Rat King Plush Artifact — Where It Hides in Outer Banks
The very first artifact in Outer Banks — a goofy knotted-rat plush you snatch on the opening run, the beat before you drop the boulder that reroutes the dive.
▶ TL;DR
The Rat King Plush kicks off the Outer Banks artifact hunt, the first of six collectables in Stage 3 of Scale the Depths. You reach it on the opening run — after the first message, the first money chest, and the first shortcut — and you want it in hand right before you trigger the boulder drop. MrLeLedg's 100% walkthrough chapters it as 'Artifact (Rat king plush)' at 0:30, with the boulder coming down at 0:36. It's collection-only, so the moment your hook touches it the pickup banks toward Outer Banks' Secrets stamp. Grab it before the route changes.
◇ Step-by-step pickup
Open Outer Banks from the destination wheel.
Outer Banks is Stage 3, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, and it unlocks after Huatulco. It's a wreck-strewn descent rather than a puzzle level, so once you cast you can read the route straight down. The first artifact comes up almost immediately, so don't get pulled into deep exploration before you've cleared the opening pickups.
Clear the opening trio first: Message 1, the first money chest, the first shortcut.
Before the Rat King Plush there are three things to handle on the opening run — the first message in a bottle, the first money chest, and the first shortcut. Grab them in order so you don't double back later. None of these three is an artifact; only the plush counts toward the Secrets stamp.
Spot the Rat King Plush on the early route.
Right after the first shortcut, the artifact-tagged pickup appears on the opening stretch. MrLeLedg's walkthrough reaches it at 0:30 — that's how early it is. It's the round, knotted-rat plush; it reads as a soft toy, not a wreck-piece, so it's easy to clock once you know to look.
Bank the plush BEFORE you touch the boulder.
This is the one timing detail that matters here. The plush sits just before a boulder that, when dropped, reroutes this section of the dive. Hook the plush and let the pickup bank first. The boulder drop in the walkthrough lands at 0:36, six seconds after the artifact chapter starts — that gap is your window.
Drop the boulder to change the route.
Once the plush is banked, trigger the boulder. It comes down and opens up the next section of Outer Banks. This is a deliberate route change, not a hazard to dodge — the rest of the world's artifacts live past it, so you do want to drop it. Just not before the plush is yours.
Push on toward the next five artifacts.
With the plush counted and the boulder dropped, continue the descent. The Bio-specimen Containment Unit is the next artifact in route order, followed by the Sonar Receiver and three more. Outer Banks spreads six artifacts across the whole dive, so keep a running count from this first one.
◐ Walkthrough Keyframes
✦ Tips
- Treat the Rat King Plush as your artifact-count anchor. It's the earliest of six in Outer Banks, so if you started counting at it you'll know exactly how many are left when you surface.
- The opening run packs a message, a money chest and a shortcut around this artifact. Sweep all of them in one pass so you're not retracing the early stretch after the route changes.
- The plush reads as a soft toy among wreckage and debris — its rounded, stitched shape is the tell. Once you've seen it you won't confuse it with the chest or the message bottle.
⚠ Warnings
- Don't drop the boulder before banking the plush. The boulder reroutes this section, and triggering it early is the cleanest way to lock yourself out of the very first artifact.
- Don't mistake the first money chest for the artifact. The chest is currency on the opening run; only the Rat King Plush feeds the Secrets stamp.
- Because it's so early, it's easy to grab on autopilot and assume you'll remember it later. Confirm it actually banked before you commit to the boulder and the rest of the dive.
⌕ Common Questions
I dropped the boulder and now I can't find the first artifact — did I miss it?
Where exactly is the Rat King Plush?
Does the plush sell for anything?
★ What you get
- Completion
- Counts toward the Outer Banks 100% Secrets achievement.
- Endgame impact
- One of the six Outer Banks artifacts that, together, complete the Stage 3 Secrets set.
- Sells for
- Rat King Plush cannot be sold. Artifacts exist for lore and 100% completion only.
✎ What Players Are Asking
Real questions from Steam Community discussions, archived as they appeared.
“The earliest Outer Banks artifacts — the ones you grab on the opening run, like the Rat King Plush — are exactly the kind you assume you'll remember collecting later, and then can't.”
Why this matters: Why this matters: a six-artifact world is hard to audit by memory, and an artifact you pick up in the first thirty seconds is the easiest one to lose track of by the time you surface — which is precisely why this page pins it to the boulder beat.
⌬ Related Secrets
Why the game called this artifact a Rat King Plush
A 'rat king' is a real piece of folklore and cryptozoology — not a single big rat, but a cluster of rats whose tails have become knotted together by hair, sap, dirt or dried blood, binding the whole writhing group into one mass. Reports go back to at least the 1500s, mostly across Europe, where the gruesome bundles were read as plague-era omens of death. A handful of preserved specimens still sit in natural-history museums: the largest, thirty-two rats found in 1828, is on display in Altenburg, Germany, and a nine-rat example survives in Nantes, France. The phenomenon was long dismissed as a hoax until a live knotted cluster turned up in Estonia in 2021. Scale the Depths takes that macabre curiosity and defangs it completely, turning it into a harmless stitched toy — a deliberately silly thing to dredge out of a shipwreck graveyard, and exactly the kind of whimsy these Outer Banks artifacts run on.