One of the puzzles in Outer Wilds involves standing in a tower and waiting for the ground it's on to collapse, making the tower fall into a black hole with you inside it , which lets you fly up through the tower. In Joe's streams of Outer Wilds he spent a while trying to figure out how to get higher up inside the tower. While he was figuring this out, he placed his scout somewhere on the tower. The scout is a small robot with various functions, one of which is that it tells you the surface integrity of the piece of land it's on, which is how close that piece of ground is to collapsing. This is displayed at the top of the screen as a percentage, which Joe noticed was at 1% while he was inside the tower. And before he figured out the actual solution, he tried launching himself higher up in the tower by orbiting the black hole and slingshotting himself upwards, which resulted in him hitting the side of the tower so hard that he died. If he had waited a few more moments he would've been inside the tower when it fell through the black hole and he would've been able to get to the top.[1][2]

Spoiler Alert!
This article contains spoilers for Outer Wilds. Proceed with caution.


the dragon with '1%' hovering above his head
Joe in the style of the "clueless" meme, by Stache

References

  1.     “Joseph Anderson Channel Two” video: “Outer Wilds - A Piece of Mastery (Stream One)” at 04:21:09.
  2.     “Joseph Anderson Channel Two” video: “Outer Wilds - Nailed It! (Stream Two)” at 01:05:23.