Episode 12 of The Witness starts on the red metal tower where Episode 11 stopped. Basket climbs down to a small boat, sails it to a wooded island of tree houses and walkways, and works through panels covered in orange suns, first yellow ones in the mangroves, then magenta ones up in the trees. The video ends with one sun panel still unsolved and a few new paths spotted.
Down to the boat
At the bottom of the tower sits a small boat with a tan map panel at the front. The commentary looks around for a while ("this might be the thing that's collecting all the lasers") before a line goes onto the map and the boat moves off. "We're gonna sail. Okay. So we're sailing over to, oh that's a shipwreck over there." The boat pulls up at a wooden dock on an island of mangroves.
Keep them together?
A plank walkway leads through the roots to a small hut and on to a row of yellow panels. "So there's like a tree fort, tree fort island thing we're going through." Each grid carries orange suns. The first guess is "I need to keep them together," until a straight line down the middle lights one up: "Why is this the answer?" The next idea is "balanced," then, a few panels on, "we only have two suns per section, perhaps?"
Suns and black dots
The yellow panels give way to a white one and then a run of magenta panels. "Oh there's a lot of these sun puzzles." Some add walls inside the grid, and a bigger one adds small black dots along the lines. That one takes a few tries before it clicks: "Okay, only two suns per thing and we have to cover all the black dots. Yes, all right, good."
Up the tree fort
A climb leads up into the tree houses. "There's our end goal. Oh okay, there's another laser thing there. So once we've finished this, we'll shoot a laser to the thing." The panels up here mix white squares, black squares and suns. After one line goes in, the grid changes: the suns turn white and the squares orange. "Are these suns a different color now?"
That grid holds Basket for about six minutes. "The orange dot wants to be with the orange dot," the commentary decides, but every line leaves something out of place. "This is solvable, right?"
Where it ends
Basket leaves the grid and walks the walkways instead. A red panel by a tree gets a look ("eventually after I solve orange it'll go over there"), then a green panel and an orange one further on. "Can my brain handle this right now? I think not." The video ends on a path down into the trees, with the sun grid in the tree fort still unsolved.