The notebooks are spiral notebooks found in classrooms hovering on big desks. They come in various colors, which are, in the alphabetical order, black, blue, cyan, green, red, salmon, and yellow.
Once the player left-clicks on the notebook, it will be immediately added to the notebook counter. Also, the player's stamina is refilled and Baldi will go a bit faster. The amount of notebooks required is changed based on the floor:
Note that if there are errors in the level generation, there will be less notebooks than usual.
Starting with floor 2, Baldi's Math Machine can be found in the classrooms. To get a notebook, the player must answer the problem correctly or incorrectly by using one of the Math Machine balloons floating around the room.
After collecting all the required notebooks, the elevators will open up. The player must reach all of the elevators to complete the floor.
Notebooks award the player 10 You Thought Points when collected. Notebooks from Baldi's Math Machine do not award YTPs, however.
Similar to Hide-and-Seek and Explorer Mode, but there is no limit to the number of notebooks the player can collect. After a certain amount of time, the notebooks will respawn in random rooms, and a chime plays to notify the player of their presence. If the classroom has Baldi's Math Machine, the player has to solve the math problem again in order to get a notebook. The player's final score will show up on the screen after getting caught by Baldi and it will appear on the leaderboard if the player scores enough points.
Along with Challenge Mode, notebooks in this mode do not give YTPs.
The number of notebooks in the challenges are different:
The notebooks have different colors and are bigger. Left clicking or touching the button near the first notebook will open the You Can Think Pad, which prompts the first 3 normal math problems that can be solved. However, the second notebook and onward will show an impossible and corrupted question that the player cannot solve. After the player gets all three problems wrong, Baldi will be attracted to the location where the notebook is.
When the player collects all seven notebooks (as long as they get 6 questions wrong), Baldi will become a bit faster than the player's running speed. At this time, Arts and Crafters will also become a new threat to the player. If looked at for more than a second, he will charge at the player and bring them straight to Baldi which puts the player at risk of a game over.
The new objective is to find all four exits in any order to finish the game.
The gameplay is almost the same as in Baldi's Basics Plus. If the player finds a notebook in this mode, the third math problem in the 3rd notebook onwards can be solved, but Baldi will still accelerate while the player is trying to find them. When the player gets caught by Baldi, the number of notebooks they collected is their high score for Endless Mode if the player collected more than they did last time. The high score is displayed near the Endless Mode icon.
The original seven notebooks are in the same places as Baldi's Basics Classic.
Note: The following content may have spoilers for the deep lore.
Two additional salmon notebooks are located in the glitched school.
Baldi's Basics Classic Remastered
The notebooks are found in the same spots in Baldi's Basics Classic and Birthday Bash, but the colors are randomized. In Classic Style and Party Style, Baldi is also attracted near the notebook when the player gets any problem incorrectly for the first time.
Note: The following content may have spoilers for the deep lore.
In NULL/Glitch Style, collecting a notebook will attract Null or the red Baldloon to the location where the player collects it.
In this demo, there are 8 notebooks that the player needs to collect. All of the notebooks are colored green.
Trivia
General
The notebooks' respawn audio in Endless Mode is a slowed-down version of a crashing cymbal. In Music Maker, the sound effect is 119 Reversed Cymbal, and it is edited with 3F.
Baldi's Basics Plus/Classic Remastered
The notebooks are a lot smaller than in Baldi's Basics Classic and Birthday Bash.
In the game files, there are 7 notebooks, but the black one is yet to be used in the game.
Baldi's Basics Plus
Floors containing fewer notebooks is not intended, but it depends on the number of classrooms the floors generate.[1]
The color of the notebooks will still change even if the player uses the same seed.
Prior to V0.1.3, when a notebook respawned, the subtitle showed Localized text not found, and in V0.1.3, it showed Sfx_NoteRespawn. this is because there was no value corresponding to the notebook respawning sound's key before the V0.1.4 update.
Prior to V0.2, a regular notebook did not give You Thought Points.
Prior to V0.3, floor 1 sometimes had 5 notebooks. Floor 2 had 6 notebooks more often than the current version.
Prior to V0.6, collecting a notebook would make no sound.
Baldi's Basics Classic/Birthday Bash
A notebook stored under the map along with It's a Bully using Mod Menus.
Every time a notebook is collected, it is stored beneath the map. This can be seen when hacking the game or when glitching outside of the Schoolhouse.
Notebooks can still be interacted with below the map. That means that more than 7 notebooks can be collected in Story Mode.
It is possible to hack the game to make the 3rd problem for the 2nd to 7th notebooks solvable. However, only some of the things in the school are loaded until the player gets a question wrong.
The salmon notebook on the Story Mode icon looks gray due to a dithering effect.
The respawning audio is also played in the Kickstarter video when mystman12's face is closing up and he makes the frowning face. It is twice longer than the game's audio.
Baldi's Basics Classic/Classic Remastered
In the "HOW TO PLAY" screen from the game menu screen, the word "notebooks" is misspelled as "noteboos" as a typo.
This typo can also be found when the developer tested Baldi's ruler slapping interval by using some graphs.[2]
Baldi's Basics Classic
Sometimes, the notebook counter is set to 5/7 for a strange reason when loading the school scene in Unity.
Each notebook was originally planned to include different subjects than just math, but due to the time limit, and the history and spelling subjects were considered too difficult for those who do not understand American history and the English language, the idea was cut.[3] Localization for each country is the reason why those subjects are unlikely implemented.[4] According to mystman12 during his stream, the subjects are still intended to be added for Baldi's Basics Plus, although they will be logic-based instead of trivia-based.[5]
When hacking, the notebooks' supposedly used subjects are revealed as follows:
Prior to V1.4, the player could collect notebooks while the game was paused.
Prior to V1.4, there were two duplicated red notebooks in the classroom with the chalkboard saying "The world is big. Class dismissed.". One of them was replaced with a yellow one in this version.
A green notebook from Principal of the Thing's action figure.
A cyan notebook from It's a Bully's action figure.
Notebooks on the bottom from the Baldi's Basics Plus development roadmap.
Ditto, but the updated version posted in the 16th Status Update on Kickstarter.
Notebooks from an original image of Endless Mode icon in Baldi's Basics Classic and Birthday Bash.
References
↑"It's not intended, but I wouldn't consider it a bug. It's just that very rarely levels generate in a way that results in very few class rooms." - mystman12. July 11, 2020. Twitter
↑"I always assumed it was on a curve, since the rate at which he increases his ruler slapping *is* on a curve, but I wasn't exactly sure what that looked like, what anger values corresponded to what average speed, etc. So I did some math and... DUN DUN DUN!" - mystman12. July 14, 2020. Twitter
↑"I ran out of time to add more subjects initially and ultimately I've sort of decided against adding anything like history, anything like a logic base, just because I don't want to make it harder for people who don't know American history very well or don't know English, stuff like that, so I'm trying to keep it." - Livestream archive 1:04:11~1:04:27
↑"I don't plan on adding subjects like English or History because those would need a lot of work to be localized for different locations and languages." - mystman12. August 22, 2018. Twitter
button near the first notebook will open the You Can Think Pad, which prompts the first 3 normal math problems that can be solved. However, the second notebook and onward will show an impossible and corrupted question that the player cannot solve. After the player gets all three problems wrong, Baldi will be attracted to the location where the notebook is.
