Celeste
30 Achievements
1,000
8-10h
Pointless Machines
Collect the Crystal Heart in Chapter 1 Details for this achievement will be revealed once unlocked
25
6.74%
How to unlock the Pointless Machines achievement in Celeste - Definitive Guide
Seeing as this will be your first Crystal Heart, I'll go into a little bit of detail. There's a crystal heart in every level, which usually requires a bit of paying attention to detail to understand how to collect. Each one is different, and I think the heart for Chapter 1 might be the most unique. That being said, let's find it first.
Starting from Section 2 of Chapter 1, you'll head through the first two screens to come up to the third screen, where you'll see a sign upside down with an arrow pointing up. You need to ride the second moving platform up, then jump off of it and fly into that area where the arrow is to find a secret path leading left. Jump across the gap and enter the next screen on the left. Cross through that room and exit through the top left to find the crystal heart's screen.
Cross over the large gaps to find a satellite, a computer, and five birds doing their own little dance over and over again. There are two things to notice here: the order of the flashing screen and the direction the birds are dashing. The screen flashing is the order that we need to dash in, and the birds dashing is the direction we need to dash.
The screen flashes, in order, white, purple, blue, red, purple, yellow.
The white bird dashes up.
The purple bird dashes left.
The blue bird dashes down-right.
The red bird dashes up-right.
The yellow bird dashes up-left.
So, in order to dash along with the screen, you need to dash up, then left, then down-right, then up-right, then left, and lastly up-left. A small cutscene will play where the birds turn into the heart and deposit it on the lower platform. Simply dash into it from there and you'll collect your first of many crystal hearts.
If you happen to dash incorrectly, you will have to start from the beginning of the sequence. You can use the D-pad to dash in each direction, pressing both directions for the three combinations of directions.
Enjoy your first Crystal Heart and probably your first achievement in Celeste.
Timestamp: 9:38
Refer to "Heart of the Mountain".
Crystal hearts are the third and final collectible in Celeste, with one for each chapter, including the B-side and C-side variants. These eventually are used to enable full access to chapter 8, with 4 required for the standard chapter, then 15 for the B-side and 23 for the C-side (there are a total of 24 crystal hearts in the game). For the standard chapters, the crystal hearts are well-hidden; by contrast, for the B-sides and C-sides, completing the chapter will award you with the crystal heart.
IGN's collectibles guide includes the locations of all of the crystal hearts and can be found here; similarly, they're included in the video walkthroughs linked above for each chapter. Alternatively, for a guide focused solely on the crystal hearts, see Gameranx's guide here for text and screenshots, or IGN's video guide, as below: