Ah, gentlemen. It’ll be a pleasure tin-foiling with you.
Welcome, Dr. Stroodle.
Guns, I think that idea of using the periodic table as a code is a great idea; have you had any luck with it?
So I’ve got the general gist of what’s happened so far, but what the relevance about that niobium element? Have you just found a bunch of references to it in ciphers and such, and/or is there speculation about its significance?
Yeah, I was able to get a couple words out of it, for instance the first four numbers spelled “GATE”, but nothing consistent after that. So we either have to subtract some of the numbers via the first three codes, or it’s not the right way to do it.
Speaking of elements, I think I see Silicon on the December calender. I also see 25 is highlighted in red. Maybe pictures and words highlighted in red could lead to clues.
The December calender shows the chemical formula for caffeine, 25 is Christmas holiday. I don’t believe these are related to the ARG. A lot of stuff is posted into the wiki, read to get a general idea of where we are.
I didn’t know about the caffeine, I’ve been on earth long enough to know the 25th is a holiday. I’m just saying maybe there’s some correletion with what’s been highlighted or circled in red pen.
Never really done an ARG before, so why the hell not?
I get the basic gist of what’s going on, but I still need to catch up on plenty of things.
Also, I’m not quite sure what to “do,” so if anyone has anything particular to ask of me, go right ahead.
That’s the thing… we’ve kind of explored all the options we can think of. Nobody’s really sure how to proceed.
Lets just wait for the Xen chapters and see if the last code is over there.
I don’t have a lot of time to help out with this, but here is a summary of how i think this is running, based on my experience of ARGs.
I think the IRC clues are storyline based, in this case the transporting of an element needed for a project. I dont think they are clues, as nothing in there seems relevant to a cipher.
The ARG seems to have both an in game and a web element. I notice that so far people seem obsessed with running around inside the game, but noone seems to have thought to look outside it. There seems to be alot of hints about a Dr Welsh, does he have any links outside the game?
The most obvious way to proceed would be to solve Code D. From the way the puzzles are laid out, this seems to be just the trailhead, as such I would very much doubt if the solution is not already present within the game as it stands. You don’t create a small grouping of starter puzzles and then have the final gateway puzzles solution split into a separate release way down the line.
I think it would be a great idea if we focused on collating information about the storyline as it has been presented, from what I know of ARGs, we write the story ourselves, built on the clues found within it. So that would be one area to look at. Considering so far the number of elements outside the game itself, I dont think restricting looking for clues etc within the game itself is a good idea. Might be time to think outside the box a bit more.
As for the final puzzle, it is definitely a cipher of somesort. We’ve had a simple substitution cipher, a picture puzzle and an encode. I doubt we would get another code based puzzle, but instead a more complex cipher. Usually the last trailhead puzzle is designed to test the ability of the players, in order to construct further puzzles along the lines of the story. I would be looking for clues in the close vicinity of that, probably somewhere within the level it was found, and I would assume that it is a cipher of some complexity.
As for where it leads, who knows, I suspect as with all gateway puzzles there will be some kind of clue embedded within it.
Just my 2 cents.
The picture in QE of the airforce base looks a lot like the White Sands Air Force base in the second coordinates in the IRC, so maybe the coordinates, or maybe the Kryptos statue in the CIA headquarters may help us solve the VIC code. I don’t know, just throwing ideas out there.
What if the “NOTEWELSH” simply means that the cipher is written in Welsh, since the Welsh language is known to have a much different letter count than English? For example, our “Y” count is much, much lower than theirs, since they use the letter “Y” more frequently.
Now, at least to me, that would be hilarious. I really, really doubt it, but still . . . hilarious.
In all seriousness though, I’ve been doing a lot of work with the cipher in regards to analyzing its format, rather than trying to crack it with a bunch of random keys and whatnot. By this I mean that I’ve got a list of possible ciphers (which, thanks to it being a number cipher, there are actually pretty limited possibilities) and I’m going through and trying to evaluate what it could and could not be. I’ve also run the cipher through a couple of programs that attempt to match its form to other ciphers, and the nihilist substitution is always one of the top choices. Others include tridigital, grandpre, monome dinome, and morbit.
Hey I am new here with regards to posting but I saw this and though possibly a long shot wondered if it might be useful.
I was idly hitting cardboard boxes and came across this one i couldn’t break:
It was just at the beginning of Blast Pit after talking to the scientist. This is a screen shot of the room.
I honestly have no idea if this is either relevant or useful but here it is nonetheless!
oh just googled the code and this came up so i guess i am just behind, sorry!
Hi, this is my first time actually posting anything on this thread… I have been following it since a little while after it started but i only just now decided to attempt to help out… I took some pictures of stuff just to see if anyone thinks that they could be of use… i’m sorry if anyone else found these and im just wasting forum space or if i’m just being stupid but i at least wanna try and help…
no clue if this is relevant or already found.
found a binary code some where noclue where I found this (map on image c1a1d0)
(only decode first part wich is lol)(screen shot bad so can’t get 1s and 0s right)
Try to get a better picture. I don’t think anyone has found anything yet. I want to see what it says.
I gave a quick shot:
Binary code:
011011000110111101101100001001010010001010100111001001110001100000101111101000010010010010100111001000111000011010000101001011000110111101101100(I snapped out a “0” at the end because otherwise it’s invalid… But I might have missed another character)
ASCII:
lol%"§'/¡$§#†…,ol