20. Portrait of Plunder (Part 1)

The first mystery was centered around a banana. The second starred a pair of parrots. The third mystery emphasized paintings.

The first two stages of the Hoarders Hunt Mystery were solved in 2-3 days, so I was able to explain the the full solution on my usual Sunday blog post. Unfortunately, the community is stuck on the third mystery, so I have much less to say about it.

When the mystery launched, dozens of portraits of Gold Hoarders appeared on Sea of Thieves and Rare-related social media accounts. They all had symbols on them that resembled pigpen ciphers. I organized the portraits by character and found six words: ROB(O)T, F(R)OST, ROCKE(D), WASHE(D), LOCKER, AND DI(E)T, some with a missing letter, as represented by parentheses. The Gold Hoarder cards gave us gibberish: OAJKEN.

This is how Jimi organized the portraits... If you work on a Sea of Thieves mystery, it's always best to try working through it on your own so that you can understand how it all works!

Astute readers may recognize the words as those spoken by our feathered friend the parrot in last week's puzzle, A Feathered Fortune. We found that bit.ly links pairing these words brought us to empty OneDrive folders.

We also found that if we took the missing letters from the other six words and added them to OAJKEN, we got the phrase: ADD ONE JOKER. Interesting!

We have some interesting leads, but even the greatest picaroon puzzle-masters seem to be at a loss regarding the next step. Hopefully we will find some answers before the final chapter of this mystery is released on Thursday!