The Voyages of Skipper Jimi

With the Hoarder's Hunt mystery solved, Skipper Jimi has devoted himself to a new mystery: the search for the mysterious Dodo bird. A few months ago, a dodo was briefly spotted on the docks at Ancient Spire Outpost, but it quickly disappeared. Some people believe it was a myth, but one clever pirate managed to capture this grainy image of the creature with a camera obscura: Although this dodo's visit to Ancient Spire Outpost was brief, he will never be forgotten! Jimi has taken it upon himself to search the Sea of Thieves for this creature! The Sea of Thieves takes place in the Caribbean, but the dodo bird was actually from the island that today we call Mauritius, near Madagascar. In the early 1500s, Portuguese sailors arrived on Mauritius, which was then uninhabited by humans. Captain Domingo Fernandez Pereira named it “Ilha Do Cerne" (Island of the Swan). Perhaps "swan" referred to the Dodo Bird! This famous portrait depicts what may have been the very first me...

Last week, I described how we were stuck on the final stage of the Hoarder's Hunt mystery. Well, yesterday (despite many misleading comments from Rare) a very clever pirate solved the mystery at last. Before continuing, be sure to read The Crowning Glory (Part 1) . How Far We Got on Day 1 On the first day of the mystery's final stage, Rare gave us a number of puzzles, which we quickly solved. The answers to the puzzles led us to a Twitter account (@HSEESALL) that had posted this peculiar parchment: We discovered this paper on Day 1 of the mystery... It stumped us for several days, and then Rare told us we were missing something, even though we really weren't... Look closely at the document. Every line starts with the letter of a compass direction: NSEW. Surely, these were directions of some kind. In addition, the Twitter account told us to account for EVERY coin, so the coins were obviously important too. At first, we wondered if the sets of coins might correlate to the lin...

This golden skull awaits us... if we can ever figure out the final puzzle in the Hoarder's Hunt! Well, it is now Day 11 of the final chapter of the Hoarder's Hunt, and we have made virtually zero progress in 10 days.  At first glance, this puzzle is much more straightforward than the previous puzzles, which had us searching all corners of the Internet and navigating obscure websites. Rare has confirmed that they have provided all of the materials we need to win the contest through their mystery-related Twitter accounts. 1. The Map & the Chest After the final stage of the mystery launched, the official Sea of Thieves Twitter account posted this mysterious picture of the final, unopened chest.  What could be inside the chest! And what do the constellations mean? The four Twitter accounts owned by H that we found during the Portrait of Plunder had also been updated. They provided us with four map fragments, which we could piece together into a map of the Sea of Thieves with ...

Portrait of Plunder was a little frustrating at first, but we were rewarded for our patience with some incredible art, like this one! It took almost a week, but we finally solved Portrait of Plunder and were able to progress to the final round on Thursday. At time of writing, we are stumped again, now on the final round, but I will save that for next weekend's blog. Do you remember how we found pigpen in the cards that spelled out some random parrot words, like frost and robot? As I wrote last week, we typed these out at bit.ly addresses, but it only turned up empty OneDrive folders. We imagined Rare had set these up to head off trolls or something. Actually, we were on the right track! They were the names of Twitter accounts set up by H. There were four Twitter accounts. Each one had the beautiful portrait of pirates playing Blackjack, as seen in the photo above. Each of these portraits looked identical at first, but actually each one had different Roman numerals etched into the b...