22. The Crowning Glory (Part 1)

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 a large H in the middle:

A puzzling map of the Sea of Thieves.

If you look closely at the picture of the chest, in addition to the pictures of Sea of Thieves astronomy and lore, there are also several right angles. It turns out you can line these up with the red shapes on the edges of the Sea of Thieves map. This must be a treasure map of sorts!

It seems like we are meant to line up the chest and the treasure map... but to what purpose? After 11 days, we are still uncertain...

2. H Sees All

We decided to move on. Attached to the tweet with the chest picture, the Sea of Thieves official Twitter account also gave us the following scrap of paper. Our first goal was to figure out this pigpen cipher:

The Pigpen reads GMQHRDKK. Gibberish!

The pigpen was gibberish. Obviously, we had to figure out how to decode it. The Twitter accounts gave us a clue about what to do: a cipher called FOURSQUARE. You can read more about it (and try it out for yourself!) here. Twitter gave us three keywords to use in our foursquare grids: OUTCAST, TWOFACED, and GRUDGE, which you might remember as the solutions to the three previous puzzles. The fourth grid, the Twitter hints told us, should simply be the alphabet.

See the four arrows above the pigpen? Well, we also received four puzzles from H, each provided by one of the four Twitter accounts we discovered in Portrait of Plunder. Each of these puzzles (as you will see below) ALSO has a corresponding arrow. 

Our mission seemed clear: We had to use the OUTCAST-TWOFACED-GRUDGE-ALPHABET foursquare to complete the four puzzles. Then we could set up a new foursquare with the answers to those puzzles in order to decode the gibberish.

You can see how I set up the foursquare grids here. Notice there is no J! This seems to be standard procedure for this cipher, as each grid can only contain 25 characters. 

Puzzle 1 

The first arrow was pointing up, so let's start by solving the puzzle with the upward-pointing arrow:

In this puzzle, H is running around the Shores of Gold, fleeing the Gold Hoarder. 

Pay close attention to the compass directions and periods in each paragraph. You can actually use the to draw pigpen characters!

The Ancient Isles University forensics team assigned me to this puzzle. I'm sure many others figured it much faster than I did, but it felt exciting to be one of the first to solve it!

The pigpen reads, from top to bottom: RINRQEKW. If you plug this into the OUTCAST-TWOFACED-GRUDGE-ALPHABET foursquare described above, you get MONARCHX. Puzzle 1 solved. Easy!

Puzzle 2

The second puzzle was quite a bit more difficult. There are many gibberish words throughout the text. If you simply plug these into the OUTCAST-TWOFACED-GRUDGE-ALPHABET foursquare, you will get the names of Gold Hoarder representatives, types of treasure chests, and vaults. You need to find out which hoarder arrived home first, and where he hid his treasure on his way.

The second puzzle was a logic puzzle sure to tickle the fancy of any treasure-hunting picaroon!

It's quite fun and definitely worth a try if you like puzzles... or have a long plane flight! I created an Excel sheet to keep track of everything, and (like almost everyone else) I ended up with Horace and the Eagle Vault as an answer.

I enjoy these sort of puzzles... though I did feel a little stressed out while doing this one because we were all racing to be the first to solve the puzzle and win a prize... Little did we know that 11 days later we wouldn't have made any progress!

Puzzle 3

The third puzzle was a star chart and instructions for how to navigate the stars and find the answer. As with puzzle 2, there are many gibberish words in the instructions that can easily be corrected with the OUTCAST-TWOFACED-GRUDGE-ALPHABET foursquare. 

Note that East and West are mirrored. This confused many inquiring picaroons, but this is apparently standard procedure for star charts. You learn something new everyday on the Sea of Thieves!

Following the instructions, I mapped out the route in red below. I ended up in the jaws of the Singing Snake constellation.

What a fun puzzle! I recommend you leaf through Sudds' notes from the Stars of a Thief Tall Tale while you do this. You can enjoy the lore behind each of the constellations!

Puzzle 4

Phew! We're moving right along. We felt good as we started the fourth puzzle, a word search. 

Each line on the first page is a hint for one of ten words we are supposed to find. There are clever hints in each sentence to help us find the word.

Unlike a normal word search, the words we were looking for were not horizontal, vertical, or even diagonal. Instead, they were shaped like pigpen characters!

Image courtesy of Ancient Isles University

It took several attempts to get the order of the letters right, but finally by plugging the pigpen characters into (you guessed it!) the OUTCAST-TWOFACED-GRUDGE-ALPHABET foursquare cipher, we got AFORECLOUD.

I thought this was a strange term, because the other three words (Monarch, Eagle, Snake) all corresponded to star constellations in the Sea of Thieves. I wondered if AFORE might refer to A-4. Do you remember the hand-drawn map we found in the Portrait of Plunder? Checking A-4 there, I found that it landed on Shark Fin Camp, and that it had a skeleton cloud above it. Perhaps Shark Fin Camp was the answer. This would make sense, because ONE-EYED SHARK was another constellation in the Sea of Thieves.

Drum Roll, Please!

We had completed the four puzzles, so we plugged our four new words in the foursquare cipher and tried to decipher the gibberish... but no matter how much we changed the wording, we couldn't get it to work. There was a mistake somewhere!

Finally, one clever pirate decided to abandon the four-square method and created a custom pigpen cipher out of our words.

As mentioned above, I preferred SHARK as the final word because of its constellation connection, but many in the community pointed out that SKULL FORT filled out the pigpen grid nicely. On the other hand, skull fort is not a word that appears in the lore, as far as I know. It's a player "slang" word for these world events.

Using this custom cipher on the original message, we get:

The custom pigpen worked! H Sees All!

The community quickly found a Twitter account called @HSeesAll, which provided us with yet another cryptic clue from H:

 H says in the tweet that we should "account for EVERY coin." But what do the coins mean??!?!? After eleven days, we have no idea. H's fiendish puzzles are indeed niggling away at our tiny minds. Grrr!!!

3. What's next?

We're stuck. We have no idea what to do next. We haven't made any progress in eleven days. We've tried dozens of experiments and theories, but nothing has yielded any results.

We have to figure out:

1. What to do with the map and the chest.
2. The coin puzzle from the HSeesAll Twitter account.
3. Rare has hinted that we need to look more closely at the word search puzzle, so obviously either AFORECLOUD was incorrect... or perhaps there are other words that we have to find!

After eleven days, the puzzle is still unsolved, and there are many fabulous prizes still up for grabs. Hopefully by next Sunday we will have a new breakthrough, but that is all I have to report for now.