23. The Crowning Glory (Part 2)

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 lines of text, but there were 19 piles of coins and only 14 lines of text. We also noted that there were 77 white coins and 77 words total. Coincidence? Maybe. We tried many methods, but we could not find a direct connection between the coins and words that gave us any results.

We decided to put the coins aside and focus on the text itself. The first sentence reads: Never thought it would actually come to this. That's eight words... Perhaps it meant eight squares north on the map? Here is the first letter and number of words in each line:

N8, W6, N6, E8, S9, E4, S6, E4, N5, W2, N7, E3, N6, E3

We decided to follow these movements around the map and see where we ended up. But where to start? We noticed the background of the picture in the banner for @HSEESALL looked like Ancient Gold Fortress, so we decided to count from there.

The @HSEESALL Twitter account used this picture of Ancient Gold Fort as its banner. 

Following the directions from Ancient Gold Fort brought us to the ocean west of the Shores of Gold. Actually, the map was so large, that the directions required you to cross almost the entirety of the map from the southwestern to northeastern corners, so Tribute Peak in the Shores of Gold was the only probably destination.

Even if Tribute Peak was the correct answer, we did not know what to do with it. We assumed we were missing an important step and called it quits for the first day. If only we knew how close we were...

Rare Misleads Us!?!

Over the next week, we investigated other parts of the riddle. For example, we tried deciphering the white and black coins around the edge of the page above using Morse Code, clock cipher, and other methods. We also continued to play with the map that I introduced last week. We tried flipping it in different directions and overlaying it with different papers and pictures. No luck.

As our progress ground to a halt, Rare sent out the following "hint" to help us along...

The official Sea of Thieves Twitter account told us that "key steps remain incomplete" and that we "should go over everything again..."

On Rare's advice, we re-worked (and re-re-worked and re-re-re-worked) all of the puzzles that I introduced last week. We felt confident of our answers for the first three puzzles. AFORECLOUD (from the word search) was the strangest of the answers. Since it wasn't really necessary for finding the @HSEESALL Twitter account without it, we wondered: Was there something hidden in the word search that we had not noticed? Rare fed the fire with yet another "hint":

Rare hinted strongly that we should revisit the word search puzzle.

After a few more days going down rabbit holes with the word puzzle, @HSEESALL tweeted another message, very similar in design to the coin puzzle. 

After about two weeks of floundering, we received this cryptic hint from @HSEESALL...

It has the same number of coins around the edges as the original coin puzzle note. The letters and number of words in each line are also the same. This confirmed that we were on the right track back on Day 1! However, the letter continues to chide us for missing something in the word puzzle: "While you continue to flounder aimlessly, no one thinks to solve an easy toddler's puzzle by just searching for a simple word." It also says, "Completing this will require noticing the connection between symbols, map and everything on this note."

This seemed to confirm our suspicion that we were missing something in the word search that would help us understand our map overlay, which would then help us to figure out the coin puzzle. After two weeks, we were stuck as ever!

Do you see the pictures on the chest and in the background? We thought that words from the word search and other puzzles would correlate to these symbols. For example, the words I mentioned last week, such as snake, monarch, and eagle, can all be seen in the picture. We thought if we lined up the map properly and connected the dots between the symbols, we would be able to make sense of the coin puzzle.

The Solution

On Saturday morning at 4:30 AM JST (Jimi Standard Time), I woke up suddenly and decided to peek at my phone to see if there had been any updates on the mystery... and (would you believe it), just after I turned on the phone I received a message from a friend at Ancient Isles University that the code had been discovered! WOW!!!

I leapt out of bed, booted the computer, typed in the code, and along with thousands of other people around the world I raced through the in-game quest as quickly as possible (it took me about two hours...) so that I could try and be among the first 111 people to complete it and win a real world prize. I doubt I was successful, but it was exciting to be a part of the race right up until the end!

Let me talk about the solution. It turns out we were on the cusp of finding the final answer way back on Day 1. As described above, we had followed the map instructions to Tribute Peak. This was correct!

Our mistake (which Rare had deviously spent weeks encouraging) was thinking that we needed more information. Actually, Tribute Peak was all we needed. The word search, the map, and the treasure chest picture were all unnecessary for completing the puzzle! TRIBUTE PEAK was the key for understanding the coins. Each pile of coins represented a letter, and there was one word on each side of the page—four words total. 

"BAIT TRAP BREAK RETAKE" was the solution to the coin riddle. It was so simple, yet it stumped the cleverest pirates in the world for three weeks! Well done to the puzzle master and to the picaroon who figured this out first!

One thing that I've continued to wonder about is how we were supposed to know where to start the map. As mentioned above, we used Ancient Gold Fortress, which was pictured on the @HSEESALL Twitter account, which had posted the coin puzzle in the first place. However, starting here did not quite reach Tribute Peak. I heard that the pirate who solved the puzzle used Plunder Outpost as a starting point, but I am not sure why they started there. 

One theory that I've come up with is that the correct starting point is LOOKOUT Point. My reasoning? Check out the coin puzzle one more time: the 10th line reads "WATCH OUT!" At one point, we wondered if this was a hint at a clock cipher. But I now suspect this might have been a hint for LOOKOUT Point.

Was WATCH OUT a hint that we should start counting at Lookout Point? By using the first letter of every line as a compass direction and then using the number of words in each line as the number of squares, you could draw a route across the Sea of Thieves from Lookout Point to Tribute Peak. Tribute Peak was the keyword for figuring out the coins puzzle. (Map of Sea of Thieves courtesy of Merfolk's Lullaby. The red and yellow mystery-related lines and marking are my own!)

My Thoughts on the Final Chapter of the Hoarder's Hunt

As mentioned above, I rushed through the in-game voyage of "The Crowning Glory" as soon as the solution was discovered. After completing it, I felt a twinge of disappointment, since I had been expecting that this voyage would have us return to Tribute Peak where we would meet H and learn his motives.

After all, the first mystery concluded with a very impressive cutscene featuring Lesedi, Ramsey, and the Siren Queen. Rumor has it that Lesedi's search for DeMarco is set to continue in a comic series later this year. I thought we might expect something similar from the Hoarder's Hunt. In contrast, the Hoarder's Hunt voyage simply ended with a "Voyage Complete" message.

However, my initial disappointment has faded. I played through the final in-game voyage a second time with some family members. We took our time with it and it was actually great fun solving each individual step in the riddles. (During my initial "speed run" we managed to skip large portions of the puzzles.) Even the parts of the quest that took place in the Wilds were enjoyable, and it was nice to see the uncharted islands included!

As for the finale... I think the Tribute Peak finale will come in a future mystery or Tall Tale involving H. I'm looking forward to it!

Jimi turns in the final key, revealing a golden skull in the mysterious chest. What could it mean? Although anticlimactic, I think the main lesson here is that the Hoarder's Hunt is TO BE CONTINUED... And we will be hearing again from H and learning more about these golden skulls down the road!