The Voyages of Skipper Jimi

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...

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 ma...

This week, I will continue writing my thoughts about the ongoing Hoarder's Hunt mystery. I will discuss "A Feathered Fortune," the second installment of the mystery. (In case you missed it, click here  to read about my experience with the first installment.) A bright belly macaw looks over Golden Sands  1. Learning to Speak Parrot "A Feathered Fortune" kicked off on Thursday with a video called "Message from H." This video of two parrots is adorable... and they were trying their best to tell us where the treasure was at! Unfortunately, it was difficult for many pirates to understand parrot-speech! In this video, we can watch two cute parrots playing, grooming, chattering, and having a grand time. At one point in the video, we can see another Pigpen Cipher (which we learned last week) written on a banana.  We learned about Pigpen Cipher last week, so this was easy! This message on the banana was WHATTHREEWORDS, which is the name of a website that divi...

The first installment of the Hoarder's Hunt mystery was called Skin of Gold . Today, I'll talk a bit about my experience with this mystery. Does "Skin of Gold" refer to a banana peel or to the golden skin of the cursed Gold Hoarders? 1. Learning Ciphers I joined the hunt a few hours after the mystery had already started. By that time, the community had already discovered the word "BOUNTY" (the letters were hidden in Spotify videos) and five scraps of paper with fruits and pigpen letters.  Using these five scraps of paper and the word BOUNTY, players had to find a password to progress the mystery on the website and open an in-game voyage. These scraps of paper were hidden in a secret OneDrive folder. The URL for the folder itself was discovered through hidden pigpen characters in a Twitter video hinted at by an official Sea of Thieves Instagram post. You can read more details about these intricate clues and how people discovered them  here . I thought it was ...