Confusion, Intuition, Deception
The mysterious puzzle boxes were finally opened on Monday and players have been working their way through the clues. This has been both intriguing and confusing, like the Moon tarot:
Darkness prevails and nothing is clear. Something is hidden, by yourself or others. Pay attention to your intuition and dreams. Seek understanding before taking action. Cycle of changing seasons.
Like many others, I’ve had to work all week and haven’t had a chance to keep up with the puzzling, especially since a lot of it happens while I’m asleep. As I started digging through VODs and discord chats, I quickly realised it was hard to follow, so decided to create an article to help myself, and hopefully others, understand how we got to the answers. Since I don’t usually watch any Twitch streamers except Narok Star, there was a lot to catch up on.
Contents
The Puzzle Box
As we saw in our previous article, a puzzle box was given out to seven streamers, with instructions to open on the 22nd September at 9am PST. Each of these streamers did a countdown and then opened the box with their communities.
The Streamers
The box was sent to Av3 Mort3m, BagginsTV, Ginger Prime, Jay Oddity, OhKayBet, Trick Trick, and YaBoiWilly, along with a handwritten card thanking them for their support. It contained a deck of custom tarot cards, a hidden blue light torch, and a clue:
Remember. There are often more sides to a story than you assume. Every piece of the story contains a piece of the answer. But only the entire story, seen in the right light, and from the right point of view, yields the truth.
Secret Symbols
The community worked out that they needed to place the cards in Roman Numeral order and shine the black light on the side to reveal hidden symbols.
After some trial and error, each streamer linked their symbols to cards in the tarot deck and from there to the Roman numeral of the card.
The Roman numeral was converted to a letter-to-number cipher, which got them 13 letters.
Unfortunately, I did not get to see some of the streamers’ cards because their VODs are set to subscriber-only. No, it did not inspire me to subscribe.
There is a Price website
All together, the letters made up the phrase, “THERE IS A PRICE”. There was a bit of freaking out in stream chats from players thinking that Season 10 would be a paid expansion – it’s not, it’s FREE.
A little help from the devs
Once they had the answer, it took a bit to figure it out. Some suggested trying another anagram with the letters. Aenwyn kept them on track by confirming they had the right phrase.
You put it somewhere lmfao
Finally, they figured out to put it in a browser and found thereisaprice.com
The site had a large image of all the cards laid out in Arabic numerical order, not roman numerals, and a clue:
Well done, traveller. You have parted the first veil. But as with all things...the truth may be plain to see today, but remain yet to be understood until the experiences of tomorrow.
The team guessed, correctly, that the next clues would be in the new Outpost Rush map preview.
Secrets in the cards
While waiting for OPR, players from the community were eager to get their own hands on the cards, and delved into the image from the site. A number of secrets were soon found. Jay Oddity has a spreadsheet where ideas have been collected here, and this is the most useful summary of the infomation I can find.
Crossword
In the bottom right corner of the image, there is a dark rectangle. By playing with the different colour channels and increasing contrast, it is possible to make out a crossword and word puzzle box.
Hidden numbers
The next thing people discovered were hidden numbers in most of the cards. These can be seen by adding a black and white adjustment layer and sliding the different colours.
The website text updated as players worked through the clues.
The cards have been dealt, and you now have what you need to sense the patterns they reveal. Your journey is not yet over. Patience. Perseverance. Perspective.
Outpost Rush Lore Notes
As suspected, there were more clues in the new Tower of Calomel Outpost Rush preview.
Locations of the Notes
If you want to collect the notes from the Tower of Calomel, we’ve created a handy map to help you find them. While our super helpful sites like New World database and New World Buddy have the location pins, the background of the map is missing so it was difficult to work out the exact locations.
Each of the lore pages contained 2 images with a representation of a location, and a series of numbers. Players tracked down the locations and found new lore notes. The numbers can be used with an alphabet cipher again, to get more letters.
Numbers to letters
Players travelled Aeternum to find the locations and lore pages. This looks to be a time-consuming but essentially joyful task, although I’m not sure how many locations were confirmed in the end.
The numbers on the OPR note images corresponded to letters in the location lore notes. These letters were then used as a book cipher to find words in the original lore pages from OPR.
See the example below to understand how it works:
First image from The Inferior Man
You have discovered much. Good work, wanderer. You must continue to work together. Fresh eyes can often see more clearly than the studied. Ask yourself...what shape the answer you seek will take? What are you looking for? From that, work backwards.
Bringing it all together
The next step was to bring all the knowledge together to solve the puzzle. There were the words from the book cipher, the crossword and side boxes, amd the hidden letters on the tarot cards.
Working out the order
Fitting the words into the crossword layout and numbering them left to right, top to bottom, provided an order for the words. But it didn’t say anything that made sense, because there were still more clues to incorporate.
The shape of the “answer you seek” is the 18 boxes on the side of the crossword. Eighteen cards have hidden numbers.
The order of the words corresponds to the numbers of the tarot cards. For example, The Magician is 1 so it pairs with the word Bold.
The hidden number on the cards represents a letter in the word. So the Magician has 1 hidden, which is the B in Bold.
The devs confirmed players were on the right track with an updated message providing the letters from the lore notes.
10,82 - F,F. 161,7 - A,N. 55,34 - E,V. 227,298 - I,G. 18,198 - F,L. 283,328 - A,E. 91,834 - G,Q. 171,225 - G,L. 245,434 - I,H. 78,225 - H,B. 239,289 - E,D. 299,172 - H,K. 234,351 - G,F. 210,433 - F,H. 185,184 - C,K. 353,423 - L,N. 643,859 - J,K. 107,154 - N,G. Remember how you got here.
Bell Tower Tolls True
The upside down numbers
One final trick in this part involved the upside down numbers on the cards. Using the Arabic numerals, the letters started falling into place, until 7, where The Tower, with its upside down 2 indicating A, and number 8 The Echo, not having a hidden number at all.
When cards with an upside down hidden number were referred to by their Roman Numeral (which was also printed upside down), 7 became The Chariot and 8 became Strength. The Tower moved down to 16.
When all the letters were found, the puzzle box reads, Bell Tower Tolls True, with the word tower outlined. There’s still a question about the arrow, does it simply point to the S and refer to multiple towers or is there another stage of the puzzle to solve?
What do we make of this cryptic message so far? The new Outpost Rush map is a tower. Towers feature throughout Aeternum. The Tower card in the Tarot foretells sudden change and upheaval.
Everything you know will be challenged and you need to think in new ways. Unexpected events can lead you to question your beliefs. Be sure to build up a nest egg to tide you over in times of uncertainty. This card could be advice to shake things up and think outside the box. Drastic changes are needed for positive growth.
Is this advice for Season 10? Everything is going to change. Maybe the devs are telling us the best way to prepare is to save gold. When the new season comes, we may need to start thinking in new ways.
Get ready – change is coming!
The Puzzle Continues
UPDATE: As I finished this article, the website updated to confirm the puzzle continues. We continue our journey in The Secret of the Museum
Thank you
This guide has just been a catch up for myself and anyone else who missed the puzzling process this week. I really appreciate all the information on Jay Oddity’s discord and the work that community has done to figure out the clues. Even though it was still difficult enough to decipher your notes that I felt I went on a journey of discovery to connect the final answer to the clues, it was much easier than doing it blind.
I’m also really blown away by the attention to detail and effort that has gone into this promotion by the AGS marketing team. I’m just so excited about the future of New World and absolutely in love with the Tarot and Vampire aesthetic.
What do we think, is this the end of the puzzle or is there more to solve? With the countdown to Nighthaven less than two weeks away, I expect we will hear more from the devs in the coming days.
