The Puzzle Continues
So, after being stuck for days, the team had a breakthrough and have completely solved it, while I was working all week. After all the effort to get to the point we did, I was not interested in just knowing the answer, and delved back into Jay Oddity’s discord to trace the steps and discover how we got here. I write this to allow fellow players to appreciate the puzzling process and to preserve this history for generations of Aeterniums to come.
Contents
Bell Tower Tolls True
We left the puzzle with a solution of the phrase; Bell Tower Tolls True. The thereisaprice.com website was updated to include the following clues:
TOWER + tolls true?
This indicated that the arrow was not pointing to the S but to the whole phrase below the word TOWER. Many ideas were thrown around, but nothing seemed to get anywhere. Players searched all the towers in the game and sought out complex ciphers. The devs must have been watching in pity, because they updated the site with the word “try” linked to a Wikipedia page on the process of elimination:
TOWER + tolls true? The only way to know ... is to try.
Players continued to explore a wide range of ideas, not sure what they needed to eliminate. This went on for long enough that a new clue was added:
You will need to find an accounting of the bell's tolls.
TOWER + bell tower tolls...? The answer will not be heard, nor seen, but read--in the words of the one who heard it. There will be more than one way to combine the answer together, but when you've applied the right answer in the right way, you will know it to be the truth.
The Undead
From this, we understood the clue to be in the fifth Outpost Rush lore note – The Undead. Scholars spent hour upon hour poring over the note to uncover a hidden clue. The account of the tolling of the bells confirmed it was the right direction. The number of tolls and souls and names were all carefully counted and combined, to no avail. The towers in the game have never had so much traffic.
The idea of applying “the right answer in the right way” sounded like it was a URL that was needed, so players started trying different combinations in the hope of stumbling upon the right one. Most sites were nothing at all and others loaded up benign-looking “normal” websites with no New World style visual clues.
How many stumbled upon the correct site and rejected it without realising? I think I did, although my mind didn’t even pay enough attention to remember it in detail. I do know I saw a couple of bland sites in my search that I assumed belonged to unsuspecting Tower branded businesses or organisations.
Many felt as though the puzzle was too difficult at this point and there were too many possibilities without enough guidance. But what’s a puzzle without a challenge?
Finally, the devs got more explicit – TOWER plus two characters:
TOWER__ Be sure to look closely at what you find. They hide in plain sight.
Tower36.com
Once they got this clue, the community started checking sites with tower plus 2 digits. Of course, tower69 was the first to get a hit (in the discord chat). The actual site was the second one shared, and ignored.
Stepping back to the clues we were given – “tolls true” and “bell tower tolls …” refer to the accounting of the bells in the Undead note. The two tolls of the bells that are specifically mentioned are the third and the sixth. Which led to looking more closely at the “simple in hindsight” URL tower36.com. It was also discovered that tower367XVI.com directs to the same site, demonstrating “more than one way” to get there.
Looking more carefully at this site, there were clues in the text and more clues in the page source comments.
The site is full of corporate double-speak, which is probably why so many missed it. The site logo looks suspiciously like a stylised version of the Covenant symbol (my colour overlay). Players started looking more deeply into the files, as well as the text copy on the site.
Hidden messages
The team got excited as they found hidden messages in the html source code, including a reference to a commented out image link to the Tower card. In true puzzle form, the gif needed to be changed to jpg.
Every inch of the site was scoured for clues. The icon names G M H, the hidden CSS arcana; #2cc, with its nod to the Major Arcana of the Tarot and the number 716 in decimal, like the Tower card numbers 7 and 16.
There’s a message by the mysterious E, hinting here that we’re looking for another website “they change their public face often”. If we check the site for “what they are looking for”, it says:
We are looking for known bloodline descendants of those who have spent time in the Western Kingdom. Search for genealogy and personal research sites.
The Western Kingdom seems to refer to Nighthaven, as a new landmass on the western side of the map. Those who have spent time there must be the people from the OPR lore notes – Edward, Talbot (dog), Gunner Satyre, Seaman Marten, Cook Petru, Sailing Master John (dead), and the Narrator. Players also included Morgaine, as she seems key to Nighthaven. From these, players used the Process of Elimination again, to find another website. Hardstyle jokingly suggested morgainefamilytree.com, so the incredibly handy New World Domain Checker tool created by Veeo was used to work through a list of sites, and Crownbreaker finally shared satyrefamilytree.com with the group.
The site was confirmed as part of the puzzle by discovering a hidden Tower card, and noting that it was registered in the same week as the other two sites. The year 2009 coincides with the year in the markup comment from tower36.
Puzzle Solving Playlist
Most of the blog entries listed a music track, which Reverseroll kindly turned into a playlist. I’ve been listening to this as I trace the pathway of the puzzlers.
Uncovering the story
I recommend you read the blog yourself, but if you’re not going to do that, there’s a summary below.
The blog follows the story of Beth Satyre, a widow with grown up children who has decided to research her family tree. She discovers an account of a ancestor with a fantastic tale of shipwreck on a eternal isle, with castles of stone whose towers did strike the clouds. She scours the internet for clues and finds many dead ends (like us!) until she finally stumbles upon a book with a chapter on William Satryre. There was reference to a map but it had been torn out.
The next thing she discovered was that someone had been following the trail before her. A name, Robert Marten, showed up on all the borrowing slips in the libraries (remember Seaman Marten from The Undead lore note). With the help of her friend Peter, the librarian, she tracks down this mysterious predecessor and sees that he does, indeed, have the map, through an old photo of his garage.
We’re also introduced to the antagonists of this story, a shadowy organisation identified only by sightings of a black van with a symbol of a winged shield with a tower on it, tinted golden yellow. Sound familiar? Beth finds accounts of Bob being chased by them and when she tracks down his old home and looks for the map, they are there.
The map is missing, but Beth finds a box of papers and steals them. When she leaves, she notices a black van but it turns off. She takes the papers to Peter at the library and they digitise what they can. It got late, so they decided to take a break and come back the next day. When Beth was driving home, a black van with a golden logo of a winged shield with a tower on it started following her, and she drove around all night to throw it off.
The next day, they return to the library to discover all the notes are gone.
So the next thing to do is find the digitised files. There is reference to:
- a printout of pages of letters and numbers called the “hex dump”.
- the archived website for a Dutch museum with a name that reminded Beth of the word the Vikings use for the end of the world (Ragnarök? ;P)
- some typed pages that look like journals
- a page of strange diagrams
Secret GIFS
The first thing that was found were secret gifs. I’m going to do my best to explain the process of deduction for the non-math brained among us. In the source code of the satyrefamilytree site, in the sidebar section, there were more comments:
So, there was a clue leading to a card – The Chariot. Convert to binary – just converting the text leads to an 80 character string, which felt too long, plus it didn’t work.Â
So what other clues were there?Â
On tower36.com there was another hidden clue in the CSS relating to hexadecimal:
arcana; #2cc = 716 in decimal = 7 and 16 = the numbers of The Tower card
So, do the same for The Chariot and convert that to binary.
The Chariot = 16 and 7 = 167 decimal = A7 hex = 10100111 binary
This pattern was applied to other cards. Only two produced a gif link on satyrefamilytree.com:
- The Chariot – satyrefamilytree.com/10100111.gif
- The Fool – satyrefamilytree.com/0.gif
However, since the original hex clue came from the tower36.com website, the team went back and checked there for more gifs. Lo and behold, we have:
- The Tower – tower36.com/1011001100.gif
- The Hermit – tower36.com/1100011.gif
I think we were probably meant to find these first so I’ve put them in that order.
 These look like teasers for Season 10. The Tower looks like maybe it’s the trailer showing the picture from the card as a place in Nighthaven. The Hermit looks like it might be referring to the Catacombs, with the maze on the Hermit card and the dungeon-looking gameplay. The Chariot is definitely the creepiest and I think we’re going to meet some cousins of the Hercyne spiders we already know and fear (or “Larrys” for the arachnophobic among us). Looks like Moon was well ahead of their time with their spider predictions. The Fool looks like, well, a Fool, or perhaps a Jester. Are these new boss mobs?
Robert Marten's journals
A number of secret journal links to Bob Marten’s archived papers were found and shared by Aacro. The Dutch pages were translated by MaleOreo, and I’ve also reproduced the text below.
satyrefamilytree.com/archives/journal1.txt
2 weeks ago, I was reviewing the mission logs and checking them with satellite telemetry and discovered something very strange: energy signatures deep in the Atlantic Ocean, highly localized. I requisitioned additional computer time to print these logs for further analysis.
Performed Fourier analysis, as usual, with the HP calculator and a paper tape plot. Result: pattern resembles phase modulation, but bits jump. Not NAVSAT, not weather satellite.
Tested with a directional antenna – signal grows. Then it disappears. Like flipping a switch. Minutes later: back, exactly the same phase. Cannot be a natural phenomenon. Much too deep. Far below the pressure depth. But definitely man-made. I listened to it over and over, there is some pattern to it that I just cannot quite sense.
I took it to command. It might somehow be some kind of distress signal, perhaps some new classified submarine. They concluded they should forward it to technical analysis. Technical analysis wanted my raw tapes, so I gave them.
The next day, some strange men visited me at my office. I did not recognize them, they had visitor badges. They and asked if I’d made any copies of the tapes. I said no. But of course I had. I always do.
Since then, I feel I’m being followed. My mail seems like it’s being tampered with. But I continue to study the pattern.
I’ll use Dutch in my private notes, in case they are read.
satyrefamilytree.com/archives/journal2.txt (translated)
Nu ik niet meer bij NASA werk, zet ik mijn onderzoek thuis voort en overleg ik met JPL en anderen. Ik rijd veel. Ik neem mijn materialen overal mee naartoe en mijn garage-uitrusting blijft verborgen als ik weg ben.Now that I’m no longer working at NASA, I continue my research at home and consult with JPL and others. I drive a lot. I take my materials everywhere, and my garage equipment stays hidden when I’m away.
Ik geloof dat mijn onderzoeksgegevens verschillende gelokaliseerde knooppunten laten zien die variaties van vergelijkbare frequenties uitzenden, die allemaal samen een overlappend patroon vormen. I believe my research data shows several localized nodes emitting variations of similar frequencies, all of which together form an overlapping pattern.
Ik heb deze locaties in mijn grafieken aangeduid als locaties A, B, C, enzovoort. Mijn telstargegevens komen er op de een of andere manier mee overeen, maar ik heb meer gegevens nodig om precies te weten hoe.I’ve labeled these locations in my graphs as locations A, B, C, and so on. My Telstar data matches them somehow, but I need more data to know exactly how.
Ik heb urenlang geluisterd naar mijn opnames van de geluiden uit de diepte. Wat ik kon horen voordat mijn satelliettoegang werd ingetrokken.I’ve spent hours listening to my recordings of the sounds from the depths. What I could hear before my satellite access was revoked.
Als ik luister, wordt mijn lichaam vreemd kalm en voelt het alsof mijn geest zich uitbreidt.
When I listen, my body becomes strangely calm and my mind feels like it is expanding.
Als ik reis, doe ik onderzoek. Er zijn berichten over dit gebied in de Atlantische Oceaan. Een klein gebied, net ten noordoosten van de Bermudadriehoek. Ik ging ervan uit dat er veel scheepvaartroutes doorheen lopen, maar in mijn onderzoek lijkt dat voor de meeste niet het geval te zijn.When I travel, I do research. There are reports of this area in the Atlantic Ocean. A small area just northeast of the Bermuda Triangle. I assumed many shipping lanes run through it, but my research suggests that’s not the case for most of them.
Het dichtstbijzijnde geschreven verslag dat ik heb gevonden, is van een expeditie die beweert land te hebben ontdekt vlak bij deze coördinaten. Een Britse zeeman genaamd Sartyre beweerde dat het bewoond werd door beschaafde mensen, samen met andere fantastische details. Ik heb documenten verzameld, waaronder een kaart die deze man beweerde zo'n 300 jaar geleden te hebben getekend. Die kaart past ongeveer bij de vorm van mijn plots, wat geen toeval kan zijn.
The closest written account I’ve found is from an expedition claiming to have discovered land near these coordinates. A British sailor named Sartyre claimed it was inhabited by civilized people, along with other fantastic details. I’ve collected documents, including a map this man claims to have drawn some 300 years ago. That map roughly matches the shape of my plots, which can’t be a coincidence.
Hij voer voor de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. Ik ga binnenkort naar mijn ouderlijk huis in Amsterdam om te kijken wat ik daar kan vinden.He sailed for the Dutch East India Company. I’m going to my parents’ house in Amsterdam soon to see what I can find there.
satyrefamilytree.com/archives/journal3.txt
In Amsterdam, my research through the expedition reports and manifestos of the Dutch East India Company was illuminating. It’s fascinating that all these reports have survived. ‘Sartyre’ appears to have been a misspelling of ‘Satyre,’ and there were others from his expedition who apparently returned. One of them bore my surname. Is this a coincidence or a genuine lineage? It’s impossible to say; it’s a common name. A curiosity for another time.
I was directed to a museum near the harbor that collected many artifacts from the Dutch Golden Age of exploration. I was told they had pieces from Satyre’s expedition. The curator there recognized the name and directed me to a room at the back. As we walked, I began to hear a familiar rhythm. The pattern of my recordings. It was something I was tuned into, like a radio. We came to one artifact, which the curator confirmed was the one I was looking for.
I asked the curator how they’d come up with it. He said it was 30 years ago, when he was still a young man. It was rare to receive new donations in those years, during the height of the war and the chaos in the city. He said it seemed extraordinary, and I agree.
The sound in my head had never been so clear, and suddenly I knew how the puzzle pieces fit together. I had to get home as quickly as possible.
satyrefamilytree.com/archives/journal4.txt (translated)
Ik voel de ogen van het gevleugelde schild op me insluiten. Ik heb besloten dat ik mijn gegevens moet beschermen.
I feel the eyes of the winged shield closing in on me. I’ve decided I must protect my data.
Een oude collega van mij uit de Apollo-tijd, wiens bedrijf aan de computers van het schip werkte, bood vriendelijk aan me te informeren over het encryptiesysteem dat zijn team ontwikkelt. Hij nodigde me uit om hem te bezoeken in het onderzoekscentrum van zijn bedrijf terwijl ik naar New York reisde. Ik heb veel geleerd en ik denk dat ik met mijn beperkte apparatuur een eenvoudige versie van hun systeem kan implementeren. An old colleague of mine from the Apollo era, whose company worked on the ship’s computers, kindly offered to inform me about the encryption system his team was developing. He invited me to visit him at his company’s research center while I was traveling to New York. I learned a lot, and I think I can implement a simple version of their system with my limited equipment.
Maar nogmaals... overal waar ik kijk, zie ik dat verdomde Artefact. Zonder het te weten, hebben ze hun encryptiesysteem de naam van het Artefact gegeven! Sterker nog... in het onderzoekscentrum hebben ze een luchtfoto van het gebouw. ​​But again… everywhere I look, I see that damned Artifact. Without realizing it, they’ve named their encryption system the Artifact! In fact… in the research center, they have an aerial view of the building.
Het gebouw zelf lijkt precies op het symbool bovenop het Artefact. Het blijft me roepen. Ik hoor het signaal in gedachten.The building itself looks exactly like the symbol atop the Artifact. It keeps calling me. I can hear the signal in my mind.
I’ve successfully built my own, very simplified version of the system and use it to encrypt my material. The details aren’t all that secret; there’s even a published explanation from the lead researcher about how it works. But without a computer like mine, and without the secret key… the artifact’s number… the secrets will remain hidden. Until I can claim them.
I’ve chartered a ship. I’m going to that location on the ocean to see for myself what’s out there. I’ve started packing everything from my lab. I’ll have to be more careful than ever in the coming weeks.
This provided more questions and lots of clues, especially in the Dutch pages.
The Strange Diagrams
Another file in the Archives, satyrefamilytree.com/archives/diagrams.jpg was found. This looks like a clue to decoding the map, using the hex dump.
Translation
Full implementation details can be found in SA by HF.
No rounds. No key rotation. No modulo. Bit ordering from left to right.
CALIBRATION
test key: 101010101010
SECRET -> 5694CB927957
Horst Feistel (HF): the inventor of LUCIFER, the cryptographic algorithm that changed cryptology – paper published in 1972 in Scientific American (SA)
This is what I can gather from MrMojito‘s notes:
- The images are permutation diagrams (If you know what that means, great, if not, sorry I do not have the capacity to understand or explain it)
- The binary key determines which diagram is used to convert each character in the code
- If you convert SECRET to ASCII then to Binary, you get a 48 bit number, which you can use the image on the left to convert into different Binary. If you then convert those back to Hex (4C31B2338B40) and use the 2 images on the right to convert them, it becomes 5694CB927957
- So that explains the process of the the decryption but a key is needed to do it for the Hex Dump.
Now, there was a whole lot of decoding and converting and electical diagrams, jumping ahead by bruteforcing, and then the whole museum website that was skipped, but I think the main key here is the word Lucifer, in relation to the Artifact.
But again... everywhere I look, I see that damned Artifact. Without realizing it, they've named their encryption system the Artifact! In fact... in the research center, they have an aerial view of the building.
The encryption system was named Lucifer. The IBM Research Centre building where Horst Feistal worked looks like an eye from the aeriel view. The Devil card features an eye (which I felt was an interesting choice when I first saw the cards, and Lish thought read like the beam from the eye in the Corrupted head in Invasions).
Additionally, if you use the museum site and clues from the Dutch journal notes, you can find reference to the Artifact being a tarot card.
So, using the same system as before, the numbers on The Devil card are 21 and 15.
The Devil = 2115 decimal = 843 hexadecimal = 100001000011 binary
This is the key.
The Decoded Map
Using the Devil key, the Hex dump and the Lucifer (or its modern equivalent DES) cryptographic algorithm, minds smarter than mine turned the hex dump into a series of text lines that make up the following image. There were letters within the characters, which make up the 12 coordinates below.
I believe my research data shows several localized nodes emitting variations of similar frequencies, all of which together form an overlapping pattern. I've labeled these locations in my graphs as locations A, B, C, and so on. My Telstar data matches them somehow, but I need more data to know exactly how.
This is clearly a map of Nighthaven, which AGS released a few days later on X in a cleaner format. It looks pretty huge and we appear to have a fort, so it’s likely to be a player-owned territory. It will be interesting to discover what is at the marked locations.
At the end of the file, there was another clue:
You're nearing the end. - E
You're nearing the end. Welcome back to where you started...my new archive. Just like before. To help you on the quest. - E
The final document I held in my hand that day ... is here. You're nearing the end. Welcome back to where you started...my new archive. Just like before. To help you on the quest. - E
This brought them back to the archives directory on thereisaprice.com and Tyrenzo found thereisaprice.com/archives/telstar196804789.txt
A Final Message
This contains a message from Elizabeth, and clearly refers to us playing in Nighthaven.Â
I remember the document now as clearly as when I was holding it. This is what it said: C = 30 degrees D = 310 degrees I can see that you will go to the island where my ancestor sinned and was cast out, but you will ascend. You will find the spot on the map. Bring the potion of fool's sight, and you will claim your prize. Until then... https://thereisaprice.com/23xxiii/index.html -Elizabeth
The Solution
“You will go to the island … you will find the spot on the map”. So it sounds like we will need a Potion of Fool’s Sight if we want to claim our prize.
Treasure Map Coordinates
The most important thing is the map coordinates, so we can find our prize when Nighthaven goes live. Using the clues for triangulation, a line was drawn from each of the points at 30 and 310 degrees respectively, and we should be able to find a prize at the point where they intersect. It looks like it’s at the very edge of the map.
I was holding a small piece of paper in my hand with an underlined code of some kind. I recognized the word 'star,' but the rest was gibberish. And under that were a pair of letters and degrees. I was about to bring it to the scanner when I yanwed heavily and my eyes went blurry for a moment.
MrMojito used the numbers from The Star tarot, 23 and XXIII, to come up with thereisaprice.com/23xxiii/index.html and the puzzle was solved!
UNLISTED TRANSMISSION INCOMING 10.06.25.9:00 PDT map.txt. C = 30 degrees, D = 310 degrees. Congratulations, wanderer. The puzzle has been solved. Your resolve, resourcefulness, and teamwork has carried you through. There is a prize waiting for you somewhere in Nighthaven. Its location would never have been revealed, except through the map you now hold. (By us, anyway.) You have all the pieces you need to pinpoint its location, provided of course you have some kind of scaling reference...
Dev Video Incoming
The unlisted transmission has to be the dev video. Stay tuned for its release on October 6 at 9:00am PDT, or Delos server time October 7 at 3:00am.
Absolutely Amazing
I just want to say that I am blown away by the detail and dedication that has gone into this puzzle. Sometimes, as players, we feel like the devs don’t “get” us, or that they are only putting half an effort in. This puzzle experience not only shows that they are doing so much work, but also reflects back on the layers of depth New World as a game has. I am sure we did not touch on everything there was to find in the puzzle and encourage others to continue seeking. MrMojito has provided a spoiler-protected walk-through for the museum website on Jay Oddity’s discord if people would like to play along.
The community were amazing and so smart to figure some of the clues out. It was great to see people working together, with none of the toxicity players are generally known for. I’ve only mentioned a couple in my story, be sure to check out the full list on thereisaprice.com/23xxiii/index.htmlÂ
I felt like some of the maths was a bit difficult, but I loved the Photoshop elements and wished I had been part of that in real time instead of catching up. My favourite thing was the storytelling. I’m invested in Elizabeth’s story and the mysterious black van. I hope we come across traces of her again.
I just feel so much love for these devs right now. All the little things, like providing a playlist to add music to the experience, or making reference to daggers, knowing how much of a hot topic they are for the community. Since late 2023, there has been a feeling that the loyal player base were neglected and not considered by the devs. This Puzzle Event, and everything that’s coming in Season 10, has completely turned this around. We feel seen, and we can’t wait to explore the new land and discover what secrets it has in store for us!
Finally, I want to say thanks for thanking me on “the list”. I feel a bit like it was undeserving as I spent most of the time just running along behind, picking up what people had already worked out. I have to say I’ve loved getting it all down on record and will be happy to look back on the story in years to come. Perhaps this is my archive, incomplete, but the best I could do.
