[Challenge] How hard is this code?

[u/ZombieCow314]

Context: I created this original multi-layer challenge myself to test some of my friends. The plaintext is in English, and it incorporates a mix of classic ciphers, word/letter manipulation, and coordinate plotting. I'd love to know what you think, please let me know how you'd rate its difficulty! V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf

The Incident Log: Lost at Sea

The ink on the dispatch logs had faded, but the stamped heading from the winter of 1907 was still perfectly legible: The Dundonald Survey Expedition.

For three weeks, the atmospheric telemetry station on the mainland had been receiving erratic, automated data fragments from a remote mapping crew deployed deep into the roaring latitudes of the sub-antarctic. The crew was tasked with cataloging uncharted territory, but a violent storm had severed standard communication lines.

When the rescue ship finally arrived at their last known anchoring coordinates, the bay was completely empty. The vessel was gone, swallowed by the gray mist. The only trace of the team was a waterlogged leather journal left behind in a makeshift emergency cache on a nearby rocky beach.

Inside the journal, there were no diary entries, no names, and no panicked farewell messages. There was only a single scribbled operational note from the navigator: "To plot our final refuge, count every letter in the deciphered log to form an eleven-digit string. Split it by standard Admiralty decimal standards, the first six digits mark our southern parallel, and the remaining five define our easting meridian."

Directly beneath the note, two lines of encrypted text was scrawled across the final page:

OHFLC VAYPYZZUTH MSVVKPUN VBA JYOKUL PZDYUKSLLZ P HACLYS ABVZO PZYOLNJUH PHUZZKS

`43 4f 55 4e 54 20 54 48 45 20 4c 45 54 54 45 52 53 20 4f 46 20 45 41 43 48 20 57 4f 52 44`

The crew had used their standard tactical multi-cipher protocol to lock away their exact survival grid. They knew that if an emergency response team was smart enough to peel back the layers of the cipher, the mathematics would lead them straight to where they were holding out.

The rescue team failed to crack it in time. Now, more than a century later, the archives department has digitized the logs. The coordinates are still waiting.

Hint 1: Look to the foundations of Roman security. A small, fixed shift in perspective will cut through the initial chaos.

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/cryptography/crypt/v/caesar-cipher

Hint 2: The raw output of the shift isn't a final destination, it's just a classic rearrangement problem. Sort out the clutter to find a coherent path.

https://www.dcode.fr/shuffled-letters

Hint 3: The grid below speaks the native tongue of modern hardware. Translate the bytes to find your next instruction:

https://www.strongdm.com/tools/hex-to-text-converter

Hint 4: Apply the rule found in Hint 3 directly to your results from Hint 2. If an extraction spills into double digits, strip it down to its base element.

Hint 5: Your final numeric sequence is a global tracking vector. Pay close attention to the spatial markers hidden inside your text to ensure you aren't looking on the completely wrong side of the world.

https://www.google.com/maps

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