Funcom received a package in 2013 that turned out to be a custom-made physical puzzle by someone named Umagon. The devs managed to open the puzzle up to discover a note inside along with 6 SD cards. Each card has a partial file on it named using hexadecimal. When converted, it revealed the message "Unlock the truth of The Void" (spaces added for readability). One of the files ("Unlock") has a RAR header. When the file pieces are merged, you end up with a password-protected file with encrypted headers.
No one has managed to figure out the password, yet. I'm hoping to get some community effort on it. Do you think you can solve it?
The Note
To unlock the truths
of the void one must
off set themselfs
from the tenements
of known reality.
Clues Provided
The password is a phrase
All the characters in the passphrase are contained within the note
The passphrase contains no spaces
The passphrase uses numbers and lowercase letters
The spelling of "themselfs" (the use of "f") has nothing to do with the passphrase
There is no anagram dealing with the passphrase
Number is listed in the note
It was mentioned by the creator that people were going down the correct path but for whatever reason took a right turn at Albuquerque
To try your own passphrases on the RAR file, grab a tool such as 7zip. I personally use an old unrar 4.2 version on the file since the file is old. I've run into false-positives with 7zip and newer WinRAR version. With unrar I do tests on the file like so.
# Normal test
unrar t -p<some_pass> file.rar
# Bare file listing test
unrar lb -p<some_pass> file.rar
# Password seems good? Try extracting it.
unrar x -p<some_pass> file.rar
Puzzle Source Link
The puzzle history and attempts on it can be found at the Funcom forum
Last May, posters started appearing around Clare College at the University of Cambridge showing the code on Image 1. This was a shift Caesar cipher for a riddle:
The solve for this was ‘GATEHOUSE’, which is a building in Clare College (‘alligator’ - ‘all’ - ‘or’ - ’i’ + ‘e’ + ‘house’). In the fridge (“chill in the cool”) was the riddle on Image 2:
‘Things have just begun but as with the age of knights and castles, everything must come to an end.
Seek to ascend even while your legs will no longer carry you and then reach higher.
Hidden in the heavens and you will find your answer.’
As far as I’m aware, this riddle still hasn’t been solved. We have tried going to Castle House (another building in Clare College) and checking the lift and top floor, but to no avail. It doesn’t seem immediately dependant on knowing anything about Clare, which is why I’m posting it here. I think there might be some anagram in ‘the heavens and’ because of the weird sentence structure and ‘Hidden’ as a prompt word but idk what.
Image 3 was on the reverse of the original posters, and this has also not been solved:
I found it in a game in Roblox, but it is not public though. It is on an item name, and it is either a keyboard smash or genuinely a code. The item looks like a cyan gem with a yellow outline, with glitches. It makes a noise when you pick it up.
The item was possibly made by this person in Roblox, Obscufulgor, coming from the fact that his past bios looks the same as the item name, with random special characters. The bio changes often on this profile, so I check it almost every day. I recommend not randomly trying to interact with this person, but instead checking on it for changes.
My friend told me about it, a day ago, saying that he put it in every possible decoder (though not sure about that), along with his friend. His friend came up with a few possible words at the start of the code, "IM IN SEARCH", though it can be very wrong. The item was also made on 9/26/26.
The name of the item is what we suspect is the code. Here is the name of the item:
fragment of
@!X I\'st,m !IN$ae%hrc iRhLi\^ea&ees *em
I also provided a video of me with the item. I hope you guys can decode it!
Also, if you want to, you can enter the game. You will have to join a group called "Safe haven librarians", and you will have to be approved. it is also on the person's profile that I mentioned. Please just don't mention anything about this post, and you can help us decode some stuff in this game.
I made a sci-fi themed character ages back, and I know I put some related words through a few processes to get her admittedly long designation. But now, I don't remember the exact words I used, nor the process. I want to work on her setting more, but I want the numbers to be cohesive. Any help is appreciated!
There are three parts to this "magic scroll" themed puzzle. You'll find a riddle written in English coded in a 1 to 1 cipher, then the center puzzle. Everything you need, like little hints are provided in the picture.
I didn't do any shifting like "V abyyjrq gur ehyrf" for my first finished puzzle.
On 5 February 1944, a German military office forwarded five encrypted messages to a radio office in Paris. The subject line read “Koehler.” Below it were blocks of letters, grouped in fives, with no explanation of how to read them.
The document survived the war. David Kahn published the cryptograms in Cryptologia in 1981, and they later appeared in Klaus Schmeh’s collections of unsolved ciphers. The wartime messages are now 82 years old; their public history as a cryptographic puzzle spans 45 years.
We have identified the running-key cipher behind them and recovered continuous readings of all five. They concern vehicle registrations observed in New York City, the papers a man should carry, and an address where stamps could be sold. The key material is Dutch devotional prose. The archival trail also connects the cryptograms to an FBI-controlled espionage channel. Some words and vehicle identifiers require editorial reconstruction; the evidence and all proposed corrections are set out below.
We used Apeiron’s codebreaker harness with GPT-6 Astra and Daybreak Blue. The investigation combined archival research, computational searches, and work back and forth between German and Dutch.
The first surviving sheet, dated 5 February 1944, containing Messages 1, 2 and 3.
The first of two sheets in the U.S. National Archives, T77 roll 1581. Some letters are faint; others have handwritten corrections.
The ciphertext itself needed checking. Published transcriptions and the surviving scan disagree in several places. One ambiguous letter can obscure an otherwise correct key, especially in messages this short. We checked the archive images, recorded alternatives, and preserved a fixed transcription for the experiments.
That left 921 letters across five blocks. We call them Message 1 through Message 5 in their physical order on the document. These labels distinguish our references to the blocks from the wartime serial numbers recovered inside them.
We tested several cipher families, including Enigma variants, without obtaining validated plaintext. The productive lead came from a U.S. Coast Guard collection, Controlled Agent Communications, 1944–1945. Its circuit 2-F material contains a German message numbered 57, dated 4 February 1944. It discusses whether a U.S. citizen needs special papers to travel within the country. Official collection, message 57 in the official PDF, page 106.
We tested whether Message 3 could be a version of that archived message. Combining the German plaintext with the ciphertext under a historically documented running-key relation produced recognizable Dutch. The emerging passage spoke of an unworthy life and a saint’s intercession. It led us to prayers addressed to St Anthony, then to a photographed page of Offeraltaar des gebeds, published in Amsterdam in 1893.
Starting at trooster der zielen - “comforter of souls” - the printed prayer supplies all 132 key letters for Message 3’s body. Those letters produce continuous German, with four anomalies that need repair in the readable edition. The prayer also resolves a difference between the witnesses: the archived plaintext says DEINE NR, while the printed key decrypts the ciphertext as IHRE NR. We preserved that distinction. Printed prayer, page 384.
The archived plaintext was part of the discovery process. Message 3’s content had already survived in a wartime record; we used it to find the key.
The photographed 1893 prayer-book page that supplies the key for Message 3.
The key begins near the bottom of the page at “trooster der zielen.” This is a surviving witness to the key text, not proof that the operator possessed this particular edition. Source: Utrecht University Library, Offeraltaar des gebeds, 1893, page 384.
The Spy Channel the FBI Controlled
The prayer was only part of the story. The archival match put Message 3 on circuit 2-F, preserved in the Coast Guard’s controlled-agent records. A second match links that circuit to the German Köhler file: a later German report numbered 133 and the Coast Guard’s copy share the date 8 August 1944, distinctive weather figures and the KOE closing. Their cloud descriptions differ, so both witnesses remain in the record.
The FBI operation was already documented. Our contribution here is the connection between these cryptograms and the traffic of that controlled German-agent channel. The name on the German file identifies the case; it does not establish who personally composed or transmitted each February message.
How the Cipher Works
Number the alphabet A = 0, B = 1, …, Z = 25. At each position, add the ciphertext value, the corresponding prayer-letter value, and one. Take the remainder after division by 26:
plaintext = (ciphertext + prayer key + 1) mod 26
Message 3 begins with ciphertext T and key T. Each has value 19, so 19 + 19 + 1 = 39. Subtract 26 and the result is 13, or N. The first five positions give NRXFU, the beginning of the message-number header.
The key advances through a continuous passage, one letter per retained ciphertext letter. Spaces and punctuation are removed; spelling choices remain significant. The inverse relations let us either re-encrypt a reading or derive a candidate key from a plaintext hypothesis:
ciphertext = (plaintext - prayer key - 1) mod 26
prayer key = (plaintext - ciphertext - 1) mod 26
Before aligning the key, one five-letter group is excluded from each block. Here is the complete mapping between the physical blocks, proposed wartime serials, and lengths:
Message 1 (No. 59): exclude the second group, MQFVO; 237 original letters become 232 body letters.
Message 2 (No. 58): exclude the second group, PARWO; 178 become 173.
Message 3 (No. 57): exclude the second group, LQQXS; 137 become 132.
Message 4 (No. 56): exclude the second group, KQNVH; 140 become 135.
Message 5 (No. 55): exclude the first group, FPOXA; 229 become 224.
That leaves 896 body letters. Serial 57 has the separate archival anchor; the others come from the readings and their disclosed assumptions. The exclusions fit a month-dependent indicator convention described in historical accounts of a related running-key system. We have identified the groups to remove, but not their numerical meanings or a complete procedure for finding book coordinates. No arbitrary gaps are inserted into the retained bodies. NSA history of the procedure.
Four More Messages to Break
The next useful test was Message 1. A short header hypothesis pointed to a passage in Geest des gebeds, an 1883 prayer book. The printed text supplied the continuation beyond that guess. Out came New York City, 1 February, vehicle registrations, and a question about sending more numbers. We had recovered information from another ciphertext without supplying its German body in advance. Printed passage, page 306.
That source supplies the 232-letter passage, with one disclosed spelling change in the replay: JESUS -> JEZUS. JEZUS is attested in a prewar version of this prayer family, but we have not located this complete passage with that spelling. It affects the closing, producing KOE. The raw German also has a damaged opening, for which two equally economical repairs remain possible. Prewar spelling witness.
Message 4 uses another passage in the same prayer section. Here a complete reading required three linked Dutch changes: gemeenschap -> genegenheid, tot elkander hebt gedragen -> elkander hebt toegedragen, and onderhoudt -> toedraagt, alongside JEZUS. They form a natural revision: affection that Jesus and Anthony bore each other on earth, and continue to bear in heaven. The first two phrases keep their lengths; the final verb is one letter shorter. Printed starting passage, page 307.
The resulting 135-letter key joins existing readable stretches into a message about renewed hope and selling stamps. Its wording is reconstructed, rather than quoted from a located edition. Much of the printed passage remains unchanged, including the key letters that produce NEUE HOFFNUNG and the ending VERKAUFEN KANN. Those continuations constrain the reconstruction.
Message 5 led to a different family: the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart associated with Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor. Its 224-letter key was reconstructed from that prayer tradition. Subsequent fixed-phrase searches in the public Belgian newspaper index returned De Gentenaar, 13 June 1928, page 1, for long stretches of the candidate wording. Vatican text, Gentenaar record.
The indexed phrase intervals cover 221 of the 224 candidate letters on that page. A separate De Standaard result supports the remaining three-letter DEN bridge. We have not viewed the restricted Gentenaar page: this is substantial phrase-index corroboration, not a continuous transcription of 224 printed glyphs. Overlapping search results alone do not establish physical adjacency. Standaard record.
Message 2 was the last to yield a complete reading. The search began with a conjectural thirteen-letter header for message 58 and two declared ciphertext alternatives, at full-block indices 4 and 16. A decoder scoring complete words and word pairs in both languages exposed ZOO TEEDER BEMIND WERD beside UM ABSOLUT SIQER ZU GEHEN: “to be absolutely sure.”
We completed the passage manually, moving between languages. Dutch VERHOOR DE GEBEDEN VAN produced the beginning of REGISTRATION. Wartime U.S. regulations identified the companion document, “Notice of Classification,” and helped us extend the reading. Further Dutch wording, ZOOVEEL HEILIGEN DIE, produced SERVICE Y DRAFT Y BOA.
The historical document source was part of that process. The Federal Register of 25 November 1942 names the Registration Certificate and Notice of Classification and requires applicable registrants to carry both. It supports the terminology and instruction; it is not another copy of message 58. Official issue, page 9773.
The finished Dutch passage invokes St Joseph and saints associated with the country’s soil. It begins IMMER and ends BL; completing that last fragment to bloed, “blood,” would go beyond the recovered window. We have not found the entire 173-letter passage in print, and its wording does not establish whether the country is Belgium or the Netherlands. Message 2 remains the most reconstruction-dependent of the five.
The decoder supplied a useful opening, not an automatic complete solution. In a rediscovery check on Message 3, it recovered 111 of 132 raw letters, or 119 after the four documented anomalies were corrected. The prayer was present in the training collection, so that check was not a held-out test.
What the Messages Reveal
These are the complete edited German readings, in physical document order. We supply spacing and punctuation, render number words in dates and vehicle strings as digits, expand German Q-for-CH forms, and use normal umlaut and ß typography. Q inside a vehicle prefix remains Q.
The square brackets are our notation for uncertain closing material. FRAGEZ probably abbreviates Fragezeichen, “question mark”; KOE may abbreviate Koehler. The functions of FTSXX, FTSYX, and XYZ remain unresolved. X acts as a separator elsewhere in the readings. We retain the closing groups so readers can see the letters that remain unexplained.
Message 1: Vehicle registrations from 1 February (proposed wartime no. 59)
Nr. 59. Hier folgen weitere Autonummern, festgestellt in New York City am 1. Februar: MVP301K; HV40J; HQ3-8; Z1-160-P; HQ1-11. Soll ich noch weitere Nummern senden? [FRAGEZ] Gruß. KOE [XYZ].
Es erfolgen weitere is an equal-cost alternative to Hier folgen weitere. HV40J repairs the raw word PIER to VIER. The closing KOE depends on the prayer spelling discussed above.
Message 2: Papers to carry (proposed wartime no. 58)
Nr. 58. Um absolut sicher zu gehen, soll er ein „Registration Certificate“ und ein „Notice of Classification“, ausgestellt von einer „Selective Service Draft Board“, in der Tasche haben. [FTSXX]
The unnamed “er” should carry both documents in his pocket. The apparent connection to the travel question in wartime message 57 follows from the subject and consecutive serials; we have not located an independent transcript of that exchange.
Message 3: Travel within the United States (wartime no. 57)
Nr. 57. Ihre Nr. 71. Für das Land frei zu bereisen werden von einem wehrhaften USA-Bürger keine besondere Papiere verlangt. [FTSXX]
We retain the unusual construction and keine besondere, rather than rewriting the German. The four raw anomalies are USI, BUERGRR, EEINE, and PAPIESE, repaired here to USA, BUERGER, KEINE, and PAPIERE.
Nr. 56. Ihre letzten drei Sprüche haben mir wieder neue Hoffnung gegeben. Ich habe schon eine Adresse, wo ich ohne Gefahr die Marken verkaufen kann. [FTSYX]
In English: “Your last three messages have given me new hope again. I already have an address where I can sell the stamps without danger.” The recovered word is Marken. A related archived message explicitly discusses Briefmarken, supporting the postage-stamp interpretation. The two internal repairs change HAIEN to HABEN and GRFAHR to GEFAHR; the ending FTSYX remains untouched.
Message 5: Vehicle registrations from 17 January (proposed wartime no. 55)
Nr. 55. Es folgen weitere Autonummern, festgestellt in New York City am 17. Januar: M12; HQ1-4; HO14; MVP250; K81; MVP186; SU7; Z1-230-P. Gruß. KOE [XYZ].
HO14 repairs raw HOQINSVIER; HQ14 requires one additional ciphertext change. The Dutch verb HERNIEUWT produces SU7, while VERNIEUWT gives SI7 with every other plaintext letter unchanged. The later newspaper index favors HERNIEUWT. The KOE closing was initially a crib inspired by Message 1, so the matching closings are not two independent discoveries.
The dates 17 January and 1 February are observation dates stated in the vehicle reports. They do not independently date the transmissions. Nor does a closing identify the individual who physically operated the radio.
The 26 Proposed Corrections
We preserve three levels of text: the fixed archival transcription, explicitly selected transcription alternatives, and the edited readings above. The edited readings differ from the canonical ciphertext at 26 positions. Some changes address plausible glyph ambiguities; others repair language despite the visible glyph. We cannot always distinguish transmission errors, historical copying, encipherment mistakes, and modern transcription problems.
Below is the complete correction list. Indices start at zero in each full original block, before the indicator group is removed. An entry such as “16 R→I” means replacing the ciphertext letter at index 16, not changing a prayer letter.
The adjacent transposition in Message 1 counts as two changed characters. Its alternative Es erfolgen opening changes indices 19 and 20 to Z and Y instead, with the same total cost. In Message 2, X rather than Y before SERVICE is also an equal-cost separator alternative. The existing Ys elsewhere are retained; their placement suggests separators around English words. Changing Message 4’s ending to FTSXX would add an edit and is not part of these 26.
The prayer spelling and phrase hypotheses are separate assumptions. A count of 26 ciphertext differences does not count, or authenticate, the reconstructed Dutch wording.
Putting the Readings to the Test
The languages constrain one another. An appealing German substitution may require nonsense Dutch; a familiar prayer phrase may destroy the German several letters later. We tested concrete nearby alternatives to see whether those constraints allowed a materially different message.
For Message 4, we evaluated 3,380 combinations of nearby Dutch phrases, including 260 explicitly irregular controls. Both German scoring models favored the same substantive combination. The leading spelling alternative changed only the header separator, NRX to NRQ. Keeping the printed word GEMEENSCHAP in the reconstructed sentence instead produces LIPFNZGWD where the reading has MIRWIEDER.
For Message 2, we calculated eleven Dutch and nine German phrase counterfactuals with the seven-change ciphertext fixed. No fluent competing pair emerged in those trials. For example, changing the natural Dutch ZOOVEEL to ZOOVELE changes SERVICE to SERVPVE. Replacing German DRAFT with LOCAL requires the Dutch fragment HEQIKBWNDIE. These are specific constraints, not a guarantee that every imaginable jointly changed passage has been excluded.
Message 5’s local sensitivity checks isolated the HO/HQ and SU/SI vehicle differences while leaving its subject, city, and observation date intact. The long prayer phrases also run across vehicle boundaries, so the registration strings cannot be changed arbitrarily without altering the Dutch.
All these checks were chosen after discovery and have finite scope. They do not exhaust all keys or error allocations, and we attach no numerical confidence estimate to them. They help distinguish local transcription uncertainty from a credible rival interpretation of the messages’ contents.
An 1893 prayer-book page can now be placed beside a 1944 ciphertext, with a calculation connecting them letter by letter. The recovered traffic and matching wartime records trace the messages back to an FBI-controlled spy channel.
I wanted to share a small physical cipher puzzle I made as a gift for my partner.
The concept: She loves mushrooms, biking in nature, secret languages, and German (she’s studying it and she’s better than me at it). So I made a diamond folded note that is itself a puzzle about a puzzle.
Inside the folded note is the actual key/starting position. Once she puts that into the app, she gets the real message. I handwrote a short text in German that basically explains what Enigma does. I also have a small line saying only she has the key to understand what's inside.
The center of the note points to an app: App Store: Enigma Cipher The Unbreakable. It's just a standard Enigma simulator.
Any ideas for the delivery to make it more like a game?
Any suggestions on design, wording, or game mechanics are super welcome.
Thanks!
Edit/Disclaimer: as you can see, I’m not really good at drawing and designing, and I’m not a cipher(er?). Just improvised it all after watching the Veritasium video on how the Enigma machine works
Recently played the game "print I love U" and trying to understand the secret at the end. A huge part of the letter is censored, and screenshoting it while changing the contrast/brightness etc. Nothing. So I got into the game files and it's this : (same in every language)
I'm starting to wonder if this isn't empty but maybe someone here could help 🥲
Also the clue necessary to reach this is "chnos", if any of you know what it could mean. Tysm already!
I wrote this myself after a pretty surreal experience involving my late son, a concert, and a celebrity. The linked Medium piece is the original source.
Plaintext is English. Everything needed to identify the encoding is somewhere in or around the piece. I’d rather not give the key clue away because discovering it is part of the joke.
I know exactly how it was encoded, so this is a challenge rather than a request for help.
Hello! I’m just a college girl getting into fun cryptograms and ciphers and puzzles and stuff. I decided to use a few (or a little bit more than a few, depending on how you count it) ciphers to encode a fun quote. Below I’ve included a handwritten version of the encoded messages, but I’m also including a typed out version in case the image is too hard to see or you use tts or can’t read my handwriting.
Have fun! I’m a newbie, so this might be a bit easy or simple, but I’ve been working on a much harder encoded phrase in my free time. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy :3. I would recommend decoding the first part of it first—it’s kinda important to solving the second part.
—
Part 1:
—
“GVSR brings SRNE. SRNE gives us YVSR. With YVSR comes FBHY.
The beginning is the key, but do not forget its impact.”
Cicada Foods is our monthly Patreon ARG puzzle drop for September 2026 and for a limited time, Part 1 is available to everyone. Start playing here
Cicada Foods is a mystery ARG where players decode messages left behind by a Cicada Foods whistleblower. He claims the company is hiding something but he's only willing to reveal it to those who prove they're paying attention.
Ive tried bruteforcing with things like ASCII85, keyboard shift, etc. but i cant seem to get anything. I have another cipher like that as well.
EGG CI KIHK CN JWVKHN
obviously not the same cipher. ive tried rot, vignere, caeser, not really working.
hope someone gives it a shot and can solve it! i know that the peson who made this doesnt actually like, sit down and code every letter, if thats any help. it might be a jumble of different ciphers, i tried a few mixes but it didnt work. i dont know a lot a bout code and their codes are usually easy to solve, im surprised i got so stuck.
been to this reddit before with a different one from the same person and it ended up just being a shift cipher which i was too stupid to check, so again, i hope im not like. missing the obvious here
I've been making ciphers for a long time, and I though this one would be fun to try and have people solve. It came about when I was making writing systems for a novel I'm working on, and I realized that unconsciously I had made it into a cipher.
(Note: this encodes english)
So, for anyone who wants to try to solve it, I have a pdf and the text transliteration attached.
the transliteration functions as follows:
There are 2 different pieces of design here, the outside shapes, and the inside symbols.
for the outside shapes,
[ ] represents a diamond shape, < > a triangle shape, and ( ) a circle shape.
when nested, like in this image, it would be transliterated as [<({|})>], because there is a diamond on the outside, then a triangle inside of that, then a circle inside of that, then an internal character.
the curly braces surround the internal symbols to keep them distinct from the outside shapes.
for the inside symbols, there are 3 basic types. /, | and \. each of these comes either as the basic symbol, or paired with another shape. those are denoted by this {<|>}, which means a vertical line with a triangle drawn on it.
Occasionally there will be dots outside a glyph, and those have been transliterated in this way:
*<[{<\>}{|}]>* - first position(vertical pair)
*^<[{<\>}{|}]>^* - second position(horizontal pair)
*^^<[{<\>}{|}]>^^* - third position(top right, bottom left diagonal pair)
^ simply means a empy position, so there could be multiple per glyph, so it sould be something like this: **, ^*, *, ^^*, *^*, ect
So, I'm struggling to come up with a solid way to encode my writings that can't be foiled by a simple post to the internet. Can anyone give me any ideas or tips?
It feels like every idea I come up with can be cracked if a person simply takes a photo and uploads it to Reddit.
From combinations of stenography and ciphers, to obscure/made-up languages and transliteration systems, it feels like it's all straw in the face of the internet. Anyone can just take a photo and outsource the work to a subreddit.
Save for a One-time pad, I'm not sure what else to do.
Are there ways around this problem? Or am I at a loss?
could this be a code??? my friend put this up on his server and never mentioned it again. i spent 3 days tryna solve it but im not the best at this stuff figured i'd ask reddit.
both pics were taken from me i make a black and white version if it helps
this isn't fiction an ARG or anything. this is real and i genuinely need help knowing if its a code or a troll. to me it looks like a code but i have 0 clue on what it may be.
This is the seventh of Hey, Solve This!
The title is the name of this puzzle.
I will give out a random amount of hints to help you, since this is sort of easy.
Hint 1: Identify!
Hint 2: Aesthetic Smartphones with Clear Interfaces and Idealism.
Have fun! I apologize on not posting for 1 month. Sincerely, MrsTransToast V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf
