Reverse Engineering Letter's Hobo Alphabet

[Puny Punny]

Hobos and gentlers, I have given myself a headache.

From what I'm aware, I have compiled every single instance of Hobo Code into an image [i.imgur.com].

I've tried to somehow link The Blackboard (to the "North" of Charlie) from SIT to The Whiteboard (to the "West" of Charlie). My trials have proven unsuccessful and my brain wrinkles are beginning to implode.

Finding a connection could have some relation to other big puzzles, namely:

• 5 Bottle Words A (BAKES OPERA DIARY HANOI INERT)
  
• 5 Bottle Words B (OCTAL TAHOE ACORN RANTO YOGAS)
  
• SIT Puzzle Ring
  
• SIT Library Name Lookup

If there are any other people into puzzle nerd nonsense, I wish for their insights (unless you're wrong, in which case you will be ciphered like Caesar).

[Du-Vu]

Doing Saint Pope's work. Wish I had something to add. I'll keep an eye out.

[andrew.irony]

There are 26 symbols on Letters's whiteboard in the cryptography boxcar. This really seems to be giving us a fairly direct, albeit impartial, cipher key: The symbol in third position (reading down the first column) looks like a C; the next one looks like a D... The final column would be V, W, X, Y, and Z, and note that the X is an X in a circle, while the Z is basically a Z.

But also note that H is a rotated F, and so is L. Y is a rotated Q. Looking at the environmental hobo code examples, there are a lot of rotations of glyphs that we "know" which presumably stand for something else. Like the stone outside Saint Polycarp's: The middle symbol is (what I hypothesize to be) an F, but the top symbol is an upside-down V.

This makes it really tough to analyze all the environmental examples, because, what angle are we supposed to be looking at the symbols from. Is the "top" always "up" from the camera's perspective?

The arrow symbol is very tricky as well. I keep wanting to see its use on the chemistry blackboard as an "equals" or "therefore" or "is" sign, but it might stand for a plain old letter.

I have to say I'm not really sure the environmental examples all translate to anything meaningful. One of them appears to be "__Q_" which is not encouraging. But the chemistry blackboard looks very deliberate.

One deliberate feature might be how it doesn't use ANY of the symbols we "know" from the whiteboard! This is weirdly helpful, in a way. It means the words on the chemistry board "must" (if I'm right about the whiteboard) use only the letters
ABEIMNORSTU. That's eleven possible letters—a pretty good crop of frequently-used letters—while the blackboard uses ten different glyphs.

The double letter at the end of the second word seemed like a good place to start. I hypothesized it might be S. But then the word itself would have to be EMBOSS, MORASS, REMISS, or something weirder. If it's EMBOSS, the first word can't be anything. If it's MORASS, the first word could be NOISE, but "NOISE MORASS..." doesn't get us anything. If it's REMISS, the first word could be BEAST. BEAST REMISS.

So, if I'm barking up the right tree AT ALL, the + character probably doesn't stand for S.

[SamTheCookieLord]

Interesting! I've tried to look into this before, after finding the entire glyph set in the files (seen here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xTPSexqrva59yhzCy2GC89hBS9sGFaV_DJLkNycVUkM/edit) but came to the conclusion that any instance of hobo code is just gibberish, but it'd be really cool if it actually wasn't! Wishing you luck in deciphering!

[andrew.irony]

What a shame! They clearly went through the trouble of making a decodable script, and all they used it for was keyboard-mashing! I expected better from these nerds.

[Iantha611]

I think we may be going about this the wrong way. If we look at Letters' board, there are sentence lines next to the symbols. Traditional hobo code was one symbol for a /concept/, not one letter or syllable. Is it possible that the files use letters just for implementation purposes, and the symbols are for words/phrases instead?

For example, if you look at the symbols outside Crystaldream Hardware store, they say 'nice man, ask him for candy.'
From the lists of 'real' hobo code lists I've found (which, take with a grain of salt, I guess), the circle with an X means 'good for a handout,' the arrow literally means 'this way' and it's pointing at the store, and the plus sign means 'alright.'
While those three don't translate specifically to 'ask this dude for candy,' they do communicate 'this dude is alright and will give you handouts.'
I've only looked into this one, not all the others, so I may be off base.

Also, I can't find all Letters' symbols in real hobo code, so maybe there could also be wiggle room in how the devs are using the symbols here, too!