has anyone actually solved the "cryptic messages"?

[Icedfate]

i'm talking about the cryptic messages in the bottle that get fished up.
i right away realized it spelled words both horizontal and vertical, but no clue where to use them, even if i could decode it, there's no place in gamemthat allows you to manually type in words, except for the SIT library , which only responds to specific names of faculty members.

i googled it and only find a couple of reddit posts full of people speculating and no actual solution. . i hope it's not some ARG that requires outside knowledge or hacking the game files or some weird crap.

i hate ARGs. . they make me feel dumb.

i mean, west of loathing had some places where you had to type in words and numbers and you needed to metagame them, because some of them required knowledge of easter egg references from other games like kingdom of loathing browser game and inside jokes, of which obviously i would never be able to figure those out on my own. . .

i'm just wondering if anyone has actually figured this out yet

[Halfshell]

Theres another thread here. I think I might have been on to something, seems very unlikely to be coincidence. Basically the thread was thinking about the Sandwhich place lock because you can enter letters.

Now I noticed the hint of the lock being German seemed a little too specific. So I tried translating the bottle, no luck. I tried plugging each line of the bottle into a German anagram generator. Now one line only worked when the bottle was read top to bottom, but in both cases they were the last or 5th line.

Plugging the 1st top down last line: lenos into a German anagram nets us losen, or solve.

The 2nd bottle last line from left right: inert nets us riten, or rites (ritual but 5 letters).

Netting us solve rites. Now solve the ritual.. is what we have to do in the town of Sandwhich. At this point though the only conclusion is there must be 4 other obscure language related hints, and each pair of lines must relate to that puzzle.

I am not observant enough to comb the game for obscure language hints though..

[Icedfate]

the thing with that german lock is it alreadymhas a solution, and also that lock is rigged so you can only use certain letters of the alphabet. all 26 are not available on that lock

[Halfshell]

I don't mean to use the lock, that was what the other thread was about. When the lock is 1st examined its mentioned that "its an expensive German lock". I only used the fact that it was German. It seems like a steep coincidence that the 5th line of each bottles had German anagrams that meant "solve ritual".

[Icedfate]

oh, okay, i see, but then if the words are anagrams, there's probably dozens of words you can make from them.
or caesar cipher or any other possible cipher. . .there's probably zillions of words could be made from them.

but the problem still stands that there's nowhere in game that lets you actually "use" these words.

unless you are supposed to try them in the library? i'm about to reach the library again, but i would find it odd if someone didn't already try that

[Halfshell]

Well, with using German anyway the other 4 sets of lines either made nothing or gibberish. The 5th set of lines was very clear. Also to be clear heresolving the ritual is what saves the town of Sandwhich. Thus yes if we don't know what language to use theres a zillion combos. But like the lock there must be other language clues here and there. And they must relate to solving a puzzle at each location the clue is at.

My guess is this is a multistage puzzle. I think once we find all 5 language clues and thus make all 5 pairs of anagrams the new messages in a bottle will look very different if we exchange them for these anagrams.

[Icedfate]

yeah, i remember the gravyard thing in West Of, making you convert a word from morse code, then converting numbers based on their positions, then a caesar cipher, then reading letters in certain positions, then Naval Semaphore Code, i still don't understand what that is. . .

and in a separate section, there is a "tontine" puzzle, which actually looks kind of similar to this puzzle.

the thing is that other one was more obvious that it actually was a puzzle, while some folks on reddit are speculating that this puzzle might be a red herring and actually be nothing.

but then some other folks are thinking that it must be something because people would be really pissed if it turned out to be nothing and there would be a backlash against the devs.

but then, maybe the devs also remembered that puzzle in the graveyard and decided " we gotta put one of those in the new game, but we have to top it, like, make it even more cryptic, even more difficult"
which could be why it's even less obvious what to do.

i mean, yeah, i see the words in there sideways and downways, some of them don't even "feel" like real words. . but then they all do seam to have a meaning

BAKES : to make baked goods in an over
OPERA : a theatrical performance
DIARY : a journal people write in
HANOI : a place in vietnam(?)
INERT : not chemically active

BODHI : a buddhist word
APIAN : pertaining to bees
KEANE : a proper name(?)
ERROR : a mistake
SAYIT : speak something out loud(?)

OCTAL: base 8 numerical notation
TAHOE : a lake, a place in california
ACORN : the seed of a tree
RANTO : ????????
YOGAS : a stretching exercise

OTARY : an eared seal(?)
CACAO : chocolate bean
THING : an object, something
AORTA : an artery in the heart
LENOS : openwork fabric with warp threads twisted in pairs before weaving(?)


i don't know if the definitions have anything to do with the puzzle, unless we are supposed to pick out that "one of these things is not like the others", as in that one word, Ranto doesn't seem to have a definition. like it's not a real word.
maybe that's some kind of cryptographic word we need to use a cipher?


i did try every one of these words in the SIT library and got nothing.

another thing that popped into my head is what if this puzzle is tied to west of loathing, like we are supposed to type these words in at the graveyard, but then i don't know if i want to reinstall west of loathing and play back up to that point just to try it.

like maybe the devs did it to incentivise people to play the previous game. . .but then whatever someone doesn't have that game in their library. i would think that's a ♥♥♥♥ move to put a puzzle in a game that literally forces players to buy another game in order to solve it. . .


i remember legend of grimrock 2 had a ridiculous one, where in the ending credits, it plays an animation and for like. . a fraction of a second, an encoded message appears and then you have to decrypt it but it doesn't decrypt into english, it decrypts into an obscure long dead language, which then has to be translated. . .and like wtf.

maybe they did something lik that here, like we have to decrypt it into some other language and then retranslate it into english and i'm just not galaxy brained enough to go any further into this.
so i guess i'll just have to rely on the community to solve this for me. .



edit : also, in the SIT campus, sometimes i see a guy offering me a fuse but if i have too many i can't get one and when he greets you , he says "Honig!", which sounds german and it means honey in german, i dunno. the reason i thought to google it is if you don't lie, he says "IHTFP" and that looked suspicious, hecause it was all caps and it's exactly 5 letters, but a google search went somewhere else. apparently that's something that real life MIT students say. . .

[moomal]

I mentioned in the thread i started that the people riding the ferris wheel at the boardwalk have hats with letters on them which spell out AXIOM. So if it's some sort of code, then that's probably the key. I think it's unlikely to actually require the cemetery in west of loathing because all of those puzzles had six letter words as solutions. But you never know...

[Icedfate]

Originally posted by moomal:

I mentioned in the thread i started that the people riding the ferris wheel at the boardwalk have hats with letters on them which spell out AXIOM. So if it's some sort of code, then that's probably the key. I think it's unlikely to actually require the cemetery in west of loathing because all of those puzzles had six letter words as solutions. But you never know...

i did consider that those were 6 letters, and that game game first so in order for that idea to work, they would have either had this thing planned from the start or they went back and patched it in.

i dead read about the axiom thing and some think it might be significant that the ferris wheel spns in the opposite direction, so that if you watch it, the letters appear as moixa, whihc is likely why i didn't notice it and i just assumed that they made the wheel spin backwards to throw people off, but i dunno, maybe it is significant aftar all?

unless, if "axiom" is the decryption key, then would we take
"axiom" and assume all a's are a's, all x's are b's, all i's are c's all o's are d, all m's are e?
or does the wheel going in reverse mean we use it in reverse as in all m's are a's and so on?
or is it like, reversed alphabeticaly, where all a's are z's, all x' are y, all i's are x?

[moomal]

Originally posted by Icedfate:

i did consider that those were 6 letters, and that game game first so in order for that idea to work, they would have either had this thing planned from the start or they went back and patched it in.

i dead read about the axiom thing and some think it might be significant that the ferris wheel spns in the opposite direction, so that if you watch it, the letters appear as moixa, whihc is likely why i didn't notice it and i just assumed that they made the wheel spin backwards to throw people off, but i dunno, maybe it is significant aftar all?

unless, if "axiom" is the decryption key, then would we take
"axiom" and assume all a's are a's, all x's are b's, all i's are c's all o's are d, all m's are e?
or does the wheel going in reverse mean we use it in reverse as in all m's are a's and so on?
or is it like, reversed alphabeticaly, where all a's are z's, all x' are y, all i's are x?

If you actually read the letters in the direction the wheel is spinning, they spell out AXIOM. If, however, you read them in the order they approach you, then they come out backwards, which is why people are getting MOXIA instead.

[Icedfate]

the thing is that axiom is a real word, moixa is not.
i actually considered the idea that the word is a cipher key and i don't really understand decryption, but i used to watch gravity falls and that show had some puzzles hidden in their closing credits and so a bit of google searching taught me about ciphers, like the caesar cipher and the vigenere cipher.

meanwhile, west of loathing graveyard thing took that up to eleven, by forcing the player to use "naval semaphore" whatever that is. . .

now, i went to a website that "decrypts" text and it said it was for a vignere cipher and had a spot to plug in the "key".

i just put the first 5 words in the field "BAKES OPERA DIARY HANOI INERT"
i tried both axiom and moixa as the "key" and both of them came up completely gibberish nonsense.

however, when i told it to just brute force decrypt is, i got some weird results. the website just presented a bunch of possibilities and most of the were gibberish, but quite a few tried to convert "BAKES" into "BEANS" for some reason and a few tried to convert "HANOI" into "TRAIN" and i dunno. i'm probably waaay off track there, it's a real leap but i was thinking baked beans and trains are both things that are associated with hobos and there is that hobo town in the game. . .

but i suspect it's just a coincidence, like one reddit user took the words "OCTAL TAHOE ACORN RANTO YOGAS" and noted the numerical positions of the O's as "14352" and then looked at "BAKES OPERA DIARY HANOI INERT" AND SAW THAT "14352" corresponds to the letters "BRAIN", as in, "you must need a huge galaxy BRAIN to solve this" and they are highly suspect that's just a coincidence as well, because this pattern is never repeated anywhere else in the puzzle.

so i dunno. i was just posting all this, hopefully, maybe someone else might be inspired by what i write here and maybe figure it out

[Icedfate]

now , i just found something on the internet , called "the Playfair Cipher" and according to this article, a playfair cipher
"utilizes a 5*5 matrix to store the keyword or key, which is used for the decryption process"
"the step is working as follows
1. enter the keyword in the matrix in a row-wise manner, from left to right and top to bottom"
2. skip the duplicate words in the keyword
3. fill the remaining spaces with the rest of the aplhabet (A-Z) that were not part of the keyword"


there's more stuff involved, but the things that jumped out at me was "5*5 matrix" and "from left to right and top to bottom"

just like these puzzles are words arranged in a 5*5 matrix, read from left to right and top to bottom.

i still can't figure it out, but maybe this is a "Playfair Cipher". .

edit : aand, i might be wrong about the playfair cipher, because i think the 5*% grid has to have no repeating letters, which means every letter in the alphabet would have to be represented in there and all these bottle messages have lots of repeating letters and no Z's or X's or W's anywhere.

and that grid only acts as the "key" to decrypt other text and i never encountered anything in game that looks like encrypted text that needs to be figured out. .

[Red Raven Thorn]

Other 5 letter words at the boardwalk include TAROT, GAMES, FIRST (aid),

Ugh, I got nothing, I might actually be going crazy