The Trailhead
The Trailhead to this hidden puzzle was found when SpacePirate Games released their second edition of Hack & Hash, named Hack & Hash 2: Wen Moon, a casual dungeon crawler.
Hack & Hash 2: Wen Moon contained the above image, which lead me to investigating all things involving Rustbits (the currency used in Age of Rust),
In the search for clues to solving H&H 2, I found this Transmission error message that seemed very suspicious. “incoming…error…+0x1200e0x2er12xgcb”
Transmission Error
Looking further into this discovery, I looked at the actual data being displayed in the enjin , using and looking in the source for the that contains the data.
Decoding the “+0x1200e0x2er12xgcb” down into it’s based parts revealed
1. +
Part 1 meant we needed to add the following parts to the “base”, which could be found as the Rustbit ID itself. “0x780000000000022e”
2. 0x1200e
0x is an indicator the following characters are to be used as hex. So if we take our “base”, and add “0x1200e” to it, we get “0x780000000001223c”
3. 0x2e
Again, we can determine this is hexadecimal, and when turned into ASCII gives us the “.” symbol
4. r12
This part required knowledge of basic ciphers used in standard puzzles, which allowed you determined it would be ROT 12.
5. xgcb
Using the previous ROT 12 clue, we can rotate these letters into “json”
Combining all these parts together gets us “0x780000000001223c.json”, however we must use the some reasoning and follow the same format as the Rustbit , so we must add the trailing 0s to create the link to the next part of the puzzle.
The SOS
“This is an automated SOS transmission. I repeat, this is an automated SOS transmission. Please advise, ship crew in peril danger and requires emergency assistance.”
We are met with an automated emergency transmission in the next, along with a large amount of hexadecimal characters. Putting the hexadecimal into a hex editor and examining the data reveals the telltale signs of a PNG file (image file).
Along with the png image, the End of File has data that will prove useful later in the puzzle. “| 39 38 40 44 45 46 63 56 61 74 75 76 79 79 80 88 163 | 32 09 31 16 19 39 20 20 38 64 26 15 36 63 14 06 023 |”
The PNG
Using a tool such as Steganabra allows us to see the image’s pixel colors.
Immediately you can see from the RGB values we are getting legible ASCII values. We can manually extract these values or write a script that can extract them for us. After extracting every pixel in the image and converting the decimal value to ASCII, we are left with a truly horrifying discovery.
The Monarch
The Message
This is Captain Tio of the cargo ship Monarch.
I can’t disable the transmission without alerting the others.
I have hacked into this transmission to warn others not to board this ship.
Please, I urge you to heed this warning.
These damn mechs… they boarded our ship and laid trap to anyone that should come here.
My crew believed in me to keep them safe; they are nothing but ash and dust now.
Their screams have been branded in my mind… oh god, it’s all I can hear.
I can’t think; I can’t get these screams out of my head.
There is nothing decent or just left in this ship for humanity.
They haven’t discovered my hidden cargobay, but I’m running out of supplies.
I don’t have much time left for this world…
God damn these murderous rust buckets.
This is MY ship and I will take my final stand against these soulless heathens.
I will send them into the oblivion of space.
You are not likely to hear this transmission again once I set this ship ablaze.
Part of the cargo was intended for Mele Sonels, I’m sorry I was not able to get it to you; the cargo has been encrypted in this transmission should you receive it.
This is my end, godspeed to humanity…26 19 18 10 10 11 16 23 26 6 19 25 2 26 25 13 6 9 19 9 15 18 4 23 17 7 7 26 21 5 4 19 18 11 20 24 2 21 1 2 16 24 18 4 1 19 9 22 22 16 26 22 16 15 9 3 17 26 20 5 13 18 22 10
Whats catches your eye are the numbers at the bottom being valued 1–26, this typically indicates they can be decoded from numbers to A-Z letters. “ZSRJJKPWZFSYBZYMFISIORDWQGGZUEDSRKTXBUABPXRDASIVVPZVPOICQZTEMRVJ”
After some typical cipher analysis (frequency analysis, index of coincidence), we can determine this cipher text will not be decoded by simple mono-substitution.
We must use all the data that has been given to us and determine how we will be able to find the key to this cipher, and the earlier numbers from the EOF of the PNG have not been used. “| 39 38 40 44 45 46 63 56 61 74 75 76 79 79 80 88 163 | 32 09 31 16 19 39 20 20 38 64 26 15 36 63 14 06 023 |”
Conveniently, they are in two groups of 17, which also happens to be the amount of lines in the SOS Message. This relationship allows us to closely examine what the numbers could relate to each line. After some thought, you might determine that the first set of numbers is line length, and the second set of numbers will be the index into the line.
So, we find the line that has the length of 39, “This is my end, godspeed to humanity…” and we find the 32nd letter in the sentence which happens to be “a”. Repeating this process leaves us with “a smtMcnoIritov i”, which doesn’t look great. So one last step must be made, and that is to re-correct the ordering back to the original text for the decoded message, which reveals “Mors vincit omnia”
Death conquers all
The last step in solving this puzzle is to use the “Mors vincit omnia” as the Vigenere key to our cipher text of “ZSRJJKPWZFSYBZYMFISIORDWQGGZUEDSRKTXBUABPXRDASIVVPZVPOICQZTEMRVJ“ which decodes to the proper seed words for the prize .
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the mysterious creator of this hidden puzzle, who did a fantastic job in mixing a great story line with a fun puzzle. I look forward to the next tales of Captain Tio and Mele Sonels. Thanks to SpacePirate Games for providing the prize support of 10k Rustbits and an Age of Rust MFT. Please check out their upcoming with rewards up to 20 ! Come join us in the hunt on Age of Rust’s .
Published at Wed, 22 May 2019 21:05:13 +0000
