Clockwork Empires 'Eye Sigil' ARG solved

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Alephred, Aug 11, 2016.

  1. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    Just a post for the folks who haven't been following the Eye Sigil ARG goings-on; the folks at r/gamedetectives were able to reveal the hidden map piece, details in this thread.

    To summarise, though: a mysterious eye/hand rune has been appearing in a number of games. Details here (Game Detectives wiki). In each case, this indicated that someplace in the game (or the game's website, or in one case, somewhere in the real world), there was a puzzle piece, which they've been theorising can all be assembled into one circular map.

    A couple of weeks ago, someone noticed that the eye/hand sigil also appears on the back of this block, which led to some hardcore data-mining. Although I was brought in to consult, I was only able to answer general questions like "Around when were Obeliskians introduced?" and "What's an Event Arc?"

    Relevant clues discovered through investigation:

    • the symbols on the smaller rock in the bottom right originate from the real-life Phaistos Disc, a Minoan artifact of unknown significance (which also bears a striking resemblance to a certain in-game artifact)
    • taking the numeric value of the appearance of each symbol on the disc gives you the number 191761112
    • in an apparently unrelated effort, someone else noticed that the image in the Sept. 2015 newsletter was actually in .PNG format, whereas every other newsletter image is .JPG
    • poking around in the bits, the .PNG was derived from the .JPG, and it was determined that extra information was hiding in the LSBs (least significant bits)
    • after lots of trial and error, it was determined that the program used to hide information in the .PNG was OpenStego, an open-source steganography program (used to hide information in other information, like an image inside another image). Password? 191761112.
    • resulting hidden image here.
    What does it all mean? What is the significance of the (not as of yet) fully assembled map? Nobody knows.

    Amusing dead end:

    • one of the Game Detectives went through the game files with a hex editor, looking for image files (JPG, PNG, etc.) that had been renamed
    • although no puzzle piece was found this way, he did find this, a file named bipedDTest.gif, cleverly renamed bipedDTest.upa:
    bipedDTest.gif
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2016
  2. Puzzlemaker

    Puzzlemaker Member

    Thats awesome! Glad it was figured out!