The Solarium - An Alternate Reality Game in Space
Hi everybody! Before we get into the main meat of this message, I'd like to provide a bit of context. This is all based around a game called Space Station 13, which runs on the BYOND (short for Build Your Own Net Dream) platform. More specifically, it's focused on the goonstation branch of this game. If you're interested in finding out more about this game, you'll find a link to the main page of the goonstation wiki at the bottom of this submission. But for now, let's cut to the chase and talk about why we're here in the first place. You see, there's a lot of really intricate subsystems in Space Station 13, and one of them tasks players with discovering the hidden lore of the game by exploring the depths of space, delving into ancient ruins on alien worlds, evading dangerous traps, slaying eldritch horrors, and cracking codes all to locate mysterious artifacts that hold the key to unlocking the secret of the enigmatic stellar installation known only as the solarium.
The solarium puzzle proved so difficult to complete, that a team of dedicated people had to be assembled in order to even have a remote chance of succeeding. I am one of those people.
Now here's the real crazy part. The team and I have been working on solving the solarium for literal years and we STILL haven't solved it!
On the bright side, we've made consistent progress and have grown ever closer to finally cracking this nut. Well, we were. For the past two months or so, we've been stuck on a snag. We've been trying and failing to decode this strange piece of audio:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0jkg4JDufZu
We are 100% positive that some clue is hidden within this thing, but we have yet to figure out its meaning. We tried running it through several different SSTV (slow scan television) programs, but those attempts were total busts. Then we tried using FL Studio to de-noise the audio in an attempt to find some obscured signal, but that also failed.
After that point, we acted upon a whole laundry list of different ideas to no avail: reversing it, slowing it down, pitch shifting it, bit crunching it, running it through an online midi converter, and hooking it into a fax machine.
We've managed to acquire various other miscellaneous hints about the next stage in the solarium puzzle, but most of them have only led to dead ends and red herrings.
The few promising ones are:
- A single, incomplete word: Polyph____
- A message that, when decrypted by setting the rotors on a replica enigma machine to S O L, gives the message "THEXWORLDXHASXCHANGEDZSEEKXTHEXSTARSZ"
- This image:
- The phrase: No Gods in the Abyss
Now, normally, we're not the type of people to just give up, but we've run out of options at this point. I genuinely worry that the team might be forced to disband if we don't get something out of the audio signal soon.
Thus, I ask from the bottom of my heart, the depths of my soul, the very fiber of my being:
Will you help us?
Be warned: this isn't even the craziest thing we've had to solve, just the most difficult. If you decide to help us, be prepared to go down the rabbit hole and not come back up for a while.
If you're interested in learning more about the solarium, then you can drop by the official sol team wiki: https://sol.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page
If you'd like to learn more about goonstation in general, then you can check out the official goonstation wiki: http://wiki.ss13.co/Main_Page
If you want to contact the sol team, we're available in the #sol channel on SynIRC.
I liked the idea of testing it on SSTV decoders, so I compared it to a real SSTV audio file (Example:
) It seems to be spaced out much more, so maybe the audio file was slowed down, I have a strong feeling the file was manipulated in some way at least.
It also, might be worth to note, that the audio file frequency is 22,050hz which is a frequency used mostly in FM radio, digital audio media tends to be 44100hz.
FM Radio huh?
Well, we did have to decode what was effectively a digital numbers station before. Maybe we have to solve an analog station now?
This is probably something that you have looked at already, but here is a link to a dictionary search for all words that start with polyph and have 4 letters after. The most related one I can see is polyphonic. Maybe that has something to do with the audio?
That's #2 on the suspect list actually.
Our top three candidates are, in order,
I really like the way you think; you're pretty resourceful. That website you linked seems ESPECIALLY useful. I would've loved to have had that during some earlier puzzles.
"Polyph____"
I believe that, since you are working with an audio file, it might have something to do with polyphony.
"THEXWORLDXHASXCHANGEDZSEEKXTHEXSTARSZ"
Ok, so there are either the letters "X" and "Z" between each word. Without them it spells "The world has changed seek the stars". That's kinda obvious. But the order of the X's and Z's is "XXXZXXZ".
What I'm thinking is that this could be the key of a vigenere cipher? Or, seeing as it's Z and X, maybe coordinates?
"The bradbury II business computer"
The main text visible is "The bradbury II business computer".
But you can also see "...sman on the go", "...can do for [you]", and ...n do for... (probably a repeat of can do for you). I don't know what this is referencing but I believe it is something within the game... these quotes might be familiar to you?
"No Gods In The Abyss"
I don't know about this one really...
The audio itself:
Hmm, this might actually be very distorted morse code. I'm not sure about it though. It also sounds like it could be translated to an image, a lot of images sound like that when translated...
I'm not very good with this arg stuff so i hope this was (slightly) helpful lol
Sorry for taking so long to get to you!
Poly
Regarding "THEXWORLDXHASXCHANGEDZSEEKXTHEXSTARSZ" The X's and Z's are actually artifacts from the decoding process. It was encoded using an enigma cipher, and those letters were used instead of spaces in order to separate the words.
However, it is odd that both X and Z were used rather than just one or the other. That's definitely suspicious and we will investigate it further.
I should've elaborated about bradbury. Bradbury is effectively an in-game AI that was deactivated for some reason. It uses old magnetic tapes that are scattered throughout the game for storage. We're still missing some tapes, so we think this image has some sort of location hidden in it somehow.
But now that I think about it, bradbury is a huge machine, so I'm not sure how a businessman on the go could use it...
Maybe there's a portable version somewhere?
We've got no clue about the gods in the abyss thing either.
We've tried to convert the sound to an image via SSTV, but there may be other ways we don't know of.