The King in Yellow as Found Footage Minecraft ARG

“Whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left. Don’t be fooled. It’s listening.” This is the strange message that a Minecrafter named AVeryLargeMayo (“Avery”) discovered inside a book in his Minecraft instance. At the end of the book, there’s a cryptic cipher that Avery doesn’t know how to solve. So, he makes a video asking the internet to help solve the mystery for him. All told, the video is less than four minutes long. Which makes the 40 minute long video the YouTuber the Minecraft YouTuber Wifies makes unpacking his discoveries exploring the Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist ARG all the more impressive…even if he is secretly the game’s creator. And it’s that clever incorporation of the “ARG Explainer” video format as part of the ARG’s content that makes this Minecraft ARG so fascinating.

At least on the surface, this alternate reality game is handed to viewers as a fully-solved and crisply edited package, explaining (almost) everything and leaving little to the imagination. And yet, there is still considerable value in going to the “source material”, as none of the game’s three narrators are fully reliable.

Unlocking the First Layer: An Introduction to D3rlord3
The puzzle that Avery presents as the initial call to action in his video remains unsolved, at least at the beginning of the video: it doesn’t quite work as alphanumeric cipher, and similar attempts to treat it like a book cipher are quickly thwarted. Instead, Wifies falls down the rabbit hole by examining an inventory menu that flashes briefly onscreen during Avery’s video…a glitch in the system.

Wifies discovers that taking the first letter of each inventory item (and capitalizing the letters if there’s more than one of the item in the stack) spells out the location of a Google Drive link. So, the first image of a light block would be the number “1”, the three zombie heads in the second slot would become a capital “Z”, and the vine in the third slot would become the letter “v”.

When Wifies checks the URL, he finds the Google Drive link contains three files: two of these files are ~100 minutes of “raw” footage of someone playing Minecraft, and the final file is a PDF of an info doc from an anonymous Minecraft player, noting that the videos represent their “exploration into a strange tunnel I found in my minecraft world.” The rest of the video is Wifies’ account of what he uncovers through those video files from a user we’d later learn goes by the username D3rlord3.

Notably, this is only a puzzle that works when explained in retrospect: the numbers could have just as easily represented indices into the words, and interpreting the blank space as underscore presumes that the solution will be a Google Drive link. But since this is a puzzle constructed to be presented as solved, none of that matters. The link wouldn’t even need to exist, since Wifies helpfully explains everything you’d need to know about its contents.

And yet, the Google Drive link does exist. You can watch the full 100 minutes of D3rlord3’s exploration. AveryLargeMayo’s channel also exists, so you can confirm the secret message is present, and watch him win at a game of SkyWars.

The Protagonist’s Competence: What Would D3rlord3 Do
As the PDF introduction explains, D3rlord3’s videos center around his exploration of curious signs of life that shouldn’t exist on a random Minecraft seed. At first, the idiosyncrasies are little things: plant life growing where it shouldn’t. But then, he notices signs of something following him. Footsteps echoing just a half-second too long after stopping…torches going out in a long tunnel when they shouldn’t.

D3rlord3 sets up layered traps using obscure Minecraft functionality about how chunks load to confirm that something is following him, and determine how much it can see and hear. He confirms: something is out there, and it appears to be “listening” to what he says in chat, as well. Moving forward, he is writing to this unseen follower as much as anything else.

Eventually, he stumbles across a block of cipher text carved into the walls. In the raw footage, he pauses here for over 15 minutes, commenting “this isn’t trivial” before solving the puzzle and complimenting his unseen follower: “got it. good poem…but cipher stacking is pretty bad practice you know”.

Wifies doesn’t solve this cipher himself in his video overview, but he does provide a transcription of the letters…or at least, a reasonable facsimile of a transcription, since it’s incredibly easy to confuse similar letters in the block text etched into the walls of his Minecraft world. When corrected, something like this emerges:

Using the corrected cipher text and the Vigenere key CIPPSA (the word “yellow” shifted four letters forward) gives something close to the following poem:

Beneath the sky of melting gold
Ancient echoes of a shepherds mold
An old decay If left one goes
Is unseen truth all but faux

This is one of the most fascinating narrative beats of the ARG. As the game’s creator, Wifies knows both the intended solution, and the transcription necessary to generate it. As the creator of the explainer video, however, he does not know the answer and is equally baffled by how to transcribe the cipher text, since much of the resolution of ambiguous letters shown above required familiarity with the structure of the intended message.

Even then, a likely error in what was carved into virtual walls leaves part of the message inscrutable. And yet all of this is solved by D3rlord3 in mere minutes, followed by a snarky comment on poor puzzle design.

The first segment of Searching For a World That Doesn’t Exist is a celebration of D3rlord3’s competence: both through his knowledge of the game, and his ability to solve complex puzzles with minimal effort invested. And this is something that Wifies celebrates in his narration. All to make the fall that much more poignant.

The Hubris and Downfall of D3rlord3
After moving on from the puzzle, D3rlord3 enters an abandoned village and finds a book that recounts the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the world. The book’s anonymous author leaves a final entreaty:

I’m going. I’m leaving this here in the rare case someone finds it. If you have found this, I implore you, turn back. Disconnect. Forget about this world. It is not for you.

If you’ve come here you must be curious. I know you must want to continue onwards.

So I know that this is a heavy ask, but please do not go any further. For you own good. Do not.

D3rlord3 ignores this message, and finds a staircase hidden behind a bookshelf that leads to a pair of massive golden doors. What he sees is censored from view, even with the “raw” footage from the Google Drive link. Whatever it is he sees, it causes him to hurry back to the initial room, and write the warning for whoever is unlucky enough to find the world next.

Only this time, with the footage of his gameplay, we have the key to translate the cipher: yet again, it relies on the contents of his inventory, with the book cipher indexing into the names of items in set inventory slots. The message: RUN AVERY ITS HERE.

We don’t hear again from Avery, so his fate remains a mystery.

A Quick Refresher to The King in Yellow
At its core, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist is an allusion to the mythos that emerged around Robert W Chambers’ short story collection, The King in Yellow. Chambers introduced The King in Yellow through a series of four connected short stories in a book of the same name, centered around a play capable of driving its readers mad. Each short story touches on a different person’s experiences with the play, and the different flavors of madness it could trigger.

And while the play itself is never fully revealed, excerpts provide glimpses into what can be found within, through lyric poetry. Some of that poetry references Carcosa, the ruins of an “ancient and famous city” introduced through Ambrose Bierce’s An Inhabitant of Carcosa. The search for Carcosa itself drove one of its former inhabitants mad, culminating in the man discovering his own tombstone.

While The King in Yellow has come to be associated with the Lovecraftian mythos’ Hastur, the King himself is rarely the direct threat: instead, it’s the stories that touch upon him.

Do Not Trust This Video: The Existential Threat of Curiosity
D3rlord3 received an explicit warning against curiosity from a book left by a nameless villager. He ignored the message, until he was confronted by whatever lay behind the door. As what seems like his final act, he passed on the same message to the next person to find themselves in this world: “whatever you do, at the crossroads, don’t turn left.”

Suspecting this wouldn’t be enough to slake his successor’s curiosity, he left a video archive of his journey. In it, he revealed that something was following him…watching him. Through tests, he realized that it wasn’t just following him: it could see what he was writing. What he was doing. And so, he left a second, more deeply obscured message to the Minecraft instance’s next recipient: “Run Avery, it’s here.” This message wasn’t set to be triggered after Avery himself passed through the golden doors: instead, it was set to be triggered by finishing the story. Because what if the threat wasn’t just turning left at the crossroads and confronting what lay behind the golden doors yourself, but merely witnessing the act?

If so, that begs the question: who shared that Google Drive link, in the first place? Was that actually an example of D3rlord3 warning future visitors of what was to come, or was it the unknown entity tricking more people into engaging with the story? Were all the ciphers, codes, and secret online folders an excuse to expose more people to the story? And did pulling on all those threads place Wifies (and by extension the ARG’s active playerbase) in greater danger?

An ARG That Weaponizes the “Explainer Video” Dynamic
Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist works incredibly well as standalone explainer video. The raw footage was re-cut to create dramatic tension, audio narration explains the mostly silent main character’s strategic choices, and an epic soundtrack provides full orchestral accompaniment to the story. There’s really no need to dig any deeper, especially since the reveals that can be uncovered are relatively minor. By contrast, the “raw footage” can be an often confusing slog, and understanding the puzzles feels borderline impenetrable.

And that influences audiences’ reactions to the work: near the end of Wifies’ video, he ponders, “whatever was [censored behind the golden doors] in that black square was enough to drive probably the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen into running for his life.” When Ludwig Ahgren does a live reaction to the episode on stream, he echoes that sentiment: “what is this, Light Yagami…the smartest motherf*cker to ever exist”. Not because of what D3rlord3 did…but because of Wifies’ explanation of that behavior.

But Wifies’ video is edited to tell a particular narrative, and that viewpoint is limited: both by knowledge, and by editorial intent. Since D3rlord3 doesn’t explain the solution to the cipher carved into the cave wall, Wifies doesn’t understand it enough to properly transcribe the message, making the message harder to untangle based on his record. But in the edit, he also leans into making D3rlord3 as “the smartest protagonist I’ve ever seen”, leaving moments that go against that narrative out of the final cut. A TikToker went through and created their own edit of some of his more humanizing moments…and while this edit is itself a curated view, it finds a different story in the same source material. Another TikToker even highlighted a moment where D3rlord3 almost walks away from the mystery after reading about the King in Yellow’s initial visit to the Minecraft instance.

D3rlord3’s unreliable narration came from conflicting motivations: the playthrough was presumably left as a record for Avery…but because of his wholly justified paranoia about an unseen entity literally following his every step, at least some of what he shared was left as a trap for that entity. He’s perfectly willing to leave a plaintext warning against following his footsteps. But the warning that the danger exists even without experiencing it himself is obfuscated.

Finally, there’s Avery himself – almost an afterthought to the whole story, existing to pass the mystery on from one storyteller to another. We see no evidence of him solving any mysteries, or even exploring the space. And yet, his video includes a hidden message that is essential in passing the story on to yet another victim. Did his lack of inquisitiveness save him and he’s back to happily trouncing friends at SkyWars, or did he merely fail to document his downfall?

If this is a story drawing on the King in Yellow mythos, it doesn’t take seeing the King to drive one mad. It’s being confronted with stories of him. D3rlord3’s presumed descent into madness didn’t start at the golden doors, it was already upon him when he translated the poem carved into the cave walls. It continued when he read a story about the King’s visit. And yes, it came to a head when he saw what was behind the golden doors.

These days, maybe all it takes to spread a memetic virus is a fresh coat of yellow paint on a Minecraft ARG explainer video…give it a watch on Wifies’ YouTube channel, just in case. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Updated 3/30 to add: Wifies has released a two hour long follow-up to the original video titled Destroying A World That Doesn’t Exist, offering a summary of the considerably longer AveryTheMayo video behind the gates, clocking in at a vaguely terrifying fifteen hours.

This update was preceded by a more formal alternate reality game Wifies launched as part of Minecraft Live – players compiled a Google Doc walkthrough of the solve, and the YouTuber Freshi created his own video walkthrough, including a video interview with Wifies about the experience.