Tag: d3rlord3

“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.