THIS WEEK AT RAIDSECRETS - 8/26/2021 (2024)

This week at Raid Secrets, the we return to the Dreaming City.

With the launch of Season of the Lost, we search for secrets. The Shattered Realm and Astral Alignment are here, serving as this season's activities. Personally I think there will be some interesting discoveries there, but they're yet to be seen. Hopefully we'll get something that's actually a puzzle or challenge of some sort, especially with our hopes of Kingship Dock being dashed with the end of Season 14.

With the new season we also saw lots of... beans? For some reason that's what Twitch and YouTube chat decided to focus on while we waited for the Destiny 2 Showcase stream to start. It's a nice change of pace from the instant "Whether we wanted it or not" flood that we're used to seeing, but I'm not sure the beans will become a household staple of streams. Either way, let's get into the beans of the reveal.

THE QUEEN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

If you're somehow reading this and haven't seen ANY of the new game content, social posts, Bungie videos, or chat rooms, then it's safe to say you're the exception. The last two weeks have been full of drama and hype with the new season and expansion, from leaks (more on that later) to the height of Savathun.

We've got new content, taking the shape of a 53-step seasonal quest line, a new matchmade activity, and a repeatable quest. The quest line, Wayfinder's Voyage, brings us to step 6 this week. I won't link the spoilers here, but if you're using a third-party app like braytech.org then you can see all of the steps for yourself - minus the redacted ones of course. Nested inside the introductory steps for Wayfinder is a run through the Shattered Realm and an Astral Alignment completion. Once you've completed the forced-pair mission related runs for each of those, you can continue to run them independently of each other. It's possible that we'll get some more required pairing in the future, but there doesn't seem to be much of an indication for that at the moment. The API team at Bungie seems to be actively classifying and redacting more entries this season, which is a nice change of pace from the past, so hopefully we have more surprises around each corner.

On the calendar, the next corner for us to round is the one that brings us to the 30th Anniversary of Bungie. In December, we will be getting a 30th Anniversary content release that will notably bring with it a dungeon, some cosmetics, and the return of the revered Gjallarhorn. Only time will tell if wolfpack rounds will be just as broken as the days of old, but here's to hoping.

One thing I would like to draw attention to is the repeatedmention of "secrets" to unravel from the Bungie stream. Over on Discord, there was a handful of conversation trying to get ahead of the ball and figure out what the deal is with the (rapidly sold out)Witch Queen Collector's Edition puzzle, and the leading theories seem to be pointing to some sort of chemistry puzzle. Some of the icons on the Hive Ghost stand resemble levels of acidity, and the armor has the same elemental icons that we saw back in the armor teaser image. The other secrets, if they exist, have yet to show themselves outside of the up-front story questions and mysteries, but we're not even through with the first week of the season. Personally, I would love to see some more cryptic puzzles strewn around the season, maybe the reveal of Wish 15, and maybe even another community-wide puzzle. Maybe the Hive Rune Database will be helpful with whatever comes down the pipe, or maybe it's a puzzle in itself.

"EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL"

Sandbox has changed. One of those changes was around Titan Hammers. Here is a reddit post (that I stole the title from) showing just how broken hammers have become.

Hammers, along with a handful of other things, will definitely need a re-balance in the new sandbox landscape, so enjoy the broken mechanics while you can. One of the things likely getting a pass is Lorentz Driver, a new exotic with Season of the Lost. Apparently, the perk activates as long as the gun is just equipped - not even active. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination, but maybe try jumping in a 6-man fireteam and running something with a lot of walls, and see what happens.

Another sandbox change is the move to infinite primary ammo - which has completely broken heavy ammo economy in PvP and Gambitby allowing special ammo to overflow into heavy with certain builds. Fighting Lion and Sweet Business also have their chance in the spotlight, and some of the memes coming out of those two are frankly hilarious with how absurd they can be.

LAST EXIT'S RE-ENTRY

Over on the discord server, @quartermaster has almost single-handedly revived the search for the answer of the Last Exit puzzle from Destiny 1. Watching people come together to solve it after all this time is impressive and heartwarming, and obviously inspiring to others with the snowball of traffic that's forming. As someone who isn't directly involved in the puzzle currently, here's what Quartermaster has to say about it:

Summary of Last Exit puzzle decipherment: 8/24/2021

After reading a lot about the unsolved Last Exit code/cipher in the RS reddit, I decided to do a ground-up cryptanalysis using a couple of books on the subject which are considered the best for “aspiring cryptographers” as Derek C. mentioned in his post about the Last Exit puzzle in 2016. Following the path of a cryptanalyst and partnering with the RS community we have made progress in eliminating many known types of ciphers that this puzzle could be.

We have the following observations from analysis so far to help us eliminate possibilities:

• There are 36 unique symbols in the Last Exit ciphertext: 18 letters, 6 numbers, and 12 keyboard symbols.
• Last Exit ciphertext appears to use a hand-crafted “toy cipher” of classical type (frequency characteristics are not suppressed, but are altered to skew analysis)
  
• Since the English alphabet only contains 26 unique letters and Last Exit contains 36, a simple transposition cipher is ruled out (another clue is the irregular block lengths)
• Performing a frequency analysis of the ciphertext, we see some similarities to a transposition cipher, but since we have less than 100 characters this is not reliable
• Frequency Analysis compares the encoded text to the frequency distribution of the English language. This method was used to perform the initial decode of the Beyond Light ARG text.
• Normally, we could use a test called the Index of Coincidence (IoC) to determine the type of cipher used, but have the following complications:
  
• The IoC Test is not reliable without a second text encoded with the same cipher
• We cannot simulate a second text to compare Last Exit
• Stripping all symbols and numbers from the ciphertext results in a test score that suggests high randomness which indicates a polyalphabetic cipher and not a transposition cipher

Given those facts, we can make a reasonable guess as to the type of cypher used to encode Last Exit:

Last Exit is likely encoded with a hom*ophonic Substitution Cipher (Dhavare et al., 2013)

• Permits a ciphertext alphabet of greater than 26 unique characters
• We have (2) bigrams which hom*ophonic substitutions permit
• Polyalphabetic substitutions are permitted in this type and our test result from Friedman Index of Coincidence scoring suggests polyalphabetic substitution

Proceeding down this path currently, I am deploying a method known as the Consonant-Line Shortcut method. It is used to find underlying patterns in which ciphertext symbols touch which others, allowing the deduction of which symbols/characters are consonants and which are vowels. This is a manual method and takes time but is effective.

I’d like to extend my thanks to the following RS community members for chipping in with different paths to attempt decipherment:
@tadpolefeet is testing: Error Correction Codes, and others

@TactiCutie is proceeding on testing Markov Chain Monte Carlo method (a form of hill-climbing attack) using the software we found to be suited to this purpose (AZdecrypt and CrypTool)

@Taquito Vendor Of The USS Motes and @Twiggy have put in work testing monoalphabetic word substitutions by manually fitting words to the ciphertext using existing word breaks

@Bachmanetti put in work running the ciphertext through Rail Fence algorithm

@NuclearFrisson, @Trevor, @Trixx and @Scorn Of The USS Motes have contributed in-game D1 scouting and tremendous encouragement consistently over the past weeks.

@ObstnateOstrich for consonant-line testing, and @huz_004 for helping check it

@Soooo many others in the RS discord for their invaluable help, ideas, encouragement, and excitement as we give this unsolved mystery the ol’ college try :)

@Ashnaxx for editing this writeup

I'm trying to work out a way that more folks can help out with the grunt work, so keep an eye on #last-exit in the Discord if you'd like to be a part of cracking this code

Now, that's a lot of information. If this kind of thing interests you, please join the Discord or create a Reddit thread and hopefully we can finally solve this puzzle.

BROOM? BOOM.

Last week, there was no TWARS. There was also a lot of discussion about leaks. This week, there is a TWARS and there is no more discussion of leaks.We will continue to not allow leaks, discussion of them, or discussion of where to find them inside of Raid Secrets. We've also noticed several other communities following up with their own limitations on leaks, and we are glad to see it. @Bachmanetti said it best - "Whatever your opinion of them. They are damaging to Bungie, and the game as a whole."

With this change, we also would like to remind people that datamined content is still spoilers even if it's technically "in game" and not redacted. If you are unable to find something by logging in to the game or going to Bungie.net and seeing it for yourself, please tag it as a spoiler or datamine before posting it somewhere.

We've also now got some little fun things in the Discord server - RSCoin! No, this isn't a crypto, it's just a little gamified currency that people have been gambling away for the past few days now. It's still in relatively early alpha so functionality is very limited, but we're adding to it whenever we can.

And that's it. That's the end of this TWARS. People were asking where this was last week, and I'd like to remind you that they won't be every week. Currently, there is a plan to have one next week with recent happenings and discoveries, as well as some statistics from the community over the past few weeks since those have been missing.

In the mean time, go try out the new rolls on the reprised gear from Prophecy and the new seasonal loot. The new exotics definitely seem like they've got some potential.

Happy hunting,
Parisito