Solved by
JTobcat — https://twitter.com/jtobcat
Ziot — https://twitter.com/bbuerhaus
LeFevre — https://twitter.com/_LeFevre_
Mattm
FOMO, a small puzzle game by SpacePirateGames (creator of the upcoming Age of Rust game, powered by Enjin) was just one piece in the giant Josie metaverse puzzle.
FOMO however also had its own standalone prize of 5k enjin that could be found by deciphering the secrets inside. One can still explore the game by downloading from here.
Finding the Puzzles
Upon launching the game, you can find a floating robot head letting you know you are looking to find 12 seed words to unlock the prize wallet.
Walking around you can find the first clue of what you are looking for on the backside of the building.
Upon closer inspection you’ll notice that its a grid of blocks with different heights, orientations and striped edges.
With some exploration, you can find 12 of these total throughout the game. (Though I solved this in the end with only having 11)
Solving the Puzzles
Once you have the grids it’s time to start trying to decipher them. Knowing that you are looking for 12 seed words means its a safe assumption that each grid encodes a seed word. Most likely they are all encoded the same, so once you decipher one, you’ll be able to decipher them all. Right off the bat I started looking for patterns with a few obvious ones sticking out. The far 3 columns all appear to have the same block on them for almost all the grids, this most likely means that there is no data encoded there and the date starts from the upper left and is read in columns left to right. Next it was noticed that there was exactly 1 diamond block on each grid and it was usually followed by only a couple of unique blocks before hitting the empty data section. This most likely meant a diamond was a delimiter and the format of each grid was "word-number" (for seed position)
Using this, I then started assigning values to each of the 6 block types (x,0,1,2,3,4) and transcribing the grids to make them easier to work with. At this point the aha moment came, when it was noticed the number of blocks before each diamond was an even number, meaning each pair of blocks gave one letter of the seed word (also backed up by the fact that there were 4–8 pairs before the diamond too which is ideal word length).
Once I had my blocks mapped I decided to test my bigram theory and assign random letters to bigrams and run it through quipquip (a simple cryptogram solver) to see if it gave valid seed words.
The first 4 words I tested came back as valid seed words so it was off to the races. Though even with the words I needed to map the order which couldn’t be done with a solver so it was time to create a polybius grid to map these letters and find how to map the numbers. Using the solved words I had I was able to map all character and numbers to the grid below.
Using this grid to map every bigram for the 11 grids I had gave me the word and position for each and leaving a hole for just the second seed word
At this point with only 1 missing word and location, and a quick test of the 2048 possibilities gave the final word as delay, to make the final seed
verify delay sleep cute close sister intact salad century pitch question smart
This opened the final wallet for the FOMO specific prize. Even with this puzzle completed, there is still a puzzle hidden within the game as part of the giant Josie Metaverse puzzle with a 10 eth prize and dozens of NFTS. Come join the hunt below.
Josie Metaverse puzzle- https://josie.io/campaigns/view-campaign/TgudOYJSmjhBCZjqArH9iUzm2dtjTvC9_fYi5VZ19qgqzqw6hDRnfcBHUHp_pjueT6vCX-tF-CwZyYaXfgQ58KMMw-UbvNWl
Josie Discord-https://discord.gg/ZKk8MNN
Josie Metaverse NFT prize wallet-https://opensea.io/accounts/0x0fa6602c0b55eb5f49847ab6f34a86ca29c85764
