Solving A Wifies ARG That Doesn't Exist

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:05]On March 23rd, 2026, there's a discovery of something that has never quite happened before in the history of Minecraft. It all begins with a link to a very intriguing website. The design itself is fairly simple, a black and white door in the background and a text box with instructions to enter key.

[00:00:24]Below it is a sequence of strange floating symbols accompanied by text that simply says good luck to a seasoned Minecraft player. These characters should be familiar. They're from the enchanting table language officially known as the standard galactic alphabet.

[00:00:39]This is a substitution cipher which means that we can look up each symbol on a key and swap it out for the plain text. Several characters have a line underneath them. This represents capitalization.

[00:00:50]Additionally, there are a couple of numbers. These are undefined in the alphabet. So we can leave them as is.

[00:00:56]The result is an 11 character alpha numeric sequence. Could this be the first key?

[00:01:06]Unfortunately, it doesn't work. We are bluntly informed that is incorrect. We will need to try something else.

[00:01:13]But wait, let's take a step back for a moment. Where exactly did we find this website? Well, it was discovered in Minecraft Live, an event where developers announced new features for the game. Before the mainstream was a community pre-show in which several content creators discussed what they make using Minecraft.

[00:01:35]A few minutes into the segment, something caught my eye.

[00:01:42]Feeding in from the darkness was a yellow door, and through it walked Weees. Hello, my name is >> Weeies is the creator of a video called Searching for a World That Does Doesn't Exist, the most popular Minecraft unfiction video to ever be released. We begins to discuss his channel explaining Minecraft web series and ARGs for the people who don't know.

[00:02:02]>> Sometimes I make my own stories and sometimes I look to the community for theirs. But if I had to say one thing, it would be that.

[00:02:10]>> But suddenly the video cuts.

[00:02:15]A house doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

[00:02:17]>> But we wouldn't build a house for no one to live in.

[00:02:19]>> So, you're saying it just popped into existence?

[00:02:22]>> What I'm saying is that no one has ever lived in that house, and it doesn't make sense that we built it for no reason.

[00:02:27]>> And it's not possible. You're just forgetting who lived there.

[00:02:30]>> Do you remember anyone?

[00:02:34]>> Well, no.

[00:02:37]>> Exactly.

[00:02:41]I'm going to find out what's going on.

[00:02:46]Uh anyway, I think easily one of my favorite things about solving these mysteries is the fun of just solving puzzles. In fact, in this very segment, in everything you've seen so far, there are clues hidden for you, the viewer, to find. So, if you're curious and you want to figure out what's really happening, then the answer is out there waiting for you. Good luck.

[00:03:12]This is how we ended up at this website, a link in the biggest Minecraft event of the year. And we've already made a bit of progress decoding the standard galactic alphabet into plain text. In fact, fans of other Minecraft ARGs will probably recognize this as a YouTube video ID. Appending it to the URL takes us to an unlisted video entitled WeI's ARG Rules. If you're seeing this, then good job. You've successfully managed to decipher the enchanting table language.

[00:03:41]But I promise the rest of the puzzles won't be as straightforward or easy.

[00:03:45]>> We then proceeds to tell us some basic information about what we're doing. We need to solve a series of five different puzzles, some of which have multiple parts. Whenever a new code is solved, we'll be taken to a page on the website that has the clue for the next key. The enchanting table code beneath will lead to a lore video, which is not required to progress. This introduction video will be the only one containing a clue.

[00:04:07]We says it about 3 minutes in. But okay, here's here's puzzle one. To unlock the first password, you'll need to answer three riddles that are now on screen.

[00:04:16]Riddle one, what mob has the ability to turn blue sheep red? Riddle two, what block can only be generated by wearing a piece of armor? And riddle three, I break with the particles of nether souls and reduce the sight range of bony archered foes. What block am I? If we combine the answer to all three questions and remove the spaces, then we'll have our first key. So, let's think about riddle number one, a mob that turns blue sheep red. The solution to this is actually an Easter egg. The evoker is able to swap the color of sheep. It's a reference to the priest unit in Age of Empires, which could convert enemy units into friendly units.

[00:04:57]Thus, the first part of the key is evoker. The second riddle asks what block can only be created by wearing a specific armor enchantment. The only enchantment that generates any blocks at all is frost walker. When equipped, a player can walk on water because temporary frosted ice blocks are created. This is the second part of the solution. The final riddle is a block that breaks with particles of nether souls and reduces the sight range of bony archer foes. I actually didn't know the answer to this before starting the video, but the solution is a skeleton skull. If you equip it as a helmet, it serves as a disguise that reduces the detection range of nearby skeletons.

[00:05:34]Combining these three answers together produces our first key. Evoker frosted ice skeleton skull.

[00:05:47]Entering it on the website, we get a message saying correct. And then we are taken to the second page.

[00:05:55]The enchanting table language leads to audio log one.

[00:06:00]>> This is epsilon audio log one. It is 4 weeks BK. I've officially decided to take on the case of House 31. It just hasn't been sitting right with me.

[00:06:10]Everyone has a different story. Some people say it's always been there. Some say it just appeared recently, but most people think it looks familiar. I know it looks familiar. Epsilon goes on to discuss that they're going to interview several people about the mysterious House 31.

[00:06:28]At the top of the page, the clue is quite simple. a short 1 second file called sound.wave. Let's take a listen.

[00:06:40]Our initial instinct should be to look at this in a spectrogram, a display of how frequencies in the audio change over time. But there's nothing obviously hidden here. So, let's instead examine the waveform, which shows the shape of the vibrations that produce sound. There are two different channels, one for the left speaker and one for the right.

[00:06:57]Intriguingly, these two tracks are very different from one another. one of them is much louder than the other. There are also some linear unnatural slopes that seem to be connected between the two channels. So perhaps what we need is some way to see the relationship between audio in the left speaker and audio in the right. One way we can do this is using a vector scope. The position of the x-axis indicates the vibrations on the right channel and the y-axis is the left. If both the left and the right are doing the exact same thing, we get a diagonal line. However, where the vector scope becomes interesting is when the channels are different. If we have two pure tones that are related to one another, we can get some really cool stable patterns known as Lisa curves. If the frequencies are adjusted slightly, the resonance breaks and the patterns move. Sound outwave is much more complex than a pair of sine waves, but the vectors scope can analyze it nonetheless.

[00:07:47]Examining it, we can see that hidden within the relationship between the two channels is another code.

[00:07:54]But once again, this is not the password. It instead must connect to something else. It is too short to be a YouTube ID. To figure out what it's for, we'll need to return to the rules video, which contains a hint.

[00:08:06]>> Now, certain parts of this ARG will take you to websites like YouTube, paste bin, and SoundCloud, inger, but nowhere.

[00:08:14]>> The code does not work with Imager or SoundCloud, but it is a paste bin link, which is a website that allows people to, well, paste text. This directs us to a Google doc. We see a large chunk of gibberish at the bottom are instructions stating that the clue is a single word that needs to be Caesar shifted by 24.

[00:08:32]So how are we supposed to decrypt this mess? Well, a hint is embedded in the title of the document. Wall 2, shelf 1, volume 10, page 268.

[00:08:43]H. This is one of those codes that's easy if you've seen it before and very difficult if you haven't. In 1941, the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Boures published a short story called The Library of Babel. It described a huge library containing every possible 410 page book. That's right. Any combination of letters would exist somewhere in this library. Your deepest fears, the weather tomorrow, how important it is that you subscribe to RGN, it would all be here.

[00:09:13]The library of Babel is from a fictional story. But what is really cool is that a person named Jonathan Basile has created a real version of it in the form of a website. This is extremely interesting.

[00:09:24]If you enter a hex name to choose a floor, you can then select the wall, the shelf, the volume, and then scroll through the pages of the book. Now, obviously, the vast majority of books are gibberish. After all, it's very unlikely for a random sequence of characters to be meaningful. But since every possible book exists somewhere in the library, there are volumes with readable text if you know where to look.

[00:09:51]And this is the purpose of the Google doc. It contains instructions for how to access a very specific volume in the library of Babel. By entering the hex code, it takes us to the correct floor.

[00:10:01]Then we'll go to wall 2, shelf 1, volume 10, page 268.

[00:10:08]We have something. It's not gibberish.

[00:10:11]Instead, it's a sequence of Roman numerals.

[00:10:15]We can convert this to Arabic numerals to see more clearly what we've got.

[00:10:18]There's a sequence of 73 distinct groups of three separated by commas. Every number is a positive integer and none of them are higher than 119. What type of information is commonly stored in groups of three separated by commas? The answer is something very important to the game of Minecraft. Coordinates. This could be a list of locations. We don't have a specific seed or anything, so probably the best course of action is to just place a block at each of these coordinates to see what we can come up with. We could do this the tedious way, but it's much easier to just write a bunch of set block commands using Python. Then we can put this list into an MC function file, which allows us to run the commands in order. So, let's create a new superflat world and see what happens.

[00:11:05]Hm.

[00:11:07]Looks kind of random. There's not really an obvious pattern from the bottom. It's all very jumbled. I'm not sure what we're supposed to Wait a minute.

[00:11:19]That kind of looks like something, doesn't it? Let's move back and zoom in to get a better view. There's definitely a pattern that becomes visible from this angle. It kind of looks like the enchanting table language, although not all the characters work. Most sections have portions of a square, sometimes with a dot in the middle. The only exception is the final character, which is an angle bracket.

[00:11:41]Veterans of retro gaming now will recognize this code. In fact, it was used in old route, the very first ARG I ever covered. This is known as the pigpin cipher. It's another substitution cipher. We just have to look at the key and replace each letter. The result is one word, Gilbert. According to the instructions, we need to Caesar shift this by 24. This is pretty straightforward. We just need to shift each letter along the alphabet 24 times.

[00:12:08]Once we do this, it reveals code number two.

[00:12:21]The enchanting table language links to audio log 2. This includes an interview with Abraham. He discusses hearing a creaking noise and seeing the house appear. He entered to find that the interior was normal, like every other home, but with no one living in it. It's implied that someone named Tim could have made it using a spell from an unnamed library.

[00:12:41]The clue for code 3 is interesting. It's a sequence of hexadesimal characters with a few dashes. In fact, this is not the first time we've seen something like this. If you were paying close attention during the Minecraft live sequence, you may have noticed that we had a book in his inventory with a very similar looking name. This one had an open dash, which seems to suggest that we should add our clue to it. Combining them produces a long sequence of characters.

[00:13:05]What is this? The answer is that it's a UYU ID. This is a number used to differentiate between different objects in the Minecraft game world, from mobs to items to conduits. One of the more well-known examples of UYU IDs is one that represents a player. Each Minecraft Java account has its own ID. In fact, you can use it to look up the player on a website like NameMC.

[00:13:28]When we do this, we discover that the UYU ID does connect to a player, although the name is too complicated to read out loud. Though they've had various skins in the past, they currently are the default skin. In the information section is something noteworthy, a link to a Soundcloud page named Gerard. He has two tracks, one called Blueprints and one called instructions. Let's start with blueprints.

[00:14:00]It's a harsh and unnatural sound. Once again, let's take a look at it in the spectrogram. This time, there is something to find. It appears to be a portion of a link. We've got another old route special, an imager page. By appending it to the end of imager.com, we can see an album called blueprints.

[00:14:19]Clearly, this shows how to build a certain redstone contraption. But there are many things that are unclear, such as the meaning of the different wool blocks. To understand it, we will need to listen to the other Soundcloud track entitled instructions. We says that we need to use these images to build something. He then proceeds to give a very detailed set of instructions. Okay.

[00:14:40]Using commands in a singleplayer world, you will place the structure template ancient city center. variant three. Make sure to set the rotation to none. After you do this, you must build the contraption outlined in the blueprint images you have hopefully found from the other audio on this Soundcloud. There is a waterlogged skullk sensor. The first thing you will do is break it, but note its location. It is marked in the blueprint by a blue wool block.

[00:15:16]Place all redstone and other blocks outlined by the blueprint first and then finish with the copper bulbs. Any black and white glass, black and white concrete, and blue and red concrete in the blueprints is to be ignored. If a wool is dark green, it means it replaces blocks of the ancient city center structure.

[00:15:42]only when you are finished building the blueprint. Then you can place all 20 copper bulbs. Finally, place a redstone block where you see the purple wool in the blueprints.

[00:15:55]Then replace the skullk sensor in the water and activate it once by stepping on it. This will activate the entire contraption and leave some of the copper bulbs on and some of the copper bulbs off. Read the copper bulbs. Off is zero.

[00:16:15]On is 1. Read in order of increasing ZV value. Reading the bulbs in order of ascending ZV valueue provides the third code.

[00:16:30]Audio log 3 is another interview. This time with Ty and Abel. Tyne thinks that the house appearing is just a practical joke. Abel says that it's Yanius's home, his brother. But Tyne says that Abel is an only child. The interview is cut short as Tyne becomes flustered.

[00:16:47]Unlike the others, this clue is not text. Instead, it's a single image called oceanwater.png.

[00:16:54]Let's take a closer look at it. It shows Wei standing in the water looking at a white house with red windows. So, what's in the ocean water? Well, if we look more closely, we'll see text to the bottom right that says, "Look inside."

[00:17:07]But there's nothing obvious to find inside the house. The text must be referencing something else. Where else could we possibly look inside? Well, what if it's referring to the file itself? There's a field known as steganography, which is the practice of hiding information in plain sight, such that it's not obvious there's a code.

[00:17:25]There are countless ways you could do this, such as every 30th letter in a paragraph spelling out a word.

[00:17:30]Unsurprisingly, steganographic techniques can become quite complex, especially when dealing with something like a digital image. Could this be what's happening in oceanwater.png?

[00:17:40]Thankfully, there are tools out there to make the search easier. One such example is Zstag, which is specifically designed to find hidden data in image files. And when we run Ocean Water through the program, it discovers something.

[00:17:54]To understand how the code is hidden, we need to think about how a computer image works. A PNG file is composed of a matrix of pixels. Each one of these has some combination of the primary colors.

[00:18:05]By changing the brightness of red, green, and blue, any other color can be produced. For example, one pixel might have 200 red, 143 green, and 89 blue.

[00:18:14]This information would define the color of that pixel. All you need are three numbers. Of course, since this is a computer, the numbers would be represented in binary. It's the same information just presented in a different way. Zstag discovered that a code was hidden in the binary numbers representing each pixel. What it did was take the last digit from each color and pull it out. In our example, it would produce 0, 1, and one. Then, Zeke repeats this process again and again, moving from left to right and top to bottom. The result is a huge binary string. While a lot of it is just zeros, we can see that the beginning does contain some sort of data. It turns out that this is ASKI, one way the computers store text. If we decode this binary string using the ASI standard, the plain text is revealed. Associated with this image are two primes. Multiply them by the prime in the Minecraft live segment to obtain a world seed. In a thousand block radius around 0, plus or minus a,000 on X and Z axis, there are six different blocks that only generate once. Consider all infested blocks and potted plants to be non-unique. Find the unique blocks and multiply the coordinates of their y value to get the next password. The two prime numbers in the image are easy to find. It's the dimensions 967 x 521. But we also need to find a prime in the Minecraft live segment. If we search through it, we'll see a moment when we opens a chest with the name 563. This is our third number.

[00:19:41]Let's multiply our three primes together to get a world seed and join the world.

[00:19:52]As we'd expect, it looks regular. What we are searching for are six different blocks in a thousand block radius that only generate once. Obviously, this is extremely difficult to do by hand. The best way to accomplish this is to write code that can search through the save file automatically. This produces our six blocks. One is a diamond block found in a woodland mansion secret room.

[00:20:14]Another is a pink bed in a trial chamber. We have an oak gate fence in a village and an orange bed in another trial chamber room. There's a sign beneath an igloo. And finally, an unlit campfire in an ancient city. Each block has its own set of coordinates.

[00:20:30]Multiplying all the y values together reveals code number four.

[00:20:42]Audio lock 4 is an interview with Lang.

[00:20:45]He says that there are spells that can create a house and spells that can cause people to forget. Epsilon says that Lang could have potentially cast these spells himself, perhaps to get back at father.

[00:20:55]Then Epsilon asks if Lang knows Yinius.

[00:20:58]Lang tells Epsilon to leave his house.

[00:21:00]We hear the sound of a book and Lang says that his journal discussed a conversation with an unnamed brother, a conversation that he does not remember.

[00:21:08]Suddenly, someone enters and says they found a video about the house.

[00:21:14]It's time for the final code. The clue is a sequence of nine boxes that appear to be static. From looking at it initially, it's not really clear what we're supposed to do with this. We need to find a way to get more information about what we're seeing. So, how should we proceed? Well, one thing that would be helpful to know is if the static is random. If it isn't, then perhaps it contains the data we need in order to find the next password. The best way to figure this out is to look at the website source. Let me explain how this works. When your browser is trying to load a web page, it sends a request to the server that has the website. Then the server responds by sending your computer some information back. We can think of this like a letter in the mail.

[00:21:52]Inside the envelope is a blueprint that tells your computer what is on the web page. The document is in a format known as HTML and it describes everything on the web page. It includes text as well as any links to other assets that might be needed like images. You might have seen this before with inspect element.

[00:22:10]This allows you to temporarily modify the HTML blueprint causing the web page to look different in your browser.

[00:22:16]Therefore, to understand if these static boxes contain a code, the place to look is the web pages HTML.

[00:22:25]Opening it up, we see something unexpected. Asky art of a person. In fact, we could have found this on the very first page if we looked. The meaning of this is not clear. Further down in the HTML, we discover the function that generates the static, appropriately called draw static. It turns out that the nine boxes really are random. There's no code hidden within.

[00:22:47]But there may be a hint elsewhere. So, let's continue looking through the source. It is actually possible to get the lore video link without using the translation table. There's even a comment saying that they're freebies. As we scroll through the HTML, we notice something interesting in the head section. This is part of the document that gives more information about the page, including things like the title and the style. But it also shows the author, which is a very intriguing set of characters. But unfortunately, this is not the solution. Something else is missing.

[00:23:20]On the Wei's Discord server, a user named Alina Fes was the first to document a critical discovery. Remember how I said that a web page is kind of like a letter from a server? The HTML is on the paper inside the envelope, which tells the browser what to render. But there's also information on the envelope itself, which we can't see unless we go looking for it. The envelope is called a response header. It contains information like the content type and the timestamp when the server responded. We can see it by running a command in Chrome, but as we look through it, there's something at the end that we don't typically see, an X secret with a 32 character string.

[00:23:56]This would turn out to be another critical clue.

[00:23:59]To find the final piece, we need to think about what we've seen so far. As each code is discovered, it leads to another page. The URL would have the code number followed by 20 characters to make it difficult to guess the correct address. But the URL for code 5 is different. Instead of a 20 character tag, there are only 19. This indicates that there's something special about it.

[00:24:21]Perhaps it's the information that we'll need.

[00:24:24]To say that solving the final clue was difficult would be quite an understatement. In fact, it was dramatically harder than any other password. Much of the exploration towards the fifth code took place on a dedicated Discord server. They created a document outlining their attempts, which I have linked below. The attempts were far and wide. Users inputed the X secret as a world seed and looked at the treasure chests within sunken ships.

[00:24:47]They attempted a Huffman binary cipher, an algorithm often used in data compression. They checked wide varieties of websites such as Imager, YouTube, the Minecraft wiki, Instagram, Discord, and so on. They attempted every Caesar shift on the author, decoding it using UTF-16BE, resulting in Chinese text that translates to the towering peaks and lush valleys. Another shift resulted in burning the flames, but this led nowhere. At some point, Weises began to provide help in chat. He said that we would know the key when we saw it. The solution is not a random string. He also said that if an ARG did this, he would be a bit annoyed. The process is not beautiful or creative. The puzzle requires doing something unintuitive.

[00:25:30]However, he did confirm that all the pieces were there. The only thing required was one more leap.

[00:25:36]Xor codes, QR codes, UU IDs, a random severed hand in the Tower of London somehow. Vernum ciphers, square ciphers, Bowfort ciphers, Playfair ciphers. On and on and on they went, but nothing worked.

[00:25:52]until suddenly something did.

[00:25:55]On March 25th, 2026, a user named Dancing Rain tried a unique approach.

[00:26:00]Here's what they did. They had a hunch that we'd need a visionire cipher. This is a more complex version of a Caesar cipher. Instead of shifting each letter by the same amount, there's a keyword.

[00:26:10]The letters are then shifted by the number in the alphabet of the associated key. For example, let's say the plain text was like and subscribe and the key was RGN. We repeat the key beneath the plain text. Since R is the 17th letter in the alphabet starting from zero, we'd shift the first letter 17 spaces. G is the sixth and N is the 13th, so we'd shift each of those letters accordingly.

[00:26:32]Then we'd repeat this over and over until the cipher text is completed.

[00:26:35]Decrypting is the same, but shifting in the opposite direction. Dancing rain took the X secret and performed this visionire shift with the website URL as the key. This resulted in another string. But this still wasn't right.

[00:26:50]That's when Dancing Rain switched from classical cryptography to modern cryptography.

[00:26:55]One of the most popular computer encryption schemes is called AES 256.

[00:26:59]It's extremely secure. It's actually the code that encrypted two Mineconz if you've seen that video. To decrypt it, you need a key that's 256 bits long, far too large to find using brute force.

[00:27:12]However, we just so happen to have a clue that is 256 bits. The visionired X secret. Dancing rain thought that this might be an AES 256 key. So where was the cipher text? Well, there's one major clue that we have yet to use. The author. What if this is the encoded text?

[00:27:43]BIM clerk. Could this be it? The final key.

[00:28:11]The result is a link to one final YouTube video. called eraser.

[00:28:19]>> Okay, sorry. Say that again.

[00:28:21]I said something isn't right about this summoning. Everyone insists that this is what we have to do and that the king will help all of us, but we don't know that. I know my brother. I I knew my brother and he would never have wanted this. And look what they've done to him.

[00:28:39]>> What is your fear here? I I just fear that the king is not what everyone is hoping for. I fear that the king doesn't have any desire to help any of us. And I fear that I'm losing my brother. It's completely fair to have some anxiety around this whole thing. But I'm afraid I'm not seeing a ton of the evidence to support any of this right now.

[00:29:03]>> Look, I I don't have any proof, okay?

[00:29:06]But you have to believe me when I say this. I know my brother Abel may seem like he's fine that he's just focusing on the preparations, but deep down he's scared. Deep down, he knows something is wrong. He's just too scared to say anything about it. He can't tell us. He He definitely can't tell father that you love and know your brother. I just worry that your feelings are just >> You know what? You're right. It's all right. I've just I just had an idea.

[00:29:37]I've thought of something. Thank you for your time, Epsilon. I I really should go, but thank you.

[00:29:43]>> Okay. Uh, see you.

[00:29:45]>> Bye.

[00:30:02]Heat. Heat.

[00:31:13]4 days later, the follow-up to Searching for a World That Does Doesn't Exist would be released.

[00:31:21]This is one of the most interesting Minecraft ARGs to exist or to not exist because it all started with the biggest Minecraft event of the year, Minecraft Live. I was so interested in this that I wanted to know more about how it was designed. So, I called up my friend Weies to see if we'd be willing to have a chat and he agreed. This is an edited and a bridge version of our discussion.

[00:31:41]You can check out the full thing on Modern Gaming later.

[00:31:46]Hey, how's it going?

[00:31:47]>> I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good. Thank you for having me.

[00:31:50]>> Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much for agreeing to talk. You know, I just had a couple of questions about the ARG.

[00:31:55]You know, I wanted to learn a little bit more about what was happening behind the curtain or uh behind the yellow door, if you will. Okay, so my first question for you, this ARG began unexpectedly during the Minecraft Live community pre-show.

[00:32:08]How did you hope to utilize this unique trail head opportunity? How did this influence your design philosophy when building the project?

[00:32:15]Okay, so I was reached out to by Mojang and asked if I wanted to make a community showcase, but I didn't like I didn't want to just talk about my own videos. If I was going to do this, I wanted to make it more interesting and give the viewers who know me and who don't just like a nice I guess taste in their mouth with what I was presenting.

[00:32:33]This was around the time when Mr. Beast's Super Bowl ad had also dropped, which is like in a sense an ARG for a million dollars. And I thought this was perfect. like it fits my brand and I think it's fun. I think it's interesting. And obviously like I wasn't 100% sure what the content of the ARG would be, but I settled on a story line that was tangential to my main ongoing video duology I guess on my channel.

[00:33:00]With regards to the design philosophy though, I had initially kind of had this idea stewing that it would be really cool if Mojang let me like have the reward for the ARG be some sort of teaser about the upcoming Minecraft update. Because something I didn't really like necessarily was that the only quote unquote reward for doing this ARG is like some love of the game thing, which is why I also wanted to give like good lore payoffs to make it feel more worth it. I kind of asked when Mojang was like probably not like higherups probably would not have wanted to do it.

[00:33:34]Whatever. But when that was still the running idea, I thought, okay, if I was making an official Minecraft ARG, I would definitely want to do something where you have to open the game.

[00:33:45]>> So that was like the big like baseline idea for all the puzzles. Like it had to be something where you had to open Minecraft, know something about Minecraft. All the puzzles weren't just going to be codes. They were going to be Minecraft related. like everything follows that sort of philosophy where it's like you need Minecraft for it. You need to know the game, you need to play the game and that kind of stuck even after the payoff was no longer like leaking some sort of feature about the update.

[00:34:09]>> Okay. So, you sort of mentioned that like things were changing as time went on because you thought, okay, maybe this is going to be to tease a new feature, maybe not. And one thing that I noticed is that the puzzle for code 5, the final code, was really difficult, like well beyond any of the other codes. You commented on the discord that you felt it was not a particularly beautiful or creative solution. So how did you develop the final mystery and why was it so difficult?

[00:34:34]>> Yeah. So this is like a multi-part answer. You know Kryptos K5, right? Let me know video.

[00:34:40]>> Yeah. Long story short, it's this code that was given to the CIA. It has four parts. They solved the first three parts of the four-part code in a day and the fourth part has been unsolved for what, like 26 years. Like ridiculous. And it's such a cool legacy and a puzzle. And initially, I was toying around with the idea of doing something like that where the final stage of my ARG would be fully unsolvable just so it would be something that like gets talked about in a video like the the Wei's puzzle 5. Like it would have technically a solution, but it would be like like a hash and the key to decrypt it would be hidden in a random video subtitles for 1 second from like 6 years ago that I posted. like something that's not solvable by any stretch of the imagination and just so it would live longer and like leave some sort of legacy. That idea ended up getting scrapped because like I feel like you owe the people something when you give them this kind of mystery and it's kind of toxic in a sense or bad game design in my opinion to make a purposefully unsolvable puzzle like you want to reward them with something.

[00:35:46]However, the turnaround time was not particularly long. I think it was like 10 days.

[00:35:52]>> Oh wow.

[00:35:53]>> So we did not have a lot of time to prep the lore videos. We didn't even have the final payoff for code 5 done by the time like the ARG was ready to be submitted.

[00:36:06]>> Oh wow.

[00:36:06]>> And this was kind of bad cuz like I mean code 5 at this point was still impossible. Like I wanted the the code five, the final payoff to be good, to be like something interesting and to be something related to the world that I'd already built. But because we didn't have enough time, puzzle 5 was purposefully engineered to be like a timesaver. Like while people were working on the ARG, I was still like recording the puzzle 5 while they were sol I was recording the payoff while they were solving it. It still is that AES idea, but this time the key is not locked in some video subtitles. It's it's um locked behind a URL veneer as everyone probably now knows. It's a kind of solution where it doesn't really have anything that would lead you to get to it, >> right? It doesn't really feel motivated, right? It's just sort of there.

[00:36:56]>> Exactly. Exactly. Like you kind of have to take a leap of faith by shifting it with the URL, but it's nothing nothing really implies that that's the correct direction to go in. And in that sense, I think it's a like bad puzzle design, but it was purposefully engineered to be, I guess, difficult because I needed the extra time to finish the payoff. But the time crunch plus remnants of what was going to be an impossible puzzle all came together. And that's why Code 5 is so different. Like, it has no Minecraft basis. It was made in maybe 5 minutes.

[00:37:27]>> Different question for you. The Minecraft ARG niche has grown dramatically in the last few years. It's been like really interesting for me to watch it flourish and kind of develop into its own unique art form. So, a lot of people are going to watch things like searching for a world that doesn't exist in the followup and they're going to be inspired to make their own ARGs. So, what would be your advice to people who want to do that, who want to make their own web series? I think an ARG works best when you have a story that you want to communicate. And I think that's the driving force of what makes the good ones so good. Characters that have depth. So, you shouldn't just make something for the sake of like making something creepy. I think you should know the story that you want to communicate and then use the ARG kind of format as a vessel to tell that story.

[00:38:12]And I know you people have different goals in the space. Like your goal doesn't have to be getting covered by another YouTube channel, but I think if you want that to happen, you do need a good story because all these YouTubers making ARG videos are looking for something, you know, interesting and entertaining. And a lot of that comes from the story. I think back in the day when it was maybe just me and you and two other people making ARG videos, you could get away with titles that were like a disturbing Minecraft alpha footage you've never seen because the idea was so foreign that people saw these videos and they were it was like a really interesting novel thing to see these shadowy figures in Minecraft where they really shouldn't exist. But now where it's like established that this is a genre and this is kind of what it looks like, you can't just put upside down crosses or mysterious shadowy figures. So the bar has been raised to the point where you have to kind of get more unique in your visuals and your ideas. So I think if you're making these kind of web serieses, number one, you want to have a story that drives the rest of the events, but number two, you just want to make it to the best of your ability unique. You want to make it something that hopefully not a lot of people have seen. Just tell the story in an unorthodox and still compelling way.

[00:39:27]If your goal is popularity, that is what will push the video the most.

[00:39:32]>> Yeah, I think your discussion about the importance of the story is an excellent insight, right? Because as we look at how the niche has evolved, you're right.

[00:39:39]At the beginning, it's like, okay, this sort of found footage concept is something that's foreign to most people.

[00:39:45]But what's interesting is nowadays, everybody knows that these ARGs, these web series are fake, but they don't care, right? right? Cuz the story is really what they want to know about. Um so I think it's a really excellent thing that you've identified. I think it's a great piece of advice is, you know, focus on the story.

[00:39:59]>> Yeah. Cuz I I still think maybe what 5% of my audience probably fully believes these stories are real. But the majority of people exactly are now familiar with this. They know it's scripted. So what they're coming for is to be entertained.

[00:40:14]You still 100% want to create an environment where you can suspend disbelief. like it should feel at least the premise should feel like it could be real. It should feel like it's, you know, possible, but also people are coming to be entertained. So, what matters the most is the kind of story that you're telling.

[00:40:31]>> Well, thank you so much for chatting with me and I'm looking forward to see what comes next.

[00:40:35]>> Of course. Of course. Thank you very much for having me.

[00:40:40]That was an a bridge version of a full interview I did with Weeies. We got into the history of Minecraft ARGs, a deeper discussion about how we think about the medium, and a little teaser for what might be next on the Wei's channel. If you're interested, check out the link to the full interview. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you all in the next video. Have a great day.