We announced Treasure Hunts in our whitepaper as an alternative and complementary adventure type to the one we are building in Daedaland. Treasure Hunts are puzzles involving cryptography, blockchain, ciphers, logic and more.
The goal of this recap is to provide some ideas and methods we use in our puzzles so that it may be easier for newcomers to join in and participate in the future Hunts. If this sounds interesting, we invite you to research more. If you end up learning a thing or two new from this, we would be honored to have introduced you to these concepts.
On April 2nd 2022, we released our first ever treasure hunt for our growing Discord community. Here’s the puzzle and the first clue:
This sparked quite a discussion and an amazing collaboration within our community. Lots of fantastic ideas circled around (we may even borrow some for the upcoming Treasure Hunts 😀).
Two days later we released a new clue for the puzzle.
Soon after, the solution was found and we had our first ever champion, RocketMan, who was the first one that managed to connect all the pieces together. He was kind enough to do the following write-up.
I’m going to tell this story in a linear fashion. However, what needed to be done revealed itself slowly, aided by energizing collaboration on Discord…
To solve the first puzzle, we had to find a private key encoded in a grid, use it to import an account in MetaMask, and interact with a specific contract.
The grid was accompanied by hints that provided a number assignment for the eight symbols, as follows:
- A map is nothing without a compass (Map = 0, Compass = 1).
- When the time is at the highest peak (Time = 7).
- One-two-three the music rings, following the weapon swings (Music = 3, Weapon = 2).
- Know that feather comes before the beak (Feather then Beak).
- Finally, carefully measure indicated the ruler which had 6 notches (Ruler = 6).
- With this in mind, Feather = 4 and Beak = 5.
Replacing these values in the grid resulted in an 86-digit number, which needed to be converted to a 256-bit hex value.
A little side track: depending on how your brain works, you could think of these 86 digits as octal or as binary. Somehow, I could more easily think of them as binary, so I took the extra step of converting them to their 3-bit representation.
Regardless of the number system, punching all the digits in a handy online tool converted them into the winning private key:
c071672e2c07553b1d82a7501aeed2972b3c3c3af770d6a8d644e9c2c1137cad
By the time this key was found, we had already found the contract for a token suspiciously called Daedaland Puzzle Clue (CLUE).
The contract source code included a function called claimReward, which could only be called once from this account:
0x2E36B9d81306419F001Af7434499511456b862e2
Using the private key, I imported this account into MetaMask and called the claimReward function.
⚠ This is not an endorsement to interact with conveniently named contracts in the blockchain. Never rush, always know what you’re doing and, when in doubt, ask.
This quick-read summarized 3 days of collaboration in Discord. I am humbled by how much I learned and how much more I have to learn based on other people’s contributions to this treasure hunt. Thanks to all and best of luck for the next one!
-RocketMan
We thank RocketMan for this write-up and look forward to seeing everyone collaborate on the next Treasure Hunt.
We announced this earlier and would like to repeat again: We will never ask you to connect your wallet to any website. To solve the puzzle, a new account needed to be imported and once done it is recommended you delete it so you don’t start using it accidentally because anyone can gain access to it.
On behalf of the Daedaland team,
Zoran
