So, been messing around with it. Going to try and organize this into something coherent rather than a vomit of words. Actually, it's going to be a vomit of words either way.
The letter is the cipher key. The siege of numantia, 133BC, Scipio Aemilianus destroyed the iberians, and Polybius was there himself, he was scipio's friend and advisor. Polybius at the time invented a special signaling system based on torches in a 5x5 grid, polybius square. Ahem, a 5x5 grid hmmm
polybius
square of five rows and five columns (literally the 5x5 grid)
numerical positions of torches (polybius signaled with two groups of torches, left hand = row, right hand = column)
grid / key
So, the blocks we have;
Deepslate, Obsidian, Warped Nylium, zombie head, basalt
Noteblock (specifically F#/Gb), Redstone lamp, Dried kelp block, block of copper, empty/air/dirt block below(?)
Block of Emerald, Verdant Froglight, Prismarine, Moss Block, Yellow Terracotta
Hay bale, Sculk, Jukebox, Lodestone, Fletching table
Tuff, Block of Iron, empty/air/grass block below, quartz pillar, gilded blackstone
Gives us a table like:
| col 1 | col 2 | col 3 | col 4 | col 5 | |
| row 1 | D | O | W | Z | B |
| row 2 | N | R | K | C | |
| row 3 | E | V | P | M | Y |
| row 4 | H | S | J | L | F |
| row 5 | T | I | Q | G | |
Dried kelp is K not D, because if dried kelp was D we would have two D's, and obviously Deepslate is D. But if you think about it, K is a really hard letter to find a block for. Same reason the zombie head is there for Z. Rare letters get interesting blocks.
Counting what we have: B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W Y Z = 23 letters. Missing from the alphabet entirely: A, U, X.
Plus two empty slots in the grid at (2,5) and (5,3).
3 missing letters, 2 empty slots. (2,5) being empty made me think it's probably literally "A" for "air". The other empty might just be a no-letter slot because chou's plaintext didn't contain U/X. Hold this thought, we come back to it.
The odd thing is the noteblock can go either way. F# and Gb in music are the same pitch but two names, an EnHarMoNiC EQuiVaLeNT, and that's kinda oddly specific. Could be that the audio uses musical pitches for encoding F#. Could also be that two cells in the grid are 'enharmonic' so two letters share (but with I and J already in separate cells I dunno which pair that could be) or just literally chou being chou.
Grabbing the audio, it sounds like a fucked up fax machine because it kinda is. The audio is SSTV, slow scan television, an old amateur radio mode that lets you transmit images with audio. Basically just IS a fax machine. 1200hz horizontal line is the sync tone, 1500-2300hz modulating band is pixel data.
The audio is just literally an encoded image.
I used to mess around with radio a bit and have some half-baked decoders. I was able to identify the leader tone pattern in the audio,
two 300ms tones at about 1900hz separated by a very short ~10ms gap at around 1200hz, which matches the standard sstv VIS format that precedes the transmission data.
The transmission encodes
11 bits total over ~330ms starting at around 1.41s. There's a
start bit,
eight data bits transmitted (LSB first using freq shifts) with
1100hz for 1 and
1300hz for 0, an even parity bit for error checking, and a stop bit. Each lasting
30ms.
Decoded VIS = 0x3C. This maps to
Scottie S1, a 320x256 color SSTV mode. Different SSTV references give different VIS code tables which is annoyingly inconsistent (a lot of charts list 0x3C as Robot 36, but the line timing tells the truth).
Scottie S1 line layout is a 9ms sync at 1200hz, then a 1.5ms porch at 1500hz, then a 138ms RED scan where pixels are mapped from 1500hz black to 2300hz white, then a separator, then 138ms GREEN, separator, 138ms BLUE. Ridiculous lol.
428ms per line times 256 lines equals 109.6s. Plus the VIS header at the front gives you 111s total. lines up perfectly. So the whole audio is one single Scottie S1 image, not multiple transmissions as I originally thought.
Pulled the instantaneous frequency out with a Hilbert transform, gridded each row aligned to its sync pulse, mapped frequency to pixel value, and got this:
View attachment 1275
The whole audio file is literally just a screenshot of **22 polybius coordinate pairs** typed in big black text on a white background:
44 12 25 54 22 12
25 54 42 15 34 14
25 35 55 25 54 11
11 12 21 22
Plus a scribbly stylized 5x5 grid in the bottom right corner as a signature. cute touch.
Plug these into our grid as (row, col) and you get LOQROQSBMZ which is... not english. Tried (col, row). Nope. Tried flipped rows. Nope.
Took me a minute but the in-game block grid as we listed it is the
TRANSPOSE of the actual cipher grid. When you stand in MC and look down at a flat 5x5 of blocks, what you naturally read as "rows" are actually the
COLUMNS of the polybius square. You have to transpose
AND flip the rows to get the proper cipher reading.
The real grid is:
| col 1 | col 2 | col 3 | col 4 | col 5 | |
| row 1 | T | H | E | N | D |
| row 2 | I | S | V | R | O |
| row 3 | A | J | P | K | W |
| row 4 | Q | L | M | C | Z |
| row 5 | G | F | Y | U | B |
Row one is kinda neat, eh?
**T H E N D**
Chou used "THE END" as the keyword to scramble the polybius square. Dedupes to T-H-E-N-D, fills row one, rest of the alphabet fills in after.
And those two "empty" slots from the world grid that we couldn't quite figure out?
Empty with grass below = **A**
Empty with dirt below = **U**
My "U doesn't appear in the message" theory was the
opposite of right. U actually appears all over the message, it was just literally invisible in the world grid. And the A I thought was at (2,5) is actually at (5,3) instead. The empties were swapped from what I guessed.
(The F#/Gb noteblock thing turned out to be just chou flavor too. No enharmonic letter pair, no special audio encoding. Just decoration..... Unless-?)
Decode time:
44 12 25 54 22 12 : C H O U S H
25 54 42 15 34 14 : O U L D K N
25 35 55 25 54 11 : O W B O U T
11 12 21 22 : T H I S
# CHOU SHOULD KNOW BOUT THIS
View attachment 1276
the actual saying is the early bird gets the worm, but chou seemed to intentionally swap the bird with a beaver, then double flagged it with 'rather I think it was the beaver" which is directly not a misspeak but another clue.
View attachment 1277
View attachment 1278
Take note, eh? Possibly literal? The noteblock, F#/Gb was dismissed as just chou being chou, but maybe F#/Gb being enharmonic
is a real clue.
And perhaps "my words" could mean the literal words, anywhere chou has spoken/written including forum posts, signs, item names, books, etc etc etc can be read weirdly when looked at twice.
1. The noteblock might matter. Same pitch, two names. Could be a hint that something in the puzzle has dual identities or that two things share a value. Maybe a future cipher where two letters share a cell, or a clue elsewhere that maybe has two readings.
2. A beaver is involved somewhere, either a literal search for the word, the animal, or beaver coded content on the server or in Chou's post. Last I recall there aren't beavers in MC, right?
3. Chou's words are a corpus, anything Chou has publicly written as I said might contain something. A steg or coded content.
Caffeine and adderall o7 see, I don't
only shitpost.
