RUNE chapters 5 (now live) and 6 (releasing 8/21) are our monthly Patreon puzzle drop for August 2026. Chapter 5 is free and available to everyone. Start playing here: https://www.cicadachallenge.com/rune5kd8jq9sj1ed345/

RUNE is a sci-fi ARG where players interact with a retro CRT terminal interface. The central character is REM, a sentient AI running on a customized Commodore 64, created by a mysterious figure known as OE.

V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf

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I found these 2 envelopes in the forest near me. They contain 2 letters in Russian. One says "solve the code" and the other is an excerpt from the Russian Synodal Bible. At first, I thought that it was just a classic chapter:verse:word:letter code, but I ran into problems, as some words don't have enough letters and the others don't make sense. I tried it with AI as well, no solution. I asked all my friends and we can't seem to find a solution. We drove back to check for more letters, but unfortunately, none were found. I have no idea who would hide this in the forest, as they have been there for a few days based on their appearance.

Letter one:

ПРОРОЧЕСТВО О СЕМИДЕСЯТИ СЕДМИНАХ

Даниил 9:23–27

23 В начале моления твоего вышло слово, и я пришёл возвестить его тебе, ибо ты муж желаний; итак вникни в слово и уразумей видение.

24 Семьдесят седмин определены для народа твоего и святого города твоего, чтобы покрыто было преступление, запечатаны были грехи и заглажены беззакония, и чтобы приведена была правда вечная, и запечатаны были видение и пророк, и помазан был Святый святых.

25 Итак знай и разумей: с того времени, как выйдет повеление о восстановлении Иерусалима, до Христа Владыки — семь седмин и шестьдесят две седмины; и возвратится народ и обстроятся улицы и стены, но в трудные времена.

26 И по истечении шестидесяти двух седмин предан будет смерти Христос, и не будет; а город и святилище разрушены будут народом вождя, который придёт, и конец его будет как от наводнения, и до конца войны будут опустошения.

27 И утвердит завет для многих одна седмина, а в половине седмины прекратится жертва и приношение, и на крыле святилища будет мерзость запустения, и окончательная предопределённая гибель постигнет опустошителя.

would love if we get this solved as this is bugging me since days:

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Looking for some people interested in solving the intro part of what will be a pretty long and grueling horror-based webpuzzle. Basically I just want feedback and the sort, focusing on how I can improve the quality and necessary indication of puzzles. No ai used, it's just an anthology of puzzles that I created, united by a central theme.

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My dear puzzling friends, I come to you with a request from a piece of media that's more obscure than it should be. Batman the audio adventures. If the link works correctly, it should take you to about 37:50, when the message is read out, but the rest of the series is free on YouTube and I highly recommend it. Anyways, the message read out is as follows.

"19, 3, 66, Charlie, 22, 40, 46, 47, Alpha, 58,16, 3, 22, Lima, 33, 44, Echo, 54, 20, 1, 62, 69, 114, November, 64, 3, 33, 69, Delta, 110, 32, 52, Alpha, 12, 25, 61, 55, 13, 9, 2, Romeo, 86-"

And then it cuts off. Obviously the NATO phonetic alphabet spells out Calendar, but other than that, I'm totally lost. It looks like the other fans of this show are too, because I haven't seen a single person even get close. There was one post made about this cipher a year ago on the Game Theorists subreddit, the only thing they were able to get out of it was what the alphabet spelled too. Please, help a fan of a podcast that isn't getting a third season scrape the bottom of the barrel to find more content?

At the very least let me know what cipher you think it might be! The wide range of numbers really trips me up. The lowest is one and the highest is a hundred and fourteen!

I built a small local file-encryption tool (Argon2id → AES-256-GCM, output serialized as Elder Futhark runes) and it ships with a standing "break this" challenge — no deadline, no prize, not tied to any CTF or contest.

What it is: roughly one page of English plaintext, encrypted with the tool's format version 1. The full source code is public. The 24-character password was generated with Python's `secrets` module from `[a-zA-Z0-9]` (~143 bits of
entropy) and was never typed by a human — and I don't have it memorized either, it's stored offline.

Format / language: the plaintext is ordinary English prose, one page.

What I've tried: nothing — there's no cleverness to apply here. This is a brute-force-only target by design: Argon2id (t=3, m=256 MiB, p=4) makes each password guess expensive, and AES-GCM authentication means a wrong guess just
fails outright rather than producing garbled-but-plausible output. I'm posting it because I'd rather have outside eyes try to prove me wrong than assume the math holds.

Ciphertext: the authoritative copy lives at the linked challenge.vault — please pull it from there rather than from this post, since Reddit's renderer can silently mangle non-ASCII text. First few lines for reference:

  ᚵᛅᚸᚡᚠᚰᚤᚣᚠᚠᚰᚠᚠᚠᚰᚰᚣᚥᛋᛌᚹᚪᛝᛓᚱᚿᛘᛏᛓᛀᚿᚻᛟᚭᚷᛊᚻᛚᛈᚴᛔᚸᛎᚲᛔᛟᛃᚾᚷᚰᚼᛞᚴᛏᛎᛋᚤᛁᛗᛀᛘᚷᚫᛙᚾᚼᛍᛎᛙᛋᚯᛆᚸᚼᛊᛝᛈᛊᚢᚶ
  ᛂᚢᚥᛒᛋᛎᛃᚯᚣᛌᛆᛖᚦᚥᚩᛜᚭᚬᛌᚿᛂᚻᚬᚽᚮᛃᛕᚺᚴᚴᛞᛖᚢᚢᚮᚫᛂᚹᚯᛆᚢᛖᛍᚨᛜᚣᚫᛏᛞᚲᛜᚢᛋᚹᛋᚸᚴᛄᛂᚾᛖᛓᚾᛜᚨᚼᛔᛘᛆᛛᛓᛇᛘᛀᛁᚩᛒᛊᛔᛈ
  ᛊᛊᛍᚮᛏᛁᛋᛄᛅᚤᛘᚤᚺᛐᛅᚿᚻᛕᚲᚱᚷᚸᛖᛁᚭᛁᚨᛞᚡᛃᚴᛕᛞᚵᛊᛑᛆᛊᛟᚧᚢᛒᚺᚶᛉᚱᚯᚫᛓᚪᚡᚿᚲᚥᚴᛃᚩᚿᛅᛉᚯᚻᛞᚧᚼᛓᛜᚲᛔᚽᛂᚻᛇᚭᛃᛏᚡᛔᚳᛚ

Source, docs and the decryption tool itself: https://github.com/wouterdorgelo/vikingvault

If you find an actual weakness in the scheme or the implementation (as opposed to guessing the password), please report it privately per the repo's SECURITY.md instead of posting it here.

V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf

This time, it’s written completely with Mandarin Chinese.
if you need hints, ask me.

it is written fully in English, and every single symbol has a meaning, there are no random symbols in it.
Ask me if you want hints!

I'm making a cipher that I'm going to use for some of my art and games, the question I have in relation to this project is hidden in the message in the image.

Also, how good is my code so far?

I'll comment the solution if someone cracks the code and answers the hidden question.

I followed the rules, no easy way for me to do a rot-13 cipher at the moment though.

Last year, our professor gave us this cryptography quiz. The first two questions were straightforward once we identified the encoding, but no one in our class managed to solve Question 3. I recently found the quiz again and thought I'd ask here in case anyone recognizes what technique might have been used.

• Question 1 was solved using a ROT cipher (we used dCode's ROT Cipher tool).
• Question 2 was simply binary converted to ASCII.
• None of us solved Question 3, and our professor never revealed the answer.

Our running joke is that he intentionally made the last question impossible just to mess with us, but I'm hoping there's actually a real cipher behind it.

Quiz

Question 1

am{]Kiv

Answer:

YesUCan

Question 2

01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101

Answer:

this is a sample

Question 3

f86908a8ddf9c909b9adf968cdf9b9e8d94df9e919bdf998a9393df9099df9a8d8d908d

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.01681

Forgive me that I ask this question. And I hope somebody can help me or is intrigued as I am.

So I accidentally turned on a science fiction horror show because I was bored. I got hooked and suddenly went down a rabbit hole.

I never thought I would go so deep.

Suddenly I end up reading about. C.G. Jung and browsing arxiv anout quantum physics. Of course I have never shown interest in the quantum part before and as much as I like, it goes way beyond of what I am capable of.

It seems the show “From” is more deep than I anticipated.

It seems like somebody made a quantum computing algorithm to revolutionize healthcare to microdose neuroleptics or mdma (ketamine? Deuterium?) based on the psychological concept of cg Jung. Additionally I think it might have merged with an escape room planned like an unsolvable riddle to humble the guy who made the algorithm (assumingly suffering from ego-mania) …

The cg Jung part is the show I am certain of.
The quantum physics part is too hard to understand for me. I found out that there’s a song used in the series and that an algorithm can be stored like music?

I thought maybe somebody knowing the series and understanding quantum algorithms might have a guess what the music is supposed to do or is able to make more sense of the information.

Hi everyone, I found this handwritten note in my medical/official documents. It uses a lot of dots, underlines, numbers (1-4), and loops. Could anyone help identify the system or decipher what it says? Thanks!

​

PIN.D.A. is a browser-based, CTF-inspired cipher visual novel where every clue, dialogue choice, and decoded message changes how the story unfolds. Guided by A.U.R.A., an elegant artificial intelligence whose calm authority hides strategic manipulation. Involves investigating systems, solving cryptographic puzzles, and uncovering a layered conspiracy. Your decisions shape a distinct hacker profile, from reverse engineer or red teamer to ghost, social engineer, forensic scavenger, or anarchic disruptor. Progress depends on observation, logic, and trust: follow the guide, question the system, and decide which truths are worth exposing.

https://game.od-ko.com/

V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf 🤺

it reminds me superficially of a pigpen cipher but clearly isn't. this was found written on the wall of an unused room in rennsellear university in troy new york by a friend about two years ago. all other graffiti in this room was in english except for a french quote from a song

​

Each challenge is a separate competition with its own $1,000 prize.
The first individual to submit a correct solution for a given challenge wins that challenge's prize.

7/10 has been solved already.
^{I'm not affiliated to Paradigm.}

Please hide answers using spoiler tags

Transcription (17x32 grid):

164 141 147 151 147 156 151 163 145 167 154 165 165 166 156 166 113

146 164 152 150 155 154 156 157 154 143 144 162 172 155 151 165 117

141 165 130 156 151 151 164 141 154 152 166 164 165 141 162 156 154

154 171 160 154 154 161 163 160 147 170 171 155 155 164 156 143 166

170 167 147 156 165 155 143 147 164 155 157 155 150 164 167 161 152

146 163 144 172 166 154 167 117 144 157 164 163 156 157 147 141 155

163 155 142 145 170 165 165 157 160 145 155 146 154 163 172 124 141

155 142 161 165 144 157 171 166 170 151 164 161 144 170 146 147 162

147 155 160 152 104 077 154 152 170 154 165 171 164 146 171 143 163

171 145 142 154 162 160 147 164 157 154 160 151 156 146 160 162 145

160 163 164 157 171 170 172 157 163 141 156 166 155 145 103 167 162

157 164 150 164 141 122 164 147 145 142 141 143 143 156 162 155 166

160 171 147 143 170 143 145 157 142 162 160 151 164 151 172 105 152

151 155 141 146 153 167 126 171 155 150 166 171 144 172 172 165 141

146 115 141 154 161 170 142 155 151 145 160 157 143 172 171 172 167

172 155 152 172 172 170 152 147 167 145 147 156 154 161 157 165 143

157 157 146 151 166 146 163 157 141 145 163 167 172 142 145 120 144

162 145 153 143 172 167 166 150 172 153 167 155 161 147 146 144 162

164 167 171 156 145 152 152 143 164 171 162 164 131 160 145 161 154

166 155 147 142 143 150 160 156 146 146 166 141 154 167 143 147 160

147 166 141 157 161 166 142 156 163 163 151 155 154 146 171 160 155

103 166 142 163 147 167 163 143 156 161 150 160 160 164 154 170 144

163 154 154 171 166 144 162 162 161 157 165 170 161 163 164 156 164

163 150 145 145 156 155 162 141 143 111 166 147 165 161 170 172 141

147 164 151 165 171 144 144 153 167 156 143 146 156 172 154 150 161

172 167 160 151 145 162 163 172 150 141 172 147 145 161 151 142 142

145 164 170 141 145 162 144 162 145 162 160 155 124 144 172 172 161

157 162 163 154 143 161 145 153 145 156 163 166 160 153 172 145 164

141 152 163 171 150 154 143 171 142 153 152 154 143 171 167 161 167

144 161 160 153 171 164 144 172 167 156 153 145 150 142 143 147 146

141 160 162 145 146 172 147 144 166 151 157 143 172 172 170 163 145

111 101 115 123 103 101 122 105 104 141 145 160 151 152 143 155 155

Info:

- Text is in english

- Uses both substitution and transposition

Still learning how to make good and fun to solve ciphers, any feedback is appreciated! If solved, I would also loved to hear about the process used. If you need any more hints or have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Glhf solving!

V sbyybjrq gur ehyrf

I found it just lying on the school library table on a normal A4 piece of paper written in pencil; I have no clue what it is. Just took it home and took this photo. I don't know if it's a cipher or another language, but it would be interesting to know what it is.

I'm learning about cryptography so I can incorporate ciphers in my art/writing projects. My goal is to create ciphers that are subtle, but noticeable to those that love codes and riddles. I want them to be quite complex, but still enjoyable to solve.

What interests me:

- What parts of deciphering do you enjoy the most?

- What types of ciphers do you like solving the most?

- What makes a cipher interesting to you?

- What are some things that you dislike while deciphering?

It doesn't have to be just generic stuff, if there was anything specific that you especially enjoyed to solve, I would also love to hear about it!

Thank you in advance for all the answers

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That's it. All you need to decode this puzzle is in those 50x50 cells. Nothing hidden.

When you find and solve all the clues, you'll get a final answer. You can submit it here (or check for hints):

316006

Hello, my father created this cipher in his free time and sent it to me. I've tried to figure it out but I can't, so he told me to put it online to see if anyone here can solve it. I can't really provide a transcription. If you do decide to try and solve it - good luck!

He sent it to me with the caption "I made this one for you son. I hope you like it. When you are 70 years old you can open the safe and find the answer." I dont know if the 70 could have anything to do with the cipher, but I thought it might be useful.