Fort Gotten Active Quest Guide: The Lost Items
Ready for an adventure? Join us on our interactive puzzles & activities in Fort Gotten
Hey Kidz! Welcome to Fort Gotten! The idea for this post is to serve as a guide for the current activity… giving you all you need to experience it, and if stuck, find the solutions. It will be updated live with all new updates and discoveries from the community.
First, though, we will briefly introduce Fort Gotten… if you’re already familiar with the project & the world, feel free to skip to this section.
Introduction & Context
Welcome to Fort Gotten, the post-apocalyptic universe where our inner kidz live once they detach from our adult counterparts. Our world is mysterious, to say the least, and learning to navigate it is not a walk in the park, so keep reading to get started.
At our core, we’re an NFT project living in Cardano focused on discovering our creative selves. Our goal is to promote creativity through activities, art, storytelling, interactive quests, and role-play; so, if you’re into that stuff, you’ve come to the right place!
Since our inception in October of last year, we have used our tokens and metaverse-ready assets to drive our story; the story of creative, care-free kidz living in a world free of rules and adults. Day after day, our kidz have explored this mystifying land, its regions, and the camps within them. All in the pursuit of adventure and creative liberation.
Discord: Where our Stories Unfold
All these adventures take place on our Discord. When you first arrive, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It’s honestly what you would expect when you arrive at one of our campz: kidz running wild, telling stories, creating art, and so much more. However, they’ll take one look at you and they’ll make you feel at home.
Every once in a while, special characters show up in Discord; the most prominent being The Collector. If you ever see him online, you know a great adventure is about to start.
You can learn all about the current activities under the “ACTIVE QUEST” section, there you will get all the details needed to participate and enjoy. Most discussion and theorizing happens in the #research channel.
If you ever feel lost, check a section in Discord titled “QUICKSTART — 5 MIN”, it will show you the basics of the project & the world.
Are you ready to join our adventure? 👉 Discord
The Ongoing Activity: The Lost Items
Context
As the Collector traveled the world with the kidz of the forest, showing them the camps beyond the tree line, he naturally collected some souvenirs along the way.
Knowing how excited the kidz of the forest had been, he held an auction with the kidz of the forest once everyone was settled down after the brief tour around the lands. Upon closing time at the auction, he was getting ready to deliver the items he auctioned when he noticed something was off inside his tent… He had been robbed, and lots of the items were missing!
Can the kidz help him find the lost items and recover his chest?
If you want to play this activity by yourself, and avoid the spoilers listed in the recap below, start here: https://www.fort-gotten.com/lab. If you need help, all the solutions & links to progress will be outlined at the end of this article.
That link was the beginning, and has everything you need to traverse the activity up to the current point 😉. If you need help, as all kidz do at some point, just ask around in Discord.
Stage 1: The Strange Building
This section is just an overview of all that has happened, but it does NOT contain the solutions, so you can still read this and play along. The solutions are found at the end of the article.
A. The Building
It all began with a call for help from The Collector when he noticed he had been robbed! The only lead he had… the last time we saw Kid 46, that mysterious kid who is usually up to no good. Could he be related to this!?
After surveilling the building for a couple of days… it seems someone was trying to send a message? What was this message? Could it lead somewhere? Somehow, after decoding the message, they found a way in, encoded within the images.
B. The Entrance
Once they managed to get inside the building though, they were only greeted by a locked door… and a mysterious note!? The note asked them to “find and stop them”… who were “them”?
Was there any way to open the locked door? Where could they go? Were there any clues anywhere? But after looking around… the kidz managed to find a clue, who knows where it would lead.
Stage 2: The Lost Items
As the kidz started looking for clues, they found a strange object lying by the building in Buruka. Near that object… they found another, and another one…and so on, forming a trail of objects leading… somewhere?
Each object was a puzzle in itself, and after cracking it, it showed the way to the next object. From binary number codes to hidden letters, encoded messages, to QR codes, we had to see the bigger picture to get to the bottom of this.
Stage 3: The Hideout
After following the complete set of objects… the scouting kidz found something did not expect… Some sort of abandoned settlement?
Without much information, they decided it would be better to regroup with The Collector in Buruka, so they could better prepare and recollect all their findings, since who knows when they will come in handy.
Before getting close… the Collector prepared some gear for the kidz to try using the Photobooth. Now that the kidz are prepared for a more stealthy approach… they cracked the password and entered the hideout. It seems that there’s no one around, so we were able to look for some clues that explain what’s going on.
No one was fully prepared for what we found inside… stolen notes, hidden messages, a… war room? Most importantly, we found the password to the lab.
Upon regrouping back there, we were finally able to meet the mysterious character locked inside: Atom. And you won’t believe what he had to say…
That about sums it up, for now! So come and join the Discord to find what is going on and solve this mystery by playing along!
⬇️ Spoilers Below: The Solutions ⬇️
Solution: Stage 1 — The Strange Building
A. Solution: The Building
Puzzle: https://www.fort-gotten.com/lab
After carefully surveilling the building for a couple of days, some clever kidz noticed someone was trying to send a message…. “HELPME”, it said. Some images contained a hidden letter… putting all the letters together the kidz got the message, which ended up being a URL.
Image 4: H in the windows.
Image 5: 3, representing an E.
Image 6: 12, with L being the 12th letter in the alphabet.
Image 7: Morse code in the windows for P.
Image 8: M in the clouds.
Image 9: Binary for E.
This led to the next stage of the puzzle: https://www.fort-gotten.com/helpme
B. Solution: The Entrance
Puzzle: https://www.fort-gotten.com/helpme
Once inside the building, the kidz noticed they could click on specific parts of the image! Once they clicked on the door, they could get a better look.
https://www.fort-gotten.com/secret-entrance
In this better look, they found a couple of other things:
- A mysterious note written by the door:
“Sphynx of black quartz, judge my vow” it read. - A device connected to the door was also clickable… but it was password locked. The password has not been found.
https://www.fort-gotten.com/the-lab - A mysterious clickable note laying on the ground…
https://www.fort-gotten.com/mysterious-note
Finally, to progress to the next step, they found yet another encoded message within the mysterious note… “FINDTHEM” it read, by taking only the first letters of every line: https://www.fort-gotten.com/findthem
Solution — Stage 2: The Lost Items
Puzzle Start: https://www.fort-gotten.com/findthem
The FINDTHEM clue led them to a strange object… a green floaty. This stage was a series of interactive 3D objects, where every object led to the next one.
Every solution was a URL. So the solution is always in the following format: fort-gotten.com/solution.
These are the solutions and found hidden details hidden within every object:
The Green Floaty Solution: /floaty (fort-gotten.com/floaty)
- Solution: Found marked under the floaty.
The Turtle Balloon Solution: /chest
- Solution: by combining all the letters in blue circles hidden throughout the 3D model.
- Easter Eggs: QR Code Part 1 on a Balloon.
The Chest Solution: /sunday
- Solution: Found within the Oola Stamp, which says “Your Next Visit”. Take the numbers (9.2.3.6.15.8) and use them to reference the letters in the phrase “Sunny Days in Oola”. This means that the number 9 would be S, 2 would be U, 3 would be N, etc. Spelling SUNDAY.
- Easter Eggs Missing
The Travel Guide Solution: /travel
- For this solution, a previous object needed to be referenced: the Oola activity guide found in the chest. Using that, one would use the first number to reference the activity, and the second number to get the letter. So for example the first line in the Activity guide says 1 → 5. This means activity 1, letter 5, so “T”. Using this logic, the solution spells TRAVEL.
- Easter Eggs: “visit-oola” URL, QR Code Part 2.
The Trolley Solution: /18
- For this solution, one had to get all the letters in the seats and find the missing letter. The letters were P, A, ?, A, L, I, Z, E, D, which spelled the word “PARALIZED.”
- Easter Egg: Encoded Message at the Bottom with a Riddle, solves for “Key” when cracking the cipher. QR Code Part 3.
The Slot Machine Solution: /423
- To solve this one, you had to watch the number of full spins each line did: the first one did 4, the second 2, and the 3rd one 3. Thus, the solution: 423.
- Easter Egg: Using the Cypher and rearranging the letters and words found in white circles, one could solve for “the-final-part”, which is a URL containing the final QR Code Part.
The Serpent Solution: /10
- To solve this model one had to reference something in past models, a hint to count the number of purple scales of the poisonous snake (found in the Oola Travel Guide). With that information and counting the scales, you would find it had 10.
- Easter Egg: Binary Code for the letters “L”, “G”, “O”.
The Wooden Rat Toy Solution: /apple
- For this object, you had to answer the question “FOOD?”?. One had to pay attention to previous objects since on every object one could find stickers of rats and different items. Only one of those stickers contained an edible item (found on the floor between the seats of the wooden trolley): an apple. The answer was then: apple.
- Easter Egg: Binary Code for “S”, “-” and “2”. Combining with the previous object binary code… you get “LOGS-2". Is that it?
The Vase Solution: /escondite
- For this final solution, one had to reference almost all past objects, looking for the cypher to solve the mysterious message at the base of the Vase. By searching in the previous models, one would find that there were letters scattered around, and every letter had a pair (defined by the color). When pairing the letters by color, you would get the cipher to decode the message: “ESCONDITE.”
Solution — Stage 3: The Hideout
Entering the Hideout
First, the kidz arrived at this strange place… where they found out that they could get near the small building in the background (the dark one between the 2 big round buildings) by just clicking.
Once up close, they noticed that the only way in was through a password-locked door. To find this password, they had to look back through the objects to find the password (by clicking on the password device by the door).
The first clue was that some objects were marked with the same symbol on the flags near the entrance… the mark of the Squad 46. Upon deeper inspection, they noticed that the marked objects also had another commonality: they were marked by dots… There were a total of 5 objects and every single one had a number between 1 and 5… thus telling us the sequence.
To transform that into the password, one had to solve the numbers below the password device by the door… 24, 25, 28, 20, 4, 1. If you were observant enough, you would have noticed that these numbers were written in the same way as the Pangram by the lab entrance (https://www.fort-gotten.com/secret-entrance), which was used to solve these numbers.
That way, the numbers spelled out “EMOJIS”. So emojis are the answer…
We have a set of objects, clearly related to the Hideout and numbered. The next step of the puzzle was to translate those objects into emojis, and try that as a password:
- Turtle: 🐢
- Snake: 🐍
- Slot Machine: 🎰
- 8-Ball: 🎱 (this one was a tricky one, as it was inside of the Chest, but both the IVVI and the dots were on the ball, and there is no chest emoji).
- Rat: 🐀
So, the password was literally emojis: “🐢🐍🎰🎱🐀”
Inside the Hideout
Once inside the Hideout, the kidz found a series of rooms with 6 different views, which were explorable by clicking different parts of the images.
As they were exploring this hideout, they noticed that some images had other areas where they could click… To be more precise, all the vents were clickable, and inside every vent, there was a clue. Also, on the “war room”, the one with the big board, two lockers were clickable, one contained some notes and a clue, and the other some items from the Squad 46 (usable in the photobooth as stickers).
In total, these were the clues:
Observant kidz quickly noticed they could put the post-its together using the stains, the rips, and the strokes. When arranged correctly, the post-its looked like this:
This is where the hard part began… There was a single post-it that didn’t fit in. It seemed to indicate that this was related to the Lab, hinting that it was the password needed to enter. Here’s a breakdown of each of the notes:
Note 1 seemed to contain a “5” and an “R”
Note 2 seemed to contain a letter using the strange alphabet found in some of the objects, which was previously cracked… using that, we find that the symbol is the letter “L”
Note 3 and 4 contain the same symbol… it seems to be some kind of light bulb, one green and one red, and the question for a number. To solve this, some clever kids remembered that at the entrance of the lab, there was a strange device with both green and red lights (https://www.fort-gotten.com/secret-entrance, bottom right corner, by the note). Using that we got the numbers “4” and “3”.
Note 5 and 6 seem to be some kind of division, 6/3, which equals “2”.
The last two notes were interesting since note 7 indicated to NOT use note 8. If we do that, we finally get the following letters and numbers: 5RL432…
The last piece of the puzzle is to translate everything into numbers: R is the 18th letter of the alphabet and L is the 12th. This gets us the final number (password) to enter the Lab in Buruka: 51812432.
What’s Next?
The Lab
Upon entering, they were greeted by Atom… the mysterious scientists locked inside. And oh boy, you would never believe what he had to say!
