Manhunt event – solution

Congratulations to SellerSword, Gellert, DJKiltScor, EggYolk, klo13 and MsTinyJedi for completing successfully the community event in less than 72 hours! I hope everyone had fun in this little competition and I am looking forward for the next one – feel free to let me know your feedback at root@playuntrusted.com or in the discord server!

The solution

With the latest patch, 7 new avatars, the “Manhunt Team” series, were made available for purchase:

By equipping any of this identity and winning a game, you’d get a clue at the end of the game. The clue you’d get had an RNG component, meaning you could have gotten the same clue more than once, making this event much more likely to be won by playing as a team (afterall, you’re part of a manhunt team!)

The clues were the following:

  • A 31
  • B 8,31,13
  • C 7,8,9
  • D 23,4,43,8
  • E 109,84,6,107,9
  • F 58,93,77
  • G 21,88,42,52,116
  • H 88,45,45,61
  • I 74,10,63,46,94
  • The Operation Leader is key.
  • Ignore whitespaces and special characters such as , and . etcetera.
  • A B C D E F G H I
  • 7 = T
  • 8 = H
  • 9 = E
  • 58 = T
  • 93 = H
  • 77 = E
  • Once you figure out the code, you must redeem it in the pre-lobby screen.
  • Some clues will help you confirm on the right track to find the key.
  • The event has to be played in the English language.
  • There are 22 post-game clues, including this one.

The most important clue was certainly “The Operation Leader is key” (which in fact, had better chances to spawn as a clue) along with the 9 cipher ones.

The next step would have been to open the ingame manual (which is why there is a clue that tells you to play the event in English – this won’t work with the Italian translation loaded!) and check the Operation Leader page:

The clues 7=T, 8=H, 9=E corresponds to the 7th, 8th and 9th letter of the description. In fact, if you start numbering the description letters (ignoring all special characters), you can see how the description is the key of a one time pad message (kind of, we’re not worried about security for this event as it is a game – you generally want a completely random string for a secure OTP).

So the letters “You Are The…” would be 1,2,3 4,5,6 7,8,9 and so on for the rest of the description.

Since we know the order from the clue “A B C D E F G H I” (although even without knowing it, it would be trivial re-arranging it) we know that the cipher must be

31 8,31,13 7,8,9 23,4,43,8 109,84,6,107,9 58,93,77 21,88,42,52,116 88,45,45,61 74,10,63,46,94

Which translates to

“I hid the cash where the sting took place”

There’s an avatar series of inmates, and given the theme of the manhunt and escaped convict, the next step would be reading the avatar descriptions:

The only avatar naming a sting, is in fact, Inmate #76196, which happened in “Acacia Avenue”. We know the code is 12 letters and in fact using “AcaciaAvenue” as the unlock code was the solution!