🔀h, The Third

The Reveal

A story as old as time itself… h

We have just wrapped up our third h extravaganza resulting in the reveal of our gen 1 collection: the Zoomers! For those not familiar, h comes in many forms but can be best described as a digital treasure hunt or escape room spawning across web3 and several days/weeks depending on difficulty.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words (special thanks to Wizlala — she doesn’t know she’s letting me use this NFT for the article yet)

Let’s get right into the breakdown of this h hunt!

This time, we started things off a little bit different. The first indication of the beginning of a new h was a raffle up on the Boomer Squad website.

Boomer Squad Pawn Shop Raffles

The winners of this raffle were awarded the h role in our Discord. The h role enabled access to a hidden channel, h.

Our new h holders were given access to the channel along with one of 5 different NFTs shown below. Each NFT came with its own unique meta data and information. In order, they were named:

1: Broken

2: Underwater

3: City

4: Apocalypse

5: Infinity

At this stage of the game and with the hints and information provided, it wasn’t likely that our first 5 h heroes could trigger the next step. Extremely difficult, but not impossible. The meta data for this set of raffles said “ElderKarl is typing…”

The beginning of the hunt was designed to be a bit more slow going. Not many hints or clues were provided yet, and so our pioneers put themselves to work. Many, many commands and attempts were made with no luck. This meant more raffles, more h NFTs, and additional users gaining access to the channel.

The 2nd round of raffles. Meta data information was “Red Light Green Light”.

6: Camouflage

7: Forest

8: Marbles

9: Mold

10: Pretty

In between the 2nd and 3rd raffles, an additional clue was also being given in the discord for those wise enough to catch on. Posting the “Older Man” emoji at various times/channels.

3rd round of h raffles, this time with a few more hints contained in the meta data. Each NFT had a different hint contained in the meta data — “h is big”, “h is hidden”, “h is the beginning”, “h is old”, “h is typing”. These were meant as clues for a variety of steps along the way which I will elaborate on as we go.

This 3rd round of raffles included a fresh new set of clues hidden in the meta data to give our hunters a little push. “h is hidden”, “h is old” & “h is typing” were the relevant clues. “h is hidden” because they were looking for an actual hidden H in discord. “h is old” to hint towards the “Boomers” channel. “h is typing” to further hint at discord (playing with the ElderKarl meme).

This channel was initially locked — the chat was not accessible. The chat channel was unlocked by typing the Boomer count command in the h channel. For example, per the above screen snip, the command would be !2502. The correct answer would vary based on current count.

As our intrepid hunters found out, unlocking the channel didn’t make it any easier to find! There was no indication of the command being entered correctly. It was a combination of luck, exploration, and pure grit that pushed them through this initial step. Well done to Toxic Positivity for being the first to find the hidden channel and therefore, the hidden H, unlocking their next clue.

This was the next unlocked clue.

Along with this clue, the group was advised that the required !commands in the h channel were now activated. This was a lesson learned from previous h hunts! These guys are great at brute forcing commands. This time, the commands were inactive until the hunters were at the appropriate step in the race.

This next step was a tough one. I will admit to you guys, this was a surprise for me. I knew it was a bit tricky, but I didn’t expect it to be the stumbling block it ended up being. The clue shown above was meant to represent a scroll / writing and an emoji that looked as close to a Zoomer as I could find. This was meant to point to our Zoomer Comic on the Boomer Squad website. One of the hidden meta data clues, “h is big”, was also another clue to indicate our website was involved in the hunt. For those familiar with the first race, this was a clue previously provided to get our boomers thinking “outside the box(discord)”.

The command the crew was looking for was !zooomer (3 o’s). Why, you ask? When our dev was putting together the website, he thought it would be funny to spell “Booomer” and “Zooomer” that way. I thought it was the perfect chance to throw a little chaos in the mix.

!zooomer

The !zooomer command in the h channel prompted the bot to reply with:

The next command to figure out was !alphabet

With !alphabet, the bot would randomly respond with one of four different numbers: 8, 18, 20, 22

This was another hint provided for this portion.

The numbers indicated a line up with the ‘alphabet’ — which many of our hunters realized. But just lining up the numbers to the letters wasn’t quite enough. One of the hints, ‘h is the beginning’, was meant for this puzzle. If you were to line up each letter with a number, you would use ‘h’ as ‘1’. If ‘solved’, the letters associated were: Y, C, A, O.

The yellow squares, 24x4, were meant to indicate that there may be multiple attempts required to figure out the next command: a combination of the letters A, C, Y, O. The actual combination was the following: !CYOA which stands for “Choose Your Own Adventure”. A foreshadowing of this h hunt. There was a bit of a mix up here which I had to fix up, a misalignment with the alphabet but it didn’t slow down our hunters much.

“Fool Discloosure” was a double hint — one, aimed at the “Full Disclosure” link found on our GitBook. It was misspelled on purpose — the double ‘oo’ in both words to hint at B’oo’m R’oo’m. 19801 was the ID# of the Boom Room in question our hunters had to track down. The room was stored on one of our project wallets (found in the Full Disclosure section of our GitBook): https://cronoscan.com/token/0x8dd9975c78423480a6188f55b0767fbf4478b001?a=19801#comments

This was found in the comments page Boom Room ID# 19801

The next hint displayed just 6 digits — “0xb650". Clearly the beginning of a wallet address, but which?!

There were two ways to solve this next portion. One, to track down our team wallets and find the one that matched the beginning of this address. The other was to use the hint found on this page — the downvotes. There were 3 ‘downvotes’ attached to this comment. The clue here was to use the digits found here, “0xb650”, put them in the search bar, and go ‘down’ 3 addresses to find the correct one:

And once here, the comments page included the very beginning of your own adventure story. I won’t post the full thing here, but you can feel free to check it out yourself as the story remains up to this day.

The first STEP.

Enjoy the short story until you get sucked up into the Dooker portal; finding yourself in a new discord.

Upon first joining the discord, only the “dooks” channel was visible. Our hunters quickly found the first rule of Dooker… 🤭

The channel came with a simple question but one big problem — a 6 hour slow mode. You had to make sure your answer was correct. The correct answer was !187, which is that particular Dooker’s ID #.

This unlocked the next channel:

Each channel came with a slow mode — had to be sure about your answers, or test the waters with new ones

Our new friend was, in fact, a !pudgypenguins, which is the name of the collection they are from.

The next unlocked channel, dooksorida.

The answer to this puzzle was !928522 — the highest score achieved for Dookey Dash (shown in the tweet it links to).

The next channel, dookstorious. And with it — a pause.

A few parts of the h hunt this time needed some manual overlooking and so I had to pause the race for a short time as the team was attending the GDC convention in San Francesco. Upon my return, the following address was posted in the newest unlocked channel:

0x6614d26064d762922c7bc7a00337713d5169ae7c

The adventure continues…

I won’t post the whole story here as this is even longer and more intricate than the first part, but you can explore it as you wish. A few things were different from this portion, however… this wasn’t a simple story. Not a simple race! Those who navigated the options as quickly as possible did find themselves to a new discord before long — but quickly found themselves stumped.

Welcome to the Polymorph discord! Initially, only the ‘#portal-world’ and ‘#limbo’ channels were visible. Everything else was hidden. “#portal-world” would not allow any chatter and would be immediately deleted.

There wasn’t much to work with come finding the new Discord. With only two channels available, and only one allowing chatter, most of the group gathered up in #limbo, trying to figure out their next steps.

There was much chatter in the #limbo channel, trying to figure out how the unlock the next step.

This step was missed by many of our hunters. While chatting, some of the steps were being inadvertently unlocked by our unknowing chatters. The key to this clue was in the #portal-world channel, namely this portion:

As the requirements were fulfilled, this would be modified to match the result.

This part was only noticed by a few of our hunters. As our chatters unknowingly fulfilled the requirements, this was first modified to show the following:

And then:

The “2” and “3” were removed somewhat by accident — throughout the story, there were 3 what you might call ‘checkpoints’, all found in different weaves of the adventure. At these certain checkpoints, one of two things could happen. One, you were either asked to send a POGT (a token freely minted on the last h hunt) to different addresses. On other checkpoints, a friendly NPC would hand you an item and tell you that you would require it later. Examples below:

In order to remove each “number” from the lock, it was necessary to simply post a picture of each item in the #limbo channel. As they were posted, a number was removed.

For the lock itself, it was opened by 3 POGTs being sent to 3 seperate addresses found throughout the story as shown:

Exploring the Comments section of the address listed would find a comment by the Boomer Squad account stating “NEED MOAR POGT!!!”. Once a POGT was sent, the comment was deleted.

Once all 3 addresses received their due POGT, the last piece of the puzzle was unlocked and the first ‘boss room’ opened up.

The first boss

Using the .attack command, a d100 roll would be initiated. If your hit was above the threshold (for example, for the first boss, the threshold was “80”, indicated by the channel name #boss-1-80-00), the boss would lose a life. The last number was how many hits remaining are required to ‘kill’ the boss and unlock the next channel. Each channel was set behind a slowdown mode and each was incrementally more difficult to ‘hit’. The group had to work together to take these down.

This last one had a twice — with a “heal” button. I wanted to play a little social expirement here that ultimately failed as the heal button was not working properly! Unfortunate, but it did make the final boss a bit easier on the crew :)

With the final boss downed, the next clue was provided once again in the form of a wallet address: 0x0300D214313f57F9623F472D43399eb56C883Ea7

They were this time greeted with a much shorter storyline leading up to the final discord.

A quick note here for those who overlooked it. The word “END!!!” is hyperlinked in this blurb but does not go anywhere — a dead link. This was a hint for further in the story which we will get back to in a moment. The story, in this string, ended with OGBoomer’s betrayal of ElderKarl, having rid himself of every other 1/1 and now wanting to take out Karl as well.

The picture was the hint.

On our GitBook, you can find information about the Battle of the Boomers Twitter voting game we played around with. This cosmetic item was awarded to the winner at the time, the owner of OGBoomer. You could find the cosmetic, as well as it’s ID # (listed on the page for our hunters to find), by navigating our GitBook. Once our hunters figured out the ID# and hint, they tracked down it’s comments section page on Cronos Scan, continuing where they left off:

Remember the hyperlinked, ‘dead’ link right when this string started? It was a clue that the word “end” here is what you should click. If you clicked on any part of the hyperlink from “The end of it all as we know it.” that wasn’t the word “end”, you would be invited to a fake discord, called ‘faHke’.

🤭

Eventually, our crew trickled their way to the correct discord, which was a series of puzzles to be unlocked.

The first room was unlocked relatively quickly with the command !zoomer — granting the h role.

This one… all went wrong

Ultimately, the command for this channel was !timetoearn. Though it was found by chance, I will explain the reasoning. The picture shown here was meant to hint at the h NFTs that had been raffled up to this point.

For those who noticed, the h NFTs were split into two separate contracts each ‘holding’ 10 of NFTs. This was meant as a clue. It was meant to hint that they were ‘pairs’ to each other, from 1 to 10 and again from 1 to 10. The commands you were looking for here were a combination of the h NFT names, such as !brokenclouds (h NFT 1 = broken, h NFT 1 = clouds), which would respond with the letter ‘t’. Next was !underwaterplate (#2 paired with #2) which would respond with ‘i’. And so on and so forth.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), you guys managed to brute force it. I thought I’d learned my lesson from last time, but it seems I slipped up right at the end 🤭

If you still have your h NFT(s), there will be future uses implemented for them. It is up to you to decide what you wish to do with them until then. You are free to speculate, but the team won’t elaborate further, much like the POGTs.

An easy quiz!

Angry OGBoomer

The almost final step to our h hunt. Taking down OGBoomer. The first to roll a 100 received the h3 role to access the final channel.

The final channel. Doodlesack.cro was the first to roll 100 and gain access. There was a 6 hour slow mode enabled in this channel, and so only one real chance at correctly guessing the command.

The command could ultimately be found on our GitBook, under “The Art, The Meme” section.

With the race completed, Doodlesack.cro won 2000 $Scratch and a Zoomer. He also claims the unique ‘h, The Third’ role in our discord, for being the first to complete the hunt. Although there could only be one ‘winner’, this was without question a team quest throughout with many contributors coming through!

It was great to see everyone working together to reach the final result. And with it came the reveal of the Zoomers later that evening.

I hope you all had a fun time throughout this h hunt. I still have a lot of learning to do on my side on making these go smoother and more fun but I will continue to improve the experience as we go along. Thank you everyone for playing along and until next time… h