In last week’s post, I revealed many of the secret details that appeared in the PSA Missions, ranging from simple continuity details all the way to hidden coded messages.
However, there was one secret that I purposefully left out from the post because, despite my best efforts, I was unable to properly decipher it in time. In this post, I’ll show you how I discovered this secret message and what clues lead me to believe that it is actually translatable.
This secret message, encoded with the tic-tac-toe code, can be found in the mission ‘Operation Spy & Seek‘. When viewing Herbert’s Camp through the Binoculars 3000, a few displays appear on the screen to make it look more high-tech. These displays seem to be meaningless, including the box at the top-right which rapidly displays random letters from the tic-tac-toe code.
But if you read my last post, then you will know that every other wall of ‘random’ letters that we’ve seen in the PSA missions has been a hidden message. In fact, if anything even remotely resembles the tic-tac-toe code then it’s probably a hidden message.
The letters fly by far too quickly to be decoded in real-time, but after recording the mission (and reviewing it at 0.25 speed), I was able to figure out and decode the different symbols that appeared, but the result was simply a meaningless string of text.
Much to my disappointment, there didn’t seem to be a hidden message after all. Perhaps the letters are just randomly generated, as the Club Penguin Wikipedia states.
But even though the translation is gibberish, there does seem to be some sort of order to the text. You may have noticed that the scene with Herbert and Klutzy seems to go on for quite some time, yet the decoded ‘message’ is only a few words long. This is because the message loops over and over again—proving it’s not a completely random assortment of letters.
I decided to compare my own footage with various YouTubers’ and found that in every single video, it was a letter for letter match. No matter when the video was created or how they were playing the game, they always saw the exact same string of letters. So the text isn’t random. Somewhere along the line, someone decided to use these specific letters in this specific order, the question is just why.
The message must be encoded—either through a transposition cipher (which scrambles the order of the letters) or a substitution cipher (which represents each letter with a different letter).
This message seems more likely to be a substitution cipher due to the high frequency of uncommon letters such as Y’s and W’s.
The text also has a few notable characteristics that are reminiscent of an actual sentence. Firstly, while the word lengths are varied, the average word in the sentence has four or five letters. This is exactly the same as the average word length in the english language. I also noticed that some words in the sentence end in the same way. Three of the words (cwshaoh, yswhaoh and twhioh) end with a similar suffix (-haoh or -hioh).
You may have noticed quadruple space break in the text. In game, this break makes the box appear completely blank for a few frames since it only renders four characters at a time. It would make sense for this to be the marker signifying both the end and beginning of the message, even though it appears part-way through in game.
Now cracking cyphers isn’t my strong suit, but I did manage to pick up on a few things. Firstly, the letter ‘H’ appears far more frequently than any other letter in the sentence; appearing twelve times in total. This means that it, most likely, actually represents the most common letter in the english language – ‘E’.
The next most common letter in the cypher, appearing a total of nine times, is the letter ‘W’. There are only a few possibilities for this letter as it appears in a one-letter word by itself. This means that it has to be either ‘A’ or ‘I’ (it could also be ‘G’ – Gary’s code name, but due to how frequently the letter’s used, this isn’t as likely). The letter ‘I’ is also used as a standalone letter meaning that, whichever letter ‘W’ represents, ‘I’ represents the opposite.
But none of this working has allowed me to make sense of this message, and there are some complications as well. For starters, the first word in the sentence seems to either start with a double ‘I’ or ‘A’, which is impossible considering the length of the word. The suffix is also problematic as it starts and ends with the same letter. And then there’s the mysterious double space part way through the line that seems to only have been added to alter the way the text appears.
Perhaps the message is a transposition cipher after all and the message just happens to feature a lot of uncommon letters; feel free to experiment and let me know how you get on! But as far as I can tell, this message may just be meaningless after all. But let me know your thoughts and theories down below, and until next time,
Splosh Jnr Guides 
The message has now been decoded! As it turns out, the message was actually a columnar transposition cypher – it could be decoded by writing the letters out in rows, and then reading them vertically instead of horizontally.
Columnar transposition cyphers normally also have a key, a certain word or combination of letters that indicates how many letters should be in each row. In this case, the key was actually related to something that I barely touched on: the letters in the cypher appeared four at a time on the Binoculars 3000.
When decoded, the message translates to “WHICH WAY IS SOUTH “, though what this message means is up for dispute. I personally like to think that this is alluding to the fact that most maps in Club Penguin show every compass point as North.
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Not sure but This can be 3 latters back, search about it.
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Thanks for the suggestion Thiago, that was actually one of the ways that I first tried to decypher the message! It actually turned out to be a columnar transposition cipher translating to “WHICH WAY IS SOUTH” (you can read more about that in my comment above!).
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