"OLDROOT": Minecraft's Unsolved Mystery...

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your purchase that being said let's get right into the video [Music] [Music] [Music] minecraft is one of the most popular games ever created i think that's a statement most people can agree on if you look at it just by pure player count it probably wins if you look at it by sales it probably wins as well and if you're living on youtube it might actually be the first thing you see when you tap gaming there's no doubt that minecraft is a sea of conspiracies and stories once you breed past the surface of survival multiplayer and you'll find out that while maybe for me in my case herobrine should have been the biggest conspiracy that i should have covered and i probably will there are seas of conspiracies that outrank that that have been left unsolved one of them is old route now if you haven't heard of old root i'm not surprised alright it took me a while to find this but basically its origins date back to july of 2014. where on reddit user lewis green actually ended up posting this on the minecraft subreddit now the post consisted of a message received a mysterious message with my picture any idea what it is and where he received a reddit direct message from a user simply known as old root who said that this is the beginning those who are pure will see what hides in the darkness alongside this message with it was an image and on close inspection it seems to be a screenshot from the game albeit a dark one which is sort of a standard theme for this arc going forward all you can really do is make out the ground if you use software like photoshop and you'll be able to adjust the levels brightness and contrast which is a required component of moving forward in this arc and here you can make out two key details an npc glitched on the upper right side of the image which is simply going to be old root's character some can call it minecraft steve possessed or herobrine 2.0 i'm just going to call it rudykins as the community likes to detail now what community well the summarization of this entire deal all goes down to a big github post this is a chronological archive a summarization that we'll be going through beat by beat just to simply detail the history of old route because quite frankly with how obscure this is simply gathering all the information isn't exactly the easiest thing to do but there are way more things related to root that we're going to be delving into but again going back to it without going on a big giant tangent like i just did this image basically had the old glitched up character at the top right but more importantly a soundcloud link towards the left of it this soundcloud link led to a page still up which hosts a 5 second audio track titled it has begun now if that just sounded familiar to you it's because you probably watched it on deep web browsing when we looked at the infamous plague doctor videos now those plague doctor videos the audio necessarily sounded like a bunch of beeps and boops and static and when audio sounds like that it's a pretty good sign that there are images or messages encoded within them so dropping this track into an audio editing software like adobe audition i checked the spectrograph display and found the word silent raven there was one more audio file simply titled old root that also contained a message and this message came out to be another link it led to an imgur post which had the same npc we saw earlier in the message the raven is watching now soon after reddit user toxic popcorn direct messages old roots reddit account and receives a link to this image once again it's way too dark to do anything with so again you're going to need photoshop or any applicable tool to brighten it up and then you'll notice the next breadcrumb a tumbler link now this link has actually changed and it's gotten a bit defunct so it's really not going to be usable for this r going forward but if that github is to be believed the summarization of the detectives are to be believed which i have no reason not to then it pretty much is a password protected page which silent raven ended up being the password too it was also discovered in the source code as well so old root wasn't necessarily trying to hide this that well but this led to the next image a dark corridor now brightening this up would reveal way in the distance that raven figure and of course on closer inspection you can actually read the words we are the answer just above raven's figure just above old roots standing above there and that at the same time user lewis green again receives one more message another inger link again dark and does all of them have been so far brightening it up revealed a default minecraft steve this time looking less possessed than before with the words of course i'm trying to pronunciate that you simply can't that is actually a form of encryption known as the rot cipher which basically uses simple letter substitution usually this specific type would be used in things like online forums to hide things like spoilers and decoding it is as simple as finding an online tool and coming to the result of we are waiting now that same image ended up containing the string fm3 y w 0 b which when you plug in the end of an inger link it'll lead you to the next image and this is pretty much how the breadcrumb trail went people found strings like this and plugged it into imgur which led to the next piece of the puzzle now this image would contain one word when brightened raven when further brightened a poem ended up being revealed and reddit user mordecai pylord had ended up finding this out to be edgar allan poe's the raven further examination led to a server whitelist app known as kingdom of companions and within that was written hidden deep in the roots of an old tree a mystery awaits with patterns of three he watches from behind quiet and mute the one with no face whom they call old root let these words foreshadow of what might be if you make the decision to white list me what's sig lick dis silver reserve i'm going to keep trying to pronunciate these the best i can but that last line actually is the same rot cipher we just looked at and when translated meant trapped in a prison of wood old root allegedly had this discus account where he posted on mindstorm vanilla server mindstorm for those of you don't know is a minecraft whitelisted server that's actually pretty popular when it comes to vanilla play i say allegedly he posted this on discus because i couldn't even find the original discus account through url tracing but what alleged to be posted by old route goes kind of like this deep in the roots of an old tree were a sacrifice made in patterns of three let these words foreshadow of what it is to be if you make the decision to whitelist me again relatively similar to what we just read earlier eventually users started to search old root as a player on the minecraft server listings and they found that they had visited a server known as nightmare craft but see this is where the investigation takes a left turn because now it's discovered that old route was actually being faked all right investigators found this guy on minecraft forums and while being let on for hours it led to tumblr blogs that had furry pornography song lyrics and everything unrelated to the actual mystery at hand basically running away any time investigators came too close it was just a giant crapshoot for a little bit but at this point a very prominent user in this case lady of wc started investigating the case even further and this is basically a piece of her summary summary of recent events we went on the irc internet relay chat for those of you who are under the age of 12 had no success on the server or analyzing the old images we then found out about the new image that old root had posted we quickly started trying to break it this was the new image now for anybody watching this is getting to the point where these images are actually nearly impossible to read no matter how much you can clean the image and do error correction the string is nearly illegible eventually i figured out this was binary lady of wc and her team ended up coming out to that same conclusion as well too but they actually had to use some scripts that would brute force them figuring out this binary eventually decoding it to another inger link and leading to this exact image now of course what we're looking here is hexadecimal so converting this string and then using it as a suffix for those inger links that we've constantly been doing up until now leads you to another image now at the center of this you have roots figure but to the right you have the words we are the answer but more importantly when you brighten the image up there is this bright white vertical line looking closely at it that's morse code and this morse codes translates to deceptic or decepti depending on how you read it there's also a string of characters around that bottom left but i can't clean it up and it's just way too noisy to work around at this point you're dealing with a lot of visual noise that is just incredibly difficult to fix up the earlier images didn't have this problem now we're getting to this issue at this point lady of wc receives further direct messages from old root who sent a new imgur link and this time things were a little bit more legible keyword a bit more again it's still very pitch black now this image consisted of a list of numbers brightening it up you get to witness the letters w h g on the left hand side there are words above but they appear to be stuffed through this blur filter that i couldn't you know fix off now this point reddit user jealous12 comes out and converts and cracks the puzzle here by roadmapping the conversion of these numbers through a set of octal conversions hexadecimal base 32 and finally all the way to ascii 2. and the string oct mbqt ended up being discovered and as you've probably again guessed that leads to another imgur link and then the image went somewhat like this now while it says good luck there's a blurry part just underneath it that no matter how much i tried to manipulate and fix it and i'm pretty sure i got to the right answer it didn't lead to an actual working imgur link and i believe that might even be removed i might have actually screwed up and completely gotten the string wrong but i did try my best at it as evidenced in my recordings the image was supposed to be the hardest to fix up in this point and everyone was actually stumped from what this led to al armarjan actually does solve this hard to crack puzzle and actually leads to the next image in this piece which when brightened had all this to say you are deeper down the rabbit hole false prophets will deceive you that misspelling on prophets and deceive yeah that's that that that's that's that's intended apparently those who are pure will see what hides in the darkness the raven is always watching we are the answer now the various blobs to text around this were a few names of various investigators who were decoding the puzzles there's way more than what's mentioned but just to understand at this point old route is following the investigation very clear very very closely and the breadcrumbs are being laid out literally as in real time at this point reddit user rib shark receives another message from old root basically getting another inger link to the next image which consisted of two lines or it kind of looked like a little graph but when converting those strings to ascii 2 repeated false prophets will deceive you spelling mistakes once again completely present now there were also dots of which four were blue and one were red and i believe the way that these dots were positioned they specifically were at the intersection of the misspelling so with profit where they had the i instead of the e that's where one of the dots was placed again maybe it was to add relevance but none of this played out relevantly later on in the entire affair now at this point old route posts to their youtube channel alright and this channel as of this time consists of just two uploads okay at the time of this video's upload the one we're interested in is titled quote the raven nevermoor now this video played the song tiny tim tiptoe through the tulips and at several points it seems like the character is being hunted through these derelict minds that are being explored now of course it keeps cutting back and forth but to me when i keep watching this it shows me that numerous shots here were just screen grabbed with the earlier photos typically when we were looking at the minecraft footage those dark you know that that that like dark hallway if you will all this was just screen grab from this exact video and that's pretty much where i'm gonna sit at regarding this so while this video played out it led to another dry spell and at this point investigation reddit user spore the saiyan ended up coming in who was sent the next piece of all this puzzle a month into this entire tale the image consisted of a phrase whom the angel's name with the string of characters at the very bottom jish always eller dwarvy this uis that's what we got the usage discovered that this was actually encrypted via the vignere cipher and using the key lenore you end up getting this specific phrase you must learn the past before the future now this point the longest try spell kicked in three months and no actual update no users banning to solve and honestly seemed like the whole thing was just coming straight up to an end that is until old root gets into it but before that soundcloud user and investigator the purple plant receives a direct message from old root again watching from the shadows waiting with such name as nevermore and a few days later old roots sent an image of an individual i censored this time stating hello friends now of course after a few iterations purple plant posts with the now delete a tweet and one response from old root's discover twitter account this is old root's actual twitter account regarding this arg now this twitter account we are the answer sent an image to purple plant and was actually a string of characters that spelled out japan i'm not even going to attempt to read that that's just way too much several days later one more image is actually sent and this time it appears to be written in old italian and now this is where the beauty of reddit comes in because the investigators went to the languages subreddit and a rough translation was basically given by those beautiful members of their own community for many years i've begun to work on my studies and talk with important people who are viewed with high esteem and of the same importance as the beautiful profession of secret writing by way of those who are universally called codes i with the inclination given to me by the nature of having no greater delight than learning have come to continue to practice that profession and have found it in many methods that to someone of great skill won't not like it occurs to me that this last empty seat to find myself lieutenant general of the illustrious and most reverend cardinal durant in the state of camarino now this excerpt was actually discovered to be from an italian cryptography book known as la sifra del sieg and this was basically discovered by reddit user skin tai the other detective in this case who entered the ring and translated that earlier string of characters that we saw you know that big giant that i wasn't going to attempt to read to purge yourself of your sins purge yourself of your desires and purge yourself of your flesh now old root then tweets out a link to a tumblr blog that we discussed earlier that is now defunct and to me i can't find anything of value so i'm going to rely on the investigators in this case summarizing the entire affair now while this image we didn't see it led to another imgur link that we actually have a hold of this imgur consists of a few words that you can read the ones that i know are fenway and kinneret i can point these words out fenway at least from what i know is a boston baseball park okay and i think most of the investigators pretty much landed on that entire deal as well what the investigators did find because they were just cultured like hell actually identified kinneret as lake kinneret or sea of galilee which actually belongs to israel now the words beweigh chile kite which is actually a misspelling but the investigators found out this was the dutch word for movement and golden ewe was the dutch for golden age the last string 4 35 41 actually references a bible passage which mentions lake kinneret so it all ties in together but again when you take this image and you throw it into photoshop like i did and you basically boost the levels up you'll get this interesting logo behind it as well what does this signify well i couldn't really give you the answer to that but i'm going to say that this is old root's branding image around this time reddit investigators on the case kept receiving message after message user fergan schunfer received a breadcrumb leading to a pig pen cipher at the same time microphone man was given their own imgur link leading to another image the image simply stating that the fun has only just begun eventually the last image was sent out to the investigators with one word left remember an image that had visual errors but asides from that nothing actually stood out and that is where the summarization ends as far as the github investigators are considering it now at this point there's a few more pieces of media that exist out there one relative to a map and the other simply known as the zed files which we're going to investigate together right now now this map guideline was actually created by user frozen programmer on reddit who basically created this as a timeline map of what we were looking at so these are all messages received to users like mr carreco and luke arsys who are other users who received multiple ciphers and images in this case images that when brighton would offer like extra you know sort of code written alongside or voynic manuscript as their writing again you really have to be able to manipulate the images briefly to actually get answers here now interestingly enough the image we just looked at with the weird logo actually came from this uh actually was discovered within the source code to the tumblr website again this tumblr website is different simply going to it at this point takes you to this image page okay which talks about vignere to the power of three again that's one of the cipher methods that was used but again there's not much else to the website in fact opening up the actual source code to this isn't going to give you anything worth a damn so if you just open it up it's far different than what it initially was people were able to get actual answers from the source code to multiple other things again when you go around over here further into it you can see that the pic pen cipher that we just looked at then they have more breadcrumbs in regards to these images the fun has begun which led once opened with winrar led to this image another imgur link suffix then to this image and finally the further we go into it the further we end up going was this image where if you wish to know the future you must know the past good luck of course one of the one of the users likes torsious and gazarumph basically had received this image which was i'll show you and then you had old root who was sending out images like become void to then they ended up getting more images and more images and more images and that's pretty much this one right here is the weird one to me because i never really got the answer to it in my end which basically gave you atomic mass numbers for argon neon beryllium lithium and zirconium so again we've we've went from minecraft to this absolute end of the earth now reddit user lil weave created what is the zed work archive the zed file archive which is all related to the minecraft zwork server that old root was chilling around on now within the z file things like many books were actually created in this case and they use the same cipher algorithm that we've seen constantly before right so here you got you know just more and more of these books playing around and of course all these are by old root in this case right so what is this a a clue in the dawn of the zed work servers there was a horrible griefer he wrecked the world and the zed was forced to restart the map before the griefer was banned he planted a seed of hatred and chaos which grew into a tree again all this has to do with the old old root tree right you had various items one of them was this ender pearl item but it was titled a prison of wood and then you had an actual you know block of wood that was titled old roots grow deep there were also plenty of signs in the entire scenario so where they looked at if up this flight of stairs you wish to climb when the planets align with the sun you must find all the secrets in this rhyme and of course the further you went into it it led to this weird ominous building of course things old root has said death awaits poem on the wall out front oh it seems we're back again cross one from my list only two of you matter to my sinister plot twist who am i you might ask well why don't you start and of course you will find the tree worble 23 world 23 being the name of the person who is investigating this and of course this long corridor it has begun we are watching we are the answer false idols give false hope clues hidden a secret i will take to the grave with me and since it's unsolved i actually kind of believe that the one with no face you feel him watching you so again yeah it's multiple signs and on the zed work server now while this seems batshit insane to most people it actually did have a conclusion kind of because at the end of it it never really got solved basically aldrid ended up coming out four years ago and giving this statement on reddit in july 2011 in july 11 2014 a post was made by lewis green that started what you all called the old route mystery more than two years later the old route mystery remains unsolved still is to this day one of my main goals with this project was to make a code-based arg that didn't just rely on those decoder websites that didn't take any effort to solve i ended up creating my own codes that required effort and cooperation to solve and because of that i think this arg was a success and i believe so too it was a success at some point the ciphers actually ended up becoming quite difficult requiring a on a collaboration the old root mystery does have an ending and a story that you can get to me without me doing anything so i feel like continually responding to pms with cryptic hints devalues the project chances are no one will ever solve the arc especially considering the codes only get harder from here but i'd rather have a complete arc that never gets solved and an arc that i've solved for you i wasn't sure if i wanted to make this post but i think that if i didn't then it might be remembered as an unfinished arg and that the creator had abandoned this was my first arc and i had a great time making it and watching you all work together it definitely wasn't perfect there are many things i would do differently if i had gotten the chance to start over right now i'm in the middle of my second r which has been going on for quite a while it's much more planned out i put a lot more effort into it and it's completely video based it hasn't gained as much attention as this arg has which is probably because from the outside it seems like a completely normal youtube channel thank you for participating in this experience i hope you all enjoyed it as much as i have before i go i will leave you with one last code to which we get this number sequence what does it lead to well i think i'm going to leave that to you members of the community because while this arg is left unfinished it's not as if it's abandoned because clearly it does have an ending as the author has stated so what is the ending that's going to be something we're going to have to come together and figure out ladies and gentlemen now while most args i feel like this one kind of did fall into some genericness it was great it was nice initially but i felt like when you know it wasn't getting solved the creator constantly poking in to lead to the next breadcrumb trail was definitely devaluing it for sure and i'm glad that they acknowledged it but then again what do you expect from an arg that never really truly caught on but to a fringe few out on the community to that i'm going to have to congratulate old root because he did actually make an interesting segment of the entire minecraft r community and while it definitely deviated from minecraft to an extent i wonder if towards the end it would all just tie up and feed back in like some crazy mind-blowing experience i mean who really knows maybe somebody will pick up the mantle to finally hunt the truth down maybe not at the end of the day i do hope you enjoyed the video and i hope you learned about one of minecraft's longest running arcs that is left unfinished one that even the creator has moved on from but at least admits an ending exists so ladies and gentlemen let me know what you think about old route let me know if you even plan on finishing it that being said if you like what you saw please like comment and subscribe just like if you dislike it i am out

Channel: SomeOrdinaryGamers

Views: 950,281

Keywords: minecraft, mystery, unsolved, oldroot, gaming, gameplay, minecraft mods

Id: kUym0u3LfRY

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021