Felcycle Secrets and More to Come, The Making of Ratts’ Revenge: Deciphering Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle

Introduced within the 20th Anniversary content update was a new series of puzzles — not from the Mind-Seekers, Azeroth’s enigmatic riddle-makers, but from Ratts: an overly-enthusiastic secret hunter, puzzle crafter, and former event coordinator of the Bronze Dragon Celebrations. Ratts’ Revenge was a series of secret puzzles that rewarded Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle.

Let’s pull back the blue curtain to reveal the design of each puzzle and explore how the community solved them.

Warning: Spoilers ahead! If you wish to solve this riddle for yourself, DON’T READ ON! You have been warned.

Greetings champions! It has been an honor and a pleasure for the development team to create this secret and watch the community solve it. Putting this together took a lot of work from a lot of people: we had an awesome team of art, production, QA, sound, and more to support this effort. We’d like to deep-dive into some of the more interesting behind-the-scenes parts of this secret; we won’t be talking about exactly how to solve it (there are great player guides for that) but instead providing some commentary from a developer perspective. Let’s dive in!

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Prologue

In the opening of Ratts’ Revenge, players heeded the warning of mysterious wisps in the Borean Tundra, investigated a lead from a Dalaran Survivor in Dornogal, and tracked Ratts down a dark hole beneath Azj-Kahet.

Why were these wisps in Northrend, anyway? Did they really travel all the way from Kalimdor to warn us about the peculiar key? About Ratts?

This prologue was our first attempt at bridging the gap between noticeable secrets and truly difficult secrets. There were multiple visible signs of a secret being present (the Distracting Wisps and the gray quest marker above the Dalaran Survivor), and in fact earlier versions of this secret had multiple groups of Distracting Wisps across the Guest Relations quests. We wanted this secret to be seen by the more casual secret-finders as an opportunity to find out about the deeply hidden mysteries of Azeroth. In practice, this encouraged some players to attempt to solve Incognitro without understanding what they were getting themselves into, so we may adjust our approach in the future to be clearer about the difficulty up front.

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Chapter 1: Abandoned Celebrations

Ratts’ Lair

Something we did differently with this secret was showing players from the start (or close to it) what their prize would be — Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle, surrounded by twelve pedestals that would eventually light up as you solved Ratts’ puzzles.

These pedestals were an attempt to show progress in-game so that players did not need to run a script command or use an addon to see which steps had been completed. This was done as part of an overall effort to increase accessibility and reduce the reliance on addons. However, Ratts’ Lair also included many distractions or red herrings, some of which were also tracked as “progress”—in the future, visible progress will be more trustworthy and herring-free, especially since players invent plenty of red herrings for themselves.

The Big Red Button

Speaking of distractions, in the first available room of the catacombs players found a big red button. This, of course, needed to be pushed. A lot.

Nearly 90,000 players pushed this button an average of 1,000 times each. One determined secret hunter even managed to press the button over 240,000 times! In total, the button was pressed over 71 million times, and we still don’t know what it does.

The Lovingly Handcrafted Clue

Labeled as “puzzle 1” internally and “1 o’clock – Love” by the community, the first puzzle in Ratts’ Lair was her lovingly handcrafted clue. Players correctly identified this as an anagram from very early on—and in fact, in one of the Chinese translations, it was simply that (by mistake). It wasn’t until much later in the secret hunt that the solution for English and other languages (the intended puzzle and solution) was solved.

While an anagram that long would already be difficult, Ratts seems to have made it unsolvable by making it incomplete (that is, by removing some letters). The question of which letters are missing, though, stumped the community for quite some time. Even though it was right in front of them all along, no one could find the missing letters… Until someone observed that the listed objective in Ratts’ Lair is to “Find Ratts” — and that was the key. Ratts had taken her own name out of the anagram (or, as it happens, “start,” an anagram of Ratts and a lovely way to begin her puzzling journey).

The lovingly handcrafted clue seems to have been a leftover from Ratts’ former job as an eccentric event coordinator. Despite the labor of love she put into this puzzle for a celebratory mystery hunt, it never happened—at least, not while she was in charge. Her puzzles were ruthless and unfair. And perhaps Ratts knew this and hated it, which is why she tried to destroy her work in the next puzzle…

Message from the Old Gods

“2 o’clock – Pray” (puzzle 2 internally) started back in Ratts’ Lair. In the corner of a pile of paper trash are a few crumpled notes.

When gods of mantids pierce the Veil
stand high above the glowing tail
and pray with gifts of gods imbued
that they may claim your puppy, too

Let’s break this down. “Gods of mantids” refers to the Old Gods, worshipped by the Klaxxi. This might indicate that “Veil” refers to the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but if “Veil” is misspelled, then perhaps “tail” is similarly meant to be “tale.” “Piercing the Vale” would then refer to when the Old Gods assaulted the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Standing above the “glowing tale” would then mean being on top of the building where Lorewalker Cho tells stories illustrated with glowing ghosts of the past. The “gifts of gods” refers to the gift of N’zoth, a visual buff from the Twitching Eyeball or All-Seeing Eyes toy. Finally, we have the puppy, our Perky Pug, who must also be claimed by the Old Gods by dressing them up in the Hallow’s End “Yipp-Saron” costume, or the knock-off “Dogg-Saron” costume sold by Vashti.

Putting this all together, we arrive above Lorewalker Cho during the Old Gods’ assault and find a Ny’alotha Obelisk. We don our gift of N’Zoth, call our Perky Pug, dress them up, and /pray to the obelisk that we are worthy. If these offerings are acceptable, the gods will grant you (and all nearby players) a Key of Shadows.

But why would the Old Gods want us to get deeper into Ratts’ Lair? Unless…

This was a fun puzzle to put together and the multiplayer-friendliness mitigates some of its flaws, but players noted some minor complications with the phasing of this puzzle. Then there was the issue that these Perky Pug costumes are quite expensive for a single-use consumable! In the future, we will likely be avoiding expensive consumables that could be accidentally wasted while experimenting with solutions.

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Chapter 2: Descent Into Sadness

With the Key of Shadows in hand, players returned once more to Ratts’ Lair to unlock two new rooms. In these rooms, it becomes clear that Ratts was in a dark place after being fired. Convinced that someone needed to be punished, Ratts tore apart her old puzzles and corrupted them into traps, filling her lair with deadly hazards.

A Starry-Eyed Wonder

To make further progress, players needed the Starry-Eyed Goggles locked in the Astral Chest. The solution, unconventionally, was to fish the key out by casting your fishing line into the bowl.

Players solved this much quicker than expected, particularly because of a small oversight on our part: we forgot that the “Find Fish” tracking option would mark the Astral Bowl on your minimap! The rubber duck bobber was even added because internal testing suggested that this step might be too hard.

A Numbers Game

“3 o’clock – Hate”, or “puzzle 3a”, was a series of nine consoles hidden around Ratts’ Lair, (though here I’ll only focus on a few of them). This step of Ratts’ Revenge made use of external resources such as slash commands and game files. While these were cheeky experiments in puzzle design, we will be trying to keep future puzzles more intrinsic to the game itself and focused on the world of Azeroth.

My Secret Password

This console was in the room dubbed “Room 430” by the community due to it being behind “Door 430”. (As several players noted, Door 430, with its big red button above it, was a reference to the Stanley Parable game and its achievement to click on Door 430 five times.)

Navigating carefully around a field of Mogu tile traps, the player could find a hidden note from Ratts that her secret password is 466478. This was, however, a trick. Inputting this code would simply activate the cloud tile, pushing you back into the other traps with a burst of air. The real code was found inside the Guo-Lai Halls where these Mogu tiles originally came from. Equipped with the Starry-Eyed Goggles, players found the book “17112317”, which just so happens to be object 466478 in the game’s files. Oh, Ratts. As an aside, some players noticed that this code is 1123 (November 23rd, WoW’s anniversary date) flanked by the number 17, a number that has seemed to appear in several secret places of Azeroth recently…

Rubenstein’s Revenge

This puzzle is admittedly a mark of one of the creators, who loves juggling. From the environmental clues, we can infer that Rubenstein is a juggler (of torches), and his dagger is preparing for revenge. He’s also “sight-swapped” with his eyes in the wrong places. This all leads us to the juggling trick Rubenstein’s Revenge, which has a “siteswap” notation (a way to describe juggling tricks) of 52233.

Here (#1)

Although we communicated that no addons would be required, this puzzle was meant to be the first indication that slash commands and the Wowhead database could be part of the solution, either of which could be used to find the ID of the zone / map / scenario you’re currently located in. Depending on which solution you used, any of the following IDs were accepted: 1533, 3457, 8265, and 10638.

The Pacifist’s Chest

At the base of the stairs, an astral console gives the hint “No violence, please.” Unequipping your weapons was a good first step, but the hint says, “no violence,” so you also need to set your game client to disable violence visuals using the command /console violenceLevel 0.

Like the first puzzle, this one was circumvented by a difference in locales. Some regions are set to violence level 0 by default, so simply unequipping their weapons produced the code.

Feeling Lucky?

The last console, or set of consoles, surrounds Incognitro itself. There are exactly 17 “Feeling Lucky?” slot machines, any of which work for this puzzle. The code is simply any sequence which contains a lucky number. To be inclusive of many real-world cultures, lucky numbers included 777, 888, and 168. However, the machine only gives you a Piece of Hate if you are “lucky” enough, as judged by whether you have 5 unique luck buffs from any of the 13 possible sources of luck. Fittingly for the theme of this puzzle, many players seem to think that chance is involved and will try longer sequences of 7s, other consoles, or continued inputs hoping for a better outcome.

Doom in the Tomb

“4 o’clock – Doom” (“puzzle 3b”) continues the theme of numbers but adds some letters in as well. Hidden throughout Ratts’ Lair are quite a few paper scraps with numbers on them. Our hint for how to interpret them comes from a torn journal entry from Ratts’ journal.

How many years has it been since that fateful day? When so many heroes began their journeys on Azeroth…

“That fateful day” alludes to the launch of World of Warcraft, November 23, 2004. The rest of this puzzle was localized to fit each language, but they all followed a similar idea to the original English. The solution is a multiplication cipher using the date as our key. That is to say, each letter was encoded by taking the ASCII value, multiplying by 253 (11 times 23), and then modulo dividing the answer by 2004. (We can infer that the key is applied this way because no number goes above 2004. Clever mathematicians could have also solved this with the use of the inverse modulo.)

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Chapter 3: Ratts the Secret Finder

The fourth clue room solidified the understanding that, despite her eccentricities, Ratts is just like the players: a lover of secrets with laser-like focus and outlandish theories. Like the community, Ratts took hours mapping out the Endless Halls and trying to understand the Isle of the Watchers. But unlike the community, Ratts seems to have found the answers to several yet-unsolved secrets. Will these secrets be solved by the community eventually too? Are they even secrets that can be solved by players? Only time will tell.

Altars of Acquisition

(6 o’clock – altars / puzzle 5a)

Among the books in this room, one stands out: “Zul’gurub and the Altars of Acquisition.” A few players recognized this as a datamined, unfinished secret started by another designer some time ago, but to many it was the only mention of a secret that wasn’t known to the community. (Indeed, the original idea was never implemented, but this secret brings it to life.)

With torch in hand, players revealed five spirits at the “Altars of Acquisition” in southwest Zul’gurub. To complete this puzzle, each Spirit of Collections must be appeased by your collection, achieved by showing off your mounts, pets, toys, and transmogs. Several hints tell the players the theme of each spirit and provide visual feedback about which requirements are satisfied.

We’ll briefly mention some aspects of this puzzle that players haven’t fully solved (or at least documented) yet:

• The Corruption spirit will accept seven kinds of corrupted mounts and three kinds of corrupted pets.
• The Lust spirit will accept any of a certain kind of book, and two different pets.
• The Void/Shadow spirit originally required both the Shadowy Disguise and Void Totem toys; this was a bit too challenging, so now the spirit only requires one toy out of four possible options (as well as one of eight battle pets.)

Because this puzzle is multiplayer-friendly (all players share credit when any combination of players satisfies the spirit), this step was far easier for the first wave of players (when everyone brought their collections) compared to those who come later to follow in their footsteps. This is interesting since puzzles are typically only easier with time (as guides are developed, players become stronger, and items become more easily obtainable). In retrospect, this puzzle was perhaps too demanding on any given (solo) player for the amount of odd collections they would need to obtain.

The Owl Watchers

(7 o’clock – watchers / puzzle 5b)

Interestingly, the community solved the first few steps of this puzzle before it was even fully available to solve. An error in our encryption methods lit up the four statues outside the Vault of the Wardens with each color of the buffs you can receive from the Owl of the Watcher statues around the island. Players noticed this and experimented to figure out that the Fledgling Warden Owl reacts to the statues. The design intent (which is working now) was that each of the statues outside the vault would light up to show your progress on training your owl in case you forgot which ones you had already completed (similar to the small orbs of progress shown in Ratts’ Lair).

This secret also resurrected a familiar puzzle, but this time much more challenging. This step is based on a classic logic puzzle called Lights Out. Across a grid of owl statues, some are activated and some deactivated. The goal is to deactivate all statues. By interacting with a statue, you toggle the status of it and all orthogonally adjacent statues, as shown in the image below.

However, this puzzle has a few tricks that make it more complicated. First, you can only interact with activated statues. Second, the grid wraps around the edges (so the top row is considered adjacent to the bottom row and the leftmost column is adjacent to the rightmost column). And third, most confusingly, the statues are in a randomized order from their “true” locations. As illustrated below, each statue maps to the “real” puzzle in a unique way each attempt.

Ingenious players quickly wrote external tools to help solve this logic puzzle. Originally, this step was designed to require individual players to solve their own unique puzzle (rather than simply plugging in the solution found by the community or relying on an external tool to do all the heavy lifting); however, in retrospect this puzzle can be a bit cognitively inaccessible, so I am glad that these player-made aids exist to help players who need it.

They say that a magician never reveals their secrets, but I am no magician. Candidly, prior to Ratts’ Revenge there was no secret on the Isle of the Watchers. But with the amount of effort that the community put into solving it, I needed to add something here. This was one mystery that needed a resolution. Yes, the statues’ buffs are strange, the way they activate in a seemingly esoteric order. Yes, there was no shipped usage of Cell Door 3-5×1. Yes, the puzzle in Glazer’s room seems like it should be something more than a simple dungeon world quest. But these were a confluence of oddities, nothing more. The development process often leaves vestiges and strange behaviors.

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Chapter 4: Despite Everything, She’s Still Ratts

The concluding chapter emphasizes that, despite being a secret finder like you, Ratts is not your friend. She has chosen violence, she has corrupted her puzzles with traps, and she has left you behind in her search for Ulzik.

Plates With Friends

(8 o’clock – Rats / puzzle 6)

To continue following Ratts, players would need to enter her secret vault. However, it seems that the door is stuck. Ratts had her own way of getting in, but you’d have to enter by getting the enigma machine to work—despite Ratts leaving a sign on it stating that it hasn’t worked in 20 years. Indeed, even Ratts couldn’t solve the last two puzzles, she never acquired the ancient shaman blood or warden’s mirror, the components needed to make the enigma machine work.

But you, clever players, you did! Once activated, there are seven pressure plates around Ratts’ Lair and a number of rats running around. The pressure plates are numbered corresponding to their clockwise position from the enigma machine, hinted at by the grandfather clock elsewhere in the lair.

The solution requires counting (and then killing) the number of rats that spawn — the number of rats multiplied by the step of the puzzle and then modulo divided by 20 (hinted at by Ratts’ sign on the machine) is the answer for each step. This value is input by standing on the corresponding pressure plate. When playing solo, this is achieved by dragging the various statues around the lair onto the pressure plates. If the value is more than 7, the answer wraps around but with an extra person/statue on the plate: for example, 8 is two people on plate 1, 9 is two people on plate 2, and so on.

This puzzle was originally intended to be solved as a team for players who like playing with friends. In practice, though, most players seemed to prefer taking the extra time to drag statues around than taking the time to group up.

For the Love of Play

(9 o’clock / puzzle 7)

Internally dubbed “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish,” this puzzle was meant to be the most challenging, though it ended up being quite a bit more challenging than even intended.

It starts with the cryptic plaque above the great enigmatic door — a plaque that was visible from Incognitro itself and had been taunting players the entire time.

To be like me you’ll need to know
The missing rhyme
The crystal’s glow
The stars above
The space below
The time of now
for long ago
My secret notes you’ll never see
Unless you learn to work as three.
JYPFFQVY

Let’s break this down. The first line is Ratts telling the player that to be like her (an extraordinary secret hunter and indeed one who has obtained Incognitro), you’ll need a few things:

• The missing rhyme (we’ll come back to this one)
• The crystal’s glow (the Relic of Crystal Connections which glows a connecting beam to nearby crystals)
• The stars above (the Starry-Eyed Goggles which make the stars visible above you)
• The space below (referring to the space in Pillar-Nest Vosh where you chased Ratts to, down that “dark rabbit hole” in Azj-Kahet)
• The time of now for long ago (we’ll come back to this one as well)

The following two lines ended up being more of a red herring than a clue. Originally, they were a hint for the previous puzzle: Ratts’ secret notes (her journal pages, the missing rhyme) are locked until you learn to work as three: the pressure plates require at most three people standing on them. So if you work as three people (either with friends or by making use of the statues around the lair), you can access Ratts’ secret notes. In retrospect, this isn’t even an accurate hint because you would need a fourth person to pull the lever on the enigma machine. (Doubly inaccurate because Ratts never solved the enigma machine!) The community produced a slightly more coherent interpretation: the secret notes of puzzle 2 (the scratched-out poem) can only be seen with the help of three versions of Olgra. In either case, I think in the future I’ll be more careful about making sure my hints are actually useful.

Finally, Ratts leaves a cryptic code.

Behind the enigmatic door, we find a few interesting items:

• The last (?) chapter of Ratts’ journal
• A birthday cake sitting atop an hourglass
• A naga portal which draws the attention of the Torch of Pyrreth

To understand Ratts’ journal, we need to look through her previous journal entries. Some excerpts are highlighted below:

It’s all about the endless hunt, the love of play.

If this is a game to them, I’ll show them how much I love to play.

I just love playing around with potential solutions.

Now, when we look at Ratts’ last chapter, although she seems to trail off, we can fill in what she left out — the missing rhyme.

In catacombs with dusty pages
As paladins or rogues or mages
Through all the wars that never cease
In search of hope
In search of peace
For all the journeys, in any weather,
For adventures yet to come together
The final key is why I stay:
For you…
For Azeroth…
For the love of play.

With only this information, the puzzle is now technically solvable, but let’s dig into the remaining hints.

The cake on the hourglass hints at a birthday — WoW’s birthday. With this hint, “The time of now for long ago” refers to the date of the 20th anniversary (the time this year in honor of a time long ago). World of Warcraft launched on November 23, 2004 so the 20th anniversary date is November 23, 2024.

Finally, the naga portal points us to Darkshore — the only other location where this exact portal appears in-game. Killing the naga around that portal has a chance to drop four curious items:

• Sandshift Relic
• Sand Shifter
• Indecipherable Pages
• Indecipherable Plans

These items hint that a shift cipher of some kind may be necessary.

But there was one more hint to find. The naga of Darkshore were led by Queen Azshara. The champions of Azeroth contended with these naga again in the Eye of Azshara dungeon. Players who explored that area found a curious constellation inside an overturned boat.

This constellation spelled out VIG. Knowing that the first naga hint led you to a shift cipher, this clue makes it even more explicit that you might need a Vigenère cipher (more on that in a bit). Coincidentally, this constellation has 24 stars (as in, 2024, the time of now for long ago) and “VIG” could also be short for “vigentennial”, a 20th anniversary! How very fitting — let’s all imagine this was completely intentional.

By the time the community had found all the pieces, they were well aware of where to input Ratts’ cryptic code. In the space below (Pillar-Nest Vosh), while seeing the stars above (with the Starry-Eyed Goggles), one could connect to the crystal’s glow (using the Relic of Crystal Connections) to reach a previously hidden platform with one final console and chest.

That explains how we need the space below, stars above, and crystal’s glow. The last two clues — the missing rhyme and the time of now for long ago — then tell us the code.

This code was localized into multiple languages. Let’s unpack the English version for this post — the other languages are solved in a mostly similar fashion, though some languages use ASCII and hex codes where letter-shifting doesn’t make as much sense.

We start with the code phrase: JYPFFQVY.

This code was encrypted with the “time of now for long ago,” or 11/23/2024. So to decode it, we shift each letter back by that number. For example, J is the 10th letter of the alphabet and shifting it back by 1 makes it into an I, the 9th letter of the alphabet.

JYPFFQVY
– 11232024
______________
= IXNCDQTU

 

Next comes the hard part: the code was also encrypted by the “missing rhyme,” which we figured out was “for the love of play.” The concept is the same as the previous step. For example, I is the 9th letter of the alphabet, and if we shift it back by F, the 6th letter of the alphabet, we get C, the 3rd letter of the alphabet.

The trick is: what happens if we get to 0 or below? Well, elsewhere in Ratts’ lair is a book called “The Hidden Zeroth Letter of the Alphabet and Other Mysteries of Linguistic Mathematics” — so let’s assume 0 is a valid letter. We could represent it as “?”, so our alphabet is actually ? A B C… and so on. And if we get below zero, let’s just wrap back around to Z.

Our code phrase is exactly 8 characters long and the missing rhyme “for the love of play” is 16 characters long when you ignore spaces. So we do the shift in two halves as so:

IXNCDQTU
– FORTHELO
______________
= CIWJWLHF

 

CIWJWLHF
– VEOFPLAY
______________
= HDHDG?GH

(This method of shifting a text code by a key phrase is called a Vigenère cipher in case you were wondering where that comes into play.)

This leaves us with a final value of HDHDG?GH, which just so happens to have no letters above the 10th letter, meaning we can convert each letter into a single digit: 84847078.

And that’s our code! Enter that number into the final console and we found where Ratts left the keys to Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle. As a final message to us, her secret code converted to ASCII is “TTFN,” or “ta ta for now”! Which makes you wonder: did Ratts want the player to steal Incognitro? What are her plans? And where is Chief Engineer Ulzik? What is he up to?

So many questions remain unanswered, but it seems we’ve hit a dead end for now. Ratts’ Lair is dimly lit by shadowy (perhaps fore-shadowy) flames, and we have no further clues to follow.

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Concluding Commentary

This hunt was absolutely epic and we were thrilled to be a part of it. Congratulations to everyone who worked on solving it, you did a fantastic job. Now, let’s answer a few frequently asked questions before we wrap up.

What’s the meaning of “Ratts’ Revenge”?

We’ll let you decide! Was it her revenge on you? (Some of those puzzles sure were frustrating!) Or was it about her revenge on Chief Engineer Ulzik, given that she stole his felcycle? Or is it foreshadowing for the revenge she has yet to seek?

How did you go about designing puzzles as the right challenge for a large community?

Making puzzles in an MMO is incredibly difficult. Most challenges one can think of are either solved immediately or not at all. Some of our tools included:

• Leveraging obscure Warcraft knowledge
• Leveraging a variety of skills and accomplishments, such as your collections (Altars of Acquisitions), battle pets (Master of Secrets), mathematical prowess (Doom in the Tomb), riddle solving (Message from the Old Gods), and linguistic ciphers (For the Love of Play)
• Creating individualized steps, such as the Watcher puzzle

This hunt confirmed that many players will scour every inch of Azeroth looking for clues while a fewer number of players will take out pen and paper to map out their wildest theories. As secret designers, we try to create solutions just outside what you would first think to try.

What did you learn from watching the community solve this secret?

So much! We took many notes on how the next secret can be even better. Some of the most common requests were:

• More puzzles that leverage obscure lore
• Fewer red herrings
• More individualized puzzles
• Clearer rules on the boundaries of puzzles (such as whether you would need external information)

We really appreciate the community’s feedback and we hope to take all of it into consideration in the next chapter of Ratts’ story!

What comes next?

Light only knows. Perhaps more will come in a future update. Perhaps in the future there will be more to discover about the felcycle itself. Chief Engineer Ulzik seems to have hidden some additional capabilities behind protected codes. Stay tuned!

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We hope you enjoyed this breakdown of our puzzles in the hunt for Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle. The development team thoroughly enjoyed watching the community’s progress, memes, and far-out suggestions. We hope you had fun, too!

Until next time, secret finding community. Ta ta for now!