Elite Dangerous | Halloween Event 2023

[Oddisaurus]

Check message 8 and the letters....

There's something in the full stops by the looks of it in message 10 too....

I’ve explored that idea and I think you're right. As far as my discoveries go however, and in regards to the 8th log's full stops, all I'll say is……….. connect the dots to the Thetis
If you’re good at maths you might find yourself asking… What is 5/5 + 8/10?

 

[Kira Goto]

If you’re good at maths you might find yourself asking… What is 5/5 + 8/10?

1.8? (My head maths might be off) What are you trying to hint at with that, if I’m correct?

I personally believe this will somehow end up tying back into the Thargoid storyline, with the Thetis serving as some kind of backdrop with the signal being reused for another purpose. Let’s be mindful of the fact that skull guy(if it even is a guy… as in, male) seemed to specifically target those driven insane, but leave those not attacking each other at the time of their passing alive*. And what message 10 says about ‘they won’t let me leave’ and ‘i have to look for them’… with no specification for who them is.

If this isn’t some kind of twisted test/experiment of an individual with more time than morals at their hands.

*They might have been looking for something on the outpost that was facilitated through the chaos this signal created, with little care for casualties.

 

[Emperor]

1.8? (My head maths might be off) What are you trying to hint at with that, if I’m correct?

I personally believe this will somehow end up tying back into the Thargoid storyline, with the Thetis serving as some kind of backdrop with the signal being reused for another purpose. Let’s be mindful of the fact that skull guy(if it even is a guy… as in, male) seemed to specifically target those driven insane, but leave those not attacking each other at the time of their passing alive*. And what message 10 says about ‘they won’t let me leave’ and ‘i have to look for them’… with no specification for who them is.

If this isn’t some kind of twisted test/experiment of an individual with more time than morals at their hands.

*They might have been looking for something on the outpost that was facilitated through the chaos this signal created, with little care for casualties.

Generation Ship

A Generation Ship is a large starship with a self-sustaining environment that travels interstellar distances at sub-light speeds. These vessels were conceived before the advent of faster-than-light travel and cryogenic stasis, and were designed to support hundreds or thousands of people for...

elite-dangerous.fandom.com

Shortly into the Thetis's ninth generation, passengers began reporting whispering sounds coming from comms units. The sounds, a digital signal being picked up by the ship's comms array, drove passengers homicidally insane, resulting in the loss of whole decks. The signal was found to have originated from an uninhabited planet that the Thetis had passed 15 lightyears earlier. A crew member who accidentally heard the signal described it as a whisper that said "kill them all". The crew were unable to stop the signal's spread through the comms network, and the killings continued, with those affected also writing words in an unknown script on the walls in blood. The final log is a garbled transmission of the signal.[7]

 

[Oddisaurus]

1.8? (My head maths might be off) What are you trying to hint at with that, if I’m correct?

I personally believe this will somehow end up tying back into the Thargoid storyline, with the Thetis serving as some kind of backdrop with the signal being reused for another purpose. Let’s be mindful of the fact that skull guy(if it even is a guy… as in, male) seemed to specifically target those driven insane, but leave those not attacking each other at the time of their passing alive*. And what message 10 says about ‘they won’t let me leave’ and ‘i have to look for them’… with no specification for who them is.

If this isn’t some kind of twisted test/experiment of an individual with more time than morals at their hands.

*They might have been looking for something on the outpost that was facilitated through the chaos this signal created, with little care for casualties.

I'll admit to being a little bit cryptic there. Just didn't wanna give a too spoilery spoiler and ruin peoples investigation fun.
Allow me to explain myself... (Apologies now if it's rambly)

The comms logs are organised via fractions. There are 10 new comms logs, therefore they're numbered 1/10 to 10/10.
The ones featuring a series of . full stops . have similarities to logs found at the Thetis generation ship. Where there are only 5 in total. (1/5 to 5/5)
I was suggesting adding two of the comms logs (Thetis log 5/5 + Shamash log 8/10) together to find a potential clue.
As I believe the dots ... .. . .. ... are the main puzzle to solve and if you "connect the dots" ie. the comms logs between the Thetis and Shamash beacons, you may see something interesting coming together. At least... I did... I think?

The dotted lines in the two comms are as follows:

The 5th Thetis log contained:
. . . . K . L . . . . . . H . M . . . . . . . . L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And the 8th Shamash log contained:
. . . . . I . L . . . . T H . . . . . . . . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E . . . .

I added them together and got:
. . . . K I L L . . . . T H . M . . . . . . . O L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E . . . .

I assuming it's says something along the lines of... KILL....THEM.......something something...

Regardless of potential future lore implications and new character introductions, my guess is FDev plan for us to find out what this message really is?

 

[Kira Goto]

Apologies now if it's rambly)

No, makes perfect sense, actually. I just didn’t see that you could connect the two logs in such a way. (Did visit the Thetis since it’s right next door.)

Regardless of potential future lore implications and new character introductions, my guess is FDev plan for us to find out what this message really is?

Possibly. There is, after all, that spectrogram with Kill them for me… having said that, I believe it’s more a derivative of the Thetis signal, some kind of altered version. Who made it? Now that’s the question.

And who ‘skull person’ is, of course. Something that, I feel, will be revealed in due time. But we’re definitely not supposed to find any great details on the first day of a multi-day event, I’d guess.

 

[jojon]

Heh, "Vincent Prowse" -- nice one.

 

[Lhorndra]

Right. I found the message in the spectogram too, been to the Thetis, investigated Garret Orbital. I listened to all messages backwards, but I didn't notice anything special. I do have some questions that I haven't seen here so far:

1. Does anyone have any clue about the "Fleet Exercise GREY SWAN"? Is it just narrative noise or a substantial part of the thing?
2. Why are there people in the concourse of Garrett Orbital, and why do they behave as if nothing happened? (I guess it's just something Odyssey does per default, and it would have been to much work for the devs to switch it off for one particular station.)
3. Is it possible at all to enter the small access corridor under the concourse window? My Dolphin seemed to be small enough, but couldn't enter. Maybe a SLF could?

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

1. Does anyone have any clue about the "Fleet Exercise GREY SWAN"? Is it just narrative noise or a substantial part of the thing?

It's just part of the story, the first couple of logs seem to reveal that it was the members of that operation who were first exposed while out on duty (the reference to the open comms channel) and they carried it back to the station.

 

[Kira Goto]

It's just part of the story, the first couple of logs seem to reveal that it was the members of that operation who were first exposed while out on duty (the reference to the open comms channel) and they carried it back to the station.

The Grey Swans also just straight up don’t exist in the system BGS as a faction. Saw that in system chat, and they don’t appear in the status panel, by the looks of it.

So yeah, seems purely like a lore thing that doesn’t really exist as a game asset.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

The Grey Swans also just straight up don’t exist in the system BGS as a faction. Saw that in system chat, and they don’t appear in the status panel, by the looks of it.

So yeah, seems purely like a lore thing that doesn’t really exist as a game asset.

It's an operation (or squad) name, not a faction.

 

[Lhorndra]

The Grey Swans also just straight up don’t exist in the system BGS as a faction. Saw that in system chat, and they don’t appear in the status panel, by the looks of it.

So yeah, seems purely like a lore thing that doesn’t really exist as a game asset.

Well, I didn't see anything about a faction. The audio logs mention a military operation called "Grey Swan" (singular), so it's just the name for this particular operation, not for the ships or pilots participating.

 

[PillowTalk]

I haven't played the game since about a year after Power Play became a thing and I come back to this event and I'm pretty confused by the talk. Can the puzzle, if there even is a puzzle, be solved just playing the game or have they been known to incorprate ARG elements and other obtuse puzzle designs in these? I can't find many clues in the text, the audio is just creepy sounds and noise, and searching for a source of the signal talked about in the logs doesn't yield any results unless I'm expected to keep jumping into USS's and finding it that way. :/

 

[Kira Goto]

It's an operation (or squad) name, not a faction.

That’s the thing - they are marked as being in control of the outpost affected by this signal all of a sudden, but there is no BGS counterpart to it in the game.

Now I don't know if this means anything, but it's there. And if you're curious about the presence of the San Tu State Network - they have a megaship in system. The presence of the faction is only known on inara from Wednesday last week. And I don't have much of a clue how to interpret this graph for when the faction has popped up in there.

 

[Ayradyss]

FWIW, "Grey Swan Pilots" is definitely listed as the owning faction of Garrett Orbital in-game.

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

1. Why are there people in the concourse of Garrett Orbital, and why do they behave as if nothing happened? (I guess it's just something Odyssey does per default, and it would have been to much work for the devs to switch it off for one particular station.)

I am guessing Frontier have no easy way to clear an otherwise functional station, or make the NPCs in there go crazy? Obviously the tools for turning off docking are there, like at attacked ports; did anyone ever look through the windows of an outpost under Goid attack? Do the NPCs just chill out there too?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Can the puzzle, if there even is a puzzle, be solved just playing the game or have they been known to incorprate ARG elements and other obtuse puzzle designs in these?

In general, Frontier's previous puzzles have been solvable entirely by playing the game and scribbling a lot of notes on paper. But no "out of universe" stuff like the message revealing a URL on the 21st century internet, etc.

There have been some code puzzles which have taken people collectively a few days to solve: but they've not been complex codes - a 19th century cryptographer could have broken them all - just a little obfuscated so that you can't just drop them into some "code-breaking website" and get the answer.

There have been a number of puzzles requiring a brute-force search of an area as part of the solution: this doesn't seem like one of them yet.

There have been a few requiring the use of certain in-game items in non-obvious ways: obviously those are all solvable in-game.

There have been a few (not for a while) multi-stage ones requiring piecing together several of the above by multiple people.

 

[CMDR Timber McWolf]

And who ‘skull person’ is, of course.

Two possible candidates (maby a little far fetched, but who knows?):

1. Last year's "Judge"
2. Wycherly.

 

[Kira Goto]

Two possible candidates (maby a little far fetched, but who knows?):

1. Last year's "Judge"
2. Wycherly.

I’ll hold off from any bets just yet, but there is the (with some tinfoil hattery required) possibility of non-human influence. Or, at least, only partially human.

Whether there actually ends up being a connection to that, remains to be seen… that voice at the back of my head - it’s definitely just a figment of my imagination and nothing else - is sure telling me a lot about Thargoid this and Thargoid that. Still trying to figure out exactly what.

 

[CMDR Timber McWolf]

So there's still hope it's not me . It would also be a welcome change of pace - correct me if I'm wrong, but the last few events were all pretty much one evening events - usually they were solved when I came home from work . This time, I'm completely stumped though, I got nothing. Let's hope for more breadcrumbs during the days leading up to Halloween.

I've been listening to the audio files over and over like a madman. Everything that sounds like it could be a hidden image is just noise as far as I can tell, except the one I posted above... there is spoken stuff in the background I can almost make out, but it is just too distorted, and I have no TV hacker magic, just an audio workstation. Also, for a giggle, listen to the stuff in 1.5x or 2x speed. Makes you feel crazy. Where is my tinfoil hat?

I had a few of those messages where all I had was the transcription, the according logs delivered nothing audible - unless the audible stuff comes somewhen after a minute of barely audible white noise...

 

[Kira Goto]

I had a few of those messages where all I had was the transcription, the according logs delivered nothing audible - unless the audible stuff comes somewhen after a minute of barely audible white noise...

Nope, some of the messages - such as the one with the fleet exercise record/transcript - straight up just don’t have any (recognizable) vocal patterns to them. Or no spoken words, just a lot of terrified screaming and some odd human wailing/crying/moaning(not in that sense, get your mind out of the dirt) sounds.

Or, at least, they are distorted to the point where it is almost impossible to discern any words from it with just your ears.