Lesser Petroleum

Lesser Petroleum
Active since 2018-10-08
A promotional ARG that led to a game called Sandship.
Type	Investigation
Creator	Rockbite Games
Discovered	2018-10-08

Main Page > List of Investigations > Lesser Petroleum

The Lesser Petroleum ARG was created by Rockbite Games to promote their upcoming title code-named "Project Sandship". Players of the Rockbite mining game Deeptown discovered that visiting an asteroid called "AS66" would present the player with a link to a Twitter account called "sweatingdark" which links to the ARGs main site lesserpetroleum.com.

Deeptown screenshot of message received after visiting asteroid AS66.

Lesser Petroleum Private Network

Having found the Twitter account and then the primary site multiple Reddit threads were created beginning on Oct. 10, 2018 sparking interest in the ARG. Upon visiting the site players were prompted to enter an email address and password to create an account.

After registering and confirming receipt of a sign-up email players were dropped into a command line environment resembling a Unix shell under a user account called "jonah".

Available Commands

The help text in the shell provides the following information.

jonah@lp:~$ help
clear - clears console window
help - list of all terminal commands
list - lists files in current working directory
read [file_name] - shows contents of text file
view [file_name] - shows contents of image file
play [file_name] - plays audio file
su [user_name] [password] - switches user to another one (will ask for password)
cipher [string] - encodes a string with mysterious cipher (v.1.0)

The list, read, view, and play commands allow players to examine files available to the current user. Players progress by using the "su" command to move into new accounts.

The cipher command accepts certain characters as input and produces an encoded output. Players have observed that it seems to accept only lower case ASCII characters, but not all of them. Specifically vowels (including "y") and the letters "x" and "z" are rejected.

Complete table of encodings:

• b => 13y
• c => 1n
• d => 22d
• e => Vowels are not supported in version 1.0
• f => 26s
• g => 19l
• h => 2n
• i => Vowels are not supported in version 1.0
• j => 757e
• k => 536d
• l => 8y
• m => 15s
• n => 14o
• o => Vowels are not supported in version 1.0
• p => 3r
• q => 357y
• r => 55s
• s => 11s
• t => 6o
• u => Vowels are not supported in version 1.0
• v => 880y
• x => Parameter is not valid. Some of the characters are not decodable. Please try something else.
• y => Vowels are not supported in version 1.0
• z => Parameter is not valid. Some of the characters are not decodable. Please try something else.

Combinations of any valid characters can be encoded but only one word at a time.

jonah@lp:~$ cipher lssrptrlm
8y11s11s55s3r6o55s8y15s

jonah@lp:~$ cipher bc df
You can decode only one word at a time.

Jonah's Account

No further instructions are provided but any input the system does not understand suggests players use the help command which provides some guidance. Exploring the available commands players quickly discovered that the home directory of the "jonah" user contained several files which can be examined.

jonah@lp:~$ list
0001.txt 
contacts.txt 
lp_mail_0042.txt 
lp_poster.png 
ss_mail_008.txt

jonah@lp:~$ read 0001.txt
12 32 35 21 44

jonah@lp:~$ read contacts.txt
Username: jonah
First Name: Jonah
Phone: 0-553-80373-5
Position: Lab Assistant

Username: snail
First Name: Elias
Phone: 0-553-80370-0
Position: -classified-

Username: paul
First Name: Paul
Address: 80 E. 11th St. New York 3, N.Y
Phone: 0-553-80371-9
Position: PR

Username: hermann
First Name: Hermann
Last Name: M.
Address: -classified-
Phone: 0-553-80372-7
Position: Chief Scientist at Severskaya UHS

jonah@lp:~$ read lp_mail_0042.txt
From: Lesser Petroleum
Date: 08.18.1986

Hermann is messing around again from his cold hideout. He modified the security system.. again. With all his crazy puzzles, Nuts like his brother.
Just letting you know that file permissions are changed, and basically we can’t see the Severskaya lab results till this is resolved. I was hoping you can help.
Good Luck.

Jonah Eves
Lab Assistant at LP

jonah@lp:~$ read ss_mail_008.txt
From: Station Severskaya
Date: 08.17.1986

Think you are better than me? Security system my ass!!! You want answers? I want entertainment. Figure it out, or you get no lab results from severaskaya till next year.
And by the way, sending a plane here to punch me in the face will cost like - gazillion, so good luck with that.

Cheers,
H. M

It was noted that the "phone numbers" in the contacts.txt file are actually ISBN numbers for several classic Isaac Asimov novels.

• 0553803735 = Second Foundation (Jonah's telephone number)
• 0553803700 = I, Robot (Elias' telephone number)
• 0553803719 = Foundation (Paul's telephone number)
• 0553803727 = Foundation And Empire (Hermann's telephone number)

lp_poster.png

Polybius square hint with alphabet.

While the contacts and mail files set the scene the Greek writing in the background of the poster and the contents of 0001.txt pointed players to attempt use of a Polybius square. The arrangement of black dots in white squares in the bottom right corner gives the set up for a non-standard Polybius square which, given the digits in 000.txt, decodes to multiple possible solutions.

blpft
blpfu
blpfv
bmpft
bmpfu
bmpfv

Further guesswork showed that using the "mysterious" cipher command exhaustively on these potential solutions in combination with the `su` command resulted in access to the "snail" account.

jonah@lp:~$ cipher bmpfv
13y15s3r26s880y
jonah@lp:~$ su snail 13y15s3r26s880y
You have successfully logged in as snail.
snail@lp:~$

Elias's Account

The home directory of Elias's account presented players with a new set of files, including the first audio file, a voicemail message.

snail@lp:~$ list
dcim001.png 
findings01.txt 
notes.txt 
voice_mail_01.mp3

snail@lp:~$ read findings01.txt
Hey Jonah, if it's you...

The spectrum might come in handy later, no reason to use it now.
Paul is important, I'll wait you there. It's brutally simple.. as is.

snail@lp:~$ read notes.txt
Centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now. The millions left after the billions had died tore up the gleaming metal base of the planet and exposed soil that had not felt the touch of sun in a thousand years. Surrounded by the mechanical perfections of human efforts, encircled by the industrial marvels of mankind freed of the tyranny of environment.

The findings01.txt file revealed that players are taking on the role of Jonah the lab assistant and suggests that Elias is an ally providing guidance. The contents of the notes.txt file were another Asimov reference, an excerpt from book two of the Foundation series "Foundation and Empire".

The voicemail file contained a distorted recording of a mans voice talking about seeing snails.

Transcript: "I keep seeing snails everywhere, as if they all now only move towards me. Maybe all of this is just in my head but whenever I go <inaudible>. It's just crazy. I didn't say which is the one. Dad."

Several players noted that this speech was reminiscent of the recording of Colonel Kurtz's monologue about watching a snail on a straight razor from the film Apocalypse Now. The first tweet from the trailhead account also alluded to the immortal snail meme which describes being pursued by snails.

Noting the suggestion that "the spectrum might come in handy later" players generated a spectrogram of this audio file and discovered a series of numbers hidden within.

Spectrogram of the voicemail message.

Numbers: 46, 178, 23, 56, 89, 23, 117, 52, 85,42, 1, 87, 134, 98,222, 213, 30, 59, 38, 168.

The numbers did not have any obvious use immediately.

dcim001.png

The file continued the snail theme showing a slightly distorted image of a snail on a leaf with some slight discolorations suggesting symbols.

After cleaning up the image symbols for a Pigpen code were revealed which yielded the message: "snailhascometotwelve".

With this information in hand and the suggestion from Elias that "It's brutally simple. As is." it was quickly found that no cipher was required to access the next account.

snail@lp:~$ su paul snailhascometotwelve
You have successfully logged in as paul.
paul@lp:~$

Paul's Account

A new set of files were present.

paul@lp:~$ list
cipher.gif 
findings02.txt 
hm_mail02.txt

paul@lp:~$ read findings02.txt
Hey Jonah, if it's you...

The spectrum nums proved to be useful, they seem to "fix things". First the image, but I think I can repurpose them for this...
Rightshift caesar with alphabetically self and globally rotational key, which is the spectrum.
Mm... A is 1, and Z is 26, remember? In case you forgot the alphabet... again.

mjxmw uaz dxqy ys... wkh fg'z bup ogsbf ndxx pcejygrg qmewfql. m cvgbhfm nvnw ftcjd lybua drtbsw he qaip.. im b aifi jaznwfrd k vh i, hmiu kiq nfpg pwoxvy ylhf qkoh.

paul@lp:~$ read hm_mail02.txt
There is a rat hole in space that, it seems, does not pay its taxes.

The file cipher.gif contained an animation with scrambled letters similar to the coded message in the findings02.txt file.

Text: qApeDnVixD buZGl VoRy

Despite the suggestion of the use of a caesar cipher which maps one letter to another this message was determined to be a variation where each letter was individually shifted along the alphabet in reverse (wrapping around when needed) corresponding to the numbers found in the spectrogram with the numbers repeated many times to cover all 166 characters in the message.

Eg. the first character in the coded message is "m" and the first number is 46, working backwards from "m" towards "a" and wrapping back through "z" 46 times yields the letter "s". Repeating this process revealed the complete message.

snail has come to... and it's all about that specific chapter. i figured this thing about cipher as well.. if a word contains x or z, then you just ignore that word.

This process did not reveal anything intelligible from the text of the cipher.gif file.

The beginning of the decoded message refers to the "snailhascometotwelve" solution of the previous puzzle and the contents of the hm_mail02.txt file is another excerpt from the novel Foundation and Empire (complete text freely available here), this time specifically from chapter 12. The complete line of dialogue from the character Captain Han Pritcher to Mayor Indbur reads:

"Excellence, there is a rat hole in space that, it seems, does not pay its taxes."

The filename "cipher.gif" and the reference to ignoring words which include "x" or "z" suggested that the next step involved the cipher command. Looking at the cipher and at chapter 12 of "Foundation and Empire" leads to the finding that the cipher is made up of words from this chapter. b=13y The 13. word of the chapter is the first word beginning with b "by", ending with y c=1n The first word of the chapter is the first word beginning with c: "captain", ending with n d=22d 22nd word of the chapter is the first word beginning with d: "discouraged", ending with d. Following that method we get a=12d e=53e i=16d o=9f u=5d

We still haven't used the letter sequence from the audio file. VoRy is the only word in that file that doesn't contain q, x or z. 880y9f55s201t is the password to Hermann's account.