Ledger of Szabo: Battleship Rocks, Solution #1
The Ledger of Szabo
In September 2019, Blockade Games released Ledger of Szabo, a fun and short adventure game reminiscent of old 80s and 90s classics. In it, we’ve hidden a total of 1 BTC worth of prizes, hidden within 8 individual puzzles.
It’s been four months, and four of the eight puzzles have been cracked! Now we’re starting to share all of the solutions to the known puzzles. Read on to see which puzzle was cracked, letting you focus on finding the remaining puzzles and prizes.
Want to Play?
Go play Ledger of Szabo and seek out the remaining puzzles at the Pineapple Arcade! It only costs 0.05 ETH to buy a character and join the fun!
Battleship Rocks
Battleship Rocks was one of the first solved puzzles. It came with a prize of 0.01 BTC from the total 1 BTC prize pool.
To solve this puzzle, you must first find the sign located in the bottom left area of the overworld. (Three screens left of the starting screen.)
From here, exploring the map, you’ll notice there appears to be a lot of rocks. There are 52 rocks to be exact if you ignore ones that make up barriers to areas as the sign suggests. (If you have trouble identifying barriers, rocks used in barriers have a light colored pixel in the upper left, while rocks used in the puzzle have a dark colored pixel instead.)
Red rocks are barriers and can be ignored, green rocks are part of the puzzle.
Going around all 16 sections of the overworld will help you locate the remainder of the rocks. There are 52 in total.
At this point it can be noticed that exactly 1 rock exists on each horizontal line of the overworld and the rocks span a width of 58 blocks. This is a hint to label your y-axis with the numbers 1–52 to indicate the order for the private key and your x-axis with the base58 alphabet:
123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz
This alphabet is the common alphabet used to create bitcoin private keys as it removes ambiguous characters such as 0/O and I/l. Setting your grid origin point at the sign you initially found, a grid can be overlaid on the entire map and the private key can be extracted as shown below.
The final extracted Private Key
KxuYrckXozbPqYxZhkg1WaLVhn7XyToicnWQFfkuQXY2QnDWTRyF
