¶ The Cat Bot ARG
This ARG was hosted as a result of 2025's Cat Bot birthday event. After 1 million puzzle pieces were collected, the last one being collected by @ducksinarow, the puzzle began. Running /event lead you to an initial image:
¶ Event Image
This will be called the “Event Image”.
¶ Burger King Ad
The burger king ad was achieved by decoding the MDN string through Base64, reversing the output, and using it as a YouTube video ID:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-mc0k96e30
That will bring you to this Burger King ad. 2 top comments are held by Lia themselves. This led you to her channel, so you can see the Text Video.
¶ Text Video (1853-1856)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z85MUb_3NL4
The Text Video was in a Burger King Ad Playlist, and the Text Video was the last one in it. It was uploaded by Lia on March 14, recorded at 15:19.
The video consists of a big wall of nonsense text in the Kate editor for Linux.
Overlaying this video’s contents with the original event image yields a text when you look at the green bar: fYcHkMV. Plugging this into imgur gets you the Boar Image.
¶ Boar Image
The Boar Image is the next step in the ARG.
Text in the bottom left corner reads “f.minkos.lol/h.txt”. Following this link reveals the text: “dVpPZElXU0lRUGlrUnNVWVpIZGRwWHh4SmJjdW9XYVlodmVTUWtUYmlnS3dQUlJneENwZnpOclFrZXJoU3dNCg”
When decoded from base64, and the output is formatted to match it, this text closely matches up with the Vertical Text on the Event Image, aside from the capitalization. Overlaying these two texts & lines gives you another set of items:
¶ The Last Key
After this, the loop is complete. You have returned to the original image. On the way, you will have found 4 numbers:
- 1 (because of 1000000, the bottom of the Event Image had a question mark which should be filled in with
1), - 35162 (= 1000000 -
pixels in image) - 9298 (the 1853rd-1856th digits of pi)
- 326311167 (positions of the characters with the wrong cases in the last step)
You can combine these keys into: 1351629298326311167.
This number is the User Id of a user: @puzzlepiecemaker. Go to their linked bluesky to get h@ppyb1rthdaycatb0t! as your final key.
You can use h@ppyb1rthdaycatb0t! as a key to a vigenere cipher. At this point, the kx70piuznAb86h5qk9Y string had still been unused. If you used the ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789@! alphabet, and h@ppyb1rthdaycatb0t! as the keyword, you will get an invite to the Cat Bot Birthday server. However, the final invite has an incorrect capitalization on one of the letters. K=k indicates you had to change a lowercase k to an uppercase K to unlock the final invite.
The first 5 people to join the Birthday Server after the event won 20 minutes of Cat Rain.