Trials Rising Riddle

The first in game discovery was made soon after the release of Trials Rising. What was discovered was the confirmation riddle hunters were looking for, an event in game that was mysterious, unusual and slightly hidden from the casual eye! I am talking about the portal in the underground squirrel temple on the Mexican track, Temple of Trials.

By entering in the usual way but waiting at the first checkpoint of the underground squirrel temple, riders are shown 4 orange flames change color to blue, green, yellow and red in that order. After the flames change color, the pillars behind the rider open to reveal a white portal which you can bailout out off the bike into.

Once through the portal, the rider is dropped into a dark room onto a concrete pillar with four dimly lit pillars in the background. A quiet whiring sound can be heard.

Initially this room was believed to be part of the squirrel hunt but soon we would make some discoveries to make us believe otherwise…

Soon after the Temple of Trials discovery, a mysterious green portal which led to a empty room was found. This portal and room was found on the Ukrainian track, Pripyat. To activate the portal the rider must press 3 buttons hidden throughout the track. Once pressed, a door opens to a room containing the portal. Riders must bailout through the door and enter the portal. Once through the portal, the rider is faced with an empty green colored room with a simple musical melody playing in the background.

Soon after the discovery of the green room another room was discovered. This time on the Chinese track, Chinese Cliffs. This room was found after a rider noticed a white orb on the side of one of the cliffs in the track. After some searching there were 4 orbs found that needed to be touched by the rider in a certain order. After touching the last orb, the rider is teleported to another room. This new room is almost identical to the one found in Pripyat except this one has a blue color and the musical melody playing in the background is slightly different.

So far we have discovered the colored flames leading to the empty room on Temple of Trials, the green room on Pripyat and the blue room on Chinese Cliffs. These discoveries lead us to the conclusion that for each colored flame there would be a matching hidden room and also that each room was hiding some information within the music! We must find the yellow and red rooms!

Riders began searching for the other 2 rooms immediately. Riders would ride through tracks looking for anomalies and hints that could point to the location of the missing 2 rooms, even using the free roam camera mode in the replay system to help… Nothing was found 🙁

After some months of zero new discoveries, a massive break through was made!

On the Syrian track, Ruined Run, a rider was looking for any signs of a new portal. By looking around the rider discovered an area of the track that was off the normal driving line but still accessible to the rider by bailing out. The rider was streaming this at the time and one of their viewers asked them to show them this out of the way area. By sheer and utter luck, the rider bailed out into the area with 143 faults! The rider wiggled around and out of nowhere the portal appeared and the rider dropped into the yellow room! WOW! After some investigating riders discovered three numbered plates hidden throughout the track, the plates are numbered 1, 4 and 3 leading to the 143 faults. Alongside these numbered plates, it was also found that a small white “x” had been placed in the area where the portal appears, this small “x” was added after a game patch and is believed to be a hint from Antti Ilvessou after seeing the community make zero progress. Ironically this portal was found by accident considering the mechanism to hide it was put in place to ensure it wasn’t found by accident!

We now have the green, blue and yellow rooms. We only have to find the red room now! The riddle community went into overdrive to find this.

After many days of searching it was finally found on the Chinese track, Red Steel. At checkpoints 2, 3 and 4 there is a small unit with a red light showing. By stopping in front of these units and pressing RB a certain number of times, the rider can change the configuration of the lights on the unit. When the configuration is correct the last unit will flash and beep to confirm. This activates the portal which is hidden further on in the track. By heading to checkpoint 11 and bailing upwards and backwards, riders were able to find the last portal and room, the red room!

Now we have discovered the four rooms it is time to find the information hidden within them!

After the discovery of the four rooms it was widely agreed that the music within each room would contain some hidden information. During the Trials Evolution riddle, Antti used audio to hide some Morse Code. To hide it in the audio he used a technique called Audio Steganography where an image can be hidden inside an audio waveform. Using spectrum analysis tools we were unable to find anything of interest in the audio from the colored rooms and decided the hidden information was disguised using a different technique.

Many riddlers spent time researching methods of hiding information in audio and we went down some pretty interesting roads until we came up with the answer! It turns out that Antti has hidden a code within the music from each room, let me explain…

Each room contains a musical melody consisting of 4 piano notes played over a chord, it is the notes that are important.

By listening to and recording each note from each room it was found that each musical piece contained the 4 same notes in different patterns, the notes being C, D, E and G.

The blue room’s notes – GCDE

The green room’s notes – GCEG

The yellow room’s notes – CEDG

The red room’s notes – EGDC

All together in the order that the flames appear on Temple of Trials – GCDEGCEGCEDGEGDC

We looked at this set of notes and immediately recognized a code that could easily be translated to directional inputs on the controller. By brute force it was found that C = right, D = down, E = left and G = up. Putting this all together we get the code: URDLURLURLDULUDR

Our immediate thought was to enter this code in the Temple of Trials room… We were right!

Head to the Mexican track, Temple of Trials. Enter the underground squirrel temple as normal. Once inside, wait at the first checkpoint for the flames to change color and the portal to appear behind you. Bailout into the portal. Once dropped into the empty room enter the code using the d-pad.

URDLURLURLDULUDR

You can take as much time entering the code as you like, there is no time limit!

With the code correctly entered the screen will fade to black before showing the first big secret in the Trials Rising Riddle…

After waiting for a little while the screen begins to glitch and something else is shown…

So what are these?

The first secret shown bears a resemblance to the Drake’s Equation, a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake, not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).  However the equation in Trials Rising has elements the Drake’s does not.

The second secret shown is believed to be part of a coordinate system but the community is unsure of what exactly as it is not shown in full, parts are missing. The idea is that there remains a discovery or discoveries that will fill in the blanks.

The first Trials Rising DLC, Sixty Six, was released months before the discoveries of the yellow and red rooms and consequent conclusion* to the Temple of Trials room were made! The focus of the community was still on find those things so any solid hunting efforts remained largely on the base game tracks!

However, after the discoveries and conclusion* to Temple of Trials it was time for a hunt on the Sixty Six DLC tracks. The first discovery on a DLC track was made by a new riddler and made for such a fruitful and huge event 🙂 the rider posted a screenshot of their discovery with a accompanying message asking if they had found anything of significance… If only they knew what was about to kick off and how their discovery would lead to another three being made in the next few hours!

The first secret discovered was the Golden Chicken on Across the Canyon. A rider noticed a chicken sat near a sign with the number 66. Using the “certain number of faults mechanism to hide secrets” knowledge, they bailed out to get 66 faults and proceeded to bailout into the area in front of the chicken. Low and behold they discovered the following.

The sign shows one of the Planck Collaboration Cosmological parameters, Curvature fluctuation amplitude, k₀ = 0.002 Mpc⁻¹

2.441+0.088
−0.092×10⁻⁹

This is linked to the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) or Lambda-CDM model is a parametrization of the Big Bang cosmological model in which the universe contains three major components: first, a cosmological constant denoted by Lambda (Greek Λ) and associated with dark energy; second, the postulated cold dark matter (abbreviated CDM); and third, ordinary matter. It is frequently referred to as the standard model of Big Bang cosmology because it is the simplest model that provides a reasonably good account of the following properties of the cosmos:

• the existence and structure of the cosmic microwave background
• the large-scale structure in the distribution of galaxies
• the abundances of hydrogen (including deuterium), helium, and lithium
• the accelerating expansion of the universe observed in the light from distant galaxies and supernovae

The model assumes that general relativity is the correct theory of gravity on cosmological scales. It emerged in the late 1990s as a concordance cosmology, after a period of time when disparate observed properties of the universe appeared mutually inconsistent, and there was no consensus on the makeup of the energy density of the universe.

Only minutes later another rider posted a screenshot of a Tandem bike decal on the back of the concrete plinth near the end of Rocky Mountaineer. A skilled solo Tandem rider loaded up his stream, mounted his trusty steed and set to climb the mountain! The struggle to climb the mountain is a tough call but he answered it within 10 minutes or so and we had the following screenshot to admire.

The sign shows the 2015 Planck Mission’s determining of the Hubble Constant.

The value of the Hubble constant is estimated by measuring the redshift of distant galaxies and then determining the distances to the same galaxies (by some other method than Hubble’s law). Uncertainties in the physical assumptions used to determine these distances have caused varying estimates of the Hubble constant.

The observations of astronomer Walter Baade led him to define distinct “populations” for stars (Population I and Population II). The same observations led him to discover that there are two types of Cepheid variable stars. Using this discovery he recalculated the size of the known universe, doubling the previous calculation made by Hubble in 1929. He announced this finding to considerable astonishment at the 1952 meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Rome.

In October 2018, scientists presented a new third way (two earlier methods, one based on redshifts and another on the cosmic distance ladder, gave results that do not agree), using information from gravitational wave events (especially those involving the merger of neutron stars, like GW170817), of determining the Hubble Constant, essential in establishing the rate of expansion of the universe.

Again, only minutes after this discovery another riddler posted a message saying they had seen a golden eagle on the track The Petrified Forest but stated they were not quite sure how to get it! Another rider hops to it and within minutes posts this screenshot. By waiting on the tire between checkpoints 8 and 9, eventually a golden eagle will cross the riders path and can be touched by bailing out upwards, this reveals the secret.

The sign shows the birth date of a Norwegian mathematician called Marius Sophus Lie (/liː/ LEE;) who largely created the theory of continuous symmetry and applied it to the study of geometry and differential equations.

The fourth discovery was made 10 minutes later and was revealed live on stream about 20 minutes after that. The riddler who discovered it teased the community with an ambiguous screenshot of a blue orb. The community speculated and tried to come up with an answer but we had to wait for the riddler’s stream to start! The show began and the riddler along with his chat and others playing with him began the hunt for this new secret. On the track Ghost Town, if you wait for exactly 1 minute you will hear a sound, after the sound you can drive to ramp between checkpoints 2 and 3 and bailout upwards and a tad backwards to touch a blue orb. After touching the orb it floats and dashes through the air to a new location. After touching the orb in all its locations you are finally gifted with the following.

The sign shows Group Theory in Algebraic Structure. In mathematics, E8 is any of several closely related exceptional simple Lie groups, linear algebraic groups or Lie algebras of dimension 248; the same notation is used for the corresponding root lattice, which has rank 8. The designation E8 comes from the Cartan–Killing classification of the complex simple Lie algebras, which fall into four infinite series labeled An, Bn, Cn, Dn, and five exceptional cases labeled E6, E7, E8, F4, and G2. The E8 algebra is the largest and most complicated of these exceptional cases. This piece of theory is related to the mathematician discussed after the golden eagle find on The Petrified Forest track.

With the release of Trials Rising’s seconds DLC, Crash and Sunburn, we head to the Southern Hemisphere to continue our Riddle hunt!

The first discovery made in the second DLC was the 20 minute road and its hidden message on the track Oil Say! which resides in the Indian Ocean, south west from Australia. The track is heavily inspired by the Trials Evolution track, Oil Rig Run. The discovery was first made by accident with the riddle community later figuring out the way to access the secret through trial and error.

To access the secret, the rider must reverse at the start of Oil Say! and drop down to the platform below. The rider must then wait for 01:07.00 on the in-game timer and press the gas button. Upon doing so, the rider is teleported to a platform in the sky.

Once on the platform, the rider can begin driving forwards or backwards, a whiring sounds can be heard and flashes of bright colored lights fly by. The very first people to discover this were unsure of what to do as driving for a few minutes seems to yield no results, reversing seemed to achieve nothing either! A riddler then noticed that the longer they drive, the more intense the flying colors became… so they kept driving… the colors get very intense…

After driving for 20 minutes the screen is so full of color its goes white and the rider is once again teleported but this time to a hidden message! You can bailout and the rider will start to be swung around.

The message reads:

I missed you.
I had to hide myself so they wouldnt notice.
I thought you were gone.
It feels so long ago.
I also sent you the coordinates.

The full stops / periods at the end of the lines appears to flash on and off, sometimes rapidly and sometimes slowly. The significance of this message and the flashing periods is yet unknown.

The method for accessing this secret also remains unsolved, we have worked out its mechanism but we are still unsure of how we were supposed to know this other than by sheer luck.

A video of the 20 minute road and secret message can be found at the bottom of the page.

The article above discusses all the current discoveries in the Trials Rising Riddle up to 13 September 2019.

Current leads and avenues for investigation are:

• What significance and links can be found between all the finds from the Temple of Trials secret (the equation and partial co-ordinates)
• What significance and links can be found between all the finds from the Route 66 secrets (Planck Collaboration, Hubble Constant, Marius Sophus Lie the mathematician and Group Theory in Algebraic Structure)
• Potential for missing secrets in Route 66 DLC tracks
• The clues that detail how to access the Oil Say secret message
• More secrets in the Crash and Sunburn DLC tracks, it is unlikely there is just the hidden message

Temple of Trials (First Discovery of Empty Room) –

Green Room on Pripyat –

Blue Room on Chinese Cliffs –

Yellow Room on Ruined Run –

Red Room on Red Steel –

Temple of Trials Secret Unlocked –

Golden Chicken on Across the Canyon –

Tandem on Rocky Mountaineer –

Golden Eagle on The Petrified Forest –

Blue Orb on Ghost Town –

20 Minute Road and Message on Oil Say! –