Introduction
Beginning in Trials HD and continuing in Trials Rising, the Creative Director of the Trials Series, Antti Ilvessuo, brings players another mind bending riddle to wrap their collective heads around. This article aims to gather, collate and put into perspective all the current Trials Rising Riddle finds. The article will continue to evolve as new discoveries and leads are found. The riddle, the discoveries and the background research into them is a community effort and thus this article will not be naming anyone specifically. You will find video guides on how to unlock all the secrets discussed in the article at the bottom. Let us begin…
The First Discovery
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.
The Four Rooms
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. A small “x”was found in the area where the portal appears, a rider discovered it was in 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. The small “x” was found to have been added after a game patch and is believed to be a hint from Antti Ilvessuo 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!
The Music is the Key
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!
Entering the Code
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 Secrets of Route 66
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.
67.74 ± 0.46 km s-1
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.
Heading South for Secrets
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.
To the Faire!
After months of searching and not making progress, Antti Ilvessuo tweeted “Is Feudal Fun found?” followed by another tweet saying “or Faire Play”. These tweets were in reference to some new tracks found in the Track Pack “To the Faire”.
Riddlers spent the next hours and days searching the 2 tracks and eventually their secrets were discovered.
On the track, Feudal Fun, you must set the rider on fire by hitting an object early on in the track, ride to checkpoint 4 and breaking through some boards to reveal a platform. Once on the platform the rider is presented with following.
The sign reads: TGF Verified L Violation. PASSED
Antti tweeted the following code: ENSMUSG00000002603, which relates to a certain gene of the common mouse.
Gene: Tgfb1 ENSMUSG00000002603
On the track Faire Play, just after checkpoint 8, there are some cows on the castle behind some hay bails. To unlock the secret, a gap was found that the rider can bailout and swing into. Falling into the small gap reveals the following.
The sign shows the birth date of Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz.
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (/ˈlɒrənts/; 18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations underpinning Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
According to the biography published by the Nobel Foundation, “It may well be said that Lorentz was regarded by all theoretical physicists as the world’s leading spirit, who completed what was left unfinished by his predecessors and prepared the ground for the fruitful reception of the new ideas based on the quantum theory.” He received many honours and distinctions, including a term as chairman of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the forerunner of UNESCO, between 1925 and 1928.
Gigatrack - "Four transfers into one!"
During the Ubisoft Forward 2020 Pre-Show, Antti appears in the Gigatrack preview video stating “Gigatrack is like life, it starts, it ends and its long! Depends how you enjoy it. And also one secret thing, four transfers into one.” The track was previewed a few days before release and the riddle community began to postulate… Gigatrack Preview Video
The riddle hunt instantly begins and within hours the community produces a solid lead. Strange sounds are first heard at various checkpoints by many riders but the first tangible discovery was to be the various hard-to-see wooden buttons that once touched disappeared into dust. Initial thoughts were that we were looking for 4 buttons as per Antti’s hint… 3 buttons were found and the community kept searching. Almost at the same time, 2 riders posted message stating they had found the last button, one rider says it is at CP3 the other says CP67! So we kept looking. After a few moments we had found 8 buttons at checkpoints 3, 6, 14, 19, 41, 56, 65 and 73. Once all the buttons have been pressed a sign reading “Love Is Wise” is revealed at CP73. By looking at the back of the sign using the free cam in a replay, a rider found some Morse Code! The Morse Code reads dot dot dot, dot dot dash, dash dot which translates to SUN.
Soon after the next secret was found. A rider discovered a green orb high in the sky after bailing out at checkpoint 19, further searching resulted in green orbs at checkpoints 31, 62, 68 and a final one above the statue between checkpoint 73 and 74. After touching the final orb another sign is revealed that reads “Hatred Is Foolish“. Like the first sign, there is some Morse Code on the back, it reads dot dash dash dash dash, dash dot dot dot dot which translates to 16.
Exactly one month later, after many hours of frustrating searches that yielded nothing, Antti gave a couple of clues. He said “Equus africanus asinus” and pointed us towards a book, Walker’s Mammals of the World, 1964 von Ernest P. Walker and Ronald M. Nowak (urn:oclc:record:1151667294). Two days later, Antti asked “Any zero faults yet?”
This led a rider to check a replay of a donkey run. When the rider has zero faults in the replay, you can pause the replay, go to the end of the track using the free cam option and a red portal will appear!
We instantly got the hints, we needed to perform a zero fault run with the Donkey bike! Beating Gigatrack with zero faults on any bike is a challenge of endurance, the Donkey bike however is much less forgiving than most. The Riddle community called on the S-Tier rider, IBlubbiI, and he set about getting to the end of the track with zero faults. An hour later, IBlubbiI falls into the portal and we were able to admire the next sign… “We Have To Learn To Tolerate Each Other” Like the other two signs, there was some Morse Code on the back, it reads dash dot dot dot, dot dash dot, dot dot, dash dot, dash dash dot / dot dash / dot dot dash dot, dot dash dot, dot dot, dot, dash dot, dash dot dot which translates to BRING / A / FRIEND.
After a long period of searching for the final sign with nothing found, the community was at a bit of a dead end. Antti had be keeping in contact with the community and he kept telling us to wait for something to happen. We were told by Antti that we were unlikely to find the final sign without a hint and that we had to wait a little longer for the hint to be given to us. However, the community managed to crack the Gigatrack code without the hint!
It was assumed that the 3/4 signs that had already been discovered were signs 1, 2 and 4 and that sign 3 was still missing. It was therefore assumed that sign 3 would appear on track between checkpoints 74 and 87. Using these assumptions, a community memeber set about scanning every object, front to back, top to bottom, in close detail using the free camera in the replays! After many hours of searching, the community member arrived at checkpoint 80 where they would make a massive discovery!
At checkpoint 80, on the rear side of one of the rocks in the background, a number was found! 61! The find was posted to the community forum and the community got to figuring out what it meant… A community member started a live stream and the community started suggesting all manner of things to try at checkpoint 80… 61 faults, 61 seconds do this or that and so on but after some playing around the following appeared…
A glowing orb appeared on the rock with the number 61 on it, but nothing else happened. After some more testing it was soon found that 61 presses of gas would make the orb appear! With this knowlegde in mind the community set about trying many gas presses at every checkpoint hoping to find more orbs… Sure enough, that was the case and within 15 minutes we had found similar orbs at checkpoints 4, 39 and 59!
But what about the numbers? We had found the 61 at checkpoint 80 and now we had found 4 orbs, it was assumed that there would be other numbers indicating the number of gas presses on objects near each orb. After some searching they were all found! A 42 on the back of the rock that the checkpoint object stands on at checkpoint 4. A 53 on the trunk of the palm tree behind checkpoint 39. And finally a 32 on the rocks in the lava behind checkpoint 59.
After activating each orb we were presented with the 4th sign to be revealed at checkpoint 80…
As per the previous three signs, the fourth had some Morse code on the back:
..- .–. / -.. — .– -. / .-.. . ..-. – / .-. .. –. ….
Which translates to read:
UP / DOWN / LEFT / RIGHT
We now had the 4 instructions for Antti’s “four into one” secret!!!
SUN, 16, UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT, BRING A FRIEND
The community set about using the instructions, assuming that we had to land on the sun in the planetarium, on the Tandem bike, with 16 faults and then enter the input code up/down/left/right. A few riders quickly reported back that nothing happened when following these instructions..! However, it was soon found that 16 did not represent faults but time instead! To unlock the final secret of the Gigatrack you must land on the sun in the planetarium, on the Tandem bike, wait till 16 minutes has passed in real time and then enter the input code within a small time window. Doing so will reveal the following…
A sign with an encrypted message!? It reads:
hvzr ql’o idp zabu eqld vtbs swo dwhek ggq zzv pv jg ymekquxzrj?
After some research and analysis the community came up the answer… By using some crytography analysis tools the message was found to be encrypted using a Vigenère cipher and with some quick thinking the key to decrypt it was found. There is a small error in the encrypted message but we were able to work around it.
The front of each of the 4 signs when put together make up a quote by British mathematician, Bertrand Russell. The quote reads:
…love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other…
The quote is the key! By using online decrypting tools the community finally discovered the big secret hidden within the Gigatrack!
when it's all said and done how would you like to be remembered?
The Hint
Shortly after Gigatrack was solved the community had an idea to use an online tool called Miro to create an interactive and collaborative timeline for all the Trials Riddles past and present. You can check it out here – Trials Riddle Miro
This tool also happened to be one of the tools Antti had used before in his work at Redlynx so he began to join us in making the timeline. He also used it as an opportunity to drop hints and clues, one of them being the hint that we were waiting for before we solved the Gigatrack riddle. A hint that would ultimately lead us into a real world treasure hunt!
Barter Joe's
Some community members were working on the Miro when Antti came in and posted this image:
The community figured out it was an address: 605 W 4th St Pittsburgh. The address is home to Barter Joes ‘s Buy Sell & Trade, a store selling vintage, rare and sought after items.
Then Antti posted this text:
A community member found the store on Facebook and decided to message them:
The community rallied and arranged for someone to go to the address, when they arrived they said the secret message and were handed 2 books.
The person was handed Walker’s Mammals of the World, 1964 von Ernest P. Walker and Ronald M. Nowak in 2 volumes, the same books Antti had tweeted and hinted to previously. After looking through the books, they were found to contain some handwritten marks and numbers written inside. On page 42 and 53 the page numbers were circled, on page 1487 the number 61 was written and on 1187 the number 32 was written.
The numbers circled and written are the same numbers that you will find on the Gigatrack, the same numbers that represent the number of gas presses at each checkpoint. It seems Antti went to great lengths to make a hint for Gigatrack!
Back to Route 66
Quite some time passed before the next discovery, around 5 months, but after some rallying in the community Discord a group of riders ended up looking on some tracks again. One of those riders were on the track The Windy City. The rider was on the shopping cart bike and they fell out of the cart at checkpoint 5. When their rider hit the ground he vanished! They posted a screenshot of the rider vanished but it was dimissed as a glitch as similar things happen on another track. The community member tried to make the rider vanish again but couldn’t make it happen so they went to cook some dinner leaving the rider laying in front of checkpoint 5. After coming back the game timer had passed 30 minutes but something was obviously showing in the background!
This is the Baryon Density parameter as part of the 2015 data release from the analysis of Planck’s full mission, you can read more about that mission here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_(spacecraft)#2015_data_release
After some brief testing it was found that to unlock the secret you must stop in front of checkpoint 5 for 60 seconds. This also seems to be hinted at by the sign in the background, the blue parking sign where the ‘k’ is slightly off color suggesting to ‘park’ there!
