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First, a round of applause for Datto and his Destinyraid crew.

A great many people worked on solving the epic, new puzzle in Destiny: Rise of Iron's "Wrath of the Machine" raid, but Datto streamed the elaborate process. This is exactly the sort of community-driven discovery that Bungie's game attempts to always foster.

Let's back up.

There's a secret quest tucked away in the new raid, and completing it unlocks an exotic weapon that can't be obtained anywhere else. We only know this for sure now that the puzzle has been solved, but the quest and its reward had been the subject of speculation before Rise of Ironwas even released.

It all started with an alternate reality game. If you're just looking for a solution to the puzzle, Datto's process is laid out right here.

Open Owl Sector records

On Sept. 15, five days before Rise of Ironlaunched, a post surfaced on the Destinysubreddit bearing the title "Splendor 2.6 perk?" 9Blu, the post's author, spoke of a mysterious XP booster -- called Splendor 2.6 -- that had suddenly appeared on a friend's character.

As commenters stepped up to share their own similar discoveries, it quickly became clear that some kind of "infection" had gripped the game. The perk could pass from player to player by at-the-time unknown means.

On the same day, Bungie launched a website at owlsector.bungie.net. The page referenced the five XP boosters that had been discovered -- Brilliance 3.2, Glory 2.1, Magnificence 2.0, Fortitude 3.1 and, of course, Splendor 2.6. It quickly became clear to inquisitive fans that Bungie had cooked up an ARG.

In the days that followed, players puzzled out how the "infection" transmitted from player to player and pored over Owl Sector. On the site, text-based chat transcripts were appearing at semi-regular intervals and they seemed to reference Rise of Iron's SIVA nanotech threat.

Networking Simulation

Wrath of the Machine launched on Sept. 23, the Friday after Rise of Ironarrived. A few days later, Destinyfans made another discovery: a Bungie web address that led to a "Networking Simulation." Running the page spat out a lengthy blob of code, like this:

The ASCII symbol at the top of the page is a SIVA mark, which is a direct reference to Rise of Iron. And the data, as it turned out, was the key to solving the first part of the raid's puzzle.

Cryptography nerds and coding-savvy fans quickly saw the data for what it was: an encoded message. Text on the page further suggested that the jumble of incomprehensible text was just one piece in an eight-part chain, and each full chain would need to be decrypted.

To view the "Networking Simulation" page at all, players needed to be signed in on Bungie.net. And when puzzle-solvers in the fan community put their heads together, they realized that the code was in some way connected to the profile viewing it. In other words, players were seeing different datasets.

This meant that the next step in the process would have to be a community effort. If players were seeing different strings of data and eight of those strings were required to piece together... whatever it was, results would have to be pooled.

That's exactly what started happening early this week on the Destinysubreddit. A website was created on Tuesday explaining how players could participate by sharing their data. By this point, the code-knowledgeable fans had discerned that each eight-part chain of data led to an image.

There are around 1,000 small, square images in all, with sequences of five shapes on each of their four sides. Here's a stockpile of 269 decoded images, for your reference.

It's a massive jigsaw puzzle. All the corresponding sides needed to be lined up and connected before the full picture could be revealed. As players worked furiously to solve the puzzle, a bigger picture took shape (via Traelium's post on the RaidSecrets subreddit).

It's difficult to single out the individuals that did the heavy lifting on data decryption, as it was evidently a group effort. But redditors MockingDolphin, TheGrayFox89, starlog_rules and mg2brandon all delivered critical information.

Math of the Machine

While all of this data-compiling was going on, the Destinyplayerbase was discovering Wrath of the Machine for the first time. Remember: the raid launched on Friday, but the scavenger hunt didn't begin in earnest until the following Monday.

Scattered throughout the raid are several carefully hidden monitors that you can interact with. There are five in all, and -- as we now know -- activating them leads to unlocking a quest for the raid exotic.

Three of the monitors were located with relative ease. The fifthone was discovered in a secret room near the final boss, where five lasers block access to a chest. Each laser corresponds to a monitor and each monitor activation turns one laser off.

But there was still that fourth chest. No one even knew where it was initially, until one player -- YouTuber Avacadro Boi -- spotted a monitor's telltale white noise through a crack in a large, diamond-shaped structure that players pass by on their way to the raid's final encounters.

Here's a look at that room:

The monitor is inside that big, diamond-shaped structure at the center of the room. But pay attention to the round canisters scattered around the room. Those are the key.

The Owl Sector puzzle's jigsaw image seemed to be a recreation of the monitor room's four-quadrant grid of canisters. And with four circles in the jigsaw image individually marked, the puzzle solvers quickly deduced that these were activation platforms.

You can find the mostly assembled jigsaw puzzle linked in this Reddit post from Justin Watts, the founder of Datto's clan, Math Class.

Players would have to look at the grid, figure out which marked circles corresponded to which containers and then have four people standing on each container. A map of the room was created for any player to reference.

Cylinder room map

There's more to the process of opening up the diamond, and that's where Datto comes in. The prolific Destinystreamer solved the puzzle -- and unlocked then completed the exotic quest -- with his raid crew, then took to Twitch to educate the rest of the community.

Just step back for a second and think about the scope of this process. Bungie launched a head-scratching ARG five days before Rise of Ironlaunched, and its sole purpose was to get players startedon a rather lengthy path to unlocking a new, coveted exotic weapon.

The puzzle would have been literally impossible to solve as anything less than a community effort. This is the beauty of Destiny. It's a completely enjoyable space shooter in its own right, but the game's real magic is held within its community of passionate fans. People who would dump garbled text into a widely shared Google Doc in the hopes that someone smarter could make sense of it.

Congratulations to Datto and the members of the Math Class clan that publicized the puzzle solution, but congrats as well to the nameless masses who were essential to dismantling the ARG's mystery. This kind of discovery is what Destinyis about. Happy hunting in your quest for Outbreak Prime.

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