ARG:Second Breakfast

This page contains spoilers about the Heartbound ARG. If you want to solve the puzzle yourself, avoid reading this article.

The Artifact

Second Breakfast was found by solving Ring Ring, which led to the page https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/games/Heartbound/OSCAR/OCTOTHORPE/. The page shows the The Artifact's eyes, as despicted on the right picture. The source code of the page has the following:

<!-- Chapter 5 - Second Breakfast -->

<!-- Every failure is a new path. -->
<!-- New pages to turn. -->
<!-- New chances to succeed. -->
<!-- Sometimes when you lose you win. -->
<!-- Don't you agree? -->

<div class="Do you really believe that...?">
  <!-- Meet me at the hour of witches. -->
</div>

This clue used to mention a date on the place of "Meet me at the hour of witches", May 20^th 2019, which was the date in which the text was be updated to provide the clue. That date is also the National Rescue Dog Day on the United States; this specific day was chosen because of its relevance to the themes on HeartBound, namely the dog Baron.

The "Sometimes when you lose you win" sentence looks pretty similar to "Sometimes when you win you lose" (except that "lose" and "win" are reversed). That phrase is said twice in the game: first when you choose to throw your weapon at Barghest at the end of the fight, and second in Darksider Glyphs at the end of Jotunheim. It's speculated that some of those elements might play a role in this part.

The Timegate

A web search reveals to us that the "hour of witches" is 3 AM, and the only place in the game that has a time cycle is Animus. The ARG page has The Artifact's eyes, so "meet me at the hour of witches" suggests that we need to speak to The Artifact on Animus at 3 AM. Also for this to work, the Storyline Variable 238 must still be set to 42. This was already made on the previous step of the ARG by editing the save file.

Just to remember, the save file is located at "(user)\AppData\Local\Heartbound" on Windows, while on Linux it is stored in the "~/.config/Heartbound". The line 245 of the save file was set to 42 (it was this line, and not 238, because the storyline variables begin on line 7 and are counted from zero).

On Animus, The Artifact (the book you carry through the game) can be found there at the time room, which is a hidden location and can only be accessed by editing the save file. We also need to change the time on Animus to 3 AM, which needs save editing too. All in all, we have to make the following changes to the save file:

• Line 2: darkworld_timeroom
• Line 3: 320
• Line 4: 224
• Line 245: 42
• Line 246: 10800

Line 2 stores the name of the current room Lore is in, the Animus' time room is called "darkworld_timeroom" on the game files. Lines 3 and 4 store his X and Y coordinates, respectively. We need to edit the coordinates so Lore does not begin stuck outside the room. Line 245 is "The Truth", which we already changed to 42 on the previous step of the ARG. Line 246 stores the current time on Animus, more precisely the amount of seconds since midnight. 10800 seconds is exactly 3:00:00 AM.

Talking to the book on the hidden time room.

Now we can start playing Heartbound. If all those changes were made correctly, once Lore leaves his room he will be teleported to the time room in front of The Artifact (the book). When Lore interacts with him, the book says the following:

So you've found the gate.

Are you ready for what comes next?

Build the key.

Then a file called MeanGreen.thor is created in the same folder where is the save file. Now we need to "build the key" from this file.

Mean Green

If you try to open the MeanGreen.thor file with a text editor, you will find a long string of characters. The two equal signs at the end (==) indicates that this is a base64 encoded file. Now you need to upload the file to a base64 decoder] and then download the decoded file. You will notice that the file is a PNG image (you might need to change the file extension to PNG), that looks like this:

Now we need to decode this image and figure out what it means . The image is divided in 81 tiles, in a 9 x 9 grid. There are 10 different tiles, each one with the piece of an image. Those 10 pieces can be stitched together to form a seamless image:

Then we can number each tile from 0 to 9, from left to right, in the order that they appear in the image that they formed together. Now we return to the mean MeanGreen image and add those numbers to their respective tiles:

The numbers can be read as (from left to right, top to bottom):
715154208919151651812091514919315131612520541618153554201512520202135191721118519
This is a number to letter cipher (A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26), but there is no space between the numbers so it's necessary a bit of trial and error to figure out the digits pairings. After that, we get:

7-15-15-4-20-8-9-19-15-16-5-18-1-20-9-15-14-9-19-3-15-13-16-12-5-20-5-4-16-18-15-3-5-5-4-20-15-12-5-20-20-21-3-5-19-17-21-1-18-5-19

This is translated to GOODTHISOPERATIONISCOMPLETEDPROCEEDTOLETTUCESQUARES, which can be read as "Good, this operation is completed. Proceed to Lettuce Squares". What we need to do now is to add "LETTUCESQUARES" to the URL, and we get to the next ARG page: https://www.gopiratesoftware.com/games/Heartbound/OSCAR/OCTOTHORPE/LETTUCESQUARES/.

This leads us to the next step of the ARG: Hard To Starboard.