The race to solve the Chia Friends puzzle

The Chia Friends website says There’s also a puzzle embedded in the collection for the community to discover.... The community at XCH Foundation - chia-friends-puzzle is working through solving the Chia Friends puzzle. There are some really interesting items that are being discovered daily.

What is the puzzle?

Yes.

What are the knowns?

1. There are 10K friends
   • 9998 are PNG
   • 2 are GIF (#880 and #9098)
2. https://www.bueno.art/ was used for assembling the collection
3. Seth has mentioned a few things that could be interesting (@jon/ChiaLinks.com) :
   • K32s and Timelords are best friends
   • Timelords should prompt a search/lookup on K32s
   • He didn’t have control over the minting order
   • you win a “coin” if you have the right “prove” (update 2022-10-03 this was a hypothesis; Seth confirmed he didn’t say this)
   • (2022-07-06) confirmed mint numbers do not matter
   • (2022-07-06) the unique chia designed NFTs aren’t part of the puzzle (the fact that they are unique)
   • (2022-07-06) Chia legal team shut down the idea of a mnemonic/prize
   • (2022-07-06) the solution to the puzzle is something Seth is hoping the community can use afterwards
   • (2022-07-06) no steganography involved
4. Seth provided clue(s):
   • “There is something significant about 1854” ( note Amethyst is seth’s birth stone )
5. (@jon/ChiaLinks.com): Timelords starting point -> K32 -> coin
6. There are 25 Timelord bodies with these symbols.
7. There are 1865 K32 bodies.
8. There are 26 Keywords with these symbols.
   • starts with each letter of the alphabet
   • not all BIP-39 words
9. (2022-07-06) There are 318 PNGs with transparent backgrounds.
10. (2022-07-06) @nezee - 5 NFTs have “XCH” tokens:
    • #880, #4060, #9008, #9098, #9450

Useful tools

1. Community generated rarity list by @jon/ChiaLinks.com
2. Metadata search tool: by @mikehw12
3. Chia Friends Puzzle findings by AchterRudolf
4. Rarity list on Dexie.space by @tjumpx
   • WARNING: Read source code before enabling it in your browser. Protect yourself against malicious JavaScript.
   • I was able to make this work but I had to click on the Chia Friends collection offers on dexie.space link which opens https://dexie.space/offers/col1z0ef7w5n4vq9qkue67y8jnwumd9799sm50t8fyle73c70ly4z0ws0p2rhl/xch from the greasyfork website to see the rarity list

Discord experiments

1. @joshpainter

   been thinking more - current theory is that there may not necessarily be an “answer” at all, but we may be trying to reconstitute a “secret decoder ring” that we can then use to have fun encrypting simple messages and sending them to each other, maybe on twitter, like we did when we were kids. So maybe we post an encrypted message along with a link to a chia friend, which itself is the “key” to the message we’ve posted. This is more along the lines of “something that helps the community” than my other guesses and more in line with his clues I think. There could still be an encrypted bit of text with a special key, but I think first we have to build the decoder ring and understand the rules.

2. @Thiccuimos

   Blessed be the longbeaks

   • may indicate Sterling is a misspelling of Starling (an actual bird) just like Trancended, and Buterfly

3. @nezee

   Just spent about 10 min staring at the images with 3D glasses I had on hand. While trippy, can’t see anything SUPER apparent. Some colors are dull, while some are trippy, but seems mostly random. Also didn’t see anything special on the animated gifs 2/10, would not recommend… eyes angry at me now haha! Wonder if Mint having transparency if that is a hint or nod at anything, what with “minting” NFTs

4. @88888888

   I’ve been looking at the timelords relationship to the coins:

   1. Each of the 24 timelords has a word that corresponds to a set of 42 coins
   2. Each set of the 42 coins could be laid out in a 7x7 grid
   3. That would create a 1050x1050 collage (the same as the resolution of one image)

10K collection

The thumbnail preview of the 10K Chia Friends:

The full scale image was created using ImageMagick toolset:

montage *.png -geometry 100x100 _chia-friends-all.png

Rarity (may not be 100% accurate) can be found here: https://chialinks.com/chiafriends/

10K image as a single PNG in a 100x100 grild (100px images): 220 MB ZIP - click to download the full resolution image

10K individual images as a single ZIP + JSON metadata: 102 MB ZIP - click to download images + metadata

Timelords

There are 25 Timelord bodies with these symbols:

#3372 buterfly is confirmed as “bug” (by Seth) #1479 infinity is confirmed to contain null instead of infinity metadata was a mistake (by Seth)

#55 skull
#342 flame
#580 crown
#1106 lightning
#1173 squiggle
#1479 infinity
#1646 circle
#3372 buterfly
#3949 leaf
#3957 eye
#4306 rainbow
#5776 aries
#6321 swirl
#6477 heart
#6539 hamburger
#6573 smile
#7062 asterisk
#7329 pi
#7528 diamond
#8074 hourglass
#8147 star
#8406 triangle
#8749 key
#8794 square
#9301 crescent

K32

There are 1865 of K32 bodies: 30 MB ZIP - click to download the full resolution image

Keywords

There are 26 friends with trait_type Keyword ( @ECTS.io + @Yakuhito )

#1231 usage
#1308 quirk
#1850 prove
#1887 edify
#2510 wacky
#2528 acorn
#2706 viper
#2885 xrays
#3179 index
#3882 dingo
#3943 china
#4033 zebra
#4235 nicer
#4595 jumbo
#4968 graze
#5349 oxide
#5945 medal
#6054 yacht
#6107 leafy
#7086 kings
#7385 fixes
#7452 topaz
#8099 hints
#8526 snowy
#8545 birds
#9438 remix

Chia team designed NFTs

There are a few Chia designed Chia Friend NFTs. Do note this was confirmed unrelated to the puzzle. Shared by @randomjuan in the XCH Foundation discord:

Images with transparent backgrounds

Below is the list of the 318 images not counting the 2 special GIFs (#880 + #9098) that if you exported the frames end up having transperency.

This list was created using this script + ImageMagick toolset:

for PNGNUM in {1..10000}
do
    PNGNAME=${PNGNUM}.png
    ISALPHA=`identify -format '%[channels]' ${PNGNAME};`
    if [[ $ISALPHA = *srgba* ]]; then
      echo $PNGNAME
    fi
done

According to @danceswithwoofs these are the colors:

Mint                 186
Mint & Gradient       65
Mint & Watercolor     30
Mint & Sparkle        18
Mint & Glimmer        10
Mint & Shimmer         9

The 318 PNGs with an alpha channel:

5.png
43.png
72.png
101.png
123.png
142.png
169.png
180.png
194.png
208.png
272.png
309.png
364.png
408.png
420.png
421.png
441.png
486.png
490.png
538.png
553.png
675.png
682.png
767.png
781.png
798.png
834.png
960.png
967.png
987.png
988.png
1001.png
1008.png
1056.png
1066.png
1073.png
1114.png
1123.png
1136.png
1214.png
1270.png
1291.png
1302.png
1347.png
1350.png
1357.png
1439.png
1440.png
1525.png
1527.png
1536.png
1552.png
1563.png
1621.png
1684.png
1695.png
1727.png
1789.png
1802.png
1818.png
1864.png
1935.png
1939.png
1958.png
1974.png
1990.png
2031.png
2083.png
2135.png
2183.png
2226.png
2247.png
2248.png
2279.png
2280.png
2284.png
2309.png
2412.png
2525.png
2562.png
2567.png
2602.png
2611.png
2674.png
2703.png
2705.png
2766.png
2773.png
2791.png
2808.png
2816.png
2833.png
2851.png
2862.png
2921.png
2974.png
2992.png
2994.png
3000.png
3010.png
3091.png
3109.png
3110.png
3119.png
3120.png
3125.png
3131.png
3133.png
3140.png
3175.png
3200.png
3302.png
3358.png
3388.png
3393.png
3412.png
3547.png
3559.png
3569.png
3571.png
3598.png
3654.png
3663.png
3760.png
3763.png
3771.png
3846.png
3857.png
3886.png
3977.png
4055.png
4107.png
4108.png
4199.png
4208.png
4241.png
4277.png
4287.png
4310.png
4315.png
4338.png
4350.png
4360.png
4373.png
4396.png
4424.png
4511.png
4522.png
4540.png
4579.png
4581.png
4615.png
4625.png
4663.png
4810.png
4863.png
4891.png
4895.png
4968.png
5067.png
5087.png
5132.png
5133.png
5167.png
5177.png
5202.png
5313.png
5343.png
5395.png
5396.png
5397.png
5398.png
5403.png
5447.png
5500.png
5514.png
5522.png
5591.png
5603.png
5648.png
5662.png
5761.png
5799.png
5855.png
5895.png
5907.png
5968.png
5989.png
5995.png
6035.png
6052.png
6096.png
6134.png
6148.png
6149.png
6187.png
6201.png
6205.png
6207.png
6354.png
6363.png
6365.png
6377.png
6511.png
6547.png
6559.png
6568.png
6575.png
6621.png
6643.png
6717.png
6725.png
6752.png
6769.png
6777.png
6782.png
6824.png
6831.png
6843.png
6847.png
6855.png
6881.png
6908.png
6961.png
6980.png
7023.png
7069.png
7101.png
7105.png
7123.png
7132.png
7158.png
7159.png
7246.png
7251.png
7252.png
7280.png
7313.png
7321.png
7341.png
7350.png
7381.png
7440.png
7455.png
7513.png
7558.png
7583.png
7611.png
7627.png
7640.png
7675.png
7705.png
7715.png
7725.png
7730.png
7748.png
7762.png
7842.png
7868.png
7893.png
7902.png
7973.png
7996.png
8104.png
8108.png
8153.png
8235.png
8251.png
8286.png
8297.png
8365.png
8440.png
8455.png
8459.png
8476.png
8510.png
8556.png
8627.png
8630.png
8733.png
8742.png
8809.png
8814.png
8822.png
8894.png
8919.png
8927.png
8932.png
9017.png
9043.png
9067.png
9090.png
9120.png
9213.png
9239.png
9240.png
9261.png
9286.png
9316.png
9318.png
9321.png
9335.png
9351.png
9353.png
9354.png
9377.png
9490.png
9527.png
9577.png
9672.png
9777.png
9789.png
9793.png
9816.png
9862.png
9906.png
9917.png
9918.png