201405052029 24tmeo

Status: solved. The message is the community's 2014 reading; this write-up checks it cell by cell and shows that the rest of the grid holds nothing.

The layers. The body is 226 tokens of hexadecimal. They decode to 1,808 more hex characters, those to 904 characters of Base64, and that to 676 bytes: exactly 26 × 26, with nothing left over. The first row is a ruler (0123456789…), the first column holds row labels, and the rest is 25 × 25 capital letters, with one full stop and three digits.

The instructions. The top row reads TWENTYSIX SQ XXX EIGHTEEN TWO: a 26-square grid, start at column 18 of row 2. That cell is a W. From it the message runs one step at a time, up, down, left or right, never doubling back, crossing its own track in places. Searching from that W for the community's text finds it letter for letter, in two ways that differ only at one crossing. The track ends …OF A, then climbs column 5 through 8, 5, 8 to the full stop.

In the grid below, the top row and the message track are in blue bold. The marked words are explained further on.

    1234567890123456789012345
  1 TWENTYSIXSQXXXEIGHTEENTWO
  2 MMFZELFYVYSEAIHEYWPBQZFLS
  3 IVHEREALZHBJZZZZUPOEGXBDF
  4 YUTXIWNSMUZYFELIZSBGSQSXZ
  5 MSRB.BYEQGSINNEEDSJUQEXNY
  6 EDEM8IYCFWDAXESIKMGOBLPDK
  7 AVVA5IVRYVJRDATRPADYWFKPK
  8 CFOE8JZEGGMBDQOBRRJMEJXTE
  9 CECHAFOTDJMYSEOUQTYEWDLTZ
  0 IDSEJMGGDJMNOWHHJSEDLDRVE
  1 AYIMVNIARBGIBNAMUHIFEKWJE
  2 RODDSBEVEMATJLRJRMOCHLAOO
  3 LKLMJIJOXVYROFDDMCROOWDTO
  4 TYLCGGSUCCBQNUJBVENUSABAT
  5 PEIPVDHGIEREHCRAESEFZLWDV
  6 QLWEZEBPNSSFIEINCDTMFUQGE
  7 LYSJRROEFSMAYBEADEDRDRXSY
  8 SHSNZPRGMHAEFBYSMTIEYXRPE
  9 MIESLNXJHERBMDYWIACFEFIMV
  0 OJLERITDNATEHELFQTFQZNJWH
  1 SCRLEHBNFQEXGNEKTUVJIEPCU
  2 VBYBTDDNOAQFRPFVVYSUXIMPS
  3 MUZYFEIZSBGQSXZFSDOEGXBMA
  4 COVEPLLXXVFGRLAQEGEWSJNDU
  5 DEDEHXYTURKEVBFMAEHEQQONN

The letters along the track, with spaces added:

W PUZZLES TOO HARD FOR TINY BRAIN NEED SMARTS HUMAN BIG BRAIN BIG SUCCESS MAYBE A DEDICATED SEARCHER SMART AND TIRELESS WILL DISCOVER THE REAL SECRET OF A858.

The community's smoother reading, "We make puzzles too hard for tiny brains. We need smart humans with big brains for big success. Maybe a dedicated searcher, smart and tireless will discover the real secret of A858.", adds words that are not in the grid: "make" and "with" appear nowhere in it, in any of the eight directions. The search here started from the community's text, so it confirms their track rather than finding the message independently. The track never enters rows 21 to 25 or columns 20 to 25.

HEY and BYE. The three letters just before the starting W spell HEY, and the three just after the final full stop spell BYE (its E is also on the track). Solvers noticed this in 2014: "HEY, W… OF A858. BYE". Three-letter words turn up all over a grid this size by chance, so only their positions, right at the start and the end, make them look deliberate. They add nothing to the message.

The other 475 letters. Everything off the track and below the top row is filler, and it carries nothing:

• It is not typed by mashing the keyboard: letters that sit next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard, and doubled letters, are as common as in a shuffled copy of the same letters.
• It hides no words. Searching the filler in all eight directions for the 10,000 commonest English words of four letters or more finds only COVE and USES. Random letters with the same frequencies give about 6 such hits.
• It is not English, or a simple cipher of English: the index of coincidence is 0.0438, close to random letters (0.0385) and far from English (0.067), and no period from 1 to 30 brings it near the English value.
• Its letter counts are uneven mostly because of E, with 50 against about 18 expected. The extra Es are spread evenly, near the track and away from it, so they look like a lopsided letter source rather than decoys placed beside the message.

One copied row. Row 23 is pieced together from rows 3 and 4. It is the end of row 4 from MUZYFE on with two letters left out, then FSD, then OEGXB from row 3, in the same columns (19 to 23) as in row 3, then MA:

row  4   YUTXIWNSMUZYFELIZSBGSQSXZ
row 23   MUZYFEIZSBGQSXZFSDOEGXBMA
row  3   IVHEREALZHBJZZZZUPOEGXBDF

Six five-letter runs repeat across these rows, against 0.1 expected by chance, and no other two rows share more than three letters in a row. VectorAlpha pointed out the repeat on r/Solving_A858 in 2014. The run in row 4, MUZYFELIZ, is close to the Spanish "muy feliz" ("very happy") with a stray Z.

Verdict. The post is a word search put together by hand. Its only content is the message the community read in 2014, framed by HEY and BYE. The filler is a stream of non-English letters with one row copied by hand. It holds no key, salt or second message, so it is not the treasure that 3j99nf says is "amoung the trash".

The day before, 24sf75 addressed the same solvers in a grid read down its columns.