Solving the Titanium Ingot ARG#

Terra Nostra ran a four-day ARG in late August 2026, seeding an unannounced Moon update. Titanium ingots started dropping from ore. An account calling itself the International Space Committee began posting clues. Nobody knew what any of it was for.

Two techniques that remained resilient during the event. First: when a number is meant to be divided and the divisor is unknown, factorise and filter the quotient space against a semantic constraint. Four lines of Python turned fourteen digits into one unambiguous answer. Second: the account lied in chat and told the truth on signs. Reaction emoji were the most honest channel of all.

The failure is worth more than either. The answer sat in plaintext, in item frames, in a town anyone could walk into, four months before the first clue dropped. I found it. Tested it. Wrote it off on reasoning that was sound about the wrong question.

Details: Titanium is dropped when mining any natural mining blocks (stone, deepslate, ores) with a fortune or silk touch pickaxe. It is given to you only if you have a free inventory slot.

I found a pinned forum thread in the official discord with a discord account saying the following

- Good morning people. It's been a while... **This is the International Space Committee speaking.** It appears you have uncovered the ancient titanium reserves, hidden deep on earth. Titanium Ingots are extremely rare to come by, but reward those who find it. First, it is important we encrypt these messages, as there may be other entities listening in. RG8gbm90IHRyeSB0byByZXZlcnNlIGVuZ2luZWVyIGl0IC0geW91IHdvbid0IGdldCBmYXIuIEdhdGhlciBhcyBtYW55IGFzIHlvdSBjYW4sIGFuZCBhd2FpdCB3aGF0J3MgdG8gY29tZS4g Godspeed, descendants.

reading this we notice a large string, which is obviously base64

doing the following I decode the string

echo "RG8gbm90IHRyeSB0byByZXZlcnNlIGVuZ2luZWVyIGl0IC0geW91IHdvbid0IGdldCBmYXIuIEdhdGhlciBhcyBtYW55IGFzIHlvdSBjYW4sIGFuZCBhd2FpdCB3aGF0J3MgdG8gY29tZS4g" | base64 -d

Which gives us the following: Do not try to reverse engineer it - you won't get far. Gather as many as you can, and await what's to come.

Which is extremely telling, it is basically telling us to farm as many as you can, but for what exactly?

The second clue they give us is the following, which Is rather a direction:

- Trace the signs, until you find the true answer. It begins at 22070 71 -3583

Heading to the coords I see a sign, which says

Sign 1/3 - Find the sign at 5198 7197
The third sign contains a useful tip

So I follow the coords which leads to sign 2/3 Which is basic HEX to ascii

33 39 32 38 20 = 3928 x
2D 32 34 37 34 36 = -24746 z

again follow the coords to the final sign which gives us a hint in base64 again, they really like base64 :p

VGhlIG9yZXMgYXJlIHlvdXIgZnJpZW5k

Which translates to "The ores are your friend"

So this is how to up your chances of getting titanium ingots it seems, these aren't actually clues to a thing rather "what you should be doing" which if you go to the first clue "Dont try to reverse engineer it, gather as much as you can and wait "

A few hours later a user by the name "Draconian" stated the following on what they found:

Hello, everyone.

I've been doing some digging on the Titanium Ingot and have some information I don't think has been uncovered yet. I used to do a lot of work on Slimefun (a plugin that uses a lot of custom recipes) on different servers, so I thought I'd take a look at the NBT data of the ingot. I extracted a world download with an ingot in my inventory and copied it to singleplayer and used NBTExplorer to check the internals. Here's what I found.
## Anatomy of the Titanium Ingot
**Item:** `Iron Ingot`
**Name:** `Titanium Ingot` (gradient)
**Lore:** `Strong, but lightweight` (gray)
**Enchantment:** `Unbreaking 1` (hidden)
**Custom Data:**
* **PublicBukkitValues:**
  * `earthmoon:item_type: TITANIUM_INGOT`

**Name Gradient:**
#E256D3 - T
#E359D4 - i
#E35CD5 - t
#E45FD5 - a
#E462D6 - n
#E565D7 - i
#E568D8 - u
#E66CD8 - m
#E66FD9 - [ blank ]
#E772DA - I
#E775DB - n
#E878DB - g
#E87BDC - o
#E97EDD - t

---

If I recall, PublicBukkitValues is used by a variety of plugins to attach unique plugin-specific metadata to items. Slimefun also did this to distinguish between the various custom items it added. I think this means that the Titanium Ingot is being managed under a plugin called `earthmoon`. Call me crazy, but that fits the space theme that the first hint ISC dropped gave us.

I hope this helps!

few hours later the official event account said the following: "1368962217"

At first we thought it was important, instantly people assume its coords, including myself but eventually if you search the numbers in google, you will get on the first result "Red Herring" , A distraction

Obsidian Circle at ~ 22695, 63, -9751#

What it is#

Flat obsidian disc, radius of 20.5, sitting at y=63. Originally had 27 end crystals placed on top; these have since been destroyed by players for "testing". The disc itself is being strip-mined for obsidian double drops.

Reproducible in creative with //cyl obsidian 20.5.

Location: Kazakhstan / Aral Sea region.

Evidence it was placed by staff#

Four independent checks, each reproducible in under a minute:

1. Recent. Not present on archival map renders from 19 August. Built within the last week — i.e. during the titanium event.
2. Double drops. Mining the obsidian yields mcMMO double drops, meaning the blocks never entered mcMMO's placestore. Hand-placed blocks fire BlockPlaceEvent and get flagged; WorldEdit and /setblock write directly and bypass it. I verified this below
3. Placestore is functioning and persistent. Control tests: - Placed an obsidian block and mined it same-session → single drop. - Mined a block I placed in Nostra's first week → single drop. So the flag works, and it is long-term.
4. Players don't have WorldEdit on EarthMC. The load-bearing premise, and the only one here you cannot check yourself in a minute; it rests on knowing the server's permission setup. Grant it and points 1–3 leave staff as the sole plausible author.

Day 2#

I got off but i got pinged that there was an hint announced to the server, so i logged back on

The hint was obfuscated in global, saying ‘A strong signal emitting from Earth. Near 0 0 the power is most.’

Upon going to 0, 0 - a bedrock block was there, with signs each reading ‘Think OUTSIDE the box (Or as an /og)’ ~ Credits Panth_r for the image

People were going around and around, but I remembered a warp, which was in hub, the hub also being considered another server or in minecraft earth server the "box", the warp was conveniently '/warp og' so i decided to go to hub, i looked around for a solid 10 minutes but couldn't find anything, there was so much signs a single person probably couldn't do it before anyone else figured it out anyway. So, I stated in the forum channel 'Well i tried looking around /og warp in hub and couldnt find anything. lmk if you guys find anything' . instantly a flood of people came to hub, and began looking, i went into nostra to begin my search there, I went to 0,0 height limit, bedrock in the nether at 0,0 even going to true 0,0 on the earth, nothing was there.

Eventually someone in the hub said in the forum "Have we found it yet" to which the event account replied with an image of the location "You have."

The signs at the location were the following: Sign 1: "Collect 5, Collect 5, Collect 5" Sign 2: "sprinkle with something valuable" Sign 3: "add something powerful for success"

Afterward the account said "There is nothing more to be found out today. The committee will notify you of new discoveries."

What do the signs mean?#

Reading the three signs together, each "Collect 5" is a separate slot holding a stack of five, putting 15 titanium into three positions rather than five into one. five ingots is trivial for anyone who has been mining.

Day 3#

ISC posted, raw digits:

73705607272800

Fourteen digits, breaking the ten digit format established by the red herring and by "Next clue at 1787842800". The format break was itself the signal that this was a different kind of hint.

I tried the following but nothing seemed to have worked#

NPC15 town#

While the number sat unsolved I went wandering, checking anything anyone mentioned. One of those was a town in northern Siberia called "Awd", held by an NPC mayor ~ NPC15. Sand cubes, item frames, cactus, a villager, generally slop. Inside a sealed stone cube there were two item frame grids that looked like crafting recipes.

I tested both. Nothing.

I wrote it off, and the reasoning was sound at the time: the town was founded 23 April, months before the event started, and EarthMC has plenty of these scattered through empty terrain — mod towns held by NPCs where devs and staff test things. Nothing about it pointed at titanium other than the iron blocks.

The two grids were:

[iron block ][iron block ][iron block ]  
[glass bottle][fire charge][glass bottle]  
[end crystal][ empty ][end crystal]

[iron block ][ nether star ][iron block ]  
[netherite ingot][tinted glass][netherite ingot]  
[glass bottle ][ empty ][glass bottle ]

The solution#

At 1:28 AM, 28 minutes after the number, ISC posted a single character:

/

I didn't see it. Everyone who did assumed it was a link of some kind. I'd already tried that on the official site and got a 404.

Then the account posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_(mathematics)

Which retroactively made the / obvious. Divide.

The immediate problem is that "divide" without a divisor isn't really an instruction, but a category. I'd already swept the obvious candidates, 2 through 12, 16, 24, 60, 64, 100, 1000, 3600, 86400, and nothing hit anywhere meaningful. Most of them divided neatly, but only because the number ends in two zeros, so that told me nothing. The one interesting result was ÷3600 = 20473779798 exact, which meant the number was a whole number of hours but not of days. Suggestive, not useful.

Guessing divisors one at a time was clearly the wrong approach. So factorise instead and you get every possible divisor at once:

import sympy
sympy.factorint(73705607272800)
# {2: 5, 3: 4, 5: 2, 6871: 1, 165541: 1}

Two large primes, 6871 and 165541, sitting on a remainder of 2⁵ · 3⁴ · 5². A number built to be divided has its meaning in the big factors.

At that point the reasoning was: every numeric clue in this event so far has been a Unix timestamp. If this one is fourteen digits, maybe it's a timestamp that's been multiplied by something. So instead of asking "what should I divide by," ask "what divisor produces something that looks like a timestamp." Then just enumerate all of them:

import sympy, datetime
n = 73705607272800
for d in sympy.divisors(n):
    q = n // d
    if 1_500_000_000 < q < 2_000_000_000:
        print(d, q, datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(q))

Exactly one result: 41226 1787842800 2026-08-27 15:00:00

1787842800 is the timestamp ISC gave the day before. The exact moment this clue dropped. So the big number was built by multiplying a value we already had by one we didn't. Dividing by the known part leaves the content.

41226 is the only new information in the message, and it's unique in Unix range, so there's no ambiguity about which divisor was intended.

I posted just the number. ISC replied "Excellent." followed by "No more clues for today." ![[Pasted image 20260828022342.png]]

When people pushed back that 41226 was a stupid number, ISC said:

"Figure out what the number indicates."

So the division was the decode, not the answer. 41226 was a new object and it meant something.

Day 4 — what 41226 indicates#

Everything I tried on it, in order:

An admin nudged the channel with "what if that number is just much simpler" after I sent the Wikipedia page ID. That was a steer, it ruled out anything needing a lookup table thankfully.

I posted 4/12/26 right after, no steer. MultiTGM surfaced the forwarded announcement: the final Aurora event, "Aurora shut down", Terra Nostra opening 17 April. 12 April 2026.

The same date is also the International Day of Human Space Flight ~ Yuri Day. The channel enjoyed that considerably more.

ISC confirmed the format ("the number was indeed a date, not a coordinate") but left the referent open: "The dispute on which date it is, and what significant event it is a reference to, has not yet ended." Then: "As a community, you must decide which you would like to submit in the next 24 hours."

The vote came back 100% for April 12th 2026. ISC's final message confirmed it, and gave the referent as the Aurora end event.

The "no recipe" misdirection#

ISC posted, before the timestamp clue:

"To clarify, there is nothing you can do either. There are no crafting or brewing recipes, or any other interaction you can do with Titanium."

Anyone who took that at face value stopped testing. Then a fourth sign was found at the hub site, in a hole in front of the other three:

"...or maybe not?"

Method note worth carrying: ISC's chat messages are unreliable, the signs never were. Every sign has been literal — hex coordinates, "the ores are your friend," collect/sprinkle/add instructions. The account trolls in chat and tells the truth on signs.

Recipe attempts#

Tested the beacon-shaped layout (5 titanium in the glass positions, 3 valuable across the bottom, 1 powerful in the centre) with gold + nether star. Nothing. Tried titanium in a brewing stand ingredient slot. Nothing.

Then ISC: "The committee urges you to store enough power - you'll be needing it soon." Someone guessed "power books?" and got a thumbs-down react. Someone guessed fuel and got a thumbs-up.

Reactions turned out to be how ISC answered yes/no questions all week, and they were more reliable than anything the account said in text.

The finale#

"Titanium will in fact have a use very soon. For now, this is goodbye. The committee believes you are ready for what's to come, and wishes you the best. Godspeed, descendants."

Then a maintenance restart, and the Moon Update.

earthmoon meant exactly what it said.

What the sign actually described:

"Collect 5, sprinkle with something valuable, add something powerful for success"

Titanium casing = 5 titanium ingots + 4 gold blocks, yielding a renamed iron block. A rocket takes 3 casings.

Literal at every level, repetition included. Three "Collect 5" meant three casings, five titanium apiece. I had the aggregate right at 15. The structure was wrong: one craft holding three groups, when it was three crafts feeding a fourth.

Call it a shape prior. The count was never the problem. I arrived carrying an assumption about how a crafting hint is built, and applied it well ahead of the evidence. Same prior sent me to the beacon layout. Same prior made two item frame grids in a Siberian mod town read as noise, because I was hunting for one.

"Powerful" was the fuel. Which ISC said outright, and the thumbs-up confirmed.

The NPC15 frames were the recipes.

Every item in those two grids is in the real update. Tinted glass, nether star, and netherite ingots are in the cosmonaut helmet. End crystals, tinted glass and a fire charge are in the rocket.

Right that it was a dev test town. Right that it predated the event. Both true, both beside the point. The frames matched the shipped recipes 1:1. Devs had been assembling them since April and I was standing inside the answer.

So the whole cryptographic layer gated timing rather than content. Base64, hex, the fourteen-digit product... ornamental, all of it. The solution was legible in a walkable location before the first clue posted.

Everything else landed where the hints pointed:

• End crystals are in the rocket recipe. The obsidian circle had 27 of them
• Nether star and tinted glass are in the cosmonaut helmet
• Hydrogen and oxygen brew from water bottles + blaze powder + redstone block. Electrolysis, 2:1 — chemically correct
• Titanium drops from any ore except nether quartz. "The ores are your friend" was literal. Anyone mining sandstone was never going to get one