In this article I’d like to talk about the Phantom Assignment in Battlefield 4.

I’ll also mention this here so the article makes more sense. How this game’s development path has worked is as follows:

November 2013 – Game published with 4 maps to play on.

December 2013 – Map expansion #1 with 4 new maps themed “China Rising”.

February 2014 – Map expansion #2 with 4 new maps themed “Second Assault”.

March 2014 – Map expansion #3 with 4 new maps themed “Navel Strike”.

July 2015 – Map expansion #4 with 4 new maps themed “Dragons Teeth”.

November 2014 – Map expansion #5 with 4 new maps themed “Final Stand”.

Ok then, lets take a step back to November 2013 when the game was first published. To accompany the game, the developers have created a companion web page that allows you to communicate with friends and view various statistics about your play. Nothing out of the ordinary here. This is more or less something the previous Battlefield games have had too. Fast forward a couple weeks, into December now when the China Rising expansion is released. While browsing the companion web page someone in the community discovers that strange looking skull has been added to the bottom of the companion webpage. It’s very faint and somewhat out of the way at the bottom of the page. That’s weird. Never seen that before.

Said person notices that the skull is actually linked to something, so he clicks it. What opens appears to be a terminal entry window into some kind of secret ops portal. Here’s a screenshot of the terminal after the password has been entered. Password? What password?

Upon first seeing the terminal window, it would have stopped at the “ENTER PASSCODE” line. It turns out “bumpinthenight” was the correct password, and it looks like after entering the correct password the terminal displayed a few more lines.

Let’s take a step back and take in what’s happened. Day 1, someone notices this weird skull on the companion web page and finds that it’s linked to a terminal window. The terminal says “INITIALIZING PHANTOM PROGRAM”. Day 2, this person promptly reports to the community of his findings. Day 3, a modern day witch hunt begins to figure out what exactly is happening, what’s a Phantom Program, and what the password could be. It would later turn out that this was only one assignment of many assignments inside the Phantom Program. This particular assignment was called the Phantom Prospect.

Recall the 5 expansions that have occurred since the original game was published. In addition to the Phantom Prospect, new clues were discovered after each new expansion pack. In total 4 of the expansions have come with a  new phase to the Phantom Program. They are as follows:

Phantom Prospect – China Rising (expansion 1)

Phantom Trainee – Naval Strike (expansion 3)

Phantom Initiate – Dragons Teeth (expansion 4)

Phantom Operative – Final Stand (expansion 5)

—–

[Back to the Phantom Prospect]

So, where were we. Ah yes, trying to figure out the password. Remember we’re working with a terminal window, and nothing else. No clues to immediately work with.

The first clue appears when someone in the community discovers a random Genghis khan statue in one of the new maps. Remember these 4 new maps are themed China Rising. And after close inspection the statue appears to contain a braille marking.

 

It will later be discovered that across the 4 new maps, there are 14 statues, each with a different braille marking. Here’s a list of the statues and their braille number:

Guilin Peaks: 20, 21, 16

Dragon Pass: 14, 14, 9, 8

Altai Range: 20, 13, 7

Silk Road: 2, 8, 9, 9

Noticing that each number is less than 26. Someone in the community theorizes that each number could correspond to a letter. A =1, B = 2, …etc

After conversion: t u p n n i h t m g b h i i

After I’m sure countless attempts to scramble the letters, it’s found that they should be arranged to spell: bumpinthenight.

Going back to that terminal and entering the password proved successful.

The Phantom Prospect has been cracked. Great, now what?

Well, as a reward for entering the correct password, you’re greeted with a prize. In this case it’s a unique dog tag for your character to wear. Note that anyone can log into the terminal and enter the password to claim the reward, not just the first person to do so.

—–

[Fast forward to March for the Naval Strike expansion – Phantom Trainee]

This one is kind of weird, but bear with me.

So, it’s March and we have 4 new maps themed Navel Strike. The terminal window has also updated, and is now asking for a new password. So we know a new phase of the Phantom Program is upon us. Let the hunt begin!

One day while searching for clues, on one of the new maps, someone discovers door with “Kevin Simpson1942” on the name plate.

You need to be a fan of the Battlefield series to get this one, but in the game called “Battlefield 1942”, Kevin Simpson was a character. So, as any rational person would do, www.kevinsimpson1492.com was entered into the browser and sure enough it was a real web page! Among other things, the web page linked to this image:

And again like any rational person would do, they started looking for clues in the image. I’ve circled the clues in the image, note how there are 5 clues. In the end, the clues work out to spell “DREAM”.

How? This does not make any sense.

Lets start with the coke bottle on the floor. Notice how it has the number 500 on it? Turns out, the Roman numeral translation to english of 500 is the letter D.

Next look at the back wall, there’s a Morse Code character on the frame the looks like a dot with line and another dot. Converted to English letters this is the letter R.

Next look at the yellow sticky note on the roof. It just so happens that this character belongs to the Windings character set, and once converted to English represents the letter E.

Next notice how the ladder leaning against the wall kind of looks like the letter A. Well it does.

Now for our last letter, notice the symbol engraved into the ladder. This, it turns out, is the Viking symbol for the letter M.

So, we now the have spelled DREAM. Great, someone try this in the terminal. Hold on, the terminal isn’t accepting this as the correct password? It would just so happen that the password is not yet complete.

I’d like to mention that to find the word DREAM took the effort of the entire community and with the help some of the developers. This was truly a team effort.

For the next part of the password, it was noticed that the kevinsimpson1942 web page had some background music playing. The web page also let you download the audio file. So, as any ration person would do, the file was downloaded and inspected. Viewing the audio track as a spectrograph showed something very interesting. The word EPIC.

All right, we’ve got it, back to the terminal. EPIC DREAM. Didn’t work… Dreams were crushed.

But alas, the developers kept urging the community to keep digging as they were getting close.

It was then discovered that kevinsimpson1942 had a profile on the companion web page. And this his emblem was changing daily. Notice how above the character’s shoulder there appears to be a grouping of planets. Well, someone behind the scenes was changing the amount of planets on this profile page daily. Someone in the community recognized this and eventually came to the conclusion that this must represent the word WORLDS.

Back the terminal we go, sure enough the community now had it!

EPIC DREAM WORLDS.

Wow, that was exhausting. But also really fun.

Entering the correct password rewarded the user with a unique camouflage for their weapon.

—–

[Into July now for the Dragons Teeth expansion – Phantom Initiate]

This one is even more obscure than the previous. But fun. Lets get started!

Jumping straight into the clue hunting, 8 Pictograms are discovered in various places around the 4 new maps. Just little marking on sides of walls in really out of the way places.

All 8 of them lined up are as follows:

As it turns out, these Pictograms are of the Bauga character set. From Wikipedia: The bagua (Chinese: 八卦; literally: “eight symbols”) are eight trigrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each line either “broken” or “unbroken,” representing yin or yang, respectively. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as “trigrams” in English.

To convert into trigrams we’ll need this table:

From this we can take the pictogram, that has two pictures (one over the other), and end up with two trigrams stacked on top of each other. Using the lookup table below to convert our now stacked trigrams into numbers.

Wikipedia again comes to the rescue with this table.

After conversion, our original pictograms give us the following numbers. Note that the numbers can be arranged into an order representing the Fibonacci sequence. This turned out to be a decoy.

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21

One clever chap decided to convert the numbers into their decimal equivalent. Using the lookup table above, Wikipedia shows us the various conversions. Here’s the conversion for the number 1:

After conversion, our new number set ends up being:

19904 19904 19905 19906 19908 19911 19916 19924

Keeping it rolling, remember that terminal window? Well there are now some clues in there that we need to take a look at. This is actually a screen shot from a community member’s terminal:

Three clues we need to make note of. The first in the function DIG 11 (max, floor). Form this we use the first variable “max” to rearrange our number sequence in order of largest to smallest:

19924 19916 19911 19908 19906 19905 19904 19904

We’ll come back to the floor part in a minute.

The second clue is the number he has highlighted. This as it turns out is an ISBN of a text book on polynomials.

So using our string of numbers in a polynomial sequence gives us:

19924*X^0 + 19916*X^1 + 19911*X^2 + 19908*X^3 + 19906*X^4 + 19905*X^5 + 19904*X^6 + 19904*X^7

The third clue we take from the terminal window is CHI: 7.2515… And after a clue from a developer, CHI if you recall is Greek for X. And we can now use this value to plug into the equation above.

After doing the math, our polynomial sequence equals: 24344241893.000178…

Here’s where the floor part of the function comes into play. We simply truncate the number and are left with simply: 24344241893

This as it turns out is the correct password.

Again, this was truly a community effort. The internet was literally on fire as the community was collaborating trying to make sense of the clues.

The reward for this assignment was a unique camouflage for your character’s uniform.

—–

[It’s December, to the Final Stand expansion we go – Phantom Operative]

This is a bit more straight forward than the last two, but still somewhat tricky.

When the Final Stand expansion was released many people noticed the terminal window updated to show the following message (notice the text “physical access required”):

This was the first clue that seemed to indicate you needed to be somewhere physical to unlock this one. It wasn’t just a password in the terminal like the previous three assignments. Where was this magical place? One theory was an elevator hidden away in the back of one of the new maps. The power to the elevator seemed to be turned off, and there were no buttons to press. Dark scary elevators are often places of interest right?

In the following few days one of the community members was digging through the code for the game and noticed a few audio files in Russian (the Final Stand map pack was based in Russia) that seemed to indicate the elevator was in fact the correct place to be.

The audio he found said things like “Elevator access granted”, “Welcome operatives”, “Access denied”. All in Russian of course. But, this seemed to confirm the elevator.

A keen ear also pulled out that the word “operatives” was plural, indicating that more than one person needed to be in the elevator to activate it.

A few days passes and suddenly people started finding dog tags scattered around the 4 new maps. The dog tags actually weren’t scattered, they seemed to randomly appear in different places at random times throughout the game. The tags were hard to find as they appeared in a tiny boxes in the same color as their surroundings. Here are a couple examples:

It had been theorized that a new dog tag would appear every 10 minutes throughout a game, and in different places. Community members started noting where the tags appeared and built up a maps available for all community members to use in their hunt for a tag. People were literally spending hundreds of hours walking around the 4 new maps looking for these elusive dog tags. Here’s an example of one of the maps created:

As dog tags were found it was theorized that they might unlock this magical elevator. Didn’t work. People were equipping their characters with the dog tags trying to gain access to no prevail.

Remembering that keyword “Operatives”, it was then theorized that in order to gain access to the elevator maybe 4 people needed to be in the elevator, each wearing a different dog tag (one from each map). This didn’t seem to work either.

Maybe in addition to the 4 unique dog tags, characters also needed to be wearing the unique dog tags from the Phantom Prospect assignment, the weapon camo from the Trainee assignment, and the uniform camo from the Initiate assignment?

YES! This worked. The solution was to have 4 people in the elevator, each with a different dog tag, and each wearing the rewards from the previous assignments. Once inside the elevator the button (that was previously dark) lit up enabling the players to ride. And while ridding those same audio files found earlier began to play. Neat!

After the ride down the elevator, the 4 players were no left standing in front of what appeared to be a force field with key pad.

It wasn’t enough to get down the elevator, we also needed a pass code? Come on developers!

Back on the hunt, it was discovered a unique place existed in each of the 4 new maps that either spoke Morse code or flashed a light in Morse code. Again, these are really obscure, out of the way places not usually traveled to in a game. The clever community members really had to search hard for these spots.

For future reference, the 4 places are as follows:

Once translated, the Morse codes each gave a unique number. It turned out once assembled in the correct order, this was the password to the keypad.

1290-429-397648-970

Now we could get inside the force field and take a look at the shiny new cross bow. Picking up the cross bow seemed to be the point of getting into this room. Players were now free use the cross bow in future games.

 

—–

So there you have it.

This has been the extent of the Phantom Program thus far.

Pretty neat hey?