With the 1.4.0 Beast update, the developer included in-game secrets that reference other secrets out on the Internet. It appears these mysteries were intended to be solved as a multilingual group effort, so I am making this guide as a place to mark our progress and solicit help.

Edit: Some online clues were planted several years ago. This scavenger hunt has apparently been a long time in the making!


Presumably the first clue players were intended to find is encountered by fighting the new secret boss, Death, while also using the "Death's Song" boon (unlocked by defeating Death previously). Before the battle, death says something using strange glyphs:



The player has no way to interpret these glyphs. The first chance we have of figuring out what they represent is if the player ALSO loses the fight with death. After a loss, the Portal Keeper gives a familiar message, but now printed in the glyphs:



By comparing the message to the usual message, the player can figure out the substitution cypher and then interpret all the other in-game messages! Of course, it turns out that is NOT how Klayht first solved it. He found the clues out of order and brute force solved the cypher! Respect.

The information below all follows from searching the game and Internet for glyphs and then translating the messages. From here on out, there will be spoilers!

Before going any further, I would like to advertise Klayht on YouTube (Klay on Steam). I discovered this puzzle existed through his YouTube channel. When no one was getting any of the clues, the developer tipped him off to the puzzle's existence, and he did a TON of early work figuring out the symbol alphabet and discovering most of the in-game clues. He and his Discord have done pretty much all the work that I know about. I just joined the hunt in January but want to revive and expand the effort.


A special thanks to Chrest on Steam as well for finding new messages both in game and online.

Don't read ahead if you don't want spoilers! That said, this puzzle has been pretty hard to solve and appears to have been intended as a collaborative effort.


At this point, there are lots of messages both in-game and online using a set of glyphs. Below is a crude table of the Dungeon Beneath Glyphs and their translation to the English alphabet. To my knowledge, Klayht was the first to decipher the letters.


The glyphs are a substitution cypher of the English alphabet, where one glyph always corresponds to the same letter.

Some letters (J, Q, and Z) aren't translated because they have not yet appeared in any messages.


When encountering Death with the Death's Song boon active, Death says:

Translated, it says (with spaces inserted):

ELEVEN DEMONS TO BE FOUND FROM BEYOND THIS MORTAL GROUND

Presumably, "beyond this mortal ground" refers to the location of the clues on the Internet (as opposed to the physical world) outside of the game.

In the fight with Death, a glyph message also scrolls by on the wall:


When decrypted, the message says:

OF MANY THINGS HIDDEN LONG REVEALED AGAIN WITH DEATHS SONG

This refers to the need to take the Death's Song boon in order to see the rest of the in-game messages.

As inferred from the previous messages, there are 11 in-game clues that cryptically direct players to search for solutions online. Below is a list of all 11 in-game clues.


If one plays the game with the Death's Song boon active, messages will appear on the walls. The first six clues can be found this way. Difficulty does not seem to matter, so NewGame- is the easiest way to search for these:

In the Abbadon fight:


ONE IN THE BEGINNING THE FIRST BLUEBIRD SANG

In the Illifar fight:



TWO IN ANCIENT TIMES FOUND ON RED

In the Nazzatoth fight:


THREE ARE FRIENDS HARD TO SEE IN THE MIST

Randomly in the Upper Dungeon:

FOUR IS ATOP WHERE THE BLUEBIRD ONCE SANG

Randomly in the Underneath:
FIVE IS HIDDEN BOLDLY IN THE MIST

Randomly in the Abyss:



SIX IN THE ANCIENT SYMBOLS THAT THE BIRD NOTED


The remaining clues are harder to find. They are all triggered by doing something in-game.

When re-rolling a single item shop 25 times, one of your characters will say:


SEVEN SANG OF AN ANCIENT MOSAIC


Clue 8 was found by Chrest. If you give the item Death's Shadow to Andromalus, you get the message:
EIGHT SPOKE ANOTHER TONGUE IN THE MIST

In the "Settings" screen, there is a "Secrets" check box. When ticked, very subtle glyphs appear at the right and left edges of the screen. They say:
NINE LOOKED BELOW THEN LOOKED BEYOND

Clue 10, found by Frankie, is hidden when you visit the witch selling potions. The torch on the right side pulses in a Morse code pattern:
- . -. …. .- .. .-.. . -.. --- ..-. -.. . .- - …. .. -. - …. . -- .. … -

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168914052
It says:
TEN HAILED OF DEATH IN THE MIST

Clue 11 is known, but no one has reported how to trigger it in-game. Please comment if you know how to get it.

For each in-game clue, there is a corresponding online solution. These solutions take the form of a color and a name.


ONE IN THE BEGINNING THE FIRST BLUEBIRD SANG

Several of the solutions are found on Twitter, and a bit of speculation remains as to which solution corresponds to which clue. Old Twitter posts by @PuzzleBoxGames were edited to include an emoji in the beginning of each post. In order from oldest to newest, these emoji are:

Alien
Zebra
Unicorn
Rat
Elf
Airplane
Nail polish
Dragon
Robot
Elf
Alembic
Lizard
Penguin
Hourglass
Umbrella
Skull

These emoji are an anagram that spell:
AZURE ANDREALPHUS


TWO IN ANCIENT TIMES FOUND ON RED

Hidden among old comments by the account PuzzleBoxGames on Reddit are a series of strings all with the form #[Letter]-[Number]. They can be found here by scrolling to the oldest messages: https://www.reddit.com/user/PuzzleBoxGames/comments/?sort=new. By starting with the Letter and counting up the Number of letters, each string corresponds to one character.

The full list of strings is and their corresponding character:
#G-21 - B
#F-6 - L
#V-25 - U
#R-13 - E
#O-12 - A
#P-3 - S
#Q-3 - T
#S-8 - A
#H-10 - R
#R-23 - O
#G-13 - T
#V-12 - H

Thus, the solution is:
BLUE ASTAROTH


THREE ARE FRIENDS HARD TO SEE IN THE MIST

No one has found a solution to this clue!

FOUR IS ATOP WHERE THE BLUEBIRD ONCE SANG

Really hard to see, but there is glyph text discovered by Klayht at the top middle of the Twitter/X Banner graphic.


It says:
VIOLET BALAM

The bluebird being the Twitter logo, and "once sang" because it is now rebranded to X. The banner graphic was at the top of the page.


FIVE IS HIDDEN BOLDLY IN THE MIST

Chrest (and others before us from an old Reddit post) found single bold letters dispersed in the game's description on the Steam store page. When put in order, they spell:
GREEN BELIAL

You can check it out for yourself on the Steam Store page! ("The Mist" meaning Steam.)


SIX IN THE ANCIENT SYMBOLS THAT THE BIRD NOTED
SEVEN SANG OF AN ANCIENT MOSAIC

Clues 6 and 7 both refer to the same post on X. It is not clear which solution goes to which clue. This is the post: https://twitter.com/PuzzleBox_Games/status/1288522438440034309

And this is the "mosaic" in question:



Translated it says:


Diagonally from top left to bottom right, it spells:
IVORY OSE

The last few seconds of a video posted to IndieDB (found by Frankie) shows a similar mosaic: https://www.indiedb.com/games/the-dungeon-beneath/videos/tdb-announce-trailer-1

All the letters are X except for a series of characters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H.

X X F X X X X X
X D X X X X X X
X X X X X X E X
X X X H X X X X
X X X X X X A X
B X X X X X X X
X X X G X X X X
C X X X X X X X

If you go back to the original mosaic and substitute in characters from the corresponding positions, it spells:
RED VEPAR

It seems like RED VEPAR is the solution to clue 6 and IVORY OSE is clue 7, but that could easily be reversed.

EIGHT SPOKE ANOTHER TONGUE IN THE MIST

The solution to this clue may be found by visiting the store page with the language set to Russian. A Glyph message is written prominently in the game description


It says:
GRAY BATHIN


NINE LOOKED BELOW THEN LOOKED BEYOND

On the bottom of the homepage of the game’s website (https://www.thedungeonbeneath.com/), there is a footer graphic. Normally, you cannot scroll all the way to the bottom and only see text in orange with an encrypted message:

The orange text says: LOOK BEYOND

By either shrinking the screen to a mobile device width (possibly an oversight by the devs) or opening the footer image in a new tab, you can see yellow encrypted text blow.

The yellow text says:
YELLOW VALEFOR


TEN HAILED OF DEATH IN THE MIST

At the bottom of the 1.4.0 Beast update Steam News entry was a little, subtle image containing glyph characters:

It says: TEAL MALPHAS

You can check it out for yourself on the News page. This solution was actually found before the in-game clue, so there is some discussion on whether it corresponds to clue 10 or some other clue.


ELEVEN IS THE FIRST BOVINE DIVING AT YOU


While the author doesn't know how to trigger this clue in-game, Chrest has already found the solution, which was super sneaky! The "YOU" here was a reference to YouTube. The "FIRST BOVINE" apparently refers to "Advanced Gaming Cow" (https://www.youtube.com/@advkow) a content creator that has made a number of videos on The Dungeon Beneath over the years. And his first video on the game, entitled "Dungeon Diving" matches the "DIVING" hint.

In the comment section is one from around the same time as the Beast Update by a user named:
COPPER FURCAS

Diabolically sneaky!

I save this until the end because I'm not sure when the developers expected this clue to be discovered. They have dropped a couple of hints since the 1.4.0 release to get the community going, including this tweet: https://twitter.com/PuzzleBox_Games/status/1709224594735800503?t=5fzbrsFwUMPIKGjo0H1UBQ

It was enough of a tip for Klayht to notice the hidden word, and by typing it in, discover the 11 dancing demons.

In the Main Menu screen, the lights of the building spell a word in Braille. If you type in this word (capitalization does not matter), a new icon appears in the top right of the screen. Clicking on this icon reveals a popup with eleven dancing demons, each a different color, and each with a 72 character popup message.



The significance of this screen seems to be a culmination of the other in-game clues. The raw strings are below for the 11 demons since they are hard to copy down from just the in-game popup.
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While most clues have now been solved, the puzzle is not solved. It needs to be a community effort!

• We still need to find how to trigger clue ELEVEN from within the game.
  
• Clue THREE is completely unsolved. We need help figuring it out.
  
• A lot has been tried with the text from the Dancing Demons, but nothing has yielded results yet. It feels like this is the culmination of the puzzle, but it hasn't been solved.

One last note, we do not want to solve this by decompiling the code. It will only get us so far anyway, since many of the clues exist outside the game, but if you discovery a clue by scraping the code somehow, please keep it to yourself until you are able to acquire it the intended way.

Klay and I will make a best effort to update this guide as progress is made.