If it's another language then it is probably Czech (ie Czech Republic, where KSH is based), which uses accents (like á, é etc). It may explain why some of the symbols look really similar but have slight modifications.
I think it's a good theory with the accents, buy there aren't any single letter words with accents in czech and then it woudn't make sense that the same symbols would be accents in other words.
@@Zer0sLegion I'm Czech. And there are interesting things .. like the green L and orange L suffix, which is there 4 times. That's quite Czech-like, lot of words share suffixes. On the other hand there are double orange L .. and double letters are very rare in Czech. There is also very specific pattern toward the end .. red green orange TLL .. 3rd word from end .. and then very similar at the end .. with just a few "accents". I can't think of any such combination. Also typical Czech would have lot more accents. Still I wouldn't rule it out completely ..
One correction: The monolith and stereolith can be welded up VERY slowly. If you take a look at some videos where ppl test it for armor, they also test wether it can be welded up or not.
@@Zer0sLegion Yeah, in the video I've seen someone needed 10 minutes with 8 or so welders to even bring it up a few percent. It was from a guy called Kaulutu, iirc.
I have someone in my faction that always uses a few of them on their moon base as part of the logo. they usually just leave a welder on it and leave it working while everyone is busy with their own stuff. it always feels like an age passes and even several days depends on how often someone is playing near it so it welds.
I get the fealing you need the monolith to translate the stereolith it is after all a pun. For instance you might have to remove every letter that is on the monolith from the stereolith to get a coherent result. Hell it might go through an enigma cipher based on the monolith text.
I only found them because I wanted the achievement. They're easy to miss because they only spawn on the planet starts(the three that Zero mentioned). They don't show up if you do a solar system start.
Fun fact, the Stereolith can be found in deep space, as well. It appears in grids as Platform 9871 (if I remember right). It's set as a station, so you can build a seat on it, switch it to 'ship', remove the seat, and you can grab it with mag plate or landing gear and move it into a hangar/cargo hold then fly around with it. It's very hard and rare to find.
Maybe there is 2 of them ? Perhaps that is the missing piece of the puzzle? I mean, the fact that the stereolith is an obvious wordplay on monolith shouldn't eliminate the possibilty that it might very well mean something, like I don't know , that there is 2 of them ?
What I find remarkable is the fact that the 1st white letter with the purple dot looks like a flipped version of the orange L, they look basically the same if you flip them around
Maybe keen could add a story element that sends you to deep space co-ordinates to find character elements that enable people to translate it. OH... you're only doing letters... what about numbers ? What if its co-ordinates ?!!
I think it translates to "All hail Lord Clang" in gibberish...you can only see it when you put a piston and a rotor on the same grid and hope nothing goes wrong!!
The symbols on the "Stereolith" themselves appear to be partial and fragmented. I think the key to it lies elsewhere, and the name is the hint: Maybe the text needs to be combined with that on the "Monolith," or viewed through something else, like that trick in which a picture of random clutter turns into numerical code when viewed through evenly spaced bars. Or maybe, the symbols were split apart and displaced as if they were viewed through a stereogram, and the original text needs to be reconstructed from two sets of fragments.
That's kind of what I was thinking. Especially due to the names having mono and stereo. I know the mono signal tends to just be the left audio channel from stereo signals in a lot of older vcr's and tv's.
The names of the blocks might be significant too - you used "monoalphabetic substitution" to solve the monolith engraving. So the stereolith could use a method associated with "stereo". Perhaps someone with more knowledge could shed light on that.
Could be that it's some polyalphabetic into monoalphabetic. I tried vigenere into substitution, but couldn't really get any clear results. It's really hard to find the key for vigenere, since there are so many character chain occurences and they don't really share a factor. That being said they could have used a different poly. Btw besides bruteforcing and finding throught math I also tried using the answer from monolith as a key for vigenere, as well as 'SE' and 'klang'/'clang'...
Yeah, the stereolith has been a PITA for years lol What really sucks, is the characters on the edge might even be a language styled after something like cruciform or a pictographic (or pictogram based, if you prefer) language. Since it's in small , irregular groupings, it might also be a combination of formats where single/double characters may be a full word by themselves modified by contextual usage (think of languages like Japanese, Korean, or Chinese) Hell, it might even be as simple as reversing/inverting the image (or parsing it to be viewed from a multi/combination lens - there are arguably "intelligent" arachnids [Saberoids] in lore after-all).
The Mars volcano is based on Olypus mons aka the largest volcano in the entire solar system. Which I LOVE that keen decided to make that one of the major monuments you can notice.
I remember discovering the monolith and stereolith for the first time by accident whilst going through the entity list trying to solve my lag problems. They, oddly enough, didn't pique my curiosity in the slightest because they seemed to be an immediate dead end. SE never struck me as the type of game to have anything more to the lore than slight references, so I figured that neither of these extraterrestrial platforms would give me anything if I put effort into them. Seems I was mostly right. The only thing I didn't know about previously was that the monolith confirmed some sort of alien race, but that was my initial guess anyways. As for my interpretation of the text, it seems some race either colonized or evolved on mars, and then abandoned the planet later for unknown reasons. Beyond that, I don't think Keen currently has any plans to expand upon or add more lore to this game, especially a story, since they've prioritized adding blocks and game mechanics.
Keen have said in the past that the game has lore but they haven't really had any avenues to explore it. Most of what we know comes from loading screens and scenarios.
Another option you didn't mention is that might be not a complete messge. I see in the texture there are large spaces, as if part of the sentence is omitted.
I have a suspicion that, if the stereolith truly isn't encoded English, it might be encoded Russian. Background: Clue #1 - While "Monolith" is a word, "Stereolith" is not. Stereolithing, however, is a method of 3d printing, around since the 80s, for creating prototypes. Clue #2 - There is a file in the SE files called "testFont" in a folder than concerns itself with, apparently, creating custom fonts for the game to use. This file is written in Russian. Russian is also a language that uses marks above certain letters. Russian fits. I am still looking through files, specifically the monolith and stereolith files for the moment. I'll see if I find any more clues.
anyways, it seems like some add for something, english translation goes as follows: We have the best hosting THEM, minimal ping, good server build, adequate players and admins, server platform costs Linux, 32 slots for amenities, 1000 fps, stable online players, superban and banlist are present, PsyhoStats server player statistics, there is a TeamSpeak3 server for communication and questions, server IP can be entered without a port, it costs FastHTTP - fast download, 24/7 round-the-clock work, HLTV presence on the server, and that's not all !!!
@@goblinslayer310 No, it is russian. I copied the text into google translator and it said "russian". Plus, there are files that are named for their language, and there are two non-latin scripts there: japanese and russian. It's not japanese. Aka, it's russian. The Czech use the latin script, not cyrillic.
Probably been discussed before, but, what is the characters are meant to be deciphered under a stereoscopic lens? Maybe the font can be overlayed over itself in such a way that parts of the letters reform to reform another. Would fit the idea of “another race up above”
I think I translated a Czech word for the Stereolith, which was the word "sny" meaning "dreams" in english. The part I derived this from was the second line, second word. I figured this by comparing the fonts and seeing which ones closely resembled another, reasoning behind this is that they could be derived from one another, just in a different evolved language. In order for me to figure out what letters could be in it and what couldn't, I made a list of what letters appeared in the monolith's transcription, which were these: "ACDEGHILNOPRSTVWY" with the ones not present being "BFJKMQUZ" Considering that I do not speak/know Czech and got this from an intensive few hours using an AI translator and wikipedia, I could be completely wrong in this. I do not know really any words from the language nor could I effectively order them in a way that resembles the positons of the stereolith. I do, however, believe that it's intended to be read left to right, are likely not numbers (as any coordinates would be irrelevant using debug mode in the game to locate anything at all), and that Czech or a slavic equivalent is the language it's based on. I think it is literally just another substitution but using extra letters from the Czech alphabet. I also did learn that the language is very flexible in its word placement, meaning that it could technically be interpreted multiple ways depending on positioning.
hey zer0. very good stuff, your channel really caught my attention with the hovercraft video and now i'll be searching for the volcano on mars with my hovercraft. If the stereolith requires a cypher to decode you could maybe look back at the scenarios. or maybe there's a second stereolith (as in stereo) and you need both to decode it
I knew these were in the game but I always figured it was just scribbles on the side. Be very interesting to see if the stereolith has an alien language
maybe... just maybe... "monolith" and "stereolith" makes a bit of a hint about the approach to translation. "mono"- could mean single letter code (one gliph hides one letter) and "stereo" - could mean bi-letter code (one gliph hides two letters or two gliphs hides one letter). just as an ssumption.
put the two Monoliths together, and see if they can be made sense of when mixing the text between them. look to see if there is any space inbetween one that the other can fill.
Some of the characters on the stereolith, that seem seperate, are definitely singular. They just have multiple strokes. The characters on the monolith seem like there are minor differences in characters that translate to the same letter. So it may be handwritten.
The moon in SE is partially based on our moon. In the planet data files you can see some of the eastern mare that form the moon face. They added a lot of large craters, probably because the SE moon is smaller. I couldn't see Tycho at the spot it's supposed to be.
Yeah, there is a crater that looks like Tyco but it's not in the right place. Due to the fact we don't know which way is north in SE, it's also difficult to know what is the north and south of the moon.
Could you imagine turning those into Armour for your ships geez that would make your ship near indestructible and also make it impossible for hydro manning because it will take them 2-4 hours to get past it XD. Have you ever though about slamming ships into it to see how much damage it does to the monolith and Stereolith? it would be interesting to see the results.
Zer0, i have some important information: you can indeed get a projected monolith/ stereolith to 100% completion however, you are gonna need a lot of time to do it even using the super ship tools mod's welders. using the build info mod it shows you how long until complete, and I successfully repaired the monolith from 96% to 100 with super ship welders.
There's a technique to hide messages on sounds. Basically you want to make the right and left channels of the audio opposites, that way, when the audio is played on a mono speaker, you can't hear anything, but if you listen on stereo speakers it sounds just fine. As you know, at the end of the tutorial scenario, the monolith talks to you. Maybe there is something hidden on that audio, or maybe there is some sound on the monolith and stereolith that we just can't hear. Also it wouldn't be the first time a game uses that exact mechanic of having an inaudible sound with a hidden message.
Perhaps you should try doing things the other way round, instead of trying to match up real world letters to the symbols maybe take the Monolith and extrapolate what advanced time would do to that langue then translate the Stereolith. Edit: my reasoning is because the message in the Monolith is about the beginning of a race and maybe that was their language at the time and then the Stereolith is about where that race ended up, heading to Earth.
yea im curious if its in czech or some other eastern european language though if they really made their own, thatd be neat. ive made a few fictional languages myself and its always fun
To my knowledge, there aren't any conjunctions with accent in czech or any eastern european language that I know of. So either it's their own language or the seemingly single letter word isn't sigle letter word (that is if we're talking about czech and similiar languages). Unfortunately, I couldn't find any sites with a substitution cipher for czech, and I just don't have the time to do it manually when I don't even know what to count as a letter.
@@Zer0sLegion my suggestion would be to find a cryptographer forum or subreddit and submit it with the info from both monoliths cryptographers do that stuff often professionally, they love a challenge
I have no proof but I believe the text has reference to Miner Wars, which was Keen’s release prior to SE it had “mysterious alien mysteries” as part of its desc. As far as I know it’s been defunct and I think they released the source code back in like 2013
I did find some characters that were consistent across the two. And since the monolith says, "A great race has lived on this planet Now they live in the stars" I was able to find three consistent characters, a, e, and n (a is the comma looking character, n is the L character, e is the L with the partially sticking out line that is in the front of the L That's all I found so far.
I been reading the comments about the possible translation of the stereolith. what someone said might be correct it be "2 letters" overlaying each other hence "stereo" if that taken into account for each letter that double the length of every single word represented. Overlayed cyphers have been used before .
I have read 2001, loved the book and would recommend, but I know there are multiple sequels to it I have not read. The monolith translation may make sense, as there was an alien race that …. Turned into sentient radiation I think. The text could be a reference to another work by the same author named “Times Eye” where in the third book in the series, they had a Mars base that was bombed into a collapsing pocket dimension so that most likely is not relevant. Oh, that times eye series it also not very good and Arthur c Clark died before the series was finished to it ends at a weird cliff hanger.
@@Zer0sLegion *smh* I was so busy fighting npc's that I didnt really give much thought to the writing. When I did see the one on Mars I was busy running away from Reavers.
We thank you, oh Monolith, for revealing the cunning plans of your enemies to us. May your light shine down on the souls of the brave soldiers who gave their lives in service to your will. Onward warriors of the Monolith, avenge your fallen brothers, blessed as they are in their eternal union with the Monolith.
It's a possibility some of the accent characters are another character that come before or after other characters. The only example I have off the top of my head is the gnommish script from Artemis Fowl, where the character for E ends up underneath previous characters instead of next to them. Though that is a direct 1 to 1 for english and english characters, as well, and this is likely a little more complex than that
In the campagin, (first journey or whatever it's called) on mission 2, in the cave system thing where you activate the projecter. It showed the sterolith
To decrypt the given cipher, it appears to be cipher is known as a Caesar cipher with a shift of 3 positions backward. Decrypted message: PLAN YOUR SCHEDULE FOR TOMORROW AND GET READY NOW Using a shift of three positions forward in the alphabet, each letter in the original message is shifted three positions to the right to get the decrypted message. no idea if this is correct or if it will get noticed but I gave it a shot
So mono(lith) suggests that there is one and stereo(lith) suggests there is two. The monolith contains one code. Does the stereolith maybe use two texts on top of each other and they cancel each other out where they lay on top of each other?
its litterally just a 2001 refference theres other refferences to 2001 if you look sensors look vagueley like hal9000s eye and funnily enough sensors can be used to OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS
If the lunar one was the first one to appear in the game, maybe that one is just for show and there is not written there, and after that they decided to create a mistery on the second one. But it is a IF.
There were both added at the same time I'm pretty sure. It's also the Stereolith (meaning 2) and doesn't have an achievement associated with it. From that, i'd assume it's the one you're supposed to find second.
And what if the second one is the continuation of the first, since it means "2"? Maybe it's the finishing sentence, and soeey for the bad english up there 🤣
Space Engineers has announced the "Automatons Public Beta Release Stream" and by looking at the shared image on their website, I think we will have full block air vents now. We can also see the large grid AI Task block, and blocks on which you can see "rear panel" and "F-", maybe for "Front panel". Orientation could be important in AI blocks placement, like the remote control block or cockpits.
one thing I noticed is that on stereolith the text looks like... fragmented, as if there were other letters there, but they have erased over time or something like that not sure if this will solve it, but maybe?
"na této planetě žila velká rasa, nyní žijí ve hvězdách" that is a really rough translation of the English version into Czech, it is not an exact match obviously, but I think i see some similarities in accents and word lengths, I could be way off, but it was a good idea to look at another regions language since English is not the only possibility. I am sure there is a way to say it that has more meaning and isnt a literal translation.
It has been a year this video came out. But here's a thought.. Are we not looking in the wrong place and are those not all letters.. but numbers? Creating GPS coordinates. (Or for SE.. Or northitude and longitude RL?)
I think the name sterolith might be a hint? sterolithography is a thing and is sorta like resin 3d printing. However the process involves light. You pointed out that the sun never touches the sterolith. Maybe blast away some of the crater walls so the sun can touch the object, maybe touch the text and see if that does anything.
I noticed how in some of the letters there are these dots that sometimes appear and sometimes not. It reminds me a lot about Hebrew and how placment of dots and lines above,below and to the side of letters can change the sound they make. as an example. putting a dot on one side of the letter ש can make the diffrence between a "S/ɬ" sound and a "sh/ʃ" sound. it could also be that rather than the letters change sound, they can change the "strength" or "softness" of a sound. for instance, in Hebrew putting a dot inside the letter פ can either make it a "p" sound or a "f" sound. it could also be that there are letters that are diffrent at the end of a word kinda like capital letters at the start of a word
One thing kinda worth mentioning is that there is a scenario which ends with you going to a monolith or sterolith (I forget which) and being consumed/teleported by it. I doubt there is anything to be gleaned from the scenario but it may be worth looking into with admin stuff to look at all grids.
devs are czech, but the game does not contain any czech languge support or czech references whatsoever. It's like they've abandoned their own language so I highly doubt it will be related to czech. Btw I am from Czech republic. Nice video and good job tho
Czech is the only clue I have, even if the game doesn't support it, doesn't mean the stereolith isn't using it as a base. I will take what you've said into consideration though, it's definitely worth keeping in mind.
is it just me or does that almost look like klingon? soo i did hebrew and split the top line and bottom line and got this וו ש החם הנסי א= א והו ה ניא י הים which translated by google to And the heat, the try, and the sea unsure if this brings it any closer but hey worth adding my 2 cents
@@RUclipsAccountName They both have 13,650 HP/integrity, and an artillery does 17,000 damage. Not exactly a huge amount. As for gridining them down and welding them up, it takes 1 day, 3 hours, 56 minutes, and 40 seconds to completely grind them down with a basic grinder on 1x grinding speed. It takes 2 dys, 6 hours, 32 minutes and 6 seconds to weld them up, on the other hand
The part that confuses me the most is the 3 repetitions of similar "words" (T,LL [2nd word] TLL [7th] •TLL [9th])... I don't know if there is anything that uses 3 characters and can have that many variations. The first word also looks a bit like the last one, until the last character, that one is rotated 180°. Also the sentences aren't structured the same, the first one uses medium length words (1 to 6 characters) with smooth transitions and natural return to average. The second one uses either short - medium or long - ultra long words (1 to 3 and 6 to 8 characters) and has sharp transitions (~7 characters right before 1). This is possible in english, but to me it feels odd, unnatural...
Yeah, hence why it's more difficult to decode. I tried decoding just the short words with the similar characters and there's no combination of characters that fit.
@@Zer0sLegion Maybe looking through various languages dictionaries for 3 letter words and finding a pattern of AXX BXX CXX would help? (A,B,C,X - any letter; X - same as other Xs) Better have a program to do it tho
Easy way to solve this. Torture Keen's staff until they tell you what it means. Yeah, the quick and dirty solution might land you in jail but being psychologically tortured over years with this tease is sort of the same, so... I'm kidding of course.
![I Finally Tamed a Cosmo Jumping Spider! - ARK Aberration [E6]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8OMBm-X3pxs/mqdefault.jpg)
![I Finally Tamed a Cosmo Jumping Spider! - ARK Aberration [E6]](/img/tr.png)
Find the solution here: ruclips.net/video/RsFCBabaUWc/видео.html
Can't wait for them to add the Surroundsoundolith
I nearly made that joke in the video.
Dolbyolith 😆
quadrophonicolith first :)
Headphonith
Probably on the alien planet XD
If it's another language then it is probably Czech (ie Czech Republic, where KSH is based), which uses accents (like á, é etc). It may explain why some of the symbols look really similar but have slight modifications.
Yeah, that was my thought.
I think it's a good theory with the accents, buy there aren't any single letter words with accents in czech and then it woudn't make sense that the same symbols would be accents in other words.
@@Zer0sLegion Also the online solvers will ignore proper nouns, so if it says someone's name (like "Marek") it won't pick up on it.
@@Zer0sLegion I'm Czech. And there are interesting things .. like the green L and orange L suffix, which is there 4 times. That's quite Czech-like, lot of words share suffixes. On the other hand there are double orange L .. and double letters are very rare in Czech. There is also very specific pattern toward the end .. red green orange TLL .. 3rd word from end .. and then very similar at the end .. with just a few "accents". I can't think of any such combination. Also typical Czech would have lot more accents.
Still I wouldn't rule it out completely ..
Maybe even Hungarian, which has the symbols öőüű too
One correction: The monolith and stereolith can be welded up VERY slowly. If you take a look at some videos where ppl test it for armor, they also test wether it can be welded up or not.
Ok, it is very very slow then, I sat for a full 10 minutes trying to weld one up.
@@Zer0sLegion Yeah, in the video I've seen someone needed 10 minutes with 8 or so welders to even bring it up a few percent. It was from a guy called Kaulutu, iirc.
I have someone in my faction that always uses a few of them on their moon base as part of the logo. they usually just leave a welder on it and leave it working while everyone is busy with their own stuff. it always feels like an age passes and even several days depends on how often someone is playing near it so it welds.
@@jmw1500its bin a month how's the ship welding going
@@Kuat0GWA best comment thread 2023
I get the fealing you need the monolith to translate the stereolith it is after all a pun. For instance you might have to remove every letter that is on the monolith from the stereolith to get a coherent result. Hell it might go through an enigma cipher based on the monolith text.
It could be something like that, we just need a push in the right direction
You see a puzzle to solve... I see the ballistic cap for space engineer's strongest gravity weapon projectile.
Lololol, I had the same though!
been playing since 2013 and never knew there was a Monolith on Mars.
You learn something new every day!
I did find it when i whas leaving mars in space engineers and saw a black thingie sow i had to look and found it a cool spot to build a base around it
Is it in creative also
I never knew there was one on the moon
I only found them because I wanted the achievement. They're easy to miss because they only spawn on the planet starts(the three that Zero mentioned). They don't show up if you do a solar system start.
Fun fact, the Stereolith can be found in deep space, as well. It appears in grids as Platform 9871 (if I remember right). It's set as a station, so you can build a seat on it, switch it to 'ship', remove the seat, and you can grab it with mag plate or landing gear and move it into a hangar/cargo hold then fly around with it. It's very hard and rare to find.
Platform 9871 is the Stereolith on the moon.
@@Zer0sLegion Yeah, I know. But twice I've found it free floating in deep space and have scooped it up to decorate my ship with.
@@AveryChristy Did you delete the moon?
@@TminusDoom Nope. it appears as an Encounter object. It's rare. I've only seen it pop up in my games twice.
Maybe there is 2 of them ?
Perhaps that is the missing piece of the puzzle?
I mean, the fact that the stereolith is an obvious wordplay on monolith shouldn't eliminate the possibilty that it might very well mean something, like I don't know , that there is 2 of them ?
What I find remarkable is the fact that the 1st white letter with the purple dot looks like a flipped version of the orange L, they look basically the same if you flip them around
But what if it's something like d and p? They look similar but are completely different
@@alejandrostrass2559 which could work with the Czech alphabet, the orange L could be "P" and the other character being "Ď"
Maybe keen could add a story element that sends you to deep space co-ordinates to find character elements that enable people to translate it. OH... you're only doing letters... what about numbers ? What if its co-ordinates ?!!
I think it translates to "All hail Lord Clang" in gibberish...you can only see it when you put a piston and a rotor on the same grid and hope nothing goes wrong!!
The symbols on the "Stereolith" themselves appear to be partial and fragmented.
I think the key to it lies elsewhere, and the name is the hint: Maybe the text needs to be combined with that on the "Monolith," or viewed through something else, like that trick in which a picture of random clutter turns into numerical code when viewed through evenly spaced bars.
Or maybe, the symbols were split apart and displaced as if they were viewed through a stereogram, and the original text needs to be reconstructed from two sets of fragments.
That's kind of what I was thinking. Especially due to the names having mono and stereo. I know the mono signal tends to just be the left audio channel from stereo signals in a lot of older vcr's and tv's.
The names of the blocks might be significant too - you used "monoalphabetic substitution" to solve the monolith engraving. So the stereolith could use a method associated with "stereo". Perhaps someone with more knowledge could shed light on that.
Maybe? I think it's just we don't know what the characters are
Could be that it's some polyalphabetic into monoalphabetic. I tried vigenere into substitution, but couldn't really get any clear results. It's really hard to find the key for vigenere, since there are so many character chain occurences and they don't really share a factor. That being said they could have used a different poly. Btw besides bruteforcing and finding throught math I also tried using the answer from monolith as a key for vigenere, as well as 'SE' and 'klang'/'clang'...
Maybe it's a music cypher?
you can weld the monolith back up. you just need a whole bunch of large welder blocks. and with 8 of them it will take about 3-4 hours. 🙂
It must take a hell of a long time, I sat for 10 minutes trying to weld one up.
Yeah, the stereolith has been a PITA for years lol
What really sucks, is the characters on the edge might even be a language styled after something like cruciform or a pictographic (or pictogram based, if you prefer) language. Since it's in small , irregular groupings, it might also be a combination of formats where single/double characters may be a full word by themselves modified by contextual usage (think of languages like Japanese, Korean, or Chinese)
Hell, it might even be as simple as reversing/inverting the image (or parsing it to be viewed from a multi/combination lens - there are arguably "intelligent" arachnids [Saberoids] in lore after-all).
My biggest complaint about this is the fact that neither of them show up on the Star System start, the objectively best single player start world.
It does says it's an empty solar system star
that one clip in space oddysey has taught me one thing iirc.
if you throw a bone high enough it becomes a spaceship
The Mars volcano is based on Olypus mons aka the largest volcano in the entire solar system.
Which I LOVE that keen decided to make that one of the major monuments you can notice.
I remember discovering the monolith and stereolith for the first time by accident whilst going through the entity list trying to solve my lag problems. They, oddly enough, didn't pique my curiosity in the slightest because they seemed to be an immediate dead end. SE never struck me as the type of game to have anything more to the lore than slight references, so I figured that neither of these extraterrestrial platforms would give me anything if I put effort into them. Seems I was mostly right. The only thing I didn't know about previously was that the monolith confirmed some sort of alien race, but that was my initial guess anyways. As for my interpretation of the text, it seems some race either colonized or evolved on mars, and then abandoned the planet later for unknown reasons. Beyond that, I don't think Keen currently has any plans to expand upon or add more lore to this game, especially a story, since they've prioritized adding blocks and game mechanics.
Keen have said in the past that the game has lore but they haven't really had any avenues to explore it. Most of what we know comes from loading screens and scenarios.
I stumbled across it too this way.
Oh man that zoom in on the computer screen with the ufo. Got me good 😆
Another option you didn't mention is that might be not a complete messge. I see in the texture there are large spaces, as if part of the sentence is omitted.
I think that's just so it lines up on the centre of the Stereolith. It needs a gap at the beginning and end in order to line up on the side of it.
I have a suspicion that, if the stereolith truly isn't encoded English, it might be encoded Russian.
Background:
Clue #1 - While "Monolith" is a word, "Stereolith" is not. Stereolithing, however, is a method of 3d printing, around since the 80s, for creating prototypes.
Clue #2 - There is a file in the SE files called "testFont" in a folder than concerns itself with, apparently, creating custom fonts for the game to use. This file is written in Russian.
Russian is also a language that uses marks above certain letters. Russian fits.
I am still looking through files, specifically the monolith and stereolith files for the moment. I'll see if I find any more clues.
I am guessing you are meaning eastern european language, not russain, as they are czech.
oh heck, it actually is in cyrilic
anyways, it seems like some add for something, english translation goes as follows:
We have the best hosting THEM, minimal ping, good server build, adequate players and admins, server platform costs Linux, 32 slots for amenities, 1000 fps, stable online players, superban and banlist are present, PsyhoStats server player statistics, there is a TeamSpeak3 server for communication and questions, server IP can be entered without a port, it costs FastHTTP - fast download, 24/7 round-the-clock work, HLTV presence on the server, and that's not all !!!
@@goblinslayer310 No, it is russian. I copied the text into google translator and it said "russian". Plus, there are files that are named for their language, and there are two non-latin scripts there: japanese and russian. It's not japanese. Aka, it's russian.
The Czech use the latin script, not cyrillic.
Czech was my theory but I didn't get anywhere with it.
Probably been discussed before, but, what is the characters are meant to be deciphered under a stereoscopic lens?
Maybe the font can be overlayed over itself in such a way that parts of the letters reform to reform another.
Would fit the idea of “another race up above”
I think I translated a Czech word for the Stereolith, which was the word "sny" meaning "dreams" in english. The part I derived this from was the second line, second word. I figured this by comparing the fonts and seeing which ones closely resembled another, reasoning behind this is that they could be derived from one another, just in a different evolved language.
In order for me to figure out what letters could be in it and what couldn't, I made a list of what letters appeared in the monolith's transcription, which were these: "ACDEGHILNOPRSTVWY" with the ones not present being "BFJKMQUZ"
Considering that I do not speak/know Czech and got this from an intensive few hours using an AI translator and wikipedia, I could be completely wrong in this. I do not know really any words from the language nor could I effectively order them in a way that resembles the positons of the stereolith. I do, however, believe that it's intended to be read left to right, are likely not numbers (as any coordinates would be irrelevant using debug mode in the game to locate anything at all), and that Czech or a slavic equivalent is the language it's based on.
I think it is literally just another substitution but using extra letters from the Czech alphabet. I also did learn that the language is very flexible in its word placement, meaning that it could technically be interpreted multiple ways depending on positioning.
Did you know this mystery and what do you think the solution is? Let me know!
Never saw such thing, thank u I guess
Wait. Why couldn’t you take the Ytterbium2 font from the game files and then type in the characters on the monolith to decipher?
@@WilliamFord972 it's not in the game files as far as I'm aware.
@@Zer0sLegion That’s wild. Have you tried to see if ChatGPT can solve it?
@@WilliamFord972 Yeah, it's not very helpful
Have you tried numbers. It might be a coordinate to something. That would explain the dots.
The translation probably says something like, "This isn't the achievement monolith."
Lol, i'm surprised their isn't a Stereolith Achievement
hey zer0. very good stuff, your channel really caught my attention with the hovercraft video and now i'll be searching for the volcano on mars with my hovercraft. If the stereolith requires a cypher to decode you could maybe look back at the scenarios. or maybe there's a second stereolith (as in stereo) and you need both to decode it
The Monolith appears in a scenario but it doesn't really indicate how to solve the Stereolith.
I knew these were in the game but I always figured it was just scribbles on the side. Be very interesting to see if the stereolith has an alien language
maybe... just maybe... "monolith" and "stereolith" makes a bit of a hint about the approach to translation. "mono"- could mean single letter code (one gliph hides one letter) and "stereo" - could mean bi-letter code (one gliph hides two letters or two gliphs hides one letter). just as an ssumption.
Maybe but I think the names are just supposed to be a joke.
put the two Monoliths together, and see if they can be made sense of when mixing the text between them. look to see if there is any space inbetween one that the other can fill.
imagine being a developer and trying to keep the secret for all these years
Some of the characters on the stereolith, that seem seperate, are definitely singular. They just have multiple strokes. The characters on the monolith seem like there are minor differences in characters that translate to the same letter. So it may be handwritten.
The moon in SE is partially based on our moon. In the planet data files you can see some of the eastern mare that form the moon face. They added a lot of large craters, probably because the SE moon is smaller. I couldn't see Tycho at the spot it's supposed to be.
Yeah, there is a crater that looks like Tyco but it's not in the right place. Due to the fact we don't know which way is north in SE, it's also difficult to know what is the north and south of the moon.
Could you imagine turning those into Armour for your ships geez that would make your ship near indestructible and also make it impossible for hydro manning because it will take them 2-4 hours to get past it XD. Have you ever though about slamming ships into it to see how much damage it does to the monolith and Stereolith? it would be interesting to see the results.
Due to the way physics works in SE, if two blocks enter the same space, they are destroyed, so it's not as useful for ramming as you'd expect.
Zer0, i have some important information: you can indeed get a projected monolith/ stereolith to 100% completion however, you are gonna need a lot of time to do it even using the super ship tools mod's welders. using the build info mod it shows you how long until complete, and I successfully repaired the monolith from 96% to 100 with super ship welders.
There's a technique to hide messages on sounds. Basically you want to make the right and left channels of the audio opposites, that way, when the audio is played on a mono speaker, you can't hear anything, but if you listen on stereo speakers it sounds just fine. As you know, at the end of the tutorial scenario, the monolith talks to you. Maybe there is something hidden on that audio, or maybe there is some sound on the monolith and stereolith that we just can't hear. Also it wouldn't be the first time a game uses that exact mechanic of having an inaudible sound with a hidden message.
I don't think it's something that hidden but I have looked and not found anything.
I have one of these monoliths in the engine room of my ship
i wish they would put the monolith and stereolith on the star system maps as i spend more of my play time on that.
I normally add them before I start. I normally move the planets so it I would have to anyway.
Perhaps you should try doing things the other way round, instead of trying to match up real world letters to the symbols maybe take the Monolith and extrapolate what advanced time would do to that langue then translate the Stereolith.
Edit: my reasoning is because the message in the Monolith is about the beginning of a race and maybe that was their language at the time and then the Stereolith is about where that race ended up, heading to Earth.
Is the sterolith in Czech?
I did think that but I'd have no idea how to solve it if that were the case.
If the monolith is a single letter substitution, maybe the stereolith uses a 2 rail fence encryption combined with substitution?
Maybe!
yea im curious if its in czech or some other eastern european language
though if they really made their own, thatd be neat. ive made a few fictional languages myself and its always fun
My theory is that it could be czech but I wouldn't even know where to start decoding that
We could try Klingon or Huttese. Hell, it could be Dothraki
To my knowledge, there aren't any conjunctions with accent in czech or any eastern european language that I know of. So either it's their own language or the seemingly single letter word isn't sigle letter word (that is if we're talking about czech and similiar languages).
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any sites with a substitution cipher for czech, and I just don't have the time to do it manually when I don't even know what to count as a letter.
@@Zer0sLegion my suggestion would be to find a cryptographer forum or subreddit and submit it with the info from both monoliths
cryptographers do that stuff often professionally, they love a challenge
I have no proof but I believe the text has reference to Miner Wars, which was Keen’s release prior to SE it had “mysterious alien mysteries” as part of its desc. As far as I know it’s been defunct and I think they released the source code back in like 2013
Just checked and there's no font I can find in the code. I would need someone who had played the game to let me know if their appear.
I did find some characters that were consistent across the two. And since the monolith says,
"A great race has lived on this planet
Now they live in the stars"
I was able to find three consistent characters, a, e, and n (a is the comma looking character, n is the L character, e is the L with the partially sticking out line that is in the front of the L
That's all I found so far.
I been reading the comments about the possible translation of the stereolith. what someone said might be correct it be "2 letters" overlaying each other hence "stereo" if that taken into account for each letter that double the length of every single word represented. Overlayed cyphers have been used before .
Just imagine if that almost-a-decade-old secret just contains a funny joke.
It just says "bottom text"
I have read 2001, loved the book and would recommend, but I know there are multiple sequels to it I have not read. The monolith translation may make sense, as there was an alien race that …. Turned into sentient radiation I think. The text could be a reference to another work by the same author named “Times Eye” where in the third book in the series, they had a Mars base that was bombed into a collapsing pocket dimension so that most likely is not relevant. Oh, that times eye series it also not very good and Arthur c Clark died before the series was finished to it ends at a weird cliff hanger.
Wow ive seen them but never thought about solving the characters on the side.
Solving it was the first thing I thought of when I saw them!
@@Zer0sLegion *smh* I was so busy fighting npc's that I didnt really give much thought to the writing. When I did see the one on Mars I was busy running away from Reavers.
$2 it is a link to a Rick Roll.
That would be very funny😅
Also in the Entity List, the Steriolith is called "Platform 9870" for some reason.
We thank you, oh Monolith, for revealing the cunning plans of your enemies to us. May your light shine down on the souls of the brave soldiers who gave their lives in service to your will. Onward warriors of the Monolith, avenge your fallen brothers, blessed as they are in their eternal union with the Monolith.
Слава монолит, путь завершон человек.
Иди ко мне.
I’ve seen that before and was super confused
could it be multiple languages at once? like a combonation of dif characters
I wonder if it 'they now live in the stars' is a hint
It's a possibility some of the accent characters are another character that come before or after other characters. The only example I have off the top of my head is the gnommish script from Artemis Fowl, where the character for E ends up underneath previous characters instead of next to them. Though that is a direct 1 to 1 for english and english characters, as well, and this is likely a little more complex than that
In the campagin, (first journey or whatever it's called) on mission 2, in the cave system thing where you activate the projecter. It showed the sterolith
Yeah, I was saving that for a follow up video.
@@Zer0sLegion Alright
I wanna make a canon loaded with monoliths OMG
In my current playthrough of SE, I'm bringing both Mono and stereo liths to Earth - Remotely, without leaving Earth. It's gonna take a while.
To decrypt the given cipher, it appears to be cipher is known as a Caesar cipher with a shift of 3 positions backward.
Decrypted message:
PLAN YOUR SCHEDULE FOR TOMORROW AND GET READY NOW
Using a shift of three positions forward in the alphabet, each letter in the original message is shifted three positions to the right to get the decrypted message.
no idea if this is correct or if it will get noticed but I gave it a shot
the characters could work the same way the japanese language works, hiragana katakana and kanji, so 1 character could be a whole word by itself
What if it's numbers? GPS location maybe?
Maybe!
What if it was as simple as it being in reverse
gosh i totally forgot about the alphabet generator, i played around with that so long ago..
So mono(lith) suggests that there is one and stereo(lith) suggests there is two.
The monolith contains one code.
Does the stereolith maybe use two texts on top of each other and they cancel each other out where they lay on top of each other?
I wonder is the font was generated twice or if there are two script, one over written on the other, making it hard to read
I think the names are just a joke, I wouldn't think too much into it.
8:53 The last word is either are, que, or one.
its litterally just a 2001 refference theres other refferences to 2001 if you look
sensors look vagueley like hal9000s eye and funnily enough sensors can be used to OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS
A buddy of mine will use these as kinetic gravity projectiles.
In Hebrew, that dot inside the character means sounds out as OOH, like the OO in boo
The person to figure it out will get a visit from the Airforce and teleported to a starship to be taken to Destiny!
I thought the official name of our moon is "Luna."
That's the Latinisation for it, it's actual name is The Moon
If the lunar one was the first one to appear in the game, maybe that one is just for show and there is not written there, and after that they decided to create a mistery on the second one. But it is a IF.
There were both added at the same time I'm pretty sure. It's also the Stereolith (meaning 2) and doesn't have an achievement associated with it. From that, i'd assume it's the one you're supposed to find second.
And what if the second one is the continuation of the first, since it means "2"? Maybe it's the finishing sentence, and soeey for the bad english up there 🤣
Space Engineers has announced the "Automatons Public Beta Release Stream" and by looking at the shared image on their website, I think we will have full block air vents now. We can also see the large grid AI Task block, and blocks on which you can see "rear panel" and "F-", maybe for "Front panel". Orientation could be important in AI blocks placement, like the remote control block or cockpits.
I'm making a video on that next
Full block air vents will be a very welcome addition.
one thing I noticed is that on stereolith the text looks like... fragmented, as if there were other letters there, but they have erased over time or something like that
not sure if this will solve it, but maybe?
I think it's just so it lines up at the centre of the Stereolith, the text is shorter so it's needs a gap at the beginning and end to line up.
maybe its eroded font, font that got weathered overtime
In going to say the stereolith is written in a Slavic language the constantly repeated LL reminds me a lot of йи in Slavic languages
Keen I want answers so make a play through like frostbite that explains the mystery of the monoliths
Maybe the stereolith isn't a straight alphabetic substitution. Maybe it's syllabary substitution...which would make things harder
"na této planetě žila velká rasa, nyní žijí ve hvězdách" that is a really rough translation of the English version into Czech, it is not an exact match obviously, but I think i see some similarities in accents and word lengths, I could be way off, but it was a good idea to look at another regions language since English is not the only possibility. I am sure there is a way to say it that has more meaning and isnt a literal translation.
It has been a year this video came out. But here's a thought.. Are we not looking in the wrong place and are those not all letters.. but numbers?
Creating GPS coordinates. (Or for SE.. Or northitude and longitude RL?)
You'll find out very soon 😈
I'll be watching.. 😶🌫
It could be similar to how we used codes in WW2 where it's scrambled in another Language even, or just be in English and it's just scrambled too
Nothing as complicated, you'll find out soon!
Lol for all we know it could be all of the languages in one saying what's in the next update
Man you could really mess with an online buddy by placing a bunch of these around there base
Haha, that would be funny.
I think the name sterolith might be a hint? sterolithography is a thing and is sorta like resin 3d printing. However the process involves light.
You pointed out that the sun never touches the sterolith. Maybe blast away some of the crater walls so the sun can touch the object, maybe touch the text and see if that does anything.
If it were that easy, I think people would have solved it alright 😅
Marker..... Just like Dead Space
I noticed how in some of the letters there are these dots that sometimes appear and sometimes not.
It reminds me a lot about Hebrew and how placment of dots and lines above,below and to the side of letters can change the sound they make.
as an example.
putting a dot on one side of the letter ש can make the diffrence between a "S/ɬ" sound and a "sh/ʃ" sound.
it could also be that rather than the letters change sound, they can change the "strength" or "softness" of a sound.
for instance, in Hebrew putting a dot inside the letter פ can either make it a "p" sound or a "f" sound.
it could also be that there are letters that are diffrent at the end of a word kinda like capital letters at the start of a word
they're monuments to my glory
Very true!
One thing kinda worth mentioning is that there is a scenario which ends with you going to a monolith or sterolith (I forget which) and being consumed/teleported by it. I doubt there is anything to be gleaned from the scenario but it may be worth looking into with admin stuff to look at all grids.
Yeah, there's nothing new there but I was saving that for the follow up video.
@@Zer0sLegion wasn't sure if keen hid some text logs or something somewhere
I always thought those were added by a mod, never realized it was a base game thing
This show how many people play the game's tutorial😉
seems like Kilrathi from wing commander. Or "when the walls fell" aka Tamaran language from STNG
It could also be the universal language. Mathematics. So its just equations for light speed, mass, conservation of energy, etc.
It seems more likely to be maths but still no one has solved it.
devs are czech, but the game does not contain any czech languge support or czech references whatsoever. It's like they've abandoned their own language so I highly doubt it will be related to czech.
Btw I am from Czech republic. Nice video and good job tho
Czech is the only clue I have, even if the game doesn't support it, doesn't mean the stereolith isn't using it as a base. I will take what you've said into consideration though, it's definitely worth keeping in mind.
This might be written in Czech, it uses a lot of accent dots and other shapes. It could also be any of the other central Slavic languages.
That was my theory but no luck yet!
perhaps the stereolith is a transcribed song, with the "accent marks" representing notes that are flat, sharp, etc. ?
I'd imagine it's characters but who knows
is it just me or does that almost look like klingon?
soo i did hebrew and split the top line and bottom line and got this וו ש החם הנסי א= א והו ה ניא י הים which translated by google to
And the heat, the try, and the sea
unsure if this brings it any closer but hey worth adding my 2 cents
As BuildInfo shows, you can in fact repair the monolith, it just takes an obscenely long time
Too long, I spent ages trying!
Wouldn't that make it the strongest armor, and/or projectile then?
@@RUclipsAccountName They both have 13,650 HP/integrity, and an artillery does 17,000 damage. Not exactly a huge amount. As for gridining them down and welding them up, it takes 1 day, 3 hours, 56 minutes, and 40 seconds to completely grind them down with a basic grinder on 1x grinding speed. It takes 2 dys, 6 hours, 32 minutes and 6 seconds to weld them up, on the other hand
Keen Software House are based in Prague, Czech Republic.
If its in another language, it might be in the Czech language.
...
Which I do not speak.
That was my theory but I didn't get anywhere with it.
The part that confuses me the most is the 3 repetitions of similar "words" (T,LL [2nd word] TLL [7th] •TLL [9th])... I don't know if there is anything that uses 3 characters and can have that many variations.
The first word also looks a bit like the last one, until the last character, that one is rotated 180°.
Also the sentences aren't structured the same, the first one uses medium length words (1 to 6 characters) with smooth transitions and natural return to average. The second one uses either short - medium or long - ultra long words (1 to 3 and 6 to 8 characters) and has sharp transitions (~7 characters right before 1). This is possible in english, but to me it feels odd, unnatural...
Yeah, hence why it's more difficult to decode. I tried decoding just the short words with the similar characters and there's no combination of characters that fit.
@@Zer0sLegion Maybe looking through various languages dictionaries for 3 letter words and finding a pattern of AXX BXX CXX would help? (A,B,C,X - any letter; X - same as other Xs)
Better have a program to do it tho
Easy way to solve this. Torture Keen's staff until they tell you what it means. Yeah, the quick and dirty solution might land you in jail but being psychologically tortured over years with this tease is sort of the same, so... I'm kidding of course.
Brb, just gonna spam all of the Keen devs with pictures of terrible SE builds until someone tells me.
@@Zer0sLegion HAHAHA That is awesome!
oh boy! alien mysteries beyond english comprehension! my favourite!
Maybe the symbles are words. Eye in cave, relax, hangout. Hangout, slide, relax, relax. Bend over, hat, look, slide, zipline, kiss, melon flavered relax, relax.... :D