The Hunt for Internment

Just what is a Medal Hunter, and what was the big deal recently about some new medal? Find out today in this sneak peek into the madness!

Medals are achievements which are given for accomplishing certain gameplay goals. You've probably already achieved a few and might not even know why! Rest assured, this is (mostly) by design, because their solutions are kept under wraps. New medals are added every now and then, and on 727 day (as in, the 27th of July) a little while ago, a set of all-new Hush-Hush medals were released as part of the Summer Splash update. Most notably of all, a bounty for the "Medal Hunter" title was announced for the first time in several years.

Medal Hunter is a unique title awarded for being the very first player to unlock an extremely hard-to-solve Hush-Hush medal. The previous Medal Hunter title was given out nearly 6 years ago in fact, so it has been quite a while since anyone last saw a new one.

This time around, the bounty was set for a particular Hush-Hush medal in the latest release, known as Internment. What makes this medal (and the previous medal that received a Medal Hunter bounty) particularly special is that rather than being a test of a player's mechanical skill, practically all of the difficulty comes from deciphering a set of hints (or "flair texts") that can be viewed when hovering the medal on one's profile page.

Said hints are of course incredibly cryptic: "stained in the hues of madness, they rage within a four-walled jail" and "bask in the shade of an ailing mind".

This article gradually reveals a solution to the Internment medal. If you want to search for the solution yourself, you can use the above information and skip the rest of this news post for now.

With the fires of discovery lit in the hearts of medal aficionados across the globe, the Medal Hunters' Discord server huddled together and decided to pool their efforts to see one of their number made the latest Medal Hunter.

But before we get to community's attempts to solve it, here's some details they knew from the beginning from their familiarity with previous medals:

• The medal is only visible on the profiles of osu! players, so it can only be obtained by clicking circles;
• If the medal is specific to a particular map, it is usually a Featured Artist song;
• The medal is in the Hush-Hush (Expert) category, which means no difficulty reduction mods (or special mods) are allowed.

Within the first few minutes of the medal releasing, players immediately began poring over all this information and quickly noticed the medal icon itself clearly referenced a popular Frums track titled theyaremanycolors. From there, aspiring medal hunters were swift to piece together that the wording from the medal flair may be hinting at the RGB colour spectrum in some capacity, but nobody could quite figure out how.

Setting out to find how to translate these RGB-related suspicions into in-game scores, much was considered and tried. Red, green, and blue imagery all show up prominently in theyaremanycolors' accompanying video used in the beatmaps, so many initial theories involved exploring failing at particular parts of the video, or only comboing up to the first appearances of specific colours.

Speculations grew wild and fast — could it have been to do with setting certain grades of scores back to back? After all, as every (mostly) sane prospective medal hunter knows, D ranks are red, A ranks are green, and B ranks are blue. Could it have to do with mod colours in the default skin? Hard Rock is red, Easy is green... no, difficulty-reducing mods can't be used for expert Hush-Hush medals.

Also, while the "hues of madness" part of the hint seemed to be critical in figuring out the medal solution, just what in the world could "bask in the shade of an ailing mind" mean? A helpful developer chimed in after 48 hours to reassuringly inform them that they would not need a single hint extra to help them along. However, with no way to tell if any theories were getting closer to the solution, the insanity only continued to grow.

Days began to pass. The community was putting every brain cell available towards the task of unravelling this growing mystery, but after an enormous number of quashed theories that they thought surely must've worked, the only discovery of anything related to "ailing minds" was in the rapidly waning sanity of those still searching for it.

During the hunt, the community had surmised various facts. The first notable one was that the medal could involve "ARG"-style (alternate reality game) elements, which was met with screams of unbridled terror. The possibilities seemed endless — many, if you're feeling creative. Another helpful fact descended from a video recorded by Glassive, one of medal hunters at cavoe's osu! event (COE), featuring peppy himself!

This particular revelation from peppy let on that the solution may need to be altered because it depended on something that could be changed in the future. This left only two possibilities: something to do with osu!(lazer), and the website. While there were theories close to the actual solution at this point, the hint wasn't of much help in retrospect — in fact it started to throw some off the rails a little bit.

After peppy said anyone (including new players) would likely be able to get Internment if they really tried, suspicions turned towards the easier difficulties on the theyaremanycolors sets, which resulted in days of hundreds upon hundreds of attempts that ultimately turned out to be for naught.

The theories continued to become wilder in the wake of these hints, with many prospective medal hunters entering full Sherlock Holmes mode at the ever-increasing possibilities posed to them. In a twist of hilarity, they began relying more on insanity than logic and soon, discussion threads were drowned out with countless threads spouting some... interesting theories. Some were so utterly deranged that the medal team "took note" of them for future designs, and others... well, let's just introduce you to the wonder that is the Pac-Man theory:

But, despite all the challenges, the community was still determined to find the solution. One such participant, a fellow by the name of UberFazz had donned his fattest thinking cap, suggesting one theory of achieving 16,777,216 score, because that's how many possible colours there are with RGB values (256³). Another guess of theirs was to interact with the osu! website to find a hidden message somewhere on it, which would then lead to a solution. They were also informed by one of the developers that they had insanely close guesses multiple times, but it was all just not enough...

Efforts progressed, and hope began to wane. It looked as if that the colours were winning, for while the theories were many, the solution was yet to be found. Hunters soon found themselves in a four-walled jail of their own creation, mired by increasingly bewildering theories. Perhaps Internment would never be found...

But suddenly, after more than 3 weeks, an innocuous bit of encouragement from a watching developer noting that "a message in the last 8 hours was a hint in the right direction" spurned our fated hero into donning his extremely fat thinking cap again. UberFazz read that message and surmised exactly what he needed to do.

His new theory was to set scores with particular combo counts that relate to the very specific RGB values of the website's difficulty icon on a theyaremanycolors map. UberFazz guessed the best difficulty to try was celinsane, with "cell" referring to jail and "insane" referring to madness or ailing mind in the medal flair.

After a tense fifteen minutes as UberFazz conjured the requisite three scores into existence, an elated gasp ran through the Medal Hunters server as he found himself the first recipient of the Internment medal and the second-ever "Medal Hunter" title, after more than a month since the medal's release!

Despite the title being awarded to only one person, the solution belonged to every participant in spirit. After some scientific elimination of any existing theories, the community was finally ready to present the full solution to Internment medal:

On any Insane difficulty (4.0*–5.29*) of Frums - theyaremanycolors, set three plays in a row that have combos equal to the R, G, and B values of the difficulty indicator (on the osu! website) for the map you are playing. The possible combinations are as follows:

You also MUST get the scores back to back, and the third one must be a pass; if you overcombo or fail at any point, you must restart the medal from the beginning.

And now, after this great struggle, UberFazz would like to give massive thanks to all those who participated in this event. They say that without the osu! medal hunting community, this would have never transpired. There were very incredibly close guesses that barely undershot the medal solution, but UberFazz was ultimately the one that made that final push and emerged as the ultimate victor.

With this herculean task of colours and insanity behind them, the medal hunting community couldn't help but agree that Internment truly was a challenge worthy of the title.

If you wish to entertain yourself with fun unique challenges that give you shiny medallions to proudly display on your profile, please, by all means, consider becoming a medal hunter. Furthermore, if you do not know the solution to a medal such as this one, consider following the footsteps medal hunters must take for every new Hush-Hush medal that comes out. Ephemeral and the osu! team go out of their way to make medals the community can go crazy over. So much so, that there is a chance that the next medal batches may have medals specifically made for osu!(lazer)!

Does being a medal hunter seem like something that could spark your interest? Do you believe you can crack medals as creatively sophisticated as this one? If so, don't hesitate to give it a shot!

As a final note, we are truly grateful to every medal hunter for their contributions to solving Internment during the past month. We wouldn't have achieved it without you! Thanks and see you next time!

—MegaMix_Craft & Tomy