BREAKING NEWS: The XM value of recycling portal keys has increased significantly from 20XM to a massive 500XM!
Filling a capsule full of keys can now be recycled for 50,080XM. An L16 agent only needs 44 keys in a capsule to completely fill up their XM tank from empty. It might be a good time to check your XM capacity so you don’t waste any.
We are still working on the teardown for APK version 1.89, so stay tuned for updates on that.
Earlier today Ingress announced the Limited Edition Anomaly Pack for purchase in the In-App store. It’s mentioned a few times that these will only be available for a limited time (unknown, but assumed until the end of the #Abaddon anomaly), and is currently the only method to obtain Niantic Beacons.
And you have to admit, the Niantic beacon looks pretty dang sexy.
Today we were also alerted that Circle K portals were coming online into the portal network via a post on reddit.
Circle K is the largest independent convenience-store operator in the United States. Their locations are known to be the support network for a worldwide group of archaeologists and treasure-hunters created by Circle K’s founder, Fred Hervey. Their quest is to find a group of lost, ancient XM Artifacts inscribed with the ‘Sustain’ Glyph and possessing power, vitalizing properties.
Is this just a promised number of physical visit impressions by Niantic to Circle K, or will there psychical in-store items with passcodes (like Hint Water)? There is a highly speculative picture listing in-store items for passcode coupons at different rarities, but because I don’t want to cause another pay2play shit storm announcement… I’ll let you look for yourself and you form your own speculations. When official info comes out we’ll be able to see what the facts are, and again just know this might be fake: Image. The majority of the Circle K Portals have come online around Phoenix, AZ.
We’ll update this post with more info as it becomes available.
Here are a few locations to see these portals for yourself:
Merry Christmas! 
O93B5U9DOX… there may be more?
1,743 Agents from 60 cities in 27 countries earned 197 million AP, gained 240 levels and walked 5,730 km during December’s First Saturday events around the world.
The top city for December was Shizuoka, Japan with 43 level ups and over 20 million AP earned!
Although Shizuoka had the biggest event this month with 192 agents, they only ranked 32nd in the average AP per agent category. Mérida, Mexico topped the tally again with 14 agents earning an average of 248,435 AP per agent. There was an average of 21 agents per city this month, the lowest average for 2015.
The agents in Shizuoka walked the furthest combined distance of 815km while the 36 agents in Monterrey, Mexico walked an average of 10.5 km each.
Registrations are now open for January 2016 FS events, get your event registered here to be included in the listings.
69,645 Points, 7,720 portals, 3,448 links, 1,159 fields, 152 shards, 28 cities, 22 characters, 6 anomalies – The Resistance have won the Abaddon Anomaly Series!
The Resistance got off to a strong start to the series winning 3 of the 4 shard events and Anomalies 2 and 3 which meant that the Enlightened would have had to win all three anomalies last weekend. Overall, the Enlightened finished the series with more total points, portals, volatiles, links, anchored fields and covering fields than the Resistance. However, it wasn’t in the right places to take the series.
The Enlightened started the last day of Abaddon standing very strong but only on one foot: Their win in Okinawa was large enough to offset the Resistance wins in the other three cities.
The 2nd round of the day saw the Resistance win 3 out of 4 cities once again but with control of the primary in Milan, they were able to win this round.
With the anomaly points at 13 to 8 and this round only worth 4 points, it meant that the Enlightened wouldn’t be able to win the series no matter the outcome but it didn’t stop them for a second as they won 3 of the 4 cities in this final round.
The Septicycle started off with the Resistance in the lead but that was short-lived when the Enlightened created Gigafields for the second checkpoint. However, the Enlightened’s score wore off gradually until the Resistance started anomaly day with some massive fields worth almost 3 billion MU.
Coming up soon, we’ll be covering the decoding techniques used to for the Volatile portal puzzles with Jack, Mustafa will go over the effects on the story that the anomaly had and I’ll have The Year that Was in Anomalies.
We touched a little bit on the emergence of the Circle-K portals in a previous article, along with an unconfirmed image giving details. Turns out…
Since our previous article Niantic has released some details of this partnership and I’ve also been in touch with the regional rep for Circle-K Arizona. I’ll share the details of what I know so far as well as a recap of what we found out in the previous article.
Circle-K portals come online
On 12/11/15, 400+ Circle-K portals came online into the portal network, centered around Phoenix Arizona. While we’ve been talking with the Circle-K AZ regional rep for details, we still have not been able to confirm out how long this promotion will be going, or if it’ll spread to all other Circle-K locations as well (NDA maybe). We do know that this partnership was at the very least targeted at those attending the #Abaddon anomaly in Phoenix held last weekend.
The ‘Sustain’ Glyph
The Niantic Project posted about The Circle-K AZ partnership, tying it into the Ingress lore and giving us a new glyph mimicking the Circle-K logo. It is opposite of the ‘Interrupt’ glyph and suggested to mean ‘Sustain’. Alternatively it’s suggested that it could mean ‘Sustain-All’ because it is combined with that ‘All’ glyph. It is unknown if we’ll be seeing this glyph more in Ingress lore or in the scanner.
Promotion Details
The Niantic post directed users to the Circle-K AZ Rewards page, which gives details on registering for the required Circle-K Rewards app (Android / iOS). However nothing in the Niantic post or linked rewards page really gave all the details on what the promotion offered and how to participate in it. Thankfully, the Circle-K AZ regional rep has our backs and got me the details! Here are the promotions from the Circle-K app itself:
This outlines a Common, Rare, and Very Rare promotional deals through the app itself and mentions that you can “claim this deal instantly to receive your printed Ingress passcode.” Even with all this, it still didn’t detail what kind of items are in each passcode rarity, what this printed passcode looked like, or how to receive it after your purchase. When originally discovered on Reddit, local cashiers also had no clue about the promotion when agents went asking around in AZ.
Not only was I able to get the details on what is in each passcode, but I also found out they also work like lottery tickets, each having at a chance to give Shields, ADA/Jarvis, and Very Rare Link Amp’s on top of their normal load outs. Here are the details:
Get a COMMON Ingress passcode when you purchase:
Get a RARE Ingress Passcode when you purchase:
Get a VERY RARE Ingress Passcode when you purchase:
Each code is one time use and gives the following chances to get the following items, at player level:
And here are the details on how to redeem your passcodes (only at the Circle-K AZ locations):
The above details are from this page that the Circle-K AZ regional rep shared with me. I’ll make sure to post more updates as they come (especially if this goes outside AZ). Also a reminder from the page I just linked it to is be patient with the cashiers. They probably know less than we do and we should cut them some slack.
The FG / Circle-K contest (Psst, passcodes!)
Even though the promotion is only at Circle-K’s in AZ currently, the AZ regional rep has decided to give us a small amount of passcodes to be given away in a contest that we will be running via our Twitter account (@FevGames). If you live near a Circle-K (even outside the AZ area), you’ll want to give us a follow on Twitter for a heads up on when this contest is being ran as it’ll be a first come, first serve basis. The rarity of the passcodes given are unknown.
Welcome back everyone. We took a break for a few versions of teardowns, as there was not much worth mentioning. We did have some exciting changes though with the enhanced capsule handling (sorting, multi select, etc). These changes were visible to all agents while we try and focus our effort to finding things that hide from the public eye.
Now this teardown is late, really late. First off, this version of Ingress (1.89.0) started a new data structure of internal elements. This structure broke all my tools that I use to decode. Luckily, I also maintain such tools so fixes had to be done and quick. This bug took far too long to fix. Once I finally fixed the problem, I was in a car driving to an anomaly.
Thus we are late, so lets get into it.
I noticed a large amount of changes to both the AndroidManifest and source files. They all referenced this new analytic engine (Think Google Analytics), except from a company known as Upsight.
The Manifest file showed a basic list of what was being sent.
I hadn’t heard an update about this change, so I took a peek at the Ingress Privacy Policy. This line interested me (shown on right).
Information Shared with Third Parties. We may share aggregated information and non-identifying information with third parties for industry research and analysis, demographic profiling, and other similar purposes.
I can’t speak if the information is aggregated or not by the time it reaches the source, but on initial look every request seems unique to my device. I monitored the requests my 1.89.0 scanner sent and between certain actions or 200-400 seconds a request was sent to this company with the following information.
With a lot more information than I thought. Fields that stuck out to me were
So I took a look at the service (Upsight Custom Metrics) – and it looks powerful. Reports and graphs easily sort-able by the mass amount of information being provided.
This version also removed & added a few things
1.89.0 was built on Dec 2nd and we obtained it on Dec 7th. Likewise 1.89.1 was built and released on Dec 10th. Upsight was the large change of this version with a large amount of code cleanup done.
BREAKING NEWS – Ingress 1.90.1 now allows you to have a Glyph Control Channel before actual glyphing where you can change the key hack behavior!
Just released in 1.90.1 the latest version of Ingress allows you to enter “control” glyphs to influence the hack results just before normal glyphing begins.
Niantic Project released a post here that covers the lore behind this modification.
Version 1.90.1 release notes:
NEW FEATURES
Choose “Hack No Key” on long pressing a portal to not receive keys after hacks
Glyph Command Channel now available when you start a glyph hack:
– Use the LESS glyph to request no key
– Use the MORE glyph to request more keys
Thank you Agents for an exciting #Abaddon Anomaly series. See you in 2016 for the next set of Anomaly events.
Upon starting a glyph hack the agent is now presented with a screen that says COMMAND CHANNEL OPEN… with a hint as either ENTER “MORE” – GET MORE KEYS or ENTER “LESS” – GET FEWER KEYS at the top of the screen. This occurs while the glyph is loading from the server, so no additional time is taken.
The agent has 2 seconds to enter a control glyph for the command channel, and can enter in up to 8 glyphs in total (2 second delay applies after the previous glyph completed). Note that the amount of time it takes the agent to complete the control glyph is recorded and submitted. Unknown if this influences anything, but doubtful – they probably just reused the same code base for the main glyph hacking.
By entering the glyph for “MORE” you can request to receive a key even if you already have one, and conversely by entering “LESS” you can ask to not receive a key even if you don’t already have one.
(animation courtesy of @DisasterCthulhu)
After this the glyph hack proceeds as normal. Note that this only applies for the one hack – the agent needs to do this for every hack that they wish to influence.
It is rumored that during the brief window when the command channel is open you have multiple attempts to enter the control glyph. If you do it wrong the first time, simply do it again. Note that all sequences that you enter are submitted to the server as-is, so it’s possible that the server may do something extra with this information that we don’t know about.
There are also changes to the menu accessed by long-pressing the portal from the main screen.
This pop-up radial menu stays the same regardless if you have a key in your inventory or not. This gives you a quick ability to do a normal hack without a key, but note there is no ability to do a normal hack requesting an extra key.
Requesting an extra key does not always provide one. The probability is most likely the same as if you hacked without a key in your inventory, but more testing will be necessary.
You cannot initiate a glyph hack to request an extra key, then bypass the glyph. In this case the extra key request is not passed along to the server.
In the hours before Abaddon 04, a series of pages from a manual was leaked and contained information crucial to the upcoming XM-influenced events.
The first page was released at 15:00 UTC with the subsequent pages releasing in one hour increments.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 5
Page 4
The last page was released at 20:00 UTC and contained the following text:
1. Up to fourteen segments may be required when using a Z divider. (b-ez) 2. A trip to the patent office may be needed, as well as trips back and forth to base. (4965) 3. Processor and firmware are provided, although only initial instructions are needed. (8080) 4. If you spell "ohms" backwards, you get "mhos". (0.00) 5. Some resistors have no parallel. (190) 6. Capacitors are typically round, while resistors are typically rectangular cylinders. 7. Colors may mean different things, based on their position. (6.58k) 8. Consider hexadecimal values for too long may lead to floating away. (42da) 9. To display an A on a 16 element display requires 8 lit bits. (19007) 10. From an initial position of 0, A leading B, is a positive thing, but B leading A is negative. 11. A trip to base may result in characters a bit shorter than usual. (01 b0) 12. Remember that our corporate parent, Wa Bu N, is represented as .-. .. -- -- -.-.. (ヱ) 13. Please take care when removing pages from this manual. Chads can be left on or off. 14. Cryptographic pads should only be used one time, but different pads may be used sequentially. (OTPU) 15. Once all pairs are dotted, they should dash into the smallest size display (OH PS)
Thanks to Jessen Yu (@jestr), Aza Rine (@az32612), and 井伊狐狸 (@EcoliW3110) for contributing solutions to the puzzles.
All puzzles are in the volatile passcode format:
[a-z]{8}[0-9]keyword[0-9]
b-ezabefgGkzbcefkmza-fzacdGhzbchkzbcefhkzbcefgGzajmza-dGzabefgGkza-dflzdefzabcefgGzbcefkmzacdfgG
Delimiting the string at ‘z’:
b-e abefgGk bcefkm a-f acdGh bchk bcefhk bcefgG ajm a-dG abefgGk a-dil def abcefgG bcefkm acdfgG
The hint mentions fourteen segments, which would imply a 14-segment display.
The dashes mean the all the segments in between the two letters, inclusive.
bcde abefgGk bcefkm abcdef acdGh bchk bcefhk bcefgG ajm abcdG abefgGk abcdil def abcefgG bcefkm acdfgG
JRWOSVNH73RDLAW5
4965628/jhqx+3zxp7ll2ixxu
The hint mentions patent office and trips back and forth to base.
4965628 refers to the US patent for Photographic Film with patent image multi-field bar code and eye-readable symbols assigned to Kodak, also known as DX encoding
Converting the remainder of the string to a binary string from Base-64:
111111 100011 100001 101010 110001 111110 110111 110011 110001 101001 111011 100101 100101 110110 100010 110001 110001 101110
The binary string needs to be inverted
000000 011100 011110 010101 001110 000001 001000 001100 001110 010110 000100 011010 011010 001001 011101 001110 001110 010001
Interpreting each of those codes as a 1st row DX contact:
000000 5000/38° 011100 40/17° 011110 32/16° 010101 100/21° 001110 64/19° 000001 3200/36° 001000 1250/32° 001100 80/20° 001110 64/19° 010110 125/22° 000100 320/26° 011010 500/28° 011010 500/28° 001001 800/30° 011101 25/15° 001110 64/19° 001110 64/19° 010001 1600/33°
Taking the degree values and converting it into binary values:
100110 010001 010000 010101 010011 100100 100000 010100 010011 010110 011010 011100 011100 011110 001111 010011 010011 100001
And finally, converting the binary string into a Base-64 string:
mRQVTkgUTWaccePTTh =~ mrqvtkgu2accept3
8080f4d3f3fbc5844000d3d3f3eb01fbf9f9d300fbfb84f38402fb
The hint mentions processor, and 8080 is an Intel processor.
Each hex pair refers to an instruction:
F4: CP D3: OUT F3: DI FB: EI C5: PUSH 84: ADD 40: MOV 00: NOP D3: OUT D3: OUT F3: DI EB: XCHG 01: LXI FB: EI F9: SPHL F9: SPHL D3: OUT 00: NOP FB: EI FB: EI 84: ADD F3: DI 84: ADD 02: STAX FB: EI
Removing all except the first letter of all instructions:
CODEPAMNOODXLESSONEEADASE CODE PAMNOOD X LESS ONE E ADA SE
X LESS ONE: W
E: 5
SE: 7
PAMNOODW5ADA7
0.0083333333 0.0097087378 0.0090909090 0.0081967213 0.0084745762 0.0088495575 0.0097087378 0.0090909090 0.0178571428 0.0103092783 0.0100000000 0.0084745762 0.0103092783 0.0090909090 0.0101010101 0.0099009900
For each value, take the reciprocal
1 / 0.0083333333 ~ 120 1 / 0.0097087378 ~ 103 1 / 0.0090909090 ~ 110 1 / 0.0081967213 ~ 122 1 / 0.0084745762 ~ 118 1 / 0.0088495575 ~ 113 1 / 0.0097087378 ~ 103 1 / 0.0090909090 ~ 110 1 / 0.0178571428 ~ 56 1 / 0.0103092783 ~ 97 1 / 0.0100000000 = 100 1 / 0.0084745762 ~ 118 1 / 0.0103092783 ~ 97 1 / 0.0090909090 ~ 110 1 / 0.0101010101 ~ 99 1 / 0.0099009900 ~ 101
The last value is not in the tables, but a note next to the table suggests “[inserting] a 0.02S resistor to disable channel noise correction entirely.”
1 / 0.02 = 50
120 103 110 122 118 113 103 110 56 97 100 118 97 110 99 101 50
Converting this from decimal to ASCII:
xgnzvqgn8advance2
190 || 245 -- 150 || 283
155 || 290 -- 190 || 230
210 || 259 -- 190 || 230
230 || 230 -- 200 || 240
100 || 117 -- 150 || 275
170 || 255 -- 190 || 285
140 || 316 -- 175 || 289
110 || 106
The hint mentions resistors and parallel.
The formula to calculate the equivalent resistance is:
These values are resistors in parallel and to calculate the equivalent resistance:
190 || 245 = 107.0114943 ~ 107 150 || 283 = 98.0369515 ~ 98 155 || 290 = 101.011236 ~ 101 190 || 230 = 104.047619 ~ 104 210 || 259 = 115.9701493 ~ 116 190 || 230 = 104.047619 ~ 104 230 || 230 = 115 ~ 115 200 || 240 = 109.0909091 ~ 109 100 || 117 = 53.91705069 ~ 54 150 || 275 = 97.05882353 ~ 97 170 || 255 = 102 ~ 102 190 || 285 = 114 ~ 114 140 || 316 = 97.01754386 ~ 97 175 || 289 = 108.9978448 ~ 109 110 || 106 = 53.98148148 ~ 54
107 98 101 104 116 104 115 109 54 97 102 114 97 109 54
Converting this from decimal to ASCII:
kbehthsm6afram6
The first page has an image of a breadboards with resistors and capacitors on it:
• ••-• - •-- ••• ••- --•- •- -•••• •- --• •- •• -• ••---
Converting this from morse code gives:
eftwsuqa6again2
6.58kΩ ± 0.25% 7790MΩ ± 1% 6660MΩ ± 0.05% 7660MΩ ± 0.25% 85.6MΩ ± 0.1% 1690MΩ ± 0.05% 8.47kΩ ± 0.05% 2690MΩ ± 0.05%
Interpreting these as resistors and converting them into their colour equivalents:
658 16 779 71 666 78 766 76 856 96 571 69 788 48 269 68
Pairing the numbers up:
65 81 67 79 71 66 67 87 66 76 85 69 65 71 69 78 84 82 69 68
Converting the numbers from decimal to ASCII:
AQCOGBCWBLUEAGENTRED BLUE: 6 RED: 5 AQCOGBCW6AGENT5
42da3a5e42e4364642d434bc42f03df44254635442d831aa42e435c342c6199a
The hint mentions hexadecimal, long, floats, so converting hexadecimal values to IEEE 754 floating point values:
42da3a5e 109.113998 42e43646 114.106003 42d434bc 106.102997 42f03df4 120.121002 42546354 53.097000 42d831aa 108.097000 42e435c3 114.105003 42c6199a 99.050003
Rounding each number to 3 decimal places:
109.114 114.106 106.103 120.121 53.097 108.097 114.105 99.050
109 114 114 106 106 103 120 121 53 097 108 097 114 105 99 050
Converting decimal to ASCII values:
mrrjjgxy5alaric2
S/N: 19007.21504.9420.9228.9228.763 PKI: 243.9159.959.975.240.1011.46080 PIN: 975.9420.18495.1011.9159.1019
The hint mentions 16 element displays. Each value is less than 2^16 = 65536, so converting each number into a 16-bit binary value:
0100101000111111 0101010000000000 0010010011001100 0010010000001100 0010010000001100 0000001011111011 0000000011110011 0010001111000111 0000001110111111 0000001111001111 0000000011110000 0000001111110011 1011010000000000 0000001111001111 0010010011001100 0100100000111111 0000001111110011 0010001111000111 0000001111111011
Converting the 1’s into lit segments of a sixteen segment display:
BYNVVGCR9ALEXANDER6
No known solution.
01 b0 c4 81 a6 c5 81 a0 5f 01 b7 5f 01 b1 05 69 b7 06 01 b0 df 19 a6 c2 14 10 85 80 06 c6 01 b0 de 69 b0 c6 69 b7 9f 81 a0 43 79 f6 9b 75 e1 9a 6d e8 1a 6c 31 1f 00 10 84 6c 27 57
The hint mentions converting to bases, converting the hexadecimal string into a Base-64 string:
AbDEgabFgaBfAbdfAbEFabcGAbDfGabCFBCFgAbGAbDeabDGabefgaBDefabdeGabegabDEfABCEbCdX
Splitting the string at intervals of A to G:
AbDEg abFg aBf Abdf AbEF abcG AbDfG abCF BCFg AbG AbDe abDG abefg aBDef abdeG abeg abDEf ABCE bCd
Each string segment represents a 7-bit values represented by ABCDEFG, with the values in the string being 1 if they are present, 0 if they are not.
1101101 1100011 1100010 1101010 1100110 1110001 1101011 1110010 0110011 1100001 1101100 1101001 1100111 1101110 1101101 1100101 1101110 1110100 0111000
Converting from 7-bit binary to decimal:
109 99 98 106 102 113 107 114 51 97 108 105 103 110 109 101 110 116 56
Converting decimal to ASCII:
mcbjfqkr3alignment8
ヱミモルンヒテツルヱソヰサユホノヌルフツフウユ
The hint mentions Wa Bu N, which is a reference to Wabun Code (Japanese Morse Code)
Converting from Katakana to Wabun Code:
ヱ •--•• ミ ••-•- モ -••-• ル -•--• ン •-•-• ヒ --••- テ •-•-- ツ •--• ル -•--• ヱ •--•• ソ ---• ヰ •-••- サ -•-•- ユ -••-- ホ -•• ノ ••-- ヌ •••• ル -•--• フ --•• ツ •--• フ --•• ウ ••- ユ -••--
Taking the longs as 1 and shorts as 0:
01100 00101 10010 10110 01010 11001 01011 0110 10110 01100 1110 01001 10101 10011 100 0011 0000 10110 1100 0110 1100 001 10011
Combining and grouped into blocks of 8
01100001 01100101 01100101 01100101 01101101 01100110 01110010 01101011 00111000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00110011
Converting from binary to decimal
97 101 101 101 109 102 114 107 56 97 108 108 51
And finally, decimal to ASCII:
aeeemfrk8all3
On pages 2 and 3, the pages are ripped.
^__^_^_^ ^__^__^_ ^___^__^ ^__^^__^ ^__^^__^ ^__^____ ^____^_^ ^__^____ ^^___^^_ ^__^^^^_ ^__^__^_ ^__^____ ^__^___^ ^__^^___ ^___^_^_ ^___^^__ ^^__^___
Interpreting this as a binary string:
01101010 01101101 01110110 01100110 01100110 01101111 01111010 01101111 00111001 01100001 01101101 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110101 01110011 00110111
Converting from binary to decimal:
106 109 118 102 102 111 122 111 57 97 109 111 110 103 117 115 55
Converting from decimal to ASCII:
jmvffozo9amongus7
1. OTPUNSKCERXFTUACUXTSRG 2. CGTBIHLHNBAXLGSAVQSRQN 3. MGZADHMIONMVQYKWWZOZDH 4. TMLQEDDVFPSNVSGQGOFSVV
The hint mentions cryptographic pads, which means using vigenere across these strings. The correct order (or transitive equivalent) to vigenere these pads is:
3 + 2 – 1 – 4
With the + being encrypt, and – being decrypt:
3 + 2: MGZADHMIONMVQYKWWZOZDH CGTBIHLHNBAXLGSAVQSRQN ====================== OMSBLOXPBOMSBECWRPGQTU 3 + 2 - 1: OMSBLOXPBOMSBECWRPGQTU OTPUNSKCERXFTUACUXTSRG ====================== ATDHYWNNXXPNIKCUXSNYCO 3 + 2 - 1 - 4: ATDHYWNNXXPNIKCUXSNYCO TMLQEDDVFPSNVSGQGOFSVV ====================== HHSRUTKSSIXANSWEREIGHT HHSRUTKS6ANSWER8
OH PS SL FR HD WB GH BW XD SB OC OH OX JS VS PU OH LS
Each pair of letters represents a set of 7 Morse tones.
--- •••• •--• ••• ••• •-•• ••-• •-• •••• -•• •-- -••• --• •••• -••• •-- -••- -•• ••• -••• --- -•-• --- •••• --- -••- •--- ••• •••- ••• •--• ••- --- •••• •-•• •••
Interpreting these as segments of a seven-segment-display, with the segments lit for the short tones.
tEgZgFbJ4ArtiFACt6
2.8 billion AP, 57 thousand km walked, 24 thousand agents, 4 thousand levels gained, 367 cities, 57 countries, 12 months… but wait! There’s more!!
It’s the end of the first full year of Ingress FS events and it’s time to analyze the year that was. But after having a look at the data I have, I seem to be missing a lot of it, especially from the first half the year. I need your help to fill in all the missing results and correct any errors
I have put together a spreadsheet of all the events that have been submitted to us this year. If you have had events that are on separate lines and should be merged together on the same line or any other small edits, please add a comment on the spreadsheet linked below.
Spreadsheet of 2015 FS Events: https://goo.gl/gUCVUY
If there is an event missing from the list, or you would like to make a correction to a result, please submit the results to the form below
If there are any errors with your city’s scores, please submit the correct results in the form above.
January*
February
March
April*
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
*FS date was close to a public holiday and didn’t have enough events submitted for a post. If you did have an event in these months, submit them in the form above and they will be included in the upcoming report.
List of edits that have been submitted so far:
Volume 4 of The Niantic Project Files book series has been released (possibly since the 21st)! Check out links to purchase and the press release below.
You can purchase your own copy of Volume 4 from the following sources:
Press Release:
Today Niantic, developers behind Real World mobile game Ingress and the highly-anticipated Pokemon GO, just launched the fourth volume in its long-running ARG book series, Ingress: The Niantic Project Files.
Originally launched online on November 1, 2012, Ingress: The Niantic Project ARG functions as living fiction and actively adapts to the actions of real-world Agents (members of the Ingress player community), who define the flow of it story through events and anomalies that happen in the real-world.
With new content and puzzles going live every day since the ARG’s launch, over 1,100 unique pieces of content (i.e. videos, artwork, novels, prose, social posts) and 3,500 cryptographic puzzles for players to decipher to-date, the Ingress: Niantic Project ARG has garnered a passionate and involved following since its inception.
As the fourth volume in the official guide to Ingress’ in-game lore, Ingress: The Niantic Project Files Volume 4 follows the adventures of Hank Johnson in his journey back to the 13MAGNUS nest in Afghanistan. Johnson’s subsequent capture leaves the fate of several Ingress characters a mystery, setting the stage for the events in Ingress: The Niantic Project Files Volume 4 to have far-reaching consequences for all 13 of the original Niantic Investigators.
50 cities from 19 countries have registered their January Ingress First Saturday events. Find your city on the map and join in the fun!
Markers are positioned on the meeting point for each event where provided.
In 2015, we saw 153,492 points earned, 18,658 portals captured, 5,616 links create, 1,898 fields established and 177 shards scored over 63 cities during the 3 anomaly series.
The Resistance won the most points this year by a margin of 4,422 points with the shards being one of their strongest point contributing 12.7% of their total points (compared to 4.5% for the Enlightened). The biggest point earner for both teams were the Volatile portals which were worth 30.2% of the Enlightened’s total points and 26.2% for the Resistance.
The Shonin Anomaly Series got off to a very close start with only 3 points difference after the first round. The Enlightened managed to push ahead to finish the first day in the lead by 693 points and continued that push into the start of the 2nd day. It all came tumbling down in round 4 where the Resistance blasted ahead in Europe by almost 5 thousand points followed by scoring 13 shards to none.
Persepolis kicked off with a much moore abrupt start when the Resistance won the first round by 2,775 points. The Enlightened fought back hard winning rounds 2 and 3 but another smashing by the Resistance in Europe again in round 4 made it a hard task. The Enlightened managed to score 9 shards with another 8 not to far away but weren’t able to score those last few in time. by the end of the series, the Resistance won by a rather close 429 points.
After a break during Q3, the Abaddon anomaly finally came around. The series started with the Flash Shards events which the Resistance won 3 out of 4. A trend noticed over the past few anomalies is that the Enlightened would win in Asia/Pacific and the Americas while the Resistance would win in Europe, and that trend almost continued through Abaddon until the Resistance landed 4 shards in the US in round 3 to almost guarantee them the win. The Enlightened didn’t give up fighting strong to the very end by winning round 6 by a significant margin and win the total value by 4,717 points to end the year on a positive note.
Both teams fought very hard throughout the year even when the odds were against them. The Resistance came out victors winning all three anomalies this year and their 7th consecutive series leaving the Enlightened still winless since the #13Magnus anomaly.
Thank you to everyone that has supported us this year and followed our coverage of Ingress anomalies, we have some exciting changes in anomaly coverage coming in 2016.
Stay tuned over the next few days, we’ve got the year in review for the Niantic Investigation and for Ingress FS.
After your IngressFS event has finished, submit your results to be added to our analysis.
Cut off time for results submission is Wednesday January 6th at 11:59 pm UTC sharp so we can have the results published within a few days.
Please make sure your scoring spreadsheet is in the same layout as the official scoring spreadsheet and is an accessible Google Sheet.
City results submitted so far:
If your city isn’t in the list above, please submit it here.
It may take up to 10 minutes for your city to show up in the list at the top.
Registrations are now open for event organizers to submit the Google+ events for February 2016 IngressFS Events.
Here’s some #IngressFS pro-tips:
The list of registered events can be found right here:
24,688 Agents from 353 cities in 57 countries earned 2.9 billion AP, gained 4,729 levels and walked 58,404 km during the 671 First Saturday events throughout 2015.
Global Score
Top 50 Events
Country Leaderboards
City Scorecards
Country Scorecards
The final global scores were relatively close with both teams winning something. The Resistance had 190 more agents and 43.7 million more AP while the Enlightened had 111 more levels gained and 710 more km walked. Although in May, there was a 1.5x AP bonus and in December, a 2x AP bonus, the Average AP per Agent was highest in September and October. Holidays around the world had a big impact on FS events in January (New Years) and April (Easter), as well as the US holidays in July (Independence Day) and December (Thanksgiving).
The biggest event of 2015 was in Taipei, Taiwan in September where there was 310 agents and almost 52 million AP was earned.
With a staggering 194 events, USA was the #1 country for the year, earning 1250 Levels. In 2nd place is Japan, with less events than Brazil, Canada or Russia, had almost the same amount of levels gained as all three of them combined!
The strongest country for the year was the Philippines where they earned an average of 223,581 AP per agent. Top countries USA and Japan came in at 34th and 50th respectively.
Interestingly, the top 5 countries in AP Earned (USA, Japan, Brazil, Canada and Australia) are all within the center 1/5th of the scatter plot where the Average AP per Agent is between 100k-150k for both factions.
The US managed to clock up a massive 15,804 km walked, while Guatemala recorded the best average distance per agent of 5.56km.
All the city scorecards are available on our Google+ page so you can share them with your community.
In the USA, there were 194 events amongst the 111 cities that participated in 2015.
Click to view slideshow.Thank you to all the amazing FS organizers around the world for stepping up and volunteering their time and effort to make these events possible and bring so many people together to have fun. We hope that everyone has just as much fun, if not more, in 2016!
Hello there and welcome to the year in review for the Niantic Investigation! 2015 was a colossal year in terms of story as the century-old conflict between the Shapers and N’zeer heated up due to Agent activity across 3 powerful global anomalies.
2015 began not with a whimper, but with a bang – a large one, to be exact, in Afghanistan at the start of the Shonin Anomaly Series.
On February 21st, a large-scale explosion took place at the site of a 13MAGNUS Nest – a Portal of immense power used by a duo of ancient societies: 13MAGNUS and the Anti-MAGNUS. On site were 3 groups of people:
When Azmati lept into action, destroying the Shonin Stone – a powerful artifact that could be used with the Nest to summon the N’zeer – the explosion happened. Azmati died in the attack and and at that moment, OLW, Devra and all other known members of the original Niantic Project would disappear (except for ADA, we’ll get to her later.)
On March 5th, 2015, 31 XM Shards of Devra would appear in the Portal Network. Immediately, the Investigative community began to fear that Devra was the precedent of the possibility that all the missing people would return as Shards.
During this time, ADA began making discoveries about herself, learning with the help of Susanna Moyer of another AI living inside her: Truthseeker, created in one night by Richard Loeb, who has no coding experience, in 1997 at the NSA.
Further details would elucidate that Verity Seke, the operator of the Niantic Project G+, is actually Truthseeker.
Due to their control of the Anomalies and the majority of the Shards, the Resistance controlled Shonin and Devra.
Following the finale of Shonin, Hank Johnson revealed that he would travel to the ancient city of Persepolis to confront Jahan, who was in route there and stop her.
This Anomaly series revolved around the fight for the next Researcher in the Portal Network: Stein Lightman – the expert of Shaper Glyphs. This also included the rumored showdown between Hank and Jahan in the city, which was destroyed by Alexander the Great. However, the destruction had failed to destroy ancient AntiMAGNUS artifacts that were buried beneath the city. Jahan planned to activate them to further her cause. Agents lept into action again to control the Anomalies and the 41 #LightmanShards.
In the midst of the series, P.A Chapeau had managed to separate Klue and ADA once and for all.
Once again, the Resistance continued their string of victories, controlling the overall Anomalies despite the Enlightened control of the majority of the Shards. Hank would end up abandoning his goals of Persepolis at the request of Devra, who warned him if he went “There’d be no coming back.”
As things began to cool down, rumors began to emerge of Tycho creating a new comic book, entitled Ingress: Origins, and a potential attack on ADA began to form. The calm before the storm ended and the first wave of the storm began on August 6th, when ADA had been ‘terminated‘ live on Behind the Scanner:
Meanwhile, Susanna would discover a mysterious secret tied to the very creation of the Niantic Project itself: A secret project codenamed Abaddon:
This mysterious name, only known by Calvin and a secret few, would be the cause of the most massive Anomaly series yet as all the remaining 12 researchers of Niantic would be up for grabs via a new form of XM Anomaly codenamed “Flash Shards”.
During the series we learned the greatest truth of all: Ezekiel Calvin, as the Niantic Project was slowly beginning, somehow arranged for all the members of Niantic sans ADA to be killed and turned into Simulacra. He then had their bodies stored in a secret facility built below CERN. The codename of the lab: ABADN.
Why did Calvin do it? Many suspect he’s actually a member of the Anti-MAGNUS like Jahan and secretly created Niantic to strike a blow against the Shapers. What became known was that if the Resistance controlled the anomaly series, the researchers would return into our world as Simulacra with no recollection of what happened since the beginnings of Ingress and the Investigation while if the Enlightened won, they’d return as human beings.
By controlling the majority of the Anomalies plus 6 of the researchers, the Resistance closed out 2015 with another win. Hank Johnson and Jahan would work together to return to Geneva, revive the Researchers and explain the truth of what happened to them in the last 3 years.
The Resistance had claimed all 3 anomalies: Shonin, Persepolis and Recursion. The Researchers are now Simulacra and are out in the world.
2015 is over….but what mysteries will 2016 bring?
As always:
Serious investigators dig deeper. Seeking the truth, no matter where it may lead, is our calling. Faction, race, gender, age – none of these things matter here. To potentially dig down the rabbit hole, join us at Operation Essex. Keep a close eye at the Niantic Project G+ as well as pages of the Niantic Researchers, sensitives and Corporations to learn more.
See you all in 2016! I can’t wait to explore the Investigation with you all! 
Welcome back everyone. We have detected a new version currently on its 1% roll out on the Google Play Store. Lucky users will receive the version shortly, with a 100% global roll out approaching days later. This is a relatively small teardown, but holds one cool change that warrants the post.
I noticed this new string in our values/strings.xml file
<string name="GLYPH_MODE_REDO_TEXT">REDO</string>
Which led me to experimenting with Glyph hacking. We will start with an animated image, then I will explain it.
As you can see, after you enter a Glyph (before starting the next one). A “redo” button appears. If you tap that button, it allows you to redo that Glyph (in case you missed it). It is important to note that the timer still continues to count down.
Summarized
This version was built on 1/7 and obtained on 1/8. This is the first release in 2016 and starting with a feature enhancement!
949 Agents from 44 cities in 18 countries earned 90 million AP, gained 125 levels and walked 2,689 km during January’s First Saturday events around the world.
The most AP earned this month was in Portland, OR, USA, with over 8 million AP earned. (They also earned the most AP in 2015.)
Tampa Bay Area, FL and Fayetteville, AR, USA both had the most levels gained with 9 each.
The highest average AP per agent was in Merida, Mexico where 14 agents earnt an average of 235,600 AP. The biggest event was in Suzhou, China where 67 agents attended.
The agents in Suzhou, China also walked the furthest total distance, clocking up 264 km while in Las Palmas, Spain, 23 agents walked an average of 7.09 km
For the month, the Enlightened had 5 more levels gained and 4,529 more AP per agent while the Resistance had an extra 11 agents, 2.7 million ap and 239 km walked.
This month also saw the first ever FS event at the South Pole, Antarctica where 1 agent from both teams got together for a chat and drink to celebrate the new year.
Click to view slideshow.SO an interesting new leak has emerged containing the first look at the official medal for the #Obsidian Anomaly Series!
It is important to note that this is from an events page for the upcoming anomalies. Like shown in the past, details are subject to change and we don’t have all available information at our disposal. We are simply sharing what we know so far. Please do not jump to conclusions until more official details emerge.
Paid participants will have the option to have their official stats tracked at Obsidian events. Top 1331 Agents* worldwide awarded Obsidian Elite Medal (in app medal will change from Obsidian to Obsidian Elite at end of season).
Interestingly enough, purchasing the Common Swag Pack or higher will allow you the the option to have your Agent Stats tracked via the Stat Tracer: “XM Stat Tracer (optional) – have your stats tracked for Obsidian Elite consideration“.
Details are still emerging as we speak, and it seems like the production webpage is being updated piece by piece (still tons of Abaddon information on the page). Stay tuned in to Fev Games for more information and let us know your take in the comments.
Events page source: http://events.ingress.com/xmanomalies/obsidian/rio
All Abaddon pieces of the page have been removed (it seems like the production page was a copied Abaddon one used as template). Abaddon kits replaced with Obsidian ones.
Event page has been taken down.
All of the event pages have now been published! Plot twist though, the top 1331 agent competition along with the alleged Elite version of the Obsidian medal have been removed from the new event pages. Interesting to know if this was Niantic’s way of testing a leak, or if they changed this based on community feedback? Perhaps it was a combination and was intentionally leaked to poll community feedback without losing face.
Notice the XM STAT TRACER section has been changed from the previous version above.
Welcome back everyone. We have detected a new version currently on a 1% rollout. Some lucky individuals already have this version, while the 100% roll out remains a few days off. This teardown, again like the previous, is small but contains one feature worth the post.
<string name="CAPSULE_SELECT_MAX_BUTTON_TEXT">MAX</string> <string name="CAPSULE_LOAD_NO_ITEMS_AVAIALABLE">No items available.</string> <string name="CAPSULE_UNLOAD_NO_ITEMS">No items</string>
So upon finding these strings in this version, I was surprised that bulk load / unload was a feature. Especially after the capsule bugs of 2015, but enough talking and onto the screenshots.
A capsule full of 97 assorted items.
a capsule with all 97 random items selected
As you can see. It took one click to completely select all items in a capsule. This also works in reverse during filling. Let’s say you have an empty capsule with 209 keys in inventory. If you click the “select all” button, the nearest (if sorting by distance and on “keys” filter) 100 portal keys will selected and thus be inserted into the capsule. Additionally, if you are on the “mods” filter and have selected common shields and hit “select all”. It will grab all the commons, then rares, then very rares, than axas.
Basically, the select all is smart enough to know about rarity and distance when using filters.
This makes building capsules of local keys very easy and is a welcome addition.
A tiny bit boring, but still new sounds.
beacon
fracker
key locker
This version was built on 1/22 and obtained on 1/25. The last two releases have packed a feature enhancement. Can we keep the streak going?
