Congrats to Dave! (MW Discord Display name) on Solving TreasureFix Hunt NITK1 (Nails in the Kitchen #1)! He has claimed the $2500 Cash Treasure successfully!
On March 1, 2025, TREASUREFIX released 3 different hunts. Nails in the Kitchen #1 was one of them. The other two, We Didn’t Start the Word Search and Americana were also released. While the Word Search has been solved as well, with its $5000 cash prize claimed – AMERICANA with a $100,000 cash prize remains yet to solve!! Searchers are actively working on the hunt.
TREASUREFIX is also planning on releasing a new style of treasure game called TREASURE OR NO TREASURE with a $2000 prize. Learn more about this hunt on the hunt’s site – players are excited for its launch! Join the fun!
Let’s learn more about how Dave went about solving the clues for NITK1, and what advice he might have for other searchers. Might something help solve Americana or another treasure hunt?
First, though, I had the pleasure of asking Nails (co-creator of TREASUREFIX) a question about this particular hunt and solving process. Enjoy:
Q for NAILS: What did you enjoy most about creating NITK1 and did anything surprise you in watching the solving process and submission?
NAILS ANSWERS: NITK1 came together in a burst of colorful inspiration. I really enjoyed playing with the “ingredients” (i.e. Pantone colors) as if I was truly tweaking a recipe. Only in this case, I needed a great location rather than a Michelin-starred meal. When I finally fit (what I considered to be) a plausible recipe for Spicy Bok Choy Salad to Crater Lake by its “Pantone GPS coordinates), I knew that was it — AND that I was releasing a puzzle that I’ll never be able to directly replicate!
My biggest surprise watching the solving process was how quickly — and expertly — someone actually made the dish (shout out to CascadeDiver). This was actually the first time in history that Nails’ Spicy Bok Choy Salad was ever made, as far as I know, as I never recipe tested it outside of my head! ~ Nails
Six Questions with Dave:
- 1Q) Congrats on solving Nails in the Kitchen #1! Please share the excitement of solving the puzzle! How long had you been working on the hunt? Were you confident of the solution when submitting the answer?
Thank you Jenny! Absolutely I was not confident.
I’d had the hunt for almost exactly two months. Nails had released a few cryptic clues and we were all struggling a little bit finding the correct path to go down. I was (woefully incorrectly) convinced there were clues to four separate locations that would form an ‘X’ on a map, and point to the final solve location. I had three locations but couldn’t work out how to turn the recipe section into a fourth. The use of the ingredient ‘roasted pecan’ in its singular form instead of plural led me to believe it was something about the ingredients themselves, instead of their quantities, that would yield a numerical result. I won’t spoil everything, as the hunt and full solution can be found on the TreasureFix website ‘Resources’ section if anyone wants to attempt it themselves. It was a neat hunt.
- 2Q) What are you enjoying most about the TreasureFix treasure hunts? (besides solving one, of course!)
There are three things I’m really enjoying: firstly, instead of being confronted with the traditional slightly-crazy games master with an ego bigger than the hunt, TreasureFix operates through fictional (and antagonistic) characters, so you get the sense there’s a broader story to be discovered outside of the hunts. I’m a big ARG fan so I find this kind of world building within the treasure hunting space a really neat idea.
Secondly, having a more focussed community is really nice. We don’t have the mouse-wheel-breaking onslaught of conversation that’s in the JCB threads for example – it doesn’t take two days to scroll back up through new messages.
Thirdly, the hunts so far have been fairly logical, genuinely puzzle-based, and really nicely visually presented. There’s minimal poems, zero interpretation of wandering dream-like journeys the protagonist goes on before whispering something to a rock that may or not be a hint for the player, and there’s no requirement to go BOTG in the US to win anything.
- 3Q) TreasureFix hunts may contain ciphers, or other types of puzzles to solve. What resources do you find useful to help with these?
I think if my house ever gets raided, there’s going to be quite a lot of confusion about why 90% of my internet traffic is to dcode.fr. It’s just got so much interesting information on there. I used Google Earth a lot in this hunt – which I like because of the icon and colour options, and I also discovered a site I’d not used before, called coordinates-converter.com which is neat if you think you have a location but aren’t sure how it’s encoded.
- 4Q) There are lots of different types of treasure hunts available to work on. Some are more code heavy, while others consist of word play, are riddley, and more geographic in nature. Which type of hunt do you prefer?
A previous answer may have given you a feeling for the kind of hunts I dislike…
Generally I like hunts that give you an ‘aha!’ moment or two – hunts with connections or hunts that require looking at the same thing from a different angle. Also hunts with verifiers along the way. No-one likes to be eight spread sheets deep looking for a backwards-alphabet Vigenere cipher written in Wingdings 3 unless you’ve got a solid reason to.
- 5Q) If stuck on one hunt, it sometimes helps to take a break and work on another. Are you working on any other treasure hunts?
Yes! I’ve the $100,000 ‘Americana’ hunt from TreasureFix on my desktop at the minute. Anyone interested in coming into it now is going to have the advantage of being able to see the solutions to the last three TF hunts and maybe get a little bit of insight into their puzzle creation process.
I’d also consider myself one of the ‘Old Guard’ around the Cracked! bitcoin treasure hunt which I suspect will probably continue forever. It’s one of those that slowly transforms into a kind of vapid chasm of frustration over a few slow weeks and then someone will say something slightly new and you can go back to thinking about it from a different angle. It’s my comfort blanket hunt.
- 6Q) How long have you been working on hunts? What advice might you have for others involved in the treasure hunting hobby?
My first was three years ago – the hunt was The Golden Oyster and I found it on the MW Forum whilst looking for armchair hunts. The mechanism of the hunt itself was really smart – the clues were all visual, there was minimal code, multiple layers, and you ended up with a location as the solve. I was absolutely determined I was going to solve this hunt so I sat down with it over a week and followed all the steps to the location. Except the location I found was a playing field. I couldn’t see why such a clever hunt would point to such an unexceptional field. About two weeks later I read that someone else had solved it – and the location was in fact that playing field.
I wasn’t fully convinced about my answer to the Nails in the Kitchen hunt because I already had an idea of what I thought the answer ought to be – ignoring my preconceptions and ego, and learning from my mistake in The Golden Oyster meant that I was able to win this time.
My advice would be: if the author is being subjective, try to be objective.