Geocaching Puzzle Tools

Colour Decoder

Read a grid of coloured squares as text: each colour is three bytes, which often spell out coordinates.

You can also drag an image here, or press Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot.

Decoded

Set the grid to match the squares in the image.

#ColourHexRGBAs text

Colours as characters: a hex code is three bytes

A colour is three numbers from 0 to 255, and so is a run of three ASCII characters. That coincidence is the whole trick: a row of coloured squares can spell out a message that looks, to anyone glancing at the cache page, like decoration.

The hex form matters too. 4E3531 is a perfectly ordinary shade of green, and it is also the text N51. If a decoded string contains anything coordinate-shaped it is called out above the table, since that is nearly always what the puzzle was hiding.

  • Bit Plane & LSB Viewer Inspect every bit plane of an image and pull out messages hidden in the least significant bits.
  • Channel & Levels Explorer Split an image into its red, green, blue and alpha channels, stretch the contrast and posterise it to make faint hidden shapes visible.
  • Decode Anything Throw a mysterious string at every common cipher at once, and see the readings ranked with anything coordinate-shaped at the top.