Daily Brains · one picture, one hidden passphrase, a bench of forensic tools.
Deep Pixel is the steganography puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Every day the lab receives one procedurally painted picture, the same for every player, with a passphrase hidden somewhere inside it. Nothing shows to the naked eye. Players pull the secret out with lab tools that work on the real pixels (colour channels, threshold, bit planes, XOR, an odd-pixel finder, a magnifying lens and a cipher wheel), then type the passphrase to crack the day.
STORY & LORE
The picture
Each day's plate is painted in code from the day's seed: mountain ridges over a lake, sand dunes, a domain-warped nebula, a Bauhaus composition, a pixel-art skyline or stained glass, in one of twelve palettes. The plate's title and number appear under it like a museum label. Nothing is a photo and nothing is downloaded; the same seed paints the same picture on every device.
Hidden, not decorated
The hiding is real. A Monday word is a few levels brighter in one colour channel only; a Wednesday word lives in a single bit of one channel; Friday's key exists only where two channels' bits disagree. The game's test checks that every hidden mark changes the picture's brightness by less than a few levels out of 255 at normal view, and that the day's own tool reveals it clearly enough for a template reader to recover it letter for letter.
HOW IT PLAYS
The week
Difficulty ramps through the week. Monday (Gentle): a word in one colour channel, found with Channel + Contrast. Tuesday (Steady): a word a couple of levels off a near-black silhouette or a near-white moon, found with Threshold (and Invert). Wednesday (Tricky): a word in bit 0, 1 or 2 of one channel, found with Bit plane. Thursday (Tough): a grid of 2×2 dots a few levels off in one channel; Odd pixels and the Lens show it, and each row is a letter in five-bit binary. Friday (Devious, 2 layers): XOR of two channels at one bit spells a key; the plate's catalogue mark run through the Cipher wheel with that key is the passphrase. Saturday (Cunning, 2 layers): a riddle in 5-pixel letters tucked into the picture; read it with the Lens, and its answer is the passphrase. Sunday (Fiendish, 3 layers): a bit plane spells a key, a dot grid spells a ciphertext, and the Cipher wheel turns the two into the passphrase.
The tools
Photo shows the picture as it arrived. Channel isolates red, green or blue and boosts local contrast up to ×24. Threshold splits by brightness at any level, with Invert. Bit plane shows one of the 8 bits of one channel (or all three in colour). XOR compares the same bit of two channels. Odd pixels lights up any pixel that differs from its 5×5 neighbourhood. The Lens magnifies the current view ×5 or ×10 and works with touch, mouse hover and arrow keys. The Cipher wheel shifts each letter back by a key: a word key gives each letter its own shift (A = 0 … Z = 25), a number shifts them all. A forensic readout shows the coordinates and raw RGB of any pixel you touch.
Layers and the Cipher wheel
The layer boxes in the top bar light up as you crack layers. On Friday and Sunday, typing the right key into the Cipher wheel lights layer 1, and on Sunday typing the dot-grid message lights layer 2, so you know you are on the right track before the final answer. Answers are stored only as salted hashes, so the passphrase is not in the page source.
Scoring
A solve starts at 1000. Each hint costs 150, each wrong guess 25 (repeating a wrong guess is free), and past the day's par time (2 minutes on Monday up to 15 on Sunday) the clock costs a point every two seconds, up to 400. A solve never scores below 100. Hints name the tool and setting, never the answer. Give up reveals the passphrase and scores 0. No hints and no wrong guesses is a perfect day.
Sharing
The share card is spoiler-free: one square per layer (🟩 cracked, 🟨 cracked with a hint, ⬛ not cracked), the time and hint count, and the score, for example “🔍 Deep Pixel #31 · Sunday (Fiendish) / 🟩🟩🟨 3 layers · cracked in 6:12, 1 hint”.
THE WEEK
| Day | Difficulty | Layers | Technique | Par |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | 1 | Word in one colour channel | 2:00 |
| Tuesday | Steady | 1 | Word a few levels off black or white | 2:30 |
| Wednesday | Tricky | 1 | Word in a low bit plane | 4:00 |
| Thursday | Tough | 1 | Binary dot code | 6:00 |
| Friday | Devious | 2 | XOR key + cipher mark | 7:00 |
| Saturday | Cunning | 2 | Micro-text riddle | 8:00 |
| Sunday | Fiendish | 3 | Bit-plane key + dot cipher + wheel | 15:00 |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Crack the day's picture | 15 Tickets |
| Perfect day (no hints, no wrong guesses) | +25 Tickets |
| First Crack (first solve) | 🔍 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Clean Room (perfect day) | 🧪 Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Three Plates (3-day streak) | 🎞️ Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Full Week (7-day streak) | 📡 Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Head of Forensics (30-day streak) | 🕵️ Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- Procedural plates in six styles and twelve palettes; seven weekday hiding techniques from a one-channel word on Monday to a three-layer chain on Sunday.
- Lab tools: Channel + Contrast, Threshold + Invert, Bit plane, XOR, Odd pixels, Lens, Cipher wheel, pixel readout.
- Bank of 480 passphrases (no repeat for 480 days), 71 cipher keys and 63 Saturday riddles (no repeat for 63 Saturdays), all stored veiled; answers checked by salted hash.
- scripts/test-deep-pixel.mjs rebuilds 300 days in node, reads every hidden mark back through its own tool and checks it stays invisible at normal view.