Secret symbols or gibberish? A player deciphered the characters in Fort Tarsis during the VIP demo of Anthem.
What is it about? In the VIP demo of Anthem, players stumbled upon strange characters. Especially in the city of Fort Tarsis, letters, posters, or messages in an unknown language were often found.
The player dragoonjefy parked his Javelin in the demo and took it upon himself to decipher the strange “Tarsis language” – successfully! The player hoped to uncover hidden lore through the characters.
How was the language deciphered? The resourceful freelancer arrived at the solution to the riddle through logical conclusions. He looked at the sequences of letters on the various letters and chose the word with the most repetitions.
To his luck, he stumbled upon a word with eleven letters, with the same symbols in positions three and four, and repetitions in positions two and ten. In English, there is only one word that fits: Freelancers.
Since the player was able to decipher one word, he was already quite a bit further along and continued to focus on translating the language. However, he noticed that the usual English two-letter words, like “as”, “of” or “on” were completely missing.
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Instead, dragoonjefy kept coming across “et”. The characters do not produce English words but rather Latin!
What was translated? dragoonjefy posted his find in the Anthem subreddit and also provided a full translation of a text from Fort Tarsis:
OMNIBUS FREELANCERS: TARSIS QUONIAM PROPTER TE PLACENT TOLLERE PURGAMENTUM!
Those hoping for secret information will sadly be disappointed: The message can be roughly translated to “All Freelancers: For the sake of Tarsis, please throw away your trash!”.
This message is not nonsense; it is based on the lore of Anthem. As some players mention on Reddit, a codex can be found outside of Tarsis that describes the trash in the city becoming a problem.
If you want to try your hand at translation yourself, you can find here a gallery of further texts in the “Tarsis language”.
If you prefer to look for new messages yourself, you can look forward to the Open Demo of Anthem:
