You may or may not have seen an image of these weird clouds before (see second image), if not I will explain. Reddit user u/Kiwuthegamer posted that image a couple of days ago asking if this configuration of clouds was normal. Its not (who woulda thought) and it leads to a google drive link. This google drive contains 4 files. I saw it and made a post here discussing some of the initial clues I found in the 4 files that I could quickly ascertain. I'd recommend reading it because the direction this ARG is going in has potential.
I've created a google doc so I can catalogue all findings in one place:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TemCUgbrejuqCY73qO7pkrpHZatVsJ-hhZ-FkgoWvio/edit?usp=sharing
The files contain a manifest, A screenshot, corrupted footage of a Bedwars game, and a runtime log of a player joining a world for the first time. It seems to tell the story of a player named jimmyy1 whose game is trapping an entity known as endermite. It tries to relay messages to him through the main menu, multiplayer networks, and single player worlds.
I've been working on this ARG on and off for a couple of days (I think I might be the only one I don't see anyone else talking about this) and came to a couple conclusions.
In the manifest and the runtime logs, it says the files belong to a "jamesa". Jimmy is just a nickname for James, so im going to assume any file path that includes jamesa is from jimmys computer, and thus jimmy wrote the file descriptions in the manifest. Its interesting how Jimmy says that the runtime log is from his gameplay, which would make the decription next to the Bedwars file path also written by him. The screenshot however he says he did not take. Im going with the idea that the person that took the original cloud image and mountain screenshot may be the entity itself.
I did find some new clues. In the screenshot of the mountain, I decided to look closer. Not with my eyes, but with software. I used a layer analysis tool and found some hidden text in the zsteg output.
"tyhejq atzi zh nzy" transforming with cipher key endermite = "please save me jim".
This is a very common theme in this ARG, multiple encoded message of endermite begging jimmy to save them (help me please, let me free, help me jimmy, etc).
In the log, I did find that it randomly jumps from 20:44:06 to 15:58:35 and back to 20:44:06. In 15:58:35 it references jamesa. Other than that I haven't found much else. I'm sure theres more to be found, but if there is its small and extremely hard to notice, maybe to do with solving "sdafgfhugadkfm" (what the entity said to jimmy) somehow but I don't know. (interesting thing to note, sdafgfhugadkfm is compossed almost entirely of letters in the middle of your keyboard). Maybe the coordinates of both players spawning in as well could be in question.
In the Bedwars video I did find two noticeable clues. In the beginning of the video when jimmy spawns into the game a player named "modynitro_010111" joins at the same time, walks off the platform and leaves. This player uses the exact same default skin as jimmyy1 (Makena) and looking at the Pikanetwork player stats, modynitro has never played a game on the network and is level 0. They haven't logged into the server since the 20th of april, like the jimmyy1 account (see pictures for reference). Jimmy even looks a bit to the left at mody before they leave. It seems intentional and there is potential evidence for it, theres even some binary in their name, so I thought I should write it down.
In the same video, for exactly one frame, you can see ender pearls appear in jimmys inventory (see pic). These spell out "..010526" in ASCII. Near the end some groups of characters flash next to "my name is" as well. When I first wrote them down I got some of them wrong because of the font, but after finding the exact font online I was able to correctly identify every character. Its 14 groups of 7 characters, and they each have 3 letters, 2 symbols, and 2 numbers. They also all end in a letter. There is a structure to them, but I haven't found anything to do with them yet. I made a little grid to see if there was anything but no dice.
The last thing I'm considering to be a clue is the owner of the drive, "wldd". This could also just be meaningless.
To conclude, the current unconnected potential clues I have are as follows.
-sdafgfhugadkfm
-..010526
-PG56 (Spectrogram clue found at end of Bedwars video)
-14 Groups of Characters
-Hexadecimal AAAA (maybe)
-modynitro_010111
-wldd
A theory could be that something is stopping endermite from reaching jimmy, When jimmy spawned in, it asked him to "stop", killed him with TNT, banned endermite from the singleplayer world and crashed the game. Endermite is getting creative on messages that it can deliver to jimmy without whatever it is from stopping it.
I'll be honest, whatever clues might be left are small. I've watched the Bedwars video frame by frame (literally) and found nothing else. (although maybe im stupid). My best guess for another clue I've missed is in the runtime log somewhere. Somehow, those clues above combine into a link to a website, or a hidden message. I've tried making a youtube link with some of the 14 groups by converting the symbols into numbers and adding PG56 to the front and back, tried Pastebin for both configurations of PG56wldd, treating 010526 as letters (aez) and adding that to links, but nothing. the ".." implies something comes before it yet nothing I've tried with that works either. 010111010526 isn't valid binary even if you remove the 526 since its 9 bits (8 bits make a byte). I've tried shifting each letters of sdafgfhugadkfm by 010111 or 010526 and yet nothing.
This seems like a really cool ARG and I do want to solve it, but either I'm missing a small number sequence or like 3 characters in the log that somehow needs to be applied to some of these clues or I'm looking at this entirely the wrong way. Maybe 010526 means 01.05.26 and its the time a screenshot or file takes place (at 1:05am 26 seconds) and the files called like 2026-4-20_01.05.26 or smth.
If you have any ideas at all, literally no matter how stupid you may think it seems, try it and let me know (google doc or otherwise). But otherwise I'll probably wind down on working on this since I'm at a bit of a dead end. Nothing I've tried works no matter how many clues I've gotten. Unless I get an epiphany and realize I have to travel to the real coordinates 01°05'26"N 000°00'00"E and pray to endermite for the next clue I'm stuck and would appreciate any help.