Why the World of Warcraft secret-finding community spent the weekend scouring Azeroth for…a muffin?

World of Warcraft’s 20th anniversary event is in full swing, and one of its features has caused many of the heroes of Azeroth to search the entire in-game universe for a particularly elusive pastry for most of the weekend. In addition to the Guest Relations secrets that players have been able to complete, the hunt is on for Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle, a totally rad motorcycle mount at the end of a chain of confounding clues.

This article will include many spoilers for the quest chain to obtain the mount — come back later if you’d like to start by solving them on your own.

While easter eggs and ‘secret’ rewards have been a part of World of Warcraft from the very beginning, the past few expansions have formalized the most difficult of quest chains and obscure puzzles under the banner ‘Secrets of Azeroth‘. Recent secret mounts such as the Lucid Nightmare or pets like B’aal require many difficult steps, and in Dragonflight we got a formal timed event with its own fluffy llama mount reward.

The ongoing celebration outside of the Caverns of Time has its own batch of secrets to uncover with a little Tuskarr buddy through the Guest Relations chain. After getting most of the way through those quests, players earn the title of ‘Detective‘ and can begin the arduous search for the felcycle. An NPC in Dornogal simply named Dalaran Survivor claims to have witnessed a crime. She will only talk to a detective — so players who equip the title receive a quest and cryptic note.

The note is a first in a series of clues that led secret-finders across Azj-Kahet to eventually catch up with Ratts, an aspiring master of secrets (and former Assistant Event Coordinator of the 20th Anniversary bash). This wily vulpera escapes, but not before dropping a gem that is part of a key which unlocks her true hideout. By the middle of last week, players had decoded the clues on the key itself to discover Ratts’ Hideout within the Karazhan Catacombs.

Searching for clues in the catacombs

This instanced labyrinth of trash, clues, puzzles, cats, and red herrings (literal and figurative) seems completely overwhelming when you first explore it. At the very end of the hideout, the felcycle awaits, surrounded by twelve unlit torches. Players were quick to solve the first three puzzles and light the first three torches by reliving one of Azeroth’s greatest love stories, witnessing a void-powered invasion, and solving a series of number-based clues within the hideout itself.

After receiving nine coins, the Pieces of Hate, the secret-finding community were on the hunt for a way to spend them for the next macguffin. Many were reminded of this year’s Plunderstorm event, but the pirate vendor in Valdrakken refuses to accept the coins as they are “pointless”. The most astute detectives realized that the word “pointless” was actually a reference to longtime content creator Wowcrendor, a YouTuber with popular video countdowns of pointless things around Azeroth such as the saddest NPCs or the weirdest buildings.

These videos always begin with a shot of the goblin statue on the island at the mouth of Booty Bay, and sure enough, players found a vendor inside the statue that was willing to part with a teleportation relic in exchange for the Pieces of Hate plus one more item: The Golden Muffin. This is where the secret-seekers of Azeroth spun their fel-infused wheels for several days, trying to track down the location of this glowing sweet treat —  and arguing over whether that was even the next step in the puzzle.

Many players made the connection between a muffin and Jeremy Feasel a.k.a. Muffinus, a World of Warcraft game designer and previous architect of many of the puzzles and secrets of Azeroth. A tribute rare elite on Argus, Feasel the Muffin Thief, drops a Timeless Coin. Sure enough, detectives were quick to find Jeremy Feasel himself, an elite battle pet trainer, inside of a cave on the Timeless Isle. The secret-finding community spent much of the weekend prodding Jeremy and scouring the surrounding area (and the entire extended universe) for the Golden Muffin. I personally spent about an hour fishing within the cavern, positive I would reel in a glowing golden prize.

Earning your muffin

It turns out that players had been working backwards from an assumed solution instead of forwards from concrete clues in their quest to locate the muffin. In the previous step of the puzzle, as the machines that rewarded the Pieces of Hate appeared throughout Ratts’ Hideout so did several scraps of paper marked with numbers. A Discord user named Solmyre was the first to decode the numbered scraps, leading to Uther’s Tomb in Tirisfal Glades. Only after reading graffiti etched on the floor could players return to Jeremy Feasel to prove their worth by defeating him in a pet battle (using previous secret pets) in order to earn The Golden Muffin.

By Sunday afternoon, an army of sleuthing players had acquired their muffins and moved on to the next step of the puzzle gauntlet. The secret-finding community is currently moving statues around the Karazhan Catacombs to activate pressure plates in a particular order (and being foiled by pesky rats). Hop on over to their Discord channel to follow their progress towards unlocking Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle.