Borderlands players cracked a secret cipher to find 'the most valuable SHiFT code we've ever made'

(Image credit: 2K Games)

When Gearbox rocked up to PAX West to show off some concept art for Borderlands 4, they didn't give away too much information about the upcoming looter-shooter. They did give something else away, however, as our siblings at GamesRadar reported—dice cards that contained a secret message. Each one had a series of up and down arrows surrounding a picture of a D20, and when Randy Pitchford revealed they contained a secret code, the internet's sleuths went to work.

It didn't take long for someone to figure it out. Specifically, Twitter user @40_BaySt and his wife cracked the code. "It's a binary code", he explained. "Up triangles are 1. Down triangles are O. There are 29 sequences and each sequence is 8 digits. Then you convert the binary to decimal and then to ASCII."

Which revealed this: SXFBT-39953-J33TT-3T333-KSHW6. That's a Shift code you can redeem in multiple Borderlands games, rewarding you with 50 golden keys for each one, or 50 skeleton keys in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. If you redeem it in Borderlands 3, you also get 10 diamond keys. As Pitchford said, "This is the most valuable SHiFT code we've ever made, FYI."

Borderlands 4 is currently scheduled for a 2025 release. Let's all just pretend that the reveal didn't come after the movie flopped so hard you could hear it on Pandora.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.