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

We're in the money
(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 Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.

Read more
Borderlands 3 - Shift codes loot
Borderlands 3 Shift codes: Every active Shift code and how to redeem them
Tiny Tina as the Bunker Master
All Tiny Tina's Wonderlands Shift codes and how to redeem them
Borderlands 4 teaser image
Borderlands 4: Everything we know about Gearbox's next big FPS
borderlands 4
Borderlands 4 gets a release date and another acrobatic trailer
A woman in gold with a glowing blue visible under flowing white hair
'Borderlands 4 does have some open-world-like features,' says Gearbox, before clarifying it isn't an open world game 'in the traditional use of that term'
FragPunk codes - A close-up shot of a mercenary wearing a mask with glowing eyes.
All FragPunk codes and how to redeem them
Latest in FPS
Starfield's companion robot giving a thumbs-up
Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it's 'much less stressful as an indie' without daily meetings or 'office politics': it's 'very refreshing to just care about the game'
Team Fortress Spy being shocked
An FPS studio pulled its game from Steam after it got caught linking to malware disguised as a demo, but the dev insists it was actually the victim of a labyrinthine conspiracy
Neighbors Suburban Warfare screenshot a child aims a slingshot at a man from across a cul-de-sac.
A beta of backyard FPS Neighbors: Suburban Warfare is out now, and the balance discussion is hysterical: nerf trash can lids and children
Fragpunk
Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike
Image for
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s getting a new roguelite wave defense mode that sounds a whole lot like a souped-up take on Killing Floor
Destiny 2: Season of Plunder promo image.
'We made one big mistake': Destiny 2 developer reveals how a small team dedicated to player retention led to a 20 hour server outage and character rollback
Latest in News
Starfield's companion robot giving a thumbs-up
Former Bethesda dev who quit Starfield to go solo says it's 'much less stressful as an indie' without daily meetings or 'office politics': it's 'very refreshing to just care about the game'
Schedule I drug deal going down
Forget REPO, Monster Hunter Wilds and Assassin's Creed Shadows, Steam's current global top seller is an early access game about managing a drug empire
Naoe looking at the wrist blade in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft says don't compare Assassin's Creed Shadows' success to Valhalla: The latter launched in Covid's 'perfect storm' and feedback on platforms 'less affected by review bombing' is stellar
Tarn Adams, who cofounded Bay 12 Games with his brother Zach, talks about their single-player simulation game "Dwarf Fortress" during an interview at their home office in Poulsbo, Washington, west of Seattle, on December 9, 2022. - A cult favorite among indie game fans, "Dwarf Fortress" has been available for purchase on the Steam online store since December 6, a first for this title that has been distributed for free since its debut in 2006. The real-time management game, set in a medieval-fantasy world and involving overseeing a group of dwarves seeking to build a mighty fortress, has climbed to the fourth best-selling weekly title on Steam. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)
Dwarf Fortress' creator is so tired of hearing about AI: 'Press a button and it writes a really sh*tty, wrong essay about something—and they still take your job'
Crucial X9 external SSD on blue background
You can pick up the 2 TB version of my favorite budget external SSD for less than $0.06 per GB, transfers 300+ GB of data in 6 minutes
Image of illuminated manuscript-style drawings from the game Pentiment.
Random characters kept swearing in Obsidian's font-obsessed murder-mystery when its procedural error system ran amok: 'Naughtiness abounded'