Mistfall Hunter Cipher Words and Their Camp NPCs

What to actually do with a cipher

A cipher is a sealed item you hand to a camp NPC, who opens it. Three steps, and only the second one involves any judgement:

1. Reach character level 5. The Decipher option does not appear on camp NPCs before that. Two of the three sources state this outright, and one of them attributes it to Bellring Games.
2. Open the cipher and read its two clue words. They are printed on the item. Look either one up in the table above.
3. Take it to the NPC who owns that word. The bonus is theirs to pay; the base payout is not.

The cipher is consumed when you accept the result, and there is no second attempt. That is the whole reason the table exists — you get one choice per cipher, and it is worth thirty seconds of looking up.

The pairs people are actually searching for

Every cipher prints two words, and both belong to the same NPC. That is why searches for these arrive in pairs — players type in exactly what is on the scroll in front of them. These are the pairs that show up most:

The two words on your cipher	Take it to
Sealing Wax + Acid	Sigrid, the tavern wife
Weaver + Echo	Dew, at the Goddess Statue
Prophecy + Spindle	Dew
Score + Plucking	Pip, at the Auction House
Insight + Balance	Cazarro, the merchant
Covenant + Interest	Cazarro
Camel Bells + Salt Licks	Merimo, the giant goat
Elder Edict	Pip

Because both words land on the same NPC, you only ever need to recognise one of them. If the first word you look up is not in the table, try the other. Every word that belongs to Pip lives in the Auction House — the eight that are his, and how solid each one is, are covered on that page.

Getting it wrong costs you the bonus and nothing else

All seven camp NPCs — Soekja, Dew, Pip, Dramm, Cazarro, Sigrid and Merimo — will decipher any cipher you bring them. The matching NPC pays a bonus item on top; everyone else pays the base result and no bonus. Two of the three sources describe that bonus as having a high chance of being Epic rarity, which is the most anyone has published about it.

So the downside of a mistake is bounded. You do not brick the cipher, you do not lose the base reward, and nothing about it is permanent. If you are holding a cipher whose words are not on this page at all, handing it to anybody still pays.

Why “give the Ashen Cipher to Sigrid” is not a rule

It is the most repeated tip about ciphers anywhere, and it is a shortcut rather than a rule. The bonus is tied to the clue words printed on a cipher, not to the cipher’s name — so no cipher is permanently anyone’s.

The likely origin is mundane: Ashen Ciphers commonly carry one of Sigrid’s words, so one player’s correct answer got written down as a general one and copied outward. It will often be right. It is right for a reason that has nothing to do with the word “Ashen”, which means it will also sometimes be wrong, and you cannot tell which without reading your own cipher.

The same caution applies to any advice phrased as “give the X Cipher to Y”. A separate thing to keep apart: items like the Dried Flower Knot are cipher keys, which unlock content rather than paying out a reward roll. They are not what this page is about.

Haggling: the one word the sources do not agree on

Fifty-one of the 52 words below have one owner. Haggling has two answers, and this is the most useful thing on this page for anyone who has hit it:

• mistfallhunterguide.org and mistfallhunter.app both give Haggling to Cazarro, flatly.
• Game Rant lists it twice — under Cazarro as “Barter, Haggling”, and under Pip as “Haggling, Hoarding” — each marked only if paired together.

Read that way the conflict dissolves, and the answer is better than either half of it: the pair decides. Haggling with Barter goes to Cazarro; Haggling with Hoarding goes to Pip. That is also consistent with how every other cipher works, since the words always come in twos.

This is one source’s account and we are not presenting it as settled. But it explains why older posts disagreed about Haggling, and if your cipher pairs it with Hoarding, Pip is the one worth trying.

What is not settled

Eight of the 52 rows are flagged in the table, and it is worth knowing why rather than just seeing a label:

• Six words appear in one source only — Prayer for Pip, Victory Wine for Sigrid, Wings and Praise for Soekja, and Mineral Vein and Oathbound for Dramm. The last two entered Game Rant’s table through a reader comment dated 9 August 2026, which is about as fresh and as unverified as data gets.
• Haggling and Hoarding are the pair described above.
• Three words are spelled differently across sources — Cloves against Sealed Cloves, Salt Licks against Salt Block — and two more are split in one source where the others keep them whole, City State and Camel Bells. Nothing turns on this, but if you are matching text on your screen character by character, it is why you might not find an exact hit.
• Whether Dew and Serenia are one NPC under two published names, or two entries from a localisation split, is openly unresolved by the source that prints both.

None of this comes from Bellring Games. There is no official answer key — the studio has published no word list at all, and everything here was worked out by players deciphering ciphers and reporting what happened. Where all three sources print the same word against the same NPC, that is three independent write-ups agreeing, which is the strongest evidence available and still not the same thing as confirmation.

The Weaver quest is a different thing

Searching “Mistfall Hunter Weaver” turns up two unrelated things, and it is an easy trap:

• Weaver as a cipher clue word belongs to Dew. So does Echo, which is why the pair is searched together — the weaver echo pair printed on one cipher both belong to Dew.
• The Weaver as a quest is step two of the Guidance of Fate line, and it asks you to upgrade the Goddess Statue in camp. It has nothing to do with ciphers.

They feel connected because the step after The Weaver sends you to talk to Dew — the same NPC who owns the Weaver cipher word. It is a coincidence of naming, not a mechanic. Every quest in the game, all 128 of them, is listed on the quest page.

Related

If you came here because a name in your quest log does not match anything in your bag, that is a different problem with its own page — quest item names that don’t match your inventory covers the ones players have worked out, and now says which of them turned out to be cipher words rather than items.

Terms used across the camp and the run are collected in the glossary. You have to survive a run with a cipher in your bag to bring it home at all, which is what extraction is about.