History of the-christmas-tree

Introduction
The channel #the-christmas-tree, was a channel in the POLYNOMERS discord set up on the 1st of December 2020 to celebrate the Christmas month, approximately every day, the owner Polygon Donut added a sprite or emote to the tree. However, after a continuous, 16 day streak, the christmas tree disappeared, and was supposedly “stolen” by an unconfirmed entity.

The First Clue
The first clue was released the very next day, the clue was an image. The image contained a message on a sticky note from the entity who stole the Chritsmas Tree. The message announced to the reader that the tree had been split into 5 different pieces (images) and that one of the pieces of the Christmas Tree could be found in one of Polygon Donut’s previous messages. However, in under 3 minutes of the image being received by the users, the user “doovy” became the first user to locate a piece of the Christmas Tree.

The Second Clue
The next day, on the 19th of December, the second clue was released, the clue showed a series of letters and numbers written on the back of the previous image. The message was quickly figured to be an encoded message, and in fact, the message had been encoded into encryption type Base64. When the message was decoded, it would display a link, which would lead the user to the following image. Despite appearing to be a dead end, the image actually led to the next piece, the first user to figure this out was user “timo” who discovered a hidden link by desaturating and decreasing the image's brightness. Once typed into the search bar, the user would find the second piece of the Christmas Tree. The piece was finally posted as an image by user "DOG".

The Third Clue
The next day, the third clue was released, it was another image. Inside the image was a safe and a string of characters written along the side of the safe. The characters were a set of webdings, which when changed back to normal text spelt out “counting”. The message “counting” itself held no lead, however users still took the opportunity to search for a possible code inside of the channel anyway. Soon after, the code was finally uncovered by user “IrioidIsSleepy” who found the message of which had been editited to signify that it was the code to the safe.

The Fourth Clue
The following day, the fourth clue was released, the image showed a piece of paper contained within the previously used safe, which contained a message, which when written backwards, led to the link of a video. Users quickly reversed this link, and when followed it led to a video. The video held 4 frames, each containing different parts of a link. When the parts of the link were ordered correctly, the following link would have been generated. Once this link was found, the image was promptly posted into the chat by user ‘drip potato’.

The Final Clue
On the 22nd of December 2020, the next and final clue was revealed. The clue contained a note which had been found inside the previous piece. The image inside of the message showed a notebook, inside the notebook was text that had been flipped in various ways to disguise a link. The text in the notebook can be re-arranged so that it shows a valid discord server invite. The link leads to a server named “The Forgotten Realms”, it also became apparent at this point who the unknown thief of this tree was, as on the splashscreen you were invited by the user “the gronch”, who was the owner of the server. The server consists of 5 separate channels: “the-void”, “the-light”, “the-darkness”, “the-sky” and “the-field”. In each channel was a series of images, amongst these images however was part of a link, in every channel. By combining these parts of the link, one would be able to make out a link to the final clue. The link which emerges from these channels leads to an image, represented as the “final clue” and indicates that the final piece can be found where the Polygon Donut legacy began, in this case, users took the time to look through Polygon Donut’s oldest known youtube video. Among the comments of Polygon Donut’s first video, “NeonBits By PolygonDonut(ME) GeometryDash” a comment by Polygon Donut contains a link to the last piece of the tree. The last piece of the tree was finally discovered and posted by user “quil” at around 11:40am PST, on the 22nd of December 2020.

The Encounter
The next day, on the 23rd of December, the tree was finally put up to commemorate the gathering of all the pieces. However, in the process of this, the original thief of the tree, “the gronch” interrupted.

The End
On Christmas Eve, the Christmas Tree was put up in the channel for the final time to commemorate the event.

"Look in #the-forest"
On the first day of the tree’s disappearance, a user by the name of “Tronxest” told Polygon Donut to check #the-forest. The search had no lead, and after 4 attempts of searching through different forest pictures, the channel was discontinued.

"There is no hope"
On the 20th of December, user “retroded” uploaded a video of what seemed to be a shrine inside of their Minecraft world, the shrine held an image of the tree with signs labelling the image: “There is no hope”

Characters
The Gronch is a user-based entity who appeared during the History of #the-christmas-tree, the entity was first noticed during the fifth clue, in which users were led to the entities corresponding discord server. The character has close resemblance to the Dancing Cow through its image, this was later confirmed in the video titled "..." published by Polygon Donut on the 19th of February 2021.

Lore
Coming soon.

Trivia

 * The group of users focused on trying to find the pieces during this event had a dedicated discord channel called #tree-hunters, anyone who was active during the period was able to obtain the only event exclusive role in the server, the “Tree Hunter” role.
 * Three exclusive channels were made through this event, including #the-christmas-tree, #tree-hunters and #the-forest, all of these are now archived (deleted).
 * The name “The Gronch” is a deliberate misspelling of the popular movie and novel character “The Grinch” a character who is widely known to hate christmas.
 * The image of “The Gronch” closely represents the image of the Dancing Cow as they both have the same shape figure.
 * This was later confirmed in the video titled "..." published by Polygon Donut on the 19th of February 2021.
 * The image shown in the #the-field channel inside of The Forgotten Realms server is a reference to the well-known image “Bliss” one of the backgrounds from Windows XP.