Two systems that have nothing to do with each other
These two get discussed as if they were one mechanic, and the players who merge them end up wrong about both. They share nothing except arriving as raid loot. An unidentified drop is ordinary loot whose properties reveal through a timed pickup performed inside the raid. A cipher is a legendary scroll item you carry out and hand to a specific contact in camp.
The confusion has a cost. Players carry unidentified gear home expecting a camp appraisal counter that does not exist, and they hold ciphers indefinitely waiting to learn a system that turns out to be a delivery job. Both mistakes waste storage, and storage is the first thing that runs out in this game.
Neither system involves a fee that anyone has been able to confirm. A per-item identification cost in camp gets quoted around fairly often, and it has never been verified, so nothing below assumes one exists.
Identification happens where you found the item
When an unidentified item drops, revealing it is an interaction that takes time on the spot. That delay is not padding. It exists so that loot cannot be sniped the instant it hits the ground — the person who did the work has a window in which they are the one standing over it, and a third party who wants the item has to take that ground rather than simply out-click everyone.
The same design that protects you also exposes you. For the length of that pickup you are stationary, occupied, and standing on the exact spot where something loud just happened. In a PvPvE game, a fresh corpse is a signal flare, and the pickup animation is the least defensible moment of the run.
So the pickup is a decision, not a formality. Drag or pull back to cover first when you can, and identify from somewhere with one approach rather than four. If you cannot make the area safe and the item is not the reason you came, leaving it is a legitimate answer. You can check what a given category of drop tends to be worth on the item database before you decide how much exposure it justifies.
Squad rules that prevent arguments
In a trio the pickup problem becomes a coordination problem. The workable convention experienced squads use is simple: whoever is not holding the fight does the identifying, and everyone agrees in advance rather than during. A pickup performed by the player who still has full health and a clean escape line is a different risk from the same pickup performed by the one who just burned every cooldown.
Decide the loot rules before you queue, not standing over the drop. Squads that argue about who takes an unidentified piece are squads standing still, which is precisely the state the timer is designed to punish. The general question of what is worth carrying home at all is covered in what to keep and what to sell from a full run.
There is a matchmaking rule worth knowing here too, because it touches loot etiquette. The developers define illegal teaming as multiple players deliberately entering the same match to work together against others, and they have said explicitly that ad-hoc truces struck inside a match are not what they are targeting. Letting another player walk away from a drop is not a punishable act.
Ciphers are a delivery job, not an appraisal
Ciphers are legendary scrolls you extract from raids and hand to a contact in camp. Six ship in the current build: Ancestral, Bloodbound, Shadow, Elder Edict, Echo and Ashen. Handing one in produces a base payout regardless of who you give it to, so a cipher is never wasted — but the right contact adds a chance of a bonus item on top of that payout.
The routing information is in the scroll itself. Each cipher's flavour text carries keywords, and those keywords point at whose business the scroll concerns. A cipher that talks about furnaces and anvils belongs with the person who works metal. One that talks about caravans and salt licks belongs with the person who moves goods. Once you see the pattern it is legible without any table at all.
That said, the exact keyword-to-contact mapping has never been published by the developers. What exists is a map that players compiled by handing in scrolls and comparing results, and that is what the next section reproduces. Treat it as good community work rather than as a rule, and expect edge cases.
The community-compiled keyword map
The following associations come from player reports with multiple independent confirmations, not from any official source. Where a cipher's text contains none of these words, hand it to whoever fits the subject best and take the base payout.
| Keywords in the flavour text | Camp contact |
|---|---|
| city-state, intelligence, blood, insight, balance, barter | Cazarro |
| tides, stone steps | Soekja |
| homeward, anchor, echo, prophecy, spindle | Dew |
| fire, brimstone, ashes, anvil, furnace, nameless | Dramm |
| rugs, caravan, hay, cheese, camel bells, salt licks | Merimo |
| mantra, tree hollow, secret cache, score, plucking, runic, tanned leather | Pip |
| sealing wax, acid, malt | Sigrid |
Read the table as a starting hypothesis. Some scrolls carry words from two rows, and in those cases players generally report going with the stronger thematic match — a scroll about an anchor and a prophecy is closer to Dew than a scroll that only happens to mention a fire in passing. Nobody has published a tiebreaker, so this is judgement, not arithmetic.
The level or camp progress at which ciphers start appearing has also never been confirmed. If you have not seen one yet, that is not evidence that you are doing something wrong.
How to read a cipher you have never seen before
The reliable method takes about ten seconds. Read the flavour text and look for a noun that belongs to somebody's trade rather than to the world in general. Mist, ruins and hunting are set dressing. Anvils, ledgers, caravans, brewing ingredients and sealing wax are professions, and professions are people.
If two contacts could plausibly claim it, ask which one the scroll would be useful to rather than which one it mentions. A document about balance and barter is a merchant's problem even when it never names a merchant. A document about a tree hollow and a secret cache is a scavenger's problem. This is the same reasoning the community used to build the table above, and it survives contact with scrolls the table does not cover.
Do not sit on scrolls waiting for certainty. The base payout is unconditional, the bonus is a chance rather than a guarantee, and warehouse space has a real cost. A cipher you hand to a slightly wrong contact today is worth more than a perfectly routed cipher still in storage next week.
Do not let either system eat your storage
Both systems fail the same way in practice, which is by accumulation. Unidentified pieces get carried home unexamined because identification felt too risky in the moment, and ciphers get stockpiled because the reader is waiting to learn the system. Between them they will fill a warehouse that starts at 128 slots and only grows through camp investment.
The fix is a rule you apply at settlement rather than a judgement you make each time. Ciphers get handed in the same session they arrive. Anything unidentified that you did carry out gets resolved before you queue again. Then compare what is left against the recipes and camp levels you have actually committed to, and sell the remainder rather than admiring it.
Selling is its own skill, since the vendor value shown on the sell screen and the post-fee auction return are different numbers and the winner varies by item. The shop and vendor catalogs show what the static camp merchants stock and pay for, which is the sane baseline to compare an auction listing against.
Where to go next
Open the item database and look at the quest and extraction category, then at the materials list, so that the next unfamiliar drop is a recognition rather than a research problem. Cross-check anything you are about to sell against the vendor catalogs first.
If ciphers are stacking up because you keep dying before you can bring them home, the problem is upstream: read how the exit sequence actually works and the beginner errors that quietly cost loot, in that order.