Cipher methods Symbols
Teyvat (Genshin Impact)
Teyvat is the sacred script of the fictional world of Teyvat in Genshin Impact (HoYoverse / miHoYo, released September 2020 on PC, PS4, mobile, later Switch and PS5). It appears on the Statues of the Seven (seven regional deities), the temples, the archaic runes, and the title screen itself — every major in-game region (Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, Sumeru, Fontaine, Natlan, and soon Snezhnaya) carries inscriptions of it on signposts and monuments.
The Teyvat alphabet is a 1↔1 mapping onto the 26 Latin letters, designed to give visual flavour without linguistic complexity (no grammar, no lexicon). dCode notes that the S and Z glyphs look visually very close — they are indeed two distinct glyphs, but their similarity creates a risk of confusion in manual transcription.
How does the alphabet work?
The cipher uses a monoalphabetic substitution: every letter of the plaintext is replaced by a glyph drawn from a fixed correspondence table. It is one of the oldest cryptographic techniques on record — already described in antiquity (Caesar cipher, ~50 BC) — and the most directly readable family for a beginner.
The table holds 26 glyphs for the 26 Latin letters (no dedicated digit glyphs). To encrypt, read the text letter by letter and replace each letter with its glyph; to decrypt, consult the same table the other way round.
Cryptographic strength: weak. Because every plaintext letter always maps to the same glyph, the cipher falls to a frequency analysis in a few dozen words (in both English and French, E remains the most common letter, an immediate entry point). Monoalphabetic substitutions are therefore used today for their decorative, playful or pedagogical value — not to protect real information.
Historical and modern usage
- Genshin Impact (2020-) — on the Statues of the Seven, temples, archaic runes, the title screen, every region’s inscriptions.
- HoYoverse community — used in cosplay (Lumine, Aether, Venti), tattoos, fan-con puzzles.
- Pedagogy — a good example of a living, actively maintained alphabet (HoYoverse adds new inscriptions with every new region).
Related variants
- Abyss (Genshin Impact) — alphabet of the Abyss Order, different mapping, not covered here.
- Khaenri’ah — archaic variant, still undecoded by the community.
What are the weaknesses?
- Monoalphabetic substitution — immediate frequency analysis.
- S/Z confusion — visually close in the dCode table, a transcription error source.
- Documented alphabet — Genshin Wiki, dCode.
The 26 glyphs
