Standard Galactic Alphabet: Keen to Minecraft Enchanting Table

The Standard Galactic Alphabet (SGA) is a 26-symbol substitution cipher that Tom Hall drew in 1991 for Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle. It looks alien. It is not. Every symbol maps to exactly one English letter, and the mapping has been public and fixed for over three decades.

The alphabet would have stayed a niche id Software easter egg if Markus "Notch" Persson had not reused it 20 years later for Minecraft's enchanting table. When Beta 1.9 Prerelease 2 shipped in 2011, players decoded the floating runes within hours. Some of those runes spell out "cthulhu" and "fhtagn."

SGA is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. As Bruce Schneier notes in Applied Cryptography (1996, John Wiley & Sons), every monoalphabetic substitution cipher falls to frequency analysis once you have enough ciphertext. SGA is no exception. You can encode and decode it yourself with our Standard Galactic Alphabet translator.

Commander Keen was id Software's first hit. The studio released the first episode, Invasion of the Vorticons, on December 14, 1990, distributed as shareware by Apogee Software. The development team was small: Tom Hall handled design and writing, John Romero did level design and programming, and John Carmack built the engine. The side-scrolling platformer starred eight-year-old Billy Blaze, who dons a football helmet and travels to Mars.

According to the Commander Keen Wiki and the 3D Realms company history, the shareware model let Apogee distribute the first episode for free while selling the remaining episodes by mail order. It worked. The game sold well enough to fund id Software's next projects, which included Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

Tom Hall introduced the Standard Galactic Alphabet in the second trilogy, starting with Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle in 1991. The alphabet appears on signs, monuments, and alien technology throughout episodes IV, V, and VI. Hall designed it so players could decode the background text and find extra lore. The symbols also showed up as easter eggs in later id Software titles: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake 4 all contain hidden SGA inscriptions.

Hall has confirmed in interviews and on the Commander Keen Fans site that the alphabet was always intended as a simple 1:1 English substitution. There is no conlang underneath. No grammar, no syntax, no vocabulary beyond English. The alien look is pure typography.

SGA has 26 symbols, one per English letter. Some symbols resemble Latin letters with extra strokes. Others are abstract geometric shapes. A few look like they were sketched in a notebook during a lunch break, which is close to what happened.

The design philosophy was speed and recognizability. Hall needed symbols that looked alien to a player glancing at a screen but were distinct enough from each other to be readable once you knew the key. Several symbols are visually similar to their Latin counterparts rotated or mirrored, which makes the alphabet easier to learn than a fully arbitrary set.

Because SGA is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, it shares the same weakness as the Caesar cipher. Each plaintext letter always maps to the same ciphertext symbol. If you have a long enough inscription, letter frequency gives away the mapping. English text is roughly 12.7% E, 9.1% T, 8.2% A, and so on. Match the most common SGA symbol to E, the next to T, and you are most of the way there. You can practice this technique with our Caesar cipher tool, which uses the same single-alphabet substitution principle.

The Wikipedia article on Commander Keen documents the alphabet's appearance across the series. The full mapping has been available in fan communities since the early 1990s, originally distributed on BBS systems and later on fan sites. Nothing about the cipher has changed since 1991.

If you want to compare SGA to other symbol-for-letter systems, our Wingdings translator covers a similar 1:1 font-based substitution, and our Egyptian hieroglyphics translator handles a more complex historical writing system where one symbol can represent a sound, a word, or a concept.

In 2011, Markus "Notch" Persson added enchanting tables to Minecraft in Beta 1.9 Prerelease 2. The table displays floating bookshelves of glyphs drawn from the Standard Galactic Alphabet. Players standing near the table see SGA symbols drifting toward the book.

The Minecraft community decoded the glyphs within hours of the prerelease going live. The Minecraft Wiki page on enchanting documents the full system. The glyphs on the enchanting table are drawn from a pool of words, and those words are rendered in SGA. When you translate them back to English, you get entries from a fixed 62-word list.

Here is the part that surprised people: the words have zero mechanical effect. They do not determine the enchantment you receive. They do not influence the level cost or the outcome. The enchantment is selected by the game's internal random number generator based on your experience level, the number of bookshelves, and the item type. The SGA words are decoration. They exist purely for atmosphere.

This is worth stating plainly because a lot of players spent time trying to read the enchanting table to pick better enchantments. You cannot. The words are flavor text. The enchanting table picks its result the moment you click, and the floating glyphs are generated independently of that result.

The 62-word list that the enchanting table draws from contains several references to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The most recognizable are "cthulhu," "fhtagn," and "rlyeh." Others include "phnglui," "mglwnafh," "wgahnagl," "niktu," and "klaatu."

The last two are not Lovecraft. "Klaatu" and "niktu" come from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, specifically the famous line "Klaatu barada nikto." Notch has acknowledged in past posts that the word list was assembled from whatever sounded good at the time, mixing Mythos references with sci-fi callbacks.

The full phrase from Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928) is "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," which roughly translates to "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." The Minecraft word list breaks this into its component parts and scatters them randomly. You will never see the full phrase on an enchanting table because the game picks one word at a time from the pool.

Notch's choice to use SGA for the enchanting table was a direct homage to Commander Keen. He has said in interviews that Commander Keen was one of the games he grew up playing. Reusing the alphabet was a nod to id Software, layered on top of the Lovecraft references. Two layers of homage in one decorative font.

The Standard Galactic Alphabet has survived for 35 years because it is easy to learn, easy to draw, and visually distinctive. You can memorize the 26-symbol mapping in an afternoon. Fan communities have produced fonts, translation tools, and mods for dozens of games. Minecraft modders have extended SGA to custom enchanting tables, signs, and resource packs.

The alphabet also benefits from being attached to two enormously popular games. Commander Keen sold well in the early 1990s shareware market. Minecraft has sold over 300 million copies across all platforms as of 2023, according to Microsoft's official sales figures. That is a lot of people who have seen SGA on screen, even if most of them never learned what it said.

From a cryptography standpoint, SGA is not interesting. It is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher with a fixed, public key. There is no security property to analyze. The value is cultural. It is one of the few fictional alphabets that crossed over from a single game into broader pop culture, and it did so because Notch recognized a good visual when he saw one.

If you want to write your own SGA inscriptions, the Standard Galactic Alphabet translator handles encoding and decoding in your browser. For a different kind of substitution cipher that actually shifts the alphabet instead of replacing it symbol-for-symbol, try the Caesar cipher tool.