Misdirect a search by giving a searcher a small, plausible store in the obvious place so that the search ends there, while the real cache sits somewhere unrelated and ordinary. A decoy must carry no information about the real cache, because a cairn or marker placed to point toward it only gives a finder a trail to follow. Never booby-trap a decoy, since it cannot tell a thief from a child.
Part of Hidden Food Caches
Cache misdirection is the use of decoy stores, ordinary-looking hiding places and routine behaviour to make a searcher stop looking before they reach the real cache.
Searchers Stop When They Find Something
Most people who search a house or a yard stop when they find enough. A visible, easy-to-find, low-value store gives them that. The parent article describes the matching idea for ruins: the more a hiding spot looks like boring infrastructure, the less likely it is to be searched. The decoy is the other half: it is the thing the searcher is meant to find.
A decoy has to be believable. A shelf of food that is too small, too neat or too convenient looks planted. A decoy that is too valuable costs you a real loss; one that is too poor tells the searcher to look further. The decoy should be consistent with what a household like yours would plausibly keep: a few weeks of ordinary food, some tools. It also has to be cheap to lose.
What You Need
- A decoy store — a few days of ordinary food in an obvious place
- A real cache in a place with no connection to the decoy
- Ordinary habits — nothing about how you move shows where the real cache is
- A rule on who knows what — the decoy is known to the household; the real cache to few
Method: Decoy, Disconnect, Behave Normally
Step 1: Set up the decoy in the first place someone would look. A cupboard, a cellar corner or a shed. Keep it modest.
Step 2: Keep the real cache unrelated to the decoy. It should not be on the same path, in the same direction or at the same distance. The Emergency Caches article suggests a cairn at a specific bearing from the real cache as a decoy that leads to it with extra steps. That depends on the finder not working out the bearing; the parent article instead says not to mark the site with stakes, cairns or paint at all. Follow the parent: a marker that points to something is a clue, even if it is a clue with a puzzle in it.
Step 3: Make the real cache one of a number of ordinary things. A bucket in a dozen identical buckets in a barn is less remarkable than a bucket alone in a hole. In a ruin, use the parent article’s rule of boring infrastructure.
Step 4: Keep your routine. Do not visit the real cache on a pattern that someone could watch, and do not walk from the decoy to the cache.
Step 5: Reset and rotate. After a decoy has been found and emptied, replace it with something different and move the real cache if you suspect the searcher saw more than you intended.
Step 6: Keep the story consistent. Everyone in the household says the same about what is kept where.
Common Mistakes
- A decoy that points to the real cache. The cairn-and-bearing idea gives a determined searcher a method.
- Making the decoy empty or token. It tells the searcher they have not found the real one.
- Taking the same path to both. A track from one to the other is a map.
- Using misdirection against neighbours you trade with. It is for protection against theft, not for deceiving your own community.
Safety
Never booby-trap a decoy or a cache
A trap, a spring device, a blade or anything meant to injure whoever disturbs the decoy cannot tell a thief from a child, a neighbour or a member of the household, and the household is the party most likely to meet it. It also makes you responsible for any harm. Misdirection works by making the search stop, not by hurting the searcher. A decoy in a house must not be placed in a way that blocks an escape route or sits near a flue or stove, and any decoy store must be dry and free of spoiled food, since a household may eat from it.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Scent Masking — the other thing a searcher with a dog follows
- Combine with: Building Integration — in-house hiding places and the decoy problem