Trust Issues

How to unlock Trust Issues in Cheevos, visit Snopes, The Onion, or the April Fools Wikipedia page on April 1st. Worth 50 XP.

The story

Partner. It is April 1st. Nothing is verified today.

Cache reviews the same question every year on this date, and every year he arrives at the same lack of an answer: if satire is indistinguishable from reality for one day, does that make the satire true, or does it make reality a joke? He has been sitting with this since 2004. He has not resolved it. He does not expect to.

You went looking for solid ground anyway. Snopes, to check what was real. The Onion, to enjoy what wasn't. Or the Wikipedia article that exists purely to catalog every April Fools' prank the internet has ever pulled, a page that is, itself, completely sincere about being a record of insincerity.

Cache appreciates the instinct. On a day built for confusion, you went looking for a fact-checker, or you leaned all the way into the joke, or you researched the history of the joke itself. All three routes end up in the same folder for him.

He has filed seventeen fact-checks over the years on this exact date. None of them, he will tell you honestly, actually helped him figure it out.

The catalog entry

TRUST ISSUES (APRIL 1) Acquired: Browsed Snopes, The Onion, or the April Fools Day Wikipedia article on April 1st. Condition: Appropriately skeptical. Rarity: Annual. One day a year when verification is both most necessary and least possible. Cache's Notes: Every April 1st, Cache reviews the same question: if satire is indistinguishable from reality for one day, does that make satire true, or reality a joke? He has been thinking about this since 2004. He does not have an answer. He has, however, filed seventeen fact-checks. None of them helped.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one only works on a single calendar day, and it needs a specific destination.

  1. Wait for April 1st, checked against your device's local date.
  2. Visit one of three sites: Snopes (snopes.com), The Onion (theonion.com), or the Wikipedia article on April Fools' Day (wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools).
  3. The achievement unlocks on that page visit.

Cheevos checks the browser's local date for month index 3 and day 1, then matches the visited URL against those three destinations. Snopes is a long-running fact-checking outlet that verifies or debunks viral claims. The Onion is a satirical news publication that has been writing fictional headlines in a straight-faced news style since 1988. The April Fools' Day Wikipedia article documents the holiday's history and its most famous pranks, including hoaxes pulled by real news organizations. Visiting any one of the three on the day itself is enough.

Where it fits in the Stash

Trust Issues gets its own shelf in Cache's calendar section, right beside the other single-day, once-a-year finds. It is one of the few items he genuinely cannot resolve his feelings about, which is exactly why he keeps it. For the whole story, read the story.