Once Piper had a built up a sizeable following, the company began to set up physical drops for prototypes of the P7. Giving viewers hidden instructions within the blog posts on Piper’s website (www.piperco.global, now defunct) in the form of oddly specific phrasing, metadata, and hints around landmarks where the drops would be.
For the sake of summary; I will not explain exactly how each prototype drop was found. Instead, if you're curious, here are two archived articles [1], [2] to contain most of the phrasing related to the hunts. You can also check between the dates attached to this part within the official MG discord for a direct idea of how the hunts would be discussed.

These drops were set up and found in New York, London, and Los Angeles. Each of them came with a sticker, P7 "prototype," and a vandalized pamphlet with a sort of cipher and signature under the name of “The Sludge.”

With all three pamphlets combined, a cipher appeared to spell out the phrase "Until I die," which was speculated to be an unreleased song that was perfomed by Machine Girl at the Strange Overtones Festival on July 27th, just about a week earlier to this discussion. This turned out to be the case, since shortly afterwards, Piper would post a phone number to their Instagram story. This phone number would lead to a low-quality, official-sounding version of the song just prior to its release. I think is what reaffirmed the ARG to be recognized as "official."

The single was then released on August 8th, 2024, just two days after it was teased.

Next, Piper would proceed to release a final drop in the form of a giveaway, likely because of previous three being tampered with. As explained in an [outgoing Email] of theirs: A user would be randomly selected out of those who would submit a picture of their name, their dog, and their dogs’ name.

This was won by Discord and Tikok user, Phae / @phantasy_phreq, and would mark a kind of break period as users wait for Phae to recieve xyr P7 drop.

Here is the announcement video that Piper posted to their Instagram account.

Those who did not win would recieve this email:

The Los Angeles hunt notably took 9 days to find, and before the individual had found the drop itself, a paper was discovered. It basically stated that due to the inability of participants to find this drop, Piper fired 119 employees.

There was also a pipe found near this same drop which appeared to have what users had now dubbed as "sludgefont" written on it. Whether this was official or not is debated, but Piper did respond to someone who'd shared this with them.

- Lastly, there were found to be NFC chips inside of the physical prototypes that users recieved. Here is a folder of screenshots around the discovery and what was read from these chips.

[ Mega Folder Link ]