With a new update to the site The Pirate Bay has added yet more mysterious hints to its uncertain future. The site suggests that it's sailing towards its home base, but to what end? An official statement from the TPB crew is expected to be released during the days to come.

A month has passed since The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

After being down for two weeks the site’s domain became responsive again, waving a pirate flag and a counter that kept track of the time that had elapsed since the raid.

Last week this counter suddenly started counting down, indicating that something is about to happen on February 1st. A few hours ago a few new mystery changes were made to the site.

The Pirate Bay logo in the right left corner started to move to a new image named totheisland.png on the bottom left. The CSS class of the image is “setsail,” suggesting that TPB is moving to the island.

The question that remains, however, is what it all means. The text on the island image is hardly readable but on closer inspection it appears to be a copy of one of TPB’s older doodles, pictured below.

The island in question features Pirate Bay’s home base and a few other torrent landmarks, including the seeder’s cave, dead torrents swamp, Sealand and the grave of the MPAA.

So does this mean that the Pirate Bay is heading home for a fresh start? Or will the ship dock for good?

Besides the moving ship and the island image TPB also added a new “pipe vi Makefile” class for the encrypted AES code. This is yet another suggestion that something’s coming, but in common with the other hints it’s still unclear what.

A source close to The Pirate Bay team informs TF that they are not ready to make an announcement on the site’s future yet. However, an official statement will follow in a few days time.

While Pirate Bay users are eagerly hoping for a full comeback on February 1st, the site could also announce something new. The extended downtime suggests that the site was hit hard and it’s not unthinkable that recent backups are out of reach.

Meanwhile, several Pirate Bay copycats are trying to gain the hearts and minds of lost Pirate Bay users. Yesterday, one of the imposters using the com.ua TLD went as far as issuing a press release, stating that the Pirate Bay has found a new home in Ukraine.

For now, however, the real Pirate Bay remains without torrents. And if it eventually makes a comeback, it will be at the official thepiratebay.se domain.