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  • jacob1
    25th Aug 2015 Developer 6 Permalink
    Now that the puzzle is all done and solved, i've uploaded the entire dropbox folder that me and @iam4722202468 shared, and everything on the site used to make it. The website stuff is in the "Website - Final" folder, everything else is just as is.
    Secret Puzzle - Final.zip

    Here are some notes and all the answers to the puzzles:
    Most simple puzzles were done in a week around august 12th, like about all of the save ones. I uploaded placeholder saves and uploaded the final saves later because it was hard making sure they all link to each other properly, and I wanted the IDs to be spaced far enough apart to where you couldn't just automate looking through every save to get the answer. That's also why I reused some old save IDs in the end, people actually where looking through a massive amount of save IDs so it is a good thing I did that.

    Step 1 and 2 were the first ideas completed, and the last to be put in the puzzle because I had to make sure the IDs were right. I still managed to mess it up though, I decided to make step 2 end in spanish just because, but I translated the wrong save id and caused it to lead to step 4 instead of 3. Step 3 was needed to solve step 4 which was a problem. I eventually fixed my mistake, although I spelled the fixed solution wrong. Step 1 and 2 were just taking the first or second letter of each element to spell it out, step 3 involved going to a specific time at mniip.com/irc/log where I gave the coordinates to a location in the save with the save ID for step 4, and step 4 involved finding the end of the maze at I think 211,107, go back to step 3 and it leads to step 5 (step 6 in map.txt).

    The maze thing was just weird, I was bored messing around with MAZE and made some TRON go through it, then wanted to see how far I could make the TRON go. Then I stuck it into the puzzle. Also watch out for scary mutant spiders inside the CRASH save history.

    Step 6 was the first split, I wanted to stick time cube in early so that people would be able to solve that while doing all the other puzzles. The yellow sign led to a post id with the link to time cube. The white signs led to random unpublished saved that I commented more post IDs on, which led to url parts. The urls combined to form http://starcatcher.us/Moo/anVzdGNsaWNrdGhlbGlua3JlYWxseQ.html , which I redirected to the actual RPG the day before the puzzle started (since I didn't figure out where the RPG was going to go until then). The blue sign had my dropbox ID and Wheatley.jpg, you were supposed to realize it was my dropbox ID and go to download it.

    Step 9 was the RPG, the best part of the puzzle I think. We spent the most time on this. It used iam's old rpg game, which was already written before the puzzle but I suggested putting it on a website so people could play it that way. iam made it in node.js and it worked perfectly! Just kidding, it crashed all the time and was almost impossible to use. I put in 4-5 try { } catch (e) { } statements and it's now entirely fixed! Nobody saw any problems as far as I know at least ... Also, the solution is in the download but it is long and complicated so I won't put it here.

    The game was originally written by iam back in like may or june, but it was kind of short and some things didn't make sense. It only had the quest where you fetch the potatoes, the thing where you buy the armor, and then boxmein's shop had no text until you got the armor, once you did it would trigger a short (maybe 5 scenario long) escape sequence where boxmein died but you escaped anyway (as long as you saw the beach). When we first showed it to cracker64 in August (which is when we brought him on to test stuff for us) and he complained about everything, like that if you ran away from cate before knowing her name, it would act like you already knew it. I put a ton of work into expanding it the week before the puzzle. Some things you might not have noticed is the 1/10 chance of getting gold when falling out of a tree, the glitches where buying potatoes doesn't actually check if you can afford it (left in intentionally), and the thing where all 5 characters respond when you use the same nick as them. Also if you "go to sleep" after building the fire, boxmein gets kidnapped by the giant mutant spider and you have to go rescue him. Poor boxmein ):

    It then gave you a password to a zip file you got from the "numbers" save. Inside was neurotoxins.cps, which contained a piece of FILT memory you were supposed to stick inside LightPC to run a program. Type in "10" into its hexadecimal display and it will print out the binary for the next save ID, which was the DC5 puzzle. Inside there was GOLD (not present when the original was made). The ctype denoted the order of the particles, the .tmp was the digits of the next save ID.

    The next puzzle originally sucked very bad. Instead of two identical things, the '6' was done in WARP, one of the pairs was supposed to be in the description, and also there were some glitches and other problems. Cracker64 didn't like it at all so I fixed it up a lot and placed the signs. To solve, the left side again had the order of the digits of the numbers on the right side. Everything went in pairs (the pair of BRAY, the .tmp pair, the LCRY pair, etc.)

    Next was "average save", or pavg0.cps. This one was evil, it had no hint when mniip solved it but I did guide him a lot. Later I mentioned VRSS in the description, you were supposed to !set type all vrss which made the decaying virus reveal './door secret'. Type this in on IRC to Crackbot to get a link to the door game.

    The door game was a nice idea me & iam had really early on (it was coded back in May and you can find the original hidden_old.txt file in that download which was used to test it). But I didn't know what to put in it so the end result had some not so good puzzles. The zip code thing was stuck in on the last day since I had made that puzzle back in May but didn't know where to put it. The prime number thing was also confusing at first. Nobody really tested the door puzzle before it was put online either. Also the 108 and 614 doors were very last minute things but always planned to be *somewhere* in there.

    behind door 108 was a hint telling you to put in the name 'secretdebugmenu' into the RPG. This led into the actual debug menu I was using to quickly skip to places. You were supposed to give yourself a key, and unlock the door inside the hotel which led to 'final puzzle.lua'

    Door 614 led to 61442 which had a pastebin with the 'pineapple and the hare' problem. This is the first thing listed in ideas.txt, I think Doxin posting it on IRC made me want to put it in a puzzle and made me start coming up with ideas. Solving it led to 'get puzzle piece.lua', which was a page that returned a random puzzle piece out of 12 based on your ip. Putting in all 12 gave you a 12 digit door combination, at that door was one of the 3 final answers for the final puzzle page, 'donotgototwentyfour'.

    Door 378 led to a series of puzzles you can find in hidden.txt, including the one where you had to find the 1404th prime and the one with MH370. In the end was the sudoku puzzle.

    I almost cut out the sudoku puzzle because of the major difficulties people were having with doors, but then decided that it was such an easy puzzle that it shouldn't matter. Apparently I was wrong, nobody knew what to do with them at all. Eventually I had to tell people to add up the numbers in each row to get an ascii value, which led to a url. The url contained minecraft coordinates. They were all hard to reach places on the minecraft server which had haikus, which hinted you to go to a specific spot in jward212's hunger games arena. Going to this location led to a book that led to the page 'TPT Download.html'. This page had the download for a special version of TPT with an easter egg hunt. The hunt was activated with tpt.eastereggs() (hinted by the red letters in element descriptions). The 'eggs' were moos, the locations are given in TPT/solution.txt in that download. After completing the puzzle, you were given the final answer for the answer page, 'movingsolidsareawesome'

    Time cube was solved last, I had to give away the answer. Every 6 hours the page changed to one of four versions. Each version had 3 red words. The red words were the passwords to the 4 embeded zip files in the topic. You got a text file which told you to put the clue 'ONDAYISALIE' on the final page.


    Anyway wow that took a while to type. I said I would credit everyone that helped solve it, maybe I will do that tomorrow ... I think i'm done typing for now :P. Definitely download the thing if you want to see some of the reasoning behind the puzzles though.
    Edited 3 times by jacob1. Last: 10th Jan 2017
  • Happyjollyman
    25th Aug 2015 Member 0 Permalink

    Small fix... just a bit of proof reading... It should be "Wheatley.jpg" instead of "Wheatley.png". Nothing big, just wanted to point that out. :P

  • jacob1
    25th Aug 2015 Developer 0 Permalink
  • Atomic10
    25th Aug 2015 Member 0 Permalink

    Mother of God... You really went all out on that... I respect you for your potato skills and mastery.

  • TPT-_-
    25th Aug 2015 Member 0 Permalink

    That puzzel save is amazing

  • 12Me21
    17th Sep 2015 Member 0 Permalink

    What programming language is the RPG written in?

  • jacob1
    17th Sep 2015 Developer 0 Permalink
    @12Me21 (View Post)
    The website is in node.js, it communicates to the main RPG program, which is written in C.

    All the source code is in the download at the top: Secret Puzzle - Final.zip
    Edited once by jacob1. Last: 10th Jan 2017
  • Klus
    17th Sep 2015 Member 0 Permalink

    ...And yet jacob1 never let us make Game Threads...

  • Waterbottle123
    17th Jun 2021 Member 0 Permalink

    @jacob1 the game is not letting me sign in so I can make my saves public plz help me

     

  • jacob1
    17th Jun 2021 Developer 0 Permalink
    @Waterbottle123 (View Post)
    Please send me a PM or open a new thread on the forums.
Locked by jacob1: necro