Sanderson Puzzlehunt: Earth Round

[Furamirionind]

This was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to round 2.  I want to thank my teammates for carrying me through this round, as I pretty much didn't have any time.

I also know in the future to not discourage my teammates from guessing trolly answers. : )

As my schedule won't be improving and I will have literally no time on weekends, and my teammates deserve someone who will be active, I haven't decided yet if I will drop our or not...

@MetaTerminal Is there a spec doc or something? : P

Edited January 30, 2019 by Furamirionind

[MetaTerminal]

There is no spec doc, because there were no spectators. The closest thing is my personal doc which contains spoilers for future rounds.

Sanderson Puzzlehunt: Earth Round Wrapup

(The story segment contains spoilers for the meta.)

Spoiler

The ritual is completed. By carefully consulting the puzzles, you were able to work out what you needed. A huge power source, in order to transfer matter a great distance.

And what better thing to fuel the process than a Stick?

Bearing the wooden battery in hand, the white-haired man steps inside the circle. For a moment, you hang back, wanting to follow bu unwilling to intrude.

The man turns and smiles at you. “Actually, I might need some good puzzle solvers with me.”

You smile back, and step inside the circle. The white-haired man buries the stick into the ground, and flash of light rises up from the centre of the circle and surrounds you. When it fades, you are standing on another world.

So I made a thing. I can say that I think it turned out okay. 

I can’t say it was very organised, or went smoothly. On my end, I would describe it as a massive snowball rolling down a hill - I just had to keep it turning and hope it reached the bottom safely.

The rough idea for this has been pinging around the Alleyverse for a while, starting with Nohadon’s 17 Myths challenge that I believe was never completed. That took a very different format to this - a series of riddles that hinted at objects, rather than encoded information - but it gave Mac the idea that something like this could be done. He aired it to me in a PM, and I expressed interest, and we both proceeded to forget about it for some time.

It was about Christmas, inspired by the leadup to a fairly large puzzle event, that I asked around for people who were interested in participating. When I received a fairly decent response (about 6 people), I sent word to Mac that I would start designing it. The first round was completed just before signups opened. That was the push that started the snowball rolling down the hill - it reached peak speed on the second day of puzzles, when at some point in the evening I simply gave up recording answer submissions on my spreadsheet - and culminated in a tight race to the finish at about 9am in my timezone, between three teams that all had the ability to win. Congratulations to Team 5, who came out on top by about 1 hour in front of second place (Team Voidapple).

I’d like to congratulate everyone on a few things. The first is that every puzzle was solved without hints - or indeed was solved at all. (Yes, even the third one, and the meta.) The second is that every team solved a puzzle. Those give a testament somewhat to fairly watertight design - we didn’t have any unfixable puzzles, although one major problem that I will address shortly - but also to the quality of the solvers. 

On Puzzles

Below, I’m going to cover some thoughts on each of the puzzles, and what I’m happy with and what I’m not. Overall, I’m fairly happy with what went into this round. Five of the puzzles were written by me, and one was written by Mac - due to time constraints you’ll be unlikely to see much more from Mac, unfortunately. You’re stuck with me.

These do not contain solutions (although many will contain answers or spoilers). They will be going up some time in the future (although writing the next round takes priority).

At the bottom of some of the puzzles I’ve included some quotes from docs or discord chats that I found interesting or funny.

Spoiler

Keeping Up

This was the puzzle that was solved by all of the teams, being both the first and easiest puzzle in the first wave. I also think it’s the best puzzle I wrote. It’s certainly the most elegant, and the most streamlined, with multiple steps needed to find the solution, rather than a single operation (something that not all the puzzles had).

A few general things: there is a method inside the puzzle to check if you’ve identified people correctly - the images are in alphabetical order. It’s through this method (and the consistency of real names only, no nicknames or titles, which rules out ‘Lord Ruler’, ‘Legion’ and ‘Sovereign’) that you can accurately identify every person with fairly good accuracy.

The photo of ‘Calamity’ is an actual star - V838 Monocerotis. This is because I couldn’t find a relevant cover edit, so I had to make do with a general red star.

This puzzle also had the most answer submissions: I got a lot of variations on Jack, as well as Allomancer Jak, Jack Garret (who voiced the Elantris audiobook), Jack’s Beanstalk, and even a submission of ‘jars’.

And, of course, if you need to keep up with someone, you do need to be NIMBLE.

“Keeping Up With The Aspects” is obviously a Shardcast reference to “Keeping Up With The Kholins”. (It wasn’t.)

JEABNWAER??? ...Beware Jannet.

A Beginner’s Guide

I like this puzzle. I also think it could have been better. The released version didn’t contain some of the edits I had made last minute, which made it very difficult to solve. I also think some of the diagrams could have been described better, (although some people solved it without misidentifying a single one). And nobody picked up on the original sneaky double-meaning of ‘only the winners left’, which led to the Sunday morning (Saturday for the states) edit I did to make it doable.

I think this could have had one more step after you get all the letters, although that may have made it much more harder to solve as a result. I did think of a cool one today, though. Sigh. I’ll put it into something in the future.

As for the individual letters, most people had the hardest time with r (usually taken as a K), L (a D) and F (a P or Y). I’ll admit that the L is backwards, mostly to mess with people. But the first two and final four letters are fairly elementary to get.

Not much to say about the answer either, except that it’s thematically relevant.

As The Wheel Turns

Ah, this one. I think we can all agree that it is the hardest - almost impossible without the capitalisation update, although still technically solvable. Apparently it isn’t common practice to read the first letters of lines, and not many people realised that the indentation was unusual (a sign of the dying art of letter writing, maybe?). Only one team solved this without hints, and it was the last puzzle solved by the winning team.

In hindsight, we should have included the encoding numbers somewhere within the letter.

The cipher used in this puzzle contains modular arithmetic, usually described using hours on a clock - or numbers on a wheel.

The italics were my idea.

Quote: And now I’m really starting to thank my english teachers =) because some of those missspellings are so close to german words I almost missed them.

Count yourself lucky that we didn’t make you construct an enigma machine to solve this.

Government Records

I really don’t like this puzzle. It made it in because I thought people would appreciate the easy solve, and the original idea (clueing characters from the Reckoners RP) wasn’t feasible. I’m glad we decided not to go for that, since very little of that crowd joined the competition. I’m not glad I couldn’t think of anything much more interesting to take its place - I had ideas simply by looking at how people overanalysed the quotes before calling in the answer.

Room for improvement on this one. Between this and a blend of two types of fairly standard logic puzzles, there’s not a lot interesting going on in wave 2 outside of the meta. In future I’ll try and avoid non-interesting ideas like this.

Truthful Liebrarians

While this is perhaps the most ‘vanilla’ of all the puzzles, it was the most fun to write. (Although for quite a time we thought it was broken, and I spent longer than I care to admit trying to solve my own logic puzzle when we realised there could be problems.) It was originally just a normal house puzzle (the receptionists owns the zebra and drinks black coffee) but I had the idea for the punny name of ‘truthbrarian’ and ran from there. Nothing particularly new, but maybe something some people won’t have seen before.

Some of the book titles contain jokes, including one taken from my own brief personal experiences as a volunteer librarian and a ‘is reckoners cosmere?’ reference.

The final configuration of books has RED HERRING on the bottom left shelf.

Earth Meta

I’m over the moon this one got solved without hints. Originally it had much more subtle cluing - almost none at all, in fact. The second revision had the Sanderson hint come with. Just before I started the competition, I decided to rein in the hinting a little bit more, with the understanding that I could add it back in if nobody solved without it.

Huge props to the winning team, who had a solver tell me in the PM at 06:17AM that they were stuck, and then promptly solve it at 06:21 less than five minutes later, with only four answers. A well deserved win. Shoutouts to Team 6 (I know you’ve picked a name but that’s what I’ve been calling you on the spreadsheet), who got the first hint and solved it almost immediately, because they had a *literal person named Stick in their team*. And to Team 4, who solved it just after I dropped off the grid for dinner, and proceeded to go mad with the certainty that they did have the right answer. The quotes are from their doc.

(And something to Voidapple as well, I suppose, who didn’t provide an interesting story for me to share here but I feel as if I need to mention them anyway otherwise I’d leave them out. Well done, y’all. Snubbed at the finishing line.)

Unfortunately the mapping between the answers and what went in the blanks was far from perfect. Nobody got what mapped from GO WITH THE FLOW (it was FALL WITH THE RAIN, which is up there with ‘maladroit’ for ‘things Brandon doesn’t do anymore but you’re expected to know anyway’, and is a great deal more obscure), and there was the unfortunate incident with the P1 antonym. If I had actually checked what maladroit means, then we wouldn’t have had this problem. (Although we wouldn’t have had the cool JACK extraction, so I’m in two minds about it.)

I’ll take ‘things that Brandon likes to write’ for 500, Alex.’

Add Stick would be a very trolly answer.

EVERY SECOND THAT PASSES I BECOME INCREASINGLY SURE THAT ADD STICK IS THE ACTUAL ANSWER AND IF IT IS I MIGHT GO CRAZY.

On Hints

Only about half of you will know this, but at the end of the second day there was somewhat of a debacle surrounding hints for the meta. Three teams were within solving distance at the time when I went to bed. At that time, one of them requested a hint - the only team to do so. With the awareness that I would hate for a team to win just because they asked for a hint where other people held out, I made an agreement with other teams that they would only receive a hint if and when they all agreed to do so. That happened some time in the morning (after Team 5 had solved it and were onto P3 - they received the hint on that puzzle instead), which resulted in a *very* close race, with finishes at nine and ten o’clock. I think the system worked well here, and the result was somewhat fair, but I could also envision points where it could go horribly wrong. One of the teams was extremely disadvantaged by the timing. While I think the result would have been the same should all of them have been awake, it is still problematic and could happen again.

I’m also going to tweak how many hints are received, since teams currently receive too many. By the time leading teams attacked the meta, they had 7 hints. Two of the teams finished with 6. The new rules will be outlined when the round goes up.

On Story

From the three people I asked about the writeups, I got a fairly brain fried response (understandable given the hour and time in the competition). From what I ascertained, I think that most people are skipping (or at least skimming) the story of the white-haired man. I don’t particularly mind - it’s not really much more than a flimsy excuse to solve puzzles, and won’t ever contain puzzle information. I’ll still continue to write them, and the writeups will usually link into the meta, so consider this a ‘look out for the thing that I made’ announcement.

I think that’s everything. If there is something that I haven’t covered, let me know. I’d also be interested to hear what puzzles people did and didn’t like, and what kinds of things they would like to see repeated, as that will influence how I write and tell the story of the white-haired man. (Basically, write your own wrapups, people.)

See you all on another planet.

(I’ll fix the formatting later, when I’m on a better device.)

[+Doomstick]

14 minutes ago, MetaTerminal said:

I’m over the moon this one got solved without hints

Yeah!

[RShara]

30 minutes ago, MetaTerminal said:

I’ll take ‘things that Brandon likes to write’ for 500, Alex.’

Hey that was the joke I made after we figured the first two meta puzzles. *Pouts* Kidding. Congrats again on the winning team! We'll get you next time.

[Karnatheon]

I personally had a lot of fun with it. I am definitely looking forward to the next round. I liked all the puzzles, with the possible exception of the Meta. Not because it wasn't well done or well thought out, simply because it wasn't my style of puzzle. I loved the Liebrarian one and the Rithmatist one the most.

[Furamirionind]

1 hour ago, MetaTerminal said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

The ritual is completed. By carefully consulting the puzzles, you were able to work out what you needed. A huge power source, in order to transfer matter a great distance.

And what better thing to fuel the process than a Stick?

Bearing the wooden battery in hand, the white-haired man steps inside the circle. For a moment, you hang back, wanting to follow bu unwilling to intrude.

The man turns and smiles at you. “Actually, I might need some good puzzle solvers with me.”

You smile back, and step inside the circle. The white-haired man buries the stick into the ground, and flash of light rises up from the centre of the circle and surrounds you. When it fades, you are standing on another world.

 

Ok, well if my team doesn't mind, I am staying in this game. : )

More 1am-5am work parties!

Edited January 31, 2019 by Furamirionind

[xinoehp512]

Spoiler

I thought of reading the first letters of the lines, but didn't realize "affine" was supposed to be a clue. All I saw was "fine".

 

Edited January 31, 2019 by xinoehp512

[MetaTerminal]

2 hours ago, RShara said:

Hey that was the joke I made after we figured the first two meta puzzles. *Pouts* Kidding. Congrats again on the winning team! We'll get you next time.

You’re right. I will correct it.

18 minutes ago, xinoehp512 said:

 

I’d like to ask that spoilers for puzzles should be contained in a spoiler box. 

I do think the puzzle was underclued, but generally speaking, if you try something and the whole thing could be a coherent word, then you should give googling it a try. That was the main prod I gave to teams in this point of the puzzle. The next batch of rules will make the searching rule (not forbidden, actually expected) clearer.

Edited January 31, 2019 by MetaTerminal

[RShara]

39 minutes ago, MetaTerminal said:

I do think the puzzle was underclued, but generally speaking, if you try something and the whole thing could be a coherent word, then you should give googling it a try. That was the main prod I gave to teams in this point of the puzzle. The next batch of rules will make the searching rule (not forbidden, actually expected) clearer.

Or guess that coherent word as an answer

[+Doomstick]

My favorite puzzle was #5, the truthful liebrarians

[Karnatheon]

So when was the next round planned to start again? When you get the puzzles written @MetaTerminal or was there a specific day?

Edited February 2, 2019 by Karnatheon

[+Doomstick]

it Turns out that I’m going to be staying home this weekend instead of going to Tahoe, stupid 4feet of incoming snow 

[MetaTerminal]

4 hours ago, Karnatheon said:

So when was the next round planned to start again? When you get the puzzles written @MetaTerminal or was there a specific day?

When it’s ready. That could be tomorrow (although it won’t be), or next week. Right now, from where I’m standing, it’ll probably take at least a few more days before signups go up for anyone else who wants to join.

[+Doomstick]

Sign ups should happen a bit before you are done 

[MetaTerminal]

Solutions for all Earth puzzles (except the meta, unfortunately - I'll see if I can get around to writing it when the next round is finished) are contained below. I've tried to write them as if you're solving it, so you can see the process people would go through (rather than just listing everything).

Obviously, you should not read them if you want to solve them.

Keeping Up Solution

Spoiler

The flavortext for this puzzle gives fairly clear instructions (at least, for a puzzle of this style) - identify who's in the picture, and then 'size them up' somehow. The second part doesn't make much sense yet, so we'll come back to it. Going through the pictures:

1. Aesudan/Ashermartn
2. Alcatraz Smedry
3. ?
4. A star?
5. Elend Venture
6. Elhokar
7. Jasnah
8. Sovereign/Wayne/Kelsier
9. Nightblood
10. Rashek/Lord Ruler
11. Stephen Leeds/Legion
12. Waxillium Ladrian

From the ones we've positively identified, we can realize that this list is in alphabetical order. This helps us identify the last few people and clarify a few of the ambiguities:

1. Aesudan
2. Alcatraz Smedry
3. Blushweaver
4. Calamity
5. Elend Venture
6. Elhokar
7. Jasnah
8. Kelsier
9. Nightblood
10. Rashek
11. Stephen Leeds
12. Waxillium Ladrian

Now it's time to 'size them up'. The actual size of the characters is too difficult to find, so let's try sorting them by image size:

1. Jasnah
2. Alcatraz Smedry
3. Calamity
4. Kelsier
5. Blushweaver
6. Elhokar
7. Aesudan
8. Nightblood
9. Stephen Leeds
10. Waxillium Ladrian
11. Elend Venture
12. Rashek

The first letters of each of the names spells JACK BE ANSWER. After trying 'Jack' and a few other options, we can realize that the word 'answer' in the phrase is replacing the actual answer, giving us NIMBLE as the solution.

A Beginner's Guide Solution

Spoiler

The flavortext, while not helpful in giving the twist, gives a few clues as to how we should go about this: it states that we should try and draw the duels for ourselves, and that the winners should go on the left. Doing so gives us the following:

Round 1: S, P
Round 2: ?, R/K
Round 3: A, L/D
Round 4: F, ?
Round 5: N/Z, ?
Round 6: S, H/I
Round 7: E, S

Due to its frequency, we can identify ? as being a vowel - the shape most closely resembles a lowercase i, so we'll go with that. This also confirms Round 6's loser as an H, since otherwise it would be a modified Ballintain.

Round 1: S, P
Round 2: I, R/K
Round 3: A, L/D
Round 4: F, I
Round 5: N/Z, I
Round 6: S, H
Round 7: E, S

The only sensible words that this can spell is SPIRAL FINISHES, which is the answer.

As The Wheel Turns Solution

Spoiler

There's obviously a lot of encrypted information in this letter, so let's start by listing some oddities.

• Some of the letters are italicised.
• The beginnings of some lines are capitalised when they should not be.
• The lines cut off at odd points.
• The indentation is strange and symmetrical.
• Some words are misspelled or are missing letters.

Since neither the recipient nor the sender are actual characters, we won't need to worry about whether this is an actual letter from the series. Instead, we can try lookig into each of the ideas:

• The italicised letters spell RED HERRING -  a dead end.
• The missing/correct letters are QESADVDVGLPES.
• The incorrect letters are KZEBBSBJDZ.

Hum. We don't appear to have anything yet - although it's likely that all of the above (except Red Herring) will become important later, we just don't know how to use it.

• The incorrectly capitalised letters are AFFN.
• First letters of each line is DIAFFINEWK.
• First letters of each non-indented line in AFFINE.

Affine seems like an English word, so let's try googling it. After we do that, we find that Affine is a cipher - a polyalphbetic one, to be precise, that utilises modular arithmetic. Breakthrough!

Using the missing/correct letters as our encrypted text, several online solvers can provide us with the answer: GO WITH THE FLOW.

Government Records Solution

Spoiler

These seem to be all Steelheart quotes with some names crossed out from them. By parsing the text (or using our memory), we can identify who they are:

1. Obliteration
2. Deathpoint
3. Donny "Curveball" Harrison
4. Steelheart
5. Crossmark
6. Ides Hatred
7. Earless
8. Nightwielder
9. Conflux
10. El Brash Bullish Dude

The first letter of each name spells ODD SCIENCE, the answer.

Truthful Liebrarians Solution

Spoiler

Using only the first six sentences, we can uniquely identify who is who:

1. Alternator (starts by telling the truth)
2. Truthbrarian
3. Liebrarian

This informs whether or not the rest of the sentences are true false. Using that as our guide, we can determine the only possible configuration of books on each of the shelves that matches all of the statements:

Top Left:

• Dead
• And
• Returned
• Should
• Pieces

Top Right:

• Volume
• Men
• Walking
• Answer
• Will

Bottom Left:

• Silver
• Red
• Herring
• Eight
• Blank

Bottom Right:

• In
• The
• Is
• Of
• Bits

Reading the first words of the first three titles as the flavortext instructs gives us the answer, DEAD AND RETURNED.

The next round is proceeding nicely, with most puzzles well on their way to being finished. Right now I'm hoping signups will go up on Friday, and that the round itself will go up by the end of the weekend. Sorry for the wait.

[+Doomstick]

1 hour ago, MetaTerminal said:

By parsing the text (or using our memory)

Or using the coppermind

[MiToRo94]

So sad I missed this; I love both puzzles AND Sanderson! Any way to be notified when another round is posted?

[MetaTerminal]

2 hours ago, MiToRo94 said:

So sad I missed this; I love both puzzles AND Sanderson! Any way to be notified when another round is posted?

The new round will be going up soon (tomorrow or the day after) in a new post. If you’d like I can tag you when that happens.

I’d recommend going over the Earth puzzles in the intervening period, just to get a sense of what sort of puzzles you’re dealing with. The new round’s will be harder (but hopefully also better).

[MiToRo94]

1 minute ago, MetaTerminal said:

If you’d like I can tag you when that happens.

That would be awesome, if you don't mind!

2 minutes ago, MetaTerminal said:

I’d recommend going over the Earth puzzles in the intervening period, just to get a sense of what sort of puzzles you’re dealing with. The new round’s will be harder (but hopefully also better).

And i've done that, I'm very excited to see what's next!

[RShara]

I'm definitely in

[Babilarian Darkeyes]

Sign me up.

 

19 hours ago, MetaTerminal said:

The new round will be going up soon (tomorrow or the day after) in a new post. If you’d like I can tag you when that happens.

 

Yes please.

[Alvron]

Sadly I must withdraw. Good luck to the rest of you.

[Snipexe]

I’ll be signing up again

[+Doomstick]

I’m in

[Rhapsody]

I'm also in