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Sorry, yeah, Puzzle 6. I didn't like that every time we thought we solved it, there'd be the surprise of another part, and without any idea of how many more there were to go. I don't really have rankings in mind, I just remember being a bit annoyed when we submitted the answer and then find out there's yet another piece. Other than that one, the puzzles were fun, and definitely harder than the previous round.

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11 minutes ago, RShara said:

I just remember being a bit annoyed when we submitted the answer and then find out there's yet another piece.

Is it too tongue-in-cheek to say that you were annoyed to find that there was always another secret?

 

I'm sorry I missed out on this, it looks like it was really fun, though if I am fully honest, I think I would have been dead weight on any team.

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I mean, I liked the pieces of puzzle 6, I just didn't like being surprised by a multi-part puzzle, you know?

 

Traveling Blues was fun, although figuring out which map to use or whether there were locations that weren't on the map could have been more clear. I liked ordering them like a rainbow :)

Inscriptions was nicely complicated, though people who don't have the ebook are kinda at a handicap here, I think. And people who borrow from libraries and the like.

I actually liked 3 a lot. That was a cool idea.

4 was crazy. I didn't really do anything helpful on it, but I'm impressed at the thought behind it.

5 was solved before I even knew the puzzles were live, so I have no input here. Same with 8.

7 was hilarious, very clever!

2 minutes ago, Stark said:

Is it too tongue-in-cheek to say that you were annoyed to find that there was always another secret?

 

I'm sorry I missed out on this, it looks like it was really fun, though if I am fully honest, I think I would have been dead weight on any team.

Hahaha good one!

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6 hours ago, MetaTerminal said:

1) What puzzles did you enjoy? What puzzles didn’t you enjoy? (Rankings would be helpful here.)

I really enjoyed Relativity and would like to see more puzzles involving math. Gossipers was also nice, please keep including logic puzzles. Family Trees and Inscriptions were also favorites. I liked the extra parts to Makes the Man and the creativity they allowed.

Really all the puzzles were quite good and I would love to see more of any of them but if I must rank them then here goes (from favorite to least favorite);

Relativity, Inscriptions, Makes the Man, Family Trees, Gossipers, Wayneisms, Meta, Traveling Blues, Astronomers

 

 

 

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Sanderson Puzzlehunt: Wrapup

(The story section contains spoilers for the meta. Proceed at your own risk.)

Spoiler

The puzzles you solve begin to form a message, which you read off.

"Of course!" says the white-haired man, slapping his forehead. "We all know sodium stores ideas, so surely we'll be able to get one who has a good idea to get out of here."

Sure enough, your eccentric guide was able to source someone who had both Feruchemical power and vast world-hopping experience and, with the aid of a bit of magic for flair, they were able to devise a solution to the predicament that you didn't entirely understand. At last, with the various preparations set up for interplanetary travel, your group looks over the vast landscape of Scadrial.

"Next stop, we'll be meeting a friend of mine," says the guide, and a rift swallows you up and moves you to quite somewhere else.

The thing that I made got a lot more complicated. I dare say it also got better.

The writing process for this basically started in full force the weekend after Earth round finished, and was mostly completed just before the first wave went up. I say 'mostly' because the puzzle that was originally in slot 3 irreversibly broke just after signups went up - Family Trees was written in about half an hour to replace it. So technically speaking, the round wasn't finished until just before all the puzzles went live. Terrifying stuff.

Since I have less to say about the writing process overall this time (aside from 'writing puzzles quickly is hard'), I'll dive right into the actual minutiae of all of the individual puzzles. I highly recommend reading this for the puzzles you liked (or even ones you haven't solved, if you don't mind having the solutions spoiled), since I've got a lot of things to say about all of them.

Scadrial Meta

Spoiler

Due to how drafting puzzlehunts like these work, this was probably the first puzzle I drafted - the final table was created and finalized at the last minute. It was also the only puzzle solved once (at least without external help) - given how cleanly Team 5 solved it, I'd say I'm happy with it being difficult but not broken. If the cluing was any more explicit I think it would give the game away.

Something I found funny: a team spending time staring at the grid of numbers when the first wave opened and trying to 'solve' it, only to realize after some serious tabling that it was the meta.

The meta was also fairly divisive: apart from one die-hard fan of metapuzzles (and you can probably guess which team they belong to), most people ranked this puzzle fairly low.

Travelling Blues

Spoiler

This was the first puzzle I thought of when I decided on the theme of the round, mostly complete with the 'skipping stations' and everything. The original concept had pictures to go along with the clues however, with the number being written in the drawing and the color represented by a sticker or shading. Those plans went out the window when I came to terms with the fact that I can't draw. This also explains the flavourtext mentioning 'gallery' and 'images', which I decided not to change after images weren't included.

I feel that this was, overall, a less successful puzzle, and that certain things should have been made clearer: specifically, what stations should and shouldn't be 'counted', hat one stop was missing from each day, and which of the maps to use. I went off of the Coppermind's Elendel Basin map, and used my own memory of BoM for the Dulsing/New Seran positioning.

The reason I pulled this one forward to serve in #3's place was for a fairly simple reason: solving #6 and #7 give fairly strong clues to the meta, and having #4 and #8 in the same round was something I wanted to avoid, so this one fit nicely.

This puzzle was, on average, least-liked of all of the 9 (although only 1 person who ranked their favourites gave it last.)

Inscriptions

Spoiler

Oh, Inscriptions. What a delightful headache you are.

This idea for this one predates the Earth Round - me and Mac were brainstorming, and he aired the idea of using the Steel Alphabet to encrypt things. I thought it was cool - most people seemed to agree, with everyone ranking it fairly highly. I'm glad my suffering went into something worthwhile.

After some investigation into the alphabet, and writing up the clues for all the metals (I like the pocket-watch clue the best - delightfully cryptic and not so prone to author error as the others), I attempted to download all the files for the letters, and individually size them and position them onto a google doc for release. I quickly discovered that 1) the Coppermind does not store Steel Alphabet symbols in a format that Google Docs supports 2) converting image types is very difficult when you have a lot of images, and the online converters only let you do a certain number per day 3) managing eighty images on your computer isn't fun 4) adding and resizing over 100 images on a google doc is a similarly joyless way to spend an afternoon.

This was also one of the more inconsistent puzzles in terms of 'what counts' - the adjectives rule isn't hard-and-fast, and although you can get the answer with a few letters, the unclear ones only serve to obfuscate the answer. But apart from that I'm fairly happy with the finished result - especially the recursive nature of the final answer.

Yes, I am aware that this puzzle favours ebook and book owners strongly. (I used ebooks to write it.) But in my mind, if there's a round themed on a book series central to the plot of the cosmere, you can probably count on someone on the team owning said series. You can also trick Google Books into giving you the pages you want, if you're clever.

The original concept for this had the clues in Terris Glyphs, not Final Empire Steel Alphabet. I changed it because otherwise it would be figuratively impossible otherwise.

Did you know that lerasium is only mentioned once in all six Mistborn books? And that the first and last named metal (not part of a title) in the era 1 trilogy is tin? Neither did I until writing this puzzle.

Family Trees

Spoiler

As a last-minute, written-in-thirty-minutes-before-I-hit-the-sack puzzle, I'm fairly thrilled at how this turned out. A lesson in how useful Coppermind is, folks. People found it decent to solve as well, and thankfully there's only one chain of people that fulfills all the clues. Most people who solved it also broke in through Gneordin's clue, which makes sense, as it's one of the more narrow ones.

The bracket on the Patresen clue is to aid solving, as typing 'intimidated' into Coppermind gives you nothing, but 'intimidate' does.

The original cluephrase for the answer was "What do they make in the Ministry of Truth?" Since it was too long for the extraction method I chose, I had to leave it behind.

Relativity

Spoiler

Another fairly good one. As a maths problem it's not too difficult - I think the extraction for this really makes it shine. All the little pieces (the flavourtext, the plus/minus grid, the layout of the house) that initially make little sense come together. It was inspired for an idea I had for Beginner's Guide after the round ended (which involved a spiral instead of a zig-zag) that I was able to repurpose.

There was some somewhat unfortunate errata for this (in my defense, getting one-and-a-fifth for a 4:5 ratio is an easy mistake) but once it was corrected there were some quick solves on this.

Astronomy In Ancient Texts

Spoiler

Whew. This one was relatively unpopular, wasn't it?

As both the least-solved in the first wave, hardest to follow, and the fiddliest puzzle out of all of them, it jostles with Travelling Blues in the 'nobody's favourite'. Which is a shame - not surprising, in hindsight (perhaps making it clearer that printing it out would give better results would have helped), but considering the amount of work that went into this... bleh. I'll work smarter next time.

That being said: I think the final extraction for this is fairly neat. You could get it even without needing the starmap (although maybe every 16th letter would have been more thematically appropriate).

If I can find them, I will share photos I have of printed star maps and texts, complete with the letters you're supposed to read off colour-coded. It was very satisfying for me to flip the chart around and read off the different colours.

Makes The Man

Spoiler

Things are made up of piles of good things and bad things: this had a lot of good things, but also a lot of bad things.

On the good side, I think both the first and second phases individually are pretty neat. The first stage in particular is just the right blend of 'cluing what needs to be done' and 'you have to make the leap yourself'. It was very fun to monitor docs and watch people get the a-ha (one with the aid of Coppermind, and one with old-fashioned memory of what Parlin's hat looked like). I also hope people enjoyed having to do things in the real world - though probably still inside your house.

On the other hand: if I do a multi-part puzzle in the future, I will advertise how many parts there are beforehand. And the final cluephrase was a bit wonky, and requires some guessing to narrow down the field. 

The funniest moment for me was having a solver fresh off of Wayneisms guess 'crotch' instead of 'crutch' because "that's the sort of thing Wayne would do" - and then finding out that a crotch horn is a kind of antler that hunters (deerstalker-wearers) go after.  Although having multiple people remark that "I have way too many hats" was a close second.

Wayneisms

Spoiler

Funniest puzzle to watch people solve, by far - the teams who solved it also enjoyed it. Not so fun to write - I basically set my home page to Coppermind's Culture list for a few days and scanned it for possible puns. Enjoyable at first, but it got old.

The idea from this basically came from a few places. I had a whole bunch of scrapped puzzles that had good elements in limbo - among them were a music puzzle (the originator of the DEATH METAL and SKA puns), a puzzle about Sazed's religions (CAZZI/JAZZY and JAISTS) and a kind of crossword (BLOODY TAN, which I misspelled as BLOODY TAM initially). After thinking of a few more obvious puns, I noticed what became the letter pairing which fit the final answer, and built the rest from there. (Although I would admit that the extraction method is closely inspired by the excellent puzzle Twitterati, which I had solved recently.)

The puns that got the best reaction was CATACENDRE; or, as the clue describes it, cat-of-Sandra. Team Voidapple's response to it made me laugh.

Gossipers

Spoiler

When this went live, I was terrified that it was unsolvable. Instead, it was the first puzzle solved. Hooray?

I try, in general, not to write logic puzzles that follow 'familiar' rules. It's easy to generate a classic house-colour-drink-pet puzzle with a thematic skin. It's less easy (and perhaps more enjoyable for the solvers) to build something that they've never seen before. So... this puzzle happened. As you can imagine, it was a nightmare to write and check. (Although perhaps it was a mistake to write and design it longhand using pen and paper: I used up six pages on detailed diagrams, computations and my own notation that I developed just to make writing this feasible.) But I think it was all definitely worth it. Just the extraction on this is one of my favourite parts of the round. The answer is hidden in plain sight among the list of names the entire time.

As some of you may have either consciously or subconsciously picked up on, this puzzle is very heavily inspired by my experience with Sanderson Elimination (especially the excellent LG49, which was the main inspiration). The sharing of secrets and different player behaviours was core to that game's experience.

Interestingly, neither my first outline of the Earth Round or this round contained either of their constituent logic puzzles. They both snuck in during the writing process; Liebrarians because we thought we should have a logic puzzle, and this because people loved Liebrarians.

Since it's approximately Too Late, and this writeup is getting too long for its own good, I will post the second part shortly, where I will touch on pace, the general competitive landscape, and various other things that I found noteworthy.

Edited by MetaTerminal
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9 hours ago, MetaTerminal said:

The funniest moment for me was having a solver fresh off of Wayneisms guess 'crotch' instead of 'crutch' because "that's the sort of thing Wayne would do" - and then finding out that a crotch horn is a kind of antler that hunters (deerstalker-wearers) go after.  Although having multiple people remark that "I have way too many hats" was a close second.

It was a total hatastrophe.

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49 minutes ago, Stark said:

Is there a way for those of us who did not participate to see the solutions?

Solutions will go up shortly - they’ll take longer to be made, as the Scadrial puzzles are much more elaborate than the Earth ones. If you have guesses for puzzles (or want to check your work) then feel free to PM me.

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Sanderson Puzzlehunt: Wrapup - The Slightly Belated Second Half

So it's been one week since I should have done this. Better late than never, right?

On Difficulty, And Speed

The fastest solve of all puzzles took about 4 days - around 90 hours, give or take. This is almost double how long the Earth Round took - even though Scadrial didn't have twice as many puzzles. So what happened?

Simply put, the difficulty rose fairly substantially. In particular, where Wave 2 of the last round was very forgiving in terms of solving, this one was not. (Indeed, Makes The Man and Wayneisms had the least solves out of all the puzzles, with only two out of five. This was in stark contrast Records and Liebrarians which had close to universal solves. The most solved puzzles were instead Inscriptions and Travelling Blues; they both had solutions from all teams if I'm not mistaken.)

Difficulty is a particularly difficult (heh) subject to cover, as it's not very universal - a team that solved Astronomy first wouldn't agree on difficulty with a team that was never able to. And unless a team was fairly inactive, there weren't any puzzles that people simply weren't able to engage with because they were 'too hard'. So what happened?

There's a big difference, I think, in a puzzle that doesn't have a lot of solves because everyone stares at it and has no idea what to do, and a puzzle that doesn't have a lot of solves because it's easy to start and hard to finish. I try to tend towards the latter. Invariably, puzzles of the former (like Wayneisms and the initial phase of MTM) will start to creep in. Indeed, those were some of the least solved, because it took someone to 'get it' before any actual progress could be made. This is in contrast with Inscriptions, where it is immediately obvious what you need to do, and (if you know the source material) what you need to find. Hence the difference.

Tangent over. The point is that sometimes, puzzles have layers. (Yes, haha, onions.) These layers are 'things you need to do'. They're steps. Government Records only had one real step:

Spoiler

Identify epics > solution is self-evident

Of a similar structure is Family Trees, although that puzzle is helped by a much more difficult and ambiguous task.

In stark contrast, Makes The Man has many many steps (5):

Spoiler

Identify hats based on Sanderson characters who wore them > index by character > find and submit hats > decrypt hidden message > solve cluephrase to find solution

And Inscriptions is somewhere in the middle (3):

Spoiler

decrypt Steel Alphabet > find mentions of metals in books > translate metals once more > solution is self-evident

The point is that the individual steps of the puzzles weren't necessarily harder (although sometimes they were). It's just that each puzzle had more of them. This meant that solvers were more likely to get lost in the complex levels of the puzzle - when there are so many layers, eventually you're going to hit one that confuses you.

So what do?

The first thing is that I feel that I shouldn't try and sabotage puzzles to make them easier. Some puzzles just wouldn't work if they were made more self-evident (Wayneisms and Gossipers fall in this category). The ideas require a certain complexity to them in order to 'work'. Secondly, I feel that having puzzles with lots of layers is also fun - even if it just makes you marvel at the construction of it.

Really, the only thing I can do is twofold: make clues clearer, and help non-winning teams more. Travelling Blues, for example, was hurt by a lack of cluing that meant people weren't quite sure of what to do - similarly, if you guessed what you had to do, there were specific unclued details that were required to get the configuration that you needed (like the one missing entry per day requirement). And the second one:

On Non-Winning Teams

I'm going to be entirely honest: I feel that I kind of fumbled how I dealt with the non-winning teams on this one. I tried to be a bit more cagey and less-cluey with hints, and in some instances redirected hint requests ("you're really close, make sure to read the flavourtext") instead of giving them. In hindsight, I shouldn't have done this, and I feel that it hit one team really hard in particular. If all teams (maybe barring the one that finished) could respond to this, this would help me gauge how much I should help teams of every level.

Next round, I feel like I should help every team (with sufficient activity) enough so they are able to solve a meta. Running the round on a weekend would definitely assist with that.

On Size

A question to all teams: did you like the larger round, or did you wish that it had been more Earth-sized? Having the number of puzzles that it did was really down to meta structure, so if I want a bigger/smaller round it's not as simple as just cutting or adding puzzles - the round itself needs to be significantly restructured.

On Writing

As evidenced by it already being two weeks since Scadrial ended - the next round isn't going to go up as fast as the last one. Right now, I'm thinking the latter half of March is a good ETA, since I've started to become substantially busier recently. That could be the 15th (though it likely won't, due to reasons some of you may be or soon will be aware of) - it could be the 31st. We shall see. If it is delayed, however, I will definitely make sure it's worth it.


Again, thank you to everyone who put significant time into solving my puzzles. Seeing people have fun and make realizations just gives the warm fuzzies. I'll see you all on another planet.

- Meta

Edited by MetaTerminal
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1 hour ago, MetaTerminal said:

and I feel that it hit one team really hard in particular

*hides in corner*

i liked the earth size better, and points should be based on difficulty, rather than meta/non-meta (eg: government records-level: 15, inscriptions-level: 20, Makes the man-level: 25/30

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I liked the Scadrial sized round better too. Can we get the answers to each puzzle? :D

On 2/26/2019 at 11:16 PM, DoomStick said:

*hides in corner*

i liked the earth size better, and points should be based on difficulty, rather than meta/non-meta (eg: government records-level: 15, inscriptions-level: 20, Makes the man-level: 25/30

 

I think I'd like it if there were like a 5pt bonus for being the first team to solve a puzzle, rather than having the winner be the first team to have all the puzzles solved, then solve the meta first.

Edited by RShara
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  • 1 month later...

One month later...

Scadrial Round Solutions

I mean, it's only a month and a half late. What's the big deal?

There is also a very important question that I shall raise at the end of this post (regarding the next round) that I want everyone interested in participating in to at least read and consider.

Travelling Blues

Spoiler

Several clues in the text hint at both the time frame and location of the places the writer is visiting - Elendel Basin, specifically. Through use of Coppermind, maps and a little insight, solvers may be able to work out that all of these places (with one exception) are major railway stations in the Elendel Basin railway network. If we try to chart these places on the map, we might notice that they are all close together geographically. Since the flavourtext hints at the fact that some stations might be missing, we should try to work out what those missing stations are.

We might notice that many of the numbers proceeding the clues are in sequential order, with gaps missing (indicating where the missing stations are). With a little experimentation, we could work out that the entire trip is a 'chain' of stations, visited in order, never missing any major named station, with only one station missing each day. There is only one path that fulfils these constraints (skipping repeated stops for brevity, unless noted specifically in the text):

  • Bilming
  • Elendel
  • Vindiel-Camuex (Missing)
  • Doriel
  • New Seran (Missing)
  • Dulsing
  • Garmet
  • Elmsdel (Missing)
  • Steinel
  • Dryport (Missing)
  • Elendel
  • Rashekin (Missing)
  • Faleast Range
  • Wyllion
  • Dazarlomue (Missing)
  • Tathingdwel
  • Alendel
  • Drypost (Missing)
  • True Madil
  • Covingtar
  • Weathering (Missing)
  • Feltrel

Since we know that the places are not in their final orderings, we'll need to figure out how to shuffle them. Each day has a colour, so ordering the days by colour of the rainbow (with white at the end) gives us the missing cities in the following order:

  • Elmsdel (red)
  • Vindiel-Camuex (orange)
  • Dryport (yellow)
  • Drypost (green)
  • Dazarlomue (blue)
  • New Seran (indigo)
  • Weathering (violet)
  • Rashekin (white)

Indexing into each of the missing stops by their assumed number, based on the numbers of the other stations of each day, gives us the answer SUPPORTS.

Inscriptions

Spoiler

For those familiar with the source material, it's easy to recognise this as the Steel Alphabet. However, many may not know that the Steel Alphabet has actually been fully mapped onto English letters, allowing for full translation. The lines therefore read:

CAMONS POCKET WATCH
SECOND NAMED METAL IN SOS CH SM
LAST METAL IN SOS CH E
ALTERNATIVE TO ATIUM IN HOA
FIRST IN MBFE
FIRST IN FE CH 30 SY
THIRD IN WOA CH M

This is obviously the right path, but some of these letters seem like gibberish. In fact, this puzzle uses abbreviations to make things reasonable: MBFE or FE for Final Empire, WOA for Well of Ascension, HOA for Hero of Ages, and SOS for Shadows of Self. CH refers to Chapters - thus, we have to translate any gibberish letters after that into numbers. Though the numbering system is a little complex, it eventually maps to:

CAMONS POCKET WATCH
SECOND NAMED METAL IN SOS CH 27
LAST METAL IN SOS CH 3
ALTERNATIVE TO ATIUM IN HOA
FIRST IN MBFE
FIRST IN FE CH 30
THIRD IN WOA CH 11

Looking to the books to find each of the metals, we get:

GOLD 
LERASIUM 
CADMIUM 
ELECTRUM 
TIN 
BRONZE (disputably - this technically violates the 'no adjectives' rule, though it is allowed here since the noun can be omitted for a still sensible sentence)
DURALUMIN

Converting each of these metals back into letters, using the Steel Alphabet, spells the answer MAGNETS.

Family Trees

Spoiler

Since it is very unlikely that one person has this many familial relations, we can guess that these form a 'chain' of family links between people - each 'their' referring to the person in the last line. Some of the clues are maddeningly unspecific ("their leader", "their father", "someone's house"). However, others are much more specific, meaning that we can infer those through trial and error and work backwards and forwards, using the easy ones as entry points. Namely:

  • "Their co-worker’s victim in short story." The only person killed in a Mistborn short story by someone who has a co-worker is Antillius Shezler, by Kelsier. Thus, the line before refers to someone who worked with Kelsier, who is deceased.
  • "Their ally's scribe." The only scribe in Mistborn is Noorden, so the line before is someone who has children and is an ally of Elend. (This also fits with our inference of the second to last line, since most of the people who worked with Kelsier were also friends with Vin, who is Noorden's leader's wife.)
  • "Their ally’s friend’s partner’s brother." Though this seems unspecific, we know that this person's father was an ally of Elend, and that their sibling is married to someone who is friends with someone else. Guesswork and elimination allows us to arrive at the only person who fits this clue, Gneordin Cett. His father is Ashweather Cett, solving the next clue.
  • "Their predecessor’s wife’s house." and "Their cousin’s real name." Though this one seems to be difficult, searching for 'cousin' on Coppermind gives us only one possible pair of candidates: Renoux and OreSeur.

Solving all the names gives:

  • Penrod
  • Renoux
  • OreSeur
  • (Lady) Patresen
  • Aradan Yomen
  • Gneordin Cett
  • Ashweather Cett
  • Noorden
  • Dockson
  • Antillius Shezler

Reading the first letters gives the answer, PROPAGANDA.

Relativity

Spoiler

This house is in reality a four by four grid of rooms, and every room is observed by the protagonist. Thus, we can calculate the relative speeds of all the rooms - if we convert them to whole numbers, we notice that they all seem to be between 0 and 25 - this seems to suggest converting them into letters, but it just produces gibberish.

However, adding the differences from the table at the bottom shifts these letters into something more palatable. If we start at the room that the protagonist 'entered' in, and zig-zag between the rooms (by going right until we hit a wall, then going down once, then left, then down, then right...) we get the following string:

TIMXXEAPPARATUSX

Removing the X's gives the extremely thematic answer, TIME APPARATUS.

Astronomy

Spoiler

(I'm writing this one off of memory, so the solution might be a little inaccurate. Will update when I can find my paper copies of my notes.)

The first thing we might notice is that the message is actually a 20x20 grid of letters, numbers, and symbols - the same size as the 'Star Map'. If we cut out the 'stars' and overlay the map on top of the message, we get an instruction: ROTATE NINETY. Rotating the star map ninety degrees clockwise gives the next instruction: FOLD 1/2 X, FLIP Y. If we fold the star map on its new X axis (which removes many of the off-centre) and flip it along the y-axis, we are told to TRN L, or TURN LEFT. Doing so (turning 'counterclockwise' or, if you prefer, widdershins) gives us the final instruction OPEN. Unfolding the star map, we read the message EVRY 15 LETTER (and then some gibberish).

If we go back to the raw message, reading every fifteenth letter in the text spells the answer, MORE CAFFEINE.

Makes the Man

Spoiler

(This was a multi-part puzzle - only the first is available in thread, since submitting each sub-answer, or 'keyword' would grant access to the next part. Apologies to any future solvers because of this.)

Part One:

The title gives us our first clue: though there are many quotes about things that 'make the man', there is only one famous one that 'makes the man' - The Hat Makes the Man, a famous painting by Max Ernst. From this, we can assume this is a puzzle about hats!

Each of the clues references a person who wore a hat in a Sanderson book by describing the hat they wore. They are:

  • Wayne
  • Gawx
  • Hesina
  • Parlin
  • Brettin
  • Khriss
  • Vstim
  • Bashin
  • Yonatan
  • Rian

(All of these people can be easily found by typing 'hat' into Coppermind.)

Indexing into the names gives us the first keyword, EXHIBITION.

Part Two:

Spoiler

Wayne recently entered Elendel’s Official Hat Competition, expecting to breeze his way through with his good old Lucky Hat. However, he did not realise that there are, in fact, three categories: now he needs you to fill them for him, in order to get the prize. But be careful: the judges like to dock points for incorrect or poor submissions.

Categories:

 - Most Similar Hat To Examples

 - Biggest Hat

 - Most Hats In One Photo

Photos must include either your team name or your username to confirm that it is your photo. Don’t include yourself in the photo.

Here, solvers are instructed to take photos of hats they own in order to please the judges in three categories. The (uncommunicated) guidelines for each of the competitions was:

  • A hat that was creatively modified to fit a character in the book (maximum of three points)
  • A hat that was unreasonably large, or modified or photographed so as to be larger than usual (maximum of one point)
  • A number of hats equal to or exceeding sixteen (maximum sixteen points)

Once teams got the maximum number of points in each category, that category was closed. Taking the maximum point value of each category and converting it to a letter spelt CAP, the second keyword.

Part Three:

Spoiler

The judges all agree that you have absolutely killed the competition in all three submission categories - you have, in short, performed a homicidal hat trick. However, the final part of the competition is guessing what trophy you will receive (it takes the form of a strange object). They handed Wayne a clue, but he can’t make heads nor tails of it:

DEERSTALKER WEARER’S ITEM USED TO WALK WITH A BROKEN LEG

When you have the answer, call it in.

The final part of the puzzle is simply solving a cluephrase. With some thought (and perhaps a little guessing), solvers can get the answer of SHERLOCK'S CRUTCH.

Wayneisms

Spoiler

As the pre-puzzle definition hints at, each of these seemingly normal crossword clues is in fact a Wayneism of a Sanderson related thing. Solving all of them yields:

  • Bloody Tan (from bloody + tam)
  • Bands of Mourning (bands of 'morning')
  • Ska ('skaa' music)
  • Nuatoma ('noah timer', family clan member)
  • Erikeller (sounds like Helen Keller)
  • Catacendre (cat of Sandra)
  • Enefel (NFL)
  • Incarna
  • Beggar's Feast (beggar's 'yeast')
  • High Imperial (an Imperial in a high place... or a Cyrodiil on a hill, if you will)
  • Scadrial/Luthadel (from either Galadrial or Luthien - both give same answer)
  • Elsecallers (Knights who 'call' from 'elsewhere')
  • Cazzi (sounds like 'jazz')
  • Elariel (from Shan (or 'sham') Elariel)
  • Jaists (or 'jar-ists')
  • Innate
  • Allomantic Agreement of Ninety-Four (Wayne assumes the 94 represents how many people agreed, and not the date of agreement)
  • Death Metal
  • House Buvidas (uvas is Spanish for grapes)
  • Sliverism (or 'slither-ism')
  • Lord Ruler ('awed cooler')
  • First Contract (from 'First Contact')

The clues (and therefore answers) are sorted into pairs. As the flavourtext hints, there is something in common between each of them! Each pair of answers shares one letter in the same position. Taking those letters yields the (fairly nonsensical) answer of BARN GLITTER.

Gossipers

Spoiler

Though this logic puzzle may seem impenetrable at first, we can make some mileage through guesswork and pattern recognition. Specfically:

  1. Since people always have to be notified by someone, we can use the list of people who learnt the secret on the previous hour (or learnt it earlier but are still telling people) for each secret and work out who is in common among each of the examples to find who tells who.
  2. If one person is always notified after another person, they are either notified by the same individual, or one notifies another.
  3. We can use repeated notifications to pick out the noise - if two people are always notified in sequence, followed by a third person, then we can use an example where the second person already knows to find out if the third person is notified by the first or second.
  4. We can cross-reference our guesses with the names of the behaviours to complete our guesses or work out who is who.

With that in mind, we can work out who is who:

(Reminder to edit this in when it's not unreasonably late and you can actually find copies of your notes...)

From there, we can reconstruct what happens when Shan is told first. As we can see, only one new person is told each hour:

  • Shan Blanches
  • Eptres Venture
  • Elyen Venture
  • Arriev Blanches
  • Idren Lekal
  • Crews Geffenry
  • Ardous Geffenry
  • Ferson Penrod
  • Tyden Lekal
  • Salmen Penrod

Reading the diagonal of this ordering spells the answer, SPYING GEAR.


Okay, it’s time to talk about something. There’s a question that’s on all of your minds, and I’m here to answer it. Namely:

It’s been two months since the last signups went up. Where’s the new round? What have you been doing all this time?

Quiet at the back! But, yes, imaginary person, you are correct. Turnaround on the next round has been slow. Or, should I say, two rounds.

(To do list item one: set up cliffhanger. Status: complete. Item two: personal anecdote and side tangent. Proceeding...)

So the first round took over a month to draft and finalise. The second went up twice as quickly - just under two weeks. So what’s the difference?

The difference is time. I had almost unlimited free time for Scadrial - after meals, and family commitments, most of my time was on planning, writing, testing, throwing out, starting again, writing, cross-referencing... and it worked! I got a fairly successful round finished very quickly - before the dust had settled on the first round, I dare say. The problem with that method is it causes burnout. It was impossible for me to work on the third round for the rest of February - I was spent. By the time I picked the thing up again in March, workload had picked up again significantly. I’d say at least fifty hours of work in the past week has gone towards a local theatre production. More has gone to stuff I can’t share, or projects on the Shard, or personal stuff... (You can see the results of some more of my and other's work here.) I haven’t just been buried under this - I’ve spent some good time slacking off as well! - but other things have been on my mind.

Okay, Meta, stop making excuses and get to the point. Settle, settle. I do have a point, which is: at some point in late February, I looked at my sketch of the next draft and said:

This looks sorta Earth-sized, but on a much longer release schedule. I don’t want to release something this small after such a long wait, and the people who wanted another Scadrial might be disappointed...” And then I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. What’s better than one puzzlehunt round? Two puzzlehunt rounds.

(Yes, thank you, save questions to the end. We’re not trying to establish whether it was, in fact, brilliant. The point is that I thought it was.)

So I drafted another round, shuffled some things, tweaked some others. The details came out like this: I would have a first round that was slightly easier, more Earth-sized, to get everyone into the swing of things... and then the second one would pull out all the stops. It would be the biggest round yet. It would have ambitious and cool puzzles. (In theory, at least.) So I tried to write that one as well alongside it... and then, of course, I missed the March deadline.

Good news! The first round is almost ready to go. (Puzzles are drafted, just some fine-tuning.) Associated bad news: the second round isn’t. It’s about halfway. And then with the ugly news: in almost exactly one month, I shall be sitting some very important exams. (Latin exams, precisely. Respice, quaeso, aliquando...) And studying and puzzle solving does not mesh well together. In fact, one week from now I will need to be studying solely for those Important Non-Puzzle Commitments, and I won’t have time to dedicate to anything else.

Therefore, right now we have a dilemma. I can release what I have now: a single round (a finished one), after a longer-than-expected wait. But it won’t be very long, or very difficult. Underwhelming could be the right word. And the second round will have to be reworked as a result, and will take a little longer than if we wait, since I’ll have to rethink some of the things that might or might not be in it.

Conversely, I can wait a month, finish the second round (won’t take long after that) and release the two-round extravaganza as intended. Upside: my evil plans work out, and I can release the two rounds in their interlinked glory. Downside: no Sanderson Puzzle Hunt for over three months. Great for suspense, maybe. Not so good for consistency.

So! Instead of making up my own mind, I’ve put it to a vote. Would you rather a little bit of puzzle-content now (but you have to wait longer for the second/fourth round), or wait for both of them together? Neither are perfect - I would prefer the second option, but even so the delay is hardly ideal. But as long as the people more important than me - the audience - are happy, then I'm happy.

What do you say?

Edited by MetaTerminal
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I'd prefer the second option, personally--I'd love to have see a Sanderson puzzlehunt in that vein, especially if the two rounds are thematically linked (though if they are thematically linked, those of us trying to figure out the planet are going to have some very pointed guesses). So I don't mind waiting if it means you're happier with what you can release after the wait.

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  • 1 month later...

*commence thread necromancy*

This is your announcement that a herd of the rare local species New Sanderson Puzzlehunt Round has been spotted in the area! As they were previously thought to be extinct, this is exciting news for any aspiring Puzzlehunt-ologists. Keep a peeled eye for them wandering through in the coming hours!

I think that joke is about finished. This post is just to ping anyone who followed this thread or wanted to be notified of new rounds. If you want to sign up to the new round(s), please do so in the other thread when it arrives, not this one. Thank you for your interest.

@Stark

*conclude thread necromancy*

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