Mega Puzzle - About

About

Welcome to the Mega Puzzle! Over the following weeks, you and your team will get to tackle an array of puzzles ranging from from familiar favorites like crossword and soduku, to new challenges, such as decyphering an unknown language and finding the hidden message in music. But wait, there's more!! You can date a sea monster; travel to a new dimension; and even confront a dragon.

As a participant, you will recieve extra credit in LLLC-Y 102, as well as eternal power, glory, and our undying love and appreciation.

Solutions for the puzzles can be submitting using the "Solve" button on each puzzle page. You get as many submissions as you want, though please do not chase the autograder.

After the puzzle has been solved, we will also post our full solutions and inspiration, where applicable, for all of the puzzles.

Any hints or corrections that need to be made will be added in the hints portion of each page as potential roadblocks are encountered. Feel free to reach out if any clarification is needed - we won't give you the answer, but we can steer you in the right direction.

Do not disrupt classes, nor let your own work suffer in your quest to solve the puzzle.

For event attendence and prizes reasons we are limiting the max team size to a maximum of 4 people per team.

Structure

This year's megapuzzle consists of 19 different puzzles, and one ultimate final puzzle. In order to solve the final puzzle and finish the challenge, all 19 answers will be needed. On the region maps you can find difficulty ratings for all of the puzzles to get a better idea of the effort involved for each of them.

In order to win, a team must submit answers for all 20 total puzzles, however, not every team member has to submit, as long as the team name has submitted for each of them.

Puzzling Basics

Heres a few tips and tricks to keep in mind while puzzling.

For all puzzles, the answer will ALWAYS be a word or a short phrase in English with no spaces.
We will rarely tell you outright how to solve the puzzle, but you will find hints in the puzzle descriptions or titles to lead you in the right direction. For example, "think like a computer" could be a hint that an answer is encoded in binary. Perchance.
Puzzles often have multiple steps to get the answer word.
Don't be afraid of using online resources such as decoders, anagram solvers, and song identifiers.

Solving tips

Acrostic clues are where the first letter, syllable, or word of each line, paragraph, or other recurring feature spells out a word or message.
Indexing is a very popular way of extracting single letters from words, and you will run across this type of puzzle solving strategy a lot. Unfortunately as programmers some puzzle creators were more comfortable with 0 indexing while others preferred 1 indexing. Just be weary when indexing that if you find that you get nonsense one way, try the other kind of indexing. For example: 2 Cake, 6 Pudding, 5 Shortening gives you: Cake, Pudding, and Shortening, or ant with 1 indexing.
Alpha-numeric codes are also very common. If you end up with a list of numbers try replacing the numbers with the corresponding letters like this: 1 = A, 2 = B, 3 = C... 26 = Z. Again, programmer brain rot affects us all and you may have to try replacing numbers for letters like this: 0 = A, 1 = B, 2 = C ... 25 = Z.
Braille codes are occasionally used. Try braille when puzzles seem to be encoded in 2x3 matrices.
Morse code codes are also occasionally used. Try using morse code when you see that data is split into three distinct categories (dot, dash, and space).
Binary, of course we have no mention binary. We are Luddy students after all. Use binary if you have two distinct categories (one and zero). Once you have binary, you can try converting that to an ascii character, or a decimal number, or whatever to be honest...