Hunt elements

Hunt elements are elements that transcend the boundaries of individual puzzles, and instead affect how a puzzle hunt appears and functions on a larger scale. This means that the elements can relate to administrative choices made by hunt runners, individual round functionality and gimmicks, or the way that solvers progress through the hunt.

Core Characteristics
Hunt elements are unique among all other elements, as they usually cannot be applied to individual puzzles. Instead, they apply to a hunt's structure, presentation, and function. For example, if a hunt presents all of its puzzles visually with flavorful icons or a map of an area, that would be a hunt element.

The key characteristic for something to be a hunt element primarily is for it to have large-scale effects. Something that is only ever used for single puzzles, or only affects a certain subset of puzzles within a hunt (without affecting an entire round) cannot be considered a hunt element. This is partially why these elements aren't used in individual puzzles: changing the structure of a hunt for a single puzzle can be difficult, and that risk/reward balance is often unfavorable to hunt writers.

There are some exceptions to hunt elements not being used in individual puzzles, such as puzzles that actively involve parts of the hunt structure like MITMH 2020's puzzle 'Concierge Services', which made use of the just-phased-out system of submission callbacks. However, these are rare occasions that tend to be treated as special or unique puzzles.

History of Use
Early puzzle hunts, primarily those run as MIT Mystery Hunts, lacked notable hunt elements, or at least any major variation in element presence between hunts. These hunts had similar formatting: solve puzzles on a printed piece of paper, use the answers to solve a final runaround, and finish the hunt. Many of these hunts were also themeless, instead focusing on having difficult challenges.

Once hunts gained themes (one of the primary types of hunt element), they also started gaining more variety in structure, allowing for hunt writers to experiment with how hunts, hints, and puzzles were presented to their solvers.

The advent of internet-based hunts also brought more variety, as hunts could then be hosted on sites, have digital answer submission (albeit with manual answer checking for a while), and play with different ways of getting the puzzles to solvers (including Timed Unlocks, Adjacency Unlocks, and others).

Subtypes
Hunt elements can be broken up into a few categories based on what aspects of a hunt they relate to.

Basic Hunt Elements
These elements involve things that are (at least today) considered key parts of a hunt existing. Hints, leaderboards, team signups, all of these are core structural elements of a puzzle hunt, and making changes to their format constitutes the involvement of various hunt elements. However, a basic element just being missing is not usually relevant enough to be listed, while a major change to how something function (such as a leaderboard containing fake teams) is notable.

Hunt Interface
The hunt interface is what is presented to solvers as they are solving the hunt. This includes any taskbars, counters, puzzle presentation methods, and website navigation methods the hunt has implemented.

Submissions and Answers
Submissions and answers, as hunt elements, involve how a hunt chooses to accept answers, and the results given back to teams. They also involve any round-wide gimmicks based on answer types (such as a round that only has emojis as answers). Changes to how answer submissions are made, as well as what teams get in response to these submissions, are very common, particularly with regard to how a hunt handles intermediate submissions (where a phrase is extracted from a puzzle indicating a task must be done or an extra step needs to be taken, and the submission box either accepts it and gives a special response, or just marks it as wrong).

Themes
Themes are what set two otherwise-identically-structured hunts apart from each other. They tend to inform visual aesthetic of a hunt, the plot (if there is one), and sometimes the style and size of flavortext. Individual themes aren't commonly reused (at least not exactly), so they tend not to be notable enough to be elements on their own, but the way that a hunt tells a story or changes themes throughout it are much more applicable as elements.

Unlock Structure
Unlock structure refers to the conditions a hunt uses to determine what puzzles unlock and when. The norm for this has changed quite a bit over time, but particular 'types' of hunt and certain hunt writers still use unlock structures that go against this norm. Commonly, unlocks are based on behind-the-scenes point systems, meaning that solvers just get to see a pattern of 'solve a puzzle' followed by 'unlock a puzzle', with some variation on whether or not zero, one, or two-or-more puzzles unlocks as a result of a solve.