Huntinality 2022/Chaos in Neopia

Chaos in Neopia is a mini-meta-meta-puzzle from the CTO round of Huntinality 2022. The puzzle is themed after the virtual pet website Neopets, founded in 1999. Specifically, it features a series of five metas and a metameta, each associated with faeries found in Neopets. It also features the meta-matching mechanic, presenting solvers with 31 out of the 36 feeder answers used to solve the metas.

Solve Path
As the flavortext for this puzzle states, the goal is to solve the faerie-themed metas using the answers provided. It also notes that there are five unsolved feeder puzzles, and while you "won't need them to solve the metas", it's still a good idea to think about the possible answers, based on the known information (title + length), as well as any information learned about them while solving the metas.

Since there are five metas and 36 feeders (including the five unknowns), the answers can't be split up equally between the metas. However, guesses can be made about the number of answers needed to solve each meta. The Fire/Snow Faerie meta has 8 clues, so possibly uses 8 answers. Air/Earth has 7 images, so uses 7 answers. Battle/Library has 6 contests, but 10 entrants; without solving or examining the other metas one can't really be sure whether it uses 6 or 10 answers. Meanwhile, Light/Shenkuu likely uses 7 to fill in the 7 rows, and Soup/Negg likely uses 8 to fill in the 8 sets of blanks. Summing these most-likely answer counts results in exactly 30, meaning we can reasonably assume Battle/Library uses 6 answers, one for each contest. Now that this step is complete, it's time to work on the metas themselves.

Fire & Snow
Ignoring the mix of numbers, letters, and +/- symbols at the bottom, solvers should realize that the flavortext for this puzzle indicates that each of the presented "clues" is actually a mix of two separate clues. 2-Across in particular can be deciphered easily, as "slangily" is unlikely to be used twice in a row, meaning it should be the clues 'Wings, slangily' and 'Beers, slangily'. Once unscrambled, they all start to make a bit more sense:


 * 1D - To move in haste / When pluralized, reluctance
 * 2A - Wings, slangily / Beers, slangily
 * 3A - A predicament or trouble / Ice, if extreme enough
 * 3D - An open military conflict / A state of political hostility characterized by propaganda
 * 4A - A geyser, e.g. / Village in New York
 * 5D - A calendering machine / A juice extraction method
 * 6D - Very passionate / Without emotion, callous
 * 7A - A popular place / A localized indicator of paranormal activity, perhaps.

A lot of these clues have some clear answers, like 'COLD WAR ', for the second 3-Down entry, or  'HOT SPOT ' for the first 7-Across entry. Getting a few of these answers should result in two major revelations. First, all of the answers begin with the words HOT and COLD. Not only that, but within each pair, one will start with HOT and the other will start with COLD, with the same word following in each. Secondly, the words following HOT and COLD are all present in the bank of feeder answers!


 * 1D - HOT/COLD FOOT
 * 2A - HOT/COLD ONES
 * 3A - HOT/COLD WATER
 * 3D - HOT/COLD WAR
 * 4A - HOT/COLD SPRING
 * 5D - HOT/COLD PRESS
 * 6D - HOT/COLD BLOODED
 * 7A - HOT/COLD SPOT

With all of these words assigned to across/down entries, they can then be arranged in criss-cross fashion to make the number labels make sense. Following traditional rules (that no strings of 2+ letters can be formed that aren't clued words), everything can be placed logically. The best place to start is with 1D (FOOT) and 3A (WATER), since they can only intersect at the T, meaning 2A (ONES) has to intersect 1D at the first O.

Additionally, solvers should now realize that the text at the bottom indicates intersections between entries and shifts made to the letters at these intersections. Keeping the order that these intersections are presented, the result of these shifts reads the final answer for this meta:.

One other thing can be gleaned from this puzzle. While most of the words were present in the answer list, ONES was not, meaning it can be backsolved as the answer to one of the unsolved feeder puzzles. Since it's only 4 letters long, it has to be Obligatory Binary Puzzle, which thankfully fits the answer thematically.

Earth & Air
Not much is given in this puzzle aside from the Google Earth images and the bracketed numbers, so the best first step is to just identify them. They should all be relatively easy to search for, since location labels haven't been removed, allowing solvers to just google building names or neighborhoods. Doing this likely won't provide many more immediate ideas though, since there's no real connecting factors between the cities and countries; they span nearly every continent, and don't share particular letters or qualities. Plus, treating the numbers as indexes into the cities OR the countries breaks down with the 9-index into WARSAW or POLAND. However, it should be suspicious that the flavortext explains that Google Earth has been used to represent the Earth Faerie, but fails to identify something for the Air Faerie. Some additional searching should reveal that all of the cities pictured are large enough to have an airport with a 3-letter IATA code.


 * Buenos Aires, Argentina - EZE
 * Gaborone, Botswana - GBE
 * Telluride, Colorado - TEX
 * Sydney, Australia - SYD
 * Warsaw, Poland - WAW
 * Singapore, Singapore - SIN
 * Vienna, Austria - VIE

At this point, none of the answers in the answer list have been used in this puzzle, so those should be looked at for a next step (especially since there's not much else that can be gotten from the current information). Comparing the unused info (the IATA codes) to the list should reveal that almost all of them can be found as substrings in certain answers. Additionally, all of the answers are long enough to be indexed into by their maps' respective indexes.


 * TWEEZER (1) - T
 * DUNG BEETLE (2) - U
 * *TEX* (5) - ?
 * PSYDUCK (5) - U
 * WAWA PEDAL (9) - L
 * BASSINET (2) - A
 * RIVIERA (6) - R

Even though one of the answers is missing, the missing letter should be easy to fill in to create the final answer:. As a note, there are other words that can formed, but this is the most common one, and the one people are more likely to guess first.

At this point, it should be clear that each puzzle will be missing one answer. In this case, all that is known is that the answer contains the string "TEX" and has 'B ' as its 5th letter. This creates three possible structures to plug into a regex solver (or just solve on paper): TEX?B* / ?TEXB* / ????B*TEX* The second of these options doesn't return anything useful, but the first and third both return a relatively common word/phrase. The first returns TEXTBOOK (or TEXTBOX, but BOOK is more common), while the third returns CEREBRAL CORTEX. Confirming one of these answers with the puzzle titles/answer lengths is actually very easy, since all of the remaining answers either have to be between 6 and 10 letters, or be exactly 17 letters. Since CEREBRAL CORTEX is 14 letters long, it can't be a missing answer, leaving us with TEXTBOOK (which is confirmed by the answer checker). The most likely puzzle title that it goes to is 'That's So Classic', since the words "textbook" and "classic" can both mean archetypal or representative.

Battle & Library
This puzzle provides a lot of streams of information at once, including a clear indexing-based extraction at the end. Since the 'Entrants' sections appears to be clue-based (and contains enumerations), it's a good first step. Each of the clues hints at a famous book or poem, but has a particular word or phrase replaced with 'NEOPET' in all caps. Additionally, most of the enumerations are mostly correct, with one number being off. A key observation is that there are 10 clues, and 10 pictured Neopets, meaning there's probably a way to assign each one to one of the clues, possibly replacing the NEOPET in each clue. This matching ends up being done via puns, with each of the neopet names replacing one or two words in each of the book titles to make a new, Neopets-themed work that fits the given enumerations.


 * 1) Mere Christianity --> MEERCA CHRISTIANITY
 * 2) Anyone Lived In A Pretty How Town --> LENNY ONE LIVED IN A PRETTY HOW TOWN
 * 3) Infinite Jest --> INFINITE JETSAM
 * 4) Black Boy --> BLACK KOI
 * 5) If You Give A Mouse A Cookie --> IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A RUKI
 * 6) Waiting For Godot --> WAITING FOR GRUNDO
 * 7) Kafka On The Shore --> KAFKA ON THE SHOYRU
 * 8) Sister Carrie --> SISTER PTERI
 * 9) The Da Vinci Code --> THE DA MYNCI CODE
 * 10) I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings --> AISHA KNOWS WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

So at this point, all of the Neopets, books, and pairings of the two should be identified. All that's left to focus on is the contest itself, which clearly has some unknown rules that need deducing. This can be done one of two ways. The first is to look at the second/second-last placements for each contest, and try and logic out what one has a lot of that the other does not. This will probably take a bit of a long time to figure out, but is a great reason to start collecting relevant information about the neopets and the books.

The more effective method is to remember that it was identified earlier on that in all likelihood 6 answers go to this puzzle, matching with the six contests. Looking through the answer list should reveal some stand-outs as ways to quantitatively measure books. WORD COUNT and AGE in particular seem likely, and sorting the books by these measurements should result in correct second/second-last placements for the 4th and 5th competitions, respectively. In total, five answers fit as contest descriptions, and all of them fit one of the six placement descriptions:


 * 1) PET POPULARITY (Ranking of pet on Neopets) - 2nd: GRUNDO (11th), 9th: JETSAM (45th)
 * 2) SCRABBLE (Scrabble score of clue answers) - 2nd: LENNY ONE LIVED IN A PRETTY HOW TOWN (50 pts), 9th: BLACK KOI (20 pts)
 * 3) CLUE SIZE (# of characters in clue) - 2nd: BLACK KOI (149), 9th: SISTER PTERI (104)
 * 4) WORD COUNT (# of words in work) - 2nd: KAFKA ON THE SHOYRU (173100 wds), 9th: IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A RUKI (291 wds)
 * 5) AGE (Earliest publication date) - 2nd: LENNY ONE LIVED IN A PRETTY HOW TOWN (1940), 9th: KAFKA ON THE SHOYRU (2002)
 * 6) ????? - 2nd: BLACK KOI (???), 9th: THE DA MYNCI CODE (???)

With confirmation that these are the correct orderings, even without the last one, most of the indexing based one first/last placements can be done, resulting in the final answer: TOY ESCAPE


 * SCRABBLE (1st) - AISHA KNOWS WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (60)
 * CLUE SIZE (10th) - THE DA MYNCI CODE (93)
 * AGE (1st) - SISTER PTERI (1900)
 * WORD COUNT (1st) - INFINITE JETSAM (543709 wds)
 * PET POPULARITY (10th) - BLACK KOI (50th)
 * WORD COUNT (10th) - LENNY ONE LIVED IN A PRETTY HOW TOWN (228 wds)
 * AGE (10th) - THE DA MYNCI CODE (2003)
 * PET POPULARITY (1st) - KAFKA ON THE SHOYRU (1st)
 * CLUE SIZE (1st) - MEERCA CHRISTIANITY (230)
 * ??? (10th) -
 * SCRABBLE (10th) - SISTER PTERI (13 pts)
 * ??? (1st) -

The clues towards the missing answer in this puzzle are more difficult to interpret than the others. What's known is that it's a way to sort the book titles so that 'BLACK KOI' is the second in the list, and 'THE DA MYNCI CODE' is second-last. Additionally, the first in the list has to be at least 16 letters, with the 16th being E, and the last in the list has to have A as the second letter. The only entry that satisfies the first-place constraint is 'AISHA KNOWS WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS', giving one more certain data point. While it's possible there may be other ways to sort them, one that is both conspicuously missing from the contest list and fits the constraints is an alphabetical sort. This would also place 'WAITING FOR GRUNDO' last, which fits the last-place constraint. Looking at the unsolved puzzle titles, the puzzle 'Arranging the Dictionary' fits well, and further constrains the answer to being 17 letters. The only way to express that sort in 17 letters (without resorting to very uncommon phrases) is ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

Light & Shenkuu
At first, solvers can't do a whole lot with the list of "black squares", beyond making guesses as to their purpose. Those who are well-versed in logic puzzles may make the connection between a grid, black squares (labelled with numbers 0-3), and this being the Light Faerie's puzzle that the eventual result should be a solvable Akari puzzle. If this connection isn't made, the only available step to take is identifying the answers that go with this puzzle. Looking at what's in the list (either after having solved a few other metas or the whole thing, but the former makes this easier), there are a few answers that should stand out as being single words with the same length (8).

ANCESTOR, BASSINET, BOGOTIFY, COFACTOR, EXPANDED, FOXWEDGE, GARDENER, GARFIELD

With the exception of BASSINET/BOGOTIFY and GARDENER/GARFIELD, each of these answers starts with a different letter from A-G; coincidentally, the grid in this puzzle has rows of 7 cells labelled A-G. This means that it's possible to fit these words into the rows, with the labels taking the place of the first letters. Placing just the ones that are unambiguous, it should also become clear that the list of black squares refers to the letters that have now been placed in the grid. This means that it can be possibly be used to disambiguate with the B and G words. The only way for the first G to be satisfied without packing a LOT of odd letters into the missing D answer is for B to be BOGOTIFY. Filling this in and blackening the cells with the appropriate letters in them should start to reveal a symmetrical pattern. While technically the last D could theoretically come from GARDENER or GARFIELD, the only one that continues the pattern is GARDENER, so we'll place it in the G row for now. At this point, even though the middle row is unknown territory, there's only one way to keep the pattern symmetrical, and that's for the last T to be in the middle cell. With that taken care of, solvers should have a 7x7 grid with some black squares (some with numbers on them, some without), and the rest of the grid (mostly) filled in with letters.

As mentioned before, a lot of the puzzle points to this being an Akari puzzle, so solvers should attempt to solve it. Doing so should place 13 lights throughout the grid, landing on particular letters. Reading those letters gives the following clue phrase: COOTY FO??N WAR. Taking into account the Neopets theme of the overall puzzle, this can be WoF'd as 'COOTY FOE IN WAR', in reference to the Neopets minigame 'Cooty Wars', in which the 'foe' is the.

There are a lot of clues for the missing answer here. It has to be 8 letters long and start with D to fill in the missing row. On top of this, the 4th, 5th, and 6th letters need to be ETI, according to the black cell list and the extracted clue phrase. Looking at the missing puzzle titles gives a likely candidate in 'Mutated', cluing the missing answer of DELETION, a type of genetic mutation.

Soup & Negg
As the last metapuzzle in the list, this puzzle has the potential to be relatively easy, particularly if it's the last one solved and all other feeder answers have been removed from consideration.

Regardless, the puzzle being associated with the Soup and Negg Faeries, as well as the flavortext just reading 'Mm. Food!' does imply a connection to food as a whole. Looking at the list of answers, there's no distinct set that can fit into the blanks, so something else needs to go there. Instead, solvers should look at the words at the end of each of the rows. Some may evoke thoughts of particular foods by themselves: a common food projectile could be a tomato (at a comedian) or a watermelon (from a slingshot), and there is a particularly famous post-credits scene where characters eat shawarma together.

Even if these immediate connections aren't made, certain answers should draw solvers closer to them, such as 'JIRO', which can be paired with 'DREAM' to clue 'SUSHI' (after the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi), and the aforementioned 'POST-CREDITS' can be paired with 'THE AVENGERS' to get the famous SHAWARMA scene.


 * BUNOL projectile - TOMATO (Buñol is where La Tomatina festival is held, where thousands of tomatoes are thrown)
 * KENTUCKY DERBY tradition - MINT JULEP (Became the official drink in 1937, but was tradition long before)
 * GARFIELD favorite - LASAGNA (The cat, not the former president)
 * ??? exemplifies - ????
 * SERGIO LEONE style - SPAGHETTI (Leone is known for his spaghetti western movies)
 * JIRO dream - SUSHI (Jiro is the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi)
 * THE AVENGERS post-credits - SHAWARMA (A post-credits scene shows the heroes sitting down for food together)
 * IDAHO staple - POTATO (Idaho is the largest potato-producer in the US)

Once filled in, the grid should have a single vertical line going through all 8 entries, reading the phrase 'MJ'S CHIMP '. This clues the final answer, which is the name of Michael Jackson's pet chimpanzee:.

At this point, if all of the other puzzles have been solved, there are a few things known about this puzzle's missing answer. First, it needs to be something that can be paired with 'Exemplifies' to clue a food with the patterns '???C???M'. Secondly, it needs to be between 6 and 10 letters in length. Lastly (based on what puzzles the other missing answers went to), it's a thematic answer to the puzzle 'I'm Lovin' It'. Since the best possibility for the missing entry is ICE CREAM, the only clear answer is MCFLURRY, as it's an ice cream-based food found at McDonald's, which has the slogan 'I'm lovin' it'.

The Faerie Queen
At last, the metameta! At this point, solvers should have both 5 meta answers and 5 missing feeder answers, one from each metapuzzle.


 * Fire/Snow - PLUSHIE (Missing Answer: ONES)
 * Earth/Air - TUBULAR (Missing Answer: TEXTBOOK)
 * Battle/Library - TOY ESCAPE (Missing Answer: ALPHABETICAL ORDER)
 * Light/Shenkuu - MOOTIX (Missing Answer: DELETION)
 * Soup/Negg - BUBBLES (Missing Answer: MCFLURRY)

However, the flavortext for the metameta appears to imply that while the solvers were missing something (an answer from each meta), the metas themselves were also missing something. The use of the word "games" also seems suspicious, and for good reason. Searching some of the meta answers along with the theme of 'Neopets', particularly the two-word  'TOY ESCAPE ', should come up with the full names of some Neopets mini-games. TOY ESCAPE is missing BOX to form TOYBOX ESCAPE, and all of the other meta answers work the same way.


 * PLUSHIE TYCOON
 * TUBULAR KIKO RACING
 * TOY BOX ESCAPE
 * MOOTIX DROP
 * FAERIE BUBBLES

So now, the missing things from both the solvers and the metas have been discovered. The flavortext also mentions finding a "couple things in common" between the missing things, and the table seems to imply that this means exactly two things that can be sorted alphabetically. Since at this point the only things solvers really have are pairs of words, they should examine them closely. Doing so should reveal that each pair shares exactly two letters. TYCOON and ONES share O and N, for example. Extracting these letters, sorting them alphabetically within each pair, and slotting them into the correct spaces in the table allows solvers to reorder based on the table's numbers, 1-10, and read one final clue phrase: DOORKNOB OF. As the flavortext said, one last thing is missing, and that's the final answer needed to complete this item from Neopets:.

Track Differences
As with the other puzzles in this hunt, there are differences between the casual and expert tracks' versions of this puzzle. Since this puzzle has multiple sub-puzzles, most of them have their own differences between the two versions. The only sub-puzzle that is identical in both version is Soup Faerie and Negg Faerie. In all but one case, the only difference present in the casual versions is.

In Fire/Snow,. In Earth/Air,. In Battle/Library,. In Light/Shenkuu,. Lastly, the Faerie Queen has.

Overall

 * Mini-meta - An extremely rare mini-metameta! Instead of having several short puzzles contributing to a single meta, this puzzle pretends that this is the meta-solving stage of a much larger hunt, and asks solvers to complete 5 metapuzzles and a metameta.
 * Video Games (Neopets) - The whole thing is themed after the online game, with each of the metas being associated with two faeries or types of faerie found in the world of Neopia.
 * Meta-matching - Since (almost) all of the "feeders" from this "hunt" have been completed, solvers get a big list of answers that they need to assign to each of the metas. However, they only have 31 out of the 36 answers! That's because...


 * Backsolving - Part of this puzzle is to figure out what the missing five answers are, with each meta missing one of the five answers.
 * Hint in Title - Not the title of the overall puzzle, but the five missing puzzle answers do have titles, and they can help solvers figure out what their answers are, especially if there's some ambiguity.
 * Enumeration - In addition to the titles, each of the "unsolved" puzzles has an expected answer length. For one of them, it's exactly 17, but all of the others have a range like "6-10 letters" or "fewer than 6 letters".
 * Sub-answer Checking - Thankfully, solvers don't need to go through the entire puzzle just assuming they have their meta answers or missing answers correct. Instead, they can check both of these answer sets in the main answer checker.

Fire & Snow

 * Hint in Title/Hint in Flavortext - The title refers to "Fire" and "Snow", which ends up being a good clue for the HOT/COLD pairings present in this puzzle. In addition, the flavortext directly clues that the crossword clues have been interwoven.
 * Diagramless Crossword - Initially, the clues don't make sense, but they should become a bit clearer once solvers realize that...
 * Interwoven Strings - ...they're all actually two clues with the words woven together. The word order is preserved at least!
 * Identical Substrings - After solving a few, it should become clear that all of the clue pairs solve to phrases that have the same second word.
 * Antonyms - The first word in each clue answer is either HOT or COLD, as clued by the Fire/Snow pairing.
 * Letter Intersections - Once the crossword has been constructed, solvers can write down the letters at the intersections travelling from top to bottom along the chain of answers. It doesn't read anything at first, because...
 * Caesar Cipher - ...the letters need to be shifted forward or backward the proper amount (as noted below the list of clues) to get the final answer.

Earth & Air

 * Hint in Flavortext - Not a very direct clue, since the flavortext mostly just makes it clear that, of the two Faeries in the title, Earth is represented clearly, but solvers need to figure out how Air is represented.
 * Geography (Google Earth, Cities) - The bulk of the puzzle is a series of Google Earth screenshots, from which solvers need to identify major cities.
 * Transportation (IATA Airport Codes) - Each of the cities has an airport recognized by the IATA, and therefore has a 3-letter IATA Code!
 * Hidden Substrings - The IATA codes from each of the cities can then be found in some of the feeder answers as a hidden substring.
 * Indexing - Once answers are matched to screenshots via the airports, they can be indexed into by the bracketed number under each image.

Battle & Library

 * Hint in Flavortext - The flavortext mentions 'deducing the contests' rules', which hints at how the feeder answers interact with this puzzle.
 * Literature (Miscellaneous) - The 'Entrants' are all book or poem titles, clued by plot or factual information about them. However...
 * Puns - ...the actual entrants are slightly altered from the original titles, as each one has been made punnier by having a word or two replaced by...
 * Video Games (Neopets) - ...one of the ten pictured Neopets above the entrants list.
 * Enumeration - Thankfully, all of the entrant clues have enumerations attached, which should help indicate that something is amiss.
 * Reordering - Each of the 'contests' involves reordering the entrants based on one of six ordering methods: Alphabetically, by the work's word count, by the clue's character count, by the popularity of the associated Neopet, by the age of the work, and by the scrabble score of the punny title.
 * Indexing - Once ordered correct for each contest, the titles can be indexed into based on first/last place finishes and the instructions at the bottom of the puzzle.

Light & Shenkuu

 * Hint in Title - The combination of "Light" and "Shenkuu" (the latter being a region in Neopia modelled after Japan and China) clues something light-based and possibly Japanese. In this case, that means...
 * ...Akari - Since Akari can mean 'Light' in Japanese (and the puzzle type is about lighting up a space), this logic puzzle fits the hint perfectly.
 * Build-Your-Own-Puzzle - By assigning answers to rows in the grid and following the instructions to turn certain letters into black squares, solvers end up making their own Akari puzzle out of a formerly blank grid.
 * Marked Letters - While not marked at the beginning of the puzzle, certain letters will end up marked by the lights placed into the grid during the Akari solving process. These end up spelling...
 * Final Clue Phrase - ...COOTY FOE IN WAR. This refers to the Neopets game 'Cooty War', and clues the final answer for this puzzle.

Soup & Negg

 * Hint in Flavortext - Mm. Food!
 * Fill-In-The-Blanks - While blanks are not necessarily shown for the clues, each one is missing one of the answers. Once fixed, they read as proper clues for...
 * Food and Drink (Miscellaneous) - ...various food/drink items!
 * Givens - To help with ambiguity, each of the items has a single letter (first or last) already shown.
 * Shared Column - Reading down the column shared by all of the food items gives...
 * Final Clue Phrase - ...MJ'S CHIMP. Not exactly related to food, but it gives the right final answer anyway.

The Faerie Queen

 * Hint in Flavortext - The phrase 'Enough of these games' hints at the use of Neopets minigames. The rest of the flavortext also clues the missing pieces theme of the metameta, and the need to find two things in common with each pair of missing things.
 * Video Games (Neopets) - Each meta answer can be found in the title of a minigame on Neopets.
 * Missing Information - Each of the meta answers is technically missing a word or two needed to complete the name of one of the minigames.
 * Shared Letters - Between the missing answers in each meta and the missing minigame words, each pair has exactly two letters in common (but not like Eigenletters).
 * Reordering - Numerical. The puzzle provides a table into which the shared letters are slotted, and each letter is assigned a number from 1-10 to be reordered by.
 * Final Clue Phrase - DOORKNOB OF
 * Recursion - Since the puzzle was about missing words (particularly in Neopets terms), the final answer ends up being the missing word from this final clue phrase.