Huntinality 2/Chaos in Neopia

Chaos in Neopia
Huntinality 2022
CTO (Brick Zander)
Neopets' Faerie Queen, the faerie associated with the puzzle's mini-metameta.
Author(s)	Benji Nguyen
Answer	Click to revealPOWER
Statistics
No. solves	168
No. total guesses	1452
Links
Puzzle	Link
Solution	Link
Stats	Link

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: Click to revealPLUSHIE.

 

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: Click to revealTUBULAR. 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 textbooks are sometimes classic literature, or can be about 'classic' information, like history.

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 don't...

Soup & Negg

TO DO

The Faerie Queen

TO DO

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 Click to reveala single phrase in the flavortext being bolded.

In Fire/Snow, Click to reveal'mixed their clues together' is bolded to emphasize the first step to decoding the crossword clues. In Earth/Air, Click to reveal'The Air Faerie' is bolded to clue the use of airport codes to represent the Air Faerie opposite the Earth Faerie's use of Google Earth. In Battle/Library, Click to reveal'deduce the contest's rules' is bolded just to clue the need to figure out the nature of contests in order to accurately answer the questions at the end. In Light/Shenkuu, Click to revealno phrases are bolded, but the phrase "Black boxes..." has the additional word 'Akari' added to the beginning, to steer solvers towards treating the grid as an Akari puzzle. Lastly, the Faerie Queen has Click to reveal'a couple of things in common' bolded to clue the importance of finding exactly two things (letters) in common between the two "missing" things in each puzzle.

Puzzle Elements

Overall

• TO DO

Fire & Snow

• TO DO

Earth & Air

• TO DO

Battle & Library

• TO DO

Light & Shenkuu

• TO DO

Soup & Negg

• TO DO

The Faerie Queen

• TO DO