Brick's Password (Huntinality 2022)

Brick's Password
Huntinality 2022
Future Home of Haring Technologies
Brick's (literal) profile image from the hunt.
Author(s)	Benji Nguyen (Author), Ryan Liu (Dev), Violet Xiao (Dev)
Answer	Click to revealWORDPASS
Statistics
No. solves	121
No. total guesses	1174
Links
Puzzle	Link
Solution	Link
Stats	Link

Brick's Password is one of three revisitation metapuzzles found in the final round of Huntinality 2022. Continuing from the previous rounds' metas where the goal was to discover one of the board members' usernames, these puzzles task solvers with discovering the same members' passwords, in order to log into their accounts.

Solve Path

As is the case with the other revisitation puzzles in this round, the key to solve this puzzle is knowing how the other puzzles from Brick Zander's round work. There are clues to this being the case that should be clear if any of the original puzzles have been solved, the most obvious of which being the extra "meta" in the same form as the ones from Click to revealChaos in Neopia and the Ninja video and accompanying text from Click to revealAsk A Ninja.

All of the pieces of this puzzle should be straightforward if the person solving it also solved the previous puzzles. If that's not the case, gather the team together and try assigning parts of the puzzle to people who worked on the original puzzles.

 

The first section is related to Morose Codes.

 

As the original puzzle required translating strings of letters into morse code and translating the result back to letters via another method, the first step should be to translate the text to morse. Since the entire text is made up of Ts and Es, which are represented by a single dash and a single dot, respectively, the letter groupings can be maintained and treated as new morse code letters.

TT TTT ETE EEE E TETE TTT ETT TEE E --> -- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- .-- -.. . --> MORSECOWDE

In the original puzzle, extraneous letters in the resulting text were extracted, meaning 'W' is taken from this one.

The second section is related to Chaos in Neopia.

 

Thankfully, solvers can rely on the "title" of this meta to be just as helpful as the ones in the original puzzle. Since only three out of four answers are given with no shell to apply them to, it follows that there should be something that clearly ties them together. Knowing that the puzzle involves 'numbers', solvers need to notice that the given answers all have a number between one and four written out in them.

FOREG[ONE], THE ELIZABE[TH REE]F, ACADEMY O[F OUR] LADY

Using the lack of a TWO answer, and the clue of Sidney Lumet directed this from the flavortext, the missing answer can be identified as NETWORK. Ordering the four answers by their hidden numbers and diagonalizing gets the word FEED. Since the original puzzle's metas resulted in Neopets minigames missing a word, solvers can take FLORG from the game 'Feed Florg'. The text at the bottom of this section mentions that there are multiple things in common between the missing meta answer and the missing game word; in this case, it's the letters O and R. Since this text also says to put the alphabetically-earlier letter first, this puzzle extracts OR.

The third section is related to Ask A Ninja.

 

Two things can be extracted from the video right away. First is the word 'Popeye', which stands out in the response. Second is the words 'ninja grub'. The original puzzle hid nicknames for American Ninja Warrior contestants and episode titles from the web series 'Ask A Ninja' in its videos, and both of these extracted things fit these categories. Popeye is the nickname of Geoff Britten, and the 7th episode of Ask A Ninja.

While this puzzle does not let solvers use the original's system of providing videos of the ninjas' specified runs, Popeye's 2016 City Finals run (the one indicated below the video) is relatively easy to find online. Additionally, the only juice brand found in the run is in some background advertisements for POM WONDERFUL, which fits the [3 9] enumeration. Indexing into this by the episode number of Ninja Grub (7) extracts the letter D.

The fourth section is related to Map Quests.

 

The home of the King of Rock and Roll (AKA Elvis) is Graceland, providing another "Land" phrase like the ones seen in the original puzzle. The 'Start' message here (Beginning from the N/A of 5) implies two things. First, solvers are looking for 5 letter synonym for 'Grace' somewhere in the grid. Additionally, one of the steps from the original puzzle is being skipped over, namely writing words boggle-style using a starting point in the grid word and map directions.

Knowing this, the word POISE should be found in the grid as the only 5-letter word meaning 'grace'. Skipping right to the extraction method from the original puzzle should lead solvers to also finding the word PIG (from Chapter 6 of Alice in Wonderland) intersecting POISE at the letter P. This is the letter that needs to be extracted.

The fifth section is related to All Natural.

 

The original puzzle clued minerals with a mix of crossword-y clues and geological facts. In this case, APATITE is clued by both the geology info (Apatite has a Mohs hardness of 5 and is commonly used in fertilizer as a phosphate source) and the punny clue at the end (Apatite is pronounced like 'Appetite'). Overlapping APATITE and AVOCADO results in only one shared letter, and that's A.

The sixth section is related to Magic Ear.

 

Since there aren't any audio files, this mini-puzzle (thankfully) skips over the majority of the hard work needed to solve the original. Instead, solvers are presented with something that would be seen near the end of it. The pictures appear to indicate the words 'woman' and 'touch'. A little searching should uncover the existence of a song called 'Magic Woman Touch' by The Hollies, which is in line with the original concept of 'Songs minus the word Magic'.

Examining the lyrics shows that the word 'keep' is present, and is followed by the word 'searching'. Since the original puzzle just extracted the first letter of these subsequent words, the letter S is extracted here.

The last section is related to Refreshment Counter.

 

While the other mini-puzzles all require knowledge of how particular puzzles worked overall, this one requires solvers recall the digits that particular letters mapped to in the original puzzle. Knowing that the digits 0-9 are mapped to the letters BINARYCOLS in order, the five statements can be translated as follows:

1. There are more than 30 puzzles in this hunt.
2. 6532 is a smaller number than 3145.
3. This is the only true FoF in this column.
4. You are capable of finishing this hunt!
5. Not counting the meta, the first round had 9 puzzles.

Statements 1 and 5 are clearly true (The hunt had 10+8+8+8+4 or 38 puzzles at this point), meaning that 3 has to be false. Assuming that solvers aren't too hard on themselves about their chances of finishing, this gives a pattern of TFFTT, or 10011 in binary. Translating this string to decimal like in the original puzzle gives the number 19, which in A1Z26 equals S, the final extracted letter.

Once solvers have all of the letters extracted, they can just put them together in the order presented in this puzzle to get Brick's password.

Puzzle Elements

• Metapuzzle - Specifically, a revisitation meta that doesn't use the feeder puzzle answers at all.

 

Morose Codes

• Morse Code - The provided text needs to be translated both into morse code and out of morse code (after a bit of respacing).
• Extraneous Letters - The result of the translation is the phrase "MORSE CODE", but with an extra W in the middle that ends up being extracted.

Chaos in Neopia

• Metapuzzle - A mini-meta to be exact!
• Hidden Substrings - Each of the provided answers has a number hidden in them, written out.
• Reordering (Numerical) - Solvers need to reorder the answers by the aforementioned hidden numbers and...
• Diagonalization - ...take the diagonal of them, which reads FEED.
• Backsolving - Between the provided "puzzle title" and the context from the meta, solvers can identify the missing answer as NETWORK.
• Instructional Extraction - The text at the bottom of the puzzle indicates (although somewhat cryptically) that two letters are extracted from this puzzle, and that they should be ordered alphabetically when extracted.

Ask A Ninja

• TV Shows (American Ninja Warrior) - This puzzle requires both identifying a prominent "Ninja" by a nickname (Popeye), but watching a specific one of his runs to find a particular object.
• Web Series (Ask A Ninja) - The puzzle also requires recognizing the name of an episode from the Ask A Ninja web series (Ninja Grub) and noting its episode number.
• Enumeration - When searching for the answer to the provided question in the run, solvers get a hint in the form of an enumeration (3 9).
• Indexing - After they've found the correct answer in the run, solvers can index into it by the episode number found previously.

Map Quests

• Synonyms - Specifically, a synonym for "Grace".
• Wordsearch - That synonym (POISE) can be found in the 6x6 grid provided, wordsearch-style (AKA in a straight line).
• Literature (Alice in Wonderland) - A word from a chapter title of Alice In Wonderland (PIG) can also be found in the grid.
• Letter Intersections - The point where POISE and PIG intersect (P) is the extracted letter for this puzzle.

All Natural

• Geology (Minerals) - The provided clues lead to a notable mineral (APATITE).
• Eigenletters - The one eigenletter in APATITE/AVOCADO is A, which is extracted.

Magic Ear

• Rebus - Mostly mathematical, although missing any symbols. This rebus solves to 'Woman Touch'.
• Music (Song Titles, Lyrics) - Identifying the rebus as the song 'Magic Woman Touch', minus the Magic, allows solvers to look up the lyrics, which lets them...
• ...Follow The Sequence - By checking the lyrics, they can find the word that fills the blank after 'keep' below the rebus.
• Initialization - As with the original puzzle, taking the first letter of the missing word gets solvers the letter they need.

Refreshment Counter

• Alphanumeric Substitution Cipher - Not a traditional one, and perhaps more akin to Alphametics, but this puzzle uses the letter-digit assignment from Refreshment Counter.
• True-or-False Statements - Filling in the proper numbers allows solvers to identify the true/false state of the five statements.
• Meta Puzzle - Two of the statements actually relate to statistics about the hunt itself, like number of puzzles in the first round and number of puzzles overall in the hunt.
• Binary - After determining the true/false state of each of the statements, solvers can translate it into 1s (true) and 0s (false), and translate the resulting binary number into a decimal number. A1Z26-ing it into a letter gives the final answer.