All That's Left To Do Is Extract (Teammate Hunt 2021)

All That's Left To Do Is Extract
Teammate Hunt 2021
Emma
The puzzle's icon, a tree bearing many different fruits.
Author(s)	Ivan Wang, Alex Irpan, and Rachel Wei
Answer	Click to revealMIGRATE
Statistics
No. solves	194
No. total guesses	2225
Links
Puzzle	Link
Solution	Link
Stats	Link

All That's Left To Do Is Extract is a variety puzzle from the Emma round of the 2021 Teammate Hunt. Despite a relatively minimal presentation, it manages to stretch across much of the hunt's website, providing both an introduction to many common extraction methods and a unique puzzle experience.

Solve Path

The puzzle seemingly opens with only a multi-line piece of flavortext (seen below) and an photo of 10 "answers" written on a piece of lines paper.

friends,
last night i solved all of the clues but i'm stuck.
all that's left to do is extract.
good luck!
sincerely, a teammate

 

The puzzle's 10 "answers"

As the title suggests, solvers should look into trying to extract letters from the information they're presented with. Since the flavortext is spread across multiple lines, and left-aligned, it's easy to see that taking each line's first letter results in the word FLAGS. Similarly, the answers' initials spell the phrase ERRATA TIME. Depending on when one is solving the puzzle, it may be immediately obvious or not obvious at all that three errata were added to the puzzle immediately upon unlocking it, and all of the times they were "recorded" at are listed in GMT (notable as all other times on the site are listed in whatever time zone the reader is in).

Combining this information, solvers should realize the times that the errata came in can be expressed on an analog clock, and interpreted as semaphore (the only common extraction using "flags") to spell FAQ. Careful examination of the FAQ in combinations with the text of the aforementioned errata (the first of which mentions "the penultimate link") should lead solvers to a section titled "Have you tried...", with the sixth section (also mentioned in the first erratum) starting with the same text mentioned in the other two errata. In particular, the phrase "South Atlantic Treaty" combined with the errata stating that it has an "incorrect direction" should clue using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (or NATO) phonetic alphabet. The second line reads "a crossword boundaries", which should actually read "across word boundaries" cluing that something is in fact found across word boundaries within this section. Solvers can find NATO phonetic alphabet letters in this way, which end up spelling UNZIP TEAM PIC. This "have you tried" section is also important to note, as Click to revealall of the extraction methods used in this puzzle can be found among the suggestions.

Teams were encouraged when registering to upload a team picture, and for good reason. Once a picture was uploaded, it was altered so that renaming it as a .zip file and extracting its contents would result in a single text file labelled "donotread.txt". The text itself, aside from being a bit creepy, is relatively mundane. However, the punctuation used in it is entirely periods and dashes, indicative of each line being a character in morse code (another common extraction method). This extracts the message FIND BUTTERFLIES.

Depending on how close teams have paid attention to the art of the hunt at this point, they may find the next step easy, or a bit more difficult. Either way, the butterflies in question can be found on several illustrations from the "story" tab (or on individual first-round puzzles, but the story tab provides the correct order), and each has a peculiar pattern on its wings. Some have dots, and all have some darker lines along the wing borders. These patterns are in fact letters in the Pigpen cipher, and when translated spell KONAMI CODE.

Inputting the infamous Konami Code (using arrow keys for directions) anywhere on the hunt website brings up a miniature version of the previous Teammate Hunt's "PlayMATE", but with only a single "game" available to play: Tateroids NaNo. Playing through the game gives solvers a series of simple math equations to solve, each resulting in a number from 1 to 114, suspiciously close to the range of atomic numbers available for use. If solvers translate these numbers to their equivalent atomic symbols, they get the phrase FlYEr TeN CHAr WDs

Teams may remember what flyer the phrase is referencing, but if not they'll have to spend some time searching around the site. As the flyer in question is the one shown when a new team is registering. Along the border of said flyer are a series of carnival buzzwords, among which are exactly ten 10-letter words. If solvers arrange these into a 10x10 block of text (assuming they start in the top left corner), they can read the phrase SEE FAVICON diagonally. Alternatively, they can do this without physically arranging the words, just by taking the first letter of the first word, the second of the second, etc.

The Favicon (the image shown in a browser tab to represent a website) of the hunt website changes depending on what round one is looking at. However, all four version of it have the same secret embedded in them. If solvers zoom into the image and possibly turn up the contrast, they should spot several pixels that are darker than the rest of the background. These pixels can easily be identified as braille, and translated to get the phrase SHIFT RESET PW TOKEN.

The only way to get a password reset token is by actually requesting a password reset. Doing so results in the requester getting an email with a link to reset their password, with a token embedded in it, made out of seemingly random characters. However, if solvers perform a caesar shift (the amount shifted by was random for each request), they can change the first section of the token into the phrase SUBMIT RED HERRING

Submitting like the phrase says doesn't solve the puzzle, however. Instead, it brings up a response in the answer box, asking if the submitter meant one of many other animals (or a few non-animals). Similar to HERRING, each of the alternate words contains a single pair of double letters, providing one last thing to extract and resulting in the phrase REDO STEPS ONE PER ORIG CLUE

Finally, the puzzle circles back to the original set of answers. Each one of the ten extraction methods used to reach this point can be applied to one of the ten answers to get a single letter.

 

• Essential fatty acid --> NATO letters --> A (...al fa...)
• Romans 7:21 --> Semaphore from time --> N (SW + SE)
• Richmond Sixteen --> Atomic symbols --> S (Sulfur)
• Aide-de-camp --> Morse code --> M (--)
• TNT --> Rot-N --> I (shifts to EYE)
• Apollo 7 --> Pigpen --> G (With original font)
• Terrarium --> Double letters --> R
• Interpunct --> Braille --> A (A single dot)
• Musicality --> Diagonalization --> T (9th entry, 9th letter)
• Extravaganza --> Initialization --> E (Process of elimination)

Accolades

Award	Date of Ceremony	Category	Result
Bravo Awards	January 13, 2022	Nuovo Award for Puzzling Innovation	Nominated