I'm probably missing something. I don't even know where to start in the second part 😞
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First time trying to solve one of those puzzles, and I have to say it's damn epic, but unfortunately I'm still stuck at the second part of hints...
May I add you on Steam just to see if I'm on the right track?
Bump still for really well done complicated puzzle
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I surrender, I think ik all I have to know(most definitely wrong) but it seems the last stage is evading all my feeble attempts. Kudos for the incredibly well-done puzzle(s) 👍 here's hoping the next time I get it 😶🌫️
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Ok Thats it from me. I'll be waiting for the solution. SG puzzles take a toll on my tiny brain!
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>>> SOLUTION <<<
1st part:
Imgbb.co keeps metadata of hosted pictures. You can use an online exif viewer or you can just download the picture and right-click it to get to its properties and its details tab in order to see some of that data.
The first thing you can notice there is a 7-character long code leading you to an imgur picture (a dead-end).
The second thing of interest is the camera maker and the camera model: Canon ASCII and 75774910011586119. That code is another imgur code encoded by using ASCII, this time for a picture you needed in order to procede.
dcode.fr can decode ASCII without even minding about spacing.
2nd part:
In that picture you can se 3 words highlighted: PRIME, CAPITAL and NAC.
You have to make sense of NAC first. That stands for Natural Area Code, a geocode system (searching for NAC on wikipedia you could find this page). If you look into it you should understand that the code on the postcard is actually a set of coordinates.
You can pinpoint different countries using an online coordinates converter like nearby.
CAPITAL is meant to make you think of capital cities. You were supposed to look for the Capital Cities of those countries and use their first letter only as hinted in the OP.
PRIME was referring to prime numbers, meaning that out of the 12 lines of coordinates you had, you had to consider only the ones corresponding to prime numbers by counting them, so the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 11th one.
As for the uppercase/lowercase sensitivity, you just had to look at the case of the code I used. Each line is uppercase or lowercase.
So you had:
2nd. VL P2 -> Japan -> Tokyo -> T
3rd. JC QK -> Croatia -> Zagreb -> Z
5th. zw fk -> Tuvalu -> Fanafuti -> f
7th. JF QC -> Bosnia and Herzegovina -> Sarajevo -> S
11th. j1 ht -> Cameroon -> Yaoundé -> y
Final GA code: TZfSy
The hints I gave out are self explenatory now, I think. The ones I didn't mention were the ETAM spelled with the cities in the example in the OP (meta backwards, to make you think of metadata) and the "informazione fotografica" stamp, which translates to photografic information, pointing you at the picture/camera details.
That's it.
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Great puzzle! I was very close in the end, though started a bit too late on it (an hour an half before it closed). I got up to the Natural Area Codes, and figured that it would point to countries and we should take the letter from each capital. Though I didn't use "nearby.org.uk", but another site "coordinates-converter.com" and that wrongly lead me to believe that NAC has to be 6/12 characters instead of 4, and due to my rush I didn't double check it. Would have read the wiki page more carefully (or used the nearby coordinates site), I would have figured it out.
Also hadn't yet made sense of the prime number referring to the number of lines, but if I knew it was 4 characters, and each line gives you a capital and so a letter, it would be pretty self explanatory, as I was sure it has to be about prime numbers. Same with uppercase and lowercase letters.
But thanks for the effort in creating this cool puzzle.
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ok i got to the Natural Area Code and guess its prime numbers
but this is where i got stuck.
Tried a few NAC converter, no idea what to do so give up
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Did you know that, in Italy, when we have to spell a long code out loud, we might use renowned Italian city names instead of letters? I.e. Ancona instead of A, Turin instead of T, Empoli instead of E, Milan instead of M, and so on.
It's a sort of unofficial phonetic alphabet we all learn here just by hearing it from others while growing up. Do you have anything similar in your country?
Anyway, I'm wandering off the main topic here.
Here's your puzzle:
It's been a tough day today. You're almost home and you can't wait to have some well-deserved rest. Oh, wait! What's that package beside the front door?
You recognize the sender's name on it. You don't have the time for his shit right now.
You reluctantly pick it up, close the door behind you and, well, you decide to open it anyway.
There's a globe inside. Nothing fancy. A geopolitical one, just like the ones you could gift to a kid for a birthday, with a power cord, a switch, and a bulb on the inside.
Furthermore you can see a postcard with some sort of code on it and a yellow sticky note attached to it.
You stare at it for a few seconds... So, what now? What are you supposed to do?
>>> SOLUTION <<<
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