5th Puzzlemania event! Do not forget to join the group :)

[09.08] The event started.

[16.08] The first milestone for hints has been reached! Each puzzle contains new hints now! In case you did not find those puzzles yet, here is another hint for you to make some progress:

First, try discovering the whole upper part of the labyrinth. Checking walls there might be a bit helpful. If after that you still do not know what to do, then think about the words written at the door. Why a blind person can solve this puzzle? That's because blind people have a special writing system, and of course a blind person will immediately recognize this system. If you are stuck right after deciphering the message, then read the words written at the door once again. Can you give an example of a place, which is too hard to find?

[20.08] The second hints set has been revealed! In case you still did not find the place, which is too hard to find, here is a hint for you:

The upper part of the board contains 8 symbols written using Braille writing system. There was not enough space in the map to write the complete 8th symbol. Just assume that the rest of this symbol is empty, i.e. there are no portals in that part. Use the symbols you got to open www.itstoohard.com/puzzle/xxxxxxxx page. This url is case-insensitive.

[21.08] Now you get more treats in case you solved everything!

[26.08] We now have enough contributions for revealing the final hints! I already added them to every puzzle, so wait no more and solve the event! The hints did not help? Just fill in this form explaining where exactly you are stuck. In a couple of days I will read everything you wrote and will probably add more hints if needed.

For those who did not find the place, which was too hard to find, here you go.

[01.09] Last hints have been revealed for all the puzzles taking into consideration all your feedback I received via the google form.

[04.09] Players who solved everything have fought well for this achievement, so now they have a chance to win WWE 2K16 from the latest Humble Monthly :)

[07.09] The event ended.

[13.09] The solution and statistics have been posted.

Hey puzzle lovers,

You know what? I envy you. You know why? Just because I created a puzzle that would blow my mind. Too bad I already know all the answers since I created it. But you are in a far better position than me. You can fully enjoy this puzzle. And I really hope you will.

When I was designing this event, its difficulty level was somewhere around Nightmare. Then, I decided to ask your opinion about which difficulty level you want, and it turned out that not so many steamgifters expect Nightmare. Surprisingly enough, isn't it? :) However, I heard you and I decreased the difficulty considerably. First, I completely removed a couple of puzzles that were more difficult than the others. After it the difficulty level dropped to Ultra-Violence. However, even at this point I did not stop. I then changed the remaining puzzles in a way that they all now contain the information that I would initially only provide as hints. Eventually, I estimate the difficulty of this event as between Hurt me plenty and Ultra-Violence.

I think all the puzzles within this event are interesting and balanced. However, I understand that they might require some time to solve. I wanted to motivate players with good games to be given away and I have done my best. It would be super nice if other steamgifters also create some private giveaways that can only be accessed after solving the puzzle. To do so, you just need to create an invite-only giveaway that ends somewhere near the event finish date and send me a link to it.

Hints

I also want to try the following system for hints. Basically, I would give a hint for every puzzle simultaneously but you need earn them first! I will calculate how many points giveaways (that were created especially for this event) are worth, and once this number exceeds 300/500/600, the 1/2/3 sets of hints will be provided. Please don't be mad at me for doing this, I think it's worth a try. Also, please note that if you want your giveaways to be counted for hints, they must finish at least 24 hours before mine. This rule is here to prevent unfair players to get hints first and delete their giveaways later. If you truly need to remove a giveaway, contact me.

Hints piggy bank – 678 points gathered

Hints will be revealed once we reach 300/500/600 points

As for now, the following giveaways have been created by the contributors:

Description and giveaways

This event consists of five puzzles. First, there is the entry puzzle, which you must solve to obtain the access to other four puzzles. Those four ones can be then solved independently. Solving each puzzle (including the entry one) will give you access to a number of giveaways. The following tables define to which ones exactly. Note that this is most probably not the final version of these tables because users can create additional giveaways for this event.

The entry puzzle (5.1):

Puzzle 5.2

Puzzle 5.3

Puzzle 5.4

Puzzle 5.5

In case you solved all 5 puzzles

Whitelist

Rules

The event will run for one month (till 7th of September), I think it is enough time to finish all five puzzles. Sometimes, knowing the solutions of previous Puzzlemania puzzles (1, 2, 3, 4) will help.

I also would like to remind you that this is an individual puzzle event. It means that you must not share answers, give hints, ask for help anywhere. I reserve the rights to blacklist users and delete giveaways in case I find out that the rules are not respected.

All giveaways are for lvl1+ users and the entances are guarded with sgtools.

Big thanks

I would like to say a big thank you to SErVER51 for both his amazing sWords engine and awesome support. You should consider adding him to your whitelists. Seriously.

Also, thanks a lot to all the contributors! You really made this event more interesting!

Start

The puzzle begins here, good luck!

Hall of fame

Solution

Puzzlemania 5.1

The game of swords depicted a chess board. There were portals on sides of the board to show you that the board is looped, just like in Puzzlemania4. There were also portals on certain squares meaning that some chess piece is standing on that square. You should have opened a mood music link to figure out what piece exactly: the titles contain words 'king', 'bishop', 'pawn', so if you did not understand at this point that the dungeon is a chess board, now it should have been more clear. Many players experienced problems with seeing the colors of pieces. Here, mood music helped again: words 'mood music' themselves were written sometimes in black and sometimes in white. The portals led to the upper part of the dungeon where you could find rooms sized 2x3 with more portals. The words written at the door you needed to open hinted about the Braille writing system and ITH website. So, in the upper part of the dungeon 8 letters have been written using the Braille code. Using those letter you could come to this page.

At the ITH page you see only one question with the description "in 3" meaning that you should mate the black king in three moves. In the description of the puzzle I mentioned that previous Puzzlemania event may help you with this one, so your task and the notation for this chess problem was the same as in Puzzlemania4. One can notice that in the initial position the black king can go to the square H6 and he does so, the whote will not be able to mate because none of their pieces can attack this square. So, the first move should be to prevent the black king moving to H6. There is only one such move: Ka7. After this, the black have only move pawn to F5 (moving H7 pawn is not possible due to bishop at A8, mind the looping!). Now, square F6 became free and if the black king escapes there, white will not be able to mate him again. Thus, the second move is to prevent the black king from moving to F6, and again there only one such move: pawn to E5. Now, the only possible black move is pawn to F6, and the white them mate the black king by moving the bishop to C2.

So, the answer to the entry puzzle is: Ka7e5Bc2.

Puzzlemania 5.2

The excel file is indeed empty. However, in some cells the text is left-aligned, while in other cells it is right-aligned. If you fill these two groups of cells with different colors, you will see four strange symbols (see image below). Those are glyphs of Thirty Seconds to Mars music band. The least favourable moment for their journey is where the distance between Earth and Mars are the largest. In Orbit of Mars article this distance is stated to be 400.2 million km. The answer to the puzzle is 400200000 / 30 * 3600 = 48024000000.

Puzzlemania 5.3

In this puzzle you can see five pairs of overlapped flags. An overlapping represents a sum. How can we sum flags? We need to map them into numbers! Each flag represents a country and each country has a domain name for its websites. Each domain name can be found in the periodic table. If you find those elements and take their numbers, you will notice that Burundi + Argentina = Iran + Costa Rica = Canada + East Timor = France + Slovenia = Laos + Russia = 101. Back to the periodic table again, 101 is Mendelevium, denoted as Md. You have five pairs of flags, so the results you got can be written as Md5. The MD5 algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value.. I mentioned that there was a reason why I uploaded the image with flags at the hosting different from imgur. And the reason is that imgur changes the file name, which I obviously did not want. So, the file name (fc91b871c7d0b565e5680a46d3eade0f) is a Md5 hash! You can crack it either using special software or for example this web service. The answer is 'doom135' (the answer format 'word123' was also a hint).

Puzzlemania 5.4

First, you needed to understand what this system is. Here, the question could have helped you a bit: you needed to determine what the state of the system will be in one year. Which system can be predicted in one year? You could also noticed that in the center of this system we have letter 'S'. All these little hints could led you to the conclusion that this is the solar system with the Sun in its center. And you could actually verify this guess by looking to the left of the sun: N(eptun) U(ran) S(aturn) J(upiter) M(ars) E(arth) V(enus) M(ercury) correspond to planets. The only thing left is to calculate what will be in one year. For accomplishing this you should have calculate the percentage of an orbit each planet will travel in one Earth year, and then rotate the orbits in the Excel file (see image below). "Pick the right thing" from the question was another hint: you must look to the right of the Sun. After the rotation is made, you will see the following letters: SKYLINES. The designer of the Cities: Skylines game wsa Karoliina Korppoo.

Puzzlemania 5.5

8T6 should have hinted you that you must split each row consisting of 14 characters in two groups: one with 8 characters and the other with 6. Then, you could have noticed that the first group represents date and the other one represents time. After converting those timestamps into unix time and colorizing the digits in the same manner as it is done in the original Excel document, you get the image with the Instagram logo and digits '645 1' (see attached image). Just pick the letters corresponding to those digits from the word 'instagram' and you almost have the answer: 'gta i'. The director of this game is Keith R. Hamilton.

Conclusions

Thank you all again! Thank you SErVER51 for the game of sword engine and awesome support! Thank you all contributors, without you hints would not be revealed and almost nobody would solve the event completely. Thank you participants, 502 of you took part in this event making it the most successful Puzzlemaia event ever! This was a big event and it took a lot of my time. Many other things now need my attention, so there will not be another event from me any time soon. But don't be upset, Puzzlemania will be back eventually! Meanwhile, I added another giveaway for this event, it is for blue hearts only. I hope you had a great time solving Puzzlemania 5, see you in several months!

Statistics

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