Hey!
The story goes on, but puzzle-wise you just need the pictures ;)
You can start HERE.

I’ll post the solution at the end.

Giveaways:

Play the unbundled games if you win them, please.
Good luck!

HINTS:
P1: what's most important of those books is their main topic rather than the specific title
P1: do not chase red herrings, literally
P1: you know what he did for a living; you know where he was from; you know when he "ended" and can deduce when he "started"

P2: QoL update: in the imgur caption of the picture I copy-pasted the lists you have in the email for easying up the googling process
P2: some of those would be out of place in a freshwater/marine biology research facility
P2: just follow the order of the chart you're supposed to use

P3: if you're wondering what to do with that string/code, there's something on the floor telling you where to use it. Maybe you need a different perspective in order to see it, and a different color
P3: it's part of an URL
P3: the grid represents something

>>>>> SOLUTIONS <<<<<

3 years ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for stage 3. Thanks for the hint, I was overthinking it in part 2

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I guess I will see what it will be at the end. Tried so many things and none worked. And if I (as usual) overthink the heck out of it, so be it, but to not know what I do wrong is really hitting me ^^
At least I can relax a little bit by seeing that there are only a handful of people solved it at this point.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I can only say if you're unsure of something or your solution seems complicated it's not it. Apply the hints to the most obvious answers and you will soon join the solvers club

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I think we need to talk about your definition of "not complicated" XD

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I hope we're talking about part 2 as this bump was for getting past that stage.
In such case there were hints for looking for something out of order and the list of species was copied under the image, which was another hint of what to use. The ordering was not hinted properly as it wasn't based on the email itself so the hint about using capitalized part was confusing, but that was corrected by another hint by the time I solved stage 2, so basically the only thing left to do was to find a connection between the animal names and the periodic table
On the other hand I agree stage 3 was much harder. Still as long as you recognized the logo and kept notes it wasn't as hard as some other puzzles I've seen, yet I certainly wouldn't call that part not complicated :P
Initially I was checking things like using first letters form both columns, guessing if I should include animals living mainly or land instead of purely land ones, or whether we should use the mass instead of atomic number and I don't want to say how convoluted ways of encoding the order I checked, so yep once the order was clarified the real steps were the most obvious ones for me. Sorry if that was not the case for you and I caused confusion

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for solved :3
Since I found some spare time I though that I'll give this puzzle a shot. I always wanted to solve some puzzles on sg but I never finished fully any longer/harder ones before, so it was quite suprising when I managed to get to the end. Hints helped a lot, I'm a big overthinker so I was really glad for them. I really enjoyed this puzzle, looking forward to more of these^^

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for solved!

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

bump

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for solved! Had a lot of fun solving the puzzles, the first picture was the toughest one for me oddly enough. Thanks for the GAs and puzzles!

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Any chance of a hint regarding the order for puzzle 2? I (think) I have the necessary values but nothing I try seems to work so maybe I'm missing a step.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Well, there's already the one in the OP telling you to follow the order given by the "chart" that you're supposed to use.
You can also see the order looking at something of capital importance in the picture. The list of animals is not the only thing you have there.

Btw, if you have the right values, you'd need only 6 tries if you had to bruteforce.

3 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Welp, it turns out that I did have the right order, but your comment about bruteforcing led me on to something else, which helped me solve it. Much obliged!

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Haha, now I even more confused then before. Because I know the string length but that makes even less sense to me at this point. I am very intrigued by this riddle.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I can't help but wonder how can you be sure of the length.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

If you have 6 tries there are not that many permutations that allow for a finite number of objects in a string. ;)

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I get that, 6 is the number of permutations. But considering you haven't solved the puzzle yet, I was wondering how can you be sure of the length of each object, considering they're not all long the same.

3 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

On a scale of one to ten, how important is knowing where the grid is from for solving P3?

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Not sure what you mean. You need to understand what the laser grid actually represents in order to solve the puzzle.

Edit: oh, and I used the one on the english wikipedia page as a reference, if that's what you're asking.

3 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It kind of does, thanks.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump for solved!

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump!

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

View attached image.
3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Think this is it for me. Despite the tips, I don't really have a clue on where to start with P3. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, so I probably won't have time to ponder it further.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump! :3

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Guys help pls I can't enter password 😭😭😭😭 I d know I write all but nothing.pls give me some tips

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

What's mean "You guessed that already" when you write passwords in row?

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It means that you have already tried to answer that way.
I won't give further hints at this point.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

And can I have 1st picture in better quality bicouce I can't see info from tables ?

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The picture is already hi-res. Right click, select 'Open image in new tab,' then repeat to get the full-res image. Also, something something red herring.

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The Last Bump.
(Sorry, sorry. I couldn't stop myself from making that joke. ^_^' )

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

>>>>> SOLUTIONS <<<<<

  • Puzzle 1: name of a person
    • The main subject of each book tells you the man's professions: phisician, botanist, zoologist, taxonomist
    • The flag on the monitor tells you the nationality: swedish
    • The numbers his date of birth and death: (17)07 and 1778
    • Google will help you figuring out who he is.
  • Puzzle 2: numbers
    • Rattus fuscipes (rat), Aotus lemurinus (monkey) and Tragelaphus angasii (antelope) were the odd ones in the list (strictly terrestrial animals)
    • The lists were pinned close to the Periodic Table
    • The rule for binomial nomenclature says genus starts with uppercase letter while species with lowercase letter. The chemical element symbols are always written with uppercase letter followed by lowercase, if it has more than one letter.
    • So you have: Rf, Al, Ta. You need the atomic numbers of the elements with that symbols.
    • For the order, the uppercase letters of the 1st three lines under "From"+"Subject" spell MONKEY, ANTELOPE, RAT, or coincidentally you could simply follow the crescent atomic number order.
  • Puzzle 3: two words
    • The code in the caption is the code of a dropbox link that leads you to a HQ version of the same picture. (On the floor there's the dropbox logo distorted by perspective)
    • The grid represents the periodic table (there's a light different brightness highlighting its outline)
    • Looking very closely at the laser grid you can read the common name of some animals around some squares.
    • Take the symbols of the elements that have names around them. You have: He, S, Ti, V, At, Ac, Es
    • Just solve the anagram or follow the order given by the animals that, since you googled them before, you may realize are the 1st seven animals on the list of puzzle 2.
3 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

For Puzzle 1, it's possible to guess the answer from the story also. Great white sharks are mentioned for seemingly no reason, so combined with the details that the computer belongs to a marine biologist and that you're looking for the name of a person and the first thing that came to mind for me was 'who discovered the great white shark?'

3 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Honestly, even if I had linked them to the correct elements to get the correct numbers, I probably would have gotten stuck on the answer's formatting, since you asked for "numbers" (which would be expected to have spaces or other separators between each other) rather than (a string of) "digits". Oh well.

Thank you very much for the puzzle(s) and the giveaways. :D

Edit: Oh, yeah- if I said too much, tell me when you hide the solution and I'll delete this message.

3 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Closed 3 years ago by DogOnSG.