C101 Puzzle Archive Quarantine Zone
06-14-2016, 07:23 PM
Once upon a time, I ran a forum adventure. To say it "ran" would be putting it kindly - it stuttered through several years of negligence, commitment issues, rampant confusion and at least three separate attempts at shoehorning in at least five different plots, because I kept coming back after long absences and trying to change everything behind the scenes. It was a puzzle adventure, above anything else, and as vehicles for inflicting suffering on undeserving folk go it was about as effective as the Post Making Contest. But I loved it, and am all nostalgic for it still, and up until I knew the old fora were dead I was still always planning to try and make it lurch towards something resembling a conclusion someday, by whatever means necessary.
I can't really do that now. Almost all of it is gone. I have every picture, nearly every puzzle, and two and a half spreadsheets of notes, but I don't have much of what I wrote. Believe me, I wrote a lot. Without fifty-five pages worth of my writings and other people's ponderings, it is flat-out impossible for anyone to get any idea of what was going on when it last ground to a halt, including me. Despite interest from people in trying to at least finish what was left unresolved, it just isn't viable.
...except...
...so, background in case you didn't immediately click through to the Wayback Machine archive of the first post (which is fair) - the setting was a bizarre but rather well-organised complex of cubic rooms that was itself a cube, divided into octants, and there basically was a puzzle-filled path through each octant to an "end goal" of sorts. People did 010 and 101, pretty much, got through most of 111, made dents in 000 and 110 and had never even been to 001, 100 and 011 (not through want of trying). But on top of all this, there was one other path - a series of puzzles on a computer network purporting to be some kind of mainframe that were deliberately designed to be self-contained, up to a point. It comprised an unknown number of levels, each of which was divided into six parts, and these parts were either a piece of the puzzle or some story/complex-related info; thus figuring out what was relevant to the problem at hand was itself an issue.
The first level was solved by mysteriousBenefactor & whoosh! many, many years ago. The second level has never been solved, though part of it has been completed twice; once in about twenty minutes, the other after over a year. It's one of those puzzles. Coming back to it two months ago, it was clearly a mess - I'd taken a lovely idea, then completely missed the point of it and fluffed up the end with a load of extraneous. Even if anyone had got that far, they'd have been hindered by the construction and probably wouldn't have got much further.
Well, I've touched it up. I had to still stretch it out a bit so it still filled up the same number of parts as the original puzzle, but it's much cleaner and has a far more elegant resolution than before. So here's what I'm proposing to do: I'm going to post the first two levels, the first mostly for context (you can have its answer too!), and if anyone solves the second, I will post the third. Because yep, turns out I made the third level once. It's still in kit form, but I can probably assemble it without too much hassle. Then, if that gets solved, I will dump the remainder of the mainframe, which is pretty much just the final level that was full of metapuzzles no-one will be able to solve. I might therefore dump some other things alongside it, though honestly there's a lot of C101's corpse that I want to steal for a future project *cough cough* and thus do not necessarily want to see the light of day. But hey, who knows! I'd definitely like to reward anyone silly enough to actually put effort into this...
I can't really do that now. Almost all of it is gone. I have every picture, nearly every puzzle, and two and a half spreadsheets of notes, but I don't have much of what I wrote. Believe me, I wrote a lot. Without fifty-five pages worth of my writings and other people's ponderings, it is flat-out impossible for anyone to get any idea of what was going on when it last ground to a halt, including me. Despite interest from people in trying to at least finish what was left unresolved, it just isn't viable.
...except...
...so, background in case you didn't immediately click through to the Wayback Machine archive of the first post (which is fair) - the setting was a bizarre but rather well-organised complex of cubic rooms that was itself a cube, divided into octants, and there basically was a puzzle-filled path through each octant to an "end goal" of sorts. People did 010 and 101, pretty much, got through most of 111, made dents in 000 and 110 and had never even been to 001, 100 and 011 (not through want of trying). But on top of all this, there was one other path - a series of puzzles on a computer network purporting to be some kind of mainframe that were deliberately designed to be self-contained, up to a point. It comprised an unknown number of levels, each of which was divided into six parts, and these parts were either a piece of the puzzle or some story/complex-related info; thus figuring out what was relevant to the problem at hand was itself an issue.
The first level was solved by mysteriousBenefactor & whoosh! many, many years ago. The second level has never been solved, though part of it has been completed twice; once in about twenty minutes, the other after over a year. It's one of those puzzles. Coming back to it two months ago, it was clearly a mess - I'd taken a lovely idea, then completely missed the point of it and fluffed up the end with a load of extraneous. Even if anyone had got that far, they'd have been hindered by the construction and probably wouldn't have got much further.
Well, I've touched it up. I had to still stretch it out a bit so it still filled up the same number of parts as the original puzzle, but it's much cleaner and has a far more elegant resolution than before. So here's what I'm proposing to do: I'm going to post the first two levels, the first mostly for context (you can have its answer too!), and if anyone solves the second, I will post the third. Because yep, turns out I made the third level once. It's still in kit form, but I can probably assemble it without too much hassle. Then, if that gets solved, I will dump the remainder of the mainframe, which is pretty much just the final level that was full of metapuzzles no-one will be able to solve. I might therefore dump some other things alongside it, though honestly there's a lot of C101's corpse that I want to steal for a future project *cough cough* and thus do not necessarily want to see the light of day. But hey, who knows! I'd definitely like to reward anyone silly enough to actually put effort into this...