What's up guys!! My friend Z and myself have found the LA location USB stick. Turns out the "Tin" from the hint was tucked behind the plaque on the clock tower. Shouts out to Muscat for that SUPER helpful hint, wouldn't have found it otherwise. Gonna update the google doc in a sec. -Birdfeet
This is amazing! birdfeet's image had three symbols on it, which brought us up to 9 total. I played around with different code combinations and finally found the one--or, at least, one that gave a response and also unlocked the "Walk Your Own Path" achievement. Spoilers for the code and what it gave me: Spoiler If you number the symbols on the keypad 1-9, with the upper-left (left slash) being 1 and the bottom-right (E with dot) being 9, the code was: 9-9-8-4-7-5-7-3-4-2 After inputted, a black screen with Land Sliders / Prettygreat appeared, along with the achievement. And this: lna.payzyepiteiwblrrrdlazhxkq.ifq That looks like a website address? But maybe in code? If so, I have no idea what it translates to. Another puzzle?? Image of the page that appeared: http://oi62.tinypic.com/1570h1x.jpg
Spoiler That's a substitution cypher which I have determined is translated with the key "prettygreat". Unencrypted it translates to: www.whathappenedinlandsliders.com The dots were the dead giveaway
Please change your quote to have correctly formatted spoiler tags. You must have caught me mid editing. Spoiler The site loads up a Unity web player widget which won't work on mobile devices so you will need an actual web browser for the next step. Although I am at a loss what to do.
Spoiler No kidding. If you click or hold down the mouse button, the hovering part gets one character larger in each direction. Other than that, I can't seem to figure out anything about what is going on.
Great Job everybody! Spoiler I'm on the site right now, trying to figure out what the hell. I thought that maybe there are just a few letters in each spot so maybe if we will let it loop a while we'll find a few letters and it will narrow the options down. I also thought that maybe the first letter will have to be a capital letter? and also look at how they wrote on the site: "« cr&atDd w7Ih Unity. Te@$#d on Ma% + Fi)(f*x. »" so maybe it means that the sentece we are gonna find also has to be written like this (which only makes everything harder). sorry for my english:/
Spoiler Yes the page title and the footer text is encrypted most likely. page title: what?#!:&%*#(1 maybe = what Happened? Te@$#d on Ma% + Fi)(f*x maybe = Tested on Mac + Windows likely you have to make the text in the display show a word using the above methods. The numbers move real fast, apart from when you click and release to make it bigger, means you can step through the letters around the outer edge of your area. Something to think about.
Spoiler I was working on the assumption that the footer note had something to do with the decryption. However I don't have the knowledge to work out the link. The actual text is "created with Unity. Tested on Mac + Firefox" That and the title of the page also has symbols replaced. So there are at least 4 symbols that translate into an e. In those sentences. So it could be a red herring.
Spoiler How did you work that out? It was obvious that it was a website, so the first thing I did was try using the "lna." and ".ifq" as keys since they were naturally "www." and ".com". That didn't get me anywhere, though. I tried using "prettygreat" as a key next, but I didn't have any success there, either. After reading your post, I tried working backwards to see what I was doing wrong, but I still can't figure out how you solved it. If I line up the cyphered text and the solution (discarding the www. and .com for now) it looks like this: payz yepiteiw bl rrrd lazhxkq what happened in land sliders (The letters lined up vertically in the text editor, but previewing the post showed that they won't after I post it, so I spaced the words out for better clarity.) Many of the letters in the cyphered text line up with multiple different letters in the solution. The most obvious example is how "rrr" in the code is "lan" in the solution. So this is more than a simple substitution. There's some step I'm missing, and it's driving me nuts that I can't figure it out, haha!
Spoiler After reading your questions I decided to try to work out for myself how Unseen Studios solved it. Here is what I came up with. Every letter in prettygreat gets a number based on where it is in the alphabet. 16,18,5,20,20,25,7,18,5,1,20. Then every letter in the code gets another number. lna of the 'www' translates to 12,14,1. payz of the 'what' is 16,1,25,26. You then subtract the numbers. Depending on what you take away from what you will get positive or negative numbers. When I first did it I took 12 from 16 giving me 4, then 18 from 14 giving me 4, then 1 from 5 giving me 4. If you then assume the letter a is 0 and count backwards you get 4 equaling W. If you get a 0 that is an a. In my case, if you get a negative number you count the other direction. Once you reach the end of the numbers for prettygreat you start over. Hope this helps explain it and thanks to Unseen Studios. I wouldn't have come up with that on my own.
Spoiler It is called a Vigenère Cipher. The encryption only works on the whole phrase so that may explain why you struggled doing a partial decryption. Basically it involves repeating the keyword over and over again to the same length of input string and then doing substitution. Hence why two of the same letters can have different values when encrypted. This Wikipedia link will explain it better than I can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenère_cipher I also found a handy online decrypter for doing these: http://www.mygeocachingprofile.com/codebreaker.vigenerecipher.aspx Note this is also from a geocaching resource which as we know was also part of the puzzle. So there may be something in that.
I worked through this last night as well. Spoiler I'm pretty sure it's a Vigenère cipher. (See here.). I made a Gist with some instructions on how to actually run the encryption/decryption. I would've posted it here, but Gists are monospaced, and I wanted the letter to line up. I used this Ruby library as I was trying out different ciphers, but as Unseen Studios said, there are online tools that will do it as well.
Spoiler Thanks for this! I just worked it out like you explained (only I subtracted the key from the code, so that the negative numbers counted backwards and the positives counted forwards). I had tried using numbers before, but came up with nothing. I never would have thought to subtract and use the differences to hop up and down the alphabet like that. Very clever!
Spoiler So now my main questions are 1.) How the hell do we figure this website out 2.) What's in the other caches? 3.) Are there other caches just replacement pictures in case we can't visit all the locations?
