Hackaday Space: Final Transmission Minecraft Puzzles Explained

This is the last part in our round up of the ARG that we ran throughout April. Just in case you’ve had your head buried in a hole this last week, it was a month-long series of puzzles that lead up to the announcement of the frankly awesome Hackaday Prize. During the week we’ve covered Transmissions 1, 2 and 3 detailing how we put the puzzles together and the things that went wrong. For the final stage we wanted something a bit different. Throughout the ARG we had been inspired by the book Ready Player One, so in this stage we wanted a high score table that people could compete over.

Since we’d managed to get reasonably far ahead of ourselves during Transmission 3 we had just over a week to plan this round. We pitched some ideas around the office for video games we could make with high score tables. None of these really stuck and we soon realized we didn’t have the resources to get the graphic design work done for most games. Someone suggested that we try making a MUD themed around a space port with rescue for Major Tom being the last stage. This seemed like a great idea at first and I began work on it using the RanvierMUD framework. It soon became clear however that writing all the text for a full featured MUD is actually a massive endeavor and I frankly am not that great of a writer.

Learn the secrets and watch a video tour of the Minecraft world below.

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Hackaday Space: Transmission 2 Puzzles Explained

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So yesterday we gave you a round up of Transmission 1 which went out on April 1st. We quickly went from having to put something fun together for April 1st to running a full month-long ARG making things very very hectic at SupplyFrame HQ. Let’s take a look at what pearls of data were hidden in the week 2 offerings of the Alternate Reality Game. In case you’ve been stuck somewhere without Internet for a couple of days, the game was a lead up to announcing The Hackaday Prize.

Transmission 2 started with the following video appearing at the top of the Hackaday blog:

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Hackaday Space: Transmission 1

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Phew, what a month!

As most of you by now are probably sick of hearing, we ran a series of puzzles throughout April in the run up to the announcement of The Hackaday Prize. We had a lot of fun putting this together, and a great many of you pitched in and tried to solve the problems we presented. In all we were very impressed at the community spirit that came out of these challenges, so we thought we would do a write up of what was in the puzzles, how we built them, and the fantastic solutions that you all came up with.

We’ll be doing these as a series of posts this week since they’re quite long, for details on Transmission 1 keep reading after the break.

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