Sanctuary

A M#5122 discovered that Billy Basso had updated the GitHub about 6 minutes after the update was committed. Looking at what was updated, they found that [www.animalwell.net/sanctuary.html sanctuary.html] was added to the website. A M# then discovered that certain letters were intermittently flashing yellow. All characters can be seen in the code snippet below:

Looking further into the webpage, Phaethon#0993 found that clicking on the shared memory logo downloaded a file named puff.zip. This is a tool related to encoding and decoding images using lsb steganography.

Since the initial puzzle was discovered through GitHub and not an actual starting point, we assumed that the puzzle wasn’t ready or we didn’t have all the clues. Dudeman#5355 (the one writing this document) discovered that on the Day of the Devs announcement video, there was a shot of the Animal Well map with the phrase: “/sanctuary”. This ensured that we were on the correct path for the puzzle.

At 12:44 pm PST, Billy announced that there was a bug in the puzzle. After the fix was posted, alexsmith531#1738 mentioned that the sequence of glowing letters was now “awSf3boUjMo”. softshark#9105 noticed that the new sequence worked as a YouTube url. alexsmith531 was the first to realize that this sequence, inputted into OpenPuff with the peacock image from /sanctuary.html resulted in an output of the following image:

softshark inputted the string on the image as a youtube url and found this video. An interesting note is that this is a screenshot of an old demo for a game Billy never released. Musterd#7285 then re-inputted this image back into OpenPuff with the string as the password. This created a link to a Google Form, requiring both an email and the user to answer the following question: what does the duck love? The answer to this can be found in the second video since it’s about a duck who loves corn. Finally, submitting the form resulted in the final message: