Puzzle ???????

Puzzle over. Unfortunately, it was not solved. If you want to give it a try, all of the piece should still be available but there are no guarantees.

Solution:

1. People had to first realize that this was a puzzle. I tried to put many hints and clues for it all over the place but it didn't happen and the solution to this part had to be given. Here were the clues:
   1. I am not new to Empire. In the video, I mentioned that I had just finished the tutorial and claimed a residence. I have been here for many years so that couldn't be true. The idea was to get the viewer paying attention since things weren't right.
   2. I wasn't on a residence I own. I entered and left the residence a couple of times while filming. If you looked at the chat, you would have seen Dufne's name, not mine. Once again, this should have made it apparent that something was up.
   3. The quality of the video was terrible. This one was more subtle and I will admit that it was partially because I had never made a video like this before, but I decided to leave it in the hopes that people would think something was up.
   4. I linked to Onedrive instead of Youtube. A later part of this puzzle had a clue hidden in the file itself so providing a download was needed. Why would I post a video to Onedrive if everything was normal?
   5. There were random jump scare like cuts featuring white noise and quick images. These images were of puzzle pieces or story related items.
   6. I said "This is a key" before heading over to the redstone part. It was completely unrelated and out of character and directly referenced that there was something else going on.
   7. I said that I had found obsidian in the fake mine on the residence. This is impossible and is meant to improve the story while also tipping the viewer off to things being different.
   8. The credits are nonsensical strings of characters that don't even remotely resemble credits. More on these later.
   9. I posted a status shortly before posting this thread saying that I would be creating a puzzle but that it wouldn't necessarily look like one.
   10. I referenced doing this twice before in the comments. Those would be the two other puzzles I made (one of which happened to be almost exactly a year ago).
   11. The title always had ???????? in it. I used a series of question marks exclusively for the title of my previous puzzle and hoped that someone would remember or at least figure that something was off.
   12. I edited some of the quotes in my post to say "Look harder" because no one was seeing it.
2. After realizing it was a puzzle, the next step was to figure out what to do. At this point, things become fairly non-linear with multiple different possible ways of continuing. The order that follows is pretty much random.
3. In the puzzle, I fly over the cows and one's name is "PassDragon"
4. Visiting Dufne's 4th residence puts you in a box with a sign hinting that you need to find a way outside the box. Teleporting to an adjacent residence and walking on solves this.
5. Near the cow area, I have a preview sign. In the preview chest are renamed pieces of dirt. When Combined in the order they appear, they make an encrypted message.
6. When I switch to the Wikipedia page on Obsidian, I have a second tab open. That tab references "openssl aes-256-cbc" which is the command and encryption method used. From there, the command could be used using that encryption scheme and the flag for base64 to decrypt any message assuming one had the key or password.
7. Speaking of passwords, PassDragon sounds like one. Throwing that in as the password for the text found in the chest decrypts the message. There is some story related text followed by k=cow
8. In the credits, encrypted messages run by. Using cow as the key for the first one gives some more story text and loc=R___
9. From this, it should be apparent that you are trying to find a residence location and the three other blanks must be the three other credit messages.
10. Moving on, I pull up the Wikipedia page for Obsidian at one point. On that page, I edited the text to include some story elements as well as an encrypted message.
11. The redstone came right after that part in the video and I said "This is a key" so players were meant to look there next. Near it is a sign mentioning an informative number that appears when turned on. Although you don't have the ability to flip the switches, you can follow the wires and figure out what would happen. This produces a number that is used as the key for the obsidian message.
12. Once again, you get some story text along with a key. This key is used to decrypt another credit message.
13. If one goes into the mines, they will find a maze. The maze has multiple locations with signs that give coordinates and a general location. The only question left is which smp do the coordinates refer to. Some simple trial and error (and ideally teamwork) would lead you to the nether location seen in one of the cuts.
14. Not shown in the cut is a sign that gives you the next key and a story element. This key decrypts another credit message.
15. One of the cuts features a large, flat tree area with some holes along the top. The sound at this point is also very strange.
16. Although not necessary to the puzzle, one could download the video and run it through a spectrogram viewer to get a braille alphabet and an image of the nether room.
17. The holes on the trees represent braille and have to be translated back into characters. The characters give the final key for the credit messages.
18. At this point, every blank in the loc is filled in and one can travel to it. Doing so leads you to a room with Atzar and a sign from Atzar saying that you had foiled its plans but that it will return at some point. You also have the kill permission and can kill Atzar.

These were made with the help of Quartzic and Dufne. A big thanks for what they did to make this. The video was made using Kdenlive. I absolutely recommend it to others if you are looking for a free editor. It lets you layer video and audio to create a complex timeline while also providing tons of basic editing tools and effects. Obviously it won't be Adobe level but for beginners and people doing small projects, it is more than enough.

Unfortunately, this puzzle was not solved although you are free to check it out for the story elements. Previously, I was certain I wanted to make more of these for EMC but now I am much less sure. If you would like to see more of these, please vote in the poll and say so here. If I make another, I would like to push the story element even more while also balancing the puzzles. If you are interested in helping out at all, please post here as well.

Original Text and video below:

Good Luck and have fun.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aqq4DZjK8aHDgedrgufY50flW_rL0g

Share anything you find because it benefits all.

Here is some feedback

I think it is really nice to see a Let's play at empire minecraft, especially if there would be some building/redstone or maybe just participating in economics, going on trips to the wild etc. You have alot of freedom what you could do in these video's so I think you can keep the series going for quite a while.
Some little tips on the video Quality though, I would suggest to play at full screen, or at least make your hotbar visible in your recording. Also, some of those random bits in between sounded really.. broken xP. I dont know if it was ment to be like that but it hurt my ears a bit :3

Good luck with the Let's Play!

Thanks for the advice, but the weird cuts weren't in there when I posted it. Weird...

I tried full screen but my computer is garbage. I think the main points were all still conveyed though.

You don't need to be fullscreen - you can crop your video so only your Minecraft window is visible. When I'm recording at 720p, my game is windowed.

At risk of sounding like a TOTAL hypocrite, slow down slightly. Focus on enunciation and your voice being clear - if you're clear enough and fast, that's good - if not try to slow down. A bit of emotion is important too - and tbh, that can very much be a fake it until you make it type deal.

Cuts are your friend - pausing to think about what you're going to say next? Cut it. One thing that's important though is that there is padding either side of each cut. You really want to start/finish on silence, not the very end or start of a word.

Have a general idea of what you're going to say before you record a video - I think you're almost there with that one. You don't need to script it, but bullet points on paper can definitely help. If you screw up what you were going to say (ie: too many ums), feel free to just do another take. You'd be surprised how fake some lets plays can be (hint: if the person is about to go into a final battle, they probably just backed up their map so you can have that glorious finish, unless they're going for something like a fail montage).

Structure is important. The type of video you're doing can be structured. You have an intro (although your video that was corrupted doesn't need to exist, simply don't mention it - you and your audience gain nothing by it being mentioned), an ending (although take it a bit slower - there should almost be a gap between your main content and your outro - and if this something you were putting on YouTube, you'd want to look into mentioning CTAs and including an endcard. Definitely focus on the middle section - you want your sub-sections in that to flow into each other, but still be their own distinct section. For example, leave a second or so (and/or a whoosh/fade/cut transition, or a text overlay, or whatever else you'd want) between "good luck" and "over to the left".

Unless using it as a stylistic choice, you don't need to show yourself connecting to the server. Your first 5 seconds are the most important 5 seconds of your video (which is why many videos use a hook there - either by saying whats coming up, or featuring a highlight). Don't waste those 5 seconds.

Overall, a decent start. No one starts amazingly at this sort of stuff, and you definitely have potential. Learning to talk/shout at a computer monitor is WEIRD, but once you get used to it (just imagine its a person - you're talking directly to them - which can involve addressing them) making videos will be much more natural.

Have a look at the Creator Academy - some of the stuff in there is very YouTube specific, but other sections are less so. If you're looking into doing YouTube based stuff, go through this guide: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/...ytref=progress&cid=bootcamp-foundations&hl=en, and while you should definitely go through some of the other general guides, go through their gaming stuff too: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/search?hl=en&q=gaming.

Oh, and what are you using to edit? Don't be scared of having a crazily complex timeline by the end of the edit - this is what my most recent video's looks like (and that's not even a very complex video, and those dark green boxes are timelines INSIDE this timeline):

That is all really good advice. Unfortunately I can't give the long response it deserves right now. Basically, I wasn't sure whether recording my voice or using subtitles would be best, but I realized that recording was the only way to make the important parts stand out. Otherwise there would be no guarantee you would even have your sound up and might miss it. I spent most of my time on the more important part of this.

You made the right call with voice. With extremely limited exceptions, gaming videos are best suited to use voice - on screen text can be used as an aid, but shouldn't be the focus. It's generally safe to assume for lets play style stuff that the person's sound is up - when designing for Twitter/Facebook etc. it's a different story, but LP content would only touch them in limited promo form so you don't really need to worry about them.

Feel free to PM me if you need a hand with anything.

If I had to do it again I would probably have tried to make it more obvious. Although this is my third time doing this here, I am still working out the kinks and making it better.

I am definitely glad I used my voice because it gives it a little something extra, but I think this falls into those limited exceptions where using my voice or not wouldn't have impacted the main point.

Bump. This is not a competition so help each other.

Bump. Just so everyone knows, this is a puzzle and not just some horrible let's play video. I assumed it would be more obvious but I guess not

Bump

Nice Power Point presentation

What?

low fps = slideshow

My FPS is garbage. The puzzle is still entirely solvable despite it.

I will say that the puzzle takes place both on the residence and using the video.

May as well kick this off with a few things I found on the res.
(All of this is in the little maze below the res)

Went to those coords already and found some stuff, if anyone would like to collaborate, shoot me a pm, dont think I will be posting here though. ;p

You won't get any special benefits or prizes for solving it on your own, but you can try to do it anyway . It is fairly complicated so I recommend posting things here and getting help but once again, it is up to you.

pffft the special benefit / prize is solving it ;p

edit: we are making progress, even though this is definitely not in my particular wheel house.

Bump

How is it going?