Solution to Stud Finder

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Answer: BITTER BLOW

by DD Liu, Josh Alman, Nathan Pinsker

In this puzzle, you need to help someone look for a stud. Unfortunately, all they have is a stud finder finder finder finder finder finder finder finder! Luckily, it provides a picture of someone, who has the stud finder finder finder finder finder finder finder. Finding that person will give you another picture, which leads to the stud finder finder finder finder finder finder, and so on, until you eventually find the stud.

Here's a list of the pictures and where that person is located:

Outside of Simmons Hall
In the East Campus courtyard
By the lake in the Building 16 basement
By the donuts in Building 14
In the ⊥IW.giga space station
In Building 9
On the Green Building roof (accessible by walking to the lower-left, and then out onto the branches)
By the Student Center. (This is the original puzzle-giver.)

When you talk to the original student again, you complete the field goal and receive the answer, BITTER BLOW.

Authors’ Notes

Since there weren't any other projection device runarounds in the hunt at the time, we wrote this puzzle as a light runaround. We hoped people who had gotten familiar with the Projection Device would have a little opportunity to get rewarded for it.

When you fix the Green Building, the vines on the roof don't disappear, purely so that we could put the cat out on the vines for this specific puzzle, because we thought it was such a cool reveal.

The cat on the Green Building is DD's fan art of the main character in Keyboard Kitten, a small puzzle game made by Anderson and Colin for a game jam. Anderson uses this cat as his Discord avatar, so we named the cat "Nyanderson".

Asking someone for a "stud finder" and getting the response "sounds like you need a stud finder finder" is a common joke on the distinguished MIT mailing list, ec-discuss@.