The Blueprint
by Catherine Wu, Ivan Wang, Jacqui Fashimpaur, and Vinjai Vale, with art by Olga Vinogradova
Answer: A GHOST IN THE MACHINERY
Warning: this solution contains spoilers for the Hall of Innovation.
This metapuzzle uses the following 10 feeders:
| Baking Bread | NICOTINE |
| Gears | ALIGNMENTS |
| Noise Apparatus | UNLEASHING |
| Quality Assurance | NEUTRINO |
| Shortcuts | KADABRA |
| Sliced Up | LEFT ATRIUM |
| Some Assembly Required | NIGHTMARE |
| Sorting Machine | APOCRYPHAL |
| Tissues | ARTICHOKE |
| Word Press | CATSUP |
This metapuzzle also uses information from the Hall of Innovation, including the following 7 feeders:
| Cipher | CLEANOUT |
| Connect the Dots | INDUSTRIAL |
| Cryptex | ALLUSION |
| Image ID | CONFLATE |
| Maze | FIREBALL |
| Numberlink | PARTICLE |
| Word Search | PRACTICE |
This is the metapuzzle for the Factory Floor round. It unlocks after the conclusion of the Hall of Innovation meta, and assumes that the Innovation round is entirely solved, including setting all of the gizmos to the correct values.
The meta shell consists of a blueprint image whose layout resembles that of the Hall of Innovation round page. From the relative positions, we can assign one feeder answer from each Innovation puzzle onto each of the squares.
The arrows denote relationships between individual feeder answers. The similarity in letters (e.g. PRACTICE and PARTICLE) and semantically related prefixes and suffixes (FIREball, practICE) suggest that we can apply word transformations for each arrow. Each transformation is clued by the arrow shape.
Furthermore, from solving the Hall of Innovation, we know that each gizmo affects a pair of Innovation puzzles. This means that we can assign one gizmo to each pair of puzzles, and therefore associate it with an arrow.
The arrow mechanics and associated puzzles and gizmos are listed below:
| Arrow | Feeder 1 | Feeder 2 | Gizmo | Mechanic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arrow with two sides, empty middle | ALLUSION | INDUSTRIAL | 3x3 Grid | Beginnings of the two words form a two-word phrase, as do the ends |
| Joining arrow | ALLUSION | CLEANOUT | Valves | Outside letters move to the inside of the other word, while preserving the length |
| FIREBALL | CONFLATE | Sliders | ||
| Double arrow filled at meeting point | CLEANOUT | INDUSTRIAL | Clock Hands | Chain antonyms |
| PRACTICE | FIREBALL | Keyboard | ||
| Squiggly arrow | CLEANOUT | CONFLATE | Colored USBs | Change a letter and anagram |
| PRACTICE | PARTICLE | Combination | ||
| Overlapping double arrows | FIREBALL | ALLUSION | Dials on Gears | Chain last/first 3 letters |
| PARTICLE | CLEANOUT | Wires |
We can now take our attention to the Factory Floor. Each of our feeder puzzles (machines) are connected by directed edges (tubes, conveyor belts, pulleys, etc.); exactly one gizmo falls on each edge. This suggests that the gizmo’s associated mechanic should be applied to the feeder answers for those two machines. This is confirmed by the fact that gizmos with the same mechanic fall on edges of the same type: for example, valves and sliders both appear in blue tubes, while clock hands and keyboard both appear on robotic arms.
Since the gizmo falls in between two machines, we need to find a “missing” word or node (the gizmo word) in between the pair of feeder answers, using the associated transformation mechanic twice.
Starting from the first machine in the path of construction (Shortcuts) and following the puzzle pieces to the end (Some Assembly Required), we can solve for these gizmo words in order:
| Mechanic | Feeder 1 | Gizmo | Feeder 2 | Answer 1 | Gizmo Word | Answer 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chain last/first 3 letters | Shortcuts | Dials on Gears | Tissues | KADABRA | BRAGGART | ARTICHOKE |
| Double two-word phrase | Tissues | 3x3 Grid | Word Press | ARTICHOKE | HOUSEHOLD | CATSUP |
| Chain antonyms | Word Press | Clock Hands | Sliced Up | CATSUP | DOWNRIGHT | LEFTATRIUM |
| Collapse first/last letter | Sliced Up | Valves | Noise Apparatus | LEFTATRIUM | ANNULMENTS | UNLEASHING |
| Change a letter and anagram | Noise Apparatus | Combination | Gears | UNLEASHING | ENGLISHMAN | ALIGNMENTS |
| Collapse first/last letter | Gears | Sliders | Sorting Machine | ALIGNMENTS | RECLASSIFY | APOCRYPHAL |
| Chain last/first 3 letters | Sorting Machine | Wires | Baking Bread | APOCRYPHAL | HALLUCINOGENIC | NICOTINE |
| Change a letter and anagram | Baking Bread | Colored USBs | Quality Assurance | NICOTINE | CONTINUE | NEUTRINO |
| Chain antonyms | Quality Assurance | Keyboard | Some Assembly Required | NEUTRINO | YESTERDAY | NIGHTMARE |
To extract, we use the finalized gizmo positions. We observe that the letters of our gizmo words fit nicely into certain spots on the gizmos; for example, the 14 letters of HALLUCINOGENIC can fit on the left and right sides of the 7 pairs of wires. We can use this to extract our final answer:
| Gizmo | Gizmo Word | Extraction | Letters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dials on Gears | BRAGGART | One letter per dial; take dials pointing in the range. | AG |
| 3x3 Grid | HOUSEHOLD | One letter per button in left-to-right reading order; take lit buttons. | HOS |
| Clock Hands | DOWNRIGHT | Take the letters on the hands pointing DOWNand RIGHT. | TI |
| Valves | ANNULMENTS | One letter per light going down and around the outer tube; take red lights. | NT |
| Combination | ENGLISHMAN | Index the numbers 7, 1, 8 into ENGLISHMAN. | HEM |
| Sliders | RECLASSIFY | Take the letters in the positions of the sliders. | AC |
| Wires | HALLUCINOGENIC | One letter per wire going down on both sides. Take the letters where the wires are connected. | HI |
| Colored USBs | CONTINUE | One letter per peg. Take the letters on the unused USBs. | NE |
| Keyboard | YESTERDAY | Take the shared eigenletters in ARBITRARY and YESTERDAY. | RY |
This explains the cause of the strange behavior in the Innovation round: A GHOST IN THE MACHINERY.
Authors' Notes
Writing this meta was an ambitious undertaking. In line with the purpose of the factory floor, our goal was to create a metapuzzle that involved solvers effectively writing a round in the hunt themselves. What started out as a single metapuzzle blossomed into a bonus new round and lots of custom art, animations, and tech. We began ideating in April 2022 and finalized the last revision, complete with animations, in early January 2023. Talk about scope creep!
Building the transformations between feeders and “ghost words” was surprisingly tricky. The need for a densely connected graph, as well as answers that could let solvers break in, made the Innovation feeders especially constraining. We went through many, many iterations of subpar answer choices with a combination of manual searching and scripting in order to find these final answers. (Count yourself lucky you didn’t end up with RAT DOO DOO as an answer.
An alternate proposal for the Innovation round feeders
Below is some of our concept art for the Factory Floor. Designing the assembly line of machines was like a logic puzzle by itself. We wanted the path between machines to snake around the factory floor (instead of linearly like in the first sketch). We also had to build in space for stairs to the office and basement at the correct unlock locations along the floor. This is all in addition to the existing puzzle constraint of having specific connections between machines!
Unlike other rounds, we actually locked in flavor and a rough unlock order for most of our feeder puzzles before they were written, as opposed to choosing art based on the puzzle idea. While this ended up being more constraining for authors, we hope the end result felt thematic! A few puzzles were anyway written before the suggested flavors were released, and so in the process of designing industrial looking machines we were also left with including one somehow related to tissues.
