Hello and welcome back to my blog!
One of the games I love to play is Minetest and we have a vibing city built by the Neoxian citizens. Let me share a nice post from @rosecane who talked about how you can download, register and log in to the server. Tutorial for Neoxian Minetest: Getting Started
You can hop in and build anything that your heart desires. We have a lot of bright minds and one such minetest player is @rosecane himself who keeps surprising us with his mind-bending puzzles and he came up with another impressive one. Let me walk you through how I eventually solved it (after getting more hints from Rose...haha)
So, the hint we got was "Up in the sky, above the city"
Fortunately, I knew two places up in the sky besides my base which is pretty high as well. There is one "Sky House" built by @thunderjack and the other one is a structure right above Mr Ray's house called the Palace Heights.
I logged in and went straight to Palace Heights and saw a path going towards the east. This was not here a few days ago so this must be the start of Rose's puzzle.
He joined the session at the same time. I started walking on the path carefully, it was not a connected pathway and there were gaps and turns so I had to be vigilant.
Soon I reached a junction and either I could go straight or take a right turn. I took the right turn and thought one of them will be a dead end and I will come back here and go the other way eventually.
All this time I was keeping an eye on my map and the direction I was going in. With this right turn, I was going in the south direction. I saw a new perpendicular road but I had no means to get to it yet. I could not build up because of the protection blocks covering every inch of the road. Rose did a great job on this, I was constantly checking for places to build sometimes you can find one or two unprotected blocks but that was not the case here.
So, this road took a big loop and now I was now going in the west direction.
This was a very large loop and it was now dark. But I saw the glowing blocks at the "Palace Heights" and this helped me orient well now I picked a pen and started charting my route which later helped me a lot.
Just a few blocks farther there was a platform with 2 chests. One of them was a normal chest with nothing in there and the other one was a locked chest.
I took a mental note of this and continued the long walk. Rose did a good job on the platform by introducing twists and turned to disorient us. I kept walking and suddenly from a lapse of concentration fell. Fortunately, I had a glider with me so I went back up but I was in no mood of talking the long route back. So, I decided to build up from the unprotected stairs at "Palace Heights" and then jumped back to the side road. This would save me more than 1 ingame day.
The sun went down again and an interesting mese circuitry appeared, there were two levers and just wires. I tried flipping both but couldn't figure out what they did and continued my sky adventure.
After a few more turns I saw another interesting structure with a button at the top. Just a pro tip: when you see a button from Rose DO NOT PRESS. I have learnt it the hard way. :)
I was super cautious here and managed to press the button while standing on the solid block which was not going to disappear. But if you are not careful and press the button while standing on top of this black cube then you are going to fall and have to come all the way from the start.
We were now going in the south direction and there were no turns this time. But now there were hundreds of chests along the way. Each one of them was empty but I had to make sure I opened every one of them. They went for more than 800 blocks, I guess.
Finally, this infinite-looking path ended and one of the chests had some keys.
I thought that was perfect. The other locked chest that we saw earlier will be unlocked by this so I went back, it was a long way back so I jumped and glided towards the start of the puzzle. It was much faster than walking back there.
Turned out the key doesn't even unlock this chest...lol
But by this time I noticed a new floating chest in the air. It was just 1 block in the sky. So, I jumped down, went back to the Palace Heights built up from there and glided on top of the chest.
This one was a locked chest as well but my key worked on this and it had a book which said "Find the keys at house of 84863375225". I tried to map each number to letters of the English alphabet and see if I can come up with a name but it didn't make any sense so I thought it must be coordinated to the location.
I was yet to take that straight path from the start of my puzzle (the one where I choose to go right). So I went in that direction and it lead to another interesting structure. This one had a button as well and there was no way to press it while standing on a solid block. I had to stand over those "ghoststones" blocks which can vanish depending on the messe circuit.
There was a locked chest here as well. And the road ended with a waterfall going down to the ocean floor.
I had to press the button and see what happens and I did. The blocks disappeared and I fell straight into a lava pit. Thank you, Rose :)
All the stuff in my inventory was gone including the key I got after opening hundreds of empty chests. I went back and this time took 2 more keys. One for backup and one to see if the chest next to this lava pit opens.
I tried the key but it didn't work. And while investigating more I fell again into the lava and died. That was the end of my day's play. After spending 4 hours and dying twice I closed it and went to sleep.
On the next day, I went in search of the keys, and all I had was a number 84863375225. That could be coordinated but there can be multiple coordinates. For eg, (848.6, 33.7, 522.5), (84.8, 633.7, 522.5) and so on.
I made a list of potential coordinates as I knew the size of the world was roughly 30K blocks on each side. ( I had also travelled to the southern edge of the world so that limited my search to around 8 locations)
I went to each one of them one by one some of them were thousands of blocks apart in each direction. It took me another couple of hours.
It was all a waste of time and after seeing me struggling for so long Rose helped me and gave a hint which lead me to Jack's Sky House. I still don't understand what 84863375225 translates to and I can't wait for Rose's post to find out.
At last, I thought my pain is over and this new key will unlock one of the two locked chests and that chest will have the key to the final chest. But Rose had other plans.
This key I got from Jacks's house unlocked the first locked chest (the one next to the empty chest) and had the key just as I expected. But that key failed to unlock the last locked chest. Why rose...why!?
It meant more chests were hiding somewhere. All of us were trying to solve it but no one found the last chest until Rose made some changes.
Turned out the last chest was hiding on a small island next to the forest where the water was falling.
It was well hidden, if not for the big pointed arrow, it would be so difficult to find. That was the last chest and the locked chest above, next to the lava, was just a distraction. What a well-made puzzle @rosecane.
That's how I solved the puzzle. I had fun exploring the world even though it was a name and not a coordinate. Stupid me xD
Come and join us in the Minetest Server! We have a very welcoming city and you will find it enjoyable here. Let me know in the comments if you want to join as well. You must!!
Thanks for reading...