Puzzle Rojak

The puzzlehunt starts on Saturday, May 25, 2024 at 12:00 AM UTC (this is equivalent to 5pm PT Friday 5/24) and ends on Monday, June 10, 2024 at 12:00 AM UTC (equivalent to 5pm PT Sunday 6/9), at which point the leaderboards will be frozen and puzzle solutions will be available.
However, we will leave the website running until June 22 so teams can still submit answers and go through the hunt at their own pace. We will unfortunately be unable to support hint requests past June 10th. We expect the wrap up to be ready sometime before June 15th.
Teams have a maximum size of 6. You may not create multiple accounts or be on multiple teams.
There will be 5 puzzles unlocked at a time for Round 1 and at least 6 puzzles unlocked at a time for Round 2, while there are puzzles to be unlocked. There will be no timed unlocks in this hunt.
The meta for each round will unlock when at least 75% of puzzles in that round have been solved.
Teams that complete the hunt will be ranked by the time at which they finish. Teams that do not complete the hunt will be ranked by number of puzzles solved and tie-broken by earliest last solve time.
There are 37 puzzles in this hunt, along with some number of metas.
There will be a section of the story available 1h before the hunt starts.

Each answer is a string of letters A–Z. Lowercase letters will be changed into uppercase, and any other characters will be stripped before checking for correctness.
You have 15 total guesses for each puzzle. If you legitimately run out of guesses and need more, feel free to contact us, though we won’t grant your request if we see that you were, for example, guessing random thematic answers, or brute-forcing all 10-letter words.
Incorrect guesses and usage of hints do not affect ranking in any way.
Certain puzzles will have intermediate cluephrase confirmation. Such puzzles will have a box at the bottom of the puzzle that look like this:

This puzzle has intermediate cluephrase confirmation.

If you submit a partial answer for these puzzles, (i.e. a word or phrase you’d find while solving but isn’t the final answer), you will receive a message confirming you are on the right track. We recommend submitting such cluephrases for such puzzles. Any puzzles without such boxes will not have intermediate cluephrase confirmations.

This hunt will be about the same difficulty as but longer than Puzzle Rojak 1.
For those who did not do Puzzle Rojak 1, as a more recent comparison point, this hunt should be similar in length and difficulty as Huntinality 3 or Shardhunt.
There are more puzzles in Puzzle Rojak 2 as compared to Puzzle Rojak 1, but there will be 2 rounds, and Round 1 will have puzzles that will be easier than almost all of the Puzzle Rojak 1 puzzles. Importantly, the second round of Puzzle Rojak 2 has less than 26 puzzles (Puzzle Rojak 1 had 26 puzzles).
The first round is beginner-friendly, with puzzles that should feel like Restaurant from Puzzle Rojak 1, in general single aha puzzles that have an approachable break-in point and are not very long (an experienced team should be able to complete the first meta in around 2h). Teams with members new to puzzlehunts should be able to complete Round 1, with the help of hints.
Consider trying the Puzzle Rojak 1 puzzles or looking through their solutions if your team did not do Puzzle Rojak 1 to get a better sense of Puzzle Rojak 2's difficulty.

Teams will receive 2 magnifying glasses (hints) per day, at 04:00 AM UTC each day, until the end of the hunt.
We will only respond to hints for Round 1 for the first 28h. If you do not need hints for Round 1, you will be able to use all 4 hints on any Round 2 puzzle from the time the second batch of hints drop.
You can use a hint to get help on a puzzle. This can be something like a nudge in the right direction (i.e. you give us your progress on the puzzle and we’ll try to get you unstuck) or an answer to a question (e.g. “Which answers to these crossword clues are wrong?”).
If you feel that the hint we gave was not helpful for you, feel free to drop us an email at puzzlerojak@gmail.com and we will try to help you further.
After hints are released, if you are out of hints but still completely stuck, please also drop us an email. We want teams to have fun solving puzzles and will be pretty generous with our hints.
If your team wants to complete the hunt, we will help you as much as possible (do let us know early). The total hint count is such that every team can ask for a hint for most puzzles once. Use hints as and when you want to, and don't feel too stressed about the hint count! (Depending how the hunt is going, we may increase the hint count as needed)
We aim to respond to hints within 30 minutes on weekends. Weekdays will take slightly longer, expect hint replies to take up to half a day. We are a (very) small team, please be patient with us.

All puzzles that cannot easily be copied from the hunt site will have a Google Sheets clone/some form of copyable of the puzzle. However, if you still encounter issues with copying the contents of a puzzle out, do let us know and we’ll try to find a solution as soon as we can.
We tried our best to include color accessibility in all our puzzles. However, if you are colorblind or have difficulty differentiating between colors and have found an issue with one of our puzzles in this aspect, please email us and we will do our best to accommodate!
Most website elements are mobile-friendly, but the website is designed to be viewed on a desktop.

You may use any external sources for help, including (but not limited to) your favorite textbook, search engine or video streaming service.
You may not request for help from any person that is not on your team. If you wish to have more than 6 people on your team, you may unofficially invite others onto your team, as long as they are not also participating on another team.
You may not look at the HTML source/JavaScript/CSS on any webpages for any puzzle, please do not do so.
You may not publicly stream a solve of the hunt while the hunt is live, or in any other form intentionally make public your solve of the hunt.
We reserve the right to disqualify any team for unsportsmanlike conduct.
We reserve the right to change any of these rules. If there’s a big change, we’ll announce it to all teams.
If you have any questions about these rules, or if you want to contact us for any reason, email puzzlerojak@gmail.com. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

Rules