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Snowball Fight

Location: Speaker UNPreparedness Room

Introduction

Fitzy Shortstack tells us about this challenge

"Put it in the cloud," they said...

"It'll be great," they said...

All the lights on the Christmas trees throughout the castle are controlled through a remote server.

We can shuffle the colors of the lights by connecting via dial-up, but our only modem is broken!

Fortunately, I speak dial-up. However, I can't quite remember the handshake sequence.

Maybe you can help me out? The phone number is 756-8347; you can use this blue phone.

...

Hints

Solution

The video below shows one method to solve this challenge.

The steps were as follows:

  1. While at Kringle Con open the Snowball Fight game, select the "Impossible" difficulty and click "Play!"

  2. Use the "Inspector" option in the browser's Development Tools to click on the game window and look for the comment with a list of 624 rejected seeds, which starts with "Seeds attempted"

  3. Copy the contents of the comment in to an editor, and remove everything except for the numbers, which should be one per line and in the same order as in the comment. This could also be done with a small parsing script.

  4. Install Mersenne Twister Predictor (not shown in the video)

  5. As per "as a command", pipe the data into mt19937predict. The next number in the sequence, in other words the 625th number, is the one of interest.

  6. Open https://snowball2.kringlecastle.com/ in a new browser tab/window.

  7. Set the difficult level to "Easy", set the "Player Name" to the value the number found in step 5, and click "Play". By setting the "Player Name", you are playing the same game that you are playing with "Impossible" difficulty.

  8. Play the game and find all of your opponents forts. Note where the forts are or take a screenshot before you click on the last part of the fifth fort.

  9. Go back to the "Impossible" difficulty game, and play with extreme confidence as you know where your opponents' forts are.

  10. You should now have won the game in Impossible difficulty.

Snowball Fight Impossible Difficulty