Well and Phase 2 ends like Phase 1 did early on... The 7 days since posting Stage IV have passed so i think its time to reveal the way you had to go to get to the password. So there is no winner this time.
And now for anyone curious the way you had to go to solve it:
- The first thing you had to do was either to look for Link No.1 or 2. In this case ill be describing the way to Link No.1 first because its the shorter one.
- This one was quite simple. You just had to use a tool like steemworld.org and look through some of my posts and you would have found this comment which translates to https://pastebin.com/HReQZsQ
- To get this link to work you had to use some trial and error and this hint "Well at least i still know about the "d" and the "E" i have to add somewhere" and you would get https://pastebin.com/HReQZsQd.
- Now there is only "E" left
- Ive tried to make a little fake dead end here so you would end up with another gibberish mess of letters but to get around that you had to decode it twice with a tool like https://www.base64decode.org/
- Since youve got the first part of the picture you have to find the second link
- For that you had to download the picture in the original post and click on the link embedded in the picture.
- The link would get you to an imgur album with two pictures inside. One of which is just a hint how to use the picture.
- The downloaded picture had a password protected archive inside.
- To crack the password you could use some knowledge about the previous stages where i locked an archive with "soosenkasper" before and hinted at with the "missing key" i mentioned in the post or you could bruteforce it if you have enough time to crack a password that is 12 characters long :D.
- Inside the archive there was a txt file with some numbers.
- I guess this part was to hard because no one got past this step but you had to open the picture with the colors in paint to see what their RGB values where.
- With the help of a HEX table for colors you had to find the color i used in the picture and write down the first/second etc character of the hexcode like instructed in the txt file.
- In the end you would end up with the hexcode "68 74 74 70 73 3a 2f 2f 70 61 73 74 65 62 69 6e 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 6b 76 7a 79 6b 4b 51" which decodes to https://pastebin.com/kvzykKQ
- This is the part where you had to insert the missing "E" and you would end up with https://pastebin.com/kvzykKQE
- This code looks like Base64 again but just decoing it twice leaves you with garbage again
- To make sense of it you had to merge the two pastebins and decode them twice like before.
- Now youve got a picture of all first gen Pokemon but i tinkerd it a bit
- With the Pastebin names "I like Ghosts" and "poison is cool too" you could narrow it down quite a bit where you had to look since ive just changed some pixels. You had to look for Gengar
- This is the part where i hoped most people would get stuck and have to ask for a hint or some help because its quite difficult to spot if you dont know what to look for.
- In this case ive written a HEX code again and my hint would have been to look for characters that look like numbers.
- Now for the easiest part: After getting the 0x28 on Gengar you had to google it and you would find either Chansey or the Item Rare Candy.
- But since all of my Puzzles before had been Candy themed i was looking for "Rare Candy" as the Codeword.
Annoucement
I will discontinue this series because it hasnt really got off like i hoped it would. Most of the time only one or two people are solving a Stage and i dont think that the effort i have to put into each stage matches the attention ive got. If you think otherwise or have ideas how to improve this series please let me know. Otherwise this is the last Post in the theme of "Solve me if you can". Thanks for participating