To help enhance your puzzlehunt solving, we are providing this puzzlehunt FAQ with helpful tips for you.
- Be aware that some puzzle types are conducive to producing an ordered list of words or phrases as their output. Answers will often be extracted from these puzzles by the use of explicit indices - a number which indicates which letter to take from the word or phrase to spell the answer (or a clue to it). But be careful: puzzlehunts in general don't distinguish between the use of provided numbers like this for letter extraction or for answer length, and it is up to the solver to distinguish between them. You may also find a simpler variation of this technique used, where no numbers are given, but the solver is expected to form an acronym from the words, phrases (or in extreme cases, even sentences) given.
- Certain types of puzzles may produce a series of numbers. Numbers that are less than or equal to twenty-six - 3, 18, 21, 4, and 5, say - can often be decoded using alphabet position: one is A, two is B, and so on. Conversely, higher numbers such as 79 and 82 may be ASCII codes.
- Some puzzles may involve the use of codes to extract an answer. Sometimes the codes are conventional codes like Morse code or Braille. On the other hand, puzzles may form answers by piecing together one-letter or two-letter fragments from specific sets of letters or letter combinations. Sometimes these letters may be represented by digits; 1001 might be Roman numerals, or 10 might be the number of the element in the periodic table. Sometimes the letter may represent a concept in a specific domain, like "radius". And sometimes the letters are simply abbreviations, such as the postal abbreviation for Alabama.
There's one more thing worth mentioning, and that is that if there's a place for you to enter an answer, there is almost certainly a puzzle. There's a puzzle embedded in this FAQ, for instance.