When the puzzle first unlocks, we see a little plant and a watering can. Clicking on the watering can waters the plant and initiates a countdown timer of 30 minutes. The plant state and cooldown is synced across the team. There is not much else to do except to revisit the plant every 30 minutes (and remember to hydrate, of course!) Doing so twice causes the plant to sprout and unlocks the next stage.

When we unlock the puzzle Mystery Manor, we find a faucet and dimmer switch inside the kitchen. These levers actually control the weather in the plant! Turning on the faucet makes it rain, while setting the dimmer switch changes the lighting between cloudy, partly cloudy, and sunny.

By triggering a rainstorm and then a rainbow (max light and rain), the plant will grow to the next stage. At this point, a new “Customize” menu has shown up, allowing us to customize visual aspects of the plant¹. The first option available is to customize our leaf shape.

While exploring the manor, we might have encountered two locked doors, each with a different shaped keyhole. By changing the plant’s leaves to shapes 2 and 3, we can unlock doors 2 and 3 respectively in the manor. Behind these doors are more objects that can control different aspects of the plant², as well as a Horticulture Guidebook: a pictorial guide of how to grow a plant in different stages.

The guidebook depicts specific actions to take to grow the plant, which include playing music, putting grasshoppers to sleep, feeding the plant coffee and tea, and applying a variety of fertilizers and chemical elements. Along the way, several new stages unlock new forms of customization (adding a sticker to the watering can, changing petal shapes, and changing berry colors) which further change the manor side.

At the end, we are presented with a photo album of the steps we took to get our plant from a seedling to a fruit-bearing plant³. Each photo comes with a series of arrows; these indicate the actions we took for each transition between stages. By extracting one letter from each action (noting the spaces as word boundaries), we can extract the clue phrase E.G. MUD OR PECAN, a crossword clue for the answer, PIE.

Author's Notes

Since the pitch of our hunt's entanglement mechanic, an interactive puzzle had been in the back of our minds. We had several high-level design goals: back-and-forth interactivity, a relaxing zen theme, and an unexpected-yet-fitting connection that would click for solvers once they found the aha.

Unlock structure was highly debated for this particular pair. We knew from the start that Remember to Hydrate should unlock before Mystery Manor, so that solvers would build up a habit of coming back to tend to their plant. The hope was that a larger distance would feel rewarding once Mystery Manor finally unlocked. However, we wanted to avoid frustrating solvers with too large a gap.

In the end, we hope that the two-solve gap between the puzzle pair felt reasonable, especially given this is the 4th entangled pair in the hunt. We would like to extend a special shout-out to the team The Waffle Machine basically exploded. for their dedication to watering the plant 59 times (almost 30 hours) before unlocking Mystery Manor, and 124 times (and still going strong) even after solving both puzzles!⁴

This puzzle took inspiration from many, many sources, and a full credit list of music can be found in Appendix 5. (You might have noticed some nods to Stay Hydrated and Cafe Five from the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt.)

Appendix 1: Customizations

Appendix 2: Mystery Manor Changes

Appendix 3: Photo Album

Photo	Mystery Change	Plant Change	Letter to Extract
	Piano keyboard - E	Energizing Jazz	E
	Piano keyboard - G	Groovy Rock	G
	Painting - M Lieff	Tea leaves	M
	Turtle	Snail	U
	Piano keyboard - D	Dreamy Daze	D
	Painting - O Kofi	Coffee grounds	O
	Zebra	Bees	R
	Leopard	Ladybugs	P
	Keyboard - E	Phosphorus	E
	Painting - C Manur	Manure	C
	Keyboard - A	Potassium	A
	Painting - N Peele	Banana peel	N

Appendix 4: Bonus Certificate

As a bonus added a few days before hunt end, any teams that watered their plant more than 50 times and solved the puzzle would see the following certificate (with their team name and number of waters) filled in:

Appendix 5: Credits

All of the music from the game were used royalty free from the YouTube Audio Library. The specific tracks can be found below (huge thanks to Dan Henig's Eternal Garden for getting me through many a coding session):