I had the same problem with the first puzzle. I spent hours trying to figure out what ore corrosponded to what before it finally hit me about the gemstones.
(Also I switched to a different terraria wiki, so that helped too)
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Not really, I knew people on the site ranged from seasoned puzzles solvers such as yourself to people who havenāt done this type of puzzle solving before, but I didnāt want to make it exclusionary, so I leaned more the easy side (clear clues on each puzzle, not much research to understand them). I figured some would breeze through it but some would take longer.
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Well, this makes the second one I lost today and Iām not even mad 
1rst puzzle
I got Terraria on the 360, played for a bit, never played it again, it would have never occurred to me it was a game thing was it not for your profile thing that I saw because I clicked the turret to see it closer and read it without knowing what it was.
Didn't knew it was Terraria at first, I did knew it was a game, so I just image searched one block and terraria popped up, the rest was easy
2nd puzzle
Super easy, got the Dot and Dash references, didn't knew who the bloke was, Googled "famous detectives", was lucky to find a single picture of the dude, find out it was Inspector Morse (whoever the heck is that), the rest was simple was it not for stupid me that forgot that site shortener addresses are case sensitive, especially considered the previous puzzle, so I sat on that one for like half a day till I got some help.
3th puzzle
QR code, glued them together, had no problems with my phone
4th puzzle
Reconigsed the encryption, the padding at the end give it away.
5th puzzle
Know nothing of those people, still, an easy and quick search was more than enough to find the answer
It never crossed my head it was a magic eye thing, I don't even know how they even work, crossed eye stereographic images no problem, but this, not in a million years. I used Gimp to filter out the gradient and the pattern, after that it was easy(was it not for the e-mail service but watever)
In summary, good experience, still loses, thanks for the chance thou, it was fun.
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Couldnāt you just shake your head instead? even just a lil bit would have been the same as shaking the laptop.
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My experience was pretty similar to others, but Iāll describe my approach to the puzzles anyway. If nothing else it may provide some additional insight for the development of future puzzles 
First puzzle
Having played quite a bit of Terraria on the Xbox 360, I immediately recognized the blocks from that game (and the hint in Peteās profile confirmed it). But I havenāt played Terraria in a few years and got tripped up thinking the blocks represented the biomes: corruption, hell, jungle, dessert, ice. After finally realizing the blocks were gemstones 
the rest was smooth sailing.
Second puzzle
I recognized Dash (the kid from the Incredibles) right off the bat. Dot looked familiar, but I couldnāt recall her name or what show she was from (Animaniacs). So, I moved on to the guy at the top. I had no clue who he was either, but at least I had something to search for: āfamous inspectors.ā Inspector Gadget, no. Inspector Clouseau, nope. Magnum P.I., awesome mustache but also no. Ah, finally a recognizable face - Inspector Morse. At that point, it became clear the other character was named Dot and I was dealing with morse code. Now all I need is a translatorā¦
Third Puzzle
I was expecting this puzzle to involve Base64 but couldnāt find anything other than a QR Code 
.
Like others, I had some issues with this one. I pieced it together in my photo editing software and tried to lighten the top half to match the bottom half. I then had to install a QR reader on my phone (because who scans QR codes on a regular basis?). For some reason, my phone wouldnāt scan it. So, I installed a different app but my phone still wouldnāt scan it 
. Then I found an online QR code reader which seemed to work. This puzzle wasnāt hard but it was time-consuming.
Fourth Puzzle
Okay, so this is where the Base64 comes in to play. Searched for a base 64 decoder and done.
Fifth Puzzle
I quickly figured out the name of Ed Sheeranās next album, based on my knowledge of his previous album titles, but had to do some searching to find out what Blind Melonās magic number is and what Taylor Swift is feeling, etc. After I finally found the Blind Melon song (see below) the rest didnāt take long at all and I actually enjoyed listening to some of the music.
Final Puzzle
I knew right away that this was a magic eye image and could make out some of the characters. Like @Fraggles, one of the first things I did was check the meta data - hoping for an easy answer. Then I spent the next ten minutes or so gazing at the image from every possible angle. As I told Pete after the fact:
So, like @Inferry, I popped open my photo editing software and fiddled around with it until the text became clear.
Looking back, I might have been able to solve this just by staring at the image long enough, but the fact that the word āPeteā wasnāt showing up was really messing with my brain.
Overall, it took me about 3-hours (of working on the puzzles) from beginning to end. Not too shabby considering this was my first ARG.
Thanks again @PeteMcc for creating this and congrats to the winner.
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1st puzzle
Like others here Iāve played Terraria before so a trip to wiki to look up ores was all it took to figure out. Iām curious though, did anyone not familiar with Terraria participate and how difficult was it for them to find these blocks?
2nd puzzle
At first I just looked up Morse code and tried to translate it by hand, but couldnāt find ā.ā and ā/ā in any Morse code cheats sheets I saw and had to resort to online translator.
3rd puzzle
And again just like others at first I couldnāt get the app to read the combined QR code, but after I cropped and enlarged it, the code went through without any trouble on the first try. Though after the first time scanner failed, I thought that perhaps ābase 64ā hint had something to do with it, so I got distracted trying to figure it out for a couple of minutes before trying to make code more readable.
5th puzzle
The Blind Melon song got me stuck for a bit because it wasnāt in the song list on the albumās wiki and mentioned in a paragraph below it instead, making it harder to spot.
Huh, I didnāt even notice first letters spelling āMAGIC EYESā. For a moment there I thought that looking at whatās behind referred to some more hidden hints in previous puzzles, but luckily I noticed that the image looks suspicious before I started looking through them.
Iāve never managed to properly diverge my eyes to see magic eye pictures before so I thought Iād just give up there, but I had an old pair of anaglyph 3d glasses lying around so I tried them out and surprisingly they helped! A little bit, but still helped. Interesting thing - now that I know what the picture says I can see the text easily and putting the glasses again actually makes it harder to see the address.
Overall I really enjoyed this ARG. Thanks @PeteMcc!
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Iāve never played Terraria and had no idea what on earth that first puzzle represented. I copied the image into Paint and google image searched it. Nothing. I then broke it up into individual blocks and searched for each one separately. Nothing. It was only when I took a look at Peteās clue and did some research on Terraria that I realised that there might be a link. So then off to the wiki, and after a bit of research I managed to make some headway. Without Peteās first clue Iām not sure how someone who isnāt familiar with Terraria would have got started.
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same for me, donāt know anything about Terraria at all, though Iāve had it on my wishlist for a long time cuz i wanna get it for the kids one day
However, as soon as i saw that number, 105600, and googled it, it gave me terraria as the very first search result (which i guess means i busy myself way too much with games according to Google), and then I slowly started to find more and more info by looking at crafting recipes and stuff, lol. At one point I thought that what I was looking for was āpryboprobogrgā, made off the first letters of each squareās color, and then once i figured out the names of the ores and stuff i thought what i was looking for was āUnderworldā, as all the ores and shit were found in the āundergroundā and ācavernsā, except for one, which was found in the āUnderworldā only, and i kept sending Pete messages with all this useless stuff 
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That was the hardest one for me too. Spent a crazy amount of time looking through all of their studio albums and searching the lyrics for anything sorcery or number related. Remember seeing songs like āHypnotizeā and ā2 X 4ā but they didnāt make sense. Why didnāt I start with the singles
On the bright side, I now know more about Blind Melon than anyone on the planet 
Spoiler
The main guy dies.
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Although these were actual clues for puzzles (I didnāt put any red herrings in) I was hoping that some people would get tripped up with these 2 clues in the exact way you described. Glad it worked at least once 
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Oh yeah, I tried that one too before going to wiki. Only I thought that more solid colours represented upper case.
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Donāt wanna shock you butā¦
Thatās the first thing that came up with my solving
Messaged Pete to check if things were right XD
You probably know the rest XD
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And yes, i Like Microsoft Edge XD
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Got tripped on these two too. I felt really dumb at the very end after going back to each puzzle and looking for something I missed before rereading the clue again.
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yea
iāve had about 5minutes of exposure to terraria from a TB/Cox stream i think, -years ago
so the first time i were to test it, i didnāt know what i was looking at at all, and āgave upā (knowing iād need more than 5mins to solve it and such) and waited to comeback with more time.
Then when i came back it sorta just hit me out of the blue, āeach block must represent a single ādigitā in the url, therefor it must be simple like being its first digit in the blocks ānameā, -so what are the blocksā
then i ārememberedā, the āonlyā 2 block games i knew existed were(means āthe only 2 block games i could vaguely remember in existence at the timeā): Minecraft(definitely not its blocks); and Terraria
so i googled āterraria blocksā, and it instantly led me to its wiki containing a pic of all blocks and their names -solved
-funny thing is:
(after iād figured out it was Terraria), Pete told me heād added a clue, -which i completely missed ,
which would probably have cut down the time even further, needed for me to figure out it was terraria. 
But in the end it didnāt take those āmore than 5minutesā i had initially planned for
(at least not if you only count my 2nd attempt āas its ownā)
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a boat load of coins
now what did i win???
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Itās stirring, waking upā¦But no puzzles this timeā¦MAYBE!
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even with the solution i still donĀ“t understand thisā¦
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and that my friend is the pointā¦ maybeā¦ i donāt know anymore
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