Hunts Upon a Time
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Solution: A Rimer for Nitting

Answer: DELUGE

Author: Junyu Yang

Dev: Max Chang

Editor: Max Chang

Upon reading, one may notice that some words are missing letters. For example:

Looking for a hobby?

Feeling stressed and not oay? Try crafting! Studies have shown that crafting can alleviate symtoms of anxiety, deression, loneliness, and even dementia. Nitting is a articularly popular hobby that quicly improves your mood.

Is more correctly written as:

Looking for a hobby?

Feeling stressed and not okay? Try crafting! Studies have shown that crafting can alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and even dementia. kNitting is a particularly popular hobby that quickly improves your mood.

If we do this with the entire passage:

So what do you need? To start knitting, pick up a set of needles, some skeins of yarn (any kind of material is fine), and perhaps, the most key ingredient of all, a willingness to embark on a possible new pastime. If you don’t know how much you’ll like pushing yarn on needles, the investment needed to start is small. With only a skein of yarn and a set of needles from your local craft store, you can knit a scarf.

Basic Stitches

Of all the tchotchkes and trinkets you can make, a scarf is perhaps the simplest. After casting on a row of stitches, for which you may want to solicit help, you need to know only two stitches: knit and purl. When you knit, you produce a series of “v” shaped stitches into which you will add more stitches when you reach the end of your row. (This is in contrast to crochet, where you generate a series of knots.) kEep going until you are satisfied with the length.

kNitting every row produces the “garter stitch,” which is a bit bumpy to the touch. If you want a smooth surface of knit material, you will need to learn stockinette possibly. pRoducing stockinette requires knowledge of the purl stitch, another key stitch to learn.

How to Read a Pattern

To make tricky knits more complex than scarves (say: socks or stuffed kittens), knowing how to knit and purl is not sufficient. If you are keen on these ventures, you will also need to know how to read a pattern. Many patterns use charts to give instructions. Instead of just telling you to knit, you should know that some patterns will give you a grid of symbols or other hijinks depending on the kind of knitting project. Here, a knit stitch may be represented by empty space, a purl by a bullet, and so on. Patterns will also use abbreviations for brevity.

As with any other hobby, this may feel like a flood of information. But practice makes perfect, so go out and give knitting a try!

Only k’s and p’s were omitted. They cannot spell out words by themselves.

If we tally up the missing letters in each section, where a section is denoted by the bold headers, we get:

  • Section 1: kppkpkkpkkpkkppkpkk
  • Section 2: kkpkkpkpkkkkkppkkpk
  • Section 3: kkkkkkkpkkppkkkkkkk

Each section has the same number of missing letters, 19.

The next step is to figure out what “k” and “p” mean; they denote stitches. This can either be done by having previous knitting knowledge, if someone is a knitter, or by googling some combination of terms like “knitting k p”.

These stitches can then be translated into a knitting pattern. The pattern then spells out something in Braille. There are three things that clue this:

  • “Bumpy to the touch” in Section 2.
  • Three rows of 19 is consistent with a swatch of fabric.
  • Section 3, How to Read a Pattern, describes how knitting patterns are commonly written (e.g., how knit and purl stitches are denoted). Purl stitches, the “bullets”, look like Braille.

If we “translate” the k’s and p’s into stitches in a pattern, we get:

kppkpkkpkkpkkppkpkk
kkpkkpkpkkkkkppkkpk
kkkkkkkpkkppkkkkkkk

You can either knit this in real life, or, you can shade in all the p’s in a spreadsheet app:

                                      
                                      
                                      

Translating from Braille, we get the answer: DELUGE.

Authors' Notes

Thanks to Max for being an extremely helpful mentor, and to everyone who test solved and gave feedback! This was my first puzzle, and honestly, I still don’t really know how people come up with all the layers that you usually find in puzzles.

I mostly was thinking, “Wow wouldn’t it be cool to have a knitting puzzle where knowing how to knit would really help in solving it?” From there, an extraction mechanic was devised. I would have liked to write a puzzle where you have to knit in real life, but I realized that would have maybe been too unfair to teams where no one can knit.