Quantum Online Puzzle Hunt

What’s going on?

The peaceful city of Puzzleton is under attack by a terrorist mob who are planting bombs in buildings all across town!
Solve puzzles to defuse the bombs one by one and save the people of Puzzleton from a perilous fate!

How does this work exactly?

Gather a team of friends with whom you would like to play the hunt.
Recommended team size is 4–6 players, although we impose no strict limit.
Start time is Friday, 15 April 2022, 17:00 (UTC). When the hunt starts, you will have access to three entry-level (beginner-friendly) puzzles.
With each puzzle you solve, one or two new puzzles will unlock. They will generally get harder as the hunt progresses, but we may unlock a long puzzle early so you have more time to work on it, and we may unlock an easier puzzle later as a breather.
After 10 days (240 hours), a leaderboard is published which will rank the teams according to their progress within that timeframe. However, teams can continue playing/finishing the hunt for as long as they wish.
For the duration of the 10 days, you may request an individualized hint for a puzzle you may be stuck on. There is a hint request form at the bottom of each puzzle page for this.
Each puzzle has an answer consisting of a word, name or short phrase (for example, TOASTER, CLARK KENT, etc.).
Each puzzle has an answer checker near the top. The answer checker will ignore spaces, digits, and everything that is not a letter A–Z; thus, whether you type SLOT MACHINE or SLO TMA CHINE makes no difference. It also makes no difference which member of your team submits an answer.
In some puzzles, the answer checker may confirm intermediary answers or sub-answers.
To prevent raw guessing, you may only submit a maximum of 5 wrong answers per 6 hours (per puzzle).

What do these puzzles look like?

The hunt covers a wide variety of types of puzzles. For many hunt players, the element of novelty and surprise is a large part of the appeal, so no details about the puzzles themselves are revealed upfront. The challenge is to figure out what each puzzle wants from you by examining the information given, solving clues, spotting patterns, and performing various tasks.
Some of the later puzzles may be meta puzzles. For these puzzles, you need not only the information in the puzzle but also the answers from (some) prior puzzles.
In terms of difficulty, the earlier puzzles are very accessible to novice puzzlers, while experienced puzzlers will find very rewarding challenges in the later stages. For those familiar with other hunts, we think this hunt may be comparable in difficulty to Puzzle Potluck and Silph Puzzle Hunt. It is definitely harder than DP Hunt and easier than Galactic Puzzle Hunt.
In the design of this hunt, we strove to avoid reliance on obscure pop culture knowledge. This is not to say that no puzzles use any pop culture info — it is only to say that whatever info they do use, we made sure is easy to find using a search engine and is available on a website in a convenient form.
This hunt assumes that you have heard of letter encoding formats such as A1Z26, Morse code, Braille, Semaphores, and others that are frequently used in puzzle hunts. Obviously you don’t need to know these by heart (you can just find them online), only that you may need to recognize them when you see them.
We avoided putting “this is not a puzzle” on every non-puzzle page because there are no devious shenanigans that necessitate it. It’ll be obvious what the puzzles are.

Who did this?

Quantum Online Puzzle Hunt was organized and managed by Timwi.
Puzzle writers include Timwi, TasThiluna, Roger Wrightshoe, and multiple one-puzzle contributors.
Test solvers include GhostSalt, Deusovi, Roger Wrightshoe, CloudGaming, cmɢʟee, the teams Enigmatics and Skycrab Holders, and many more.