Operate the Santavator

Difficulty:
Direct link: elevator website
Terminal hint: Unscape Tmux and The Elf C0de

Objective

Request

Talk to Pepper Minstix in the entryway to get some hints about the Santavator.

Sparkle Redberry

Hey hey, Sparkle Redberry here!
The Santavator is on the fritz. Something with the wiring is grinchy, but maybe you can rig something up?
Here's the key! Good luck!
With that key, you can look under the panel and see the Super Santavator Sparkle Stream (S4).
To get to different floors, you'll need to power the various colored receivers.

Hints

Santavator Operations

It's really more art than science. The goal is to put the right colored light into the receivers on the left and top of the panel.

Santavator Bypass

There may be a way to bypass the Santavator S4 game with the browser console...

Solution

Sparkle Redberry gives you a key to open up the Santavator panel which will reveal the Super Santavator Sparkle Stream (S4) and the yellow, red, and green receivers. There's 2 main ways to solve this challenge. Either find items and arrange them to color and direct the stream towards the receivers. Alternatively, you can use the app.js JavaScript code to bypass the Santavator. This write-up focuses on the most basic solution to complete the challenge by using 2 items to activate a single floor.

Start by talking to Sparkle Redberry who will hand you a key to open the Santavator panel. You'll find a hex nut in front of the Santavator and a green light bulb in the top left corner of the Courtyard. Open the Santavator panel by clicking on the key and use the hex nut and green light bulb as shown in the image below.

Activating the green receiver will get you to the second floor where the talks are held. You can now find additional items like the red light bulb in the top right corner of the Talks Lobby. Since the hex nut already splits the stream towards the red and green receivers, adding the red light bulb in front of the red receiver will get you access to the Workshop and Roof. Below is an overview of where the different items are located.

Item	Floor	Room
Candycane	1	In front of the castle door on the Front Lawn
Hex nut	1	In front of the Santavator in the Entryway
Hex nut	1	Behind the table in the Dining Room (hidden from view)
Santavator key	1	Received from Sparkle Redberry
Green light bulb	1	Top left corner of the Courtyard
Red light bulb	2	Top right corner of the Talks Lobby
Yellow light bulb	R	Top left corner of the Netwars Room
Large marble	1.5	Workshop Room
Small marble	R	Bottom right corner of the Netwars Room (hidden from view)
Proxmark	1.5	Wrapping Room
Rubber ball	1.5	Wrapping Room
Elevator 1.5 button	2	Speaker UNPreparedness Room
Portals	2	Dropped by Release the Snacken

Answer

Use the hex nut found in front of the Santavator and the green light bulb found in the Courtyard to power the green receiver.

Bypassing the Santavator

Another option to get to the other floors, except for Santa's office which also requires a fingerprint sensor bypass, is by analysing app.js.

Once the proper particle amount for each stream color has been collected (line 3), the renderTraps() function will turn on the LED by adding the on CSS class to the LED HTML element (line 6) and change the value of the associated color LED in the powered array to true (line 7). Vice versa, when the stream levels drop too low the LED is turned off by removing the on CSS class (line 6) and the value in the powered array changes back to false (line 7).

const renderTraps = () => {
  TRAPS.forEach((points, index) => {
    const fillLevel = pl.Math.clamp(PARTICLE_COUNTS[index].length / trapTargetCounts[index], 0, 1);
    const steppa = Math.floor(fillLevel / (1 / wireSteps[index]));
    wireElements[index].style.backgroundPosition = `0 ${ -wireElements[index].clientHeight * steppa }px`;
    ledElements[index].classList[fillLevel === 1 ? 'add' : 'remove']('on');
    powered[index] = fillLevel === 1;
  });

  btn1.classList[powered[2] ? 'add' : 'remove']('powered');
  btn3.classList[powered[2] ? 'add' : 'remove']('powered');

  btn2.classList[powered[2] && powered[0] && hasToken('workshop-button') ? 'add' : 'remove']('powered');
  btnr.classList[powered[2] && powered[0] ? 'add' : 'remove']('powered');

  btn4.classList[powered[2] && powered[1] && powered[0] ? 'add' : 'remove']('powered');
};

Based on which combination of LEDs are turned on at any given time, the associated buttons will be powered on as well. This is handled by the remainder of the renderTraps() function which uses the state of the powered array to add a powered CSS class to the button elements (lines 10-16). Because the renderTraps() function is continuously called as the scene is being rendered by the render() function, any manual HTML edits to these buttons will be reverted by the renderTraps() function as soon as the proper conditions aren't met anymore.

function render(newtime) {
  if (stop) {
    return;
  }
  requestAnimationFrame(render);
  now = newtime;
  elapsed = now - then;
  if (elapsed > fpsInterval) {
    then = now - (elapsed % fpsInterval);

    ... SNIP ...

    renderTraps();
  }
}     

There's a workaround though. The first thing the render() function does is check the value of a stop variable (lines 2-4). If stop is true, we exit from the function and renderTraps() isn't called at all (line 13). This freezes the stream and prevents any manual HTML changes from being reverted.

The way app.js handles showing button 1.5 is by checking if the challenge URL contains a workshop-button value as part of the tokens GET request parameter. If that's the case a found CSS class will be added to the image identified by the f15btn CSS class (line 4), which adds the button to the panel.

const btn15img = document.querySelector('img.f15btn');

if (hasToken('workshop-button')) {
  btn15img.classList.add('found');
}

We can now bypass the Super Santavator Sparkle Stream by taking the following actions:

1. Open the web browser's developer tools
2. Open the panel to expose the circuitry
3. Enter stop = true in the JavaScript console to freeze the stream
4. Close the panel again
5. Add a found CSS class to the f15btn image so it appears
6. Add a powered CSS class to each of the button elements
7. Press the button for the desired floor