Recycling [Level 2 puzzle for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition][solution posted]

Unplanned hints are added just below the poll

Tevemadar Puzzle Recycling Factory (TPRF) seeks giveaway entries for preparing something to die, edition. Arbitrary number of entry positions are available, however the application deadline is pretty tight (Friday noon, CET).

Task description:

• successful applicants will press a green "+Enter giveaway (20P)" button

We offer:

• green "+Enter Giveaway (20P)" button for pressing
• page for posting comments

Requirements:

1. applicants should have met the requirements (specified elsewhere) of reaching Level 2
2. applicants should maintain no prior ownership of the game on Steam
3. candidates will familiarize themselves with multiple use cases of voucher. TPRF provides no vouchers this time
4. candidates will recognize a potato when encountering one. TPRF provides image sample of a potato
5. besides using their own, candidates will also get help from a rat brain, TPRF supplies no additional rat brains for applicants
6. the ideal candidate is also happy to draw/imagine a line when necessary, brave behaviour when facing a wall of text is a plus. TPRF provides coordinates for practising
7. successful candidates do not disregard giveaways for other games
8. successful candidates can Search older Discussions on their own

Spoon feeding 1: recycling is real, everything has happened already in some form.
Spoon feeding 2: a giveaway code consists of 5 characters. First, 2nd, third, 4th, fifth.
No further hints are planned.

Solution

The puzzle was about recycling older puzzles, actually I thought it would gather a lot of new solvers to join (using the old solutions) and also enable to relive some funny moments for those who already solved the puzzles once. Spoon feeding 1 tried to emphasize that I tried to make this puzzle easy. Retrospectively it seems I have been totally wrong about that, but I do not know why (feel free to comment).

Requirement 7 (successful candidates do not disregard giveaways for other games) and an unplanned hint (5 giveaways - 5 letters) tried to get people to check my active giveaways (finished by now), containing the puzzle pieces. Those GA-s also linked here if someone was wondering what the obscure GA descriptions were supposed to mean.

Requirement 8 tried to get people to search for the emphasized text. For voucher, there are multiple hits, but not too many, pretty easy to find the ones which were posted by me (the final form of requirement 3 tried to hint that more than one uses were needed). For rat brain there is a single hit, perhaps the one which was needed. For wall of text there is a single hit from me.

"It all began with the corpus callosum and associated subcortical white matter" was referring to the rat brain puzzle (the one from a few weeks ago, for Alien: Isolation and many other games), and it also said that it was about the first character. Due to the recent FlashPlayer issues I edited the rat brain thread to assure everyone that they would not need to play around with the viewers if they did not want to. The letter was 'b'.

• solution 1 (FlashPlayer): open the real view to see that corpus callosum is the bright orange thing somewhere at the beginning of the list, then the puzzle, and done.
• solution 2 (text): corpus callosum was part of the original puzzle, it was listed as the 5th largest structure. Since the solution starts with the example (5 structures), it makes corpus callosum etc. being the 10th letter in the letter-list (or the last letter of the first Screencheat GA)

(-2,0) and (6,12) were for the wall of text. Two points meant a simple line (as requirement 6 also said), so the very first part of the example applied here. The line was f(x)=1.5x+3. One could either leave this part to the end (when she or he would know which points were missing), or use spoon feeding 2. The missing characters were the 2nd and 4th one. 1.5*2+3=6 and 1.5*4+3=9. 6 and 9 were the actual characters needing no further conversion, the standalone unplanned hint was about this fact.

"My cat has a message for you: JYLZHBRK3UFBNK3JZNPKZCYERIEG2": when opening threads about vouchers, one of them would be Voucher etc.. This was a puzzle about Base32-Base64 cross-coding. Since xlate tends to be down from time to time, I also added a link to tomeko.net as an alternative. Recoding my cat's message to Base64 results in TheThirdCharacterIsEight. So the third character was 8

"Do you even potate?" was another voucher thing (requirement 3 tried to hint there were more than one of them). As opening the Steganography etc. thread did not necessarily tell it had a potato at the end (though the recent edit on the very top, in bold, including a date, might have rung a bell), an extra thread was created too recently, about potating. Now I start to think that this extra thread might have drawn attention away from the others and made people skipping the Base32-64 thing. Applying either the C# or the online decoder lead to 001101010011110100110101, which decodes to 5=5 with xlate or any other binary to ASCII decoding attempt. The 5th character was 5.

The Dark Souls GA was located at b6895. Having that many digits in a GA code is not very common, but it certainly happens from time to time.