Between a Desert and a Shady Tree

If the puzzle below doesn't make sense to you, it's because you missed out on something like 80 hours of puzzle solving education, but, lucky for you, class is always in session, and the course text book can be picked up on Steam.

I'm a big fan of The Witness; during one playthrough, the puzzle below stood out to me as obscure, aesthetically pleasing, and rewarding to solve, so I cloned it with HTML and JS.

In the game, this puzzle waits inside a warehouse in a Quarry halfway between a Desert and a shady forest; when you solve it, a satisfying tone is played, and you quickly move along and begin working on one of game's many other puzzles.

When you solve the puzzle on this page, the hash of your solution is combined with an encoded message, and displayed in the Solution Area below. Only a correct solution reveals the true message.