This is a Funny Farm-style word association web where the nodes are emojis instead of words. In fact, the input box only takes emojis, and attempting to enter anything else will simply give a feedback message of "
".
We start with a single unlocked 
node. As clued by the puzzle's title and the feedback message, this value is "", and entering "" solves the start node.
Each node in the graph is an emoji, and each edge connects two emojis semantically. Solving a node unlocks its neighbors. Submitting an emoji will yield a 
for a successful input that solves an unlocked node, 
for an incorrect input, and 
for an input already in the web. Some emojis are interpreted as aliases for others, which are displayed with 
when submitting.
As we progress, "category" nodes are revealed whenever we solve a node connected to one of them, which also unlocks all of the category's neighbors. Each category node's label is an enumeration (with some special characters), but we cannot fill them in directly since we can only input emojis. We then have to deduce each category label from the enumeration and what the category is connected to.
| Category | Label Answer |
|---|
| ●⑨●4️⃣●● | FRUITS |
| ③●❻●●5️⃣ | ZODIAC |
| ●❶●●⎵①●●●● | BODY PARTS |
| ❹●●⎵●●●1️⃣● | NFL TEAMS |
| ❾●●8️⃣●⑩●●● | CHRISTMAS |
| ●❼●●●●●●●⎵⑥●●●●●7️⃣● | CLASSICAL ELEMENTS |
| ●❸2️⃣●●●● | WEATHER |
| ❷●④●●⎵●●●●●●3️⃣● | PIZZA TOPPINGS |
| ●●●●●●●●⎵9️⃣●❺⑧●●●●● | MYTHICAL CREATURES |
| ⑤●●●6️⃣●●●❿ | LIVESTOCK |
| ⑦❽🔟●●●●⎵●●●●● | POKEMON TYPES |
| ●②●● | BUGS |
The special characters in the enumerations spell out the phrases PUZZLE PART, OPENED LOCK, and MAGIC STICK for the ⚪, ⚫, and #️⃣ sets of characters, respectively. This clues the 3 emojis 
, 
, and 
.
To solve the puzzle, input the 3 emojis into their respective ⚪, ⚫, and #️⃣ boxes.
Authors' Notes
Bryce: This association web was inspired by previous fun word association web puzzles, like MITMH 2023's Collage and Puzzle Potluck 3's Black Widow (and 2010s Google Games' word association rounds). Both puzzles' authors make it very clear that making the web was "much harder and more time-consuming than expected." We too can confirm that this was much harder and more time-consuming than expected.
This puzzle would not have been possible without Sushi, who rewrote the entire codebase to integrate the puzzle into the hunt backend and add features like puzzle state syncing across a team. Many thanks!
The graph was generated with vis.js, which comes with built-in customization and node physics. This is unfortunately resource-intensive and doesn't preserve node position on graph generation without a lot of effort that we didn't have time to implement. It does make the graph fun, draggable, and jiggly, though. We eventually ran with a node color change and a "stuck" node for the meta because they were easy-to-toggle vis.js options.
Making the input box behave as intended was an incredible amount of trouble because, as it turns out, Unicode's standard for emojis is incredibly poor because there basically is no standard. The phrases "variation selector" and "zero-width joiner" have already haunted my dreams for months. This has been your warning not to work with an interactive puzzle that forces the input to be an emoji.
We didn't have time to factcheck everything and didn't want to prune any nodes during the hunt for fear of breaking the site, so some difficult leaf nodes made it to the final version. The node also connected to 
doesn't make as much sense as it should – sorry to anyone going for 100%!
I personally am a fan of word association webs because filling them out is fun in and of itself, especially when it's collaborative. After making this, though, I wouldn't recommend it – it took far too much time and trouble. (We're looking into open-sourcing our puzzle code so that the tradeoff might be better for the next ones to try it.) Hopefully the final version was fun enough to solve.
My personal favorite is the connection between 
and 
. (It's not 🪽.)