*** # 1. General ## 1.1. Instruction 1 What to do with `INSTRUCTION 1` has already been discussed by *"rand al'thor"* and *"Tryth"* in general. Just for clarity, here again the basic idea with the terms I'll use in my answer: * **blue shading**: the blue shading of the bottles (and also the code in `INSTRUCTION 3`) * **labels**: the 8x8 grids with holes on every bottle * **yellow dots**: the yellow dots on every bottle * **code-grid**: the 8x8 grid with the odd symbols Summarized I think the image tells us to empty the *bottles* in the right **order** through the right **tube/color** into the *scale* filling a certain **amount of squares**. *** # 2. Proposed Solutions (partial) ### 2.1. Order of Bottles (verified) The first question to ask is whether the order of the bottles is actually important. The answer is **YES**. The blue shading of the bottles in `INSTRUCTION 1` and the same shading of the letters in `INSTRUCTION 3` clearly indicate a connection between a bottle and a letter of the password, i.e. every bottle corresponds to exactly one letter of the solution. And since the letter order in the solution is obviously essential, so is the order of the bottles. Although the blue shading indicates that the order is important **it does NOT indicate that the darkest blue bottle is indeed the first one!** So the order must be hidden in some other attributes of the bottles. Considering that the order must be unique and non ambiguous, the yellow dots can be ruled out and therefore only the labels remain. The important thing to observe here is that some pieces in the 8x8 *label-grid* are **missing** (i.e. not white or any other color, but *missing*). This means if we put them over the 8x8 *code-grid* some symbols will shine through. Even more important, if we put two or more labels on top of each other some symbols will still shine through. And this is exactly how the order is defined. For reconstructing the order of the bottles the symbols in the grid don't matter all that much. The procedure looks the following: >! <ol><li>Choose a label that has exactly 24 (the number of bottles and the number in the order) empty squares and put it on the grid, *E4*. There are now exactly 24 symbols visible. (There are multiple options for the first step, but only one allows successful continuation.)</li><li>Choose the next label so that when it is put over the first one there are still exactly 23 symbols visible, *A2*.</li><li>Repeat the same process for the remaining labels so that 22, 21, 20, 19, ..., 1 symbols are visible.</li><li>This is the order of the bottles with the top one being the first. Note that the last visible symbol is *A* (or *Alpha*) whereas the 24<sup>th</sup> symbol is *Omega*. That might indicate the otherwise arbitrary seeming choice in step 1.</li></ol> eventually resulting in: >!<pre> >! 8 7 21 10 3 6 >! 2 13 17 22 20 11 >! 4 14 9 16 5 18 >!23 15 19 12 1 24 >!</pre> This completes the code-square and the labels (and probably also the blue shading). *** # 3. Further Ideas ### 3.1 Tubes Now that we know the order in which the bottles have to be emptied, the next thing we have to figure out, is through which tubes to empty the bottles. Assuming that the labels, the shading and the code-grid are already completed, likely the yellow dots contain this information. Especially considering that the first bottle has exactly 5 yellow squares and `INSTRUCTION 2` shows that the first bottle must be emptied through the 5<sup>th</sup> tube. Considering that figuring out the order was rather tricky, this might be a little bit to o simple though ... I would guess that the spaces between those dots are also really significant (as they were in the labels), but I don't have any concrete ideas about that at the moment. ### 3.2 Amount of Squares Considering that there are almost no instructions left for the bottles, the amount of squares to fill by every bottle might even be constant, or actually maybe **1**. The only real other possibility i can see is that the yellow dots could indeed describe both the tube and the amount of squares. ***