This is clearly a word puzzle, so we can move on to step 2.

The title (Guidebook) obviously hints at using The Puzzle Potluck Puzzle Playbook. The flavortext has a couple of key words:

1. It describes a tent as temporary quarters — “quarters” starts with Q, so it must be important. It hints that we should start by dividing the grid into 4 equal quadrants. We’ll number these smaller grids 1-4:

   1	2
   3	4

2. It describes camping as a transformative experience — again, we know that “transformative” is a key word because it’s more than 13 letters long. It clues the main mechanic of the puzzle: transforming the words in the grid.

As mentioned above, this puzzle uses every item in the playbook, so it covers all of the possible puzzle themes:

1. Periodic table: There’s a word that can be broken down into 9 concatenated element abbreviations. We can’t transform the word into anything else quite yet though.
2. Marvel: The last name of a character in the MCU is in one of the grids. It makes the most sense to transform it into the last name of the actor who plays him.
3. Animal Crossing: One of the words contains the substring BLANK, which indicates that we need to replace that blank with something. If we replace it with ROCK (a common object in Animal Crossing), the resulting word is the name of a villager in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nice!
4. Pokémon: Remember the word we broke down into elements in step 3.1? The word just to the left of it is a Pokémon type. The common name of the molecule comprised of the 3rd, 7th, and 8th elements is another Pokémon type. There is only one Pokémon that has both types: Volcanion. We need to transform both words in the grid, so we’re looking for a two-word phrase associated with Volcanion: its signature move. We can replace the words in the grid so that the two-word signature move reads from left to right.
5. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The name of a well-known Yu-Gi-Oh! card is in one of the grids. The most logical thing to transform it into is the type of monster that you summon using that card.
6. Playing cards: The transformed word from step 3.2 starts with the name of a face card and ends with SON. We should transform it into the title you’d use to describe the son of two of the other face cards.
7. Memes: The word MEME is actually in one of the grids! Just to its left is the name of a rapper who made a music video that inspired many memes. The song name is two words long, so just like we did in step 3.4, we can replace the two words in the grid so that the song name reads from left to right.
8. Country flags: There’s a country name in one of the grids: JAPAN. Its flag can be most succinctly described with a single 3-letter word, so let’s transform it into that word.
9. DNA: There’s a 7-letter word that contains the letters GACT exactly once each. The remaining 3 letters taken in order spell out a number, so we can transform the full word into that spelled-out number.
10. Family Guy: The word TV is in one of the grids, but the word that best fits the Family Guy theme is the last name (by which he is usually referred to) of one of the main characters. We can transform his last name into his one-word catchphrase.
11. Referencing past hunts: There’s a word in grid 2 that appeared in the puzzle Association from Puzzle Potluck 0.01 (way back before we even had a website). We should transform it into its associated word from that puzzle.

Similarly, the puzzle covers each of the possible mechanics:

1. Letter swaps: The three words in the column to the left of the word we just transformed in step 3.11 can swap their first letters to transform into three new words. Let’s swap them!
2. Word reversal: There’s a 3-letter English word that reverses to a different English word — let’s reverse it. There’s also a word that we just letter swapped in step 4.1 that is reversible, so let’s reverse that too.
3. Abbreviations / acronyms: There’s a 2-letter abbreviation in one of the grids that we can expand out to the full word. There’s also a drug in one of the grids that is commonly abbreviated by a single letter — let’s transform it down to that single letter. Also that 3-letter word that we just reversed in step 4.2 is an abbreviation for a day of the week, so we can transform it into the full name of that day of the week.
4. Caesar shifts: Let’s get back to the transformed word from step 3.5. Caesar shifting it forward by 6 amazingly results in another English word! Let’s transform it.
5. Letter banks: There’s a 9-letter word in grid 2 and a 10-letter word in grid 3 that have a lot of letters in common. In fact, if you remove the U and the D from the 9-letter word, both words have the exact same letter bank! There’s only one other common 10-letter word with that letter bank, and there’s also only one common 6-letter word where each of the letters in the bank appears exactly once. We’ll transform the original 10-letter word into the 6-letter word and the 9-letter word into the new 10-letter word, because it’s fitting to enlarge the 9-letter word based on its meaning.
6. Homophones: The transformation in step 3.11 resulted in the name of a character, and the word directly above it is also a character from the same fantasy world. We can transform the above word into a homophone (technically it’s not the exact pronunciation, but close enough!).
7. Misspellings: There’s a word that almost looks like a common English word, but the third letter is incorrectly doubled. There must be a reason for the misspelling — sure enough, because the letter is doubled, the “word” consists of a common girl’s name inserted inside another girl’s name. Let’s remove the inner name since it’s shorter than the outer name.
8. Letter removal: We can get yet another girl’s name by removing the first letter of a noun in one of the grids. We can also get a boy’s name by removing the last letter of an adverb in a different grid. Let’s make those transformations!
9. Anagrams: The word REINVENTING seems relevant to anagramming, and yes indeed, we can anagram it into a new word!
10. Double letters: There are two words in grid 2 with double letters that if swapped (like we did in step 4.1) will result in two new English words. Let’s swap those letters.
11. Underclued logical leaps: All the steps so far have been very clear and intuitive, but I had to add one underclued step in order to hit this item on the list (don’t worry, I’m a great puzzle writer). The word CANARY is in one of the grids, which alludes to the phrase “canary in a coal mine.” A lump of coal is what you get for Christmas if you’re on Santa’s naughty list, so from there we can make a leap to Naughty Dog, the company that made Uncharted, which was the theme of Puzzle Potluck 1. The main character is named Nathan Drake, but since we already transformed the word DRAKE earlier, we should look at the villain’s name, Benedict Fowler. “Fowler” is a clue that we’re on the right track with CANARY, so we should replace CANARY with his first name, BENEDICT. Whew, that was the last transformation!

We can extract a letter from each grid using one of the possible extraction methods:

1. Braille: Since our grids are 3x3, we should check each 3x2 segment for valid Braille letters. If we take the lengths of the words in grid 1 and interpret the odd numbers as dots, the 3x2 segment on the left spells the letter N. (The 3x2 segment on the right is not a valid letter, and treating the even numbers as dots doesn’t lead to valid letters in either segment, so we know this must be correct.)

   7	5	10
   4	9	5
   7	6	3

2. Pigpen cipher: The word DOT appears in grid 2. Interpreting this as a Pigpen grid with the dot in that position gives the letter O.

   REST	SHUFFLE	ENGAGEMENT
   NOODLE	SMOG	DOT
   MOOD	GIMLI	RATTLE

3. Flag semaphore: Looking at the first letters of the words in grid 3, there is exactly one L and one R. Treating those as the positions of the flags held by the left hand and right hand respectively, this yields the letter N.

   P	E	B
   I	S	E
   R	M	L

4. Diagonalizing: We’re down to the final grid, in which none of the original words were transformed! If we go from left-to-right and top-to-bottom and write the words in a list, the diagonal spells ANSWER IS E, so we extract the letter E.
   ARCHIPELAGO

   INCENSE

   HOSPITAL

   SNOWCAPPED

   DEPRESSION

   SUMMERTIME

   INDOCHINESE

   EMPTINESS

   DOMINANCE

The 4 letters we extracted spell out the final answer, NONE.