×1. As there are two time tokens, the final loop of the room will have two timeclones killing eyes in the top and bottom without hitting the plates and have the player kill the eyes in the middle.
2. Because of the green door, the player has to wait until after the eyes have died
3. Thus if a clone uses the plates to kill the eyes in one timeline, he will always do it before waking the eyes (if the eyes hit the plate it would make sense, but this doesn't seem to happen.)
4. It is necessary to record a timeline that uses no timeclones, kills two eyes and does not hit the plates.
5. This seems impossible

I have noticed that

×Assumption 3 and 4 seem reasonable, but are wrong. Time can be rewritten.

×The more general trick involved has been used in one of my published holds. The time clone interaction with this trick has also been used before, and it's hardly strange or unusual how they interact.

×This is an alright entry - it looked a bit intimidating at first with rooms like 1W, 1S and 1E being difficult and having it not be immediately obvious how to manipulate the constructs. After solving some of the corner rooms and coming back to the aforementioned three, I was able to eventually figure out how to deal with the aumtlich beams. My favorite room is probably 1N1W, since it takes advantage of both the Construct tie-breaking preferences and careful observation of non-trapdoor squares. I also liked 1E for helping to contrast several different uses of the construct in the same room (mobile, stationary corpse).

Parts I don't like: I actually don't like the slight darkness and the "bunch of squares" seen in several rooms. Those, combined with the oddly-placed dirt floor made it sort of difficult to parse some of the rooms. The sunset water also means the water blends into the dirt floor and the pit floor a little too well.

I feel as if I broke 1S1E - I ended up pressing the large pressure plate in the middle area with a time clone, not with a construct.

Overall, this was a pretty fun entry once I managed to solve some of the puzzles. The gear motif worked well. I think some of the puzzles could have been polished a little bit, and the level could be cleaned up a bit so there's fewer distracting elements, but the overall product was solid.

×I have to admit I'm a sucker for the "simple" aesthetic shown here, although I don't really see the point of the dim lighting here (particularly since no rooms use ceiling lights, which show up better under such conditions).

Anyway, this is a solid set of puzzles that cover several different themes for Constructs - fine manipulation of one Construct, completely destroying one in one turn, and my favorite room is probably 1W, which involves getting three Constructs to each do three separate tasks just with proper timing. I particularly like how simple and restrained 1S and 1N1E are - they're just complicated enough to set up their main points without introducing unnecessarily difficult problems with execution. It's just "identify what needs to be done" and continue.

The super-hard secret room at 2E is an interesting idea - I like the idea of a challenge room after the blue door, and can only comment that I have an idea of what the end configuration is supposed to be that will correctly solve the puzzle, but don't yet have the middle part figured out.

Probably my only complaints with this one are that there's only 5 puzzles (and one super-tough secret room), and two of those 5 puzzles involve messing around with mimics too. The mimics do allow the player to do more actions in one turn, but I feel it does sort of distract from the main Construct theme. Still, nice work!

×This is my entry. I think I did a fair job showing off the various uses of Thin Ice, particularly in how it differs from trapdoors over water, and has some uses in and of itself. The puzzles are fairly easy, but should be interesting - I know I'm cheating a little by using the stick and decoy swords in 1N4E for puzzle purposes, but I think overall this stands on its own.

Hopefully you guys had fun with this, and the serpent manipulation in 4E wasn't too bad.

×I applaud the architect for having the wherewithal and courage to go borrow TSS's setting and one of the levels. The Scorching Path is a good setting to use fire traps in. I also like the "teamwork" aspect of the level where the engineer uses soldiers and fegundoes to help him do combat - it feels like work an engineer would do rather than a smitemaster.

That said, I'm a little disappointed that the author picked one of the most linear levels in order to showcase the fire traps. The linear design of this hold hurts it, I think, since a couple of the rooms are tough, and failing to solve one blocks the player from progressing onwards.

The first room in particular is, I think, not well-placed. It's fairly complicated, involving the Soldier AI, bombs, kegs, and a roach pressing its own plates. The solution is not too tough once found, but it's pretty difficult to see what's going on in this room at first.

2N is a nice room that shows off how Fegundoes (but not fegundo ashes, oddly enough) are immune to fire. I don't like how the power token is placed on top of a tunnel, especially since the corresponding tunnel is a little tough to see in the darkness without a ceiling light.

I think this is an OK puzzle hold, but it's not a good showcase of fire traps because the "main subjects" of the rooms aren't the fire traps - the fire traps only enforce room conditions or act as doors. I believe 1N is fundamentally a "stalwart/soldier" room, and 2N and 3N1E are fundamentally "fegundo" rooms - only in 2N1E are the properties of fire traps thoroughly explored, particularly in their activation times and turn order.

There were only four puzzle rooms in this hold - I think there would have been space for some extra puzzle rooms that showed off fire traps as main subjects. For example, a room could have explored the contrast between bumping walls and not being able to bump into fire traps, or there could be a room where we use fire traps to remotely kill monsters to save time or protect the player character.

×First, I think I do have to applaud the author for naming each room, to help emphasize that the coordinates aren't so important. "Silence in the Library" is a good room name, especially for a notorious room. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Blink (1E) is a good introductory room, to show how a single temporal clone can be used to remotely control a door at the convenience of the "main" timeline, within the constraint that the temporal clone's timeline not violate a particular condition (in this case, the gentryii killing Halph).

The Age of Steel (1S1E) further develops on this theme by introducing a stricter execution requirement: the time clone in the south chamber must follow two separate timelines: one in which a spare Construct follows him with no helper, and one in which the Construct is distracted to the top of the room by the helper, but still must be dealt with (blind!) by the time clone on his way out of the room.

Flesh and Stone (1S2E) is a neat variant, where the player can no longer rely on the Constructs reviving, but must instead carefully place both dead and live golems so that the timeline split can occur.

Silence in the Library (1S1W) employs a really evil trick, by which I mean it's evil because it involves a seemingly-standard widget exploited to cruel purpose. If you're still trying to figure it out by yourself, I suggest you stop reading.



I see what Luke means about this being a highly generalizable technique that could break many rooms if architects are unaware of this trick. However, I think it would have been polite to at least hint at this trick with a vaguely or poetically-worded scroll, since otherwise people will just have no idea how to proceed. Not all of us are DROD scientists, as Erik would say.

The Fires of Pompeii (1W) is a room that has been boiled down to the bare essentials - a barrier that keeps the time-clone from physically walking beyond a certain area, some constraints on sword and stick usage, and a seemingly-impossible task: to get the time clone beyond the western fire trap so that it can lure the mud baby out, then disappear, that being the only way to lure the mud baby out without either the mud baby or the bait dying.

And yet, I think the trick to this room is kind of weird - I'm not sure if I like it or not.


Overall, I do like this hold's clear demonstration of the effects of layering two (sometimes disparate, but still compatible) timelines, as well as the use of the temporal projection for teamwork tasks. I think Fires of Pompeii and Silence in the Library are interesting novelties, but are a bit too hard for this contest, as measured by my arbitrary standard that it took me a really long time to solve them.

×1N1W is a by-now fully-established puzzle where you lead a Construct around to drop a bunch of trapdoors, but I like that it has a small twist of having to leave the Construct on either an open yellow door or the pressure plate to finish off - a reminder that when a Fegundo is involved, the last piece of solid ground doesn't necessarily have to be next to the red door.

1N, 1E and 1S are tricky rooms requiring the player to have a thorough understanding of how Constructs move, covering slightly different aspects, but all making good use of the fact that Constructs can be made to become stationary for a complete spawn cycle. 1E in particular requires a bit of out-of-the-box thinking: the bombs clearly must be there for some purpose, but it takes further application of the same concept used earlier in the room in order to actually solve the last problem.

2S is essentially a further development of 1S's theme - I solved it by having Beethro stand on a force arrow and having the two constructs take two different paths towards him. I like rooms like this where the goal essentially remains the same, but it's the players job to accomplish that same goal in a different manner (possibly by being more frugal with resources or noticing the main room looks slightly different). I didn't end up using the orthosquare for anything, though - I could have done the room without it. Hmm...

2N1W is a category of room I've made myself in the past but have recently started enjoying less: the room where you need to remote-manipulate monsters, but set up obstacles well in advance at the start of the room. This pretty much necessitates at least two different passes: one to directly manipulate the monster and observe where obstacles are needed, and then a restart to place obstacles where needed and run the monster through again (hopefully successfully this time). It took me a few tries to figure out what path the mirror should be taking (especially since it's possible to put a rock golem on the westmost force arrow, and thus put a mirror on the south pressure plate), but eventually I figured it out. It turns out you can draw the rock giant down three squares and then kill all four golems near the start, since that's the only obstacle you actually need (due to the tunnels being nice to use). Anyway, I think this is an acceptable level of complexity - any more and this room would be confusing or too easily breakable. One thing I do like is that the very beginning of the room shows off the Construct's "sliding" preference being similar to goblins and seeps, in that it can go horizontal if the horizontal distance is large.

1W was the last room I solved, mostly because the solution seems to require that you know about the trick of killing a Construct as the clock strikes 30. This allows one construct (the one you kill) to become a broken pile just as another one wakes up, allowing a smooth transfer of weight such that the pressure plate never gets lifted up. I thought this room was pretty creative since it uses decoy swords as barriers that don't hold down the pressure plate, and the solution mostly came from observing the room carefully and thinking about what methods could be used to keep that plate pressed.

The insidiously difficult part of 1N1E comes mostly from a fact completely unrelated to Constructs, which is movement order. The tarstuff babies are spawned by cutting the tarstuff, which means they will always move after the Constructs. Combine this with the flexible and flanking behavior of the Construct horde, and the tar babies have a tendency to get "overrun" and "left behind" as the Constructs move in front of them. I've decided I'm not particularly fond of Construct hordes due to their flanking behavior and complete aggression - you can't slow them down the same way you could a horde of guards, Aumtlich or rock golems. I don't like this room.

I will admit, however, that it took me a long time to notice the west orb turned off the force arrow at the east chamber, and was trying to keep a tar baby or Construct off of that arrow - which makes me wonder why that arrow is there at all, if it could just as easily be removed what with those trapdoors and that other force arrow near the checkpoint being there.

While there are a great number of other elements employed in this hold (particularly the decoys in 1W and 1S), the focus of each puzzle is on the Construct and its behavior, so this hold does a pretty good job of showcasing the Construct and how it can be used to make lynchpin puzzles - even when the player knows everything there is to know about Constructs, they still have to think carefully about where and how to apply them.

×Unlike my entry, which focuses mostly on thin ice over deep water, this entry takes full advantage of the fact that thin ice can be over shallow water, and shows what puzzle potential there can be in having a tile vary between thin ice and shallow water. (We don't yet have trapdoors over shallow water, so thin ice is the only way to accomplish this.)

There are some fairly good ideas here - I particularly like the contrast between 1W's simple solution and 1N1W's more complicated setup - but I think some rooms suffer from having their execution requirements be a little too tough, like 1N being finicky with handling the eastern spiders properly, and 1N1E requiring quite a bit of trial and error to deal with the minimal space available.

1N2E is a good choice to be a secret room: the construct is included here only because it drops thin ice, not for any complicated movement on its part (in fact, here the construct moves pretty much the same way a brained roach would). I'm only a bit confused as to why it was put behind 1N1E, since the two deal with pretty different concepts - maybe there could have been some way to finagle it so that it would have been accessible from the Entrance?

Aesthetically, I do like how this hold shows off TSS's new tools for depicting both "fire" and "ice" settings. I don't like how the red light over the majority of room squares kind of washes out the colors a bit, but it's still relatively easy to see everything, and to distinguish shallow water from deep water.

×1W is probably the "most representative" of this hold, despite it only having four rooms. There's a solid concept here - "bring the Construct through a horde room to the end, so you can use it to trigger a remote switch", but I don't like the way the architect went about building this room. The guards and the tarstuff are fine, since they act as a way of blocking the player's forward progress, enticing him to turn his sword away from the construct and forward, but the puffs are more of an annoying obstacle that force the player to get rid of them via manipulating guards and tar babies into them, lest they form fluffstuff in annoying areas. My major complaint about this room isn't the fluff, or the roach queens, or the Construct up top (all three seem unnecessary), but actually the bomb. The bomb doesn't do much; it just blows up some puffs, some thin ice, and possibly some tarstuff or crumbly walls, but when I see the fuse layout I think to myself that the architect can't have tested this room very thoroughly. You need to step on the fuse three times to actually get the bomb to explode (once at the room start, once when the fuse stops on the force arrow, and once on a square beyond the force arrow), and that requires three circuits of the room, which is just too slow. That's a real shame.

1S is probably my favorite of the four rooms, because it's small, it's straight to the point, and it's not any more complicated than it needs to be. Killing the brain is tempting, to give fewer targets to kill before the clock strikes 30, but it drops some extra trapdoors and leaves the player less room to work with - ignoring the brain gives more space, but less time. The force arrows are easy to parse, and give enough room so that the player only need have a vague idea of where to go, not a precise path on specific squares. As long as the player has a plan, and efficiently attacks each monter as he arrives at it, this room is no problem at all. Having only one mobile construct on trapdoors to keep track of also cuts down on the potential headaches.

1E is, I think, the weakest room of the four, mostly because it's set up to be very tedious (even with the added checkpoints). The core idea is sound - killing Constructs in specific locations (the hallways) in such a way that two-way travel is still possible, and killing them on hot tiles when Beethro's sword can't be rotated (and he can't stay still either). Unfortunately the implementation of this idea is lacking, and I think the spiral design is a bit lazy and ill-considered: the western arm of the spiral lines up with the entrance to the Construct chamber, so to go that far would just let out the rest of the Constructs and cause a deadly log-jam at the spiral entrance. More to the point, there's way too many constructs for the room idea - I think instead there could have been much greater potential in trying to kill constructs in a weirder-shaped hallway, where every step counted.

My first inclination was to kill as many Constructs as I could on the spiral's east and south wings, and then instead of messing around with the western arm to go in and go back out, to kill all the rest of the Constructs on solid ground, but there's just too many of them to do that - even with efficient packing there'll still be more than 30 left. So I ended up having my sword face South and just try to burn and kill Constructs in useful locations. Having straight paths helped for this, but it was still pretty tedious. I hope the architect tested this room.

Finally, for 1N I do have to admit I take inappropriate pleasure in seeing rooms with pictures of the elements they contain - in this case a robot. I also like that this room is forgiving - you don't really need to put all twelve Constructs on the twelve fire traps; you can instead just put six on one wing, put whatever you can on the other, and efficiently kill up to six in the northern half of the room and run and kill the southern one before the clock strikes 30. The mirrors can be a little finicky, especially if free constructs try to push a mirror out of the way to free six already placed in a wing, so I appreciate that you don't need to be perfect on this one.

While this hold does have a good focus on Constructs as the main puzzle theme of each room (rather than merely "using" them but having the focus be some other element), I think 1W is the weakest room in this regard, and there are significant enough room gameplay problems that I will have to dock points. Nonetheless I'm still looking forward to this architect's next offering.

×1N1E is a fairly standard room - we've seen examples of this before with serpents, but the advantage of Gentryii is that they can move diagonally, so the player doesn't gain time by taking diagonals. By noticing that the holes are more frequent near the center than the edges, the player can avoid getting cut off by moving near the center early, and outmaneuver the Gentryii on the way out. I'm glad this room is relatively small and features only 4 Gentryii; a larger room with 6 would probably not be as fun.

I'm not really sure I understand what's going on with 1S1E. The other clones in the room do assist in manipulating the Gentryii into a good shape from all sides, but they can also be used to just weigh down extra pressure plates, so that the Gentryii only needs to hold down one or two. It's strangely easy for the category it's in.

The thing I don't like about 1N2E is that, unlike similar puzzles with serpent or rattlesnake-packing, it isn't really obvious what changes need to be made to improve a solution such that the Gentryii's chain path is longer. You can make a fairly good solution that S-curves around the room, even making use of the fact that Beethro's body can be a temporary obstacle, and still be 8 spaces short. I think I'd like this room if there were actually fewer obstacles, and you had to be efficient with the obstacles that you did have, rather than the combinatorial trial-and-error that this room seems to need.

2E and its successors 1S2E and 2S2E are a fairly in-depth exploration of Gentryii and platforms. It's somewhat telling that the architect chose to devote three out of eight rooms to this subject, which involves manipulation specifically of Gentryii with exactly one chain segment - they're almost like roaches, but that trailing chain segment (and the Gentryii weighing down the rafts) add interesting complications, such as them being unable to reverse their direction along a loop, or having their tail segments block important squares.

Aesthetically this hold seems to have some good ideas but also some strange ones - the thin ice and the run-down crumbly walls do a good job of showing neglect, but I'm really confused by the prominent checkpoint in 1N2E, which is mostly useless. Normally in this case X marks the spot, but I don't really get what this one is doing here.

Overall, I'd say this hold does a great job on keeping the focus on Gentryii, since they're the main subject of every puzzle in this hold, and in fact there are barely any other monsters (besides a brain, but who cares about those). It's all about Gentryii and moving them around the room, and that in itself is an interesting difficulty.

×This was a last-minute entry, and unfortunately I think it shows in some places. 1W and 1E are underdeveloped rooms, which have a solid idea behind them but don't really develop the idea any further, leaving the player to just mechanically squish the puffs and move on. 1W at least has the slightly interesting aspect of having to fumble around with the Gentryii to safely get at the conquer tokens and leave the room, but that really has nothing to do with fluff.

1S is a solid puzzle - it's rather lenient as there's a lot more fluff than necessary to keep the serpent penned in, but it's a good example of giving the player some materials and expecting them to build something useful with what they have. It also shows off nicely how the seemingly indestructible briar can be destroyed by puffs, thus forcing the player to consume one of their puff resources in order to let the serpent out.

1N is the finicky room of the bunch - the adder will only get shrunk once if a puff spawns on top of it, and otherwise its body will block other puff formation. It can then eat two more puffs before dying, but any remaining puffs had better conform into the fluffstuff in a hurry, because puffs can only move 6 squares before fluff vents expand again. I ended up solving this one by having the adder form an S-tetromino, forming a kink in the path in which a puff could join the fluff but leaving a diagonal path.

Manipulating the adder in this way is kind of a pain, but slightly easier since the room is oriented the way it is, with North being a useful direction to send the adder. (The mirror image of this room, with the player entering to the North and having to go South, would probably be much harder.)

I do like this room, but unfortunately I think it focuses a little too much on serpent manipulation and the fluff is merely a mechanism to ensure the adder goes in a useful place. I fear a similar effect could be achieved with tarstuff and a serpent, which means this isn't really fundamentally a fluff puzzle.

Still, this was a valiant effort and I'm glad NoahT made the effort to get this one submitted.

×
My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE

×This is a demo where I kill only one golem in a useful spot, and kill the other three giant-parts in an out-of-the-way location, showing that you only need one of the four golems.

×
My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE

×Skell's idea generator: http://forum.caravelgames.com/ideasGenerator/view
Challenges Scoreboard: http://forum.caravelgames.com/challenges.php
Level map viewer: http://forum.caravelgames.com/map.php
Tactical DROD game: http://forum.caravelgames.com/tsspreview.php
(Note: Requires Flash)
Room Element Search tool http://forum.caravelgames.com/roomsearch.php
(Search through all published holds for rooms with various elements.)
Room position Heat Map http://forum.caravelgames.com/heatmap.php
DROD has a wiki! http://drod.wikia.com/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_Of_Death_Wiki
Skell's super cool list of turn sequence stuff https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QS9Vk3xsd4jlGF23J8p7c2IM5cmhwmoe6eCEaaAn8jY/edit#heading=h.ocovx14zokm4

It's not listed in "help", but [attachment] will embed the whatever image is attached to a post.

× You need to push a mirror and powder kegs all around the room to free up trapped roaches. I think I can get it, I just need to spend some more time teasing out possible paths to take. One thing though, am I correct in assuming that i need to bring the mirror all the way over to the pressure plate on the East side of the room? I don't see how I can use a powder keg on that plate without it exploding.

×Skell's idea generator: http://forum.caravelgames.com/ideasGenerator/view
Challenges Scoreboard: http://forum.caravelgames.com/challenges.php
Level map viewer: http://forum.caravelgames.com/map.php
Tactical DROD game: http://forum.caravelgames.com/tsspreview.php
(Note: Requires Flash)
Room Element Search tool http://forum.caravelgames.com/roomsearch.php
(Search through all published holds for rooms with various elements.)
Room position Heat Map http://forum.caravelgames.com/heatmap.php
DROD has a wiki! http://drod.wikia.com/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_Of_Death_Wiki
Skell's super cool list of turn sequence stuff https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QS9Vk3xsd4jlGF23J8p7c2IM5cmhwmoe6eCEaaAn8jY/edit#heading=h.ocovx14zokm4

It's not listed in "help", but [attachment] will embed the whatever image is attached to a post.

×Correct, the fuses are there to ensure you can't use a keg so you're forced to go back to the mirror on the first plate.

×Skell's idea generator: http://forum.caravelgames.com/ideasGenerator/view
Challenges Scoreboard: http://forum.caravelgames.com/challenges.php
Level map viewer: http://forum.caravelgames.com/map.php
Tactical DROD game: http://forum.caravelgames.com/tsspreview.php
(Note: Requires Flash)
Room Element Search tool http://forum.caravelgames.com/roomsearch.php
(Search through all published holds for rooms with various elements.)
Room position Heat Map http://forum.caravelgames.com/heatmap.php
DROD has a wiki! http://drod.wikia.com/wiki/Deadly_Rooms_Of_Death_Wiki
Skell's super cool list of turn sequence stuff https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QS9Vk3xsd4jlGF23J8p7c2IM5cmhwmoe6eCEaaAn8jY/edit#heading=h.ocovx14zokm4

It's not listed in "help", but [attachment] will embed the whatever image is attached to a post.