Mix and Match Compilation:
This was a really fun contest. Almost all of the entries used their assigned elements to great effect. The secret rooms were sometimes brutal, but I’m glad that I persevered. Overall final time for hold completion and mastery was just over 17 hours.
According to Word I have a 7000 word document here regarding my thoughts while playing through the hold. It’s partially a play-by-play of my thoughts while solving the rooms, partially a developer commentary for my own entry, and partially my thoughts and opinions on which rooms I liked and what I would have liked to see differently. It also includes my guesses for the architects, which is of course influenced slightly by CaravelChat, although I have no 100% certainties for any entries beyond my own.
Obviously all the comments will be hidden until voting is finished, but my demo pack is included for architects wanting to see how I beat their rooms right away. Great work, everybody! There is some real quality here, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing through your entries.
Water Water Everywhere, Nor any Bite to Eat:
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×Architect Guess: blorx1
This is a fantastic use of the elements involved. Everything was pretty demanding, but the required interactions between the elements were satisfying to figure out. That being said, once is enough for some of these rooms. Even knowing the solution it still takes a long time to get the pieces into place sometimes. That’s the nature of puzzles based around fluff vents or repeated fegundo detonations I suppose.
Entrance: Great aesthetic. Looks like I need to come here from another entrance to get to the power token.
1W: Interesting use of fegundos, but it ultimately didn’t seem to matter whether or not I fed the adder outside of just escaping the room. The escape path was really long which made counting annoying, so I mostly used trial and error to get the adder out.
1N1W secret: Well, this is something. I think I need to get past the briar somehow using the fegundo? Also the comment about the chest makes me think that there is scripting at work here, but it’s not immediately obvious what. I see that if I can extract the puff I can use it and the fegundo to break two rows of briar, but the other fegundos in the left part of the room make manipulating the puff impossible.
If I blow up the fegundo on the checkpoint by the chest I can get the waterskipper next to it, which should help with the puff manipulations. It also leaves a single briar wide barrier for the puff to get through. Unfortunately, I still have no idea how to deal with the fegundos on the left. Aren’t fegundos supposed to collide with each other? No wait, they obviously don’t, but I’d like them to in this situation.
Oh, I see. I need to stagger the two central fegundo deaths. After a lot of playing around with that I found a pattern for it, but it won’t look like it in my replay. This was a very evil room.
Entrance: This was pretty tricky. Need to realise how much is possible to do without the puffs so that you can use the puffs for exactly what you need them to do.
1E secret: Oh no, not another secret. Over-engineered? Does that mean I need to break this somehow? Observations: the platform in the green door structure means that I don’t need to kill that first adder with a fegundo. I suspect that I will stab that one and then direct the fegundos from in there to kill the remaining 4 adders. This means I will need all 4 fegundos for the final portion of the room.
To kill the south-western adder and release the fegundo there, I need to bring a platform around. Actually, I can clear the southern adder with the green doors up, so the trick is doing all that without losing a fegundo in the process.
Why are those nests there? I’m just going to kill them. Oh no, am I supposed to use waterskippers from those to keep the three central fegundos alive?
Math time: 1 nest spawns 1 skipper every 10 turns, so 5 nests spawn 15 skippers every 30 turns. A fegundo blows up and takes 5 additional turns to respawn, so if it doesn’t move it will explode every 6 turns, or 5 times every 30 turns. If the fegundos explode individually, then there need to be 15 explosions every 30 turns, meaning that every explosion can only take out a single waterskipper, and also meaning that no nests can ever be taken out during this process.
I’ve been able to double-up the fegundos exploding, but this requires that multiple skippers be blown up with each explosion, since the exploding fegundo and the exploded fegundo change move order every time one blows the other up.
Okay, I’ve found something that I’m pretty sure can work, so now it’s just a matter of getting the fegundos into position with the right turn order. Turn order is important since I need the fegundos to only blow up one waterskipper each, but they could be adjacent to two of them. Turn order goes from bottom to top. With timing I can get the parity right so that the fegundos hit a waterskipper on a diagonal instead of on an orthogonal, but due to where I set up the platforms and where the fegundos start, one or two of the fegundos will have the wrong parity. I can correct this by timing the power token so that only the middle fegundo has the wrong parity, and then using another fegundo to blow it up after it has moved. This will force a parity change. Once I have done this I cannot allow the fegundos to bump against each other since this will reset the wrong parity.
Finally found the point of the force arrows and obstacles in the NW. Wow, that was a lot of work.
1S secret: Are you kidding me? Too much for a normal contest? It came up in chat that people might have less patience for super-hard rooms during contests since we have a deadline for voting, and I’m starting to agree with that assessment. These rooms would be great as a standalone hold, but are frustrating to play through when I want to see all the entries. I guess there’s nothing saying I have to do all of these right now, but I’ll at least give this one a shot.
Hmm… is this just a platform shuffling puzzle with the adders being used as the condition to check that the puzzle was solved? Might not be too bad, actually.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to get an adder to eat itself, aside from maybe the one 2-tile adder that isn’t necessarily trapped. Looks like that one will be a pain to get out, actually.
Figured out how to kill everything except for the SW adder. I think I see which platform I need to use to make that possible. I guess that’s the point of this puzzle, eh? Also, it really helps to just reset the entire puzzle from time to time to see where the ice started.
Not really sure how to describe this process. I enjoyed it though. I guess I’ll reiterate that it REALLY helps to occasionally just reset the room and look at where the ice is.
2S: Feed the fegundo alive long enough to form an ice bridge after clearing the room? Looks like I just need to get 5 or so puffs lined up. This room actually required very little precision since multiple puffs can attack the adder on the same turn if adjacent to it. Easy room…
3S secret: …with a secret variant. Okay, let’s see how precise the solution is on this one. Adder is the same length, so it looks like I just can’t use a wall to lazily set up the puffs. Shouldn’t be too bad, although there will be some timing involved here. Not too bad overall. Puff herding like this isn’t too bad because you get control over their turn order thanks to the vent. Neat room.
1N: A waterskipper shooting range? Nice. It was a bit tricky getting the waterskippers to double back, but once I saw I could do that it just took a bit of fiddling to get something to work.
MIX AND MATCH GROUP 1
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×Architect Guess: Xindaris
Pretty sure this entry is a troll. The title and scrolls, and the overall lack of lynchpin or difficulty suggests this entry wasn’t trying very hard. It technically meets the contest criteria though, so good job there. I would have liked to have seen some more interaction between the various elements though.
1W: Looks pretty and is pretty easy. I guess the fluff is supposed to be a timer, but there is so much more time than needed that I just ignored it. Fegundo’s flight around the nests didn’t run into any complications either; even the two nests that start next to each other were easily dealt with.
1S1W: Well, I won’t be winning any prizes for that solution, but it was fun to flood the place with fluff. Dealing with the adders that way was a bit tricky, but I was able to solve it without using the platform at all. I’m assuming the intended solution is to build an ice bridge to the platform? FLUFF IS MY FRIEND so I don’t need the platform.
1S: Another pretty easy room. You can stab the adders yourself or use the puffs. Might be fun to optimise after publication.
1E: Probably the hardest room in the level, just because you need to watch your back for the waterskippers.
Spooky Woods:
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×Architect Guess: PigmyWubba
Great use of all the elements. Some innovative arrow traps and interesting spider puzzles. Also, soldier rooms weren’t too painful. Overall, a fantastic little entry.
Entrance: Clever use of arrow traps. The puzzle isn’t to avoid eyes getting stuck, but rather to get the eyes stuck so that the giant won’t get trapped. Got the giant out, but I’m not sure what to do with it at this point. I need to create a path to the eye so that I can get into the room, but can’t get a golem into position with my sword where it needs to be.
Okay, I was just being silly. Got the giant into place. Great room.
1N: Use the gel babies as blockers for the eye? Okay, shouldn’t be too bad. Actually, that felt too easy. I thought I’d have a harder time extracting the gel babies from their starting area, but everything came together without any real effort on my part.
1S: That’s one way to force a giant to only be a single golem. A bit hard to parse, so I’ll just jump in and see what happens. Oh, that’s why the spiders are there. Is there a way to get the golem to block something? Hmm… as I’ve learned today, restarting the puzzle can often help. Eyes can’t cross water, so if I use those to block the spiders, the first part of the gauntlet should be safe.
What do I do with the bottom of this thing? I can avoid sacrificing the mirror by not having the golem on my tail, but then I still have neither the golem nor the mirror at the bottom. With just the golem I’m not sure what to do with it.
Well, I think I accidentally solved this one. Sneaky spiders. There’s a lot of different steps involved here. Great room.
1S1E secret: I get two golems this time, apparently. Wait, a soldier? I admit I don’t really know which group they were in, so I was going to be surprised no matter when he made an appearance. Oh right, shallow water interaction. Well, this looks unpleasant. Multi-stab gel using a soldier for help? No thanks.
I guess I’ll follow the hint floor and put a golem there. See what happens. Oh, I need the soldier to get the golem out for me because of the shallow water. Actually, I guess I can use the mirror for that if I race the soldier there.
Okay, I put the golem in place and then cut the gel fairly easily. The soldier somehow didn’t die while killing all the eyes. Was the golem there to get him to face the right way? Not sure if it was necessary, but I guess a win is a win.
1E: Last room? Small entry. Also, the obligatory gel mother (and technically unnecessary but still fun to use horn). Okay, looks like that’s a dead soldier no matter what I do.
Wow, that’s some efficiency. Managed to stop some gel growth. Now for the “fun” part. Looks like I’m going to be herding a soldier over to the other bit of gel so that I can cut it without being overwhelmed. I’m pretty sure that the soldier needs to survive this too since cutting the gel mother looks like death for me if I do it. Actually, I might be able to use the mirror to survive that part.
Wow. That’s even more efficiency. Getting a soldier over to there and getting past the shallow water all in 30 turns? Hmm… actually, a gel baby spawning and getting trapped is fine as long as the soldier lives long enough to get there. That architecture is sketchy though. Soldier will probably die trying to get to a gel baby in there.
So the soldier horn is only used to kill the last gel baby? Okay, that works. Makes it a lot easier than trying to get him into position.
The Hanging Gardens:
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×Architect Guess: Trickster
A good variety of puzzles using the restricted elements. Very pretty aesthetics. Distressing lack of checkpoints in several rooms.
Entrance: Very pretty. I like what I see so far. Well, except for the fact that I can’t escape without clearing the level. Hopefully this level won’t be too hard or long since that’s the case.
1E: Don’t seem to have a lot of choice as to how to start this, so I’m jumping in and seeing what happens from there. Actually, I seem to have a lot of choices. Armed? Disarmed? Sword? Dagger? What weapon does the mimic get?
I think I want the mimic with a sword for leverage, and Beethro with a dagger to deal with goblins on either side of him. Really, this is a demonstration of how easily people can abuse tokens when they aren’t constrained with force arrows or something. It’s interesting seeing this done deliberately instead of being an oversight that breaks the puzzle. Neat little room.
1S: A trapdoor puzzle with sword and dagger swapping. And disabling force arrows on top of all that? This is going to be messy. I like trapdoor puzzles, and this was a neat twist on it. Not complicated enough that I had to resort to GIMP, which in a way is a bad thing, since that’s the part of trapdoor puzzles that I really enjoy.
1W: Secret to the west of here? I think I see a way to get there. This looks like a fairly simple (but long) goblin ferry trip. Shouldn’t be too much trouble. The platform shape is a bit awkward. Definitely helps to be to the NE of the goblin and not the SW. Also, this room has a distressing lack of checkpoints.
2W secret: A mimic manipulation room in which I don’t want wraithwings getting trapped? Okay. Mimic starts at the top left and has to end there as well. Nasty trick to the start of this room. A checkpoint on the pressure plate where the mimic goes would be nice.
Once you get that one wraithwing that’s dangerously close to an arrow trap, your mobility increases a lot, making the final part of the room relatively simple.
1N1W: A platform shuffling puzzle. These get a mixed reception but I don’t usually mind them. Let’s see how this one plays out. Wow, that was easy. Not sure what to make of that.
1N2W: Teasing the secret? Doesn’t seem to be a way to access it from here, and it would be impossible anyway.
This looks like a simple mimic on trapdoors puzzle. The trick here is that there are too many of these annoying obstacles around so I can’t manoeuvre the mimic around easily.
1N: A double trapdoor puzzle with a mimic. Seems to be a lot of trapdoor puzzles here. This one looks a lot nastier than the others I’ve played so far though.
Okay, not actually too bad. Tombstones not falling when the bridges fall is pretty silly. Obstacles always worked that way though.
1N1E: What am I looking at here? You can take the dagger except that there’s no point because you need to drop the trapdoor after swapping back to a sword? Oh, that’s pretty clever. Well done.
Delay Tactics:
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×Architect Guess: Xindaris
There are a lot of annoying elements put into this one group. While some of the rooms here are pretty good, there are also rooms that involve stalwart pathfinding. Overall I would say I have mixed feelings about this entry. There were a few really cool rooms, and then there were annoying rooms that were difficult to approach, and then there were some rooms that I think I broke by deciding that playing with stalwart pathfinding was preferable to whatever the actual intended solution was.
Entrance: I’m pretty sure that I need to clear a strip of briar along the bottom of the chamber before getting the guard into one of the corners.
Or do the guard dance. That works too. Given the title of the entry I should have expected that.
1E: Okay, I see what I need to do here, but I’m not really happy about it. Get the stalwart to face a certain direction and then push him to stab the powder keg. This is going to be a lot of fiddly work.
Yeah, eventually he cooperated and it worked.
1N1E: Oh boy. Tangle up the guards so that they don’t get caught on the force arrows? This looks awful, and apparently there’s even more of it afterwards.
Not really sure how I was supposed to reason about any of that. I just ran in circles until the guards had an orientation that I hadn’t tried yet, and eventually one of them worked.
1N2E unrequired: They have pickaxes, but more importantly there’s no ring to run around them on, so this should be a lot less tedious. Yeah, this is a keg pushing puzzle. Much better.
2N1E: This was incredibly frustrating since I wasn’t sure at any given time whether the stalwarts would happen to settle into a stable pattern I could exploit or not. This room probably took me several hours to complete, and I didn’t really enjoy any of it. My final solution ended up ignoring the mud entirely, and I only opened access to the mother once all the aumtlich had been killed.
2N: Counting, there seems to be one more stalwart than necessary. I wonder if it will be irretrievable. It’s probably the stalwart that I’ll push into the cracked orb. Actually, I think I can recover him. I’m going to just kill a stalwart and hopefully get to where I can test that pretty quickly.
Did I miscount? Somehow I had enough stalwarts, but I thought that I killed two of them. Maybe I reset the room and hadn’t yet killed the first stalwart on that attempt. I liked this room a lot though. Reminiscent of the Shattered Mines.
2N1W: That’s going to be a horrendous demo. I just killed the aumtlich and built a maze out of powder kegs that slowed down the stalwart enough after several iterations.
2N2W unrequired: And now the same thing, but with guards instead of aumtlich. In other words, my previous solution should still work, right? Yep. Much easier this time around. Decided to make better use of the briar this time and had a less messy looking bunch of kegs at the end.
1N1W: The obligatory arrow rotator maze. Given how little of these I’ve seen throughout the entry, I guess this architect shares my opinion on this element. Arrow rotators and stalwarts. This is going to be something.
Mud can’t be cut from Beethro’s side, so I need the stalwart to go for the aumtlich first while shaving some mud for me. Then I go for the pickaxe to get that last mud baby. Wow. It’s nice when you state the plan and then it goes according to plan without any difficulty. Either this room is fairly lenient or I got lucky.
1W: A stalwart rotation puzzle. Looks like I need to get each orb struck once. There’s a guard thrown into the mix who looks like he’ll be complicating things quite a bit.
Wait, what actions can I even take here? Stabbing the aumtlich doesn’t do anything, and I need one of them for later anyway. Oh right, break the beam with the sword. Come on mauve, you just spent several hours doing this exact thing in 2N1E. Although, getting the aumtlich to rotate without hitting the orbs is going to take some doing.
Oh, stalwarts rotate clockwise. Of course they do. That just makes this room a lot more repetitive and tedious. In that case, I guess I nuke the orb I don’t want the stalwart to activate and then juggle an aumtlich across a row of hot tiles 6 times. Actually, I’m not sure that I can get the aumtlich to survive crossing the hot tiles without hitting the orb. Okay, this might be less tedious than I thought. In that case, it’s time to kill the stalwart squaring off with the guard, get the guard to hit those two orbs, and get the aumtlich trapped inside the guard’s cage. That should allow the aumtlich to hit the distant stalwart repeatedly without any issues. Despite my earlier pessimism I actually really enjoyed this room. Great use of all the elements. Probably my favourite on the level, actually.
1N: Okay, I liked this a lot. A little bit of stalwart dialogue can go a long way towards excusing dumb stalwart behaviour. A nice easy story room after a hard level is wonderful! Did you intend to use stairs up for the lighting effect? I was surprised when Beethro disappeared right after stepping on the first step.
Old Quarry:
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×Architect Guess: ThemsAllTook
Wow, a short and sweet entry. I liked most of the rooms here, although 1N felt a bit weaker than the others. Would have loved to see more citizen and slayer usage, but given the small room count I guess it’s understandable. Halph only had a single room too, come to think of it. This entry felt really easy, but given the other entries in the compilation that might just be relative to the insane difficulty of some of the others.
1N: Fairly straightforward once you’ve jumped in and seen what all the pieces are supposed to do. Simply a matter of adjusting the citizen’s path to a perfect length. Faster to solve via “try and adjust” than by counting, probably, so that’s what I did. The PCMT token doesn’t actually make any difference here from what I can tell.
1W: I’m glad that there’s a slayer who does more than just be an enforcement mechanism like in 1N. I was worried initially that you’d try to get away with technically using the element but not actually having it be part of any puzzle.
In this room it looks like the only thing that can stab the western golem is Beethro, or the slayer who isn’t available until after Beethro is already stuck on the force arrow with the golem anyway. The slayer is the only thing that could conceivably end up on that southern-most pressure plate, so the trick here is to weigh down everything else so that he sees that as his only option. Door/wisp interactions might be a bit arcane for some people, but this room is set up in such a way that people won’t need to understand why the slayer is doing what he is doing, making this a pretty easy room.
1S: Interesting room concept. Three plates, one for Halph, one for a golem, and one for a construct. Once everyone is in place the room is basically solved. Doesn’t look too bad. A few complications: Halph cannot go on the rightmost plate, and Halph needs to go last to facilitate manipulating the monsters. Construct couldn’t make it to the right plate, but if the golem blocks the middle force arrow at the right time it should work. Actually, construct appears to be unkillable on the right plate.
Initial assumption about Halph going on the rightmost plate was incorrect since Beethro can bump the doors leading to the release plate. Putting the construct on the left plate instead of the right one made this a lot easier overall.
1E: Looks like no choice but to start with pushing a construct over oremites. I do love a staff and oremites room. Actually, I love pretty much everything about this room. Each individual compartment was fun to figure out, and the interactions between the golem and the construct were quite clever. The bottom left chamber was especially interesting. Great use of construct reviving.
Unlikely Friends:
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×Architect: mauvebutterfly
This is my entry, so I’ll give a brief write-up of what the intent was behind each of the rooms. Overall, I wanted to make a fun and approachable slayer entry, and since slayer with staff is largely harmless due to the slayer’s preference for weapon kill over body kill, I decided to make a silly story about Beethro and an incompetent slayer working together. Constructs + oremites actually removed the need for any swords in this entry whatsoever, until Trickster convinced Nuntar to move golems to here. Oh well, it still mostly worked.
1N: This was intended to be an easy introductory room, but then I thought that I didn’t want it to be trivial so I made construct timing important, and then I wanted to have the slayer perform a useful function instead of just being a harasser to demonstrate that he is an ally throughout this level. The end result of that was that the “easy introduction” room probably ended up being more complicated that it really should have been.
1N1W: Pushing constructs across oremites is an established trick at this point, and I wanted to do something here that couldn’t normally be done. So, a staff-wielding slayer double-pushing a construct across more oremites than is normally possible alone seemed like a good idea. This room is actually really easy since the slayer is very easily managed when he has a staff and Beethro has a staff, but that’s a combination that comes up so infrequently that most people have probably never played with it before, making this room much more intimidating that it really should be. Also, I added an extra construct for slight misdirection; three plates for three constructs, but the slayer can be used for one of the plates. I ended up adding the obstacles around the slayer’s plate to hopefully make it obvious a construct couldn’t go there, since that was a much harder multi-push to set up due to the construct being free, and I didn’t want people attempting that. It was possible to have constructs on all the plates in the original version of the room.
2N1W: This is the PCMT token room. The citizen’s path needs to be adjusted by using some obstacles so that he’ll go over the plates. Oremites can keep a construct in place, and Halph will dutifully stand in the way when asked, so that’s that. The slayer is purely a hindrance here, as is the extra construct, making this a tough execution initially. Actually, I’m not too happy with how this room turned out. I’d have liked for the slayer to do something more useful than just being pushed onto an obvious pressure plate.
2N: This room serves two purposes: demonstrate that the slayer opens doors when his wisp is cut off by one, and delay a citizen while doing other things. It’s a pretty weak room overall. Unfortunately a PCMT token doesn’t prevent a citizen from changing targets when walled off, so trapping a citizen inside one of the blocks resets him to go back to the relay station. This doesn’t really make the room much easier though.
2N1E: The original idea behind this room was to have to push a citizen around carefully in order to excavate specific areas of briar without releasing constructs or other citizens. This turned out to not be that much fun in practice, so I decided to instead make it about managing numbers of released entities. If you choose to trap citizens in the cells you can gain more control over the direction of the excavation by managing the remainder. If you trap constructs the excavation goes faster, but you have a potentially tricky situation to deal with at the end when releasing all the trapped constructs at once. Of course, you can just wait for the citizens to finish clearing all the briar before releasing anybody from the cells, but where’s the fun in that?
1N1E: This room is about blocking the wisp with the construct’s body. This is an unusual property of golems and constructs, since the wisp pathfinds through most enemies.
3N1W secret: I wanted to make one super hard room. Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up here, but given how many breaks I found at the last minute, I’m sure that this room is probably still broken in some way. There are a number of steps to the intended process, but the main one I wanted to enforce for this room (and indeed the original concept of the room) was to have the slayer go open a door with his staff pointed in a specific direction.
I think that there might be a move sequence that allows you to deal with the constructs while the slayer is roaming free in the final chamber, but I really hope that people don’t attempt that. It shouldn’t be possible, but people surprise me with what they are capable of doing in DROD all the time, so that’s my main concern for a break in the room here.
I also thought it was important for the builder to announce when he was finished given that I didn’t put down all the build tokens immediately at the start of the room.
3N1E: I thought that using Halph as a door like this was silly, so I wanted to include it somewhere. The main point of this room though is to keep the construct debris around. I thought that this was important to have somewhere since for most of this level you just want the constructs gone, or you immediately push them off the oremites so that they can respawn. Here you want all the constructs dead, but none of the debris to be eaten by oremites.
Wow, did I never test the dialogue here? It shouldn’t have played when first entering the bottom entrance. Oh well, that’s something to fix for the final compilation, along with the unnecessary disarming that still happens when I changed my mind about how I wanted to implement this. The top part of this room is an obvious reference to the final secret of TCB, but I wanted to find an arbitrary way to hit the buttons in a specific order, so I naturally selected a way that would be complicated to script. It’s intentionally easy to brute force (especially with undo) since it’s more of a stupid joke and a reference than an intended challenge. I also didn’t want to punish people who played through a few rooms of this entry, then went and played a bunch of other entries, and then came back here to finish this one up.
3N: The obligatory golem. I was originally intending for this to be a complicated multi-pass room, but kind of burnt out on architecture towards the end. In hindsight, this room is actually pretty easy, especially compared to the other entries, but I didn’t want people to miss the button pressing dialogue to the east if they got this far. Turns out I was worried for nothing, since that was bugged anyway.
Part of the reason for the hint, was that this room was the hardest room on the level for me to find a solution for. That even includes the secret room. Funny how much of a difference knowing what the solution should be in advance makes. This room was “I’ll just put these three plates in an awkward arrangement and then see if it’s possible.” Also, I found a super fiddly way to do this that I don’t remember how I did and that was awful, so the hints are intended to dissuade people who are stuck trying to get that to work if they think of trying that method.
It Snow Slur Prize to Me:
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×Architect Guess: Xindaris
Oh boy, this is going to be a thing, isn’t it? Reading, I mean. Overall this entry had some good puzzles and some puzzles that could be broken fairly easily. I don’t know what the point of the dialogue being done in that manner is, but I guess it’s a valid stylistic choice. The biggest disappointment for me was that the seeding beacons were only used as enforcement mechanisms, and never as actual puzzle elements.
Entrance: Unnecessary wubba murder! How dare you! This first room seems like a huge pain to clear. Was this really necessary?
Oh, this room is awful. I was just going to brute force the time tokens, but there are too many interconnected parts for that. I guess I’ll calculate everything out then. Or on second thought I guess it’s not too bad. Just needed to pay a little bit of attention to what all the orbs do. I’m pretty sure I never needed to hit the easternmost orb to complete this room.
1N: That’s one way to use sister level clear gates I guess. Hope there’s more of those elsewhere, to go along with the seeding beacons that I know are coming.
1W: I was just thinking the other day that I don’t think I’ve seen orbs on firetraps before. I guess that won’t be so novel or clever now that I’ve been preempted on that. Once again, this room looks like a mess of orbs and fire traps, with disabled force arrows for good measure. Hopefully it’s not as bad as it looks to actually play out, but with four time clones in the mix I’m not anticipating this being a good time. I guess I have to jump in and just see what happens.
Interesting. Don’t think I’ve been forced to walk across a temporal split point as a temporal projection before. I like the way it just ignores the points the projections walk over.
I see, that long line of orbs is a reusable timer. Clever. The puzzle here seems to mostly play out by itself, so the trick is just to get out of the entrance hallway fast enough before the timer nukes everybody there.
I can confirm that this kind of room is pretty awful. I actually took the headphones off for this one. There’s also one pattern that is really difficult to avoid. Fortunately there aren’t too many moving parts here (despite what it looks like) so I was able to spot the parity trick to avoid the full field of fire.
1N1W: A force arrow maze? Why? At least there aren’t any temporal split points this time I guess. I see; briar takes out the beacon, and I just need to find a way to stash the snakes where I can kill them after the briar has done its work. Actually, the connections here look pretty straightforward. Not a force arrow maze at all, really. It’s a “blocking briar with snakes” puzzle.
Or I could just lure the snakes out and kill them there as the briar is working. That works too.
2N1W: Is this just an orb puzzle in disguise? At least the additional briar roots make it so that each leg of the journey only needs to be connected once before passing the baton on to the next relay runner. I guess it’s not too bad for a puzzle of that type.
2N: Neat room. It’s an interesting application of the briar cancelling a recording in progress, which stops a temporal projection from hitting the orb that releases the snakes. The actual solution is pretty simple.
2N1E: Another neat application of the temporal recording being cancelled by briar growth. I think that there’d be potential for a hold based around the concept of temporal projections with limited recording time. I’m also starting to think that the wubbas only exist here to be the targets of briar abuse. I suppose the loud popping sound they make gives the briar a growth sound, at least. Funny how the intro text to Under The Library specifically mentions that you can hear briar growing, but it’s the one growth action that wasn’t given a sound effect in TSS.
1N1E: This room seems surprisingly simple. The beacons are a lot of busy work, but nothing about this room is remotely difficult. Also, broken walls were a set 8 element, but I guess Nuntar okayed it here, so I won’t deduct points for them.
1N2E secret: Finally, some wubbas that aren’t just there for briar fertiliser! Aha, I see the scroll even acknowledges this fact. Let’s get this wubba party going!
At first this looked like it was going to be trivial. I’m glad that that orb removes all those force arrows. Simple enough, but hard to reason about. It’s one of those “just mess around until it works” kind of rooms, which is probably why wubba hordes aren’t that popular in general.
1E: I think the mechanism here is broken. I probably shouldn’t be able to just kill the large rattlesnake the way I did. Looks like it’s intended to be a puzzle of multiple projections cutting away at a single snake at once, and probably wouldn’t be too difficult even if that was the enforced solution.
Crowding Conundrum:
Click here to view the secret text
×Constructor Consideration: Dragon Fogel
A calculated combination of consonantal words creates a clever atmosphere in the introductory text. Can our cunning hero crack the caper? Let us commence the conclusion of this contest compilation!
Entrance: An engineer works to clear the creepers from the covered pressure plate, and the clarion call of a horn creates a clone to help with control of the crowd of roaches. I didn’t particularly enjoy clearing the plate of creatures, but the constraint in both the roach count and the size of the chamber helped avoid creating too much tedium in completing the required task.
1W: Another case of clearing a plate. This time a gentryii needs to be carefully corralled while roaches cut in from the corners. The cracked walls mostly serve as cumbersome clutter, but they do help to contain the gentryii while Beethro cleans up the queens. This room is an example of harassing enemies done correctly.
1N1W: The cord combusting towards a collision with a bomb and a clone makes for a classic clock as Beethro is forced to clear the seep contamination concisely. A compassionate architect considerately placed an excess of fuse, making conquering the room fairly easy.
2N1W: Cruel containment is forced upon Beethro as a clone considers the position of the roaches. Beethro and the clone must carefully coordinate their actions lest they cause a calamitous conjunction of the capering roaches. I’m not a fan of clones in most contexts, but here keeping constant attention on the coordinates of the roaches made for a fun puzzle.
2N: A confusing presentation of elements to consider, but once I clicked to check the connections conjoining the plates and the arrows around the clone potion, and conceded that a clutch of roach eggs could cure my inaction, I confected a course of action. By cowering in the corner with the clone, Beethro found cover from the cavalcade of roaches. This was a good room concept, but the lack of complexity in my solution left me craving another course.
2N1E: How can one room contain this many cabers? The architect’s cautioning seems completely corroborated given the crowd here. This room reminds me of a puzzle game called Rush Hour. I suppose the constraints would be more consistent with that game’s central conceit if only a single clone clasped a caber while the others conducted themselves with swords. A complication to consider here is the lack of cover for the clone crushing the bombs; additional clones can protect that clone from the oncoming roaches. I greatly enjoyed this room, and am quite content to see a more complex secret variation.
2N2E: The ability to complete the less complicated of the rooms by pressing a key on the computer keyboard is a considerate convenience. There are considerably more complications at play in this room, but the core concepts are not corrupted by the added complexity.
1N1E: Can engineers be crushed? They cannot. Their considerable constitution will therefore be an asset in constructing containments for the gentryii. Alas, having failed to confine the gentryii near the corner plates, escaping Beethro’s own containment will require considerable gentryii conduction. The clone’s ability to convey itself to safety after the roaches have been crushed alleviates any time pressure while contemplating the final gentryii movements.
1E: Clones cowering for cover behind cabers while coordinating combustive detonations isn’t a kind of puzzle I have much comfort with. With composure, and clone cooperation, I can usually complete these puzzles nevertheless. While commencing this room by creating free clones seems a clear course to consider, in the conclusion of this task only three of the clones could be of use. One did remain as a caged convict until the concussive force of a couple dozen bombs crumbled his confinement.
2E: Considering the contingent of clones choreographed themselves according to the conduct of the clones contained in 1E, I can continue to wonder if my solution to 1E was more concise that required. I continue, too, to wonder if that fourth clone could somehow escape to complete a less compact formation when detonating the colossal cluster of bombs.
1N: With hold mastery concluded, this last room remains between me and total hold completion.
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106th Skywatcher
[Last edited by mauvebutterfly at 05-28-2018 01:33 AM]
