Hyperspace
(Published on 29. May 2023, 01:10 by Bonehead)
This is the best puzzle I've ever put together, but it's probably also the hardest. However, the solve is very logical and split into 3 areas, work out the paths, work out the route of combined paths and complete the sudoku.
Don't have a heart attack when you read the rules, the example will show they are actually quite simple. :)
Rules.
Classic sudoku rules apply.
Your Defender class starship is lost in space (blue 1) and must get home (blue 2).
White circles are wormholes. Entry results in teleportation to an exit wormhole which must be determined.
Draw a hyperspace path split into 6 orthogonal paths, from start point to a wormhole, between 4 pairs of wormhole exits and entry points and from final wormhole exit to home. Paths cannot touch each other orthogonally or form 2 by 2 areas.
All wormholes and all green planets must be on a path and are used only once.
Digits may repeat on paths if allowed by other rules.
Paths may pass through yellow suns, but don't have to.
Determine the order and direction of the paths to get home. The first wormhole passed through has value 9, the second 8 and so on down to 1. The value of the 10th and last wormhole must be determined. Each green planet passed through ascends in value from 1 to 9.
No orthogonal areas between the paths can be bigger than 9 connected cells. Digits on suns in these areas have a maximum value of the size of that area. Eg. A sun in an off path area of size 6 will have a maximum value of 6. Suns on paths can be any allowed value.
The Puzzle.
CTC version with solution check here
F-Puzzles version with solution check here
Example.
As can be seen, on the paths, as the wormhole numbers descend from 9 to 1, the green planet numbers ascend from 1 to 9. The route is always start (blue planet 1) to wormhole 9, then wormholes 8 to 1, then the to-be-determined 10th wormhole to blue planet 2.(Home!)
Suns in uninhabited othogonal regions of space (blue areas between paths, max size 9 cells) have a maximum value of the size of that region.
Please comment if you manage to complete this one, (or even if you didn't!). Thank you.
Solution code: Row 7 followed by Column 2 as 18 digits, no spaces.
Comments
on 29. May 2023, 12:24 by Bonehead
Removed unnecessary duplicate description on the Example text.
on 29. May 2023, 05:50 by ScatterBrain
Figuring out the path was not very hard. But some of the order of the path was difficult. I couldn't see clearly enough to do it without some bifurcation.
Hard to see the puzzle connections as the board was quite busy.
I might have been better removing the colouring of between paths after I had solved, to make things less busy. My mistake!
Thanks for setting!
@scatterbrain. The paths are not that hard, but the ordering iis more complex. It doesnt need bifurcation as such, it is a matter of tackling the path from both ends and seeing that at each stage, which paths simply would not work. The only mildly bifurcation bit would be testing a next path with 5s and 6s clashes as path shapes that dont suit that stop wrong choice dead.
Thankyou very much for completing. This one took a lot of planning.
