Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

The previous latest puzzle - Archer's Roundtable - only came out few days ago, you can check out this link here.


The following puzzle uses one of the good old combos that still leaves me some great impression till this day, and that is thermometer + anti-knight constraints. Over a year ago, Abed Hawila came up with a lovely puzzle using this combo, and it's still really remarkable till this day. Then only few months ago, there came Phistomefel with another fantastic puzzle with the same combo.



Short story: Two months ago, when I revisited both of those puzzles, I thought in my head "Do I really have a chance to set an original and remarkable one? Surely it's just another one of those known combos there."; and so about two days later from that point, I sat down and messed around the interactions and I started to get some good ideas (at least for the opening). Took about few days and I finally got the first version of it (which I'll put in the hidden comments), although the opening was great in my eyes, the flow after that didn't really feel natural enough and rather felt messy. So I basically scrapped it and went for other ideas pretty similar to previous one, but over the time each of them was ultimately a failure (either I really didn't have anything good follow up or there were too many ugly patterns near the end in some cases).
It was quite miserable, but then I remembered the funny one trick that I used for the very first version and so it took only few nights to finally get a cool opening idea and then the rest of the solve one night later. I actually couldn't hide my emotions entirely when seeing the final result, as that's definitely the most exhausting research on a puzzle that I've ever done in a long time, hence it’s likely that I will take on a ‘short vacation’ to compensate for that crazy experience :)



Anyway, with that being said, estimated difficulty is around 4/5. I hope you enjoy!



Rules:

- Normal Sudoku rules apply: every row, column and 3x3 box contains digits from 1 to 9 each once.

- Along thermometers, digits must increase from the bulb to the end tip.

- Cells that are a Knight's move away (in chess) can't contain the same digit.

Puzzle:

F-puzzle link

Sudokulab (alt. link)

Penpa plus (alt. link)

CTC app (alt. link)

Good luck and have fun solving!