Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

I'm back for some more puzzling! For this time, I tried something refreshing instead and branched into other pencil puzzles with some sparkling ideas. Fillomino is one of those genres that I usually find pleasant and fun to solve with, so here's a fillomino with some additional weird twists.

While setting this, I was actually pretty ill and had to lie on my bed for a majority of time but in the end, I got a couple of cool results and the following one was the third result out of them (so there may be more results with much more polished and shortened rule set coming out in the future).

Anyway, I hope you'll find the solve fun overall despite the 'sacrilegious' rule set and the 'bland' puzzle title (only because I couldn't come up with a good name for this) :)


Rules:

- In the 12x12 grid, shade some cells so that the remaining unshaded cells together form a single orthogonally connected region, which will also be able to be divided into smaller orthogonally connected unshaded regions.
The shaded cells that are orthogonally connected together will form their respective shaded region; in addition, a 1 cell shaded region is also possible.
(The region border separates between shaded and unshaded)

- ALL of the shaded regions AND smaller unshaded regions are fillomino regions: enter into each cell a number that's equal to the size of its region, and no two regions of the same size can touch each other orthogonally (but may touch diagonally), regardless of being shaded or unshaded (we define the size of a region as the number of cells that region consists of).

- Clues outside the grid indicates the lengths of shaded blocks in the corresponding row/column in the given order (top to bottom for columns, left to right for rows), and two shaded blocks are separated by an unshaded block.
A '?' clue represents exactly one clue with an unknown length; an asterisk '*' clue represents an unknown number of clues, which can be zero, one or more than one clue.

[SPECIAL ARROW RULES:]
1) Any given cell with arrow(s) can't be shaded, and every unshaded fillomino region must contain at least one given cell with arrow(s).

2) There must be at least one shaded cell found on the direction of an arrow. A number in a cell with arrow(s) indicates the total number of shaded cells that are found along the arrow directions combined.

3) If there's one or more continuous unshaded cells right next to an arrow's direction, those cells must belong to the same fillomino region as the cell containing that arrow, this is done until the VERY FIRST shaded cell being found on that direction.

Extra setter note: In this puzzle, not all necessary arrows are given but the fillomino regions division must still satisfy property (1).



The rule set is quite long, but below is a 7x7 example for visualization of how each statement will work. One can also solve this example in Penpa plus and Sudokupad.

The main 12x12 puzzle:

Penpa plus - Sudokupad



Answer check in penpa will activate once all numbers are filled and the shading is done (gray color for cells being shaded). Good luck and have fun solving!