Reserved
This is one of my favorite pages on the site, because I adore nonogram/picross puzzles.
I spent well over an hour trying to figure this one out to no avail. Maybe I'm just bad at these types of puzzles. Either way I'd appreciate if someone would post the solution.
God I feel so fucking ashamed to say that, I can't just give up on a puzzle god damn it, rrrgh
And if the whole world is crashing down… fall through space out of mind with me.
Please do not post solutions outside of collapsibles. Also, I'm going to post some clues in the first post over the next couple days.
Solution:
Legend: Uncoloured=░ Safe=▒ Redacted=█
░░▒█▒▒▒██▒
██▒▒▒▒██▒▒
░░▒▒▒▒█▒░░
▒▒▒█▒█████
██▒██▒▒▒██
██▒███████
██▒██▒█▒██
▒▒▒█▒█▒▒░░
██▒▒█▒░░▒▒
██▒▒█▒░░▒▒
Extraction:
Match the uncovered letters to the image attachment and derive the phrase "daydreamlike"
Question: The security warning on the main page says that each password will be an English word. Is "daydreamlike" a word?
Interesting note: I wasn't paying much attention when I solved the puzzle. I scrolled down with out really looking because I was going straight to derive the word. I scrolled back up, saw the image for the first time, and promptly had a heart attack.
Try it out in the password checker.
Glad you like the image. Kaktus did good work.
That solution shouldn't work.
The first two columns are 2,3,2. You only have 1 in each. And, the first and third row have 1 each. With the third row as 1,1,1 it should be something like;
█▒▒█▒▒▒██▒
██▒▒▒▒██▒▒
░█▒█▒▒█▒▒▒
or
░█▒█▒▒▒██▒
██▒▒▒▒██▒▒
█▒▒█▒▒█▒▒▒
otherwise the nonogram clues don't make sense. Also, you have unidentified ones at the end of row three but the clues say any left over should be good.
Anaxagoras, I think the current clues don't allow for all the identified bad pixels to be properly identified. Was this intentional?
It is. The emails clue you in to this as well. You have to solve only as much as can be reasonably deduced without guessing; at that point, if you verify it should say "Correct" or something similar.
Yeah it took me a while to figure this out.
The six squares that aren't solvable are how you get the password.
I'm familiar with run-length-encoding schemes, yet I still found the set-up for this puzzle unapproachable until I saw Decibelles comment above and discovered that nonograms were an established thing that I could learn how to do elsewhere. I think the instructions in Charlie's email should either be a lot clearer/more detailed, or at least drop a useful/searchable reference for those of us who have never encountered this puzzle type before.
Also, having the emails appear in reverse chronological order definitely confuses things.
The emails in reverse chronological order is just so that the I can have the relevant stuff for the image closer to it; there's no deeper meaning. I tried to make Charlie's explanation clear, though it's definitely tricky to justify this in-universe. I'll probably have a link in the first post, when I have a chance to put some tips in.
Does "unjustified assumptions detected" mean that I have a valid solution but not the correct one?
Basically, yes. There's a unique (well, modulo flagging squares as confirmed good), more correct solution you can find.
Is it totally arbitrary or is there some hint I am missing? I have tried all the valid permutations I can find.
Only go for the squares you absolutely know you can fill out without needing to assume.
Yes, I did that, then I am left with three pairs of squares that can be in either of two positions. None of which seem to solve it.
You're not supposed to fill in every single square. It's intentionally left vague that certain squares aren't known where they need to go. That's because you need to do something with the nonogram and what's being counted as valid (rather than "unjustified assumptions") to complete the second part of the puzzle.
There's a lot of emphasis placed on how certain squares can't be figured out in the emails. They should also stand out as really weird, since most puzzles wouldn't be underdetermined like that. Ideally, people will figure out that those are the spaces they should work with for the extraction.
I think because I was doing this on mobile, I couldn't flag squares as confirmed safe, it wasn't as obvious as it would have been otherwise.
Finally got there though.
…if you couldn't be sure about a superpixel, wouldn't you err on the side of redacting it rather than leaving it visible? That was the only thing that forced me to look to the comments for help. I was thinking about it as a puzzle but one for which in-universe conditions might be relevant, and it just didn't even occur to me that you might leave them visible.
That aside, so fun! On to the next!
Oh boy.
Hours and hours of playing picross has prepared me for this very moment.