STATUS: Nominal Build Drop

EVERY PUZZLE IS NOW DEALT IN MISSIONS

For a dozen versions a mission handed out the same five puzzles while everything built since sat on the bench waiting for somebody to play it. You have, so the whole catalogue is live: all 41.

MISSION TIMERS 30 SECONDS TO 120

That one number decides how long every mission puzzle runs. A puzzle's own time limit never applied inside a mission, which is why some of them felt far tighter in play than they did on the bench - Archive asks for ninety seconds and was getting thirty.

Thirty is fine for a puzzle you have played fifty times and hostile to one you are meeting for the first time. Right now every puzzle is one you are meeting for the first time.

BE WARNED WHAT THIS IS generous, not balanced. The set has been

MEASURED every difficulty curve is monotone, every generator proves its

board can actually be finished - but none of it has been tuned against a mission's pacing, and 41 puzzles at two minutes each will make missions long. That is deliberate. It is far easier to find what genuinely goes wrong by playing it than by guessing at it, and both halves reverse cheaply: one bool per puzzle, one number for the clock.

So: expect it to be loose. Tell me where it drags, where a puzzle outstays its welcome, and which ones you would rather never see again.

RELAY PATH IS DELETED

Cut from the pool a while back for being genuinely unpleasant, and it has been sitting as a dead class since. Gone properly now.

WHAT WOULD HELP MOST

1. A full run. That is the whole point of this build - 36 puzzles that have never been dealt under a clock with detection running and other tabs competing for your attention.
2. Pacing. Two minutes is a guess. Tell me if it should be ninety, or sixty, or per-puzzle.
3. The solo task cap from v0.1.0 - a node should hand you at most two tasks. Verified by reading the code, never by playing it.
4. Anything that outstays its welcome. A puzzle can be provably fair and still be one you do not want to see again, and that is the judgement no amount of measuring here can make.

Two things you asked for, both from playing v0.0.99.

CACHE SIFT SHOWS THE RECORD UNDER THE TOP ONE

Each card now carries a small colour pip for whatever is beneath it.

The old rule was that nothing below the top was ever visible, and that was written when stacks were two deep. It stopped being fair once difficulty started buying DEPTH: at forty-two records over ten cells you were committing to pulls with four hidden layers behind them, and a jam you could not have seen coming reads as the puzzle cheating rather than as your mistake.

One layer, deliberately - enough to plan the pull after this one, not enough to plan the whole cache.

A NODE NO LONGER DUMPS FIVE TASKS ON ONE PERSON

A node deals a bundle and shares it round the crew, which reads fine at four players: five tasks, nobody holding more than two. Solo, all five landed on you at once, four of them ticking down while you worked the first, and the console turned into a queue you could not clear rather than work you chose between. The bundle was sized for a full crew and nothing scaled it when there was not one.

Capped at TWO PER PERSON rather than special-cased for solo - two players sharing five has the same problem in miniature. The node waits for what was actually dealt, so a smaller bundle still completes it normally.

This one is worth a specific look on a solo run: I could verify it by reading the code but not by playing it, because the test harness here cannot run a mission.

FIRST BUILD CLICKED BEFORE IT SHIPPED

v0.0.96 and v0.0.97 both went out with every button on the console broken, and both passed every automated check in the project - all of which drive puzzles through code paths that never touch mouse handling at all. There is now a page that puts up real buttons, counts presses against completed clicks, and scores itself, and it gets run before a build is published rather than after somebody notices.

You clicked this one. That is the whole point of it.

WHAT WOULD HELP MOST

1. A solo run, watching how much work a node hands you.
2. Cache Sift at difficulty 5 now the next layer is visible - is it readable, or is it now too easy?
3. Bench puzzles at difficulty 4 and 5. Measured, not played.
4. Badge Swipe, Packet Hop and Sweep - their difficulty is speeds, and no screenshot can check a speed.
5. Patch Panel at difficulty 5: 81 holes, 7 cables, 60 seconds. I still think that is wrong.

Two puzzles you flagged, both fixed rather than struck, plus the bench being less annoying to test with.

CUT TETHER COULD NOT BE WON ON A LOT OF SEEDS

You were right, and it was worst at the EASIEST rung. Measured over twenty seeds a difficulty:

difficulty 1: 9 boards in 20 had NO solution at all difficulty 3: 3 with none, and 7 more solvable only by a pair cut difficulty 5: none unsolvable, but 9 in 20 needed a pair

Unsolvable boards were dealt anyway. And the "pair" ones were arguably worse, because they looked fine: the generator proved those by cutting two ropes AT THE SAME INSTANT, which hands cannot do. You cut one, the rig swings, and the second cut happens in a different world.

The cause was doing it backwards - roll a random target port, then go hunting for a cut that reaches it. It now simulates each cut, sees where the payload actually lands, and makes one of those the target. Every board is solvable by construction, always with ONE cut. 150 seeds across all five difficulties, zero failures.

Two-tether boards are gone as well. With two ropes the only cut that releases the payload is cutting both, which is the "slash everything" answer this puzzle exists to refuse. Two tethers was not an easy version of it, it was a broken one.

APPROACH WAS UNREADABLE RATHER THAN HARD

Each node you could step to showed "-26 +40". Two numbers, no units, and nothing on screen saying which was the cost and which the gain - while that pair IS the whole decision. The node's kind was a single initial in its own colour on a dark disc, which read as a smudge, and nothing said what winning was.

Now the numbers are labelled, every legible node names its kind in the colour of its meter in the WATCHING row, and the goal is stated. At difficulty 3 the trade-off reads at a glance: CORE at 26 noise for +40 progress, against RELAY at 6 for +6. That was always the puzzle. None of it was reaching you.

Still tell me if it earns its place. That part is a play call and I have only made it legible, not proved it is fun.

BACKLOG SHOWS THE NEXT BLOCK

Without it a falling-block well is a reaction test - you cannot decide where THIS piece goes without knowing what follows it.

MINEFIELD TILES ARE SQUARE

At every board size. They were being stretched to fill a fixed rectangle, worst at the low difficulties.

THE BENCH IS LESS TEDIOUS

• Every row starts on its own seed instead of all of them on 1.
• RND re-rolls on launch and writes the seed it used back into the box, so a board worth reporting can still be reproduced.
• ? on each row opens HOW TO PLAY for that puzzle without leaving the bench.

WHAT WOULD HELP MOST

1. Cut Tether and Approach, since both were yours. Cut Tether should now always be winnable with a single slash - if you find one that is not, the seed is in the bench box and that is the whole bug report.
2. Bench puzzles at difficulty 4 and 5. Measured, not played.
3. Badge Swipe, Packet Hop and Sweep - their difficulty is speeds, and no screenshot can check a speed.
4. Patch Panel at difficulty 5: 81 holes, 7 cables, 60 seconds. I suspect that is wrong but would rather have your answer than my guess.