Design a miniature system of aqueduct towers, and challenge other to connect them in a loop. Living mossy towers (green) require the pipe to pass straight through, but turn adjacent. Dead (black) towers require the pipe to turn in place, but extend straight.
The Pathmaker puzzle field is a large grid (although the gridlines are not visible), some points of which contain green or black towers. At any given point on the grid, a pipe segment can either go straight or bend 90 degrees (the pipeline cannot cross itself). Special restrictions apply to pipes passing through towers. The puzzle solver's goal is to place sections of pipe on the field in such a fashion that:
To place a pipe section, click on a point on the field. Repeated clicking will cycle through all of the legal moves possible at that point (including removing the section entirely).
Note that a single Pathmaker puzzle can have many possible solutions. Although the designer has to solve his own puzzle before he can open it (preventing impossible puzzles from being released to the public), the solver is not required to copy the designer's solution exactly. Any legal solution will work.
Even the grid boxes without towers can be clicked to form the piping. I was trying to figure out a Pathmaker for an hour before finally figuring this out. After reading the instructions, I was under the impression pipes only went on the towers. Also, on a box where you get no pipe option, have you connected incorrectly? -Choltai
Yes, when you click through the options on a box, you will get all legal moves. If there are no options, then there are no legal moves at that location, due to the configuration of adjacent boxes. -Ur-man
Solving a Pathmaker can be achieved by following the aqueduct towers (the green and black dots) and their rules.
Your first step in solving the puzzle should be to set the towers to obvious options:
After setting the above, many more trivial moves will become available. Some examples:
The problem starts when you deplated all such moves, and must "guess" the next one. Very often, a single guess will be followed by many other trivial moves, which might even solve the puzzle. A nice trick is to take a screenshot before your guess (use ALT+C to take a screenshot), guess, follow a bunch of trivial moves, and if you reach a non-solvable position, use your screenshot to recover.
However, more complex pathmakers will have a limited amount of trivial moves and a large amount of possible guesses. A possible rule of thumb to follow here is the Rule of Evens: try and divide the board to subsections (if a group of towers is blocked behind pipes, they must be connected to each other somehow and then "leave" their subsection). Only an even number of pipes can enter a subsection- otherwise there won't be enough pipes.
The test building is built in a Small Construction Site. Construction cost: