Solar Puzzles 1.7.1: Crystal Hunt, Mystery Flights and a museum you can play with
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Solar Puzzles 1.7.1 is out on the App Store and Google Play. 1.7 rebuilt the house the games live in. This one fills it: a new way to play Planet Blocks, puzzles that are made up for you once you have run out of levels, and a museum where the exhibits do something when you touch them.
What’s new
- Crystal Hunt in Planet Blocks: forty pixel pictures built of blocks, with crystals and stardust to collect. The eight Training pictures are free; the rest come with the Space Pass.
- Mystery Flights. Clear every level you can reach in Planet Trails, Crystal Hunt, Planet Rescue or Cosmic Marbles, and a fresh puzzle is made just for you. Three a day, five minutes apart; unlimited with the Space Pass.
- Planet Rescue grows to forty missions, all free, with vertical rescues, shaped gaps and ice to rebuild.
- A Daily Puzzle in Planet Trails for Space Pass members: one chart a day, the same for everyone.
- The Space Museum comes alive, all of it free: jump on any world with ground to stand on, fly four real spacecraft missions, send a ray of light past a black hole, and open every photograph full screen.
- A progress line on every game card, and Contact Us in My space.
Crystal Hunt: pictures built of blocks
Planet Blocks has always been endless: pieces arrive, rows burn, the score climbs. Crystal Hunt gives it levels. Each board opens with a picture already on the grid — a shooting star, Saturn, a lunar lander, Pluto’s heart, and on the fortieth board the whole Solar System — and some of its blocks carry a crystal or a speck of stardust. Burn a row or a column through one and it is yours. The goal at the top says how many of each the level wants. Nothing falls and there is no clock; the level is lost only when no piece in the tray fits anywhere, and the tray deals one piece Planet Blocks never had: two blocks that touch only at a corner.
The first board plays its one move by itself — a single block into the star’s row — and then hands the same board back. The eight Training pictures each teach one idea, are free, and pay no star points; Beginner (9–20) and Explorer (21–40) come with the Space Pass.
Forty hand-drawn pictures raise a question a designer cannot answer by looking: which of them is harder? So a script plays every level two thousand times with a greedy bot and counts how often it clears each one. The bot plans nothing ahead, so its numbers do not say how many people will win; they say which of two boards is the harder, and that is what an order needs. They also taught us something we would have got wrong. Asking for more crystals makes a level longer and hardly harder — two or three more cost about five moves. What makes a board hard is the shape of its picture: blocks standing alone, rocks near the edges, holes one cell wide. Two stray rocks took the Black Hole from 85 to 71 per cent. The last levels are harder because of what they look like, not because they ask for more, and nothing in Explorer goes below 69 per cent: a lost level costs a heart, and these boards are for a child as well as for an adult.
Mystery Flights
A level list ends. Before 1.7.1, a player who had cleared every chart in Planet Trails had nothing left there but replays. Now the end of the list opens a Mystery Flight: a puzzle made up on the spot for that player — a sky chart in Planet Trails, a symmetric pixel sprite in Crystal Hunt, a rescue in Planet Rescue, a chain on one of the five tracks in Cosmic Marbles. A Trails chart and a Rescue mission are checked to be solvable before you ever see them, and a chart grows with the player.
Without the Space Pass there are three a day, five minutes apart; with it there is no limit. A Mystery Flight pays no star points and hides no artifact. That is deliberate: a puzzle that is made up for free, as many times as you like, must not also be a way to mint the points that unlock the museum. The levels pay; the flights are for the fun of it.
A museum you can play with
The museum used to be something you collected: a photo and a fact for every world your star points opened. In 1.7.1 every exhibit opens on a page of its own, and many of them have something to do. All of it is free and costs no hearts.
Jump here. Every world with something to stand on has an astronaut at the foot of its page, and every astronaut jumps with the same push. On Earth that is 50 cm; on Mars 1.3 m, on the Moon 3 m, on Ceres 17 m, with the camera pulling back to keep the jump in view. The four giants have no ground, so the jump is made on the cloud tops, and the page says so. On the asteroid Bennu the push is faster than the speed it takes to escape, and the astronaut drifts off into space and does not come back. Gravity comes from one table of real values, shared by both apps.
Fly the mission. New Horizons, Cassini, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 each fly their real route on a map of the solar system: Launch, Pause, a timeline to scrub, and a card for each part of the journey that turns as the spacecraft gets there. The routes are trajectories from NASA’s JPL Horizons system, bundled into the app, so the map works with no connection like everything else.
Send a ray of light. On the two black holes, M87* and Sagittarius A*, a lamp shines at the hole and a finger aims it. The ray is not drawn to look right; it is solved, step by step, from the equation for light in a black hole’s gravity. Aim it close and it bends; closer, and it comes back the way it went or circles the hole; closer still, and it falls in, which is why the middle of the photograph is dark. The theory says light arriving from far away is captured when its aim would pass the hole closer than 3√3, about 5.2, in the equation’s units of the hole’s mass, and escapes when it would pass wider; the app’s paths were checked against that. The picture is not to scale. The light paths are real.
And every photograph opens full screen, with pinch and double-tap to zoom and its credit still in the corner. Where nobody has photographed a world yet, it stands on someone else’s artwork, and the credit says so.
The smaller things
- A progress line on every game card, along the seam between its picture and its name, the way a video thumbnail shows how much you have watched. A game not started wears none.
- Planet Rescue’s forty missions sit on the same level road as the other games, in Training, Beginner and Explorer.
- Contact Us in My space opens the same short feedback form as Rate Us, behind the same grown-up check. The privacy policy lists it with the other links out.
- Android tablets rotate, as the iPad already did; a phone stays upright. On a tablet held upright an exhibit page takes one readable column instead of two short ones.
Get Solar Puzzles — free to play, no ads, nothing collected, every puzzle offline. On both stores.
