My brain works in interesting ways. I tend to gravitate towards correlation and inference quite naturally, which doesn’t always work out. It makes the world this giant spiderweb of interconnected pieces, where pulling on one tiny bit can have effects at seemingly completely randoms spots. Things like climate change impacting well water, which impacts purification, which impacts hockey rinks, which impacts hockey teams being able to play, which means more travel, which means more traffic and more planning, which means a tighter schedule, which means improved meal plans, which means… it can be paralyzing at times. The whole thing is this giant puzzle that’s always moving.

Then you have mystery boxes, which require you to just accept that things go in and things go out, but without causality. Using the connected pieces above, it would be more like going from dry well water straight to scheduling with no real reasons between. I struggle tremendously with letting go of my desire to understand and mystery boxes absolutely fascinate me in their complete breakdown of logic. Put in a chicken, get a thunderstorm. Put in another chicken, get soup. Like what the heck? Under most circumstances the magical box is simply a quick method to gloss over details. In the poorer versions, like say a science fiction serial, mystery boxes become writers crutches. Star Trek’s holodeck is absolutely notorious for this.

Games

Return of the Obra Dinn and Strange Antiquities are good examples of puzzles with inference. You are given contextual clues (e.g. this item turns blue when next to a flame, or this person’s bunkmate was taller) and from that, you need to extrapolate answers. Given the amount of questions present, there’s a validation exercise for each guess, and more clues are discovered as you go. There’s a quiet joy when you make a stretch guess and it opens up a new area to discover. The development challenge is difficult, as you need to create breadcrumbs to a conclusion you’ve already come to. You can’t give the answer, and you can’t give super obtuse clues that conflict with others. The sanity check alone is massive, and frankly harder and harder to do as more and more people know the answer.

I like factory production games because they act as mystery boxes when fully formed. If you do it right, you put in a few items and out pop rocket ships. Often, these games focus on logistic puzzles so that you can optimize the box – logistics mostly about moving things from one place to another.

Factorio vanilla, DSP, and many others in the genre focus on belts/trains to move things around. Foundry’s recent-ish patch for space trading implemented a giant mystery box that negates 90% of the logistics issues.

Factorio Space Age broke this model, or rather evolved from it. The start planet still has logistics issues but by the time you leave, quite a few of them are negated through fleets of robots. Robots have amazing throughput options and absolutely remove a pile of spaghetti design for logistics.

Cerys

Cerys is a mod for Space Age that puts you on a planet that’s a mix of Fulgora (materials generally come from recycling material) and Aquilo (the planet is frozen and needs to be melted in a very linear fashion). I’ve completed the game a few times now, so I’m quite aware of the tools and their applications. A recycling plant is not hard to build, but building logistics between ‘islands’ of thawed areas, or fixed production plants across the planet is challenge for sure. Bots are not an option until the puzzle box is solved.

The good part is that with a set of knowledge coming in, most of these challenges can be sorted out. The less good part is that there are 2 new core mechanics introduced that do not make any sense on the surface – both relating to particles. How you can control, defend, deflect these particles is fundamental to the larger planet puzzle. I was able to infer to a degree how one of these mechanics worked, but it’s also quite RNG based and hard to validate. The second mechanic absolutely eluded me and had zero in-game context that I could find. I still honestly have no idea how you’re supposed to figure it out. That said, once the solution was present it wasn’t terribly difficult to work my way around it.

I’ve yet to complete the planet, and I don’t see any particular benefit long-term to maintaining a presence (aside perhaps Holmium productivity boosts). I also don’t really see how anyone could appreciate this particular puzzle box without first having spent time on Aquilo in a previous playthrough. I figure I have a few sessions to go to close out this mod and then try a new one.