Untangle

About

Solve Strata puzzles like a (cheating) boss!

Heavily inspired by the strata-solver project. Written in some slick Rust.

Usage

Input format

A puzzle description consists of the following:

• First line contains rows and columns numbers
• Remaining lines contain the grid description (whitespace-delimited)

Color descriptions can be as follows:

Code	Color
*	Blank
y Y	Yellow
r R	Red
p P	Purple
g G	Green
o O	Orange

Note: obviously, color descriptions don't need to match the in-game ones, just need to be unique

Example:

4 4
p r p p
g g p g
r * r r
r r p g

The grid description should have the following orientation (using geographical directions):

      NW
   ---------
   |x x x x|
SW |x x x x| NE
   |x x x x|
   |x x x x|
   ---------
      SE

Output format

A solution description consists of ordered mappings <ROW> => <COLOR>, optionally preceded by a "blank moves" section, which shows rows mapped to the * wildcard. The blank moves can be of any color and can be made in any order, with no impact on the solution's end result.

Row numbers shall be interpreted as follows:

  ---------
0 |x x x x|
1 |x x x x|
2 |x x x x|
3 |x x x x|
  ---------
   4 5 6 7

Example:

SOLUTION 1
0 1 => *
2 => Red
3 => Purple
4 => Red
5 => Green

CLI

Here's how the help message looks:

untangle <version>
A solver for Strata game puzzles

USAGE:
    untangle [OPTIONS] [input]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -n, --number <N>    Show only the first N solutions

ARGS:
    <input>    File to read from; defaults to STDIN if not provided

Full example

Let's solve one of the puzzles:

First, create a puzzle description file:

3 3
* g r
r g *
r * p

Then we can run the solver:

$ untangle -n 1 puzzle.txt

SOLUTION 1
0 1 => *
5 => Red
2 => Purple
3 => Red
4 => Green

Et voilà!