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This hunt | Puzzle writing | Pokémon | Other

Some questions have been edited slightly for clarity.

This hunt

Is there a reason you decided to title this hunt just Silph Puzzle Hunt rather than Silph Puzzle Hunt 2 or Silph Puzzle Hunt 2025?

Honestly, we didn't really think about this. We didn't want to create a canonical ordering (is this Silph 2 or Smogon 5?) and figured solvers would just append their number of choice mentally.

How do you decide how much Pokémon is the right amount of Pokémon?

At least for puzzles actually about Pokémon, we don't think this is primarily a question of quantity—if a new Pokémon-themed idea is floated that feels sufficiently "different" from the ones already slated for the hunt, we tend to include it. Naturally the bar for what feels "different" enough is somewhat higher because the datasets or concepts draw from the same IP, so this ends up being somewhat self-regulating. We'd like to think the Pokémon puzzles in this hunt (Sudoku Starter Pack, Cry-ptic, Trading Places, Homebrewed) played out quite differently in this regard. We rejected a couple of ideas because they were quite similar to these existing puzzles, even if they were mechanically different (e.g. one other puzzle about the PTCG and a puzzle about Pocket both felt like they overlapped too much with Trading Places).

We also tend to sprinkle Pokémon references into non-Pokémon puzzles, but we try to construct these in ways that (we hope) are generally recognizable as Pokémon references to non-players and which can be resolved relatively smoothly via Google. Probably the deepest cut was the Pokémon identification subpuzzle in TPICI which required an idea about weight-based moves, but we also saw a few people get tripped up by the subpuzzle in Only Compact about Pokémon abilities. Since Silph started as Smogon Puzzle Hunt, though, we think it's both thematic and faithful to our roots to include a significant amount of Pokémon content to give a small edge to Pokémon players.

I'd like to know more about how LITS was designed, and any drafts you might've went though. I like how the puzzle eases you in linearly and was wondering whether there were any other design considerations that might not be obvious to a solver. I'm thinking of writing a sequential instructionless similar to this, and LITS was really inspiring.

When I solve instructionless/rule-learning puzzles, the biggest frustration I had was trial-and-erroring several different rules and hitting dead ends. Hence, LITS had one simple overarching design philosophy: When introducing an unfamiliar rule, make it as obvious as possible. Furthermore, since the puzzles themselves didn't have an answer check, the new rule needs to be sufficiently easy enough to figure out to the point where it's difficult for the solver to have a wrong interpretation of the rule.

The letter introduction order was also specifically chosen to create clueful titles for new gimmicks. (It went tetrominos → pentominos → NEW → TWIN → FLIP → DOT → Put R at the end and make it cursed because R is present in half of the clue phrase).

As for individual puzzle design, I tried to make every introductory puzzle mostly-solved using prior logic, then require the knowledge of the gimmick (e.g. red/blue regions) to resolve a non-uniqueness issue near the end. Then, I put a second introductory puzzle that requires using the knowledge of the gimmick to start the puzzle.

Would you release LITS as an actual puzzle book? Like in PDF form with special visual design attention and the ordinary rules of LITS included and etc.

I'm not planning to turn this into a logic book, but feel free to collate the puzzles into a book if you like them that much :)!

Does the LITS author publish their logic puzzles anywhere else?

I don't really publish my logic puzzles anywhere because I don't write logic puzzles very frequently (around twice a year or so). You can check out two of my giant Shaymin puzzles I've written: Shaymin Icebarn and Shaymin Yajilin

What was your favorite puzzle of the hunt by somebody else, for all the authors?

lydian: This is a really hard question! I loved everything, but I think I have to pick Ouroboros, it's so brilliant in so many ways!

Level 51: I'm not super decided yet, but I think my favorite might actually be the Haunted Graveyard meta—I love the general idea of recontextualizing datasets between different IPs, the selection of ghosts is great, and the construction is super tight. It's not the showiest or most dazzling puzzle but I think it's lowkey really solid.

What was the Heroku plan used for the server?

In prep for hunt start, we increased provisioning for our Heroku app to the following, roughly modeled after Huntinality's usage:

To the person who put Farfetch'd in the cauldron: who hurt you?

mstang: I would assume Farfetch'd

Level 51: We caught it trying to leek the puzzles. It had to be stopped.

rachel: It's a nod, by the way, to the phrase that originates the name of a really great soba restaurant in Seattle (and Farfetch'd's Japanese name).

Why was the art never used in any of the metas?

We got a lot of comments about this—sorry! The art was done independently of puzzle development, and after most of the metas were written, so there wasn't much opportunity to tie it in. The only meta written after the art was the metameta, but unfortunately by this point we were running low on time and opted for a less construction-intensive puzzle identification step.

We were, however, cognizant of the possibility that people would think the art had puzzle content. We made sure to have some icons with more than one Pokémon species and difficult-to-count numbers of Pokémon, to discourage that line of thinking. Hopefully it didn't mislead anybody for too long.

Can we get the full version of the art?

Yes, it's available in various forms here!

Would love to know if you post any of your art online!

rachel: Sorry, no, not outside of puzzlehunts. I did work on Teammate Hunt 2020 & 2021 with some great people. Maybe the next Silph, if it comes back again in some form.

lydian: This year I only did the hint and solve icons, although last Silph I worked on our victory page art and the map + PuzzleStops. There's also some work of mine in my Smogon art thread if you'd like to check that out—it hasn't been updated in a while (since late 2021), and I would just put all of my work there in chronological order, so do check the later pieces if you want to see my more refined drawings! (To be frank I haven't been doing a lot of art since then, so there isn't too much to update quite yet.)

Is Cross-Pollinator an ethical machine?? Are those Pokémon safe in there?

No. They are in constant pain.

Where was the Balatro puzzle?

At a farm upstate, together with the RuneScape puzzle.

Puzzle writing

What does the process of designing a hunt look like for you, and how do you find testsolvers? We're looking at writing one ourselves.

The platonic ideal of the hunt-writing process is pretty much what you might expect: some theme, scope, and structure planning, then metas are written and testsolved, feeder answers are released, and people reserve, write puzzles, and testsolve while art and tech progress in parallel.

The early stages tend to be vital for determining the direction of the hunt. (Usually we just execute this stage by kicking around ideas in chat—some teams hold a vote for competing ideas, but since Silph hunts tend to go the Pokémon route anyway we tend not to have that many different concepts and generally get by with a bit of benevolent dictatorial action.) I cannot stress enough how important it is to scope the hunt you're going to write suitably to your team's writing strength; I've been on multiple projects that fizzled out because the team selected a round-wide gimmick that constrained puzzles and made them too hard to construct, or the hunt was just too big and not enough people had ideas. This hunt itself scaled too large for our writing team—we only had five different authors act as primary author on at least one puzzle—and "died" multiple times, only reborn each time through sheer force of will and stubbornness, which are not ideal driving factors for a hunt (they tend to cause recoil damage).

Once puzzle writing begins (or maybe even before), the process becomes something of a race against demotivation and loss of interest; it's very easy to get people on board when an idea is fresh and exciting, but having a team consistently execute on the idea over the course of several months is a really tall ask, especially when there's no monetary incentive in the picture. The goal here is to have the general team motivation last long enough to get "most" of the hunt content created, up to a point where the dedicated remaining members can push through the rest of the work themselves.

To try to induce accountability in our team members, we set up regular meetings to discuss puzzle/round progress as well as weekly check-ins where we asked writers to mention what they planned to do in the following week and how their progress in the preceding week had matched up against their previous set of plans. Ultimately, though, probably the strongest solution in this regard is to be friends in real life first and rely on social pressures to drive accountability—it's much harder to consistently skip out on work when you know you're letting down people you face regularly in real life.

As for testsolvers, on an individual-puzzle level basis we just testsolve each other's puzzles in small groups or solo. We have some team members who don't necessarily write puzzles but are happy to hang around and testsolve occasionally; we also organized larger weekend testsolving sessions for subsets of this group to run through a few puzzles in the hunt at once. For full-hunt testsolving, it's often possible to ask around in various community Discord servers for people who might be interested in solving the hunt but aren't available the weekend of, or even teams who are kind enough to help out as testsolvers. Puzzle World is a public puzzle Discord server which could be helpful for this purpose (as well as other puzzle discussion).

How does one write hunt puzzles and/or how would one be able to contribute to hunt puzzles?

This is a very broad question! I'll briefly discuss an easy way to get into writing hunt puzzles as well as a more general and less practical idea about what's involved in writing hunt puzzles.

The easy way: many hunt puzzles are based on existing structures or mechanisms which are broadly recognized to be fun things to do, like crosswords, word searches, grid logic puzzles, and so on. Compared to coming up with a bespoke structure for a puzzle, it's "relatively" easy to add a twist to one of these existing ideas that leads to an extraction. Some examples I've written for easier events: crosswords where some words extend outside of the grid, which get extracted; a word search called "Double or Nothing" where double letters in the words to be found get removed in the grid, and the leftover letters spell an answerphrase; or even just a standard grid logic puzzle with an extraction grid tacked on.

More generally and less practically, hunt puzzles at their core are about having an interesting observation or idea and sharing that idea with solvers, so a puzzle is written in a way that shows off that idea, often (maybe even ideally) setting up solvers to come to that idea themselves. This led to some of the more complex puzzles in this hunt, but often it can even be as simple as "hey, come check out this cool dataset". (On this topic, the next question has a quick discussion about showcasing interesting features of datasets.)

It's possible to just write puzzles yourself and send them around, but if you're interested in getting the most eyes on your puzzles then the best vehicle for that which is most likely to get attention is a scheduled hunt of some kind. It can be awkward to join an existing writing team, but generally there's no harm in asking; if you can't do that, your other option is either to interest a group of friends in writing a hunt with you (preferable) or write a whole hunt yourself (not recommended).

What do you usually consider when writing puzzles? I've found a lot of cool datasets that would make for a cool puzzle and would be a fun Google train, but I'm having a lot more trouble brainstorming things to actually do with the information.

lydian: I think dataset puzzles are the coolest when they can explore something interesting of the medium that isn't just "a list of things with names", are there any interesting properties of your dataset that are unique to it? Are there any aspects of it that lend themselves to be puzzly elements? To second Alex's Rosenthal's TED Talk I really do think the best puzzles are the ones where the writer has an "aha" of their own that they can pass along to the solvers, be that some interesting aspect of a dataset or medium that you realize can be used an interesting way, different datasets that can be paired with or mapped onto one another, etc.

Level 51: Like lyd said above, the most important part of writing a dataset puzzle is figuring out what's special about your dataset and how the puzzle structure can be used to lean into and accentuate those features and employ the dataset in a "natural" way. This can involve mimicking the structure of the dataset in your puzzle; one example that comes to mind is I See! from Silph 2021, which mapped the 11-by-5 structure of its dataset onto a list of 11 five-letter words to associate each item with a letter for extraction. Another (somewhat heavier-leaning) example is Homebrewed from this hunt, which creates a near-duplicate of its dataset and draws multiple parallels between the two throughout the puzzle. I find drawing correspondences to be a very satisfying action in puzzles, so this is consistently one of the first things I try to do when writing puzzle around a dataset.

Another important part of a dataset puzzle is in the "inroad", where solvers have to identify items from the dataset. Here I find it's helpful to build up a "toolbox" of ways to clue or "generate" the strings being identified. For example, when I found the dataset that turned into Cry-ptic, I immediately knew that I wanted to use cryptic clues to clue the cry strings, since they're really efficient and effective at generating arbitrary strings. On the other hand, if you're dealing with names composed of meaningful words but that aren't really common phrases, maybe quirky crossword-style clues or oddly specific drawings are the way to go, like in Young Artists from GPH 2022. In yet other cases, you might even want to require solvers to find the dataset first, and then clue the elements using their dataset-specific qualities, like in I See!. The list goes on, and generally gaining experience with and exposure to more puzzles will help you decide what kind of cluing/extraction mechanisms are going to work for you.

What are some fun puzzle gimmicks you've seen in the past?

lydian: A few puzzles that come to mind:

Level 51: Just so that this doesn't just become a "favorite puzzle" question, I'm indexing heavily on the word "fun". Here are some recommendations of puzzles that made me smile and laugh:

Pokémon

Best Pokémon to have as a teammate on a puzzlehunt team?

lydian: surely Metagross, they'd solve every puzzle just by looking at it.

Level 51: lydian's answer is right IF you are just out to win. But the fun of a puzzlehunt is in the experience of solving the puzzles, not reaching the answers. So you'd want some Pokémon that enhances your puzzle solving experience, one that makes the journey through the hills and vales and contours of the puzzle that much sweeter. Therefore I would choose Metagross because you can probably use it as a printer

lovemathboy: Shaymin.

Level 51: how does that help

lovemathboy: the question didn't ask for the most helpful Pokémon

lydian: Shaymin can give you gracideas on how to solve the puzzles :)

lydian: Oh also if we're talking about enhancing the solving experience, surely having Shuppy would be a good choice so it can eat any negative emotions you're feeling from being stonewalled in the R1 meta.

rf215: Eggplant Parms hunts with a Togekiss (maybe the aerial view helps with the meta-solving?) and a Shaymin (legendary at logic puzzles), it works out pretty well for us 😊

What are your opinions on Shedinja as a defensive pivot?

lydian: Shedinja actually surprisingly has a niche as a defensive pivot: in singles it can be used on stall, especially after the introduction of Heavy-Duty Boots, to blanket check some Pokémon that would otherwise be problematic. It's seen use in VGC before too, especially in highly centralized metas like restricted formats!

Level 51: I just added this question as an example in the feedback form because I was trying to be funny and wanted something overly specific and Pokémon-related. I don't actually have anything to say about Shedinja, except it's pretty funny I guess? I peaked at #4 on the Pokémon Showdown Gen 7 Doubles OU ladder before Sword/Shield came out with a Shedinja / Chansey team which you could read about if you're interested, I guess.

Opinions on Soak Shedinja in VGC?

lydian: ah yes great idea, just pair it with a Pokémon with Lightning Rod and Skill Swap Sap Sipper onto it and it'll be unstop— hm wait a minute.

Level 51: It definitely depends on the typing spread of common threats in the format, but generally I think Soak Shedinja is a bit worse than just using vanilla Shedinja because fitting Soak into the rest of your team and bringing it to a game is inevitably going to weaken it. Usually when you Soak early the opponent just targets down your other slot (which feels a lot like a 1v2 because Shedinja does not do much) and brings out their Shedinja answer lategame and there's nothing you can do about it, and especially in a tight 4v4 format like VGC it's hard to preserve Shedinja and force their answer out and beat it and Soak lategame.

Which generation had the best OU meta?

lydian: I haven't played all of them but SM is by far my favorite! Until somewhat recently that people found out how good Cresselia teams are and that ruined the whole tier now. I may be a bit biased because I tend to like more offensive metas, as my goblin brain stops being able to focus on the game after like 30 turns (which is why I've been trying to pivot to Doubles recently). SV also looks like something I'd enjoy, with its faster pace, and I am a big fan of Terastal but I haven't had the time to play too much of it!

Level 51: BW was the only one I ever played in any quantity. I ran some semistall team and was pretty bad at it, but I blame most of that on not having a fully-developed prefrontal cortex.

Opinions on The Culling (regarding Pokémon Sw/Sh)?

lydian: I'm a bit conflicted because on one hand it probably had to happen at some point, but also Pokémon is the most profitable media franchise in the world, and they consistently don't produce games that live up to the standard of what the most profitable media franchise in the world should be putting out, and I think Dexit at the time it came was a symptom of that. Plus they didn't help themselves with the way they announced it, and with their excuse of "it's to improve animations and 3D models" when a vast majority of those were just reused. idk, I still love these games but I wish they had more resources and time put into them to make them better!

Level 51: My only opinion is that it was really sad how upset some people got about it.

Why does Spheal get so much love for its roundness when Clodsire is so much more appealingly Shaped? Spheal being a perfect circle is too artificial, whereas Clodsire is shaped like a friend and is so huggable and cute!

lydian: I love them both but Spheal is the pinnacle of cute so it outcutes Clodsire, sorry. Also Clodsire isn't very huggable because it's probably gonna protrude its spines from out of its skin to poison you if you do hug it so I'd be careful doing that!

Level 51: One of the servers I'm in has a group of Clodsire enjoyers who call themselves the "clod squad". We also had a separate "hands gang" for Iron Hands fans, but eventually all the users in that group were subsumed by the clod squad. So honestly I'd say it's doing pretty well

lovemathboy: Shaymin is also extremely friend-shaped

What is your favourite electric mouse Pokémon?

lydian: Alolan Raichu

mstang: Bulbasaur

lovemathboy: Emolga, this clip lives rent free in my head.

Top three Pokémon? Mine are Honchkrow, Galvantula, and Scolipede!

lydian: At time of writing Walking Wake, Hisuian Goodra, and Chien-Pao, but my answer is liable to change in a matter of seconds.

Level 51: Triple ducks: Porygon2, Togekiss, and Gengar :)

Other

What is your objective opinion on Singapore?

mstang: I dunno, I've never been, but seems like a fun place.

lydian: I really want to visit there someday to go to Universal Studios Singapore, look at the cool triple-building with a boat for a roof, and meet my friends Level and lmb ^^ Objectively though, my opinion is that it's hot and humid…

Level 51: 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 SINGAPORE MENTIONED 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 MAJULAH 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 THIS IS MY COUNTRY THIS IS MY LAND 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 STAND UP FOR SINGAPORE 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 MAJULAH 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 I LOVE SINGAPORE 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 SINGAPORE MENTIONED 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬

lovemathboy: 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 SINGAPORE MENTIONED 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 MAJULAH 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 THIS IS MY COUNTRY THIS IS MY LAND 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 STAND UP FOR SINGAPORE 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 MAJULAH 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 I LOVE SINGAPORE 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 SINGAPORE MENTIONED 🇸🇬 🇸🇬 🇸🇬

Have you or any of your friends had a flight cancelled in 2010 because of a looming cloud of volcanic ash?

lydian: no

Level 51: The user who asked this question has one of the best team name / team member name combinations I've seen in a hunt recently