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Puzzle Quarry

The Slitherlink Archive

There is no directory of saved boards behind this page. A date is all it takes to build the loop again from scratch, which is why nothing here can go stale.

Puzzle #1 Medium Time 0:00 Segments 0/52

00230011301211003211032332113

A medium 8×8 board with 29 numbers. Click a segment once to draw it, again to cross it out.

Check this before you rely on it. This slitherlink generator is provided free and without warranty, and its results are not professional advice.

Pick a day

Rebuilt on request, never stored

A conventional archive is a directory of saved files and it fails in the ordinary ways directories fail: something gets pruned, a migration loses a month, an old link comes back with a different board from the one somebody remembers. There are no files here. Each entry is a date, and the date is sufficient to rebuild the board exactly, because every decision the generator makes is driven by it.

That has a property worth naming. Rebuilding a past daily repeats the whole search: the loops that were grown and rejected for landing outside the day’s difficulty get grown and rejected again, in the same order, and the one that survived survives again. What you are handed is not a copy of that day’s board; it is that day’s board, produced the same way a second time.

The archive therefore has no edge and no maintenance. It runs back to the first daily and stops, because before that date there was nothing to be the loop of the day — not because a retention policy expired.

Working through the days you missed

An archived board is played on exactly the same terms as today’s: the time is kept, it can set a personal best at that size, and the day joins your history. What it cannot do is reach backwards and stitch up a streak, because a streak that could be repaired afterwards would stop being a record of anything.

The archive is far more useful as a practice ground than as a list to clear, and this puzzle rewards that better than most, because the rung a board forces is fixed by its weekday. If what you want is practice at spotting a ring about to close, work through Thursdays; if you want to drill the corners, take a run of Tuesdays. Choosing by weekday is the thing this archive can do that a folder of saved boards cannot.

Common questions

How far back does the slitherlink archive go?

Back to the very first daily, and not one day earlier. Everything from that date onwards is playable, and each board is derived from its own date on the spot.

Will a link to an old daily loop still work later?

Yes. The board is derived from the date by the generator, so the same link produces the same loop indefinitely — there is no stored file to be lost or replaced.

Does finishing an old loop repair a streak?

It does not. A streak is a tally of days you were actually here, so filling a gap afterwards would make it meaningless. The play is still recorded, and it can still set a best time.

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