So you've just started your first puzzle in Oxytone. Or maybe it's your 10th or 100th puzzle.

For your first move in the game, you can right click if you don't like the tile, and there will be no penalty (thanks to Gypsyrose's excellent guide https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3110393544 that explained this). You keep clicking until you find "the perfect starting tile".

But how would you even know? What makes one tile better than another? Which tiles make the most sense in a given location? And most importantly, "why do I keep losing over and over in this game!?"

Well let's start by first understanding, "you are about to die." And having said that, lets try to get some tools under our belts to make that less likely.

In order to avoid dying, you will have to harvest a tile. In fact, you will have to harvest a large number of tiles to fill the whole puzzle.

So let's start by figuring out which tiles can NEVER be harvested, and hopefully gain some insight along the way.

An easy way to find such tiles, is to look at a finished puzzle where all the tiles have been placed.




If we look closely at this image, we can see that there is a very long blue string that starts in the center and wiggles all over until it goes back to the center again. I've placed 2 blue arrows in the middle of the picture that point to the start and end of the blue string:




Let's zoom in on that image:




Do you notice anything about which tiles never got filled? Here I'll draw 9 boxes around the 9 tiles that never got harvested:



Every tile that touches the starting point never got filled. And also 3 tiles that touched those inner 6 tiles also never got filled!

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So let's review what we know:

- Any tile that touches the starting tile can never be filled. All tiles that touch the starting tile will have paths that lead to the inner tile, which means they will be terminated. You don't want to make your path lead to those terminating paths. I call these "Dead paths". You want to keep track of where the dead paths are, so you can avoid them.

Later we will find out that 1 of those dead paths will become the path to the finish line! But let's not worry about that for now.

- Any tile that touches a "dead path" can also never be filled.

- If we are very careful, we might be able to notice when a tile is next to an inner tile, or 2 layers out, that the tile is a candidate for harvesting - where we know we can fill every path that is on that tile.

"If we are very careful!" Ugh what do you mean! Well let me try to clarify that a little. Here I have drawn green boxes around tiles that were as close to the starting tile as possible, and still weren't touching a dead path, so they were early harvesting candidates.



That means there was some possibility that they could never touch a dead path and have all their paths filled. It can still be messed up - you have to keep watching when you pick a candidate and say "I think I will be able to fill all the paths on this tile". That's the way I do it as I'm starting early and adding my first 30 tiles onto the path I'm building. I'm always trying to steer back to that candidate tile I had picked for filling all of its tiles first.

Of course it doesn't always go as planned - sometimes one of those green ones gets a dead path hitting it by accident, just like those 3 that have red boxes but are still a further distance from the starting tile. You have to keep watching where all the dead paths are. That's really the only way.

So far we've learned that there are some tiles that can never be harvested, and where we can have a hope that some tiles maybe can be harvested if we fill all the paths in them. We've learned what a dead path is too, and that we want to avoid dead paths.

Now let's look at something new: the dead end loop.

A dead end loop is an isolated loop. It can't hurt your path-building, but it prevents a tile from being harvested, and it lowers your final score.

Here's one marked with a red box:


These isolated dead loops can be really tiny, or gigantic. They can be hard to see, and can take some effort to notice, because when you are spinning a tile trying to figure out what rotation to use, it may create and destroy these isolated dead loops just depending on the rotation you pick. I try to look at all the paths that are connected to the current tile I'm placing, just to make sure it isn't creating any new isolated loops.

But look! I missed some isolated loops in the picture! Can you find them?

Good luck finding them! It takes practice! That's part of the challenge in this game!

Remember back in one of the earlier sections I said that one of the starting dead paths will eventually become the ending path? Now we'll look at that closer. For this starting example, in the early puzzles, it applies just for the path leading back to the starter tile - but later you'll also see puzzles where there will be more than just the starter tile that might have a dead path that will become the ending path - and that's okay. But we'll only look at the first example in this guide.

Let's go back to looking at the starting hex:


If I recolor the blue path to white, and mark one of the tiles as not yet placed, I can see what the puzzle looked like before the tile was placed (even though I am not very good at drawing it - sorry):


From the starting tile, now the path that was shown blue, I've drawn white over it, showing that before the all-white (colored-in) tile was placed, that ending path was a dead end, but it turned into the finish line when that last tile was placed!

When placing this last tile, it will be very easy to accidentally create new isolated dead loops. Be careful not to just rush straight to the end here, but find the longest path that can be generated and that will remove any isolated dead loops that would otherwise be created.

Hopefully by now you can see how the puzzles work a little better. Let's review what we covered in this guide:

- Tiles can only be harvested if every path in them is used.

- Some tiles can never be harvested if they have dead paths in them.

- All tiles touching the starting tile have dead paths, so they can never be harvested.

- Some dead paths form loops, so they are isolated and can't hurt you, but they will also prevent a tile from being harvestable.

- If you can fill the whole puzzle with tiles, then one of the dead paths will become a finish line when you place the very last tile in the puzzle!

Generally, near the start of the puzzle, I try to move out the middle of some empty space, away from the starting tile, so there will be a better chance of quickly finding a way to fill a tile. That is the highest priority when starting, and it is also the most difficult part of the game. The first 30 moves or more are usually when I die, and if I make it over a "hump" then suddenly the puzzle becomes really easy and the game almost plays itself when I keep these rules in mind.

I hope this guide helped you. Have fun when playing, don't think too much - but also try to keep these rules in mind, and they will be your friend when finding solutions!

Now if you are still interested in learning more, I have also put in some "beyond basics" sections. These will try to make things even more clear, though you might just want to look at them after you've played a little too.

Congratulations for reading the previous sections. This is an "extra credit" section. In this section we will explain the various permanent tiles you'll find in Oxytone.

The most obvious two permanent tiles are the starting tile and the edge tile, both shown here:


Notice that the starting permanent tile on the left has no paths in it at all! The edge permanent tile on the right has 1 "u" shaped path in it. You will also see edge permanent tiles with no paths in them just like the starting tile (like in some pyramid puzzles).

The permanent tiles that have "u" shaped paths in them make the puzzle much easier, because they guarantee the tile won't create any dead paths. [It's possible they will create a dead isolated loop though, which isn't a big deal.]

The bad news? The bad news is that the permanent tiles that DON'T have "u" shaped paths in them make the puzzle much harder, because they guarantee the tile will create dead paths for any tile placed next to them! Some of the advanced puzzles have all the outside edges made of these tiles, so then the puzzle has a TON of dead paths that flood into it! Ugh! As if there wasn't already enough to worry about! So now you have been warned! Here is an example of such a monster:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3255928246
As an aside: I spent a long time on the first move throwing out tiles and trying to convince myself of which tile was the best starter. I settled on a straight line that went away from the starting tile, with a tight corner to the left and a "u" to the right. You might be able to make those markings out from the picture.

This was the 3rd attempt I had made on this puzzle. It felt a bit lucky, and I avoided the outside quite a lot near the beginning. I finished the inner puzzle fairly late, and then it was sort of "pick up" working on the outside, which already had some parts of the outside filled in - so I had to take care seeing ahead of time how I could prevent cutting myself off from access to all the remaining parts that were on the outside.

Uh... what were we talking about? Oh yeah, permanent tile types.
There are also some "middle of the puzzle" permanent tiles that look like this - they just stretch things out, and I have to have a lot of spare tiles before I will try going through them:


But those are advanced. Once you see them you'll already have outgrown this guide. "Psh... yeah I already know all that" you'll say to me. But hey, you gotta start somewhere!

Now close your eyes.

Okay open them! You can't read with your eyes closed!

Try to imagine a puzzle which only had "u" permanent tiles on the outside.

If there were only the single "dead-path-generating" permanent starter tile in the middle of the puzzle and every other permanent tile had a "u" hook on its exposed sides, then no matter how big the puzzle, no matter how many tiles you put down, if you fill the puzzle just by randomly placing enough tiles (blind-folded, and you're given enough tiles so you don't have to earn any like in the normal game-play), the loop must always start and end at the starter tile, and that tile must have 1 path that is the one you started at (the blue path) and 4 other "dead-paths" that also start and end at the starter tile, and there will be 0 or more disconnected loops on the board too.

This will always be the case!

So what you are trying to achieve is that there are 0 disconnected loops, and the 4 "other dead-paths" be as short as possible. At least for the first puzzle which just has the single dead-path tile as the starter. That won't always be the case, but this is a good starting example to understand what's going on.

You're still reading!? Look at you! Here I was worried you'd have given up on me by now. Thanks for putting up with my ramblings. This is another "extra credit" section. If you followed the basic guide you will figure this out on your own, but it's spelled out here because it's nice to spell things out.

There are a few tiles which could be called, for lack of any originality on the guide author's part, "not the basic" tiles. I guess they have names, like "bronze", "silver" and "gold", and I can show them here too:


I can sort of see "gold", and "silver", but "bronze"? Its more like "pukish"? Hey that's not very nice! Okay we'll call it "bronze". Maybe there's something wrong with my display, or I'm color blind. Whatever.

What you care about is, if you can create a long path when you place a tile, that long path will upgrade the tile you place next to either "pukish", "silver" or "gold"! Nice huh? And not only does the color change, but if you harvest those tiles by filling every path you will get extra tiles and not just the piddly few you normally get for filling a normal tile! So try to choose paths that will be really long, but also be careful that they don't get wasted by landing near a dead-path generating tile, as then you won't be able to harvest them, as I show I was really good at in the example picture. All those wasted tiles that I didn't harvest! Ugh again!

Good luck my friend. It's a brutal game!

Fine - I'm going to try posting a complete play-through. This is on the very first level, which is actually harder than some of the higher levels. That's right! If you are a beginner, I'm afraid you are doomed to the mercy of the random number generator gods! So let's talk about this a little okay?

Because the game is based on random number generators to pick your tiles, you can be unlucky. In fact, you can be unlucky many times in a row. And the next person playing, can be lucky. So that person will think this game is the greatest thing in the world! They will say "oh we all had hard times!" but they have NO FREAKING CLUE! So don't take this personally. Seriously. If you're not having fun, quit playing, and go to some other game. Because RNG (random number generator) games are really just a shot in the dark as far as fun goes, and one person may get lucky and they are then hooked and will weather some down-times, and the next person may start unlucky and they never want to play again!

Okay.... with that out of the way... let's watch me try to play one of the first games, where you are required to break a certain score just to get to the next level.



Do you see that little loop I just made? That tile which has the little loop, I'm targeting that tile for harvesting. I want to harvest it as fast as possible, but let's see if the random number generator gives me tiles that will make it possible?

As you watch me making moves, it looks like I'm some super-genius doesn't it? But don't be fooled. I'm just trying to make the most out of what I get, and at at least one point I even hit the right-click on the mouse button to throw out a tile I didn't like, because I was getting desperate. The game will make a fool of you. It will make you feel dumb. But it isn't you! Well it is sort of you because you hang in there and keep trying, and so now you are at the mercy of the random number generator gods! Why did you trust them? Now you can see that I'm just as foolish, and I go on my fool's errand hoping the gods will be kind to me. But alas.... they will not. Not on this round at least.




















It's been 21 moves, and now for the first time a tile is filled and harvested! That took too long! And it only returns a piddly 1 tile for all my efforts!


So at this point, you can watch the rest of the pictures, and it doesn't get better. By now I think it's obvious that I lost because I targetted a tile for harvesting that had not been leveled up to silver or gold. It's not helpful enough just to harvest a plain tile, because it only gives you one more tile, which just makes you suffer a little longer before dying.










Ugh wasn't that painful!? It's awful. This game sucks! I don't blame you if you give up now. But if you keep trying, you might get lucky eventually. That seems to be the best that we can hope for. Hopefully this guide gave you some tools to help you get through the hard times this game has to offer. It can really be fun in places, but it requires getting over the "humps" and those can be like gigantic walls that are getting in the way.

Please let me know in the comments if you have other ideas that I should put into the guide. I'm happy to hear from you!