That thermometer in the center, it is 23 cells long, and yet still contains only digits between 1 and 9 inclusive. 23 cells is one of the longest slow thermometers possible within a standard 9x9 Sudoku grid, although I’ve heard rumors of even longer. I think to be longer, the thermo has to cross itself, which can lead to some confusion. There are a few different ways to arrange such long thermometers, and this is one.
I looked up a few temperature scales to use for puzzles involving “slow” thermometers like these, and there are some odd ones. It’s nice to live in a world in which such things are settled, in which we have two settled temperature scales oriented around humans, and easy math to convert between them. Team Fahrenheit and Team Celsius don’t apply here, though. Here, temperatures rise very, very slowly, or sometimes not at all.
It’s a big one, and it’s anchored by Gravity Cages at the bottom. While these cages don’t directly affect anything else in the puzzle, I like to imagine they’ll combine to form a black hole, pulling everything in all four grids into a single cell.
The world is full of things to measure, and scales for reporting those measurements. Some are more rational than others, some are more human-oriented than others, and some are older than others, but none of them involve thermometers that sometimes rise and sometimes don’t. This puzzle does, though!
It’s an XV Thermo puzzle, except you can’t see it all at once. You can see just enough to fill in one cell, after which you’ll be able to see more. This is the second of four puzzles exploring a guided solve path using Fog of War.
Modern integrated circuits are mass-produced and extremely tiny, but I remember when even products shipped by manufacturers like Sony had internal circuits soldered together, and chips glued glued in place.
It looked slightly more like three people crawling in an earlier version of this puzzle, but I’m keeping the name.
It’s a computer chip. Or a mockup of a computer chip. Transistors, traces, and so on.
Some people seem fixated on Inuit people having many words for snow, but English does too! From blizzard to whiteout, with flurries, graupel, and drifts, we have so many words. The one this puzzle’s palindrome lines make me think of is sleet.
It may seem like a lot of constraints, but it's a Samurai Sudoku, so you should only have deal with one or two at a time.