Daily Water Sort

Daily Water Sort gives one date-stable solver-verified sorting board with its own browser-local history and streak. It is a specialist Daily mode, not a new member of Today’s 6, so the frozen main lineup remains unchanged.

One board for the date

The Daily mode derives its puzzle from the local calendar date. The date determines the difficulty, source board, color permutation and tube permutation. Reopening the same date produces the same transformed starting position, so the board is suitable for a local streak and for comparing your own attempts over time.

The 2026 schedule uses a six-day rhythm that spreads Easy, Standard and Challenge rather than placing Challenge on every day. Across the 365 dates there are 122 Easy boards, 183 Standard boards and 60 Challenge boards. The independent verifier also checks that all 365 transformed starting states are distinct.

Daily still uses verified par

The Daily board is not generated by a separate unverified randomizer. It comes from the same frozen 120-source bank as Practice. Every source has an exact breadth-first minimum move count. Daily color and tube permutations preserve the underlying state graph, so the displayed par remains the verified minimum for that transformed board.

This matters because Water Sort can look deceptively simple. A board may have several legal moves that lead to longer routes, and a purely heuristic par would be hard to interpret. Here, par has one concrete meaning: the shortest number of legal pours found for the source position.

What the Daily history stores

When a Daily board is completed, browser-local storage records its date, moves, par, elapsed time and whether the solve was Clean or Assisted. The specialist streak increases when the previous calendar day also has a completed Daily Water Sort. The best streak is kept separately from Today’s 6 streaks.

Reopening a completed date restores its specialist history. The Daily mode does not add an entry to the `days` object used by Today’s 6, and it does not alter the frozen six-game lineup. This separation is checked during migration and browser QA.

Clean versus Assisted

Using Hint marks a Daily solve Assisted because the solver identifies a next move. Undo and Restart do not. That rule mirrors Practice and keeps the record easy to explain. A player can back out of a mistaken pour without losing Clean status, while a solver-provided step remains visible in the final result.

Replayable controls such as the color-blind symbol toggle also do not affect Clean status. The toggle changes presentation only; the tube contents and legal move graph are unchanged.

How Daily difficulty rotates

Easy uses four colors and two empty tubes. Standard uses five colors and two empties. Challenge uses six colors and two empties. Tube capacity remains four on every day. Because the number of colors changes while the buffer count stays fixed, later modes require more careful staging of buried layers.

The schedule intentionally keeps Standard as the most common Daily level. It provides enough interaction to feel like a full puzzle without making every day a long Challenge solve. Easy days serve as shorter resets and Challenge days appear regularly without dominating the calendar.

Color and symbol identity

Daily transformations may rename colors compared with their source board, but every visible color also receives a letter symbol. That mapping is deterministic for the date. A user who cannot comfortably distinguish two hues can read the letters instead, and screenshots retain the same identities even when display color changes.

Local autosave

If you leave a Daily puzzle before completion, the current tube arrangement, move count, Undo history and timer state are saved locally. Returning to the same date resumes the position. Timing pauses when the page is hidden, so switching tabs does not silently inflate an active solve.

There is no account sync in this preview. Clearing browser storage can remove history and autosaves. That limitation is stated rather than hidden because the project remains local-first and public.

Strategy for a Daily board

Begin by scanning for same-color top runs that can be merged without consuming both empty tubes. If two tubes expose the same color, joining them may create a longer block that can later move in one pour. But avoid filling an empty tube with a complete color too early if doing so traps another color beneath a mixed stack.

When stuck, Undo is usually more informative than immediately asking for Hint. Compare the position before and after one branch, then decide whether the empty-tube capacity improved. If you choose Hint, the local solver searches the current state and identifies one legal next pour; the result is then recorded as Assisted.

Separate from Today’s 6 by design

Daily Water Sort exists because a specialist can benefit from date-stable replay without forcing a change to the main daily product. Today’s 6 continues to use its frozen twelve-game source set and existing 2026 sequence. The Water Sort route, history and streak remain outside that system unless a future explicit product decision changes the contract.

This makes Daily Water Sort useful as an optional repeatable habit while preserving compatibility with historical Daily scores and archives.