Water Sort Puzzle Online

Water Sort is a compact logic puzzle about managing temporary space. Every colored layer begins inside a tube. A legal pour moves the complete matching block from the top of one tube into another tube that is empty or already has the same color on top. The board is solved when each non-empty tube contains four layers of one color.

Why this version uses verified source boards

Randomly distributing colors can produce awkward or unsolvable boards, so this implementation does not generate a puzzle and simply assume it works. V0.115 contains a frozen bank of 120 source positions: forty Easy, forty Standard and forty Challenge. Each source is checked by an independent breadth-first solver. The stored par value is the minimum number of legal pours found by that exact search, not a hand-entered estimate.

Practice still changes from seed to seed. A deterministic seed selects a source board, permutes color identities and permutes tube positions. Those transformations preserve the puzzle graph, so the verified minimum move count remains valid while the visible layout changes. Sharing the same Practice URL produces the same transformed puzzle again.

Easy, Standard and Challenge

Easy uses four colors plus two empty tubes. It is a good place to learn the rule that a pour transfers the whole matching top block when space allows. Standard uses five colors and two empty tubes, which creates more competition for the same temporary buffers. Challenge uses six colors and two empties, so a poor early commitment can block several later colors at once.

The tube capacity stays four in every mode. Difficulty comes from the number of colors and the structure of the starting position rather than from hiding rules or changing the meaning of a move.

How to think about a Water Sort position

A useful first question is not “Which color can I complete immediately?” but “Which color can I expose without consuming both empty tubes?” Empty tubes are flexible because they accept any top color. Once an empty tube contains a color, it becomes temporarily specialized. Strong solves preserve at least one route for freeing buried layers.

It also helps to notice runs. If the top two or three layers of a tube are already the same color, a legal pour transfers that entire run at once. That can be efficient, but it can also move more material than expected. The move counter records pours, not individual layers, so a three-layer transfer still counts as one move.

Par and personal records

Par is tied to the exact source board and survives deterministic color and tube permutations. Finishing at par means your solve matched the minimum number of pours found by the exact solver. Finishing above par is still a valid solve and can be useful practice because the board may reveal where extra moves were introduced.

Clean personal bests are stored locally by difficulty. Move count is the primary comparison; elapsed time breaks ties. The system does not turn the result into an IQ score, percentile, medical claim or cognitive diagnosis. It reports the literal puzzle quantities the game can actually measure.

Undo, Restart and Hint

Undo restores the exact position before the previous pour and keeps a run Clean. It is intended for correcting a move or comparing two branches. Restart restores the transformed starting position and also keeps Clean status. Hint is different: it runs a local solver from the current position and identifies a legal next pour, so using Hint marks the solve Assisted.

The distinction is visible in recent-session history. Clean and Assisted solves are both preserved, but only Clean results compete for the Clean PB. This makes the record understandable without pretending that normal navigation controls are cheating.

Color-blind symbols are part of the board

Every color has a letter symbol in addition to its fill color. Symbols are on by default and may be hidden with the Color-blind symbols toggle. The symbols are generated from the same deterministic color mapping as the visual colors, so a user never has to rely on hue alone to determine whether two layers match.

This layer also makes screenshots and low-contrast displays easier to read. Turning symbols on or off does not change the puzzle state, timer, par or Clean status.

Autosave and local-first play

After a legal pour the current tubes, move count, Undo history and timing state are saved in browser-local storage. Returning to the same seeded Practice URL restores that position. The game pauses timing when the page becomes hidden and writes the latest state before leaving.

No account, remote database or paid puzzle API is required. The frozen source bank, deterministic transformations, solver, stats and autosave logic all run in the browser. The source bank is a project-authored logic asset rather than a scraped puzzle collection.

What counts as a legal pour?

A source tube must contain at least one layer. The destination must have free capacity and must either be empty or have the same color on top as the source. The game transfers the largest top run that fits. Moving an entire uniform stack into an empty tube is treated as a no-progress relocation and is excluded from the solver move set, which reduces symmetric states without changing meaningful solutions.

Practice without touching Today’s 6

Water Sort is a Practice specialist. Playing it repeatedly does not change the score or lineup of Today’s 6. Daily Water Sort also maintains a separate specialist history and streak. That separation allows the main Daily rotation to remain frozen while new specialists gain deep replayable modes.

Use the standard Practice page when you want repeatable seeded puzzles, exact par comparison and local PBs. Use Daily Water Sort when you want one date-stable board that can be restored later on the same device.