Welcome to the ‘Australian Coat of Arms’ Geo-Art. This will be released in stages. This stage is the Shield. Each puzzle is different and is ‘hopefully’ designed to help you learn a little about different types of puzzles. Some will obviously be a little harder than others but should be doable with a little patience. You will find plenty of puzzle solving tools in your toolbox.
The cache is NOT at the published co-ordinates.
Brisbane Valley Rail Trail.
The Brisbane Valley Rail Trail, when completed, will be a 160+km recreation trail from Wulkuraka to Yarraman. (two small sections are currently not complete, funding has been made available to complete these sections.) It will follow the old Brisbane Valley railway line and provide walkers, mountain bikers, touring cyclists and horse riders with an opportunity to experience the history and landscape of the Brisbane Valley.
The trail is for walking, cycling and horse riding only. The trail surface is gravel and unsuitable for road bicycles or personal mobility vehicles. NO motorised vehicles of any type are allowed.
Allow 1 hour plus if you are doing just the shield caches and a full day if doing the complete series on a MTB, longer if walking.
As with any outdoor walk, take plenty of water as there is NO water along the BVRT, (only in the towns nearby, ESK) and sun protection as it can be very hot along the BVRT with some sections having very few trees to hide under.
MAGPIE ALERT
Also note that MAGPIE season is September through to November and magpies do nest along parts of the route. So take care.
The Puzzle.
You will need to solve the below puzzle to work out the location of the cache itself.
3D Sudoku takes Sudoku to the next dimension, at least in terms of its appearance. The puzzle solves like a regular Samurai Sudoku, with a range of overlapping grids and regions, except that in 3D Sudoku these constraints are more varied and consist of rows overlapping in one of three different directions. There a staggering 243 squares to solve! The aim remains simple: just place the numbers 1 to 9 once each into every black-lined 3x3 area as well as each of the 54 rows indicated by the coloured lines. Thick black lines indicate borders where the rows don't continue, so in terms of logic complexity it's exactly the same as a regular Sudoku. In terms of solving, however, it feels very different and usually the puzzles involve a "chase" around the the grid, which is carefully designed so that nothing connects through the middle and so numbers flow in both directions around the outsides of the puzzle.
To orientate you to finding the numbers I will explain the 3 planes. There is the FLOOR which uses the 3 3x3 squares at the very bottom of the image. There is the LEFT FACE which uses the 3 3x3 squares at the top left of the image. There is the RIGHT FACE which uses the 3 3x3 squares at the top right of the image.
So now imagine each plane, ie; the FLOOR, LEFT and RIGHT is a 9x9 grid , thought spread over 4 different planes.
I have coloured the starting 'corner' for each plane as a place to start your counting from. Yellow is the Floor. Blue is the Left plane and Red is the right plane.
F(C3 R6 ) L(C4 R1 ) R(C6 R1 ) F(C9 R6 ) L(C5 R5 ) R(C5 R7 ) R(C9 R7 ) 0 F(C2 R2 ) L(C1 R1 ) L(C3 R6 ) R(C4 R6 ) R(C4 R5 ) F(C1 R9 ) L(C8 R5 )
