It's almost the new year, so it's time for the next installment in my little series I'm calling My Odd Hobby! Again, the cache is not at the posted coords, so don't bother searching there.
The Puzzle:
I recently hit my 100th find on a mystery cache, so I thought I'd celebrate by placing one of my own - and making it an actual puzzle this time! If you're unaware, I love puzzles and have for a long time. I love doing crosswords, sudoku, kakuro, you name it. But the type of puzzle I love most is picture puzzles.
Often called picross or nonograms, picture puzzles have become increasingly common as of late. (I saw quite a few caches in and around Lansing that used them...) But there's a variation on these out there that I found in a book a long time ago, and it's probably my favorite way to do them - I still work on this book to this day. And so, when thinking of ideas for my next puzzle, it was obvious what I should do. Without monologuing any longer, I give you the puzzle below:
Each square tells you how many adjacent squares should be filled in - "adjacent" here includes both the square the number is on and the squares horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. Thus, 9 would be the maximum number in any square, 6 the maximum for any square on the outside, etc. For example, the 0 in the bottom left tells you that none of the five adjacent squares or the square itself is filled in, and then you can use other numbers to figure out the rest.
The Cache:
The find should be very easy once you have the coordinates - it is a pretty large one. The difficulty for this one comes entirely from the puzzle, as it's a format I've never seen before and don't really have a reference for how easy it will be for newcomers. Oh, and there might be a little twist, so brute forcing it isn't an option here... ;) The terrain may vary depending on where you park or what time of year it is, but it shouldn't be too bad no matter what.
The FTF prize is a small puzzle set. I figure if you make an effort on this one, you probably like puzzles. :P Congrats to BryantsofTR on another FTF!