#100 - Shading Mashup

Last week, the GAPP project in the CTC server reached its 1000th day. To celebrate, the authors (myself included) collaborated on a large shading mashup, which was very positively received by many of our solvers. Feel free to check out the puzzle here, if you are in the CTC discord.

Since my 100 blog entries milestone was also coming up, and I never ended up writing a big puzzle when I reached 1000 puzzles authored, I decided to write another puzzle on the same grid we used for GAPP1K, with the same genres and (mostly the same) rules, but without the difficulty cap. I expected the puzzle to take longer to finish, but it seems I got into a groove, and here it is! 

Overall I'm very happy with it - I managed to preserve symmetry in all grids except the Half Piece one (where it really wasn't working out no matter what I tried) and built in lots of cool interactions between the various genres. 

This puzzle is a fair bit more difficult and narrow than the GAPP one, so if you want to warm up first to get used to the rules, definitely check that one out first (there's even an example to the mashup on 6x6 grids, written by Menderbug, who spearheaded the entire GAPP1K project and did a fantastic job getting everything done on time)!

Difficulty: 3.5/5

Rules can be found here. Please read the bold parts carefully even if you are familiar with all the genres - they explain how interaction across different grids works. 

If you've already solved the GAPP one, there are two important differences compared to the GAPP puzzle: (1) Parquet uses more than 2 subregions (shade one, unshade the others) and (2) Half Piece cannot have any 2x2 unshaded entirely within the subgrid (but it is allowed for 2x2 unshaded to be partially within the subgrid).

To solve on Penpa, copy the Long link in this URL and paste it in a new Penpa tab, in the dialog box that shows up when you press the Load button.