Mysterious Negg Cave

High in the mountains of Shenkuu you can find the Mysterious Negg Cave, a location discovered during the course of the Year 14 Festival of Neggs. Inside the cave lies a simple grid-based puzzle in the form of a clockwork Negg, which you can attempt to solve once per day to collect the prize inside.

You can reach the cave by clicking the background mountain on the left side of
the Shenkuu map, or access it directly by adding it to your jnAccount's dailies list.

The Puzzle

The puzzle itself is fairly simple, with three symbols and three colors to be placed on a 3x3 grid. In any valid solution to the puzzle, the grid will hold three of each symbol, each a different color. I'll be referring to them as the water symbol, the fire symbol, and the wind symbol.

The water, fire, and wind symbols, respectively.

For each puzzle, you're presented with a series of two to six clues on a scroll to the left of the Negg, showing where colors and symbols should be placed in relation to the grid and each other. While the clues may contain uncolored symbols and colors on their own, your solution will not; after you've used all the clues, you should be able to use your own reasoning to figure out where to place any symbols or colors that your clues didn't help with.

Some of these puzzles can be fairly difficult, so let's go through the solving of one step-by-step.

This puzzle is somewhat complex, but can be solved with just a bit of logical reasoning. The z-shaped area in the bottom-right of the scroll shows a red space and a water symbol; since it's three spaces wide and two tall, we know that the red has to fit in either the top-left of middle-left space on the grid. To figure out which, let's look at the other clues. The top-left clue on the scroll shows a yellow space diagonal to a fire symbol. Assuming that the first clue we looked at occupies the bottom half of the grid, what happens when we try to overlay the two?

As you can see, if we place the first clue at the bottom, either the yellow will overlap the red, or the fire will overlap the water. Color spaces can only overlap uncolored symbols or symbols of the same color, while symbols can only overlap the same symbol, in any color. Since placing the clues as shown above won't work, one of them has to be moved; the second clue is three spaces tall, so can't be moved up or down, and we've seen that there will always be a bad overlap if the first clue is on the bottom, so our only option is to move the first clue up.

At this point, we know where the first clue goes, but it's impossible to be sure about the second. Let's set the second clue aside for now and look at the others. The clue in the top-right corner of the scroll is the same shape as the first clue, but has a yellow space where the first one had a red. Since the yellow and red can't overlap, the clue has to go on the bottom, with the yellow in the center of the left column and the purple in the center of the bottom. We can also place the clue showing a fire symbol and a purple fire symbol on the left side of the grid, as the fire would overlap the water if we placed it on the right.

We can also now tell where that second clue, the one showing the yellow space and fire symbol, goes. Since the puzzle has three of each symbol in different colors, the fire symbol has to go in the bottom-right corner; otherwise, we would have two purple fires. With this, we finally know where the remaining clues go as well.

From here, it's just a matter of figuring out which colors and symbols we're missing. By making the fire red, the water purple, the yellow space water, and the red and purple spaces wind (all of which is easily inferred from what we already know), we have a solution to the puzzle.

Prizes

The Neggbreaker

Upon successfully solving the puzzle, you may also receive The Neggbreaker as a Battledome challenger. When originally released during the Year 14 Festival of Neggs, the Ancient Negg Amulet could be used to substantially weaken the Neggbreaker; this no longer seems to work, making it the strongest regular challenger in the Battledome - although the challenger is currently unavailable for battle.

This game guide was written by: Chesu