Puzzle #3 — 2026-07-22
The answer was Nepal. The scene was built from Butwal. Difficulty: medium. This day ran before launch and had no players.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- A flat plain ending abruptly at a wall of green foothills.
- Concrete buildings three or four storeys high, shops open onto the street, reinforcing bar left sticking out of the roofs.
- The buses are painted in dense multicoloured patterns.
- The script is Devanagari, and traffic keeps to the left.
- The country is landlocked between the two most populous on earth.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | banana and mango around the houses, rice on the flat, sal forest climbing the ridge behind |
|---|---|
| terrain | the last of a flat plain ending abruptly at a wall of green foothills |
| architecture | narrow concrete buildings three or four storeys high, shops open straight onto the street, reinforcing bar left sticking out of every roof |
| roadside | left-hand traffic, buses painted in dense multicoloured patterns, dust over everything |
| signage | Devanagari script (never rendered legibly) |
| light | hazy subtropical light with the hills fading into it |
Where this actually is
Butwal, Nepal sits at 27.70, 83.45 — see Butwal, Nepal on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was not in the image-quality sample — its answer key was checked, its picture was not second-guessed. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.