Puzzle #4 — 2026-07-23
The answer was Sri Lanka. The scene was built from Kurunegala. Difficulty: medium. This day ran before launch and had no players.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- Coconut palms stand over everything, with paddy in the low ground.
- Shops are single-storey with deep shaded verandas under corrugated roofs.
- Three-wheeled auto taxis are everywhere, and traffic keeps to the left.
- The script is rounded, full of loops and curls, and shares the signs with a second one.
- The country is an island off the southern tip of a much larger one.
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 | coconut palms over everything, paddy in the low ground, jackfruit beside the houses |
|---|---|
| terrain | low undulating country, nothing high in view |
| architecture | single-storey shops with deep shaded verandas under corrugated roofs, houses rendered in bright colours |
| roadside | left-hand traffic, three-wheeled auto taxis in numbers, crowded buses |
| signage | a rounded script of loops and curls beside a second one (never rendered legibly) |
| light | bright equatorial light with heavy afternoon cloud building |
Where this actually is
Kurunegala, Sri Lanka sits at 7.49, 80.36 — see Kurunegala, Sri Lanka on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.