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RuneScoop.com  >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide for RuneScape       >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering            >  The RuneScoop Ultimate Skill Guide - Dungeoneering - Challenge (Puzzle) Rooms

Ice Floor Magical Construct

This puzzle is Jagex’s homage to the “Lights Out” electronic game that Tiger Toys created in the mid-1990s. To unlock the doors, you must flip tiles in a 5x5 grid pattern so they are all the same color, using a combination of cleverness and brute force.

This puzzle is usually inset as a feature into an otherwise regular dungeon room, and there may be resources and monsters in it. There also may be keys, and they can be in odd places, so watch for them.

You’ll see a 5x5 grid of tiles, where each tile is actually is actually a set of 9 tiles in a 3x3 pattern. Some of the tiles are yellow and some are green, but on low detail the colors are desaturated so it almost looks like you are dealing with black and white. The objective is to change all of the tiles to be the same color, which can be done in two ways:

• Imbuing Tiles: Left-clicking a tile will imbue it with rune energy, causing it and the four squares immediately north, south, east and west of it to briefly glow and then flip to the other color.
  
  
• Forcing Tiles: Right-clicking a tile and selecting the “Force” option will cause the tile to change colors without any surrounding tiles changing. This will cause a small amount of damage to you (generally under 150 LP).

You are “supposed to” use the imbue option exclusively, using your brainpower to figure out the pattern that will change all of the tiles to the same color. Jagex provided the forcing option as a kindness for those who have difficulty with solving the puzzle. Forcing a tile will cause the game to warn you about the damge you’ll take and that you may mess up an otherwise-solvable puzzle, requiring other tiles to be forced as well.

This puzzle has a Runecrafting skill requirement and may not be doable if its level is above yours. In some cases you can boost your RC level high enough to do the puzzle—you may need a weak, regular or strong naturalist’s potion (using sagewort, wormwood leaf or winter’s grip respectively, each with a misshapen claw).

• Skill Requirements: Runecrafting.
  
  
• Tool Requirements: None.
  
  
• Overall Difficulty: Low.
  
  
• Added Difficulty for High Latency Connections: None.
  
  
• Danger Level: Low.
  
  
• Time Required: Low.
  
  
• Monsters in Room? Yes.
  
  
• Resources in Room? Yes.
  
  
• Impact of Team on Puzzle: None.

The best overall strategy is to get most of the tiles to be one color and then force the remaining ones. If you’re a puzzle person you can try actually solving the puzzle the proper way, but this is often much more time consuming, unless you already know the math behind how the puzzle works.

Most players prefer to think the puzzle out, imbuing tiles until they have only two or three left. There’s also a “foolproof” but slower way to ensure you never have more than a few tiles to force.

Orienting your camera so north is up, start at the northeast corner. Let’s say we are flipping from green to yellow. In the top row (northernmost), look for any tiles that are green, and imbue the tile directly south of it. This will cause the tile in the top row to become yellow, while changing other tiles as well. Repeat this for all of the green tiles in the top row. Then, repeat it for the second row from the top, then the third and fourth. At this point you’ll have at most five tiles still green (all in the bottom row). Click one or two of these to bring the total down to at most three or four, then force them.

The full solution to solving the puzzle is to use this “cascade” method to change all of the tiles in the top four rows to yellow. Now, let’s number the columns 1 through 5 going west to east (left to right). Then look at the bottom row and identify the westernmost tile that is still green:

• If the westernmost green tile on the bottom row is #1, then go back up to the first row and change tile #2 (from left to right) back to yellow. Now, repeat the cascade pattern described before down to the bottom.
  
  
• If the westernmost green tile on the bottom row is #2, click tile #1 on the top row (the westernmost one) back to yellow, then repeat the cascade pattern down to the bottom.
  
  
• If the westernmost green tile on the bottom row is #3 (in the middle left to right), click tile #4 on the top row back to yellow, then repeat the cascade pattern down to the bottom.

If none of these work, it’s possible that the puzzle can’t be solved. Note, however, that it may be necessary to do more than one of these before the puzzle is completed.

The puzzle is the same for teams. Usually it will have a Runecrafting requirement based on the player with the highest level in that skill, so have that person do it.

Ice Floor Magical Construct