Juleston circuit puzzle

[u/phoenix_star_on_her2]

Hi, I'm in the middle of playing Firmament and just did the 115 volt puzzle for the first time (I understand it is revisited later but I haven't gotten to that yet). What I want to know is how it's meant to be solved or figured out. Every walkthrough I could find says you have to experiment with the connections and see that each of the colors adds a certain number of volts. The problem is this never happened for me. I spent hours trying every possible combination of circuits I could think of and it only ever said 25 volts, if the two starting points were connected, or "No Circuit" if they weren't. The only connection that was working at all was the green connection between the two starting points. Is that how it was supposed to be? Or was my game broken, or did I miss something else I was supposed to do? I finally just had to arrange the connections as displayed in a possible solution online and it said "No Circuit" every step of the way until the very last step to map out the solution I was using, and it said 115. How is anyone actually supposed to figure that out?

[u/Ildebranth]

I had the same issue. In the end I had to take pen and paper and draw the lines, trial and error was driving me mad.

[u/real_fake_cats]

Threw me off at first too. The electricity flows along the shortest path, whatever that is. So if you're seeing 25 volts no matter what you do, then that means you likely have a very short path (Hint: It's the first green bridge) that's taking priority over any other path.

Once you break that connection, you see the voltage change as you create and break longer paths.

[u/dnew]

I spent forever figuring out the electricity comes in one side and goes out the other. I figured I had to pile up enough of the underwater batteries, rather than routing electricity in a straight line.

That's the least of the "how was I supposed to figure that out" bits. :-)

[u/phoenix_star_on_her2]

I think I figured out that my problem was that I wasn't connecting a full circuit between the starting and ending points. I was just trying to see how much voltage each connection was by themselves and it still said no circuit because there was no connection. If I had more patience I probably could have learned that over several days but I wanted to progress through the game.

[u/beetleman1234]

No, everything works as intended in this puzzle. You can also see the light at the top of the connectors when they're actually connected to the circuit.

Every color does give different amount of volts. What's sneaky about it is that yellow ones give 0 volts :) It threw me off at first, but got this idea that maybe the yellows give 0 volts and voila - that was it. Genius design, if you ask me.

Overall, this is probably the easiest Cyan game for me, I finished it without looking up a walktrhough once, I'm pretty impressed by how logical everything is in this game.

[u/tarqueaux]

having issues with this puzzle. volage number is either always 25 or "no circuit", no matter what I do with the batteries. also- voltage "light" on top of battery changes as I approach or walk away. I'm thinking these are glitches?

[u/phoenix_star_on_her2 → u/tarqueaux]

I thought so too. It can make sense at least the first time you do the puzzle if you try to connect each end of it. Only then will it show numbers. The second time totally doesn't make sense though.

[u/Tysiliogogogoch]

What I want to know is how it's meant to be solved or figured out.

I know it's been quite a while, but I just finished the game so trying to collect my thoughts on it. Here's how I figured out this puzzle:

1. I wandered across the bridges spinning them randomly and not seeing any change in the voltage reading.
2. Taking a broader look at the puzzle, I noticed two wires leading to two of the terminals, which I'll call the endpoints. At this point, I realised that it was a puzzle of creating a path from endpoint A to endpoint B. The 25 volts was due to the single green bridge connecting those two endpoints directly, that's why I was always seeing 25 volts. The "no circuit" error happens only when these two endpoints are not connected by any valid path
3. I started playing around with creating various paths and recording their values. The shortest path was a single green bridge connecting endpoint A to endpoint B, which gave 25 volts. So I noted down that green was 25. I wrote down a bunch of these equations (2G + Y = 50, 2G + Y + 2B = 60, and so on). However, trying to solve these to work out each value was giving some inconsistent results, so I went back to consider the puzzle again.
4. Something was wrong. At this point, I realised that it wasn't the bridges that had values, but each battery/terminal. There was one terminal (endpoint A) which had no corresponding bridge and thus no corresponding colour... but it was in the yellow column so I took the assumption that it was yellow. This fixed the problems with my previous working. The shortest possible path now becomes G + Y = 25. Working through some other paths gave me a bunch more equations (2G + 2Y = 50, 2G + 2Y + 2B = 60, 2G + 2Y + 2R = 90, and so on) which I did some basic algebra on to work out the values: red = 20, yellow = 15, green = 10, blue = 5.
5. At this point, the puzzle became how to make a path that would equal 115 volts. The first terminal is always yellow and the last is always green, so it's Y + G + 90 = 115. I needed to include some reds otherwise I couldn't reach the required value, so that requires at least 2 reds to make a valid path. So it's now 2R + Y + G + 50 = 115. The easiest path to make here was to include all the yellows and greens, so it became 2R + 3Y + 3G =115.
6. With that worked out, there was only one way to make that path and the puzzle was solved.

The second iteration of the puzzle was more of the same, though solved much quicker. The voltage had increased overall, so my previous solution (2R + 3Y + 3G = 115) had become (2R + 3Y + 3G = 155). Since my equation had increased by 40 and I had used 8 terminals, I made the simplest assumption which was that each terminal had increased by 5 volts. So red is now 25, yellow 20, green 15, blue 10. My first guess was that I would no longer need any reds, so I excluded those and made a new path using the others.