SGT‐CUBE(6)

📦
version 20250730.a7c7826 · 4 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

✨ SGT‐CUBE(6) ✨

bestie we are in the Games section of the manual and today's hyperfixation is a little rolling cube that will absolutely eat your whole evening, no cap 🎲💖

🌸 NAME

sgt-cube — Rolling cube puzzle

🌀 SYNOPSIS

sgt-cube [--generate n] [--print wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n]
[--colour]] [game-parameters|game-ID|random-seed]

sgt-cube --version

📖 DESCRIPTION

okay so this is yet another one the author originally saw as a web game 🌐. This particular one was a Java game (http://www3.sympatico.ca/paulscott/cube/cube.htm), and it's by Paul Scott. Iconic of him fr.

Here's the vibe 💅: you've got a grid of 16 squares, and six of them are blue 🔵. On one square rests a cube. Your move is to use the arrow keys to roll the cube through 90 degrees so that it moves to an adjacent square. If you roll the cube onto a blue square, the blue square is picked up on one face of the cube; if you roll a blue face of the cube onto a non-blue square, the blueness is put down again. (In general, whenever you roll the cube, the two faces that come into contact swap colours.) Your whole entire job, your moment, your main character arc, is to get all six blue squares onto the six faces of the cube at the same time. Count your moves and try to do it in as few as possible 👑

Unlike the original Java game, this version has an additional feature 🌈: once you've mastered the game with a cube rolling on a square grid, you can change to a triangular grid and roll any of a tetrahedron, an octahedron or an icosahedron. yes. really. slay.

🎮 Cube controls

This game can be played with either the keyboard or the mouse 🖱️⌨️.

Left-clicking anywhere on the window will move the cube (or other solid) towards the mouse pointer.

The arrow keys can also used to roll the cube on its square grid in the four cardinal directions. On the triangular grids, the mapping of arrow keys to directions is more approximate 🙈. Vertical movement is disallowed where it doesn't make sense. The four keys surrounding the arrow keys on the numeric keypad (‘7’, ‘9’, ‘1’, ‘3’) can be used for diagonal movement.

(All the actions described below are also available.)

🧊 Cube parameters

These parameters are available from the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu.

Type of solid

Selects the solid to roll (and hence the shape of the grid): tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, or icosahedron.

Width / top, Height / bottom

On a square grid, horizontal and vertical dimensions. On a triangular grid, the number of triangles on the top and bottom rows respectively.

🫶 Common actions

These actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in addition to any game-specific actions ✨.

(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead. noted bestie 🍎)

  • New game (‘N’, Ctrl+‘N’) — Starts a new game, with a random initial state 🎲.
  • Restart game — Resets the current game to its initial state. (This can be undone.)
  • Load — Loads a saved game from a file on disk.
  • Save — Saves the current state of your game to a file on disk.
    • The Load and Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save, reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving). the way that it remembers everything… obsessed 💾
  • Print — Where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog allowing you to print an arbitrary number of puzzles randomly generated from the current parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. (Only for puzzles which make sense to print, of course – it's hard to think of a sensible printable representation of Fifteen! 😭)
  • Undo (‘U’, Ctrl+‘Z’, Ctrl+‘_’, ‘*’) — Undoes a single move. (You can undo moves back to the start of the session.)
  • Redo (‘R’, Ctrl+‘R’, ‘#’) — Redoes a previously undone move.
  • Copy — Copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so that you can paste it into (say) an e-mail client or a web message board if you're discussing the game with someone else. (Not all games support this feature.)
  • Solve — Transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. For some games (Cube) this feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. For other games (such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give you information, if you can't see how a solution can exist at all or you want to know where you made a mistake. For still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations.

Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from elsewhere. Other games (such as Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what the solution is already. Still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only if they aren't too difficult.

The ‘Solve’ command adds the solved state to the end of the undo chain for the puzzle. In other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing the answer, you can just press Undo. it's giving "peek at the answer key then pretend you didn't" 👀

  • Quit (‘Q’, Ctrl+‘Q’) — Closes the application entirely.
  • Preferences — Where supported, brings up a dialog allowing you to configure personal preferences about a particular game. Some of these preferences will be specific to a particular game; others will be common to all games.

One option common to all games allows you to turn off the one-key shortcuts like ‘N’ for new game or ‘Q’ for quit, so that there's less chance of hitting them by accident. You can still access the same shortcuts with the Ctrl key.

🔑 Specifying games with the game ID

There are two ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later, or recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle.

The ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, on Mac OS X) each show a piece of text (a ‘game ID’) which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely the same game at a later date.

You can enter either of these pieces of text back into the program (via the same ‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the same game. You can also use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see below for more detail.

The difference between the two forms is that a descriptive game ID is a literal description of the initial state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used to create the puzzle. This means that:

  • Descriptive game IDs tend to be longer in many puzzles (although some, such as Cube (above), only need very short descriptions). So a random seed is often a quicker way to note down the puzzle you're currently playing, or to tell it to somebody else so they can play the same one as you.
  • Any text at all is a valid random seed. The automatically generated ones are fifteen-digit numbers, but anything will do; you can type in your full name, or a word you just made up, and a valid puzzle will be generated from it. This provides a way for two or more people to race to complete the same puzzle: you think of a random seed, then everybody types it in at the same time, and nobody has an advantage due to having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else. race day 🏁
  • It is often possible to convert puzzles from other sources (such as ‘nonograms’ or ‘sudoku’ from newspapers) into descriptive game IDs suitable for use with these programs.
  • Random seeds are not guaranteed to produce the same result if you use them with a different version of the puzzle program. This is because the generation algorithm might have been improved or modified in later versions of the code, and will therefore produce a different result when given the same sequence of random numbers. Use a descriptive game ID if you aren't sure that it will be used on the same version of the program as yours.
    • (Use the ‘About’ menu option to find out the version number of the program. Programs with the same version number running on different platforms should still be random-seed compatible.)

A descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which encodes the parameters of the current game (such as grid size). Then there is a colon, and after that is the description of the game's initial state. A random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.

If you enter a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random seed. If you enter a random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived from that random seed. 🔁

Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. For some games, there will be parameter data provided with the random seed which is not included in the descriptive game ID. This is because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. Thus, for example, the difficulty level in Solo (sgt-solo(6)) is not mentioned in the descriptive game ID.

These additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in a game ID. For example, suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle; so the friend reads out a random seed specifying ‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’ grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you have finished playing it, when you ask for a new game it will automatically go back to the ‘Advanced’ difficulty which it was previously set on. it forgets the side quest, not the main quest 💅

📂 The ‘Type’ menu

The ‘Type’ menu, if present, may contain a list of preset game settings. Selecting one of these will start a new random game with the parameters specified.

The ‘Type’ menu may also contain a ‘Custom’ option which allows you to fine-tune game parameters. The parameters available are specific to each game and are described in the following sections. 🛠️✨

💖 Specifying game parameters on the command line 💖

(heads up bestie: this whole section does not apply to the Mac OS X version, okay? don't come for me)

okay so first thing you need to know: the games in this collection deliberately never, ever save info onto the computer they're running on. no high score tables. no saved preferences. nothing. zero trace. 🙈 (the reasoning is iconic honestly: the author expects at least some people to play these at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible!)

but — and this is the slay part — if you do want one of these games to default to a particular set of parameters, you can just specify them on the command line. 💅

the easiest way to do this:

  1. set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see above)
  2. then select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (see above)

the text in the ‘Game ID’ box will be made of two parts, separated by a hash. the first part represents the game parameters — like the size of the playing area, and anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu.

if you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it'll start up with the settings you specified. periodt.

for example: if you run Cube (see above), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu, and then go to the game ID selection, you'll see a string of the form o2x2#338686542711620. take only the part before the hash (o2x2), and start Cube with that text on the command line:

sgt-cube o2x2

and if you copy the entire game ID onto the command line, the game starts up in that specific game that was described. this is occasionally a more convenient way to start a particular game ID than pasting it into the game ID selection box. 🎀

(you could also grab the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option instead of ‘Random Seed’ — but if you do, some options, like the difficulty level in Solo, will be missing. see above for more details on this, bestie.)

✨ Unix command-line options ✨

(this section only applies to the Unix port, fyi)

so on top of being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above), there's a whole other pile of options:

  • --game, --load — these two determine whether the command-line argument is treated as specifying game parameters or a save file to load. only one should be specified. if neither of these options is specified, a guess is made based on the format of the argument. 🤔
  • --generate n — if this is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a bunch of descriptive game IDs get invented and printed on standard output. super useful for gaining access to the game generation algorithms without necessarily using the frontend. if game parameters are specified on the command-line, they'll be used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters gets used. the most common use of this option is alongside --print, in which case its behaviour is slightly different — see below. 👀
  • --delete-prefs — this causes the puzzle to delete the configuration file where its user preferences were stored, if there is one. bye bye preferences 🫶
  • --print wxh — if this is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a printed representation of one or more unsolved puzzles gets sent to standard output, in PostScript format. on each page of puzzles, there'll be w across and h down. if there are more puzzles than w×*h*, more than one page gets printed. if --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to generate the printed output. otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate. for example:
sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each of which will have a 7×7 wrapping grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will send them to an actual printer. 🖨️✨

there are various other options which affect printing; see below.

  • --save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ] — if this is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, saved-game files for one or more unsolved puzzles get written to files constructed from the supplied prefix and/or suffix. if --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to generate the printed output. otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate. for example:
sgt-net --generate 12 --save game --save-suffix .sav

will generate twelve Net saved-game files with the names game0.sav to game11.sav. 💾

  • --version — prints version information about the game, and then quits. iconic, honestly.
  • --with-solutions — the set of pages filled with unsolved puzzles will be followed by the solutions to those puzzles. 🌈
  • --scale n — adjusts how big each puzzle is when printed. larger numbers make puzzles bigger; the default is 1.0.
  • --colour — puzzles will be printed in colour, rather than in black and white (if supported by the puzzle). 🌸
psst: the last three — --with-solutions, --scale n and --colour — are only meaningful if --print is also specified. no --print, no vibes. 💀

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

full documentation in /usr/share/doc/sgt-puzzles/puzzles.txt.gz. go read it, bestie, it's giving lore. 📚

and that's the whole page, fr fr! this was sgt-cube from the sgt-puzzles collection, dated July 2025, manual page SGT-CUBE(6). slay, go play some Cube 💖✨🎀🦋

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