Puzzle Quest: Galactrix :: Puzzling Guide

In Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, the same game board is used to perform different tasks. Aside from battling, you can use your puzzling skills to search for rumours, craft, mine, hack and haggle your way across the galaxy.

While space battles are fairly complex with all your weapons and such, there are really only a few ways to do the other puzzles. Follow this guide and you will have no problem with these mundane tasks.

General Protips

• You can always hit SELECT while traveling in order to see your inventory, missions, and other vital information.
• You ability complete these puzzles will sometimes depend on luck. If you fail, just try again and hope for better luck.
• Aside from hacking, there is no time limit for these puzzles, so do take a moment to think two or three moves ahead.

Mining

You will learn to mine within the first few missions of game, but you will be relying on your ability to dig into asteroids throughout the game. Not only will you find raw materials for the special items and spaceships you want to build, but you can also sell what you mine at space ports in order to make money.

• The best place to mine for money is Beta Centauri, which has the most asteroids. You can mine everything here except for medicine.
• If you need medicine, you can mine it from asteroids in Caelum, Sirius, Navi, and Icarus.
• Matching four-of-a-kind will give you six of something while five-of-a-kind will give you eight. If you have an option to do either a four-of-a-kind or two groups of three at the same time, it is always better to do four-of-a-kind because you will have more pieces remaining to work with later on.
• Clear pieces so that new pieces will fall into areas where there are more active pieces. Usually this will mean clearing towards the edge of the board.
• If you manage to mine the max numbers for the asteroid, you will get a nice bonus. This may seem to make smaller capacity asteroids look better, but in reality the bonus is not worth the effort.
• Asteroids replenish after you mine a couple other asteroids. For example, if you are in Beta Centauri, you should see an asteroids become available again after you mine your fourth asteroid.
• Keep an eye on your ship’s storage level. Once it fills up you cannot carry any more stuff and you’ll need to either drop some or sell some at a space port.
• The prices at the spaceports are constantly changing. Don’t worry too much if you are not selling at a good price since you can always mine more later. All you lose is time and, at most, about 100 credits.
• If you are mining at Beta Centauri, the most convenient space port is at Alpha Centauri.
• Be careful if you are carrying Contraband! Some ships will attack you until you sell it off.
• You can always use your PSI to run away from encounters. Also, mining asteroids and buying items at a shop will reset the encounter clock.

Hacking

You learn to hack leap gates pretty early in the game as well. The goal of this puzzle is to clear a number of listed colors before time runs out. In general, hacking is fairly easy. You just need a good eye, a fast stylus, and some luck.

• Avoid combos because they will waste your time. The only time you should purposefully get a two or three combo is if you know that you will clear a second required color using the combo.
• One way to avoid accidental combos is to work near the edges and move pieces so that only bring in a few new pieces from the side, leaving the rest of the board undisturbed.
• For the same reasons, avoid doing four-of-a-kinds, five-of-a-kinds, or double clears unless you are looking for a color that is missing in the board.
• Match time bonuses only if you really need it or if you are looking for a missing color. Usually, if you clear the time bonus, you will start a chain combo and will end up losing more time than you gain.
• Some times leap gates will randomly go offline for no good reason and will need to be hacked again. For this reason, don’t go around opening gates if you don’t need it right away.



Haggling

Haggling will become available early on in the game, after Pezt joins your crew. The goal of this puzzle is to clear as many pieces from the board (no new pieces will appear) as possible before you run out of moves. In all the emporiums you come across in Galactrix, you will see some very expensive items. Spaceships, in particular, will cost you a good deal of credits. While mining will earn you those credits, it is still good to haggle a discount in order to make your credits count.

• Take your time and double think every move. It is technically possible to completely clear every single haggling board so you want to make sure that you are always making the best move.
• Start by removing pieces near the edge of the board. Avoid letting the black pieces get to the middle and especially avoid letting the black pieces cut a line inbetween your colored pieces and get in the way.
• Before doing four-of-a-kinds, be sure to count the number of remaining pieces of the same color and note their places on the board to make sure that you can still get rid of the rest later. Getting rid of one extra piece using a four-of-a-kind but leaving two impossible to remove pieces is a bad move.
• Continue working from the outside in, or at least from one side to the other. You want to keep all your active pieces close together in the same area, which should keep your options open and allow you to get at least a 25-40% discount every time.
• Note that the percentage you haggled is only good one purchase or sale, so buy the most expensive thing you want or, if you are selling, sell the most expensive items you are willing to part with in order to get the most for your efforts.
• If your haggling is good, you can buy items you don’t want for cheap and sell them back at a higher price for profit! This works well for spaceships that are worse that your current vessel.



Crafting

While this puzzle is also available early on, you probably won’t be doing it too much until Beta Prime joins your crew and helps you get a lot of parts and ship plans. In crafting, you must match red, yellow or green together to make a different token of the same color. You must clear a certain number of these tokens before you run out of moves. Luckily, the tokens can be matched together, even if they are not the same color. As long as you have the raw materials for it, crafting is much cheaper than buying parts or spaceships.

• Work on the color that is needed the most first.
• Create tokens so that they are near to each other and clear them quickly.
• Four-of-a-kind will create two tokens while five-of-a-kind will create three.
• Shift pieces so that you always spawn more new pieces. As well, try to shift the unmovable tokens together as well so that they might clear.



Searching for Rumours

This puzzle becomes available mid-way through the game, when Elgara joins your crew. In the puzzle, you must make a certain number of moves without clearing any nuke tokens. In general, the rumours are not very helpful, they only provide some background story.

• Don’t take risks, work far away from the nuke tokens.
• Work near the edge and shift new pieces in from the edge so that you don’t spawn too many new pieces.
• Avoid combos and big clears as they don’t help in reducing the turn count.