Rules as modelled

The goal

Find the tool cupboard and reach its room, spending as little sulfur as possible. The tool cupboard has to survive: blow the floor it stands on and the loot comes down with it, which ends the raid as lost.

What you can see

• The tool cupboard is hidden. You see the base from outside: its outer walls, doors, windows, roof and foundations.
• You only see into a room once you have broken into it. Its inner walls, doors, floors and anything standing in it appear then, and the map fills in as you go.
• Every explosion is final. There is no undo, as in a real raid.
• The scout's report is a rumour about the base. It is meant to help, never to give the tool cupboard away.

Par and the Oracle

• Par is the cheapest raid that is sure to find the tool cupboard wherever it is hidden. It reaches every closed room with a floor, and it never collapses the floor of a room it has not checked yet. Against an unlucky hiding place a raider learns nothing until the last room they open, so no strategy can promise less.
• The Oracle knew where the tool cupboard was all along. Its raid is the cheapest way in at all, and the best score you can get.
• Finish under par and you read the base well. Match the Oracle and you went straight to the loot.

Moving

• You start outside and carry ladders, so you can climb to any outside wall or roof and drop into any room that is open from above.
• Rooms connect through open doorways and wall frames, missing walls and doors, and missing floors or ceilings. Windows block like walls.
• You can blow up a piece when you can reach a room it faces, or the outside it faces.

Costs

• Every piece is broken with the cheapest mix of the day's tools, solved exactly with the same knapsack as the RustFront raid pages. One C4 plus explosive ammo usually beats two C4 on a stone wall.
• Tools: C4 (2,200 sulfur), Rocket (1,400 sulfur), Satchel (480 sulfur), Explosive 5.56 (25 sulfur). Some days restrict the loadout.
• Health and damage come from the dedicated server, build 25083359, hard side. Foundations, floors, doorways and windows use the wall health of their grade.

Collapse

• After each explosion, stability is recalculated with the base builder's settled model (socket data from build 24613624, ruleset rustfront-workshop-v4). Anything under 5% stability falls, and so does anything it was holding up. Collapsed pieces are free.
• The classic case: a door falls when its frame goes. If the frame is cheaper than the door, the frame is the better target.
• Sockets do not re-link during a raid, so the links the base was built with are the only ones that can hold it up.

Not modelled

• Splash damage to neighbouring pieces, soft sides, and damage from the inside versus the outside face.
• Turrets, traps, defenders, decay, upkeep, raid time and the physical reach of placing a charge.
• Roofs, floor frames, hatches, half and low walls, and elevated foundations. Raidle bases do not use them.
• Native collapse timing. The model settles instantly.

How par and the Oracle are proven

Every base ships with its proven cheapest raid. The Oracle treats each set of destroyed pieces as a state and searches them cheapest first, so the first finished raid it reaches is optimal. Two shortcuts keep it fast and both are exact: it skips moves that neither open a passage nor hold anything up, and it stops once nothing left in the queue can beat the best raid found.

Par is found by the same search with a different finish line: every room the tool cupboard could be in, instead of the one it is in. Bases with many rooms have far more raids to consider, so the par search also uses a lower bound on the sulfur still to spend. Each unchecked room needs at least one more paid explosion from a small set of pieces: its walls, doors and ceilings, or what they stand on. A wall on an intact foundation cannot fall while the foundation stands, so the wall or the foundation has to be paid for. Shared pieces are counted once. The bound never overestimates, so the first finished raid the search reaches is still the cheapest. Pars are computed ahead of time and pinned with the base.

Both searches are checked in the test suite: against an exhaustive enumeration of every reachable state on seeded random bases, against the same search with its shortcuts and bound turned off, and by replaying each answer move by move through the game engine. Each published base's optimum and par are pinned, so a data or rules change cannot silently change a day's answer.

20 curated bases so far. Play today's Raidle →