Challenge #7

Part One:
Good Secrets Make Bad Neighbors

While helping Treeboy build the new barrier, the work settles into a steady rhythm, and the two of you fall into easy conversation. You tell him about Eos, your history with her in your original timeline, and what you've heard about her in this one. Treeboy listens with quiet interest. After a while, he mentions that he might have something useful.

"There's a reliquary to Eos not far from here," he says. "Not the Grand Temple you've heard about, just a smaller vault. But it holds a surprising amount of information." His wooden brow furrows thoughtfully. "I explored it once, mostly out of curiosity. I even wrote down the different chambers as I went."

He rummages through the satchel at his side with the stump of his better arm and taps a folded sheet of parchment for you to take. It's a simple list, your puzzle input, of scores on a single line, separated by spaces (although some scores read "None").

"These scores," he explains, "are my own system for marking how valuable the knowledge inside each chamber seemed. Lower scored chambers only hold scraps. Higher ones… well, I didn't understand everything I saw, but it felt important." You open your mouth to ask and he seems to instinctively know just what you are going to say. "The 'None' entries… hmm," he scratches his bark. "It's been so long that I've forgotten why I wrote those down. If it was an empty chamber, I would have written 0. But 'None'… you can probably just ignore those. Anyway, since you helped me with the barrier, you should have this. Maybe it'll help you."

None of the chambers have guards, but Treeboy warns you about something far more troubling.

"The reliquary has a security system. Old magic. If you enter a chamber and then step into one of its immediate neighbors, it triggers an alarm of sorts. The doors seal, and the air starts thinning. It wasn't too much of a problem for me… I just waited it out. But I remember being human and breathing being important, so you definitely want to avoid getting trapped in there."

You run your finger across the list. If adjacent chambers are off-limits, you'll have to choose your route carefully. Visit any chamber you like, so long as you never step into one directly beside a chamber you've already visited.

You fold the list and tuck it into your pack. A straightforward plan:

For example:

With a list like:

7 3 10 1 5 None 12 None 2 4 6 None None 11 14

The chambers would look like:

There are many different ways you can choose to visit chambers. Some options are:

Here is Treeboy's list:

[ click to get input ]