Fred Frauhiger is the head plumber at Knarly's Water Works. Renegade vandals from a competing company, Krasshopper's Knifty Water Works, have broken into Knarly's factory and scrambled all of the parts to Fred's new project, the Closed Circuit Septic System. Fred must now reconstruct the only existing prototype systems.

Knarly is a new type of logic puzzle. The picture above shows a simple puzzle (on the left) and its solution (on...you guessed it...the right). You're presented with clue tiles containing sections of pipe, and your task is to fit those sections of pipe together to form a "closed circuit" of plumbing. The clue tiles to the left of the puzzle must remain on their same row as they are placed into the puzzle, and clue tiles above the puzzle must remain in their same column as they're placed into the puzzle. None of the clue tiles may be rotated or flipped. All of the tiles are used to complete the puzzle. Each puzzle is guaranteed to have only one possible solution. Puzzles come in sizes 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, 7x7, and 8x8.

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WHAT-IF PUZZLES

The Knarly Works program can make many "direct logic" deductions about which pieces have to be placed where, but will frequently reach a point where it has to use "what-if logic" to proceed (see the Help screens in the game for more information regarding "what-if logic"). This doesn't mean that YOU will need to use what-if logic all the times that the computer does (you may be smarter than the computer... :-), and it doesn't mean that you will have to use as many what-if deductions as the computer does to solve a given puzzle. However, the number of what-ifs required by the PROGRAM to solve a puzzle can be a ROUGH indicator of the difficulty of the puzzle.

Some folks have expressed interest in knowing what the "needed what-ifs" counts are for the various puzzles, so I've generated an ASCII text file (.CSV, comma-separated-values) for each puzzle size 4-8, which contains a puzzle number and a what-ifs-needed count on each line. If a puzzle number is not listed, then the what-ifs-needed count for that puzzle is 0. You can read these files in a text editor or word processor, or if you wish to sort them by the what-ifs-needed counts, you can import them into a spreadsheet program and sort on the second column.

WHATIFKW - a self-extracting ZIP archive containing WI_READ.TXT, WHATIF4.CSV, WHATIF5.CSV, WHATIF6.CSV, WHATIF7.CSV and WHATIF8.CSV. Size 4 puzzles have relatively few puzzles that require what-if logic. Size 8 puzzles have relatively few that DON'T require what-if logic. The sizes in between are... well, in between. :-)

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Additional Image Sets

NOTE: These additional image sets require the licensed version, the shareware version will not load them.

ADVERT - an "Everett Kaser Software 'advertisment'" image set from Grant Fikes. (June 10, 2004)

TROMUSIC - MIDI files sent in by Judy Spence to use with her TROLLS image set (that's included in the licensed version) as background music. By the way, she also gave the trolls names:

Dunder - blue hair
Fleer - yellow hair
Moset - green hair
Pypher - orange hair
Rusket - red hair
Snod - purple hair

(Don't ask me, I just think she's a little twisted... :-)

LAYERS - This ZIP file contains TEMPLATE.PSP, which is ONLY of interest to those of you who have Paint Shop Pro version 6 or greater, know how to use the "layers" feature of it, and want to create your own KW image set with other colors, textures, backgrounds, etc. This will let you do it more easily, as the major components of the KW image set file are separated onto different layers, and the pipes themselves are a flat gray, making it easy to select them with the "magic selector wand" and then perform whatever "image effects" you want upon them (or replace them entirely with something else).
LAYERS5 - Same as above but saved in Paint Shop Pro version 5 compatible format.

ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE FILES (LOCALIZATION)

This game can be "localized". Almost all of the text used in the menus and dialogs are stored in a separate ASCII text file, and the Help screens are stored in another ASCII text file. These files can be translated to other languages (English and Danish are currently included with the game). The Danish translations were done by Michael Madsen. Below are the other available translations that have been done after the release of the game. To use them, you will need to download and run the desired language installation file. The default folder for the game is C:\EKS\KWORKS, and the language files are stored in the LANGUAGE sub-folder. The self-extracting ZIP files (EXE files) include the LANGUAGE sub-folder, so you just need to specify where the game is installed (if different than the default).

1) Download the desired language installation file.
2) Run the downloaded installation file.
3) If necessary, change the installation path if you installed the game in a different location.
4) Click the UNZIP button to install the files.
5) Run the game, and click on the Player menu, then on the Language sub-menu.
6) Select the desired language from the available lists for "strings" (menus and dialogs) and Help, then click OK.
7) Due to a bug in the program, some strings may not display properly until you exit the game and restart it, but will work fine from that point on.

The available translation languages are:

Deutsch (German) - strings only, no help, from Stephan Schmid
Svenska (Swedish) - strings only, no help, from Tom Törnroos

If you're interested in translating the strings or help into another language, see the Keys, Toolbar, and The Menus Help screen, which has a section that discusses this subject. Also, there are comments at the beginning of the STR_language.TXT and HLP_language.TXT files that describe the format.

KINT Interpreter Source Code

If you're interested in the KINT interpreter source codes (which are mentioned on the Help page about porting the game to non-Microsoft OS's) see the KINT web page. This will NOT be of interest to you, I suspect, unless you're a programmer.

Everett Kaser Software
PO Box 403
Albany OR 97321-0117
Phone: (541) 928-5259 between 8am and 8pm Pacific Time daily.
email: everett@kaser.com