s5i5 — ARC-AGI-3 game guide

Level 1

• The only action is a click. Every click spends one unit of the budget, including clicks on empty board, rods, markers, pins or walls, which do nothing else.
• Click the right half of a two-headed slider button to grow every rod of that button's color by one 3-pixel segment, away from the rod's dark gray anchor end. The left half shrinks them by one segment. The thin dark gray line down the middle does nothing, but the click still costs.
• A rod never shrinks below one segment. If one button drives several rods and one of them is already down to one segment, that rod stays as it is while the others still shrink.
• Level 1's yellow slider stands upright: its bottom half grows, its top half shrinks.
• There is no undo. RESET puts the level back to its starting layout with a full budget.
• The level clears when every pin (a small hollow dark red diamond) has a marker (a single dark red dot riding a rod) sitting exactly on it. Any marker can fill any pin, and pins never move. The check runs after each click.
• Rods are solid colored bars with a dark gray square at one end, the anchor. The anchor stays put while the rod grows or shrinks from the other end.
• A marker that touches a rod when the level starts rides on that rod from then on, moving with it whenever it grows, shrinks or turns.
• Purple pieces are fixed walls. On level 1 two purple blocks sit just past the bottom and right edges of the board, in line with the two rods, so neither rod can grow off the board.
• A click that would make any rod overlap another rod or a purple wall is cancelled in full, for every rod it would have moved, and it still costs a click. Markers and pins never block anything.
• Budgets are 50, 150, 200, 100, 150, 150, 200 and 200 clicks for levels 1-8. Running out before the level clears ends the game, and there are no lives. The win check runs first, so clearing on your last click counts.
• The bar along the bottom row of the screen is the budget: dark gray for clicks left, darker gray for clicks spent. It refills at the start of each level.
• A cancelled click is not silent: the game draws the attempted move for one frame, then snaps everything back to where it was.

Level 2

• Chained rods appear: a rod can be attached to the end of another rod, and gets carried along whenever the rod it hangs from grows, shrinks or turns. Level 2 has a chain of four one-segment rods.

Level 3

• Light gray bars appear. They have no anchor end and no button, so they never grow, shrink or turn on their own. They only move because they are attached to a rod that does.

Level 4

• One button can drive several rods: every rod of its color moves on the same click, even rods in different parts of the board growing in different directions. Level 4 has five yellow rods on one yellow button.

Level 5

• Smaller slider buttons appear. They work exactly like the big ones.

Boss, 2026-09-16: On level 5 the buttons had obviously changed from level 4, and something else had changed too. Clicked everywhere on the board looking for what the new rule was. It made no sense: most clicks moved nothing. The buttons are only smaller versions of the same grow/shrink sliders (right half grows, left half shrinks). What changed is that the orange and green buttons each drive two rods in different parts of the board, and any click that would make any rod hit something is cancelled while still costing a click. The level also starts with the light blue marker already on its pin, and that rod is in the way -- it has to be pulled off its pin and put back at the end.

Level 6

• Plus-shaped rotate buttons appear. Clicking one turns every rod of that color a quarter turn counterclockwise around its own anchor, swinging everything attached to it around the same point.
• A rod attached to another rod skips the turn that would fold it straight back over its parent: that click turns it a half turn instead.
• Level 6 has no purple border, so a rod can swing or grow partly off the board.

Boss, 2026-09-16: The rotate button looks like a cross or a plus sign. The write-up had called it a diamond. It is a plus; the hollow diamonds on the board are the pins you are aiming for.

Level 7

Boss, 2026-09-16: After turning rods, the light blue rod had grown one segment too many. Tried shrinking it back. It did not: once a rod has been turned, shrinking it does not restore the earlier position, and he was left with a rod he could not fold into place. The undo key in the site player does nothing here -- RESET was the only way back.

Boss, 2026-09-16: Level 7: colored crosses and stiff arms. Demonic. You use the colored crosses to rotate the stiff arms, like an unfolding mechanical arm. He only got this far by watching GPT-6 Astra replays. It badly needs an undo, though undo might make it too easy: you can get completely stuck where only a reset gets you out, and with any exploration at all you will need reset on this level. A nightmare for his spatial reasoning.

Level 8

• One rod can carry several rods at once: on level 8 a one-segment yellow rod has red, green, orange and blue rods attached on all four sides, and the yellow rotate button swings all four around it like a pinwheel.