sk48 — ARC-AGI-3 game guide

Level 1

• Press the direction the selected rod points (away from its handle) to extend it one segment. Press the opposite direction to pull it back one segment. It never shrinks below the one segment under its handle.
• Press a sideways direction to slide the whole rod, handle and all, one step along the striped gray rail beside the handle. Where the rail ends, or with no rail, nothing moves.
• Every direction press costs 1 energy, even when nothing moves.
• Undo (ACTION7) puts the rods and beads back as they were before your last move that changed something, and you can keep pressing it back to the level start. It is free, but it does not give back energy.
• RESET restores the level with full energy.
• The strip below the long line at the bottom shows a reference rod with a row of colored beads for each rod that counts, matched to it by handle color. The level clears when the beads on each of those rods, read outward from its handle, have the reference's colors in the same order.
• Only the first as many beads as the reference holds are checked; extra beads further out on the rod don't matter.
• Your rod is a gray zigzag bar sticking out of a pink square handle. Beads are small colored squares. Level 1 has one rod, a rail beside its handle, and a column of red, blue and green beads to be skewered as red, green, blue.
• Extending pushes a loose bead just ahead of the tip along in front of it, and beads already on the rod ride forward with it.
• A bead that can't be pushed any further (board edge, wall, or another bead that is stuck) stays where it is and the rod slides through it. That is how a bead gets skewered.
• Pulling the rod back drags the beads on it back toward the handle. A bead right next to the handle has nowhere to go, so the rod pulls out of it and leaves it loose.
• Sliding carries every bead on the rod and pushes loose beads in its way. If a bead would be pushed off the board, the slide doesn't happen.
• The tip can't go past the edge of the board. An extension that would do that does nothing, and still costs 1.
• When energy hits 0 the game is over. There are no lives. A move that clears the level with your last point still counts.
• Each level gives 196 energy, and only direction presses spend it. Clicks and undo are free.
• The long line above the bottom strip is the energy bar: gray for energy left, dark gray for energy spent. It refills at the start of each level.
• A white dot appears on a reference bead whenever the bead in the same position on the matching rod has the same color, so you can see which positions are already right.
• When a bead gets newly skewered, an outline in the bead's color flashes around it for a moment.
• The selected rod's handle has a white inside and its rod is drawn a lighter gray. Its reference in the bottom strip lights up the same way.
• On a clear, all the beads on the rods flash white a few times before the next level loads.

Level 2

Boss, 2026-09-11: The skewers at the bottom of the screen show the order the colored boxes are wanted in. Extended the long rod to spear the boxes. It is an extendable meat skewer and the boxes are pieces of meat going onto it in a set order. It is physics: you can't just get up close to a box, you have to push it against the wall and spear it. Once speared it comes along with you on the rod, and it is solid, so you can use it to push the other boxes down.

Level 3

• A fixed rod appears: a vertical rod with a black handle and a yellow center, which you can't select or move. Your rod passes straight through it. A bead on it can slide up and down along it (your rod can carry it that way), but nothing can push it sideways off the rod.

Level 4

• The rods you must fill can be ones you don't control. On level 4 the two references belong to the two fixed rods at the top (light blue and yellow centers), and your pink rod has no reference at all: it is only a tool for moving beads onto them.

Boss, 2026-09-11: Level 4 starts with pieces already on the skewers. The meat-skewer picture still explains it. The AI runs he read had called the rod a pen or a snake's tongue, and none of their guesses would handle this level.

Level 5

• Solid black wall squares appear on levels 5 and 6. The tip can't extend into one and beads can't be pushed into one.

Boss, 2026-09-11: A black box blocks the skewer, with red boxes behind it. Clicked on everything on the screen. Clicking changed nothing. He worked the level out by experimenting.

Level 6

• Two rods you control, pink and purple. Click a rod's handle, or its reference in the bottom strip, to switch to it. Switching is free, and clicking anything else does nothing.
• The purple rod hangs down from the top and slides left and right along a rail across the top. The two rods pass straight through each other.

Boss, 2026-09-11: Level 6, right before the win. Each skewer is matched to its own reference at the bottom. They are not always pairs of skewers, and a skewer does not have to match a partner.

Boss, 2026-09-21: Two skewers to work with, pink and purple, and each one wants different colors. Clicked to switch which skewer he was using. Clicking does nothing in this game until level 6 of 8. From there it is how you switch skewers.

Level 7

• The two rods have to share a bead. The board has one green bead, two blue and two red, and both references want green in the middle: pink wants blue, green, blue and purple wants red, green, red. The one green has to end up where the two rods cross, counting for both.

Boss, 2026-09-21: Pink and purple skewers, and both of them need green. Level 7 is insane: the two skewers have to work together because they share the green peas.

Level 8

• Pink's rail shrinks to two segments, so the pink rod can barely slide up or down and can't get to the lower half of the board. The green bead starts down there, straight below the purple rod, so only purple can bring it up. Pink wants blue then green; purple wants red then orange.

Boss, 2026-09-21: The purple skewer can reach the bottom of the board; the pink one on the left can't. The fiendish part: you absolutely have to work with the other skewer to win level 8.