> O I have to make a circle now from what I understand I make the circuit leaving the 4 broken conduits out and then connect them laterI need to keep alternating inners and outers and have them the same for all connectionsright or wrong?

Everything you just said sounds right except for the part about connecting the broken cunduits later, and "having them the same for all connections". The last thing was one I just didn't understand, and the thing about the broken conduits indicates to me that you still don't quite have the problem straight in your head. I think I can try to fix your misconceptions, although it may be hard, as it has been a while since I played POAT. I remember the puzzle and the solution very well, but not all of the terminology.

First of all, there are only two broken conduits, not four. The reason there might appear to be four is because you can see each of the conduits from both ends, so you can see broken conduits from four locations.

The way to think of this puzzle (as gremlinn has alluded to before) is this:

Each link is a dot. Conduits are lines connecting the dots together. What you are doing is rotating the link that connects two lines together at each dot. The rules for how to do this have been well documented, I think.

In another attempt to help explain this puzzle, I just threw together a couple of images which show pieces of the puzzle. http://monkeyman.niveous.net/conduit1.bmp shows a closeup of how a single link works. In this example, the link is connecting the north and outer directions. In order to make a circuit, the link to the north of this one (6E, I think it would be) has to point to the south. The link on the other side (1W) needs to point in the outer direction.

http://monkeyman.niveous.net/conduit2.bmp shows the whole system. The whole thing top to bottom is a circle, and the left to right lines are circles as well. Without a doughnut to draw on, it is hard to make this any clearer. The only other thing I can say is that if you take a doughnut and set it on a table, all the of the east links (1E, 2E, etc) would be dots on a circle drawn on the top of the doughnut, and the west links (1W, 2W, etc) would be dots drawn on the bottom of the doughnut (where it touches the table). You can go in a complete circle around the doughnut staying on either the top or the bottom, or you can get to one of the dots on the bottom by going through the middle of the doughnut or going around the outside.

Now, I have put in sample "broken links". The trick is, when you connect up two of the dots, you can't use a broken link to do it. Notice that since you can sit on any of the dots, there are four different places where you can be sitting and "see" a broken link--but there are still only two of them.

Well, I'm sure there is a lot more that I could say, but I don't think it would be of much help. I think the best thing to do if you're having trouble with the conduits is to read this, and if you don't understand something, please ask me SPECIFICALLY about the part that you don't understand. I can probably explain anything in here better than I have, but I need to know which things are not making sense to you. I'm not prepared to write a textbook on the subject of conduits in a fantasy game just for the sake of completeness, when you probably already understand some of this. :-)

Don "I'm sleepy. That's most of the reason why I chose to stop here." Monkey