Take control of Station Six: an automatic weather station on the Arctic ice. You have the summer to program it, before the last plane leaves and the station is on its own for 160 days. If there's a mistake in your code, it runs that mistake all winter.
Arctic Station Six is an assembly programming puzzle game. Write programs for the station's loggers, controllers and drone, send reports to the weather service, then watch a whole polar winter play out in seconds. Each year brings a new task, new instruments and new buildings, growing from a lone mast to a full research station.
Write assembly
Every part runs its own program on a card a few lines long. Read the instruments, sleep until the next hour, compare, jump, send. The first logger holds eight lines. Later controllers hold more, but never enough to be careless. Every part comes with its own manual page, built into the game.
Wire the station together
When one part can't do the whole job, wire several together. Split the work between controllers, keep a table in a memory unit, and have the drone hand its readings to the garage when it docks.
Survive a simulated winter
Fronts roll through, gales build and ease, snow falls and drifts against the buildings, and the sun sets for the polar night. Your station meets all of it with only the code you gave it, and only the power it can store or make.
Meet the brief
The Forecast Service wants readings on the synoptic hours. The Science Committee wants gale warnings, daily extremes, a snow survey, weather balloon soundings and much more. A trace under the map shows what each brief asks for, hour by hour, and every report your station sends appears on it, passed or failed.
Debug like an engineer
Step through a single line at a time, set breakpoints on a line of code or at a specific time. When a run fails, rewind to an hour before it went wrong and dig into the details to understand why it happened.
Grow the station
An instrument hut with a solar panel that has to track the sun. A drone and its garage, out in the snow to swap filters and survey the stake field. A wind turbine that has to be braked before a gust tears it apart. A magnetometer hut, a balloon shed and a satellite dish that has to get every report up while the satellite passes overhead.
Optimize
Getting it working is only the start. Every solution is scored on cycles and lines, with extra criteria on some tasks so you can go the extra mile. Histograms show how yours compares with everyone else's, as well as with your friends'.
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