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Loop Sort guide: timing taps on the ring road

Loop Sort is the real-time mode in Sort Lab. Trucks sit around a ring road, each carrying a stack of up to four coloured lumps. You tap a truck to tip its top lumps onto the road, where they circle round and drive into any truck that will take them. The aim is to finish with every truck holding a single colour. It plays like a pouring puzzle, but with timing: a good tap is one that is perfectly placed.

How a tap works

Tapping a truck tips the top run of one colour onto the road. Each lump becomes a stream of small particles that travel round the ring. A particle will drive into any truck it passes whose top colour matches, or which is empty, and which has room. A stream does not choose its truck; it fills whatever it meets first that qualifies. This is where the puzzle is: you can empty a truck just as a stream of the colour you want is about to pass it.

The ring is deterministic

There is no randomness in Loop Sort. The same taps at the same moments give the same result every time, on every phone. That means you can learn a level: if something went wrong, it was your timing, and you can do it differently next time.

Plan from the ends

1. Find an empty truck, or one that is almost empty. It is the place a stream can safely land.
2. Work out which truck the stream will reach first. Streams go round the ring in one direction, so the truck just ahead of the one you tip is the first to be offered it.
3. Tip a colour into a truck that already has the same colour on top. That builds a full truck, which is finished.
4. Do not tip a colour into a truck with room, unless you want it there. Streams fill the first suitable truck whether or not it is the one you wanted.

The colour limit

The road can only hold a limited number of different colours at once. A tap that would add one colour too many is refused before it happens, so you never lose to a surprise. If a tap is refused, wait for the road to clear, or let a colour flow into a truck first.

Shrouds

A truck can begin under a cloth of a certain colour. A shrouded truck cannot be tapped and does not take particles, and its contents are hidden. The cloth comes off for good as soon as a truck of that colour is finished. Finishing the right colour first is the puzzle, and the colour counts will still tell a careful player what is under the cloth.

Losing

A level is lost only when nothing more can happen, so there is no time pressure in the sense of a countdown. If you are stuck, you will know. The mistake to avoid is flooding the road with a colour that has nowhere to go, so before you tap, check that a truck can take the stream.

Loop Sort uses the same idea as Tube Pour, so what you learn in one helps in the other.