Stock→Pile

The main puzzle is a flowchart with mostly empty bubbles. We’ll have to fill it in somehow, but that will require determining what the colored arrows mean and what goes in most of the leaf nodes.

Starting with the tutorial, we can see that there are pre-placed words in some yellow bubbles that have been struck-out from the word list, and that there are the same number of remaining words as unfilled yellow bubbles. This tells us that we need to place the words from the word bank into the yellow bubbles.We might notice first that all the words have homophones. All the starting bubbles start with a bidirectional green transformation, so it's reasonable to guess that the green arrows might convert words to their homophones. Some bubbles have two green arrows, and both READ and REIGN have multiple homophones (REED/RED and RAIN/REIN), so this seems to check out. While placing these words in the graph, we can see that DRAINER contains the same letters as RAIN + RED, and ENDORSE contains the letters from NOSE + RED. This suggests that the red arrows combine and anagram their feeder words’ letters, and allows solving REED + REIN as REINDEER. From there, we have REINDEER + RED + NOSE feeding into a blue transformation, which must be a semantic/crossword clue transformation to our tutorial's answer — RUDOLPH.

Now coming into the main puzzle, we can see this:

If we did the tutorial, we should already know what the red, green, and blue transformations do, but if we skipped the tutorial, there are several potential break-ins to the arrow functions available. A large portion of the words in the bank have homophones (including several which we'll later find out don't use this property, such as IN, STRAIGHT and MUSCLE), and the green arrows are bidirectional, so they're a reasonable candidate for a homophonic transformation. There is also only one bubble with all its feeders already present. It's fed into by NAB and END via a red transformation from each, so a reasonable guess is that they combine together in some way. One such way is to assume the red transformation means "anagram", and that they form BANNED, which also has a homophone and a green arrow.The most common break-in order is Green, Red, Blue, Orange, Purple, which is the same order as the arrows near the word bank.

We generally progress bottom-up by getting all the feeders leading into a bubble, and then solving that bubble based on the arrow relationship. Notable exceptions include knowing that BASHFUL feeds into another one of the Seven Dwarfs characters, but not knowing the answer is DOC until getting one or both of SPIDER and MAN in their bubbles, or having to backsolve TALL from SIZE+BEYOND → [anagram of DANGER].When we reach the final bubble, its position as the topmost bubble and the presence of a question mark in it imply it is our answer. Our last step is to anagram LET and OCK, which uniquely solve to our answer — LOCKET. A completed graph would then look as follows:(note that some bubbles, such as the dwarfs other than Bashful and Doc, may be arranged in any order)

Authors' Notes

The puzzle was originally given the working title Stockpile, due to the graph forming a roughly pile shape and the puzzle narratively taking place at the supply shelves. We later realized that we could rename it Stock→Pile, with the arrow representing our purple transformation, so that became the final title.

We were inspired by Big Branch from Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2024. It was one of our favorite puzzles from the hunt!

The original clue for BATH was SALTY BOMB SPACE. It ended up being too difficult to piece together, but it still lives rent free in our heads and hearts.

An earlier version of the puzzle had an arrow going from MEME back to itself — both because the word has the somewhat unique property of being able to be made by totally rearranging itself, with no letters in the same position, and also because memes are self-referential. It was cut for clarity reasons, but we hope you enjoy the thought of our self-referential meme referencing self-referential memes.

In testing, we never saw a successful answer without 90% or more of the graph, but it is theoretically possible to snipe your way to LOCKET with a sizable fraction of the graph left unsolved.