Hey everyone. I'm having difficulty with the first puzzle in System Shock. I've seen pictures of where the power light travels through the blue dials, but all those pictures have yellow "notches" on the side of the blue dials telling you where the power flow needs to go. This one has no such marks, and no matter the position, don't seem to pass power through.

I've attached screenshots showing both the puzzle and the location. Am I missing something?

Yes, the blue dials do have these notches, in case the power can go trough them. The power can go trough straight or take a turn (i.e. 180° or 90°). From this angle I can not see for certain there are no notches. N.b. there seem to be several blue dials which could be a part of a solution if they have a set of 90° notches hiding in there, from this angle behind the round parts (the bottom and left sides).

It could also be a bug, these puzzles are randomized... which is a bit worrying. A player could be a long into the game, find a puzzle which can not be solved, potentially rendering the game un-winnable.

Yeah the dials should have two notches. I suspect it's a bug.

I'm stuck on the exact same puzzle with a different layout (see my post also from 2 days ago). My puzzle has two sets of points to connect (square -> round) and I can connect one set although one of the connections only works if the notch is pointed *away* from the incoming line. I suspect the logic behind the board components and the imagery used has issues.

The whole puzzle seems to have major bugs. The only solution I've found is either restart a new game with puzzle difficulty on easy. I'm not sure when it generates puzzles so maybe saving just before opening a puzzle for the first time gives you a chance to reload with a different board. But I suspect they're generated on the initial game creation so that probably won't work.

After generating a 6th game in level 3 puzzle level I ran into a complex one for the first puzzle (more complex than your screenshot - see the one I uploaded) and as it turns out the blue dials redirect electricity but not specifically in the axis in which the blue lines are pointing to ( I know yours are all straight ).

I suggest that you play around with the blue ones in case you get an unexpected connection.

If its not resolving the puzzle maybe you are assuming you are going the right direction but it might not be the case...

Hope you end up getting this puzzle!

You can see where the connections are meant to be, although on kenthil's pic either none of the connection points are visible due to the viewing angle (I've managed to rotate some of mine and get this) or they simply aren't there. Zavenous' pic seems to reinforce that not all dials have connections just because there's so many on that board that don't show any.

Other than these two pics showing dials with no connections, each dial seems to have 2 connections which either might be in a straight line (dial 1 in the attached ss-dial_example.jpg), connection points in the dark green boxes) or at 90 degrees (dial 2 when not powered, dial 3 when powered). When you rotate the dial, the whole piece rotates so those connection points move as well (if that wasn't obvious). In every instance I've seen the connection points on the dials seem to accurately reflect where the connection is.

The same is not true on the round button pieces. They seem to need the incoming power line on the opposite side to where the connection point is shown. You can see this in the attached pic ss-one_path_done-marked.jpg on the round button in the top right of the centre 4 pieces.

Welp, I was wrong. You do need to connect the square blocks. You can connect to the round ones (which is what mislead me) but they don't do anything.

For reference, in my previous comment, ss-one_path_done.jpg was the board I was stuck on. I finally found the correct path as shown in the pic attached here (just need to rotate the last piece below the lower of the two square pegs).

Happy you were able to figure it out Malorion!

By the way you will find "Logic Probes" ("ICE picks" for fellow SS2 players) - which you can use to unlock tough puzzles - see screenshot...