Puzzle #26 — 2026-08-14
The answer was Nigeria. The scene was built from Osogbo. Difficulty: hard.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- Deep red earth and dense green bush pressing in between the buildings.
- Two-storey rendered blockwork with rusting corrugated roofs and open shopfronts under long canopies.
- Motorcycle taxis and yellow minibuses work the road, traffic on the right.
- Signs are in English beside a tonal local language.
- The country is the most populous on its continent.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | dense green bush pressing in between the buildings, oil palm and plantain behind the houses, deep red earth |
|---|---|
| terrain | low rolling ground under heavy humid cloud, no horizon that is not green |
| architecture | two-storey rendered blockwork with rusting corrugated roofs, open shopfronts under long shading canopies, rebar standing on unfinished floors |
| roadside | right-hand traffic, motorcycle taxis in numbers, yellow minibuses, red laterite dust at the edges |
| signage | Latin script, English beside a tonal local language (never rendered legibly) |
| light | flat humid tropical light under thick cloud |
Where this actually is
Osogbo, Nigeria sits at 7.77, 4.57 — see Osogbo, Nigeria on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was not in the image-quality sample — its answer key was checked, its picture was not second-guessed. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.