Packing a Small Basement – Minima Nest

Minima Nest reminds me of my basement.  It’s a small space that you have to pack with a lot of stuff.  Once the basement is full, you then pile stuff on the stairs until you can no longer get to the basement.

Minima Nest was designed by Lucie Pauwels and made by Nothing Yet Designs.  The puzzle is 3D printed with a black and white box and orange pieces.  The print embraces the requirement of printing the box in 2 separate halves by using a big contrast of color between them, effectively hiding the seam by emphasizing it.  Well done!  The use of contrasting colors for the name and designer on the puzzle are a nice touch as well.  The lettering is raised to provide a nice clean background without crazy slicer fill patterns.

Minima Nest is part of the Minima puzzle packing series started and mostly populated by Frederic Boucher.  The original puzzles in the series had cool names like M1, M2, M3, …, but I’m guessing that they ran out of numbers and had to resort to names instead.  To be honest, I’m not sure what the requirement is for being part of the series other than being nice packing puzzles.

The first thing to notice about Minima Nest is that the stairs are steep – a full voxel up but with only a half-voxel tread.  This is also obvious with the pieces having half-voxel shifts.  Of course, this provides a significant clue on how the pieces get packed.

I found this puzzle to be on the easy end of the spectrum, although it was not trivial.  Even though I try to avoid it, it did require some thinking.  It doesn’t take too long to realize that one piece has to go on the bottom and another has to go on top.  From there you can determine that the other pieces need to go in between and around these two (hopefully, you didn’t need that last revelation).

Once solved, Minima Nest is filled to the brim, just like a typical basement.  My favorite aspect of this design is that it is easier to experiment bottom-up, but solve it top-down.