Book of Fixed Stars

We are presented with flavortext, 4 lines of Arabic text, an Arabic word search, and several enumerations.

The 4 lines of Arabic text in the beginning are disambiguations for how to find words in the grid. The first line indicates we remove “AL-” (the Arabic definite article) in the beginning of words. The second line indicates TA MARBUTA (ة), which is often found at the end of words, should be treated as TA (ت) in the grid. The third and fourth lines indicate that hamzat-ed YA (ئ) or ALIF (أ,إ) should be treated as the vowel the hamza sits on.

There are a total of 42 names of celestial objects/bodies in Arabic in the grid.^[1]There are 29 star names, 6 (Zodiac) constellations, 3 planets, NEBULA, GALAXY, MOON, and SUN. Each corresponds with a scientific/English name given in the enumeration list, which is in alphabetical order.

Below is the fully solved word-search grid with the found word annotated in red. Letters circled in black are the first letter of the word. Letters circled in light blue are leftover letters (unused) from the word search.

We are able to solve for the non-enumerated question marks in blue given the alphabetical ordering: “MOON” and “SUN”. The celestial object highlighted in red is “GALAXY”.

The acrostic gives SOLVE HYBRID LOGIC GRID, RED CENTERS ARE BLUES, HINT IN BLUE RULES ALL CAN BE ZERO. This, combined with the red and blue colorings of GALAXY, MOON, and SUN in the word bank enumerations, points us towards solving a hybrid “Moon-or-Sun” and “Galaxies” logic grid where the galaxy centers are also moons or suns. From the flavortext, we might note that letters in Arabic are split between Sun and Moon letters.

Finally, the remaining 24 letters in the word search give the string:

استخدمالحرفالاولمنكلكلمت

If we put this into the first phrase enumeration (right-to-left) we get:^[2]

استخدم الحرف الاول من كل كلمت

Which translates to “Use the first letter of each word”.^[3]

The final construction of the logic puzzle involves taking the first letter of each word in the grid, converting them to suns and moons based on the Arabic Sun and Moon designation, and taking them as galaxy centers. The goal is to complete a Moon-or-Sun loop using the regions provided by the Galaxies puzzle.

Although the Galaxies puzzle on its own has 3 different solutions, only one of those is solvable with a Moon-or-Sun loop, so there is a unique loop solution. Note that to be solvable with both rulesets, the original Nikoli ruleset must be taken literally (i.e. traversing “all” moons in a room can mean not traversing anything if there are no moons in that room). This is also hinted at in the acrostic clue HINT IN BLUE RULES ALL CAN BE ZERO.

Finally, taking the letters on the moons/suns that are not on the loop, we get:

هناانتتخزنمالك

This fits the second phrase enumeration. Filling in the spaces:^[4]

هنا انت تخزن مالك

Which translates to: “Here you store your money”.

The final answer is “bank” in Arabic:^[5]

مصرف

Final grid:

Yellow-background letters are not used in the word search (and make the intermediate clue phrase).

Purple-background letters are not on the final path (and are used in the final clue phrase).

Authors' Notes

In Arabic, the word used for "Stars" in the Book of Fixed Stars is الكواكب, which can be translated as either "planets" or "stars" depending on the specific context. We originally meant for only stars and planets to appear in the grid, but had to loosen the constraint during construction.