The ability to design puzzles is unlocked once a player has earned 20000 points. Only three puzzles can be submitted in any given 24-hour period. All player puzzles are worth 100 points.
Using the Puzzle Designer[]
- Decide if your puzzle will be a lab candidate.
- Design a secondary structure. This can be done with the puzzle designer's tools or by typing in a sequence in dot-bracket notation.
- Solve the puzzle.
- Click "publish".
- Set restrictions. A puzzle cannot require fewer GC pairs or more AU/GU pairs than are present in the solution that the designer supplies. Additionally, a puzzle cannot require more than 1/3 of pairs to be GU.
- Supply a name and description.
- Confirm and you're finished!
Lab Candidates[]
Before the puzzle designer opens, a player is given the choice of designating his or her a puzzle as a lab candidate. Lab candidates have additional restrictions, but can be chosen as the target structure for labs. The two types puzzles are compared below.
| Lab Candidate | Ordinary Puzzle | |
| Size | <100 nt | <400 |
| Base Pair Restrictions | No | Yes |
| Consecutive Nucleotide Restrictions | Yes | No |
| Fixed Bases | Yes | No |
| Reward | 100 | 100 |