Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Showing some more interest to more smaller pencil puzzle genres/extensions of known genre over here, just like my attempts on resurrecting ABC-Box in the past (and I'll definitely return to it soon).

Cross the Streams has always been one of my favorite extensions on Nonogram, and even though that one attempt of mine to fuse it with other genres turned out to be very dreadful, I still kept the thought of playing around with it at some point till this day, including setting some standard puzzles with it.

And since I've been solving some more underappreciated stuff recently, now it sounds like a good opportunity of mine to finally immerse myself in setting around CtS here, especially since there's (surprisingly) only a small amount of CtS puzzles around this site.

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In this entry though, I somewhat kicked it up a notch and developed some various cool ideas here. As far as I know, the opening sequence is rather long and deep and there're likely a few different ways to approach this opening, but the overall solve path should be narrow enough to follow in my opinion.
Special thanks to Jesper for testing this one as well! For now, do enjoy the puzzle!


Rules:

1) Cross the Streams rules apply:
- Shade some cells in the 14x14 grid so that all shaded cells form a single orthogonally connected area, and no 2x2 area anywhere in the grid can be entirely shaded.
- A circle clue outside the grid corresponds to exactly one continuous group of shaded cells in its row/column, and its contained number shows the length of that group, if given. Group of unshaded cell[s] separates between the clues.
- The correct order of the circle clues is from left to right for the rows and from top to bottom for the columns. An asterisk (*) clue shows an arbitrary number of circle clues, which can be none.

2) In this puzzle, all given clues have been ciphered.
Same letters will correspond to same numbers, while different letters will correspond to different numbers. Solvers are required to deduce what numbers the letters correspond to.

(the extra edges in the 14x14 grid are to help keeping track of the counting, they don't serve any other purpose)



Puzzle:   Penpa plus  -  Sudokupad


The answer check in penpa link will activate once both following conditions are met: the shading in the 14x14 grid is correctly done and the ciphers table on the right side has correctly filled numbers.

Good luck and have fun solving!