Directive 25: Exile a Letter (Hints & Answer)

Hint first (no full spoiler): Exile a letter you are not using and will never need, and remember that month words have opinions.

Welcome to the vault, applicant. Directive 25 requires you to select one letter and exile it. Once chosen, that letter is banned from your password in both cases, permanently. The Committee provides a picker. The Committee does not provide sympathy.

The picker does not offer all 26. Load-bearing letters are greyed out and cannot be exiled: a, d and y, because every weekday name contains all three, plus every letter of the current month spelled backwards and of next month spelled backwards, because Directive 16 will demand one of those words and a run in progress at midnight must not become unwinnable. One more class is withheld quietly: any letter whose exile would force your E count past the four Directive 27 allows, or would pin it onto the digit you already exiled at Directive 19, leaving Directive 23 with no legal number to write. Depending on the calendar and your digit exile, that leaves between 14 and 18 letters on the board. K, q, w, x and z survive every month.

The trap is obvious once stated: the ban applies to letters you are already using. Exile a letter that lives inside a word an earlier directive demanded, and you must now remove that word without breaking the rule that required it. This is how applicants die in Act IV. Stamped DENIED, escorted out, plant confiscated.

The full solution

Choose a letter that meets two conditions. It does not appear anywhere in your current password. You will never need it for a future rule. The rare letters are your friends here: x, z, q, and w are never greyed out in any month and are almost always safe exiles, because nothing in this game requires them. J is available in most months and worth a glance at the picker first.

Before you click, run a manual audit:

1. Read your entire password character by character and confirm the candidate letter is absent.
2. Ignore the month. The picker has already locked every letter of the reversed month word, so rebmevon cannot cost you its v and yraunaj cannot cost you its j.
3. Check the words you chose yourself: day names, planet names, country names, and your rhyme. These are the ones the picker cannot protect, because you could have picked differently.

Example safe picks:

• Password contains hcram, venus, chad: exiling q or x costs nothing.
• Password contains ski and kosovo: k is doing real work. Leave it and take x.
• Password contains quay for Directive 14: q is suddenly expensive. Exile x or z instead.

If every rare letter is somehow occupied, exile the least common letter you can afford to edit out, then edit it out before confirming anything else.

What breaks later

Directive 25 is a standing ban, so every rule after it inherits the restriction.

Directive 26 forces case rules on every letter but does not care which letters exist, so your exile survives it untouched. The pair only conflicts if you exiled a vowel, which you did not, because you read this guide.

Directive 27 caps every letter at four appearances. An exiled rare letter actually helps here: it is one less letter to budget. But if you were forced to swap a word because of your exile, recount your letter totals before rule 27 arrives.

Directive 30 asks you to decode a 6-letter code into a separate terminal field. The Committee notes, for the record, that the terminal field is not your password. Your exile does not apply there. Type the code as decoded.

One final note for the file: the exile also bans the uppercase form. If a rule ever pushed an uppercase letter into your password, that capital counts against the ban too. Audit both cases. The Committee audits both cases. The Committee audits everything.

Choose wisely. Fern is watching, and Fern has seen applicants ban the letter e. Fern does not speak of it.

Stuck on a different directive? Browse all 30 rule guides or return to the vault. Fern believes in you.