Carpentry

Part 1: How to play
The goal of carpentry is to fill your four holes without wasted space. You have four irregularly shaped holes, and 3 pieces you can place in the holes. If you fill a hole with no overlap, you get a Masterpiece. If you use one extra piece, you get a Craftsmanship. If you use 2 extra pieces, you get a fair job. If you use 3 extra pieces, you get Sloppy Work (I'm not so sure about this). If you use enough extra pieces (ask Fifteenbones what counts as enough :), you get a Pig's Breakfast. You must distribute your moves among the uncompleted holes. If you leave a hole alone, and it has a piece in it, on the fifth turn, the piece will rattle, on the sixth turn, it will rattle harder, and on the seventh turn it will fall out. Falling out is very bad, so always place a piece before the hole reaches the seventh turn. If the hole is empty, on the fifth turn it will flash red, on the sixth it will flash harder, on the seventh it will flash even more, and on the eighth it will grow larger. Again - never let a hole grow larger. Finally, if you place all the pieces in a hole such that the grain is horizontal, you get a grain bonus. The grain bonus is not as important as piece efficiency, so don't concentrate on getting the grain bonus at first.

Here are some neat tricks which I consider very important for everybody to know:
You can use the keyboard to flip and rotate pieces (Actually, you can play the entire game from the keyboard, but I'm not insane enough to do that :). The Z key flips the piece, and the X and C keys rotate it. I usually use the mouse to position, and the Z, X, and C keys to flip and rotate.

If you misplace a piece, you can pick it up again if you do so before you pick up another piece. You can only flip or rotate it, or shift it by one position, but it is incredibly helpful when you drop a piece in the wrong spot.

Part 2: Initial goals
You want to fill the holes from the outside in, to leave yourself as much slack as possible in terms of what pieces you can use. Try to leave yourself spaces which can be filled by the commoner pieces. Here is a frequency table, plus the letter abbreviations I'll be using later:

P - 22 ooo oo F - 14 _o_ ooo o Y - 14 __o oooo L - 8 o oooo N - 8 oo _ooo T - 7 ooo _o _o U - 4 o_o ooo V - 4 o   o ooo W - 4 o   oo _oo Z - 4 o       ooo __o X - 3 _o ooo _o I - 2 ooooo

Paste Bucket - 1

Notice that V and W can both be flipped and rotated to line the grain bonus up horizontally regardless of how the piece is placed. Get in the habit of always placing those pieces with the grain horizontal. In addition, since you never need to rotate the X piece, it should always be placed with horizontal grain.

Even if you can't fill in a hole with no wasted spaces it's important to use as few pieces as possible. Make sure that there's only one empty area in each hole as you fill them. That way, if you don't get the pieces you need to fill the final space exactly, you can usually fill it with only one extra piece. A space for 2 pieces can usually be filled with 3 pieces, and so on. It's important not to give up on holes - always try to fill them as efficiently as possible.

Part 3: Some tricks for filling holes
Firstly, practice hole management. When I'm playing, I try to have one hole filled, one hole almost done, and 2 holes mostly empty at any given time. That way I have the greatest degree of choice about where to put pieces.

Secondly, instead of waiting for pieces, wait for combinations of pieces. Once you've gotten a hole down to the point where it will take 2 pieces to complete, wait until both of those pieces are available before you complete it. Be aware that some shapes can be filled with many different combinations of pieces - do your best to finish on shapes like that. Here are some good shapes to finish on:

ooo ooo oooo Can be filled by: PL, PY, PT, PV, PZ, YU, and FU. This is the best shape to finish on. Notice that 5 of the combos take a P, which means you can get a P in your bucket, and then wait for one of 5 different shapes (with a total likelihood of 37) to show up.

_oo oooo oooo Can be filled by: PP, PL, PW. Not as many combos, but again is a matter of getting a P and then waiting for pieces with a total likelihood of 34 to show up.

ooo oooo ooo

Can be filled by: PF, PN, UX. Not nearly as good as the first 2, but for some reason I keep on getting these. :)

ooo oooo _ooo

Can be filled by: PP, NN, UU. Not great, but 2 Ps is pretty good

oo ooo oo ooo

Can be filled by: PP, FV, LU. Again, when I get this, I'm usually shooting for 2 Ps.

A paste bucket makes it much easier, since then you only have to wait for one piece. Still beware of saving paste buckets too enthusiastically - I read on the forums about a guy who got 3 paste buckets when he couldn't use any of them, and had to quit the puzzle :)

Part 4: The Grain Bonus
If you fill a hole with pieces which all have horizontal grain, then you get a grain bonus. When I started I didn't pay much attention to the grain bonus, believing piece efficiency was more important. I still believe piece efficiency is more important, but if you want to get Incredibles then getting the grain bonus is helpful. I wouldn't worry about the grain bonus until you are consistently getting Craftsmanship/Masterpieces.

The first thing to note is that all of the pieces 4 squares or more long (Y,L,N,I) only come with the grain bonus in one direction, along their lengths (presumably trees are only ever 3 squares wide :). This means that vertical spaces 2 blocks long can only be filled with a T or a V while keeping the grain bonus, and vertical spaces 3 or more blocks long cannot be filled if you are going to keep the grain bonus. There is only one exception to this - the paste bucket will never prevent you from getting the grain bonus, so if you're down to vertical L space, you can still get the grain bonus if you complete the puzzle using the paste bucket. Still, the paste bucket is fairly infrequent, so if you're going for the grain bonus in a hole it's probably best to avoid leaving yourself vertical spaces.

When the hole is still fairly large, it's usually pretty easy to place the pieces with the grain horizontal. Eventually you are going to get to the point where you have to make a choice. You can either complete the hole with the grain bonus and a Craftsmanship, or you can complete it without the grain bonus, but with a Masterpiece. If you are sure that you can get the Masterpiece, I believe a Masterpiece without the grain bonus is better than a Craftsmanship with it. However, if the Masterpiece is uncertain, it's probably better to take a relatively certain Craftsmanship with the grain bonus. Essentially, you need to weigh the nearly certain reward of the grain bonus against the chance to get a Masterpiece instead of a Craftmanship. For example:

_o ooo _ooo _ooo

F,L,L are available, The grain on the F would prevent you from getting the grain bonus if you use it to complete the hole as a Masterpiece with FU. So you have the choice between placing the F to preserve the possibility of getting a Masterpiece if you draw a U, like this:

_x xxx _oxo _ooo

Or you can place the F so that it wrecks you chance of getting a Masterpiece but allows you to get a Craftsmanship with a grain bonus, like this:

_x xxo _xxo _ooo

In this situation I would choose the second option, since Us are relatively infrequent. You're likely to get a Craftsmanship regardless of what you do, so it would be better for you if you kept the grain bonus.

Keeping the grain bonus places more constraints on where you can place pieces so I find that I usually run into trouble even before I've gotten the hole down to a 2 piece space. When that happens I make one of my holes a grain-booched hole, and try to place pieces there when I can't keep them horizontal. More generally, if a hole will need more than 2 or 3 pieces to complete it, I will usually choose to lose the grain bonus before I choose to lose the Masterpiece.

Part 5: Nice Set
If you fill a hole with pieces which are all the same type, you get a Nice Set bonus. It appears to be about as good as a Grain bonus. This is generally possible on holes which are 4x5, filled with Ps or Ls.