August 11, 2025
Description
Puzzle for everybody. Try to arrange individual pieces into a 4x4x4 cube. Maybe your grandchild will do it. Maybe you will go mad before solving it. You have been warned.
There are at least 133 solutions of Evil Cube.
Super easy PLA (or whatever material) print. No supports. The lid is scaled to fit when the box is sliced with that nice random texture, you may need to re-scale it slightly.
Evil Cube is hard. If it is too much evil for you, try the Friendly Cube!
Print 3 additional L-shaped bricks and swap them for 3 “S-bricks” in the Evil Cube.
Of course, you can also print the complete Friendly Cube from the provided file if you did not print the Evil one or you want them both complete.
Print both the Evil and Friendly cube, maybe also some extra bricks, mix all the bricks and make a 4x4x4 cube, picking whatever brick fits. This is relatively easy. Then note your solution and give your friends the bricks for your original design for which only you know the solution!
This one is really easy.
You can also use it as a source of L-bricks and R-bricks for variants mentioned below.
Strongly discouraged. Use 1xZ 1xR and 11xL bricks. Unlike most other, this one seems to have only one solution. (I did not make a print file for this one - if you really want to try this, you likely can operate the slicer, cannot you? :) )
Some people think that Evil Cube is a prank. Well, it is not, it has many solutions. But for example 12xL brick plus one R brick would be a prank. At least I do not know any solution.
This is the S-brick. (Yes, BOTH of these are S-bricks, just rotated):
Evil Cube has four S-bricks. Replace three of them. But be careful, there is also a Z-brick:
You want to KEEP that one Z-brick. Now, this is the L-brick:
There is just one L-brick in the Evil Cube. Print THREE MORE for your Friendly Cube.
In short: To make the Evil Cube into a Friendly Cube, discard three of the four S-bricks and add three more L-bricks.
There are many more versions you can try. The original Evil Cube has bricks ZSSSSRLAABBB: One Z-brick, four S-bricks, one R-brick, one L-brick, two A-bricks and three B-bricks. The Friendly Cube has bricks ZSRLLLLAABBB. Here are the remaining brick types not shown yet - this is the R-brick (R like Rectangular):
This it the A-brick:
And this is the B-brick:
There is hypothesis that adding some R-bricks and L-bricks makes it easier. Obviously, 16 R-bricks are the simplest cube. Volume of bricks must sum up to 64 (=4x4x4) so you cannot make a cube using just L-bricks which have volume 5. Not every combination works, and maybe not every combination with volume sum 64 works. Here are some combinations which do work and I have a solution for it: ZRLLLLLBBBBB, ZZSRLLLAABBB, ZSSRLLLABBBB, ZZSRLLLAABBB, ZSSRLLLAAABB, ZZZSRLLAABBB, ZSSSSSRRLLLLA, SSSSSSRRRRRRLL, ZSRRRLLLLLLAA, ZSSRRLLLLLLLA, ZSSSRLLLLLLLL, LLLLLLLLBBBB, ZZRRRRRRRRRRRLL, LLLLLLLLAAAA, SRLLLLLLLLLLL, ZRRRRRRRRRLABB, ZRRLLLBBBBBB or ZRRRLABBBBBB. Print more bricks and enjoy!
I made Evil Cube by hand. Then I wrote a software (python Jupyter notebook) using OR-Tools CP-SAT equations solver which can solve all these cubes, both friendly and evil. I may put it to Github eventually.
Not sure. Once upon a time, Rubik's cube was new and I found a way to solve it. The day I was going to show it to my classmates, another solution was published in a magazine. What a spoiler! I do not want to do this to anybody who solves Evil Cube.
On the other hand, if you find solution yourself and want to publish it here in Makes & Comments, go on! Your glory is well deserved!
So far the hall of fame is not very crowded but not empty anymore! Two people wrote each their own original software and solved Evil Cube by computer (I did as well, so three including me). And - after a lot of very hard and failed attempts by many humans - one finally did it (without a computer). Congratulations, we all (who tried) know that this is nearly impossible.
Absolutely! One of them is below.
*** SPOILER ALLERT ***
*** BELOW IS THE SOLUTION ***
*** STOP SCROLLING, UNLESS YOU WANT TO SEE IT ***
*** 3 ***
*** 2 ***
*** 1 ***
Here it is. These are the bricks in Friendly Cube, sorted by shape:
Here each brick is rotated as it will be in the solved cube below:
They should be composed like this:
And here is the composed cube from other angles:
And here is another Friendly Cube solution in my interactive solution browser.
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution
vaclavh
