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The numbers sit on the grid corners, not in the squares. Shade cells to match every corner and keep the white squares in one piece.
Every number in this puzzle sits on a corner where grid lines cross, and it counts the shaded squares among the up to four squares that touch that corner. A corner in the middle of the board watches four squares, one on an edge watches two, and one at the very corner of the board watches a single square.
Tap a square once to shade it. Tap it again to mark it with a cross, meaning you have decided it stays empty — the cross is only a note to yourself and does not affect the rules. A third tap clears the square back to blank.
There is a second rule that does as much work as the numbers: all the squares you leave unshaded must stay connected to one another in a single group, moving up, down, left or right. That means you can never wall off a white square, or split the white area into two halves, no matter how well the numbers seem to fit.
A number turns green once the squares around it are settled and correct, and red the moment too many of them are shaded, so you can see your mistakes without recounting. Finish when every number is satisfied and the white area is whole.
Start at the edges and especially at the four corners of the board. A number sitting on the board's own corner watches exactly one square, so it is never a deduction at all — it simply tells you that square outright. Numbers along the edges watch two squares, which makes a 0 or a 2 there just as decisive. Working inward from the cheap certainties gives you the footholds the middle of the board needs.
Treat 0 and 4 as free moves and take them all before doing anything clever. A 0 empties every square around it and a 4 fills every one, and each of those settled squares immediately feeds three other corners. Most Creek grids collapse a long way just from repeatedly harvesting the extremes.
The connectivity rule is not decoration; it solves squares the numbers cannot. If shading a square would seal a white square off from the rest of the board, that square must stay white, even when the surrounding numbers would happily allow it. Diagonal chains of shaded squares are the usual culprit, because they pinch the white area at a single point — get in the habit of glancing at your shaded shapes and asking whether the white can still walk from one side to the other.
When two adjacent corners share a pair of squares, compare their numbers rather than solving each alone. If a corner showing 3 sits next to one showing 1 and they share two squares, the difference tells you about the squares they do not share, which is often more than either number reveals on its own. That subtraction trick is the main tool once the easy extremes are gone.