Wondering whether anyone has a good consistent way of scrambling the camouflage 3x3x3? It's quite difficult to scramble properly and I'm sure there must be some sort of sequence to get it done but I can't work it out. specifically, it's the large block directly opposite the single cubie that I'm interested in breaking up.

Hi rline,

I don't understand this cube. I read Konrad's text. If I exchange or turn 2x2x2 blocks it's not possible to turn again. After a 4x4x4 AI corner-block-turn or corner-block-swap it's always possible to go ahead.
I tried some permutations , and I got:


[SpoilerNice Pattern : The loony bin Mezon !

]
Cheers,
Andrea

PS:
To scramble it, it's necessary to separate the the pieces from the 2x2x2 blocks. I watched Konrad's pictures in the solving thread.
But I didn't found a way to separate or exchange pieces from block that has 7 pieces to a block that has 4 pieces. Always after this the layers are blocked.
Perhaps it's a good idea to discuss this in the solving thread.

Hi Andrea


The reason it doesn't behave like the 444AI is because it's bandaged and extended, and because of where the true center is. Konrad's text and pictures helped me a lot in finally "seeing" what was going on. And because of the fact that certain key cubes have different colours it's difficult to explain an answer to your statement above, even though I know the answer! I'd like to make a video on understanding and solving it, but for a decent solve it's fairly important to get a decent scramble.

I've spent a little time on this over the weekend, getting the best scrambles i can out of them.

The 332 and the 334 can be scrambled completely, by that i mean no pairs of pieces that belong together, bandaged together, I have been unable to get similar results from the 333.

It has to do with the number of identical 2x2x2 blocks. For example, the 332 has 2 single pieces making up a 2x2 block, 2 that are made up of 2 pieces, and 2 that are made up of 4 pieces, so to scramble it well, you swap the pieces around between similar blocks, and this stops them pieces from getting blocked, and then you can scramble it in a more random way from there.

Similarly with the 334 there are even numbers of each type of block, and so you can use a similar strategy, whereas the 3x3x3 has odd numbers of all the different block types, so you may get some blocks well scrambled, but others will get blocked in the process, so you can't split up each piece from every block