Along the way are side quests and puzzles galore, including a few that are lot harder than anything involving stick figure drawings have a right to be. Probably the most difficult section to solve on your own is the trio of Pickle Factory puzzles that task you with putting down some ghosts and then getting the factory up and running again.
Solving The West Of Loathing Pickle Factory Puzzles
You can randomly find the abandoned pickle factory while wandering the desert, or by using binoculars at any of the forts with ladders, but the easiest way to discover the location is by looking at the fifth wanted poster in the Dirtwater jail.
The Dirtwater Wanted Posters
In the basement of the factory are three rooms, each with their own puzzle and a ghost mini-boss. Keep in mind that these are ghosts and not skeletons, so Alice’s anti-Skeleton skill won’t help here at all.
After completing all three pickle room puzzles, you can flip the switch in the main basement hub room to complete the quest and return home.
Cukes Room
This is the most difficult room, so we’ll start here. First talk to the ghost and initiate combat. After the battle, the note will reveal that all three vats must be at the same setting.
The problem is that moving one of the settings up or down by 1 point causes the settings on the other two vats to jump up or down by 2 points. You could literally spend hours chasing your tail trying to get them to all line up by moving each vat a single point at a time.
To solve the cukes room puzzle, start by using the levers on the middle and left vats to force the far right vat (hopper #3) to position #1.
Setting the third vat to 1
With the far right, third vat set all the way to the bottom at position 1, go back to the left and middle vat and alternate switching them until they are both at position #16.
The middle two vats are now both at #16
Now return to the far right, third vat and hit the lever five times in a row, which will set all of them to position #11 and complete the puzzle.
If you mess up and accidentally hit the lever six times, just reset the far right vat to #1 and start the sequence over again.
All three vats at position 11
Vinegar Room
To solve this puzzle, you need to already have a shovel in your possession. If you didn’t get one back at the beginning of the game by completing side quests, you can buy one in Dirtwater.
Defeat the ghosts in the vinegar room to find out you need to set the temperature on the bellows to 190 degrees. Now go grab a whole bunch of coal with the shovel, put it in, and check the temp.
It won’t ever go directly to 190 by adding coal, so you’ll need to hit the release valve to lower the temp until you hit 190. The release valve and coal don’t add and subtract at exactly the same rate, and the temperature fluctuates – so there’s no specific magic number here.
I had the best luck by adding in at least three coal shovelfuls at a time and then hitting the release valve once, but you can do other combinations.
Salt Room
This is the easiest puzzle. Defeating the ghosts will reveal you need to set the salinity number to 976. Just use the hundreds, tens, and ones levers to change the setting until it reads 976.
Now that you’ve got all three puzzles solved, return to the main room and hit the lever to get three ghost pickles and the remains of the dead bandits, which can be returned to the Dirtwater jail to complete the wanted poster quest.
Wrapping up the abandoned pickle factory quest
Having trouble with any other West Of Loathing puzzles and quests? Let us know in the comments and we’ll find the solutions!
