LociOiling Lv 1
In ligand puzzles, the ligand must be selected to use some tools, but must not be selected for other tools. These restrictions don't make much sense, and make the game more difficult than it needs to be.
All ligand tools should be available when there's a suitable ligand in play, and all non-ligand tools should just ignore any ligands.
For example, to use the (non-ligand) auto structures tool, I'd normally select all (control+a), then open the secondary structure tool (hotkey l), and click "auto". But for a ligand puzzle, it's necessary to deselect the ligand after selecting all. Deselecting the ligand requires a control-click, adding to the degree of difficulty. The auto structures tool already ignores locked protein segments, so it seems like it could just ignore ligands as well.
When there's a designable ligand, the ligand alone must be selected in order to open the ligand-specific tools. In the recent CACHE Challenge puzzles, the ligand was the only thing that could be selected in the first few puzzles, but it still needed selecting. In later CACHE puzzles, some protein segments could be selected, but these needed to be deselected and the ligand selected to open the ligand tools.
Once the "Small-Molecule Design" panel or other ligand tools are open, the selection requirements are gone. With the SMD panel open and the ligand deselected, clicking on the ligand selects the ligand and also selects a ligand atom for the tool. The ligand must be selected to open the Small Molecule Properties panel, but the panel remains open if the ligand is then deselected. So it seems like selecting the ligand in the first place is not really necessary. Instead, the ligand tools could just be available as long as there's a ligand they can act on.
(I realize some puzzles might have multiple ligands, but any non-designable ligands would probably be small and locked in place, so the ligand tools could easily ignore them. If anyone's contemplating puzzles with multiple designable ligands, the current tools are not really up to the challenge.)
