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That was head bending trying to fill the grid. Can’t imagine how bad it must have been to set! How do you find enough words made up from so few letters!

I'll do a writeup after the deadline - it's not that bad to fill the grid but checking the validity of the Sudoku afterwards was hard.

It’s nice to be able to feed back directly to the setter hamishsoup. I really enjoyed this as I try my hand at the specialist sudokus as well as crosswords. I appreciated the relatively generous clueing for the non jumbled entries. It was good to have an early framework to hang the jumbles on. I found the jumbles much more challenging so overall a good workout.
For whatever reason I did not immediately twig that two identical pairs of possibilities in a row, column or square would mean those two letters were accounted for. So in standard sudoku if you have either S or F in one cell and S or F in another one must be F and the other S. Here they could also be S and S or F and F.
That led to needing a restart when I was pretty sure I had nearly finished.
The final solve was 40a which I only managed to reverse engineer after completing the grid. A nice confirmation that I have (probably) got it right.
So it’s a thumbs up from me. Many thanks.

Stuck on two:
22A After revolution, child provided drinks (5)
20D Give reduced set out to fill with ashes (8)
Help appreciated.

Thanks very much Mattrom. All clear now.

Great puzzle. Thanks Smidgers. Definitely a candidate for POTY for me.

Hi folks,

As promised, some info on how I set the Sudoku crossword puzzle smash.

This was a puzzle which started out from an 'I wonder if...?' moment, having realised that a 9x9 Sudoku with one row and column between each of the panels, plus a one-cell border round the edge, would be a 13x13 square. I found a random Sudoku online and used that to fill in the OTTFFSSENs, then used a Listener grid from a puzzle a while back to give me a sensible set of bars, and started trying to fill it. I knew I wanted to have some fully barred-off squares to make the Sudoku element more interesting, so I popped them in quite early on. Otherwise it was then a case of fiddle/try filling/repeat for a bit.

The grid-fill was done with the wonderful QXW. I used my standard 50,000 word dictionary but it quickly became apparent that that wouldn't be enough so I expanded it to a fuller word list. I would dearly have loved to get SKELETON STAFF in there (being the only 13-letter phrase I could find which contains OTTFFSSEN) but it didn't work out. QXW has wonderful permutation options, including making the word entered normally, backwards, cycled, cycled backwards and jumbled; without this I wouldn't have been able to get things sorted. This actually wasn't a bad one to code in QXW; I've had much harder (including an eightsome reels in 3D - https://3dcalendarpuzzles.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024-11-NOV-PUZ-SOUP-AGC-futxyjOu.pdf - and a 3D alphabetical jigsaw (with rhyming couplet clues, natch) - https://3dcalendarpuzzles.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023-11-NOV-PUZ-SOUP-qV0qZ19M.pdf).

Then to testing. Dear me, the testing. The trouble with this layout is that if you have pairs of letters at the corners of a rectangle which is otherwise undivided by bars (eg FS at the top corners and SF at the bottom corners) they can be switched to give a valid solution to the sudoku, and it's SO easy to miss one. And as soon as any barring is changed then the whole thing needs to be resolved from scratch to see if it's introduced any other anomalies. So... lots and lots and lots and lots of starting from a blank grid and seeing if it worked and getting it wrong. My thanks to Andie Johnson and John Henderson for being early victims of it not working properly.

And then, eventually, it all fell out. One final word tweak for a rectangle I'd not noticed, and it was done. I set it three years ago, sat on it for a while, and eventually decided to try the Listener. Thanks to the editors for having me, and for their careful and thoughtful amending of some clues to rein in some of my wilder flights of fancy.

I am personally absolutely delighted with this puzzle. It's an example of my favourite type of puzzle: where you know from the start exactly what you have to do, but it looks impossible, and then you realise that it isn't and you're going to have to do it because you can't let the damn thing beat you. (See also my vowelless puzzle, https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2019/10/31/Genius147_v3.pdf, which I think is my favourite ever of my own puzzles - the simplicity of the instructions, ' ll vwls hv bn rmvd frm bth cls nd sltns' sits in counterpoint to the difficulty of the puzzle - and the glorious, glorious moment of realisation for Simon Anthony, as he understands that the Miracle Sudoku isn't a hoax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4 .)

I do hope you enjoyed solving it - the comments are positive, for which many thanks, and I am quietly very proud that some of you think it might be up there for your puzzle of the year - that means a lot. I look forward to annoying you further in future.

Hamish/Smidgers/Soup

PS I'm also very open to people getting in touch with me if they have something they'd like coded in QXW - I am getting better at using it and understand how some constraints work, and find filling grids like this really very fun.

Thanks Hamish, really interesting to read! Puzzle was really good fun - can’t imagine the frustration of actually setting it. Especially enjoyed the extra logical steps of words intersecting the sudoku squares to give the requisite info

And your description of the puzzle as “not letting it beat you” is spot on! I erased the whole sudoku bit at one point - but not sure if I’d actually made a mistake or just erroneously slipped back into the regular sudoku logic of each of the nine elements being unique. I’ll never know…

Am I missing something here? (Haven't been a Listener regular since the 90s, but needed something to fill the time during exam invigilation.) Having seen the solution, I have everything solved, and all but four of the squares in the Sudoku resolved correctly. The TF in column one, rows four/five, and the FT in column six, rows four/five could be reversed, and I would still have the requisite number of Fs and Ts in each row, column and box. I opted for the printed solution, only on the grounds that the word SOFT could be seen in the sixth column. Any enlightenment?

Ignore my request. Having had a look at the solution, I can see that reversing the letters would give me two Fs and no Ts in FOSTERS. In my defence, it was the last pair of letters that I had to resolve, and my poor brain was probably too tired by then - to say nothing of the beer that had been consumed.