Professor Backpack has five riddles in the base game and another in The Last Spark Hunter. The main-game puzzles each award a Planet Coin and a chest with a Star Potion. Match the mechanism to the solution below; fixed rotation counts are unreliable if you have already moved the pieces.
Beacon Beach — The Riddle of the Sunrise Temple
Find Professor Backpack in Sunrise Temple after the first major Darkmess obstacle has been cleared. Identify Augie’s outcast statue by its bag, rather than mistaking it for the favored son.
Turn Augie and the sun to face one another. Turn the king and the favored son to face one another as the second pair. These are two facing pairs: all four statues should not be looking at the central point. Once the arrangement is accepted, collect the chest. Beacon Beach route.
Pristine Peaks — The Riddle of Pristine Peaks
After clearing the mountain’s first story objective, follow the far-side route to the cannon that launches you onto Professor Backpack’s separate platform. There are three Rabbid faces with selectable symbols above them.
From left to right, set sun → Stone Mask → Darkmess Tentacle on the mountain. The sequence tells the planet’s history: heat, the cooling mask, then its corruption. The bird symbol is unused. The tentacle symbol includes the mountain; it is not the plain mask. Pristine Peaks route.
Palette Prime — The Riddle of Palette Prime
Descend the Abandoned Well in Spellbound Woods and use the side pipe near its lower section. Match the four animal discs to the times of day on the floor.
Place the woodpecker at sunrise, swan at the bright sun, fox at the crescent moon, and owl at the full moon. Think dawn, day, dusk and night. Use those floor symbols if the camera is rotated; a remembered screen direction can put an animal on the wrong tile. Palette Prime route.
Terra Flora — The Riddle of the Engineer’s Guild
Enter the hidden room in the Everbloom Tree. This puzzle needs a continuous model railway, but some movable track pieces initially have to serve as weights to open gates.
Push the first movable rail piece onto the large lift block and use Wave Power to raise it. Move it across the active bridge onto the first pressure plate. Activate the purple bridge mechanism to change which crossing is stable.
Use the block near the model’s ramp to access the next movable piece. Bring that piece across the now-active route onto the second plate. Both gates are needed to release the remaining track, so leave the weights in place while retrieving it.
Bring the newly accessible rail piece to the model. Replace the unsuitable straight section with the required corner, then use the displaced straight where the circuit needs it. Continue moving track between the model and the pressure plates as routes become available; an already placed rail can be a temporary weight again.
Trace the railway from one end before finishing. Every rail end must connect to its neighbor without a gap, and the two curves must turn the train back into a complete circuit. If the train stops, repair the first disconnected junction rather than shuffling the whole model. Terra Flora route.
Barrendale Mesa — The Riddle of Barrendale Mesa
Find Professor Backpack on the route toward the giant crane. The wall is an electrical circuit: two feeds enter at the left and the generator sits at the right.
Rotate the junction tiles so both left-hand feeds have an unbroken route to the generator. Start with the upper feed and follow its lit wire through each connection, then do the same for the lower feed. A corner that visually touches another tile is not connected unless its wire exits on the matching edge.
Use the worker portraits to distinguish the junctions: the hard-hat workers need the safety-glasses junction, which must also connect back toward the masked worker. The worker without safety gear is still part of the circuit. Once both paths carry power to the right, collect the reward. Barrendale Mesa route.
Melodic Gardens — Riddle of the Melodic Gardens
In The Last Spark Hunter, the professor waits on a northern island in the Flooded Ruins, beside a 4×4 grid. Three carvings around the ruins show the block placements. Visit the central island’s outer shore by boat, the channel toward the rising-and-falling blocks, and the wall just after docking at the Surviving the Outcasts island to see them.
Orient the grid with its symbols matching the carvings. Put one block directly above the star, one in the corner diagonally opposite the sun, and one diagonally above-left of the crescent moon. The clues describe positions relative to the printed symbols, rather than a number of pushes from wherever a block currently stands. All three correct placements reveal the Star Potion chest. Melodic Gardens walkthrough.