Strategy guides › Mix
How to mix closer in Mix: hue first, then mud, and why five drops are not enough
▶ Play Mix🎯 Try the set that starts with the olive brown
The target is a dull olive brown, the colour of a wet field in November. It looks like no tube on the table, so you reach for blue and yellow, get a fine grass green, and then stall: more yellow makes it brighter, more blue makes it darker, and neither makes it brown. Two drops of rose would do it. Rose is the colour opposite green, and mixing opposites is how painters make mud.
Mix scores you by CIEDE2000 (ΔE00), the standard measure of how different two colours look to a person: 0 is identical, 1 to 2 is about the smallest difference most people can see side by side, 5 is a clear difference, and anything over 10 looks like another paint. Every target is made from a real recipe within the 20-drop limit, so 0 is always possible. To find out what actually helps, we ran the game’s own generator and solver over 10,000 Normal targets (2,000 daily sets) and measured them. Here is what came out.
Know what is in the jar
On Normal, 63 % of targets use two tubes and 37 % use all three. Two-tube targets are the clean colours: greens from blue and yellow, purples and violets from blue and rose, reds and oranges from rose and yellow. Three-tube targets are the dull ones: browns, olives, slate greys, plum.
That split is worth deciding before your first drop, because the third tube is not a small correction. For the three-tube targets, the best mix you could make from just two tubes is ΔE 16.9 off on average, and ΔE 16.9 looks like another paint. So the first question to ask of a target is not “which colour is it” but “is it clean or muddy”. If it is muddy, it has all three tubes, and the tube it has least of is the colour opposite its hue: rose for a muddy green, yellow for a dusty purple, blue for a brick red.
Hue first, then mud
The working method that follows from that:
- Name the two tubes that make the hue. Green: blue and yellow. Violet: blue and rose. Orange: rose and yellow.
- Mix those two until the hue is right, ignoring how bright or dull it is.
- If the target is muddier, add the opposite tube one drop at a time.
The figure shows why the order matters, using the brown from the opening (Normal, seed 12, recipe 3 blue, 2 rose, 5 yellow). Without its rose it is a bright green, ΔE 27.4 away. Without its blue it is an orange-red, ΔE 34.4 away. And the six mixes one drop away from the recipe are not equally wrong.
On this target a drop of rose either way costs 8 to 10, a drop of blue 4 to 6, a drop of yellow about 2. That is the general pattern, not a quirk of one brown. Across all 10,000 targets, one extra drop of any tube on top of the exact recipe costs on average ΔE 8.7 for rose, 7.9 for blue and 6.7 for yellow. Rose is the strongest tube on the table, so set it early and with care, and leave the gentlest tube for fine tuning at the end. On Hard, white is gentler still: one drop too many of white costs only ΔE 3.0 on average, against 8.4 to 10.8 for the colours. Use white for the last correction of lightness, not the first.
Use more drops than feels necessary
Only the proportions of a mix matter: 2 blue and 4 yellow is the same paint as 1 and 2. The drop count is your resolution. With 3 drops you can only make thirds; with 10 you can make tenths. We asked the solver for the closest mix it could make to each target using at most a given number of drops:
| Drops allowed | Best possible ΔE, on average |
|---|---|
| 3 | 7.3 |
| 5 | 2.9 |
| 6 | 2.0 |
| 8 | 0.6 |
| 10 | 0.0 |
Normal recipes have from 3 to 10 drops, and the most common totals are 9, 10 and 5. A player who stops at five drops is already 2.9 off before their eye has made any mistake. So find the rough ratio with few drops, then double it (2 : 1 becomes 4 : 2) and nudge one tube by a single drop. Doubling keeps the colour exactly and halves the size of your next step.
The ratio ladder below shows how fine that resolution is between two tubes alone. Blue and yellow go from a yellowish spring green at 1 : 5 to a deep bottle green at 5 : 1, and the steps at the blue end are the closest together.
Read the hint words, not just the bar
After Compare the game describes the difference from the CIELAB components: lighter or darker, redder or greener, yellower or bluer, the two largest named first. Those words map straight onto tubes. “Too green” on a brown means a drop of rose; “too dark” on Hard means white; “too blue” on a violet means a drop of rose. If you cannot tell colours apart well, the Hint button gives the same words before you compare, for 1 ΔE each (10 points of score), and that is cheap on a target that is 10 off.
Practice
The practice set is Normal seed 12. Its first paint is the olive brown from the figure: start with blue and yellow to a green, make it 3 : 5, then add rose one drop at a time and watch the green go out of it.
