How to: carp

Carping is a planning puzzle. There are three key rules:

• You can rotate the pieces. It's astounding how many people never realised this. Use the mouse wheel, or control pieces with the Z-X-C keys.
• Place pieces as neatly fitting as possible. A perfect hole ("Masterpiece") has no overlapping pieces.
• Plan ahead. If a hole is nearing completion, don't just fill it and then hope for the last piece to come along!

Carpentry is also an odd puzzle; once you understand the puzzle, it's much easier to do well at higher ratings, as you get bigger holes and so more planning time.

Incredible carpentry comes from completing multiple masterpieces in a row.
To make a masterpiece:

• Try to make the hole smooth. While long pieces come along often enough, there's often only one way to fit them, which can force you to need a rare piece to complete a hole. I like to use my long pieces as early as I can, unless I know I can soon use a long piece when completing a hole.
• Check out http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Carpentry#Example:_Two-Piece_Holes. Finishing a hole depends on having the right pieces: certain holes have many combinations of pieces that can be used to complete them.
• When a hole shakes once (and gets a red blinking edge), you need to pay attention to that hole. When it shakes twice (and your last placed piece starts shaking), you need to place something in that hole, or the hole score will go down: even if you can't fit a piece perfectly, fill it up. You can then use the 'broken' hole as a dump for bad pieces, but try to still fit things as neatly as possible.
  
• You can pick up and readjust a piece directly after placing it. This is certainly handy for misclicks, but if you don't have both pieces for a two-piece hole, you can place the first piece - and then if any of the matching pieces comes along, you can pick up the first piece and reposition it so the new piece will fit. Pieces are not 'scored' until they are fixed in place when you either place them a second time or pick up the following piece.

Scoring well

• Holes are scored by the number of moves it takes to fill them. Whatever the size of the hole, there is a minimum number of pieces to fill it: if you can fill it with that number of pieces, you get a masterpiece. If you need an extra piece to fill it, you get "Craftsmanship!" and a lower score. As you need more and more pieces, the score for the hole gets lower and lower.
  
• Holes are partially scored as you go. If you're making round holes, you're already getting a bonus, as the puzzle/server knows you are giving yourself a high probability of getting a good score on that hole. If you're unlucky enough to need multiple specific shapes, you have a low probability of completing that hole, and get some negative points.
  
• When you manage to complete the hole - regardless of the probability that you would - you get your completion bonus. If you're about to grapple, complete holes are worth more than well-rounded open holes.
  
• When you're getting masterpieces, the best scores come from chaining multiple masterpieces in a row. Bear this in mind when you have to choose which hole to fill, if you know one won't be a masterpiece!

Bonuses

• On each piece is a barely visible grain. If all the placed pieces in a hole have a horizontal grain, you get a grain bonus for the hole. A masterpiece without a grain bonus is worth more than a craftsmanship with a grain bonus.
  
• A much less common bonus is the "nice set" bonus, which you get if you fill a hole with only one type of shape. It doesn't come along often enough to be properly understood, but it seems to be approximately the same bonus as the grain bonus. It's not worth aiming for, but provides a little variety