This Kata is a real Minefuck :)

I also tried to generate zero as a sorted list of index tupel, based on the length of that index in a dictonary, that contained (index):{applicable values for indexposition}. The idea was to make good decisions early; at the cost of potentially no marginal information gain - since we jump through the sudoku. The latter proved to be true: the midlevel values are traversed at very high cost. The number of iterations is by far greater, if zero is sorted this way (average traversals about 20000).

Any other idea to reduce the iterations?
I had one of the test cases take about 77000 steps. all others were reasonably within the range of 300 - 4000 with focus on the lower bound.

I just edited the devastation function with help of best practice - didnt see it before, but Blind4Basics had a much cleaner version of what i previously had to clean up. Thank you for putting my nose to it.