Teepees

Answer: POWWOWING

By Kevin Zhou and Ben Coukos-Wiley

This puzzle consists of two parts: cryptic crossword clues and a logic puzzle. The seven cryptic clues can each be answered with a seven-letter word, as shown below

Clue Answer Explanation 'P's 'T's
Redundancy destroys a plover OVERLAP anagram of A PLOVER 1 0
Stop scattered conflict since 1945 POSTWAR (anagram of STOP) + WAR 1 1
Married rodents turned into hit indie game STARDEW (WED + RATS) rotated 0 1
Echolocator is a toy flipper, by the sound of it DOLPHIN sounds like (DOLL + FIN) 1 0
Semi-pro Wessex player hides true skill PROWESS semi-PRO WESSex 1 0
Pillbugs are so into MP3 players ISOPODS SO inside IPODS 1 0
I fled the scene, gasping for breath PANTING PAINTING - I 1 1

The second part of the puzzle is a modified tents puzzle whose rules are explained in the beginning text. However, there is a key element missing in this tent puzzle - the numbers on either axis that count how many tents are in that row/column.

The instruction text tells us that the number of teal and purple tents are given via the answers to the cryptic clues. The a-ha of the puzzle is realizing that, since the title of the puzzle is "Teepees", that information is clued with the number of 'T's and 'P's in each word, standing for teal and purple, respectively.

O V 🌲 R L A P
P O S T W 🌲 🌲
🌲 T A R 🌲 E W
D O 🌲 P H I N
P 🌲 O W E S S
I 🌲 O P O D 🌲
P A N T I N G

Knowing this, we can solve the logic puzzle and extract from the indices containing tents. This gives us the answer to the puzzle, POWWOWING.

Authors' Notes

The theme, a-ha, and the logic of this puzzle were all created by Kevin, and Ben came in at the end to write the cryptic clues. It was pretty tough finding words with the letters for extraction, along with the right numbers of 'P's and 'T's. With this constraint the logic was tricky to write, but after many attempts at constructing the grid a version was found where everything worked out relatively nicely. Previously the puzzle was supposed to be a much larger grid with the extraction being a clue phrase for POWWOW, but that was way too daunting of a task.

In the end, we decided to make this puzzle short and sweet, and hoped it would be a good blend of two different puzzle styles. We were a bit worried that cryptics would be too large a hurdle for new solvers, making it poorly balanced against the relatively simple latter half. For this reason they were designed to be rather easy.