Hints exclude wildcards altogether, same for the insight potions and similar. I could experiment with enabling wildcards for hints since it doesn't do a full dictionary search, although for insight potions including wildcards makes the function take about a second on my hardware, rather than a few miliseconds.
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There are definitely a few ways to approach this. If you want to keep it as is, just a message displayed when the hint button fails but detects 1 or more wildcards 'hint cannot use wildcards'
I don't know what sort and search method you are using for hints, but several methods come to mind to do a search that only use a fraction of the dictionary.
Also would love to talk Kickstarter/Steam/Publishing with you if you are interested in that route. You can find me on discord under the same name.
Hints already only searched a fraction of the dictionary, and the next version uses wildcards for hints as of about 20 hours ago.
It never seemed worth specifying that it doesn't include wildcards, since if you have enough that it can't find anything outside of them, then you can probably put anything in and the wildcards will figure it out.
I've already agreed to a publishing deal with 2LeftThumbs.