Despite a tip from a commenter telling me that it was already possible to break the seal affecting all of the hub rooms, and also possible to productively interact with Belboz, I could not figure out how, nor how to progress in any meaningful way. I turned to the walkthrough, and saw that its next instructions showed how to deal with the octagonal room.
What you do is put the compass rose in a compass-shaped inlet, as I had, to open the passageway into the octagonal room. But I was wrong in my belief that the compass controls it from here! Before entering, you remove the compass rose. The passage stays open. Then you go in, and you touch the runes on the octagonal room's walls with the compass to open a passage there.
Seriously - did anyone figure that out on their own? Placing the compass in the initial inset was pretty obvious, and removing it not quite as obvious, and I knew the compass was somehow used to manipulate the room, but why would you think that touching the walls with it would do anything?
This area is actually a maze of octagonal rooms, and each of the compass's eight directions is good for one use before turning into brass and deactivating, and north is already used up to get inside. In effect, you get seven moves to navigate the maze, and can't move in any direction twice. The rooms themselves have eight walls each, and each wall has a rune whose color dictates whether the compass will react and open a hole there or not.
The maze is not large or complicated, and one room's west wall is uniquely marked with a gold rune and alabaster inset. I couldn't find any way to reach this room without using up my west move, and I don't think it's possible, but it doesn't matter - all you have to to is Rezrov the inset and the wall opens up revealing... another cube.
The ninth cube goes to "No Place." Eastward from this hub is the Inner Vault from Zork III, still full of treasure, and the door from the Outer Vault locked and Rezrov-proof. Southward from No Place is a nondescript "plain," which is in fact a frictionless plane like something out of Mathmagic Land. Colorful rocks glide around the landscape, and another cube sits on one, but walking around is impossible, and the rocks protest if you try to climb on them.
I offered the lava fragment to the green rock in the immediate vicinity, and it gratefully allowed me to climb aboard and carry me where I wished. I moved toward the brown rock in the east, and it moved away, but I could eventually trap it in the corner of this plane and get its cube.
The tenth cube goes to a "Dark Room." And this dark room is situated over a dark, dark cave. So dark that your own light sources don't work very well.
You know what this means - grue city! And if you're in deep enough that you can see their outlines, you're already dead.
To survive, you've got to memorize a Snavig spell and then abandon any light-emitting items before going on. And then you must cast Snavig to become a grue.
Past the grues is a pool of faint light, with a climbable pillar in the middle. And on top of it, a cube.
The eleventh cube goes to a "Fire Room." South goes to back to the clifftop connected to the very first cube. North goes to a volcano - we'd been to its base before, but this part is higher up.
On the volcano, a heat-resistant outcropping can be seen to the west, but there's no obvious way to reach it.
Now I'm 415 points in, out 600, and I've seen 80 rooms, but a lot of them are part of the octagonal room maze and plains area. That's already more than the median 48KB Infocom game; only Zork I and Planetfall are appreciably bigger. I've got to be nearly done.
I have four unsolved problems:
- How do I enter the sealed rooms in the hubs?
- What do I do with Belboz?
- How do I open the door in the inner vault?
- How do I reach the volcano outcropping?
The first two should be solvable already, but I still can't figure out how.
Tips would be appreciated - if possible, I'd prefer gentle tips that prod me in the right direction to find the bit of information I'm missing to solve the puzzle over outright spoilers. I'll have updates in the comments regarding my progress over the weekend.
You can't solve the two new problems before solving the two old ones.
ReplyDeleteThe first old problem involves something you have certainly seen by now, but apparently didn't think was important.
Have you tried talking to Belboz?
Thanks - I have now solved three of the four outstanding problems.
DeleteOk... what the hell is going on in the Outer Vault? I know what I'm supposed to do here, but it isn't working.
DeleteFirst attempt (that should have worked):
https://pastebin.com/uTqtLw3M
Jindak 1 narrows it down to x1, x2, x7, or x8.
Jindak 2 eliminates x1 and x2.
Jindak 3 shows it's x8.
Blorple x8 -> Nothing!
Second attempt:
https://pastebin.com/kzXAHRhS
Jindak 1, once again, narrows it down to x1, x2, x7, or x8.
Jindak 2 is lucky and shows that it is x2.
Blorple x2->Nothing!
Third attempt:
https://pastebin.com/s2FXf6TP
Jindak 1 yet again narrows it down to x1, x2, x7, or x8.
Jindak 2 shows it must be x1.
Blorple x1->Nothing!
Fourth attempt:
https://pastebin.com/tQyLaC5g
Slightly different strategy now.
Jindak 1 shows it is x3, x4, x5, or x6.
Jindak 2 shows it x4, x3, x11, or x12.
Jindak 3 shows it is x3, x9, x5, or x6.
Blorple x3->Nothing!
I feel like there must be some invisible trigger that marks the puzzle as "solved" that I'm not hitting correctly. Because I can't see why any of these attempts didn't work.
The point here is that the cube you want is different (either brighter or dimmer) so the strategies you tried only work half of the time.
DeleteAh - silly me for assuming that the true cube would more powerful than the fake ones. Weird that I was wrong four times in a row! I've solved it now, and funnily enough, the true cube was underweight yet again.
DeleteThough I think there also is an inbisible trigger in that if you try to blorple the correct cube without using jindak at least once first, it won't work
DeleteBy the way, I also made the same assumption that the true cube would be more powerful, and couldn't understand why I sometimes messed up. I'm bad at this sort of puzzles, so I would have liked it better if it gave you a few more moves to complete it.
DeleteThe magical value of a real cube (either one you have found, or the one you're trying to find) is denoted as REAL-VALUE. The magical value of a fake cube is denoted as FAKE-VALUE. Half the time, REAL-VALUE is 3 and FAKE-VALUE is 2. The rest of the time, REAL-VALUE is 2 and FAKE-VALUE is 3. Any other magic object has a magical value of 1.
(With the caveat that I may be misreading the source code.)
I'm okay with the Jindak limit. It's an old logic puzzle, and requiring the minimum number of moves is what makes it challenging. But the puzzle really should have explained its rules better, some people might not already know this one, and there's big gaps of internal logic. How are you supposed to know that you're looking for the cube that's different from the rest? Why can't you just set all twelve cubes on the floor separately and cast Jindak to see which one glows different?
DeleteFrom what I remember, I did figure out the compass rose by myself when I played it in the late eighties. The sealed exits in the hub rooms, though? Not a chance. I still don't see how I was supposed to figure that one out.
ReplyDelete"the median 48KB Infocom game"
ReplyDeleteThe smallest Infocom games were about 80 KB. I believe the upper theoretical limit for their regular games would have been 128 KB, but not every platform they supported handled that apparently.
The winter/spring 1988 issue of The Status Line had an article ("What about Atari 8-bits and the Commodore 64?") with a chart showing the sizes of their games up to and including Sherlock.
https://infodoc.plover.net/nzt/NZT7.1.pdf
Unfortunately it doesn't label the chart so figuring out which game is which is left as an exercise to the reader. You can tell that after a few years, supporting the TI99 was no longer a priority, while the C64 remained relevant almost all the way to the end.
I meant in terms of RAM, not disk size. Spellbreaker's "real" filesize is apparently about 125KB, putting it in the same league as Hitchhiker and Wishbringer.
DeleteThe chart is almost certainly release order, except Nord and Bert and Plundered Hearts are switched (Nord and Bert is the bigger game, fourth from the end right behind Beyond Zork).
I wonder why they didn't split some of their games into multi-disks for Atari. Could it have been that hard to add that ability to the Z-Machine?
Ah, ok. I never had an Atari so I have no idea what multi-disks would entail. The source code for Infocom's Z-Machine interpreters has been located: https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps
DeleteIt's mostly Greek to me, though.
I imagine it would work the same way as multi-disk games on any other system. V4 has this ability, though it may require the story file to be "aware." You could probably backport this to V3 by having system-specific interpreter logic that says "if disk 1 is inserted and the data block requested is larger than the number of blocks on disk 1, then prompt the user to insert disk 2."
DeleteMeant to come back and reflect on this sooner. Starting in version 4, the Z-machine had a separate notion of byte-addressable "low" memory and "high" memory where addresses were "packed". It would be possible for the interpreter, rather than the story file itself, to have a mapping that told it that certain ranges of packed addresses were on different physical media, prompting a disk swap. It would probably be technically possible for the story file itself to be completely unaware of this, though in practice, you would presumably need the compiler to pack memory such that you weren't flipping back and forth arbitrarily.
DeletePacked memory consists mostly of strings rather than objects, so it might be as simple as having the compiler assemble the story file in "plot order".