Picture from the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History.
Out of all the Scott Adams games, Pirate Adventure is the only one with a difficulty level of “Beginner”. Does the designation hold up? Heavy puzzle spoilers ahoy.
The map is still a work in progress. Roughly in order of when I did things:
1. There’s a pirate in a grass shack. Getting rid of him is simply a matter of providing a bottle of rum. Then you’re able to take his treasure chest and parrot.
2. There’s a “maze”, but it nearly seems like a formality (unless I’m missing some secret) because the useful destination can be reached from the opening room.
3. The rug at the London flat gives this response upon an attempt to take it:
>GET RUG
Sorry I can’t
Its nailed to the floor!
Fairly early on there’s a “claw hammer”, which when brought back to the flat, you can “take nails”, and then “take rug”, which reveals a set of keys.
5. The keys then unlock the pirate’s treasure chest.
>UNLOCK CHEST
Its open>GET PLANS
>READ PLANS
They’re plans to build the Jolly Roger (a Pirate ship!) You’ll need: hammer, nails,
lumber, anchor, sails, and a keel.
So far I’ve got the hammer, nails, and keel.
6. I know where everything else is, but it requires getting through a locked door in the maze.
I am in a pit. Visible items:
Mean and hungry looking crocodiles. Locked door.Some obvious exits are: UP
>UNLOCK DOOR
Crocs stop me
So far, I don’t think there’s the unfair timing (bees, chiggers, limited light source) of Adventureland, and there hasn’t been what I’d call outright trickery so far. We’ll see if things stay fair.
Renga in Blue 
Man, I miss the “narrow crack” puzzle. (One of the “universal” IF tropes that MIT and Scott Adams both borrowed from Adventure, which authors then got tired of and let slide into history.)
It was fussy and physically implausible and, yeah, already a cliche by 1980. But what a lovely puzzle structure! You know where your target is and what you need to do with it. Now you have to find a new approach to *something* along the line — which therefore gains greater depth.
Pirate Adventure’s handling of the crack is more realistically physical than what I’ve previously seen (limited to X number of objects, usually 1). Basically there’s a specific list of objects that won’t fit (the building supplies and the shovel) but everything else does just fine, so there’s not an inventory limit.