I am, somewhat disappointingly, quite stalled. I might have to stop my traversals here until I can summon up source code or the like.
It’s hard to put a good fixed narrative on what happened, since I essentially went through multiply forays where I started getting more of the lay of the map, but according to the documentation which lists 148 rooms, I have found only a little more than a third.
Various things I found:
• A curtain of light that I wasn’t able to do anything with; one of these is in the Bank of Zork in original Zork but there’s no way to pass through the wall I could find. I may just have the syntax wrong, or there may genuinely be a change to the puzzle.
• Speaking of changes to puzzles, the four colored buttons are in at the Dam #3, but the only way to get them to work I could find was to push all of them in reverse order, causing the room to start flooding. That led to the bolt outside glowing, and then I could TURN BOLT WITH WRENCH, which for some reason opens a staircase in the ravine below the dam as opposed to (apparently) operating anything logical. I feel like the form of the puzzle was taken but not the exact sense.
• Relatedly, I found the “echo room” from Zork, but the only way to solve it is the original way: by just typing the word ECHO. The solution involving stopping the dam water from rushing by only was added later.
• I found the thief and he on one encounter stole my stuff, and on another encounter killed me. I think if you just immediately flee when you see him he doesn’t do anything, which nullifies the impact a little.
• I found a maze of rooms “all alike”. Rather evilly, if you try to drop items to map things out, they end up getting moved to a “central room” which has a set of keys. I just had to guess my way out.
• The mine area is in, kind of — the diamond is out in the open and you don’t need to do anything special to get it — but the rusty rod with a star on it from Adventure is there also. I’ve tried waving the rod in various places with no success.
You’re locked in here and have to PUSH NEXT to get out. The NEXT button is a PLATO in-joke — it gets used all of the time in navigating the network system.
• I found two riddles in addition to the SHADOW one from last time. One of them was the WELL one from original Zork, and one of them is a regular classic.
My main sticking points are a.) the fact I still haven’t been able to get back outside, to the trophy case where the treasures are stored. b.) I don’t have a bottle of water, and I can’t substitute any other container — I can get an empty gas can but the game is just confused with syntax if I try to fill it. This means the plant calling for water in a pit (like in Adventure) can’t be grown into a beanstalk. c.) Relatedly, there’s a rusty steel door, and there’s oil, but I can’t bring one to the other. Oddly, if I try to fill the gas can with oil the game just says it’s now covered with oil (??).
I do worry there might be some bug stymying my progress. Trying to open an object gives a message about opening a book (I don’t have a book in my inventory) and the wobbly parser generally makes me concerned there’s some command too messed-up to deliver. I’m still going to make honest whacks for a few days but I may shelve this game for the moment and move on with my 1981 sequence a little more.
If you’re interested in playing the game yourself, the cyber1 server has it — you have to follow the login instructions, and when it asks what program you want to run, type “adventure” all in lower case. I still don’t understand how to set it up so save games work.
Renga in Blue 
I’ve started playing this on Cyber1. You gave me the idea that the Curtain of Light was passible, which really got me unstuck and able to explore a whole new section of the map. After trial and error I discovered “walk through curtain.”You’re right about the persnickety parser. It’s tedious to try every possible permutation of a command. I’m stuck again on two areas. The irony is, when I was just wandering aimlessly and randomly I was able to open a secret room off the visitor center waiting room where there was a bottle of water. I think this is the water I need to water the plant in the pit. I vaguely remember that I found a computer card in the dingy box room and I was able to use that in the dam control room to open the secret room… I think. Also, I remember being able to go to the West end Rainbow. But now that I’ve been mapping and taking notes, I have not been able to re-find these two things.There is definitely an order you need to visit the puzzles in and if you don’t do them in the right order, you will never be able to solve it without restarting the game. E.g., you have to kill the troll before you get to the Riddle Room otherwise the Echo room is forever blocked to you.
this is more progress than I’ve heard anyone else get!
Test
Sorry for the “test” spam, I left another comment earlier and it failed to post. Anyway…
I was wrong about having to kill the Troll first. There are in fact 4 different riddles and I thought I knew the answer to all of them, but it turns out I was wrong about the 4th one and had correlated it to not-killing the troll. When I use the correct answer it doesn’t matter if the troll is dead or not.
I was also wrong about the water bottle and computer card. Both can be found but in other locations than where I thought they were. I’ve realized I am conflating old memories of playing other games, perhaps long ago, with this one.
There do *seem* to be seemingly random outcomes for certain things, but it may be I just haven’t isolated a specific cause. E.g., there’s a Waterfall you must traverse but I seem to randomly die half the time and succeed the other half and I still don’t know why. There’s a Debris room where you enter xyzzy but it seems to teleport you randomly to one of 2 locations and I can’t figure out if it really is random or deterministic. I spent hours trying variations with minimal inventory and documenting what I was carrying and the order I picked them up and it still seems random. And it *seems* to be important where it takes you because one location is on the surface but the other location is underground in the maze.
There are many other “Alike”-type mazes that don’t let you map them!! Dropping items doesn’t help because they all get moved and gathered in the same location. It’s either purely random or there is some sequence you must use but if so, I have not determined what it is. And they get more frustrating in later stages. There’s a Stradivarius violin in a maze that I’ve stopped trying to get because it can eat up like 50 moves trying to randomly get out again.
I’m currently in second place on the leader board, which you can see by typing the DATA button on the game’s start screen. But I am currently completely blocked. I hate having to re-explore all the puzzles again to see if I’ve missed something but nothing is obvious right now. I’ll probably take a break for a while and come back to it again in the future.
thanks for the check in! I will definitely take another swing at this sometime now that I know progress is possible