Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior Adventure Quest posts here.)

I was stalling on writing this post until I also had teleportation figured out, but I’m still at a loss to completely explain it. I’m starting to suspect there’s a completely random aspect but the game is still demanding some parts be done more exactly?

From MSX World.

To continue from last time, I first went back to prod at the various locations of my map to see if I had missed something. Way back where I had received a scroll explaining the quest, I had a “loop” on my map, because I was unable to move any farther up:

What the game had actually done is moved me to a new room but not described the room nor changed the graphical screen. If you LOOK you will find you have, in fact, entered a new room, with an item I previously missed:

The stick, when dropped, grows an endless supply of fruit. I already had fruit from elsewhere and I still don’t know what it is for.

The stick grows incredibly as it hits the ground. Buds form, leaves burst and drink in the light, and the stick is a mass of flowers! Fruit swells and falls onto the ground and the leaves are shed. It is just a stick again.

Another part I prodded at insufficiently was in the tower surrounded by orcs (or at least previously surrounded, if I used a saved game where the snowman had taken care of them). On the top is a tentacle creature which I still have yet to handle.

However, you technically don’t need to handle the creature — maybe — as you can just walk on by. This is different from the sphinx, giant, djinn, and dragon, so I was implicitly assuming the same applied, but no:

This incidentally might still be “wrong” as the creature will now kill you on sight if you enter the room again, so if there’s some item you get via defeating it this will skip by. On the other hand, it seems like the authors had to special-code letting you waltz by, so maybe there is no way to defeat it.

Opening the bag says “A blast of air roars from the bag.” It took me a long time to realize where the bag went but I do have it resolved. (I’ll show you later, feel free to guess! It is one of the obstacles we’ve already seen.)

The emerald eye, on the other hand: I knew exactly where it went, as I had a statue back in the cave with a missing eye.

This gave me a weapon past the ARMED INTRUDER door so I immediately tried whacking the various obstacles with it. The dragon? Still no dice. But the spider:

Now you need to give the orc chase. It runs past the “ambush” point, but fortunately the presence of the Earth-Stone apparently now has all the hostile orcs distracted, as it is now an “unguarded” lair.

The earth-stone is stashed in a nearby storage room so you can just grab it, but rather like Adventure 200, the problem is not getting in but getting out.

But given I had just obtained a shiny new sharp implement, and there didn’t seem to be anything else to do in the orc lair, I realized I could Indiana Jones it with CUT BRIDGE:

You sever the rope bridge, preventing pursuit.

There are no orc issues in the cave past this point. There’s a still a dragon (would love to get the water trident in there and see what it can do) and some blocking giant rocks (which I think might be the solution to getting the water trident in).

The Earth-Stone itself I haven’t been able to do anything with (I’ve tried waving it, throwing it at things, etc.) so it may just not activate until we reach the final climax.

Frustrated, I went back to trying to decipher the teleport mechanics. There seems to be some sort of background timer. That is, I could be at step 5 of my teleport sequence, wander back and forth ten turns, and jump to step 7. Wander some more and I could jump to step 9. However, I was stuck at 18 (the death rapids) where no matter how much wandering I did the teleport sent me to death.

I would have thought maybe that was that, but then this happened:

This is directly in the temple past the sphinx and the snakes. I think on this particular run I hadn’t even taken care of the snakes yet. I definitely hadn’t reached here before via teleport. Where I had this happen was immediately after entering the building at the start of the game.

Maybe the white dots are part of this? (As far as I can tell, other white dot rooms like the pillar in the desert and the small cave next to where the snowman is don’t have the same effect.) In any case, after my “reset” I had a much more erratic sequence of teleport destinations which I believe is truly random. For example, I went west of the building to some “biting insects” where there’s a direction that loops and tested different number of SOUTH commands before rubbing the lamp twice. I used this same procedure with the Oracle in the game Madness and the Minotaur where I needed to “rotate the RNG”.

from biting insects –> zero steps –> underwater at well
from biting insects –> one step –> lake bed above deep trench
from biting insects –> two steps –> tiny alcove
from biting insects –> three steps –> tiny alcove
from biting insects –> four steps –> wide stone staircase climbing up, narrow path west
from biting insects –> five steps –> brick of rapids
from biting insects –> six steps –> at tentacles
from biting insects –> seven steps –> at tentacles
from biting insects –> eight steps –> at tentacles
from biting insects –> nine steps –> at tentacles
from biting insects –> ten steps –> at snowman
from biting insects –> eleven steps –> outside south door of guard tower
from biting insects –> twelve steps –> outside south door of guard tower
from biting insects –> thirteen steps –> outside south door of guard tower
from biting insects –> fourteen steps –> outside small door, foul smell
from biting insects –> fifteen steps –> underwater, belfry
from biting insects –> sixteen steps –> in rapids, one before brink

At “zero steps” I teleported to the dark room under the building. If that somehow could be done from underwater I could safely take the jellyfish over to see what’s in there. At “two steps” and “three steps” that teleported me directly to the alcove where the emerald and bag were, bypassing the tentacle creature entirely!

The fact that some teleport locations last for multiple turns and some last for only one suggests to me that teleportation is now really, truly, random. I still strongly suspect I’m missing something here.

All this random teleportation did lead me to accidentally solve a puzzle. Remember the bag that blasts air?

I cannot say I had any grand insight. I just happened to have it in my inventory when I hit the right room. I’ll take the luck, this game is an uphill climb enough.

Next up: actually getting light to the octopus-free room (is there an item now?…) and maybe trying to get it in the well too, but that sounds like a major pain. Other than that I really just have rocks to deal with. Also, a shark which I never saw before but now seems to be circling. I think it is a delayed like the wolves and I just hadn’t got “lucky” yet: