Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(My previous posts on Starcross are here.)

I’ve made enough incremental progress for a report. I was hoping to have everything on the “main floor” wrapped up, but alas, one puzzle remains elusive.

From the first British paperback cover of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, illustrated by Eddie Jones. Weirdly, it looks like there’s a painting landscape drawn on the inside, instead of the general-above view map the structure should have. The teleportation disks in Starcross come specifically from The Ringworld Engineers, although they aren’t portable in the book.

The most straightforward thing I did was finally get the red rod. The problem with testing every verb on everything is that there are exact conditions that still might not be replicated by the test.

Nesting Cage
The force projectors here aren’t working, but the cage is nonetheless inhabited by many creatures who resemble crosses between a rat and an ant. They are multi-legged with chitinous shells and pincers around their mouths, but they have long ratlike tails and sparse tufts of hair. Some of them are armed with tiny spears and walk precariously on their hind legs. In one corner is a very large mud and stick nest. The nest is constructed of all sorts of odds and ends, including a red rod. The rod is embedded in the mud near one of the entrances of the nest.

>throw black rod at nest
The black rod doesn’t damage the nest very much, and in fact a rat-ant quickly incorporates it into the nest.

Reviewing the text, I realized this implied something heftier might do the job.

>throw gun at nest
The nest smashes into fragments and the rat-ants stop dead in their tracks! They frantically evacuate the nest and immediately begin constructing a new nest at the opposite end of the cage. Rat-ant babies are being carried across the cage, and warriors watch you suspiciously.

Useful for everything but shooting at someone! But I finally got to grab the red rod, and use it to test out what it’s like to set the life support system to methane.

Repair Room
This room is taken up by two large pieces of machinery. The leftmost has a symbol depicting the emission of rays beside a yellow slot. The other machine bears a symbol in three parts: the first two parts, in black, are a solid block and a fluid level. The third, in red, is a series of parallel wavy lines. Beside it are three diagrams; under each one is a red slot. The first diagram shows four single dots equally spaced around a six-dot cluster. The second shows two eight-dot clusters in close proximity. The third has three single dots equally spaced around a seven-dot cluster. The only exit is up some stairs.
There is a metal and ceramic square here.

>put red rod in first red slot
The red rod disappears into the slot. You hear a subdued hum of machinery coming to life.

Just as a reminder, the dot patterns I had theorized were atomic numbers, and indeed that turned out to be right.

Carbon 1, Hydrogen 4 or CH⁴ = methane

Oxygen 2 or O² = dioxygen

Nitrogen 1, Hydrogen 3 or NH³ = ammonia

Enough waiting and you get

The air here has become quite pungent, smelling vaguely of charcoal.

followed by

The air here has become quite hard to breathe, permeated with the smell of coal gas.

The air here has become almost unbreathable, and heavy with the smell of coal gas.

and death with a hard cut off, just like letting the life support run out of time before.

The red rod in the second slot (like you’re supposed to do responsibly, getting oxygen) is sufficient to keep the game going on with no more time limit. I do think the “feel” of the game would be significantly different for someone who solved this puzzle early; for one thing, they wouldn’t get the still-mysterious death messages about how this solar system was going to be marked. There also wouldn’t be as much of a feeling of dread and danger, since most of the other deaths you have to go out of your way to see.

Drive Bubble Entrance
You are floating (clinging?) outside the drive bubble, a crystalline half-sphere covering the aft end of the artifact’s axis of rotation. Small knobs like handholds lead up the surface of the bubble, away from the end of the cylinder. The drive bubble is transparent and through it you can see the controls for the main engines of the artifact, which must be aft of here. The only way in is a hatch which is closed. Beside the hatch is a silver slot.

>jump
Gravity is very light here and you practically zoom into the air. Unfortunately gravity is not entirely non-existent, so eventually you begin to fall, faster and faster, in a lovely curve produced by the rotation of the artifact. You make a gorgeous but fatal swan dive into the surface.

**** You have died ****

The closest I could find with a real chemistry paper containing the same diagram, via ResearchGate.

I made a hard run then at trying to figure out the electronic mouse, since I could take my time following it around (with the literal verb FOLLOW). I tried marking up my map, especially paying attention then the mouse disappeared into the wall, and trying to figure out why it would sometimes go into a room and sometimes avoid it. (In general, it seems to “sense” garbage so, for example, it will avoid the laboratory unless you’ve put something on the ground.)

Yellow Hall
The room is lit by an emergency lighting system.
There is a maintenance mouse here, cheerfully scouring the area for garbage. It has already collected a blue disk, and a safety line.
The mouse disappears into a heretofore unnoticed hole in the wall, which closes and becomes nearly invisible.

I decided to try — just in case I maybe had made a typo before — to try out giving the mouse the blue teleportation disk again (keep in mind I was also thinking they were only usable once and I needed them for the altar; I was trying everything). Just like before, after the mouse disappeared, the blue disk did not work. However, if you wait a long time — and upon subsequent testing this might be a very long time, like 40 turns — it will finally work, and you can teleport to a new area.

>stand on red disk
There is a loud click as you step on the disk, and then a moment of disorientation.

Garage
This is the garage for Maintenance Mice. There are several stalls in which non-functional mice are rusting away. Other stalls are empty. There is a chute into which trash could be dumped, and a large bin nearby. A maintenance-mouse-sized door is in the forward wall.
There is a thin blue disk the size of a manhole cover here.
There is a maintenance mouse here.
There is a trash bin full of junk of all sorts here. Someone appears to have been dumping things for years (decades? centuries?) and never cleaning them out.
Among the trash near the top of the bin you see:
A safety line
The mouse rolls up to the trash bin and dumps some stuff into it.
The mouse leaves as unobtrusively as it arrived.

Oho! I was able to retrieve my disk, dig around the bin and find a green rod, and escape through the north wall (which leads you in that room with the mysterious south wall, so that’s two mysteries in one go).

My structural intuition was that the violet rod still gets stolen via teleport, so I tested out the disks again after the Garage incident and … they worked! But why? It turns out the teleportation happens as many times as you like, as long as you “reset” the disk positions afterwards. This opened the possibility that the disks also get applied to the obnoxious lab-globe puzzle. Alas, that’s the one puzzle I’ve been hacking at with no luck.

Laboratory
This is a glaringly lit room filled with strange devices, most completely incomprehensible. For example, a huge projector of some sort points menacingly at a silvery globe floating in midair in the center of the room. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod. Beneath the projector is a dial with four positions.
The silver sphere contains:
A blue rod

Some fun observations:

1. Typing CLIMB GLOBE just says “Bizarre!” but you can try to ENTER GLOBE gets the message:

Climbing it gives you a strange feeling, so you get back down.

2. You can fry the blue rod with the ray gun, or fry the silver sphere. If you fry the latter, everything goes away briefly (and the blue rod is destroyed permanently) but the sphere is re-formed via the matter projector.

The blast washes over the globe, which grows brighter and brighter as it overloads, then with a sinister shiver, it disappears! The blue rod is destroyed by the blast! Moments later, the projector builds up enough energy to restore the globe, and it reappears.

3. BLOCK BEAM is understood as a command, but doing so only gets the response:

Trying to destroy the beam of energy isn’t notably helpful.

4. As noted earlier, the mouse can be coaxed into the room so it might possibly give an assist, but I haven’t been able to trap it in the globe or get it to try to yank out the blue rod. (Yes, longshots, but so was hoping I could just teleport to the disk the mouse had just by waiting 50 turns.)

5. The most obvious behavior to play with is still the fact you can put things under the globe and on top of the globe. It feels like this has to be pertinent, especially because in my (admittedly short) tests I couldn’t find any object other than the globe that let you refer to the space UNDER it and put things. But what is the use? The blue rod only appears on switching the size of the globe to 1, so that has to be the last step, which potentially causes things to fall from above, or from the bottom of the bigger globe to the floor; there might be something on the floor when this happens. I tried having the teleport on the floor so that the thing from above lands on it and teleports, but no dice (additionally, why would that help?)

>turn dial to 1
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, shrunken. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod.
When the sphere shrinks, the ray gun falls to the new surface and then slides to the floor.

I’m starting to get the feeling this isn’t totally self-contained and I need an item from elsewhere, but where? The game hid its crystal rod pretty cunningly so I might be missing one or more hidden puzzles which reveal rod and/or helpful items. Even if I play like Green Lantern and try to imagine any helpful item at all, I can’t think of what would extract the blue rod.

It seems like there needs to be some way of manipulating the physical properties of the sphere — with heat or cold, say — and this can then be combined with the size changing to make the small version of the globe go pop. It has resisted all my attempts, and I did do the “try every verb” maneuver on it. It just isn’t normal matter!

>get globe
The globe won’t budge no matter how hard you try.

>touch globe
The globe feels neither hot nor cold. The globe doesn’t move no matter how hard you press.

Weirdly, even while stuck I am finding new things (even if new ways to die) so I don’t feel like I’m reaching a content limit yet. However, I just might try peeking at two (2) of the Invisiclues if I hit, let’s say, one more hour with nothing to show for it. Given the Invisiclues are already cunningly arranged by the original company I don’t need hints in the comments. (However, I would like to hear from either person who said they were playing: are you any farther? Feel free to answer in saying you have X rods.)

Via eBay.

Garage
This is the garage for Maintenance Mice. There are several stalls in which non-functional mice are rusting away. Other stalls are empty. There is a chute into which trash could be dumped, and a large bin nearby. A maintenance-mouse-sized door is in the forward wall.
There is a trash bin full of junk of all sorts here. Someone appears to have been dumping things for years (decades? centuries?) and never cleaning them out.

>examine chute
The chute seems bottomless and warm air rises from it.

>enter chute
The chute leads straight to the input hopper of a fusion reactor which gets some of its power from trash. It’s now getting some of its power from you.

**** You have died ****