Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.

You can read my prior posts on Starcross at this link. For those avoiding the ending, now is the time to veer away.

From bryron9 on Twitter, who points out the sticker on the shrinkwrap means 100% full preservation would technically need sealed packages to get the sticker variants. Also, based on Jimmy Maher’s writeup it looks like not everyone was aware the saucer is the player’s ship, the Starcross itself (“there were no actual flying saucers in the game”)?

I was rather close to done. The globe puzzle I was especially close on. As arcanetrivia pointed out in the comments, I essentially described how to solve while lamenting being unsure how to solve it.

The most obvious behavior to play with is still the fact you can put things under the globe and on top of the globe … 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?)

As far as my understanding of the mechanism goes, I was confused by two things:

1.) I thought the blue rod simply did not exist on the other settings, and the globe was of equal thinness on every setting. The real idea is that the blue rod is always present under the “force wall” even if you can’t see it. This meant my thinking that required the last step be to have the globe at its smallest setting was wrong.

2.) I thought the way the teleporter worked was simply to teleport all items that step on it. Instead, it teleports things that step on it and things that are close enough. I do not know why you would think this before it happens.

I managed to finally get the thing to work by mucking about, and I’m fairly sure I tried this combination before in almost exactly the same way, but I must have had something slightly off: Set the dial to medium (2 or 3) so there’s room on top. Slide one teleport disk under the globe while in small mode. Drop the other teleport disk on the floor as normal. Put an item on the globe. Set the dial to max size (4). The item will fall and trigger the teleport, and the teleport will teleport both the item and the rod to outside the globe.

>SET DIAL TO 3
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of a beachball.

>PUT BASKET ON GLOBE
The metal basket is now on the globe.

>SET DIAL TO 4
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of four feet and seems embedded in the floor. You hear the hum of the transporter disk activating. There is a loud click, and then the metal basket appears resting comfortably on the red disk. The blue rod must have been in range of the disk, because it appeared as well!

Looking at the image from the Zork User Group hint guide (see above) I may have not visually have placed the globe quite as much into the ground. In addition, I always assumed the rod was on the top, so even with a teleport that gets “close items” the rod doesn’t seem like it’d be close. I think it’s meant to be jammed in the middle somehow, even without the globe to anchor it? You know what, I still don’t understand this puzzle.

With that done, all I had to do was figure out what was going wrong with my ray gun so that I could get extra charges (and as a reminder, flying via shooting the gun is the only puzzle I remembered, so I knew it was running short). I needed Invisiclues for this. I previously went through my verb list and maybe didn’t pay enough attention to the SHAKE verb, especially because of a bug:

>SHAKE GUN
It rattles loudly.

This happens before you’ve shot it at all. Afterwards, SHAKE GUN gives a blank prompt.

Just to prove that it isn’t just a modern interpreter issue, here’s the same bug in the Macintosh version.

The bug implied to me that no useful information was being given and I was just hitting a glitch, but no: the rattle is very important. It implies something is stuck in the gun.

>LOOK IN GUN
In the barrel is a silver rod!

>GET SILVER ROD
Taken.

With the silver rod out, there’s no “backfire shot” and you have 3 shots rather than just 2. This is enough to make the Newton-propelled flight. Before showing that off, I should demonstrate the use of the silver rod:

>JUMP
Gravity is almost non-existent here, so your jump easily carries you to the hatch of the drive bubble.

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.

>PUT SILVER ROD IN SILVER SLOT
The silver rod slides into the slot and the hatch opens.

>IN
Drive Bubble
The drive bubble is on the axis of rotation at the aft end of the artifact, so there is no “gravity” here. It is transparent and you can see the tips of the tallest trees of the forest beyond. Far off, at the opposite end of the axis, is another bubble much like this one. The room is a featureless gray except for one small white slot. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
Floating near a white slot in the wall is a white rod.

>GET WHITE ROD
Taken.

>PUT WHITE ROD IN WHITE SLOT
As you insert the rod, the walls come alive with a white tracery of controls, dials, and gauges. In addition, a black slot surrounded by an ominous dead-black circle appears.

Putting the black rod in the black slot is an emergency stop and the game ends. The black slot (which you are required to pick up to enter the artifact) is otherwise useless.

You do need to go through the silver rod-white rod process because otherwise there’s a later moment where a button mysteriously fails (without mentioning it is because the drive bubble hasn’t been properly set, and also there’s no way to go back).

Just to be clear on our inventory now, our rods (after using up silver) are clear, violet, brown, blue, pink, black (boo!), gold, and green. Yellow and red got used on repair, and white was found right where it gets used.

The repair hatch in the forest.

Let’s go flying. To be clear on the visual, here, we’re at the aft of the cylinder where there’s a “drive bubble” and we’re flying to the opposite end where there’s a “control bubble” and the end of the game.

>JUMP
You push against the surface of the bubble, and because there is no weight here, you shoot into the air and away along the axis!

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder, near the drive bubble. There are enormous trees “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is grassland “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

Floating in Air
You are floating at the axis of rotation of the cylinder. There is a metal band “below.” There is no gravity here.

>SHOOT GUN AT DRIVE BUBBLE
A blast of orange flame issues from the gun, and the recoil propels you at an impressive speed through the air. Eventually, air resistance slows you down, but you are still in the weightless area near the center of the cylinder.

On Control Bubble
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal bubble which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can make out shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. There are odd knobs of some sort which you could use to pull yourself down the bubble. At the other end of the cylinder you can see the drive bubble in the midst of enormous trees.

>U
There is only air there.

>D
Control Bubble Entrance
You are floating outside a 100 meter crystal dome which protrudes from the fore end of the cylinder. Inside, you can discern shadowy mechanisms and odd constructions. Near you is an entrance which is closed. A small slot surrounded by gold crystal is next to the hatch. Small knobs which might make good handholds dot the surface of the bubble from the axis to the hatch.

You must specify you are shooting at the drive bubble, otherwise your path goes awry and you plummet (fortunately, I was already doing this by default, I discovered the interesting death later).

To get inside the Control Bubble you need the gold rod:

Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for a single small slot surrounded by clear crystal.

Clear activates the mechanism, and the remaining colors (brown, green, blue, violet and pink) all activate particular controls. I like how we are in a typical Collect the Twelve Orb McGuffins of McGuffinville but they get used for specific technical purposes (rather than the typical fantasy plot where It Just Works when you have the right number).

>PUT PINK ROD IN PINK SLOT
When the pink rod is inserted into the pink slot, a ghostly image appears on the wall alongside it, but the clear slot and its contents fade from view. The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows an empty area with a stylized depiction of the artifact itself.

The other colors all give “spots” which are buttons to activate some control.

To make things work, you first use the small and large squares as zoom-in / zoom-out controls; you want the view to be of the solar system. Once you’ve done this, the brown button will swap between planets. (In practice, I was hitting buttons more or less randomly until i had my first reaction, and then it started to be possible to “puzzle out” the rest.)

>PUSH LARGE SQUARE
The view screen now shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows the Sun brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Mercury brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Venus brightly highlighted.

>PUSH BROWN SPOT
The view screen now shows Earth brightly highlighted.

Your goal is to fly to Earth. I was hoping we could get an alternate ending by flying to Jupiter (“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA”) but alas, the game just informs you that the ship knows where you came from, so it shuts down and you’ve failed the trial.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in the center of Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a parabola looping around Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in an ellipse surrounding Earth.

>PUSH VIOLET SPOT
The highlighted image of Earth now is connected to that of the artifact. The line terminates in a circle around Earth.

>LOOK
Control Bubble
This room must be the main control room of the artifact. The control bubble itself is transparent and you can look out upon the interior of the artifact. Far off, hidden among the tallest trees of the forest, is the matching drive bubble. One way out is the hatch, which is open.
The walls are gray except for five small color-coded slots (pink, brown, violet, green, and blue) arranged in a pentagon.
Of the colored slots, the pink one contains a pink rod and the blue, green, violet and brown rods are in place in the like-colored slots. Alongside each of those are spots of the same color.
The pink screen includes a small square, a large square, and a display showing nearby space. This view shows the inner solar system, from the sun out to Jupiter. The symbol representing Earth is lit. A line on the display connects the position of the artifact with that of Earth, and terminating in a circle around Earth.

Green adds dots (and this is where the step fails if you haven’t prepared the Drive Bubble) and then blue launches. Finis.

All the displays flash once. There is a sensation of movement as the artifact positions itself to follow the course you have set.

The artifact, under your assured control, moves serenely toward Earth, where the knowledge it contains will immeasureably benefit mankind. Within a few years, there could be human ships flying out to the stars, and all because of your daring and cunning…

A holographic projection of a humanoid figure appears before you. The being, tall and thin, swathed in shimmering robes, speaks in your own language. “Congratulations, you who have passed our test. You have succeeded where others failed. Your race shall benefit thereby.” He smiles. “I expect to see you in person, someday.” The projection fades.

Your score would be 400 (total of 400 points), in 507 moves.
This score gives you the rank of Galactic Overlord.

One word (“immeasureably”) might be a typo; no dictionary I’ve found spells it that way (no “e”), although there are some old religious books that do.

There’s questions that have been built up, not only historical, but in terms of understanding the plot. I’ll be referring both to Jimmy Maher’s and Drew Cook’s commentary.

The most immediate question, for me, goes back to the 1982 Lebling quote I started with (which was said when the game was done but not out yet to the public):

Starcross is intended as an entry level game for people who like science fiction but who haven’t played many adventure games before.

Why does Lebling call it “entry-level”?

There is of course aspiration vs. reality; there’s also marketing vs. reality (no doubt why Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, surely one of the hardest of Infocom’s games by any metric, got marked “Standard” level). I’m not sure either quite explain the circumstance here. For one thing, his statement is targeted at “people who like science fiction” — that is, this is meant for a hard sci-fi buff who would no doubt realize the life support dot puzzle at glance. I can compare my past self with my modern self here: I remember first coming across the dots and being utterly baffled but I was too young for a chemistry class, and here (even though I didn’t remember anything other than suffering) it took me roughly five seconds to get. It was, at this point in my life — keeping in mind I now work on educational software professionally — quite “easy”.

I have now seen multiple people say they couldn’t get past the opening puzzle, even though (for those who have dealt with polar coordinates) it isn’t really a puzzle.

Still, I think Lebling was overlooking some of the tougher spots, especially the ray gun. The silver rod inside might seem from a designer standpoint almost trivial, but from a player standpoint it is extraordinarily tricky. On top of that, thinking to use the ray gun as a propulsion method is an audacious jump even for a physics buff; there are so many opportunities that feel like the ray gun ought to be used to shoot things that get passed by, for it only to show up at the end — this is a structural trick of the highest order, arguably the climax in my history of nonviolence (the cavalcade of games that give the players weapons that don’t get used as weapons). I can understand now why this was the only puzzle where I remembered the solution.

(The Invisiclues even mention there’s a ray-gun based way to get the blue rod! So someone might get stuck only with two shots and not realize they solved the globe puzzle wrong.)

In the end I’m going to attribute this to a combination of only being partially aware of how hard things will be for the audience (surely they would have tweaked the map puzzle otherwise) but also the truth that this game is a bit easier for a sci-fi buff who really needs everything to work logically. For such a person it is easier than a fantasy world with arbitrary rules (even if those rules are “simpler” in essence: do bell, book, and candle in order). When I made my first post I even had one person on Mastodon mention they found the game a “breeze”:

…what makes Starcross good is that it’s goals unravel in a natural way. Yes, death happens in the game… and is part of that natural way of explaining goals to the player. I totally get that that isn’t everyone’s favored play style, but for me, that clicked very easily. With the adventure genre, everyone experiences them VERY differently.

Both Maher and Cook struggled with a question that can be condensed as:

What’s up with the ending?

There are clear markers we are in some sort of test. (I’ll call the test-makers the Creators.) The original title of the game (as also given in Lebling’s notes from November 1981) was The Gift from the Stars: this is intended to give technology to a race who proved worthy. The spider was first, followed by the weasels, followed by the now-expired lizard.

“I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. I’m quite a stay-at-home, I haven’t left my ship for ages; nothing interesting out there any more. Those furry ones were interesting for a while but they’re stagnant now.”

Lebling’s notes explicitly say “The ship contains secrets which wish to be discovered, but only by a race advanced enough (and clever enough and lucky enough) to penetrate its mysteries.” (I should caution the notes are from the game-in-development and not all of them match the final product. This part seems to be unchanged.)

I still hold what I’ve already established, that this cannot be a full-environmental-control sort of test. Zork III had the Dungeon Master pretend to be needing bread in order to point out a secret door. He set the puzzle up entirely himself, where every piece is controlled. The weasels and spider here, instead, are their own beings. They were previously ones given the test. There was no reason to expect, as a guarantee, that the chief weasel’s brown rod held around his neck would be an object of trade.

Perhaps originally the Creators had more of a controlled method in mind, but things have been going wrong and they’ve worked around the issues. I would suspect, for instance, the ray gun being left behind with the silver rod left inside the Weapons Deck was their doing:

Weapons Deck
This was the armory of the artifact. A massive bulkhead has been burned away, giving free access to the weaponry. Unfortunately, it appears that the vast stock of futuristic armaments has been mostly destroyed. Gigantic projectors are scorched and shattered, strange battle armor is reduced to splinters, and wall racks for small arms are mostly empty.
Mounted in a wall-rack is a genuine-looking ray gun, large and formidable, with a long, ugly barrel. It’s difficult to tell whether or not the gun is fully charged.

Why would anyone but the Creators do that? But the blasted deck itself I don’t think was the doing of the Creators. Here’s Lelbing’s Nov. ’81 take; notice the change in setup, and the idea there would be other weapons:

You find a zap gun here, which has an enormous recoil to it (you can use it to propel you to the control room). It has only a certain number of charges, of course. It also has a key in its barrel which tints the blast its color. None of the other weapons works.

I believe the Creators did not burn the Weapons Deck simply because other aspects of change (the built village, the debris at the yellow deck which requires using the safety line) are from independently-thinking entities, not from the Creators. My guess is the weasels (the “furry ones” as Gurthark-tun-Besnap calls them) were of a much more complicated group than we see: they were advanced enough to be flying around in a ship. I further surmise there were factions in a war, and the chief (“a perfect example of barbarian dignity and splendor”) is the one who won. The group has intentionally taken the lower-tech route, possibly in response to whatever happened with the futuristic armaments; possibly lower-tech won out over higher-tech.

Drew Cook discusses their context in reference to attitudes to colonialism; I think they do fit the stereotypes (as the Earthling is tasked by the Creators to steal an item from their sacred idol) but there are two layers making this complicated: first, that the Creators are the ones making the Earthling do this in the first place, and second, the weasels had to intentionally pick what we think of as a “lower-tech” society. They fit the model of the “savages” that Lebling originally sketched out (he uses the exact word in his ’81 notes) but their decision not to play along with the Creator’s game makes them more advanced in a way.

Drew had another question — “is this a ‘big store’ con?” — which I already explained my answer is no. Now, we could still wonder why we have the exact means of getting by obstacles, but that’s true of any adventure game whatsoever, and we don’t think of all their narratives (in the meta-textual aspect) giant controlled tests. There is always necessary elision and simplification to present the world to the player.

This also means the obstacles would necessarily be different. That is, when Maher comments…

The only problem I have with that is that, absent all those challenges that arose from the general chaos inside the ship, actually figuring out the controls isn’t really that difficult, especially given (presumably) at least a few days to do it. Surely this spider fellow could have pulled it off.

…yes, that is true, but this was likely a matter of the Creators working around things; there likely were other obstacles we didn’t see that others being tested did. Perhaps, even, rather than the weasels being split, they faced some sort of enemy which required massive warfare (landing them at their current state).

The other aspect to this that’s worth considering is the dead lizard. Based on the “rules” of the game, resurrection and time-rewind ought to be possible for each candidate a set number of times. According to the source code, in the section titled DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION, it is four times.

The expressionless voice seems despairing. “Four failures. They would not be pleased. Such promising candidates, too. If only…”
The voice trails off into background hiss. Nothing more happens, ever.

The lizard has already been through trials, and finally has resolved to escape, burning his last life. Had the pink rod (clearly necessary for the win) gone flying after the last failure, the Creators would have given a replacement, but all they needed was an open possibility for the one being tested to find it.

Regarding life support starting to fail immediately upon the player’s arrival: it brings the artifact test to a full end, and consequently it does it in a way I don’t think the other candidates had to face. Nothing I’ve mentioned is contradicted if the Creators decided to kick off the crisis themselves, but I should add that the docking procedure (and the artifact essentially hitting themselves with a foreign ship) could have caused just enough stress to push everything over the edge. Indeed, the life support is only flashing with low urgency at first, indicating it got pushed to malfunctioning as slightly as it could go. (That would mean, the red rod wouldn’t necessarily be used? Sure, but they also definitely were the ones that placed the black rod, and that one doesn’t get used.) I think one upshot of all this (just like a wonky design gone awry in a real escape room) failure might not have been because of the subjects themselves; again, there was no absolute guarantee the player could have gotten the brown rod from the chief. Perhaps the reason the spider decided not to venture forth is they landed in a “buggy” scenario that was impossible to solve so they knew to give up. Lebling’s notes say the winner needs to be clever and lucky enough. How many deaths and transfigurations did they suffer before they decided it was enough?

I’ve avoided what I suppose really ought to be the main question, which is how does this play?

For the conditions, extraordinarily well. I’ve heard this characterized as a step back from Deadline, but it’s more of a lateral step: leaning into simulating as many conditions of the environment as possible, and hewing closing enough to real physics that puzzle solutions present themselves as the natural result of these conditions. I did end up blowing my perfect-no-hints streak, although I technically never had one in the first place since the ray gun use was in my memory. This still felt the most solvable of all the Infocom games so far to me, and I need to distinguish hard and solvable. Hard allows for hiding things obscurely and requiring death and keeping track of events from the past; solvable means if you’re paying close enough attention you can get through all those things.

Coming up next: based on a suggestion of LanHawk, I’m going to make a megapost explaining which adventure games I know about are currently either lost or behind so-far insurmountable technical barriers. This is good timing as I’m also about to play two games for the North Star Horizon that were previously lost media. I’m also about to hit my “lock” threshold where I solidify my 1982 list. After I pass the 75% mark, any new games I find — even from 1982 — will land on my “loop back” list. (Keep in mind I’ve been putting loop backs in my queue at any time, so that doesn’t mean I’ll stall if there’s a new discovery, but I do want to have a tangible end in sight.)