Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve now utilized the teleportation booths, visiting both an asteroid and an alien city. I haven’t found any way to extend my oxygen (or swap the helium that’s currently in the ship’s air with oxygen); with teleportation it may just be possible to go fast enough, but given I still have some puzzles to go I have my doubts.

All amidst a flurry of bugs, alas.

A preliminary NASA design for a 12-man module from ’69-’70. It normally is in zero-G but allows for rotation to test artificial gravity. This is smaller than the Derelict ship but with the same concept, connecting floors via a central shaft.

My first breakthrough was simply figuring out how to work the glass booths everywhere on the map. Saying both LOOK GLASS and LOOK BOOTH let to the game declaring they weren’t there, but for whatever reason GO BOOTH is special-cased to allow entering. Please note that this is different from every other object in the game; MAGNETIC BOOTS must be referred to as MAGNETIC (or just MA), not BOOTS; it’s using the initial part of the string, with no notion of which part is the verb and what’s the adjective.

Leaving is just a matter of GO OUT, but that’s not safe with the droid (who seems to always miss their first shot, but shots later have a random chance to hit). Trying to PUSH KEYBOARD leads to the game asking for a number from 1 to 99. Trying out “1” since there seemed to be no logical way to do better, as “YOU MOLECULES ARE SCATTERED”:

2 and 3 similarly lead to inadvertent exploration of the known universe; locations start at 4. I ended up just brute forcing all 99 options, although most led to death.

There’s a way to avoid at least some of the brute force (kind of, I’ll get back to that) and three of the locations — as marked in boldface — go to new areas, which I’ll also get back to. I originally didn’t have the colors on my chart but I teleported myself to SECURITY (23) to try to pop open the safe, now that the power was on. Remember, I had determined the safe was

SAFE: BLACK/PURPLE – BLACK/YELLOW – BLACK/PURPLE

but typing in PURPLE-YELLOW-PURPLE didn’t work, and I realized quickly the safe really wanted a numeric code. I realized I could triangulate the room colors with the teleport locations, leading me to find the base-10-using aliens had the code

black = 0
brown = 1
red = 2
orange = 3
yellow = 4
green = 5
blue = 6
purple = 7
gray = 8
white = 9

that is, the same order that’s on the chart from the communications room. So BLACK/PURPLE is 07 or just 7, BLACK/YELLOW is 04 or just 4, and BLACK/PURPLE is 7 again. The combination for the safe is 747.

Popping open the safe reveals a ring of keys, a phaser, and some coins. The coins are just a treasure, the keys go to the locked cabinet in the sick bay (which you’ll see shortly), and the phaser can be used to smite droids, specifically with the verb BLAST.

The two-letter parser means there’s a lot of nonsense here: the green verbs are real, blue verbs map elsewhere. I found out from the response to PLAY that PLACE has to be a verb, not on my standard list (but I added it), and BLAST (not listed) I figured out while playing around with the phaser.

Blasting droids is quite satisfying and since they seem to always miss their first shot the droid rooms are now completely safe.

Above, I’ve used the keys on the cabinet, with the debris of a destroyed droid close by. This reveals

a gray box with a knob (this creates a beam, I haven’t done anything useful with it)

a silver wire (I also haven’t done anything useful with it)

and immortality serum (!!). I tried every verb I had extracted to see if it was possible to take the serum and thus survive the oncoming lack of oxygen, but had no luck. I tested out DRINK with a response of O.K. but that just mapped to DROP.

I finally realized (by testing it at back at the ship) the serum is simply intended as a treasure and we can’t use it. I admit I was looking forward to some even-more-terrible ending message by testing out the teleport-your-molecules device whilst immortal, but alas the technical requirements of this game remain extreme (it uses 12k rather than 8k, at least) and I don’t think the authors would have wanted to custom handle that.

Returning to those new locations: one is supposed to be clued by the projector in the library, which shows a brown and black alien city so the teleportation code 10 matches.

I suspect most people who played got this already by brute force. The thing is: at least some death-testing is required to understand the code, the asteroid has no similar clue, and there’s no reason why the authors couldn’t have dropped yet another hidden teleport somewhere in the 80s or whatnot.

The puzzle is rescued by the fact that the safe really needs the player to have understood the code. I’m not sure if changing the puzzle to remove the brute force (by adding more digits, say) would have made it stronger.

The new locations are above; I marked the teleport destinations. The shaft is the buggy one, as there’s no glass booth in the room, and when you leave the booth to enter the room the booth disappears. There’s also no corresponding color (it’d be black/yellow, 04). That buggy room — which a player is most likely to come across first — is another reason why the brute force can only sort-of be avoided — even if someone spots the pattern early they get dealt a room that breaks the pattern! But it’s the only one.

The asteroid just has a titanium pickax (treasure) and some lumps of coal (not treasure, yet).

The city is more interesting; it has a “press” that you can PLACE the lumps in (…thanks goodness I randomly learned about that verb…) and convert them into diamonds, as long the power is going.

While I now can easily open the bay doors and drop the tractor beam for escape, there’s still the matter of getting the treasures. Things I have yet to puzzle out are:

• The box that shoots a beam
• The silver wire
• A flashlight near where the diamond press is (you can turn it on, but why? there’s no darkness)
• An oven with a bottle of cooking oil
• A metallic suit, which can’t be worn at the same time as the oxygen is attached
• Some “shielding” near the radiation sign

More details on the last point: the shielding is at the hyperspace drive, and I’ve successfully lit up a welding torch and managed to CUT SHIELDING. Unfortunately this simply kills the player.

(By the way, CUT on anything else has the game claim you don’t have a torch, even when you do. I have to keep alert with any parser message to determine if it’s saying something real or if it’s just a bug.)

The reason why you’d want the shielding is back at the lab: there’s a machine that indicates (via cryptogram) it is for turning lead into gold. So I imagine you can get gold shielding if you can just survive ripping it off from the engine.

I suspect I’m closing in on the ending, and I also even suspect I have all the verbs. I’m still probably getting stuck via some cryptic parser response without realizing it. If someone wants to check Dale Dobson’s playthrough, I’d appreciate any ROT13 hints (especially if it turns out I’m missing something outrageous).