Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(My previous posts on The Hobbit are here.)

I almost finished the game. I seem to be getting my victory stomped on from a bug, but this game is of the nature it is hard to tell what is really considered a bug, and it is also hard to tell if there’s some alternate method of getting by something or if a softlock is at hand.

Normally I would look up what’s going on and make this my finishing post, but I’m going avoid hints and do one more run from scratch (and consequently, one more post). There’s enough dense mechanics going on (and enough extra history I need to cover) it’s worth spending the time.

In 1989, The Hobbit landed in a Tolkien Trilogy collection. Via Spectrum Computing.

First, regarding Gollum’s riddle: I have no idea. I never solved it and I don’t think I need to solve it.

The format I’ve been using is SAY TO GOLLUM “WORD” and everything that’s managed to go through causes Bilbo to get strangled. The parser is such that you can’t say arbitrary things; it has to be a “recognized” word in the parser. These words work, but cause death:

space, empty, water, dark, darkness, light, wind, pause, A through Z (except X and Z), heart, food

These words aren’t recognized by the parser at all:

nothing, life, death, dirt, earth, void, emptiness, love, hate, word, the letters X and Z, gas, beauty, good, evil, bone(s), breath, sky, instant, moment, dot, circle, future, past, present, shape, taste, emotion, story/stories, tragedy, metaphor, tale, song, news, matter, solid, beginning, infinity, number, zero, fear, invisible, unseen, cover(ed), block(ed), missing, incomprehension, (mis)understanding, spirit(s), energy, potential

Gollum frankly can just be ignored. If you’re carrying (not wearing) the gold ring, he’ll snatch it from you, but otherwise you can invisible-icize your way out. Or, alternately, you can KILL GOLLUM WITH SWORD, and there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for doing so.

No penalty other than perhaps a bad end result to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that’s a problem for a different hobbit.

Besides that, I did manage to make a more or less sensible map of the Goblin Dungeon.

Until you have the ring, you can’t just blaze through the map; there’s a fairly high chance of hitting a goblin who tosses you in Goblin Jail™. With the ring it’s still possible to get caught but the probability I have ascertained (after enough tests) to be much less. It’s possible to get out of Goblin Jail and I’ll show you how but the process is so convoluted (with an apparently useless “reward”) that on my Final Run, For Real This Time I plan to just restore my save game if it happens.

Let’s talk about that “reward”:

There’s sand you can dig, revealing a trap door which is locked. Since neither the golden key nor the large key worked on it, I experimented with getting in the forceful way, and found that a.) HIT is interpreted as attacking which only works on creatures b.) STRIKE on the other hand can be used to damage objects, and STRIKE TRAP DOOR WITH SWORD will annihilate it.

This is only a problem because it also annihilates the sword, which is additionally your light source. (It was only at this moment that I realized the sword was doubling as my light source.) However, this let me know destruction is possible, so I tried it with my fist the old-fashioned way.

This is just bad RNG! You just have to keep going. I’ve even gotten the breaking to happen in just one hit. (For more on the theoretical implications of this, see my old post on Adventure 500. I don’t think that one applies so clearly here because authors seemingly intended a situation like the one above.)

With the trap door broken by hand, there’s no exit: it simply reveals a “cache” which has a “small curious key”. As far as I have been able to find this small curious key is needed absolutely nowhere in the game (it certainly doesn’t work on the dungeon door!) So there’s no reason to deal with this room at all.

Still, since it turned out to involve all the game’s systems, let me show off how I got out of the goblin dungeon. You can either get tossed in by a goblin, or walk in yourself. If you walk in yourself, there’s a “goblins door” you need to open first, and then upon going southeast the door is shut behind you.

My first attempt at being creative was using orders to the companions. I discovered you don’t have to just give one command (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST”) but you can give a whole list of them (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST THEN TAKE RASPBERRY THEN THROW RASPBERRY AT GANDALF THEN GO WEST”). Given the one-way door behavior described above, I tried timing out having me enter the room while Thorin waited a turn, then having Thorin open the door after Bilbo’s been trapped, letting me head back out the room again.

That didn’t work; I tried instead having Bilbo being the one handling the door on the outside. That is, I would say THORIN, WAIT THEN GO SOUTHEAST THEN DIG SAND THEN SMASH TRAP DOOR THEN TAKE KEY THEN GO NORTH. After giving this command, I’d have Bilbo OPEN GOBLINS DOOR, then keep doing that to make sure the door stays propped open while Thorin is rummaging inside the room. I found that the digging was successful but not the smashing. The smashing RNG is so uneven it is possible this technique would eventually work, but I eventually found a much easier way.

You see, the inside of the room has a window, and to the northeast, you can find the outside of the same window. I was visualizing the window as very high because Bilbo couldn’t reach it, but Bilbo is a Hobbit. Even the dwarves are taller than him. Thorin can open the window!

See the “no”. Sometimes orders are refused for no apparent reason other than RNG, making everything even more difficult to coordinate.

Furthermore, with an open window, while Bilbo can’t walk through, Thorin (and Gandalf) can.

I was still stuck for a bit before I realized I could ask Thorin to carry Bilbo, then drop him off again once outside. With this, I was able to simply

a.) walk into the dungeon with Thorin following

b.) dig the sand, spend however much time it took to smash the trapdoor and get the key

c.) have Thorin pick Bilbo up

d.) have Thorin open the window, then go west

e.) have Thorin drop Bilbo

Without Thorin around, I managed to have Gandalf just show up once on his own, for a true escape rather than an intentional-walk-into-the-dungeon scenario.

It seems like Gandalf will eventually show up if you’ve lost Thorin somewhere (maybe).

Finally I got to use the much-touted character interaction system, but as I already mentioned, there’s no reason to go through with this setup in the first place. Argh!

With that nonsense out of the way (and my curious key which I was eager to use, but never did) I went over to the Mirkwood gate. This is the gate last time where in one iteration it was closed and in another it was open; I went with a save file version where it was open so I could go in farther. It turns out with an invisibility ring on, rather than getting thrown in elf-prison by the wood elf there you have an opportunity to use the short sword and get an elf corpse.

However, the river remained impassible, so I figured — based on the actual content of the real book — I wanted to get captured.

I had inadvertently ditched Thorin by this point. I think he would have made this section more complicated.

There’s a red door to the west and a red door to the southwest, both locked. Waiting long enough, there was a sound of a red door unlocking. I used the opportunity to toss the door open and go west (with the ring on). This leads to a small area where one direction is blocked by a “magic door” (may or may not be openable) and the other direction has a wine cellar with a butler.

Invisibility is very important here; while there’s some RNG, the butler is pretty much guaranteed to toss you back in the dungeon if you’re spotted. The goal here is to go for a ride in a barrel. He has a sequence where he drinks some wine, then when the barrel is empty he tosses the barrel down a trap door. Right when the barrel is tossed you can JUMP.

That “I SEE NOTHING TO JUMP ONTO” message is how I figured this out in the first place; I knew the context would have to be either a platform or a moving thing where Bilbo was hitching a ride.

This leads down past the portcullis and Bilbo now is in Lake Town!

A fairly important character is here: Bard. He’s the one that shoots the dragon down with an arrow.

You might think there’s some convoluted events here to get Bard in the right spot in order to kill the nearby dragon, but you can actually just give him orders until he’s with the dragon…

…then SAY TO BARD “SHOOT DRAGON” and he’ll do his thing.

The treasure is right there, and there’s a path that seems like it returns to the main nexus area (as a one way trip) but there’s a huge issue: it passes through that bugged room that said the game was FULL.

It’s still “FULL” and there’s nothing I can do with it. According to Alastair in the comments “The Place Too Full to Enter is a left over diagnostic which we used while debugging the program. We forgot to take it out after testing and it should be ignored.” That’s great, but what if the bug is preventing progress? Remember, I found in the Macintosh version the room was appropriately empty.

The reason why this might not be a softlock is that it is still possible to go back through the forest. If you go south of the lake you land at the “waterfall” to the far east of Mirkwood where a spider lurks. The problem is the spider is still doing its thing and I haven’t been able to sneak (or sprint) through without being detected.

Me trying to see if adverbs mentioned in the manual make a difference. They do not.

I fully acknowledge it is possible this is the “intended” route and is just a specific puzzle I’m supposed to nail down, but the game ought to be clear if a bug is a bug or not. The main problem with the spider is you can’t refer to it before it pounces (the eyes don’t register as something in the room); I’ve even tried murdering Bard and nabbing his bow (the version of the book where Bilbo gets affected by the One Ring real early, my precioussssssssssss) but his arrow, despite killing everything else, doesn’t work.

I think I’m due for a restart. Either victory next time or glorious defeat!