Part 17: Puzzles and Dragons

Part 17: Puzzles and Dragons

Hadean Lands isn't really formally divided up into a series of levels or acts, but there are a number of events that change the nature of our environment or task sufficiently that they make plausible breakpoints.

• Act I is a linear series of tasks that introduces us to the Retort and the alchemical system generally. One could claim that this ends as soon as we brew the fungicide and escape from the Mechanica Lab into the broader eastern wing of the Retort, but I think it makes more sense to gate this on opening the fire door and gaining access to the Nave. In Act I our immediate tasks are overcoming barriers that are holding us in place.
  
• Act II is an open-ended exploration of almost the entire marcher, discovering the sparks, learning a lot of alchemy, and collecting the pure elemental substances. Act II ends when we perform the Great Marriage in the Nave. In Act II our immediate tasks are performing rituals for practice and using them opportunistically to overcome barriers that hide additional knowledge more than additional map.
  
• Act III opens by tasking us with performing the Great Marriage in the Chancel instead of the Nave. However, our ability to reach the Chancel consumes the resources we needed to take there, so Act III becomes a cycle of exploration of the alien wreck, restoration of the Retort's core functions, and exploration of what new possibilities are enabled by the restoration of those functions. Act III ends when we perform the Great Marriage properly in the Chancel.
  
• Act IV is the endgame. It ends when the game does.
  

Planning our way into the Chancel

For the moment, the core functions of the Retort are not catastrophically failing. We've been warned that the results of dragon subsumption are unstable, but for now, we've got one computing server that's multitasking all the functions of the usual four. Is this enough to get us into the Chancel to let us perform the Great Marriage? First let's add up what we need. (I am not here considering any object that is not consumed by the rituals.)

• We need the Fire-Devourer to bring the rest of our materials safely to the Chancel. This requires elemental fire.
  
• We need Obsidian Solvent to corrode open the door to the Antechamber. This requires fluorspar, a chip of marble, and elemental earth.
  
• We need an Aura Impersonation inscription to defeat the Chancel defensive stricture. We have two rituals that purport to do this, and we have only performed one of them. The one we have performed requires orichalcum and elemental water. The one we have not performed requires only elemental air.
  
• The Great Marriage requires one each of elemental earth, air, fire, and water.
  

At the beginning of Act III, we were able to reach the Chancel but that consumed all of our elements but elemental air. By restoring the functions of the dragons, though, we have resolved our resource constraint issues:

• In repairing Pneuma, we got the thin key and thus access to the Tertiary Lab. This includes a platinum-lined bound which grants us the ability to phlogisticate electrum and sustain a secondary source of elemental fire, freeing up what we need for the fire-devourer.
  
• By repairing Baros, we got access to the Deep Lab, which should let us create a Perfect Diamond, which should let us make obsidian solvent without consuming our elemental earth.
  
• Repairing Syndesis got us an extra bubble to store elemental air, and repairing Aistheta got us access to a jade bead. These two things combined let us bypass the Chancel restriction without consuming all of some element we need.
  

Each of those steps is minimal and necessary, so from here we can see that reaching the Chancel with what we need to perform the Great Marriage requires all dragons to be repaired or subsumed—and doing that requires us to collect three alien glyphs from the wreck. In this way our ultimate goal in Act III is bound up with the other two things that we're doing during the act.

Dragons and the plots on the Retort

Now, while we were doing all that, we also learned, one character at a time, that all the malfeasance whirling around the Retort involved Captain Hart. However, we never got to see Captain Hart herself, because only three dragons actually needed repairing. We can check in on her without rewinding all the way back to Update 12, though. We had to recite a symmetric sequence when we performed the dragon subsumption ritual. When we reversed that to an antisymmetric sequence in the Gaian Precipitate synthesis, we got Counter-Gaian precipitate instead. What happens if we reverse it in the dragon subsumption?


So far so normal, but if we then go to the Aithery, once Syndesis approaches Aistheta something else happens:


And when we go back, it's performed all the subsumption on its own:


I like how when we merged Argy in, the dragon being awake got an exclamation point in the description, but now it's just an afterthought.

Captain Hart is now in the otherwise empty Birdhouse, as we'd expect, and she gets a friendly or unfriendly reading as appropriate:


The Captain's shadow is where she was last time, in the Lab Hall.


Each character is associated with a dragon, appearing in the lair once that dragon has been subsumed:

• Captain Hart is in the Birdhouse when Syndesis is subsumed.
  
• Lt Powes is in the Barosy when Baros is subsumed.
  
• Lt Anderes is in the Center of the Paper Maze when Pneuma is subsumed.
  
• Ensign Ctesc is in the Aithery when Aistheta is subsumed.
  

In our playthrough, Ctesc stole knowledge from Captain Hart, Powes targeted her, and Anderes collaborated with her because we had Syndesis subsume everyone. When we reversed the subsumption procedure and fed Syndesis to Aistheta, the Captain was revealed to be involved with Ctesc.

There's never really a reason to reverse the dragon subsumption procedure, so under normal circumstances there's always going to be one character who's at the heart of all the intrigue on the Retort. By mixing and matching, though, it's possible to produce more complicated results.

Dragon Priority

When I called for a vote on dragon priority, Syndesis ended up winning with the highest priority. That let us then subsume the dragons in the remaining priority order. However, this was not in fact guaranteed; results of dragon repair and subsumption aren't symmetric.

The basic function of dragon subsumption requires you to visit two dragon's lairs on a single reset. With no dragons repaired, this is impossible, because resources are too tight to meet the entrance requirements of more than one at once:

• Aistheta requires the lead increase or decrease inscription, which in turn requires Gaian or counter-Gaian precipitate, which in turn requires elemental earth and orichalcum.
  
• Baros requires the clock tincture, which requires both sublime spirit and perfect mud. These require elemental earth, water, and fire.
  
• Pneuma requires the lodestone of centrality, which requires elemental earth, elemental fire and orichalcum.
  
• Syndesis requires aura invisibility (or, after the Great Marriage, aura imitation). Invisibility requires orichalcum and elemental fire (for the sublime spirit), and impersonation requires orichalcum and elemental water.
  

The limiting factor here is usually orichalcum; only the Barosy does not require orichalcum, but it requires every elemental substance that any other dragon might need.

However, as the dragons are repaired, these requirements are lessened.

• Fixing Aistheta first grants free access to Pneuma's lair by fixing the maze in the paper garden. With this, you subsume any dragon but Pneuma by putting the dragon fulcrum in Pneuma's lair, and you can subsume Pneuma by putting the fulcrum anywhere else and then just walking directly to Pneuma's lair.
  
• Fixing Syndesis first, as we did, is a bit more involved, but just a tiny bit. Syndesis grants access to the quarters of the Master-at-Arms, and this lets us get the flint key which grants access to Baros with no ritual requirements. Once we've used the flint key to make it to the Barosy for free, we can proceed in any order much like the Aistheta case.
  
• Fixing Pneuma first produces the most difficult path to the first dragon subsumption, but it does still allow any order. Fixing the Exoscaphe Arcade means that we can collect the thin key from the exoscaphe itself, and this grants us access to the Tertiary Lab. The Tertiary Lab has a vial of pre-made anti-Tellurian Distillate, which lets us create the lead weight decrease inscription with no cost in orichalcum or elemental earth. We can then use the lead weight decrease inscription and the dispersal brush (which requires no special reagents) to snap the counterweight in the Observatory. This, in turn, lets us reach Aistheta by spending only reagents unlocked by Pneuma's repair, which leaves us enough left over to reach any other dragon as well.
  
• Fixing Baros first actually removes our freedom to select dragon order. The Baros repair lets us create the perfect diamond, but it turns out that the perfect diamond cannot be used to create Gaian precipitate, perfect mud, nor the lodestone of centrality. What we do have, however, is the ability to reach both Pneuma and Baros's lairs with any item that lets us reach one. This means our first subsumption must be Pneuma, using the lodestone of centrality and the Barosy fulcrum like we did in the main text. With Pneuma repaired we then have free access to Aistheta as before.
  

So of all the dragon priorities, Aistheta first produces the easiest Act III, and Baros first the hardest—with Baros, we need to solve all the puzzles that we did for Pneuma and use the roundabout method to subsume Pneuma. For the others we just need to figure out one trick and then repeat it three times, and with Aistheta there's not even a trick.

Syndesis is special, it turns out, because of something we won't see until Act IV. I'm very glad you all picked Syndesis as the top-priority dragon.

That leaves Pneuma. The Pneuma-first path is dramatically different from all the other paths, and while there's some nasty puzzles that you need to solve to get your second dragon working, it actually lets you skip some otherwise mandatory puzzles:

• Performing the Dragon Subsumption requires the dragon fulcrum, which requires quicksilver and an alien glyph, both of which require you to leave the Retort.
  
• Learning the Dragon Fulcrum and the Dragon Subsumption Procedure requires you to make it to the Antechamber and the Chancel, which means you need the obsidian solvent ritual.
  
• Executing the vacuum-support potion synthesis requires the Greater Phlogistical Saturation.
  
• Both the rock-solvent ritual and the Greater Phlogistical Saturation require you to open the lead-lidded safe in the Storage Nook, which requires the lead weight decrease inscription.
  

With any initial dragon but Pneuma, opening the lead safe requires us to come up with the initiative to produce counter-Gaian precipitate. With a Pneuma-first run, we can simply use the anti-Tellurian distillate directly.

Not only that, in a Pneuma-first run the airlock is always available and functional, which means that we can get the quicksilver and alien glyphs without needing to create a glass permeability chime to walk through the Portico doors, which in turn also means we don't need to bother with the metal-attractor inscription. We'll still face the problem we're currently facing—the foreign aither and a window that blocks our path in the alien wreck—but a bunch of initial hurdles vanish, replaced with the work required to reach the Aithery without locking out our abilities to reach other dragons.