Part 5: System Mastery Trap

Part 5: System Mastery Trap

Once we get through that fire door, the game's possibility space is going to explode. We'll be spending several updates simply exploring obvious exits and cataloguing new things we can do. There is a real danger that important and extremely basic capabilities may be lost in the flood. So, before we dive into that enormous sea, we'll be putting our little corner in order and doing all the things we know how to do. In the process, I will also introduce the last of Hadean Lands's unique helper verbs.

As it stands, there is one locked door we haven't opened (the fire door), one device we haven't experimented with (the wire-wheel), and three rituals we know but have not yet successfully performed (creating a fire resistance potion, creating a resonant oculus, and the redoubled brass tarnish removal ritual). There's a key that is associated with fire drills roasting in the kiln. That's our best bet for opening that door. The direct approach would be to make ourselves fire-resistant and then pull the key out of the kiln with our bare hands.

Now, how did that ritual go? We can look it up in the alchemy journal, but we can also >RECALL rituals and facts:


I wonder if Lt. Anderes is senior enough that they let her poison people. We can also recall things we've seen:


We can try to recall things that we haven't seen yet, but that doesn't work as well:


And recalling items that no longer exist works as well as it can:

We need that pine cone to do the redoubled tarnish cleansing ritual, but that can wait. We have everything we need to do the other two rituals, so let's handle those first. I'd happened to pick up all the components we'd needed along the way, but apparently I was overly neat and tidy when I made the fungicide because I don't have the saline. I could walk back through the Mechanica Lab and the crawlspaces to get to the Chymic lab, but we don't need to do that.


Oh, also I carelessly left that door open. Let's fix that. We don't want some toxic alien ocean flooding the Chymic Lab if that fracture becomes porous.


"Thalassa," in passing, is the old Greek word for seas generally and the primordial goddess thereof. Hadean Lands invoke Hades, the Greek God of the underworld, and Erebian Lands invoke Erebus, the primordial darkness and possibly the vestibule of the underworld, depending on exactly what myth you're reading.

Now that we have the saline, we can brew a fire resistance potion. There was an alchemical bound in the Pyrics Store. That's right next to that key, so that's as good a place as any to do the ritual. >GO TO works on rooms as well as objects. Let's get to work.


Wait a minute. Orange? That's the color of a fiery atmosphere. I double-check our inventory and the ginger impet is closed. We need there to be no contaminating influences at the start. It seems, however, that operating a ritual inside an active kiln adds a fiery atmosphere no matter what.

We'll have to go back to our first workbench for this one. Fortunately, that's only one command away. Motion commands will even do cleanup operations for us:


Hrm. That pin has got to go.


To work.


Simple enough. We've also learned two more things about ritual bounds: a "pale" glow means no atmosphere is present, and the color of the glow does not change once the seal is made, even if the atmosphere changes.

Now let's get that key. We could explicitly go to the Pyrics lab, but the game also remembers the last room we entered a command in:


Handy. That's not quite where we need to be, though.


Did we really need to brew this potion?


Yes. Let's do that, and see what this porcelain paten is, too.


Mission accomplished! Let's go confirm it unlocks the fire door.


The Nave leads us to the rest of the game, more or less, so we'll leave that alone. Let's check out this Airlock and Medical Wing, though, to finish our exploration of the East Wing.


Let's... maybe not mess with this yet. This does, however, give us some notion of what it is a marcher does. The doors in a marcher seem to be able to be set up to go somewhere else. But it doesn't seem to actually travel, per se: instead it arranges itself so that it is "rigged into" other worlds.

We also here see the name for worlds that aren't terrifying hellholes deadly to all Earthly life: they are Gaian lands. The Empire's world naming nomenclature is consistently Greek.

That's about it for the airlock. Let's look into the Medical Wing, to the south.


Man, that must be pretty awful to squick out an alchemist. Let's check that door to the south.


Apparently the Medical Wing is haunted. A less scientific age would consider it a soul-sucking, malevolent spirit—fortunately, in these enlightened times we know that it is instead a inanimate but self-perpetuating soul-sucking phenomenon. Science, ladies and gentlemen. This knowledge improves our ability to act with wisdom and foresight.

That's all we can do in the East Wing beyond the fire door for now. Let's go check out the wire wheel and do the last two rituals.


To use this we need wires, and to get wires we need metal rods. We used the platinum rod to make a catalytic environment for the universal solvent, but we've seen other rods around and about. We can use the command >THINGS to recall every portable item we've ever seen or created:


Holy shit. This is just the stuff we've encountered in, effectively, the tutorial area. We've also encountered 4 kinds of metal, which means we have six possible alloys.

The platinum's already a wire, so we can extract that from the adjustable bound in the Materials Store:


The Moon-Metal rod was here too. What the Hell is moon-metal, anyway?


I'd suggest "selenium" as the obvious lazy choice, but selenium is not a metal. Palladium fits the description but it's hardly the only element that does.

The nickel rod was with the platinum one in the Mechanica Lab, and the lead rod was in the Pyrics Store. These are all easily turned into wire, and there's a lovely extra detail when we try to draw nickel into wire:


Okay. Time to make some alloys.


... well, that didn't end well. We could >RESTART, but since we're going to be destructively altering the wire in a systematic way, it's much more convenient to use out-of-game resetting actions:


Hm. Maybe moon-metal is iridium, if it alloys with platinum into a "royal" metal. But iridium isn't a little heavier than silver; assuming rods of uniform size it would be twice as heavy as lead.

All other combinations—including combinations using electrum regium wire—fail the same way platinum and nickel did. There is, however, one other fun thing we can do with the splicer, which is to only feed it one wire instead of two:

There's one last thing to do here, though. Remember the locked cabinet in the Materials Store? Neither did I. The >DOORS command is here to remind me of it:

Hang on, we have one of those.


We've been talking about phlogiston as if it is simply the absence of oxygen, much like how we talk about electrical currents as if it were the positive charges flowing. That only works to a point. Once you start phlogisticating beyond the level of "no oxidation," you are apparently back in Wacky Alchemical Magic land. This metal is now so metal that it's more metal than metal.

If we try to draw it into wire, though...


It is, but we do at least get some gold wire for our troubles. That will alloy with nickel to produce "ring-gold."


We can't undo the creation of electrum regium—at least, not without the AI also forgetting how we made it—so we'll need to do a >RESTART to test those cases. Fortunately, we need to >RESTART anyway to get our pinecone back so we can execute the redoubled tarnish cleansing ritual. Lets go clean the everliving shit out of those calipers.


Er, right. We'll need to do a >RESET.


That was polite of the game. As we advance through the game, the earliest parts of the gameplay cycle will be done as part of the reset. When we unlocked the fire door, unrusting the first door becomes automatic. We collect the items we need, and...


One down, one to go. We'll want to go to the Opticks Lab to create our resonant oculus, so let's do that.


The AI politely informs us that we are idiots. We'll have to >RESET again. After that, let's see how long a chain of operations we can force at once:


Not bad. Not optimal—we travel to the Pyrics Lab before remembering that we need to brew a fire resistance potion—but the job is done. As long as I'm doing a bunch of resets, I test alloying gold wire with platinum and moon-metal. Both work, producing "whitgold" and "moongold" respectively. Each is described simply as "a white alloy of gold and platinum/moon-metal." Also, the goal-seeking applies to more than ritual products: >CREATE GOLD WIRE went and picked up the Alchemy File Seal, unlocked the cabinet, and operated the wire-drawer for me.

Oh, and, as long as we're experimenting:


That about wraps it up for the Mechanica Lab. Our remaining ritual is the creation of a resonant oculus. We'll need a glass loop (there's one in the Mechanica Lab), a bound with a gestalt shelf with no contaminating influences (there's one in the Opticks Annex), and a lunar influence to put on the gestalt shelf (the rotor card from the Library had a "moonlit night" option).


Okay. How about the silver and brass coins I coincidentally picked up from the Pyrics Store and Chymic Lab while gathering materials?


That's an insistent little addendum. Let's follow through.


Welcome to the single most obnoxious mechanic in Hadean Lands. If you don't twig to the fact that the "spark" is something you need to check out explicitly, you will end up missing a large number of facts you need to proceed. The sparks layer an entire new map of clues onto the normal map, and we will need to >LOOK THROUGH OCULUS in every room to check it for sparks. This is extra aggravating because the more familiar you are with text games, the less likely you are to think looking at nothing in particular is helpful, and the more likely you will brickwall on this. But it turns out that there's a lot of game left to go before we notice this actually cramping our style.

In the interests of simulating this effect, and also to space out the firehose of options the game is going to be giving us, I intend to delay the harvest of sparks as long as possible.

That's no reason to not try this one out, though. There was a silver chain in the materials store and that should serve us well as a "silver thread". We've already got a lunar environment, and we can use the ginger impet to contaminate the environment.


Hm. That won't work. "Pale" means "No environment." We want a silver glow, like we had with the oculus itself. We're stymied in this attempt, but we have a terrifying number of resources available to us even with no further exploration. We should be able to make this work.

Next Time: The Retort is now, mostly, open to us. We will be able to spend some time absorbing new locations and facts and making note of new barriers. That's basically what the last update was, while this update was dedicated to systematically exercising the knowledge we had collected. So, there are two things to give simple votes on:

• Breadth vs. Depth: Should we continue to separate exploration and experimentation, or should we do basic experimentation and overcome barriers as we encounter them if they have obvious applications?
  
• Up vs. Down: It turns out the West Wing is more vertical than the East Wing. As we saw with the Herbarium, this might not mean much in the end, but if we treat the Airlock as Altitude Zero was can use it to direct our exploration.
  

Then there's a more open question: What can we try to make the Lodestone Creation ritual work?