The Let's Play Archive

Hadean Lands

by ManxomeBromide

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.

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.)

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:


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?

quote:

>PUT THICK KEY ON SHELF. SPEAK MARCHER'S. SPEAK ANTISYMMETRIC. SPEAK DRACON.
You put the thick key on the gestalt shelf.

You take a breath, trace the bound in your mind, and intone the Marcher's Sealing.

The arc begins to glow smoke-grey.

You begin reciting the values of the antisymmetric sequence. After a few minutes and a bit of counting on your fingers, you reach the end (which is of course the inverse of the beginning).

You rumble your way through the Dracon Invocation.

A sense of pressure builds in the air. You feel something move, in the distance. The bound slowly dims.

Syndesis slides in along the wall.

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

quote:

Syndesis slides towards Aistheta, faster and faster. At the last moment, Syndesis seems to crumple, break apart, and fly into the heart of Aistheta -- which flares to yellow-white life.

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

quote:

The dragon Aistheta is a mandala of alchemical runes inscribed on the dome just overhead. The circles rotate majestically, shining with yellow-white radiance (and hints of sea-green, violet-red, and brown-gold). The dragon has wakened.

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:

quote:

Captain Hart is nearby, standing with her arms crossed and a patient expression on her face.

The Captain has flung herself into this situation for her own reasons, and you're not about to accuse your superiors of bad judgement.

quote:

Captain Hart is nearby, standing with her arms crossed and an exasperated expression on her face.

The Captain has flung herself into this situation for her own reasons. But you wish her timing had been better.

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

quote:

"I have confirmed that Captain Hart has been conducting a covert affair—with a junior officer, no less: Ensign Sydney Ctesc.

"Ctesc has apparently been delving into restricted alchemical texts; the Captain has both encouraged and helped to conceal these activities. The specter of a 'love potion' must arise in these situations, but I do not think that Ctesc's research has managed anything so fantastical. The Captain must be honestly smitten. It is a breach of her discipline that I could not have imagined.

"The danger of Ctesc's work has not, I think, escaped her. The messages I have intercepted imply that she fears some alchemical disaster, but not an imminent one. I am not so complacent, however. —N"

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