I know this was posted several years ago, but I figured out a way to trigger it:
By the way, I think there may be a bug here? In Mainframe Zork, you don’t drown until the water is “high in your lungs”.
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I agree that’s a bug. The index used to print the message fronm DROWNINGS is calculated as half of WATER-LEVEL. When WATER-LEVEL increments to 14, you drown. So only DROWNINGS 0 through 6 ever get printed.
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Very nice!
I’m going to start adding contributor credits to the Visible Zorker. This will be the first. :)
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Instead of zombification the term I’ve heard is “softlock”.
You can definitely become stuck if you ride the boat too far while lacking the scepter or not having previously turned the rainbow solid. It’s possible to salvage the situation if you have the pump with you. You can deflate the boat on the shore near the falls and carry it north to the sandy beach, then inflate the boat, launch, and immediately land on the west bank to continue. Without the pump you are screwed.
Edit: I suppose if you left weapons needed to defeat the thief at the top of the falls along with the boat then made the rainbow non-solid again then lost the scepter to the thief you’d be stuck.
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So, what happens if you reach the end of Zork II under the effects of that spell? And how do you die as a ghost in Zork I?
Also, the candles sound particularly devious if they start to deplete from first collecting them, especially since I understand you need to light them, so they logically shouldn’t be burning until you light them. I suppose the game world’s environment could degrade the wax, but its still devious.
Though, in general, does the game provide any indication as to which items are treasures beyond many of them having names suggesting they are artifacts of great value and many of them being large gems or hunks of precious metal? The torch is one of them, but it isn’t obvious to anyone unfamiliar with the game that it would be a treasure and isn’t just an upgrade over the lantern, and the sword isn’t one, though one might expect a magic sword to be considered a treasure… Does the game even communicate that well that collecting the treasures is the main goal?
Though, now I’m curious how many of the treasures can actually be destroyed and not just lost in a way you can never get them back.
All treasures give points when first collected and again when placed in the trophy case.
The Fluoresce spell? There is a secret door at the very end of Zork II that you can only seen in the dark. I guess the reason is because there is light behind the door, so you see some of it leak out around the edges or something?
If you’re in a dark room, and your lamp has burned out, and you have scored more than 200 points, the Wizard may cast the Fluoresce spell. This sets the ALWAYS-LIT flag, which means all rooms will always be lit. Since there is no way to remove the effects of this spell, I don’t think there’s any way you can complete the game at this point. (Unless you already found the door before it happens, I guess.)
What I did to produce the screenshot I posted was this:
- I went through the temple area to ensure that dying would bring me back as a ghost. (It will happen if you’ve visited
SOUTH-TEMPLEi.e. the “Altar” room. - I went to the Maintenance Room and pushed the blue button to cause a leak to begin flooding the room.
- I immediately killed myself with my own sword. (There are other ways to do it, but this is the easiest.) This put me at the Entrance to Hades, in ghost form.
- I ran back to the maintenance room, which was still flooding. You can do that in nine moves, so you have a few moves to spare. (Good thing too, because that’s one of the parts of the Zork I map that I can never keep straight in my head.)
Once the room is completely flooded, you will drown even if you’re a ghost. I think this may be the only way, because of how few actions the game allows you to do as a ghost.
I guess the only hints about the torch is that it’s made of ivory, and you get points for picking it up. But I remember being surprised that it counted as a treasure back when I first played it.
The sword technically is a treasure, but only when it’s glowing. My guess is that they did it this way to give the thief a reason to steal your sword, or something? At least I seem to recall that happening from time to time. I don’t think there’s any way to make it glow while you’re in the Living Room though, so I don’t think you can exploit this for points. (There’s no way for the sword demon to detect that the thief is in the cellar below because of how the trap door is implemented.)
Probably most of them, considering that you can put objects into chasms or throw them off cliffs to get rid of them.
That’s actually a common source of Infocom bugs. They were were pretty good about preventing thePUT and THROW actions from doing anything bad, probably because they had been refined over time. But they sometimes forgot with the less standardized actions. That’s why you can do things like throw your own hands off a cliff, or throw the lurking grue overboard from the boat, etc.
Even later games has it: In Trinity, “EMPTY POCKET INTO WATCH” produces the non-sensical response “The your pocket slides off the wristwatch and lands at your feet.” Suspect has a particularly nasty one:
>BURN VERONICA IN FIREPLACE
Veronica goes into the fire.
>BURN WEATHER IN FIREPLACE
The weather goes into the fire.
>BURN HOUSE IN FIREPLACE
The house goes into the fire.
(Putting Veronica in the fireplace confuses the game, because now she won’t reach the office. The door will be locked when you get there, and at 1:35 am the game just quits for some reason.)
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I think they just needed a place to stash the sword-glow level. Using the sword’s TVALUE property for this doesn’t cause any problems. (As you say, it doesn’t glow in the Living Room.)
In Zork 2 there’s a SWORD-GLOW global.
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Whatever the reason, the effect seems to be that if the thief just walks through the room, he will ignore the sword because the sword demon hasn’t had the time to make it glow. It’s a worthless object, as far as he’s concerned. If he stops in the room, then leaves and “robbed you blind first”, he will steal the sword because while it’s glowing it’s valuable.
That glowing sword does seem to be a source of odd behavior. In Zork III it’s supposed to glow at the cliff (CLIFF) if you haven’t solved the puzzle there already. But most players will probably never see that, because even if you did get the sword first the sword demon probably isn’t running. It doesn’t start until you pick up the sword yourself, not when it’s handed to you by magic.
Another oddity in Zork III is that your sword will start glowing when you’re in the Prison Cell, telling the Dungeon Master to set the dial at the Parapet. I took that to mean that the game was warning me because I was about to do something dangerous, and possibly irreversible. I thought that was a really cool effect, but as far as I can tell it’s just a happy accident. The sword stopped glowing when you left the Dungeon Master behind, but for the one turn where he is performing that action he is the WINNER, and HERE is the Parapet when the sword demon runs. It’s detecting the Dungeon Master in his location, not yours.
(I realize this has strayed from locking yourself out of victory to weird stuff happening in the Zork games.)
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And isn’t there an elevator somewhere in Infocom’s fantasy verse where having the sword on you causes a crash as it tries to detect danger in both the room you enter the elevator from and the room the elevator takes you to due to them being in the same direction or something like that?
I’m no gaming historian, but I’ve heard “zombie states” used more often in discussion of older games, particularly IF. “Soft lock” seems to be a more recent term ported from mainstream gaming (where it’s seen as a design error, rather than a design choice).
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There’s also walking dead states, for another variation.
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You’re probably thinking of this bug, described in the Winter 1984 edition of The New Zork Times:
“Possibly the most embarrassing bug ever released occurs at the very end of the earliest version of [Zork III]. If you are carrying the sword in Prison Cell number four when the Dungeon Master pushes the button on the Parapet, the game crashes. This happens because the sword’s routine checks adjoining rooms to know whether to glow, and the relocated Prison Cell had two different NORTH exits. The reason none of the testers ever found this bug was because they all used the sword to block the beam of light, and therefore never brought it as far as the Prison Cell!”
I never tried it myself, though.
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I’ve heard it used generically to refer to anything that blocks forward progress. I’m certain at least some of the scenarios in Zork and other Infocom games were due to oversights or bugs rather than intentional design.
And TVTropes has three pages on the subject I’m aware of, Unwinnable by Design where the devs intended for there to be ways the player could make the game unwinnable, Unwinnable by mistake where there’s some glitch that can come up in normal gameplay that can make the game unwinnable, and Unwinnable by insanity where there is some sequence of actions no sane person would ever do in normal gameplay but which can render the game unwinnable… and some speedruns straddle the latter two categories(e.g. glitches that would never come up in normal gameplay, but which are essential to a glitched speedrun, where screwing up can not only lose you time, but render finishing the run impossible… straddling the line because even non-glitch or no deliberate glitch(e.g. some games are so full of glitches that occur in normal gameplay they’re basically treated as normal game mechanics and a truly glitchless run would be nearly impossible or is actually impossible)speedruns often involve playing in a way no normal player would and are insane in the sense of impressively unconventional rather than the mental illness sense).
I just realized… You can exploit this for points, but it’s rather awkward. The sword demon only runs while you are holding the sword, but dropping it does not reset its value. Nor does putting it in a container. The size of the sword is 30, which is too large for most containers but not too large for the gold coffin.
So if you take the coffin and the sword to the cellar, wait for the thief to appear, put the sword in the coffin and retreat to the Living Room (assuming the thief didn’t rob you first), the sword will still be glowing. And since you can put it in the trophy case directly from the coffin, without picking it up first, you will now get two points for the sword:
>SCORE
Your score is 50 (total of 350 points), in 187 moves.
This gives you the rank of Amateur Adventurer.
>PUT SWORD IN TROPHY CASE
Done.
>SCORE
Your score is 52 (total of 350 points), in 188 moves.
This gives you the rank of Novice Adventurer.
Maybe there’s an easier way, but this is the only one I’ve confirmed works. (I have not yet tried for a successful 352 point run of the whole game, though.)
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I wouldn’t call it easier, but you can get 1 or 2 extra points this way without the thief by using the troll. You have to knock the troll out and bypass him. Get the coffin and take it to the living room. Unfortunately you have to knock the troll out a second time to go back for the sword as you can’t carry both at the same time. Drop a light source in the cellar and after this you can put the faintly glowing sword in the coffin in the cellar or go to the troll room and put the brightly glowing sword in the coffin (you don’t need a light source while the sword is glowing brightly). This will net you 1 or two points respectively when the sword is placed in the trophy case.
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Wow, good work.
Now the question is, can you repeat the trick and get 354 points? Or infinite points.
I think the answer is no, because you’d have to turn off the sword before you took it out. The daemon won’t do that. Dying will, but then you lose ten points.
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Well, now I know it’s definitely possible:
I used the coffin as my container, because I thought - mistakenly - that putting the sword in the boat would puncture it. As it turns out, that only happens if you put the sword in the boat while you’re in the boat yourself. That appears to be a fairly “recent” addition. (Revision 75, I think.)
That led to some additional challenges. For one thing, the coffin is a lot heavier than the boat, forcing me to make some extra trips.
The “endgame” triggers when your score reaches exactly 350. (I guess that means you can’t win if you’ve died before reaching this point?) By the end of the game, I had 352 points but no map to the barrow. And I don’t think there are any treasures other than the glowing sword that are worth exactly two points. So I had to take the sword out of the trophy case, and at this point I no longer had the troll, the thief, the spirits or the cyclops to make the sword glow. But the bat is still there.
I had to do some back and forth because I couldn’t carry the coffin, the sword and a light source at the same time. (Or could I? The candles are lighter than the lamp.) Anyway, the point is that there almost certainly are easier ways than the one I used, but even the harder way that I used is possible.
Probably not. The score gets recalculated based on the contents of the trophy case whenever you do a “TAKE object” or “PUT object IN TROPHY CASE” command in the Living Room. (See LIVING-ROOM-FCN and OTVAL-FROB.) So when you take the sword, it calculates the points value of the remaining objects in the case. Then the sword demon starts running again and the sword becomes worthless.
It is possible to remove some of the treasures without your score going down, if you manage to trigger an automatic taking of the object (e.g. “READ EMERALD”). But putting it back won’t gain you any additional points.
Then again, a few days ago I was saying that you couldn’t exploit the sword for points at all, so I guess I should never say never…?
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That’s definitely true. The “Master Adventurer” rank is the same way: <EQUAL? ,SCORE 350>. So in your screenshot, your rank is reduced to “Wizard”.
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