combining items?

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hi all. I’m excited to see that Interactive Fiction is still alive and kicking. I used to play zcode games all the time. In an effort to find a hobby for the winter months I recently downloaded Inform 7, but I’m struggling with 2 very peculiar things and I hoped you guys could help me.

Any help ya’ll could give me would be awesome, so here it goes…

Problem 1: I have a thing called a cup of coffee, and a container called a caulking gun. I want, when the player puts the cup of coffee into the caulking gun, for the two items to disappear.

Problem 2: I want to put something called a badass coffee blaster in the player’s holdall, (a container called messenger bag).

The cup of coffee is defined earlier in the source, simply by saying “the cup of coffee is in the trash can”.
They pick the thing up from there.

The caulking gun is a container that they pick up later.

The badass coffee blaster is a thing.

Here is the code block for what I’m trying to accomplish. The first and fifth lines are clearly incorrect.

Instead of putting the cup of coffee in the caulking gun: say "You slide the cup of coffee in the caulking gun, creating a badass coffee blaster."; remove cup of coffee from play; remove caulking gun from play; the badass coffee blaster is in the messenger bag.

Here is the error that the soft compile console gives me:

Problem. You wrote 'Instead of putting the cup of coffee in the caulking gun'  , which seems to introduce a rule taking effect only if the action is 'putting the cup of coffee in the caulking gun'. But that did not make sense as a description of an action. I am unable to place this rule into any rulebook.
2

Problem 1: Inform calls the putting into action “inserting it into”, not “putting it in”, so you need to change the name of the rule.

Problem 2: Saying “the badass coffee blaster is in the messenger bag” doesn’t change anything; it just makes a (false) statement about the location of the badass coffee blaster. To tell Inform that you want to move the blaster, add “now” to the beginning of the line.

So the code you actually want here is:

Instead of inserting the cup of coffee into the caulking gun: say "You slide the cup of coffee in the caulking gun, creating a badass coffee blaster."; remove cup of coffee from play; remove caulking gun from play; now the badass coffee blaster is in the messenger bag.

3

Wow, i feel like a dunce.
Thank you so much for your reply, this has helped a lot!

4

Programming does that to people. Don’t worry about it. (“Inserting it into” often confuses people, by the way.)