Heh. For the last one, I always assumed that you had to anagram the oil paintings. Your way probably makes it too easy to deserve an achievement. Perhaps this one should be revised?
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I’m hazy on the role of achievements in this game. Typically, games would list out all possible achievements somewhere and you’d try to figure out how to achieve them by reading their descriptions. Maybe one or two achievements would be secret/hidden descriptions, but not all of them.
But since there’s no way to get a list of unreached achievements in this game (right?), they’re effectively all secret/hidden. I can’t see how regular human beings could possibly be expected to discover any of them except Admiral Thoureaux, Propper Rosehip, and perhaps Priscilla Parsons. The fact that you could maybe discover the Roman achievement in the course of ordinary play seems like a blessing, as a result.
But perhaps the point of this is that the ACHIEVEMENTS command at the end of the game should show the achievements you haven’t reached. A lot of these are really interesting puzzles, but there seems to be no way to know that the puzzles are out there to be found except to read my guide (or the source code). I’ve filed that as https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/issues/151
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I can’t speak for Emily Short, but it seems the plan was originally to have an in-game list of famous people of Atlantis with clues on how to get their achievements. Some of them are listed in the guidebook, so I guess the idea was to add the rest and then give the player a reason to look up all of them.
The main problem is that the achievements is a bit of an unfinished feature, and listing them all only draws attention to this fact. It doesn’t even have the obligatory achievement for getting all the achievements.
As things stand, I think they still work as rewards for experimenting and doing fun but pointless things, even if it is pretty much impossible to find all of them without cheating. I found at least the Finn Rosehip and Lucius Quagmire ones on my first playthrough back in 2012.
Regarding the Roman ‘Sticky’ Fingerstain Award, this was created at the suggestion of @Draconis in the notes included with the open source release of the game, and I’m pretty sure that the idea was that it should be rewarded specifically for making intaglio pins out of the paintings to escape with them.
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Maybe they should be attached to the wall? And even if you depluralize them, the remaining painting is still attached to the wall? So you have to anagram them/it to earn the achievement?
We are playing CF online at that moment and need some help.
We are at Goal: “escape the bureau”.
We know that we need a cord to plug synthesizer. As I can’t find none and cant join word and card to make a cord, finally I reach this thread via ifdb.
We can’t find the punch mentioned upwards in a hint. “Put something in the umlaut punch.”
“Test out equipment” doesn’t work. Look, search, examine shelves, equipment and sub types of equipment (broken, obsolete, foreign…) doesn’t bring up that punch.
Is this an issue?
- Jade
(You might want to add [spoiler] tags to your question.)
The “Equipment Archive” is the room to the east of the odor-door, where you found the lamb granulates.
The hints say to turn highlighting on as you search. (You do that by typing HIGHLIGHTING ON.) With highlighting on, the umlaut punch is clearly visible in the Equipment Archive; here’s what I see when I put something in the umlaut punch. (Any object will do.)
Equipment Archive
The ceiling is mirrored, perhaps to make it harder for anyone to sneak around without being noticed among the shelves.
The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools. There are an accent flipper, an umlaut punch, a Catalan punt volat needle, some broken components, and some lamb granulates on the equipment shelves.
The functional area continues to the south, and the hallway is west.
> put apple in umlaut punchYou put the apple into the wire basket of the umlaut punch. There is a hum as the punch warms up, then a bang! as the tines come down sharply, tattooing the apple.
Briefly the apple appears as the art metal band Applë, before fading back to itself: there just isn’t enough energy to hold the conversion, given Applë’s weak reputation. The early popularity of “Vegetable Vengeance” was never matched again.
When they are gone, a power chord remains in the air.
The repeated power chord makes it sound as though some heavy equipment is being used in here even when it’s not.
[Your score has gone up by one point and is now eighty-three.]
> wave h-remover at power chordYou reset the device to h. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the power chord turns into a power cord. This is the heaviest-duty cabling I’ve ever seen in my life: thick as a snake, covered in yellow sheathing, with a massive plug at each end.
Currently the hints say:
Is there a way I could have rephrased that to make it clearer? It seems like you were having trouble finding the umlaut punch, but I’m not 100% sure why. (Did you take it with you, perhaps?)
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I have “blurred” my previous comment. Sorry for that and thank you for your help.
I think I am playing my offline game with “highlights on” let me see.
No, that’s not working for me…
When I type look to refresh room description I obtain:
Equipment Archive
The ceiling is mirrored, perhaps to make it harder for anyone to sneak around without being noticed among the shelves.
The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools. There are an accent flipper here.
The functional area continues to the south, and the hallway is west.
The odd question is that it happened at webot online game and in my own offline game.
- Jade
There are an accent flipper here.
That certainly looks like the list of contents is cut off somehow. That’s a new one. What happens if you try to refer to the umlaut punch anyway?
Do you have a save file available that you are willing to share?
Also, there is an alternative solution to this puzzle, using the bucket.
Solution: CARD → CURD → CORD
EDIT: This won’t award the point that the other solution gives you, though.
I think I know what happened.
If you GET ALL in the Equipment Archive, you’ll take everything there except the accent flipper. I bet the umlaut punch is in your inventory or something. Try GO TO PUNCH and see if that finds it for you.
Equipment Archive
The ceiling is mirrored, perhaps to make it harder for anyone to sneak around without being noticed among the shelves.
The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools. There are an accent flipper, an umlaut punch, a Catalan punt volat needle, some broken components, and some lamb granulates on the equipment shelves.
The functional area continues to the south, and the hallway is west.
> get allumlaut punch: You get the umlaut punch.
Catalan punt volat needle: You get the Catalan punt volat needle.
broken components: You pick up the broken components.
lamb granulates: You take the lamb granulates.> lEquipment Archive
The ceiling is mirrored, perhaps to make it harder for anyone to sneak around without being noticed among the shelves.
The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools. There is an accent flipper on the equipment shelves.
The functional area continues to the south, and the hallway is west.
> go to punchYou’re carrying the umlaut punch.
I hope that’s it. Still doesn’t explain the broken conjugation, “There are an accent flipper here” rather than “There is …”
EDIT: Also, from the description it seems like the accent flipper is on the floor and not on the shelf. “There are an accent flipper here,” not “There is an accent flipper on the equipment shelves.” But in a proper room description, it would get its own paragraph:
The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools.
We can also see an accent flipper here.
So something is broken, it seems.
When I was trying to figure out how to make ass sfw in hard mode, I tried combining ass with pic to make aspics, but that didn’t work. (I got pic from removing e from piece.) Does anyone here know why that didn’t work?
P.S. This is my first post, so if this isn’t the place to ask this question, just lmk and I’ll delete it. 
Does anyone here know why that didn’t work?
The answer is simply that nobody thought of it and added aspics to the game.
Feature requests and pull requests are welcome at GitHub - i7/counterfeit-monkey: Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short
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You are welcome. As I can see you are an advanced adventurer. Last friday we finished CF in normal mode. As spanish players we think there is some extra difficult with the letter gaming.
About the question I wrote before, only the descriptions were odd indeed.
- Jade
Cool, thanks! I’ll see if I can put the request on GitHub! 
This is nothing short of excellent! I’ve just started playing. I’m wary of using hints, but the slight nudges this list offers will be great for me. It’s good for motivation just to know this page is here.
Thanks!
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Hi there - I’m hoping someone can help. I’ve finished the game and I have questions about how to separate back into Alex and Andra. I don’t know where this stopped being an option. I think it would involve us standing on the Synthesizer but I finished the game before attempting that.
I do have like 70ish saves points so I could go back to that point if needed. But I’m curious if that process is even possible, if that’s where it has to happen, or if it requires something before then? Love the game and all things Emily Short. Appreciate any help you can give me!
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I remember Atlantida shooting us and saying it was too late to reverse the merging, that we were fused for good. I have no idea if you can separate earlier in the game.
You can’t really do that in the way I think you’re imagining.
> ask atlantida about fused
“Fused?” you repeat.
“Sometimes a synthetic person gets broken,” Atlantida says. “Forced into a choice he would never have made on his own. Impossible to separate because you aren’t two whole people any more.”
It might not have been totally obvious, but you made a big choice in Cold Storage.
In Cold Storage, you can put gel on one of the objects and send out a stranger, (which is probably what you did,) or you can put gel on Brock and send him out, or, you can put gel on yourself, and volunteer to leave alone. You’ll die instantly if you do it, but you can do it.
Regardless of whether you send out Brock or a stranger object, the game says, “A faint spell comes over you and you feel dizzy,” right as you make that choice. That’s when you and Alex become inextricably linked. There’s no way to escape Cold Storage without making the choice, so there’s no way to escape Cold Storage without that “faint spell.” By the time you face Atlantida, you’re stuck together forever.
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