He isn’t. He said it himself - he only did a full test-solve of the game starting with Baros, and relied on his logic to tell him that the other combinations were solvable. And Syndesis is solvable, but only by putting the ballast in one of the other crawlways, which doesn’t seem to matter for the ending. The ballast glows in all four locations regardless of the active dragon. There are many parallels in the game, but there are some missing parallels, too, like the lack of a second source of elemental water. So I believe it isn’t solvable, or even if it is, it still won’t make any difference to the ending.
There may well be an easter-egg hidden ritual, but I’m not sure it would be for so critical a task as getting into the Birdhouse. There are already seemingly useless ritual modifications, like Slate Solvent, or whatever the reverse of Glass Permeability ends up being. And there are no required cases where it’s possible to create a ritual from scratch, only single modifications of existing rituals.
For what that’s worth, I remember a situation where I needed to use the measuring cube; I needed an orderly environment and that was all I had. (I think I had the calipers but they were tied up for some reason, perhaps with an alchemical symbol on them? Or maybe I’d just neglected to polish them. Memory fades already.)
But in general, yeah: the cube doesn’t seem to be a unique source of anything. The chimes are each one-of-a-kind in that they have musical properties.
I like your theory that there are probably rituals nobody has found yet; that seems highly probable. Whether there’s one to solve this particular issue is harder to guess.
I still think we have to be able to calcine something else, and sub it in for the copper percalcinate in aura invisibility, and use that to get into the birdhouse. The wording of the calcinate/percalcinate instructions is so intentionally general. (Of course, there could be puzzles that were discarded during development.)
The B chime is used to get the F sharp chime initially, before we get access to the Tertiary lab, so it’s used fairly significantly.
Hmmm. Well I’m going to hold out hope for an easter egg ritual. And you know what? I’m gonna hold out for a ritual you can build from scratch. I’m feeling like it would have been somewhat straightforward for him to build the logic to accept a ritual, and then just not leave a sheet lying around that explained it.
Oh, definitely. That’s how the single-modification rituals work. At least, in the iOS version, each modification shows up as a separate ritual in the Journal. So if you discovered an easter egg ritual and performed it correctly, it should work and be included in the Journal after that point.
I agree there ought to be something else to calcine (or make percalcinate for). I still think there should be a use for gold alloys, too. There are three of them that are possible, although in a second Great Marriage reset, two would be rendered impossible by creating the electrum, so the only remaining one would be ring-gold: gold + nickel.
I wasted some time trying to calcinate other metals, too. But I’m unconvinced that there will be any result in that line, and here’s why: the Copper Calcination Demonstration, and the Percalcination Procedure too, are listed as facts not rituals. I’ve not seen any indication that you can make up variant facts.
is not correct. The vibrational modes of a surface are invariant to isometric deformations of the surface, so developable sheets of glass (cylindrical, conical, etc) resonate at the same frequencies as their flattened counterparts.
It is true that surfaces with nonzero Gaussian curvature have different vibrational modes than flat ones, however.
Finally, the boundary conditions play a huge role in the modes that you get. Even rectangular panes with different aspect ratios will exhibit different frequencies and mode shapes.
Are you sure there are no dragons awakened in that save file? My notes also show that vacuum comes from the “fresh sheet” in the Nave, which only appears after fixing a dragon.
Yup, your save restores correctly on my Mac Spatterlight interpreter.
And the answer is: Oops, evouga was right, and my notes were wrong! The vacuum ritual is in the nave crawl way spark. You can access it right after the first marriage, no awakening required.
(Also, TIL you can get calyx without the “wreck debris indicator” from the Ruined Chamber in the back of the wreck. You can just dump the polar oil directly on the shards as soon as you radix the fluid resonator switch.)
Well, damn. I coulda sworn I tried exactly that (and substituting the other anima formulas) upon hearing that glass decoherence was a thing. Did not work for me … I wonder what I did wrong?
Interesting. I think I was going off of your notes about what was available where when I was planning my strategy. So, for efficiency purposes, that means that the whole radix->caudex sequence with the first polar oil use can be done right after the Great Marriage (while opening the lead hatch to get the fire devourer and solvent rituals); the calyx sequence with the second polar oil use can be done on the next reset (while getting the dragon fulcrum ritual); and you don’t need an extra reset at the end to get calyx and the intensional ballast. So the full game can be done in 10 resets.
But once you’ve done the percalcination, it shows up as a ritual. (At least on iOS, and calcination doesn’t.) But I think I’ve tried everything except starting to amalgamate things.
Thanks. I didn’t specifically know that. But I made sure that the major glass things you can’t get through (the scaphe dome, the retort) were spherical sections, because I knew that was an important difference.
For boxes and jars (cylindrical?) you’ll have to imagine rounded corners.
Sure. Obviously the game physics are simplified in many places.
Of course. And who can say how the acoustics of thin surfaces change when they are exposed to phlogiston…
EDIT: More gratuitous physics facts: the other factor, besides geometry, that determines the vibrational modes of an object are its internal stresses. Eg. a load-bearing pane of glass will vibrate at different frequencies than a free-standing one (this is obvious, by analogy to how tension affects the frequencies of a vibrating drum or string).
A tough engineering challenge is to study a Gothic cathedral and determine exactly how the forces are flowing through the structure: which of the walls, pillars, buttresses etc. are carrying how much of the weight? Straightforward instrumentation has many challenges, but the above leads to an ingenious solution: play the organ and measure how the different parts of the cathedral vibrate.
