Hadean Lands post-completion discussion (spoilers galore!)

Playing Game Hints
21

None of these are resolved for me, either. I suspect they’re all red herrings. Presumably there are other solvents you can make with other stone chips, but I haven’t done any myself and can’t see a use for them.

Another dangling thread for me is the elemental wood. It’s only used in the breath-holding potion (I think), which seems a bit small for an elemental substance. I just speculatively tried using it in the final marriage, in the hopes of being able to perform a Wu Xing version with five elements, but just got an interesting failure: “The grey light ripples as you push through the arc. The elemental wood immediately bursts into flame, flares up, and is gone. But it was a nasty smoky flame; you don’t like the looks of it.” And of course there’s no elemental metal in the game anyway (I don’t think. I wondered if the polar oil might be related, but because you need mercury for the fulcrum you can’t get it to the final marriage).

It’s interesting how important phlogiston is to alchemical theory here. It keeps turning up in odd places, like the breath-holding potion (which requires balancing phlogiston in the body, for some reason) and the intensional ballast (why would phlogiston be ballast?) And oddly, phlogiston as originally proposed by Becher (so Wikipedia tells me) was part of a new tripartite elemental theory of terra lapidea, terra fluida, and terra pinguis. All of which is probably completely irrelevant to plot and an indication I should stop thinking about it all and do some work, but it’s a pleasant indication of the syncetism of HL’s alchemical theory nonetheless.

22

I never found aluminum permeability - where’d you get it?

You can, in fact, make solvents with any of the materials mentioned on the stone periodic table that has a pebble you can put into your solvent. I made several of them but never found a use for any but obsidian or marble.

23

If you use the other brass chime you affect aluminum instead of glass.

You can also create a decoherence symbol, which destroys glass/aluminum instead of making it permeable. Using it on either window kills you (due to being impaled by shards of glass).

24

I’m on my second playthrough. A few notes:

  • the earliest possible time you can access the wreck is after performing the Lesser Marriage but before awakening any dragons. Your homunculus does not respond to calyx, the black oil, the intensional ballast, or anything else it seems.

  • yes, you can create the ballast before learning the formula. It will glow in the usual locations. You can access the ballast awakening the first dragon, but you cannot build both the fulcrum and ballast unless you picked Pneuma first (otherwise you cannot open the airlock). I haven’t tried strengthening all the dragons, by placing a ballast before each subsumption ritual.

  • the first awakened dragon will not give you a status report with calyx.

25

And I think a final text-dump, for the characters and epilogue with Aistheta alive:

[spoiler]“I have evidence that Jana Anderes is guilty of graft. She has been slowly removing rare reagents from storage, transporting them off the Retort when in home port, and profiting from their illicit sale.

“This much I knew weeks ago. It has taken me much longer to confirm who Anderes is working with… for I required the hardest of proof. I am now convinced that Captain Hart is involved in thecrime. She must have discovered it – and rather than bringing Anderes to marchcourt, decided to let the business continue under her own thumb.

“Needless to say, we cannot bring this to light until the Retort reaches home port. But we are becoming critically short on certain supplies, and I fear for the safety of the marcher.”

The dragon slides past the Lieutenant’s frozen form. As it does, you hear her voice: “I can’t sell the stuff off when the Captain is watching me. But why hasn’t she nicked me yet?” She has not moved.

Lt Anderes and her partners have managed to put the entire marcher at risk. Well, if the Retort is going down, at least they’ll be dragged down with you.

Lt Anderes and her partners have managed to put the entire marcher at risk. You’re astonished that they could plan so well, and so poorly, at the same time.

“Powes’ depredations, we find, have been calculatedly random – not so localized as to implicate any particular superior officer. Instead, the result has been a steady decrease in the Retort’s overall operational efficiency. The Ministry has not yet acted, but if this continues, they will.

“Lacking evidence of wrongdoing, the blame will inevitably fall upon Captain Hart. Thus we must assume that the Captain is Powes’ target. She would not face marchcourt for running a ‘scruffy ship’, but she would likely be transferred to a lesser command.

“I extended my search, and discovered lengthy correspondence between Powes and Captain Mehta of the Lightfire. Captain Mehta is in the offing for a favorable command, and so we must assume…”

The dragon slides past the Lieutenant’s frozen form. As it does, you hear his voice: “The Retort is limping already. A few more ‘mistakes’ and the Captain will be blamed…”

Powes has the look of a man whose plans are moving out of his control. He has committed himself to someone’s destruction. Did he know what he was doing, when he began? But it’s too late now for him to change course.

Powes has the look of a man whose plans are moving out of his control. He has committed himself to someone’s destruction. You sense that it was only a game to him, up until this moment. Well, let him stew in the reality.

“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”

The dragon slides past the Captain’s frozen form. As it does, you hear her voice: “How can I meet Sydney in the crawlway without being seen?” She has not moved.

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

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

You focus on the colorless spark through the oculus. A new memory comes into focus. “The ship’s compass has become disaligned; display does not function. Marcher transit in this state is risky. Recommendation: inscribe an intensional ballast and place it below the observatory.”

Your cleaning work in the alchemy lab… no. Not important. Could Ctesc have caused this? All those books you liberated for him… he promised that you’d share any secrets he found. But you might have underestimated his greed. Maybe if you find him.[/spoiler]

Not much new on the characters or how they fit together, but here’s one thing I got from that: the ship’s compass display is broken no matter which dragon is alive, but only Aistheta will point it out. I wondered if there might be a way to make four ballasts – there are three brass and one steel token in the game – but the ceremony consumes zafranum (which I’ve been assuming is saffron?) If there were another slightly different ending (which I doubt, actually), achieving that somehow would be where I’d bet for achieving it.

EDIT: I see we had the same thought, Evouga!

26

I had an odd experience, in that I finished the game without ever being able to look into shadows. I never got any of that descriptive text of the characters. I could infer some of it by examining the crew members when they were suddenly out and about. But the shadows revealed nothing. And I tried looking into them, examining them and searching them because of the spark which said to look into shadows.

27

You missed a way of looking into them!

With the Oculus.

28

@harry Giles : facepalm

29

So I wonder how deep the rabbit-hole really goes. I see that you all have been going back to restored games to try other dragons. I wonder if Zarf is evil enough to actually store additional state if, at the end of the game, you just RESTART. In other words, if someone had the wherewithal to run through the game four times, chaining each to the last via RESTART, each time waking a different dragon and placing a different ballast, might there be a final one true ending with all repairs complete?

30

Not to spoil the fun, but no, I don’t. The (desktop OS) interpreter would have to keep that in a .glkdata file; you’d be able to see it in your filesystem.

31

What does placing the ballast before a subsumption do?

32

Thank you for that relief.

I don’t think any of us have tried it yet, Optimality! I’m sceptical and I think I’ve obsessed too much already :smiley:

33

I’ve checked and placing the ballast before waking the intiial dragon does nothing. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I can test placing a ballast during pivoting. But it’s the most promising thing I can think of that might further affect the ending.

I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell us if there is anything for us to find, Andrew? :slight_smile:

34

By the way, has anybody figured out how to access the Birdcage and Chancel (with all four elements) simultaneously? All other ballast locations are trivial to reach, but I’m stumped on this one (as are a bunch of people in the hint thread, apparently).

35

I tried performing subsumption with ballast (in either the source or target dragon’s ballast location) and it seemed to make no difference.

So I’m now joining the “there are no other endings” camp. My understanding is that some of the kickstarter donors will eventually receive the game source code, at which point any remaining secrets will presumably be revealed.

36

A brave attempt! I’ve definitely done all the possibility-mining I care to, but I’d be excited to hear of other wild things people have tried, or little niggles they wanted to unwind. Also, I’m feeling good about my byzantine plot theory but I’d really like it to be shaken by new finishers’ own interpretations.

37

In answering Murphy on the other thread, I just had a brainwave: if you could get the gong out of Medical, you could get back into Medical whenever you liked, which means you could get unlimited elemental air, which means you could perform jade aura imitation as often as you liked, which means you could get into the Birdhouse to plant the ballast. And the gong is bronze! So I just went and metal-attractor’d it.

And nothing happened.

Disappointed.

2 Likes
38

It could just be a bug. Since it’s not required to reach the ending it’s plausible the testers missed it (like the can’t-create-ballast-unless-you-used-same-material-for-universal-tarnish bug).

39

I just want to express how blown away I was by this game. It’s a huge exponential leap forward in terms of playability. The ability to re-do rituals, and for the game to remember rooms and things — it makes what otherwise might be far-too-complicated puzzles very easy. It gave this feeling of true learning. Like I was very aware of how tentatively I did my first ritual: uncertainly using words like “bound” and “simple sealing” ---- compared with the end, when I was typing “create oculus” and “perform impermeability ritual” with complete comfort. I WAS becoming an expert in something. It was like I had this virtual exoskeleton on, and could easily grap and manipulate so much.

Man, just being able to reset and then say “go to elemental water” — and have it do the fire-resistance and the water breathing ritual for me, managing my inventory so that I would end up holding all the same items — it is remarkable.

I’m spoiled because I now want that in ALL IF games. Just bring me to the thing! Don’t make me type all the directions! I’m sure this actually represents some sort of monolith moment in the transformation of parser IF to some other abstraction where we’ll get the same feeling that parser IF gives, but in a different interface. But I’m not sure what it would be. Anyway, this is such a marvelous game.

On top of that, though we in the IF community take it for granted, Zarf’s writing is really powerful and the real star of the show, I think. I really enjoyed tweeting my progress not JUST to celebrate milestones but also just because it is FUN to type things like “Created resonant oculus.” What a fun language! What great terms!

IF games, and certainly Zarf games, are literate scientists or scientifically-sympathetic writers most of all.

IF in the Infocom style is so much just about names of rooms and things that the ability to name things with precision and style is one of the make currencies of enjoying this game. I really just loved typing the names of the rituals and ingredients. There was genuinely exciting combinations of speaking and singing and pouring and heating.

My heart was racing when I first left the ship and entered the seemingly forbidden and lethal Hadean lands.

I felt real dread about the creature around the Medical Wing.

When I first got Aistheta to emerge on the ceiling above my ritual, I was so excited. But who could I tell? I was sitting in diner on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. I looked up from my MacBook Air and saw all these people eating and chatting, and it was like I was lifting my head out of an underwater world that only I could see, and I just wanted to tell everyone. That’s why I’m here.

What a joy! I’m so glad it exists.

1 Like
40

The gong is fastened to the wall. Pulling it off with the attractor isn’t going to be any easier than pulling it off with your hands. Good thought, though.

Nobody has reported this. Email if possible.