I incline toward thinking there is some remaining undiscovered ritual, but also haven’t found it. I tried to amp up a few rituals by trying to recover the pinecone to crush instead of waving the rosemary, but wasn’t able to recover the pinecone even after Syndesis is repaired.
A few rituals I’ve tried and failed to perform by varying one or another parts of existing rituals:
lead weight increase inscription (with distillate)
doubled lead weight increase inscription
universal stone weight increase inscription
glass recension inscription
door/valve tincture
amplification brush creation
I also would welcome support for “cut rod in half” and “write ‘zafranum’ on card and put card in bound”.
I trust tried to review Hadean Lands on the Apple App Store, but got knocked back on the grounds that I hadn’t ‘purchased or downloaded’ the app first. Of course, I had downloaded it. But I did so using a redeeming code supplied by Zarf because I was a Kickstarter backer. Maybe Apple won’t let people who got a game through a code review it on the App Store (as a countermeasure against fake reviews?) If so, that’s a pity, as the app will miss out on a lot of reviews.
I also attempted (and failed) to extend the duration of aura imitation so that you have enough time to place the ballast and get to the chancel with a single use. Currently it only lasts one move. I looked at some of the longer-lasting potions (vacuum and aither resistance, as opposed to the breath-holding potion) to see if there was some pattern of extension there, but didn’t discover anything.
Permanently dispersing the evil menace outside Medical would work too. I took a dragon there in the hopes that it would defeat the menace, but no go.
All the aura rituals except the jade involve mixing the ka soul (quartz) with the ba soul (orichalcum). The “ba soul” can be represented either with copper percalcinate (aura imitation/quartz) or orichalcum (aura impermeability), but both are orichalcum dependent. The ka and ba souls appear to be replaced in the imitation/jade ritual by iron and jade. But since you only have one iron and jade bead each, that didn’t seem to offer any further possibilities.
This is technically asking for a hint, but it’s so late game, and I’m doing it so I understand speculations here more, that I’m asking here:
How can I see the colorless spark? I have subsumed three dragons into a reawakened Pneuma. Thus I have all facilities operational. I go to Pneuma’s room – there she is, fully powered. Look through the oculus: nothing.
I’ll go on and do the marriage, but I believe that will end the game? I’m missing something obvious yes?
Go to the dragon and invoke calyx. Bring the oculus with you, of course.
(I saw no hint or reference in the game linking the calyx access formula to this, so I don’t know why it works. So no, I don’t think you missed anything obvious.)
When you first learn Calyx, you get a message saying that the formula feels like it’s related to dragons.
You can actually get Calyx very early in the game, before awakening even the first dragon (you do need to perform the Lesser Marriage, as otherwise you don’t have vacuum protection). But the dragon won’t respond at first – after each subsumption, the dragon appears to become increasingly aware of you and its environment.
For the captain’s ending, does the ballast have to be placed in the Birdhouse? For the other dragons, the ballast is placed in an area below the dragon’s room, right? I put the ballast in the garden pool for Pneuma, for instance. (Not sure where it would go for Baros, but anyway…) Doesn’t that mean the ballast could be placed in the Chasm area for Syndesis? I haven’t tried it since I literally just finished the game an hour ago and then read through this thread, but it would fix the problem with getting into the Birdhouse at the same time as all the Chancel and Great Marriage stuff.
Also, did anyone find any use for gold alloys? Pretty much every other item got used for something or other, so I kept looking for a use for them, but never found one. Here are the alloys I found (spoiler-tagged in case you want to do your own experimenting, although I already wrote a tweet about them back when I was just experimenting in random directions and didn’t know if they’d be significant or not):
Whitgold = gold + platinum
Moongold = gold + moon-metal
Ring-gold = gold + nickel
I kept expecting to have to reserve the ignited electrum rod for the Great Marriage, use the elemental fire from the gold rod for the fire devourer, and alloy the plain gold rod for something else. But that never happened; it didn’t matter which rod I used. The only required alloy (using the splicer) seemed to be the electrum.
That “odor of dragons” was meant to be your hint to use “calyx” with your activated dragon.
And, to save you the trouble, here’s what it says when you do that:
[rant]
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Baros will ask you to put the ballast in the crevice north of the Barosy; Pneuma will ask you to put it in the crawlway under the garden; Aistheta will ask you to put it in the flooded Observatory crawlway. Syndesis will ask you to put it in the Birdhouse Crawl down from Birdhouse, but if you do that, as far as we know, it’s impossible to win the game.
I don’t think you put the ballast in the right place if you put it in the garden pool for Pneuma. You can still finish the game with the ballast in the wrong place, but the ballast will glow when you enter the correct room.
I’ve got a “wtf syndesis” save game handy for trying Syndesis ballast experiments; I tried wandering the chasm and the ballast never lit up.
Did you check the Garden Crawlway using your ballast savegame? I just checked on mine, and the ballast doesn’t glow in the Garden Crawlway, but it does glow in the Garden Pool, which is where I put it in my playthrough. I thought maybe it was dependent on the active dragon, but it does glow in the Observatory crawlway and Barosy crevice too (I didn’t check the Birdhouse).
You’re right that it doesn’t glow in the Chasm though, so there goes that theory. Also, I was wondering what the point of the Birdhouse crawlway room was, as it didn’t seem to have any items or papers or anything, so maybe the ballast is the only point.
It’s interesting that the ballast works wherever you put it, regardless of the specific Dragon’s instructions. In a game with less author trust I would write this off as a bug or lazy implementation, but here it really suggests that all problems with the Marcher do occur in every play through, and the dragon is only able to point one of the out. Maybe it’s time for me to revisit my four-ballast save files…
BTW the “help” that arrives surely refers to us the players? Does this mean the ending-character’s ritual turns himself into a homunculus for us to use…?
With Syndesis, there doesn’t seem to be a way to put the ballast under the birdhouse.
Has anyone done it with Syndesis the active dragon, and the ballast in one of the three other places? It still glows. With Pneuma, I put the ballast below Barosy and still got the slightly more hopeful ending.
EDIT: you guys were all on top of this. Never mind!
Well done, folks. Glad there’s finally a solution. Of course, the maddening thing is that I still feel like there might be another solution.
Yeah, I was already pretty confident of this: Aistheta reference the broken compass, which we can see is clearly broken whichever dragon is alive. So the question is, is getting all dragon-systems online and fixing just one of our broken alchemical constructs enough to give the marcher transit to a safe berth?
If there is a four-ballast ending there are two massive puzzles left:
Still, how to get the ballast under the Birdhouse.
How to duplicate the ballast, given we only have one lot of zafranum.
Personally, I’m going to wait for the sourcecode…
I think so Nice extra-narrative interpretation there! A PC is, after all, a spark of animation without agency, requiring a greater system in order to function…
Another day, another moment of clarity in the shower: What if we could fix all the extended status problems without the ballast? Those pylons in the Birdhouse – the problem is oxidation! So I rustle up a universal tarnish cleansing and chuck my pin at the pylons:
It’s possible to inscribe the ballast as soon as you learn the Greater Phlogistical Saturation (before the lesser marriage), and it glows if you take it to one of the under-dragon rooms.
Some resets have permanent effects. Maybe placing a ballast in an under-dragon room during each subsumption would accomplish something? You would have to start with Pneuma since the airlock is required to make both a ballast and a fulcrum at once.
Ah yes, I see that returning to such a place after reset does not change the ballast-glowing behavior.
Changing the subject, I would like to argue against using the term “homunculus” to describe anything other than the silver scribble. The only times the game mentions homunculus are right before and after the lesser marriage, and the scribble responds to the noun “homunculus” whereas the PC responds to “ensign”.
It does seem like the PC is some sort of echo vibration of the EC, who was an ensign with brass-polishing duties.
Huh, minor point: I never used the measuring cube for anything (or the calipers, after the tutorial section). Was there ever anything to measure? For the orderly rituals, I always used the thick key because I always ended up carrying it around anyway after getting through the fire door. It was easier than going and picking up something else.
Nice extra-narrative interpretation there! A PC is, after all, a spark of animation without agency, requiring a greater system in order to function…