Yes, that works. And one could generalize to more resets by adding more copies of each variable.
Iâm coming late to this discussion, and story speculation is more my speed than SAT solving (which sounds to me like a way to cheat on your College Boards), but I did want to point out that someone mentioned a few pages ago that the rubble end of the flooded crawlspace is under the Birdhouse â which makes sense, according to the map â and that the Ballast glows there. So clearly thatâs the âcorrectâ solution if your dragon is Syndesis.
I do agree that, for symmetryâs sake, it would have been better to have one duplicate/equivalent for the elemental water, as there was for the other three elements. Overall, though, the game universe is remarkably coherent in its symbolism (here an important element of science).
I went down a couple of dead ends due to trying to apply real-world metallurgy to the game (byproduct of having a Ph.D. for a spouse). I asked him how to make mercury amalgam, and he said to put fine silver into the mercury â in our universe, that lowers the melting point of the mercury so it stays solid; in HL, it probably has to do with phlogiston â so I spent quite a while trying to make that work. Then I got interested in what the Periodic Table of Stone fragment says at the end â âPorphyry and quartz are an interesting caseâŚâ â thinking that might lead to another workable substitution for the aura rituals. Itâs a credit to Zarf that his game inspires this much thought and discussion (as well as having swallowed up my entire week).
Hah! Yeah, I made porphyry solvent somewhere along the way, and then never found anything to do with the ability. And Iâm pretty sure the granite solvent ritual itself is useless â has anyone ever found any slate to do it with?
I would be interested to hear from Zarf how many variant rituals he built into the game that are just red herrings with no in-game use.
The biggest red herrings Iâve found so far are the aluminum and glass decoherence rituals. Which make me suspect theyâre not red herrings at allâŚ
Are you talking about the Glass Permeability ritual? Thatâs certainly not a red herring: there are at least two places I had to use it in order to win, and a third place I could have used it but didnât.
Is there an Aluminum Permeability ritual? How would you do that? F# already corresponds to aluminum; in fact, the only alternate use I know of for that would be a Metal Attractor ritual for aluminum instead of bronze. I never saw anything in the game described as aluminum as far as I recall, though, so I never found a use for that, and I canât see what good a permeability ritual would be either.
Yes, you can create the Aluminum Permeability ritual using the bronze B chime instead of the bronze F# chime. I never found a use for it, eitherâI couldnât find any aluminum walls/doors/etc.
No, thereâs a modified ritual that breaks glass (or aluminum) rather than allowing you to walk though it.
Really? Is it possible to use that without opening the marcher to vacuum? I guess if youâd taken the appropriate potion you might be able to survive that, but it still seems like a bad idea âŚ
That was me, and I donât think itâs the âcorrectâ option â isnât that the correct option for Aistheta?
Iâm looking at what I didnât use, and theorizing:
- We have two quartz prisms. Why?
- We gain access to two aura rituals (impermeability and invisibility) that seem redundant-ish. (Yes, invisibility will get you into the birdhouse and impermeability wonât AFAIK, but I donât think you need to get into the birdhouse before you can gain access to the imitation rituals. They might be there so that people can solve things in more orders, though.)
- The wording of the calcination and percalcination rituals sound an awful lot like thereâs something else we can percalcinate. Which we could maybe use in invisibility to get into the Birdhouse. Iâve tried most of the metals, but no luck.
Other random things:
- Is the rock salt ever used for anything?
- You can wave the zafranum and have it have an effect â the air sparkles. Maybe we can use this somewhere?
Iâve been poking at the minimum-reset problem with the old-fashioned type of neural network solver â i.e. my brain. You can, in fact, perform the Nave marriage with no resets, if you use notes that you couldnât have ICly. I.e. the billet combination, written down from a previous playthrough with resets. If you stick to not trying to use extra-game information, itâs one reset for the billet combination, which uses a bunch of stuff to get. You canât explore everything open if you do that â you donât visit any dragons, for example.
As far as I can tell, using it always kills you (due to being shredded by flying glass).
This doesnât entirely make sense under our usual physics, since the interior of the Marcher is pressurized, so the glass should fly safely outward into the Hadean land.
Itâs required for the aither-resistance ritual; you have to put it on the gestalt shelf during the procedure.
Just for curiosityâs sake, what modification do you make to the permeability ritual?
I havenât figured this one out either. Anyone who knows want to give a hint?
In the meantime, Iâve been working on the minimum reset puzzle, and hereâs what Iâve got. Iâve put the details under spoiler tags in case you want to work it out for yourself.
I have completed the game, with the Intensional Ballast, in 11 resets (2 forced), with a dragon order of Aistheta, Pneuma, Syndesis, Baros.
I found that the limiting factor was [spoiler]mercury, even more than the elemental ingredients. Mercury can be used to do one of three things:
[]trigger the wreck to open (using caudex access), required to get the third and fourth glyphs
[]trigger the wreck to provide the polar oil (using radix access), required earlier to get caudex access and later to get calyx access
[*]amalgamate with lead to provide the right environment for the dragon fulcrum, which is used four times
So mercury must be used seven times, and each time requires a reset. Mercury cannot be used until vacuum protection is available, which happens after the first dragon is revived. As mentioned, the first Great Marriage could be done without resetting at all, but only by using the ephemeris billet combination obtained from a prior playthrough. (The game could well have randomized that combination, but didnât.) So to play it honestly requires one reset before performing the Great Marriage, which causes a reset, and then reviving the first dragon also causes a reset, after which mercury can be used. Thatâs three, plus six more for the additional uses of the mercury to get glyphs and revive the other dragons and perform the second Great Marriage. Plus one at the end for the epilogue. Thatâs ten. All this hinges on the fact that as far as I know, mercury-lead amalgamation is the only way to provide the right environment for the dragon fulcrum. If Iâm wrong about this, please let me know.
In my playthrough, there was an extra reset before reviving the second dragon where I had to use up the elements to get to the Chancel and learn the Dragon Fulcrum / Grendel Sealing and then couldnât access two dragon lairs to place the fulcrum and perform the merge without resetting first. I donât think this is avoidable, though. I believe with only one dragon revived, itâs not possible to access the Chancel and two dragon lairs in the same reset. After that, though, with the right dragon order, itâs possible to solve all the remaining puzzles while using mercury efficiently.[/spoiler]
I believe, but havenât rigorously proven, that eleven resets is the minimum for the good ending without external information, and Iâve done that. It would then be possible to reach an ending in nine resets by cheating on the billet combination and skipping the calyx access and the intensional ballast. Can anyone do better than this? Have I missed anything?
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Not spoiler tagging this. This is the post-completion discussion!
I havenât tried it myself, but if the limit here is just the elements, could you:
- Fix Baros first
- Make a perfect diamond and use diamond-based obsidian solvent to enter the Chancel
- Use elemental earth to make the lodestone of centrality to access Pneuma (and thence Baros via the tunnel)?
I guess youâd have to read perfect diamond first, but once Baros is fixed you should have vacuum resistance, which will get you into the dome but not out with the keyâŚ?
Right, youâd use a reset getting into the dome to read the perfect diamond sheet, and you wouldnât be able to get back out, so I donât think that improves things. I wondered if there was a way to make use of the perfect diamond substitution earlier than the Great Marriage sequence, but I couldnât make it work any better.
Edit: You could get the perfect diamond at the end of the reset which involves going back and forth to the wreck and using the polar oil on the pillar. But starting with Baros and Pneuma would still result in an elemental bottleneck, even with the perfect diamond, because the Lodestone of Centrality requires both elemental earth and fire. Plus you canât go through one lair to get to the other with the fulcrum sequence - the summoned dragon canât go into the fulcrum lair when taking it to the next dragon. So using Baros to get to Pneuma wonât work. It works much better to revive Aistheta to get to Pneuma.
Canât you get mercury before awakening the first dragon (but after performing the Marriage?)
I solved the game Baros-first and AFAIK the only way to do it is Pneuma second. You create the fulcrum and centrality, go to Pneuma, take the tunnel to the Barosy, drop the fulcrum there, return to the Nave, and return to Pneuma using centrality.
But I agree that elemental fire is the bottleneck I hadnât considered. There are three points that require both fire and earth:
Chancel: Devourer consumes fire, and the Obsidian door consumes earth
Pneuma: Centrality consumes both
Baros: Tincture consumes both
EDIT: Syndesis only requires water for the quartz imitation, but then you have no more imitations to open the Chancel gate with (as we lamented earlier in the thread).
Aistheta gives you easy access to Pneuma, but still requires earth to access Aistheta, so thereâs no earth left to dissolve the obsidian door.
Yes, youâre right. I only meant that you canât use Baros to revive Pneuma without using a ritual (which requires elements). So either way, the first fulcrum sequence conflicts with accessing the Chancel, as you explained further.
I donât think so. The Vacuum Protection ritual sheet doesnât appear in the Nave crawlway until after the first dragon is revived, and you canât go out to the wreck without that.
On the other hand, you only have to use one reset to get the first and second glyphs, because the Glass Permeability apparently lasts indefinitely. It warns you that the glass is only permeable while the chime is ringing, which I initially took to mean that the duration was limited. But I tested it by waiting 150 turns and it was still going, so itâs safe to say that it lasts long enough to do anything that needs doing.
For the record, itâs also possible to use a single breath holding potion to dive to the bottom of the Garden Pool and swim through to the Observatory (by using the map to jump to the Scaphe Arcade), including picking up the B chime, but it doesnât matter since the breath holding ritual doesnât consume anything.
I am currently of the belief that it is solvable to get the ballast beneath the birdhouse, based simply on the knowledge that zarf is an insane and thorough perfectionist.
I also believe that there is no way to spread out the current ingredients using the known rituals, or obvious modifications.
Therefore, I believe the only way is to use a ritual for which we have no recipe at all. That we have to author our own recipe.
The rituals we know follow a loose sort of logic. The ingredients very roughly correspond to what weâre trying to do: passive words of sealing, Chinese words of sealing, hermetic, ka and ba things going together, a bit of the rock which is the opposite of what weâre trying to dissolve.
SO: I believe there is a way to make a new formula, probably to get through the birdhouse door. Either to break it open or to remove our aura through a new way.
I wonder if it involves the B chime, since that is kinda hard to get but not currently used for anything great. As opposed to the measuring cube which feels like a decoration, the B chime feels important, kinda.
Has this been explored? It feels like a worthy final task for a player who has done everything else. A hidden ritual.