Let's play Zork + Colossal Cave Adventure

[squam]

@squam

You can offer treasure to the thief when he attacks, but it does not seem to accomplish anything—it does not turn the thief friendly, or give you a free attack, or anything like that.

As it turns out, giving a treasure to the thief evidently is intended to have a special effect—it just doesn’t work. There is code in the game to temporarily reduce the thief’s battle strength (making the thief’s attacks less effective and the player’s attacks more effective) when you give him a treasure. It’s in the “the thief is taken aback by your unexpected generosity” code path. But due to a bug, or oversight, it doesn’t work as intended. See:

In Zork I, does THIEF-ENGROSSED actually work?

In Zork I, there’s supposed to be a mechanic whereby you can give the thief a treasure and temporarily reduce his strength to 2. The thief’s strength is initially 5, so doing this would offer a big advantage in combat. The trouble is, it doesn’t seem to work. I can see the flag getting set, but it always becomes unset again by the time the game accepts the next player input. Has anyone been able to make this game mechanic work as it is evidently intended to? There’s a global flag at the center …

@username5243

The thief had to be there on that turn. (I seem to recall reading somewhere that the thief doesn’t “random-walk” in the same way Advent’s dwarves do, though I don’t know this for sure.)

@zarf

That is correct. The thief traverses indoor rooms in the order they appear in the (offscreen) ROOMS container. This is approximately the (reversed) order they appear in the source code. It’s not necessarily adjacent rooms; he jumps around the map a lot.

We’re going to be looking at this in some detail soon, when we get to the source code episodes. It was a big surprise to me to find that the thief in Zork teleports through rooms in a fixed order—I was convinced, while playing, that he had to use the same passages that were available to the player. On the other hand, in Adventure, the pirate is a special case of the dwarves, and uses much the same logic. The pirate/dwarf movement uses the ordinary cave passages, and is essentially a random walk with some restrictions (like never returning to the room they just came from, unless there is no other option). If you want a sneak preview of the dwarf/pirate logic, see §§159–176 (“Dwarf stuff”) in the source code.