Let's play Zork + Colossal Cave Adventure

Playing Let's Play!
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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.

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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:

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.

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Episode A11

We resumed attempts at the Perfect Run.

Attempt 3

We followed the same approximate plan as before, hoping for better luck. We decided to try carrying around at least one treasure while making our rounds, to give the pirate more opportunity to attack.

First trip: spices, chain, silver, diamonds, trident, magazine. (Depositing the trident was a mistake, as it is needed later for the pearl.)

Second trip: vase, eggs, emerald, rug.

Third trip: pyramid. We picked up the trident again to take back into the cave.

Fourth trip: trident, pearl, gold, jewelry, coins. But we held on to the coins, to give the pirate something to steal.

Fifth trip: we went out in search of the pirate. We checked the past game transcripts to see in what rooms we’ve encountered the pirate before:

Count Room
5 maze of twisty little passages, all alike
3 Hall of the Mountain King
2 unknown
1 N/S passage
1 soft room
1 south side chamber
1 steep incline above large room
1 Swiss cheese room

This time, we found the pirate in his maze, just one room away from the dead end where he hides the chest. We delivered the coins and the chest to the house. Our score was 276 points after delivering all the treasures and leaving the magazine at Witt’s End.

While waiting for the cave to close, we experimented more with the random exits from Bedquilt. Going north from Bedquilt has a chance to take you to a junction of three secret canyons, exiting to the north, south, and SE. North from the junction is a “window on pit”: the same one we’ve visited so often before? No—it’s the other side of the mirror canyon, at last! Southeast from the junction took us back to Bedquilt. We didn’t get a chance to try the south exit from the junction, as the cave closed and we were whisked to the endgame.

In the repository, we took the dynamite (the rod with the rusty mark) from the southwest end and dropped it there, at the southwest end. Then we moved to the northeast end and blasted. The result: the wall broke open and flooded the room with lava.

New personal best: 335/350 points, Master Adventurer Class A.

Topics mentioned:

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There is one more minor bit of geography you haven’t seen, and this one isn’t wholely randomized like the Bedquilt thing. It does however, as you now know, have no real purpose in the game.

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Episode Z12

Job one of this episode was to figure out what to do with the thief. We finally engaged in the scurrilous practice of save scumming, saving and reloading at a point just before the battle in order to try out different tactics.

As a side quest, we needed to find out how to open the jeweled egg. Our hunch was that we had to turn it over to an NPC (because we, the player, have “neither the tools nor the expertise”). But what NPC? The troll? The cyclops? The thief? The bat?

  • Give the egg to the troll: the troll eats it.
  • Give the rusty knife to the troll: the troll eats it.
  • Drop the rusty knife in front of a disarmed troll: nothing happens.
  • Give the egg to the cyclops: “The cyclops is not so stupid as to eat THAT!”

We staged every weapon imaginable in the Cyclops Room adjacent to the thief’s hideout. (We were missing the rusty knife, however.)

  • elven sword
  • bloody axe
  • nasty knife
  • crystal trident

During this setup, the thief stole the egg from us. Then commenced a sequence of battles:

Battle #1
"Trying to attack the thief with a crystal trident is suicidal."
Throw axe: the thief just accepts it.
Attack with sword: thief wins.
Battle #2
Automatically parry a turn-zero attack, losing knife.
Attack with axe, draw blood once, but eventually get disarmed.
Attack with sword, miss, thief wins.
Battle #3
Attack ineffectually with axe, get stunned and can't fight.
Retreat, give up.
Battle #4
Attack repeatedly with axe, lightly injure the thief once.
Automatically parry an attack with the nasty knife, losing it in the process.
Attack once more with axe, thief wins.
Battle #5
Attack with knife, temporarily disarm thief.
Attack with knife, miss, get knocked out.
Attack with knife, knock the thief unconscious!
Try to take the stiletto while he's out, but "the stiletto seems white-hot".
Then: 
>dispatch thief with knife
The unconscious thief cannot defend himself: He dies.
Left behind were a chalice, a stiletto, and "a jewel-encrusted egg, with a golden clockwork canary".

The long-hoped-for victory stirs ambiguous emotions. Was fighting with the knife the key? In any case, the thief is the means by which you open the jeweled egg. You give the egg to the thief (or let it be stolen), the thief opens the egg offstage, and after you kill the thief you recover the now-open egg and the golden clockwork canary it contains.

The experience versus the thief was unsatisfying. It had really felt like it was meant to be a puzzle to solve, not brute-force randomness. The odds of victory in each attempt must be less than 50%. Are you meant to just go after the thief first thing every time, and keep restarting until you win by chance, before getting on with the rest of the game? It doesn’t jibe with our intuition about game design.

We fiddled with the granite wall in the treasure room to no effect. We attacked the sleeping cyclops; it just wakes him up. With the thief out of commission, the trap door in the living room no longer locks shut behind us.

We spent the rest of the run going around collecting and depositing treasure, to see how high we could get our score after defeating the thief. Nothing happens when you put the canary in the nest in the tree. But winding the canary, in the forest, summons the songbird, which drops off a minor treasure, a brass bauble. We took the canary, now free of its egg, to the coal mine, but it still doesn’t do anything.

Using the torch as a light source, we went off to try combining the Egyptian scarab with the Egyptian coffin. We had reached the conclusion, in the last episode, that it was not possible to get to the top of the waterfall, collect the scarab, and get back down, without first getting the sceptre (and therefore opening the coffin). But that was mistaken—it is possible, using the boat. From the buoy, go east to the sandy cave, get the scarab, return to the buoy, and land west to White Cliffs Beach south, from where you can re-enter the cave. We got the scarab, took it back to the undisturbed coffin, and abracadabra! it doesn’t do anything. But we learned that the golden coffin itself is a treasure, which requires a special move to get out of the underground.

New personal best: 251/350 points, rank of Adventurer.

Our modest proposal for improving Zork I:

  • Giving an enemy the rusty knife should work to defeat them.
  • The clockwork canary should do something in the coal mine.
  • You should be able to go through the drafty passage as a ghost.

Topics mentioned:

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Partially.

Your odds of beating the thief are merely bad with the knife, as opposed to catastrophic with any other weapon.

However, the higher your score, the higher your combat bonus. (Points are “experience points” in some vague D&D sense.) So the correct answer is to attack the thief last.

With the thief out of commission, the trap door in the living room no longer locks shut behind us.

The trap door code does not check the thief status – in any version, as far as I know.

There’s a not-entirely-clear check for the TOUCHBIT flag, but I don’t think that’s related to the thief either.

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I believe the logic is:

  • TOUCHBIT is set when the trapdoor is locked behind you
  • TOUCHBIT is cleared when you get back aboveground via the chimney in the studio or via resurrection
  • The trapdoor doesn’t get locked behind you if TOUCHBIT is set

So if you get back aboveground via any “unlimited” means (not the chimney with limited carrying capacity, or resurrection with limited uses), then the trapdoor no longer locks behind you. But because of the way it’s tracked, you can make it lock again if you use the chimney or resurrection, even if you’ve already opened the grate in the forest (etc).

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