Scroll Thief: Hint requests and potentially bug reports

[Sesquipedalian]

I’ve been playing Scroll Thief and enjoying it immensely. The world is very immersive and there are some very clever extrapolations from the canonical Enchanter trilogy - I particularly like the explanation for how scrolls work. Getting the gnusto spell was very satisfying to solve, and I’ve made a lot of progress since then. With a few peeks at the Invisiclues, I’ve managed to make it to Act 2, although as often happens, I seem to have gotten stuck.

Is it possible to blorple into the Clean Room? It looks like I should be able to move from one sphere to another, but it also looks like I can’t arrive at the destination sphere because it’s enclosed in the oven. The problem is that if I tell the adventurer to take the sphere out of the oven, she wakes up from the serage spell.

I’ve also run into a couple bugs and potential-bugs. The first time I followed the clues for the vent puzzle, I somehow managed to make the adventurer inaccessible, where she wouldn’t come into earshot as she normally does, and she appeared to be stuck in the Clean Room. I think this happened because I told the adventurer to put her lantern into the oven, and then she couldn’t move anywhere else without a light source.

It also appears there is a bug with the workbench. My first attempt to get the scribbled scroll was the lesoch spell, which didn’t work, to my chagrin. I successfully obtained it with blorb, but later on, I read in the hints that the lesoch spell is supposed to work. But, well…

>l
Spell Research Room
This is the area where advanced students can work out variations on old spells or attempt (with close supervision) to create simple enchantments from scratch.

A bright yellow poster is affixed to the wall.

Lying on the workbench is a scribbled spell scroll, probably a student's forgotten experiment.

A long workbench lines one of the walls. Judging from the amount of strange machinery around it, the alarm recording wasn't lying about the traps. It might not be a good idea to touch anything on the workbench until the trap can be deactivated.

>lesoch scroll
(first memorizing lesoch)
Disappointingly, the scribbled scroll seems mostly unaffected by the breeze.

There is another mostly-harmless object reference bug with trying to copy the yomin spell:

>put film on newly
You unroll the film and place it on the surface of the newly-printed scroll. The text spreads and blurs beneath, running to the edges of the scroll. When it stops, the center of the parchment is once again blank and unblemished, and the film is slightly darker than before.

>copy yomin on newly
A strange side effect of copying a spell into a book with magic is that the result cannot be copied again by hand.

I'm not sure how you plan to copy the Tome of Psychological Incantations.

There is also a bit of “guess the verb” with the Towers of Hanoi box, where you can’t move the discs; you must first take them and then put them:

>rezrov box
(first memorizing rezrov)
The words shift: "Nice try."

>move ivory to gold
You can't see any such thing.

>move ivory disc to gold
You can't see any such thing.

>move ivory disc to silver pillar
You can't see any such thing.

These are minor though, and don’t detract from what is overall a very fun game. And I’m still finding things to do, so I haven’t gotten completely stuck yet.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

It’s nice to see people are still enjoying Scroll Thief after so much time!

@Sesquipedalian

Is it possible to blorple into the Clean Room? It looks like I should be able to move from one sphere to another, but it also looks like I can’t arrive at the destination sphere because it’s enclosed in the oven. The problem is that if I tell the adventurer to take the sphere out of the oven, she wakes up from the serage spell.

If I remember right, the Clean Room is in fact completely inaccessible to you. You have to figure out how to accomplish your goals there from a distance. (And without using the Adventurer, because once she enters the Clean Room she starts waking up.)

@Sesquipedalian

I’ve also run into a couple bugs and potential-bugs. The first time I followed the clues for the vent puzzle, I somehow managed to make the adventurer inaccessible, where she wouldn’t come into earshot as she normally does, and she appeared to be stuck in the Clean Room. I think this happened because I told the adventurer to put her lantern into the oven, and then she couldn’t move anywhere else without a light source.

Quite possibly. The code to handle giving multiple commands at once was an enormous pain, and I’m sure there are still some bugs in it. (It’s included as a nod to the turtle puzzle in Enchanter.)

@Sesquipedalian

It also appears there is a bug with the workbench. My first attempt to get the scribbled scroll was the lesoch spell, which didn’t work, to my chagrin. I successfully obtained it with blorb, but later on, I read in the hints that the lesoch spell is supposed to work. But, well…

Yep, that’s a bug. LESOCH WORKBENCH should work, though.

The other two also look like bugs, though less painful ones. (The Towers of Hanoi box is mostly a red herring, though there is a reward if you go all the way through it.)

[Sesquipedalian]

Thanks for your response! It’s nice to see the original author still providing commentary after all this time!

I was able to make it into the Clean Room by blorpling one of the non-magical opjects I saw within the room, but apparently I had already done everything I needed to do.

And I finally finished the game! I absolutely loved the section from Adventure. I had to resort to reading the source code to figure out the Last Lousy Three Points though.

I’d like to play the next game, Spirals, but I don’t see that on the list of games at ifdb.org. Has it been released?

Also, is there any way to get the vhelas spell other than using kulcad on the locker? If the puzzle box is mostly a red herring, that implies there should be another way. The Checkpoints section of the source code implies that the vhelas spell should be in the ancient spell book in the Ruined Hall, but when I got there, I only found jindak.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@Sesquipedalian

I was able to make it into the Clean Room by blorpling one of the non-magical opjects I saw within the room, but apparently I had already done everything I needed to do.

HA! I don’t think I ever thought of that! I love that that works!

One of my favorite things in Scroll Thief was trying to code the spells to work as generically as possible so that people would find unexpected interactions. For example, testers discovered that you could BLORB KEY to unlock the junk room (or whatever I called the southeast room), since the code checked if the key was in the room, and when it’s in the strongbox, it’s not. (In the final version, that still works, but I made it so you also have to LLEPS BLORB STRONGBOX to get in, so that it still blocks progression until you’ve reached the Clean Room.)

And this particular interaction is also the source of an unintended alternate solution in early builds of Spellbreaker—if you use GIRGOL to get past the ogre, normally you can’t take the box because it’s frozen in time, and as soon as it unfreezes, the ogre comes and kills you. But if you GIRGOL past him and then BLORPLE a mundane object, he won’t find you when you come back out, and you can take the cube that way. (Of course doing this makes the game unwinnable because you need GIRGOL later, but it’s neat that it works at all.)

So I love that this same useless bit of flavor—BLORPLE on a mundane object putting you in the Nondescript Room—works to bypass a puzzle in another game as well. Though you’ll probably find a hundred other bugs if you start trying to mess with the objects in the Clean Room physically, since I never tested that.

@Sesquipedalian

I’d like to play the next game, Spirals, but I don’t see that on the list of games at ifdb.org. Has it been released?

Afraid not. I’ve recently been digging through the bits I wrote but never released, though, and some of them are probably going to show up in the Bring Out Your Bones jam. There’s at least one puzzle I completely finished and was really proud of.

@Sesquipedalian

Also, is there any way to get the vhelas spell other than using kulcad on the locker? If the puzzle box is mostly a red herring, that implies there should be another way. The Checkpoints section of the source code implies that the vhelas spell should be in the ancient spell book in the Ruined Hall, but when I got there, I only found jindak.

Oh, lemme dig out the source code and check.

Ah, here we go. You need to get the translucent scroll from the locker, but you don’t need to use KULCAD to do it.

Hints:

• Examine the locker for a hint.

• It closes automatically in the presence of unauthorized people.

• REZROV works on it; it just closes again when you come close.

• Can you do anything with it without getting close?

Solution: Use a scrying device to look at it from a distance, use REZROV to open it, then LESOCH LOCKER to blow the scroll out. Now when you go in, the locker will close again, but the scroll will be lying on the floor.

[Sesquipedalian]

@Draconis

One of my favorite things in Scroll Thief was trying to code the spells to work as generically as possible so that people would find unexpected interactions. For example, testers discovered that you could BLORB KEY to unlock the junk room (or whatever I called the southeast room), since the code checked if the key was in the room, and when it’s in the strongbox, it’s not. (In the final version, that still works, but I made it so you also have to LLEPS BLORB STRONGBOX to get in, so that it still blocks progression until you’ve reached the Clean Room.)

That happened to me! Blorbing the key was the very first spell I figured out how to cast through the spheres. I was so excited when it worked, and so frustrated when I still couldn’t get into the room!

I love this sort of emergent behavior, so it’s pretty cool to hear that you were keeping it in mind.

Afraid not. I’ve recently been digging through the bits I wrote but never released, though, and some of them are probably going to show up in the Bring Out Your Bones jam. There’s at least one puzzle I completely finished and was really proud of.

Alas. I’d love to play the full game, but I’d be happy to play the puzzle.

Oh, lemme dig out the source code and check.

Ah, here we go. You need to get the translucent scroll from the locker, but you don’t need to use KULCAD to do it.

Hints:

• Examine the locker for a hint.

• It closes automatically in the presence of unauthorized people.

• REZROV works on it; it just closes again when you come close.

• Can you do anything with it without getting close?

Solution: Use a scrying device to look at it from a distance, use REZROV to open it, then LESOCH LOCKER to blow the scroll out. Now when you go in, the locker will close again, but the scroll will be lying on the floor.

Ah, very clever!

One more thing I discovered: casting kulcad on the doors, then just walking through them, does not grant the “Front Door” achievement. I figured out how to do it the other way though.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Good catch! That one’s really a bug in the achievement description: it’s meant to reward messing around with the ropes system a lot, so getting the achievement is more about that than actually bypassing the Clean Room.