I’m playing The Little Match Girl 2, and I’m trying to set something to a letter to spell a word. But when I try to set it to a direction letter (n/e/s/w/u/d), it comes back with the error message “You must name something more substantial.” I can’t find anything about this anywhere on the Internet so I’m assuming there’s an obvious solution?
E.g.:
set third ring to n
You must name something more substantial.
This happens whether or not the letter is one of the letters on the ring.
What happens if you omit ‘third’? The same error, or it asks you which (ring) you mean? Or something else?
(I’m asking blind. The ‘something substantial’ is a default inform error message but I forget the exact cause and have no computer handy to check the causes)
-Wade
It’s the error you get when the parser is looking for a thing and gets a direction—theoretically better than the old technique of treating “north” as a physical object, “the north wall”.
But the parser should be looking for text here, not a thing, so I’m not sure why this is happening.
I’m not sure why it’s happening either!
In this particular situation, the solution is to set the entire cryptex to an entire word, instead of setting individual rings. (It’s called a “cryptex” in the game, right?) So, >SET CRYPTEX TO BASEBALL, if the answer is baseball.
On my end, the best way to eliminate this bug might be to remove the ability to set individual rings to individual letters…
Elsewhere in the source, a “pointing it at” action is defined, which accepts >SET [SOMETHING] TO [SOMETHING] as input. So the game thought you were trying to point the ring toward the north.
@Mollycule, I would like to correct this problem as soon as possible, but I don’t want to update the web version of the game and invalidate your save file in progress if you have one. Let me know when it’s safe to change it.
Sorry it took me a couple days, but I just finished it, you can go ahead and update it now! Thank you for the help!!!