Josh, I have made it out the front door! You’re right that you won’t be able to do it until you solve the safe.
Edit: Accidentally borked spoiler tags.
Perhaps try this again. The parser’s a little finicky about the way you write it; that might have been the issue? Try “set lock to [number]”
Oh man. Apparently I can’t read numbers. I swapped two of the digits. Probably five totally separate times, too. 
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Josh: I managed to figure out where the rest of the marks were without looking at your second hint, but I wouldn’t have figured it out at all without your first hint! Many, many thanks - time for me to make at least 5 more playthroughs to nab that last case item without running out of time!
Edit (since I can’t make any new replies in this topic):
You don’t need the Bourbon sign. If you’ve gotten Terri to say that you look like an explosion in a paint factory, you have all the costume parts on and just need to visit the right room. The right ‘room’ is probably not a place you’d think of right away (it sure wasn’t for me!) but it’s one you can access without any keys or codes.
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Thanks, the part about the normal use did it! 
Now to figure out this Mardi Gras business… (I got all the costume parts, I think, but I’m also missing the right location. I thought it might be the wine room, because of the conceptual connection between alcohol and partying, but that seems to be wrong. I also carried the Bourbon Street sign with me, but that didn’t help any.
I just saved my game once Terri said I looked like an explosion in a paint factory and then restored it and brute-forced all the locations. I guess the location is, well…Mardi Gras is about being seen by as many people as possible, right? 
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Aha! Thank you! There was one more step beyond examining before you get the hint, but I definitely would have overlooked this without the help!
I have a few more items to figure out the correct room for, but otherwise I think I’ve discovered everything. Now to try to plan an optimal route…
Well done and congratulations for winning my little contest!
Also good work everyone who found the wine room. That was the hardest puzzle for me, and I needed to ask Mike for hints.
Huh. I’m still not figuring out anything to do with the clock.
I don’t know if you read my spoiler text, but it’s pretty vague and might help.
To be a little clearer, you need to interact with something you can’t pick up.
Thanks for the Mardi Gras hints, Janet and Josh!
I’m at 92857 now and need to call it a day soon (or a night, rather) - it’s 5 a.m. here. 
This is a great game! Forced me to make a spreadsheet, but I regret nothing.
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OK. I hadn’t done any optimization at all: I was focused on finding all the puzzles. Now that I have that out of the way, I took a quick off-the-top-of-my-head-optimized run and got $111963, and I think I can see how to get $125K like Terri is now suggesting (though she says this “puts you in the top 10%”, so I suspect that will be the last one? But that will take some pencil and paper work. Or…hmm. Maybe a spreadsheet so I can move pieces around and add up the move counts automatically. Yeah. Here goes nothing.
Definitely make a spreadsheet.
I also set up an automatic system (using Zarf’s regtest.py) to more quickly try out new routes.
One thing I’ve found interesting playing this game is how determinative the inventory limit is. One less item would substantially cut down the possible scores; one more would increase them, but possibly not by a lot (because the turn limit is still very restrictive.) This is something I hope @Spike will discuss in a future postmortem .
Yeah, the inventory limit is interesting. And the taking/dropping/placing multiple items is great. I fiddled with it for a while and got the Study/Wine Room/Study sequence down to 11 moves (unlock safe; open safe; open right; put peach, small in right; open left; take sign, envelope, small; w; wind clock; drop wine, costume, winding; take clock; e). Fun.
I thought about bashing together something to verify routes/dependencies, but started with a spreadsheet and so far the dependencies seem very clear-cut and I haven’t felt like I needed it.
I’m sure you thought of this already, but:
Depending on your route, you might also want to (multi-)drop the diamond ring in the study.
And if you’re hitting the inventory limit, you can put the front door key into the envelope. (And when you use the key later, the implicit taking-it-out-of-the-envelope is a free action.)
Ah, thanks! I hadn’t figured out where the diamond ring belonged yet. Hmm. I was thinking you want the suit first, since you want to be able to both climb the tree for a three-move $4K-ish ($1847 sale plus probably $2000-ish average placement bonus) and so you can wear all the Mardi Gras items instead of having to carry some of them.
So I’ve been going safe key, winding key, loop through the sitting room/library, through the quick item placements in the south wing, then straight to the suit and the study/wine room. Then out through the south courtyard to the slave cabin for the painting & poem, then back up and over the balcony for the diamond ring. Loop around through the north wing for the rest of the costume, and the easier item placements, and finally up to the second floor for the sword/belt/fish/boat/poster and drop off the Mardi Gras costume pieces. At least that’s the plan: I’ve been plotting it in little pieces and haven’t added up the total move count yet. But there are a bunch of easy things to leave out the Tabasco sauce, the item placements on the second floor and based on my initial seat-of-the-pants runthrough I think it should work.
That sounds like you’re still retracing your steps a few times. How many correctly placed items is it?
For my best score I think I’m at 25.
MUAHAHAHAHA! $153,334! That worked out perfectly! 140 moves, 26 items placed, the only items I touched and didn’t place were the diamond ring and the purple suit. Sweet! And that was my first spreadsheet-assisted attempt at an optimized runthrough, too! I’m psyched!
OK, cool. I can be done with this game now. Here’s my spreadsheet, if anyone’s interested. It’s kind of cryptic, but if you’ve gotten through the game you can probably decipher it.
Ah, man. I’m pumped! OK. Now back to farm work.
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Very impressive! I don’t think I have the patience for this level of detail, so my hat is off to you. Looking at your route I think you could probably find a way to work in the candelabra and bump the total just a scootch higher. (Also I did not realize that you could drop clothing straight off your body and wear it straight off the floor; that’s a game-changer!)
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Yeah, I’ve only even seen 46 of the 50 items, so there might be one or two of those that would fit in. I’m trying to decide if I care enough to go back to try and find them. Probably I should move on to playing some other comp games. Or, y’know, work on some of the projects I’ve been neglecting for the last 6 days.
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