Have you explored both versions of those rooms?
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You actually don’t need the instruction that solving this puzzle gives you anymore, because you discovered the thing you needed to do on your own, but in case anyone else is wondering about the mural, a hint:
Note that it says UNDER US, not, say, UNDER HERE.
Or more explicitly:
You have to look under each of the individual items depicted.
As for my status, I made Encorm give me instructions for how to get to the Xanthous Chamber because she’s much better at block-pushing puzzles than I am, but the knowledge that most of what I’m going to be doing is more block-pushing puzzles is making it hard to find motivation to continue, so I might not.
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Ah, wish I had checked this thread before discovering this the hard way… 
. Thanks for the hint!
I think I’m out of steam for now. Some unsolved threads in case anyone’s making a go for that elusive sixth papyrus:
more spoilers ahoy
- Hints that I have not found a way to use:
SCREAM inside SIMPLY rooms, the messages from the four hard-to-reach locations. I have tried screaming in all those rooms, in order; no dice.- The first room-name message, “about the time you’ve spent / counting the stars: / those numbers mean nothing / unless you’ve learned / all of their names” and the note “I have lately considered that there may be something to be gained by counting the stars.” Sure seems like I should be counting some stars! You can count the stars on the ceiling in one of the rooms, but that doesn’t seem helpful, and I can’t find anywhere else to apply this.
- Papyri two through five spell out
WALK THROUGH ORBIT ALABAMA. There is a map of an Alabama town in the maps room. I have not found anything resembling an orbit. It’s possible this will not make sense until the sixth scroll is discovered and I learn a final word…
Good luck!
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The process you described here worked for me, but I had to do it the exhausting way.
I organized all of the SIMPLY rooms, unaltered, so I could reach them in a single run. Here’s how I did it. With the unaltered Altar room (pushing N/S/E/W), I spelled SMLY in the top row, which can all access each other via east/west passages. I added I south of L and P south of I, then moved the Altar east of Y and pushed east. This spelled ASMLY on the top row; I could travel south from M to I and P.
My map looked like this:
| |
A--S--M--L--Y-
| |
| | |
-Z -R I--H -E
| | |
| | | |
-N ? P- O T
| | | |
|
-J -B--F K--C-
|
| |
?--D--?- ? G-
| | |
With all that done, from the Altar:
GO EAST. SCREAM.
GO EAST. GO SOUTH. SCREAM.
GO NORTH. SCREAM.
GO SOUTH. GO SOUTH. SCREAM.
GO NORTH. GO NORTH. GO EAST. SCREAM.
GO EAST. SCREAM.
Unfortunately for me, I’ve only managed to unlock two other papyrii, so I only have four. But I’m sure if you shove around blocks for a while, you’ll get the sixth soon enough.
So, uh, where are the other two papyrii?
I have what I’d call the “homunculus papyrus” from the calendar in the altered T room, explained by Draconis here, and the “furniture papyrus” described by EJoyce here. And now, by shoving rooms, I have what I’d call the “four hidden rooms papyrus,” because the four hidden rooms (S, Walled Garden, Tower, and X) spell out SCREAM inside SIMPLY rooms.
Based on whan Ben says, you can unlock two more papyrii without solving the stars puzzle, but I have absolutely no idea where to start on that. I guess my best leads are the U-Z messages, “after filtering through purple, pink, then green your beam might reactivate machinery if everything aligns” but that means approximately nothing to me, except that it probably involves the laser. I can’t figure out how to do anything useful with it, though, or how to filter anything.
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I think it’ll involve the laser in altered J, which shines a beam of white light to the left, and then the amethyst crystal (altered M), pink crystal (normal Y), and emerald statue (normal Q) in a row next to it. All of those have east-west exits. Lemme see if I can set that up.
Well, I shone the laser through those three rooms, but nothing is happening—it must need to land on some “machinery” afterward. No idea where that would be…anyone have a guess?
A save file with those four rooms in alignment:
crystals.glksave (10.9 KB)
Oh, you almost had it.
The Altar itself has to appear west of the emerald in Q. (I just stumbled upon this as the most natural way to enter the passage after lining up QYMJ.)
So, where’s the last one?
I have:
- homunculus / calendar
- furniture / apple
- four hidden rooms / scream
- beam / altar
Oh, of course! The sensor in normal A. That makes sense.
Ugh, you know what, I was sure I’d done this – but it seems I did SIMPLE instead. Whoops!
Ah, I think you missed “the easy one” – have a look in the pie safe in “Flight of Stairs”.
Okay, plugged through it – I am now the proud owner of six papyri, with an acrostic of WALK THROUGH ORBIT ALABAMA MEMO, and no ideas for what to do with that. (I thought about trying to string rooms together so I could literally walk through them in order to spell it out, but there are too many letters that would need to be adjacent to A… unless indirect connections are also fine? But that seems a bit too evil…
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Could you also post the full contents of the papyri? I’m curious, but don’t think I can solve all of these block-pushing puzzles in a row without making things unwinnable.
EDIT: I wonder, it says counting the stars is useless until you know all of their names…does that just mean having all six papyri? Does COUNT STARS work now?
All six papyrii embedded here.
>read van der nagel
The scroll is ragged and yellow. It lies open, curling up at the edges. A spell in flaking ink covers the surface—the glyphs are beyond your comprehension.
This would be really tough to decipher without some other document to compare it to.
>read second papyrus
You look over the papyrus.
* * *
We all understand—all of us, though most will not admit it—that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, that our universe is somehow broken or misconceived.
As long as we choose to remain blind to the incorrectness of existence, we have no hope of correcting it.
Last year, Harry and I began attacking the question in earnest, and now we think we are beginning to reach an answer.
Knowledge of such things is best kept concealed from the general public—at least until the work is complete—and so for the time being we have encoded our research into the so-called “Van der Nagel papyrus.”
>read third papyrus
You look over the papyrus.
* * *
The baseline assumption of all metaphysical enterprise must be that something, somewhere, is real*, in some way.*
How can we discuss any subject, how can we claim to have any knowledge, if not by reference to reality?
“Reality” is always a subjective notion, of course.
Our experiences might not reflect reality in a totally straightforward manner, especially given the foibles of human perception.
Until we take ourselves out of the equation, we can’t be sure what exactly we are studying…
Good grief, this is a tough one.
Harry and I will be percolating on it for a while…
>read fourth papyrus
There’s a different style of handwriting on this papyrus.
* * *
Our efforts have led to a major breakthrough!
“Reality,” as Morella explained, is an inherently relative quality/quantity.
But we’ve found proof of a place “out there” that is inherently more real than our world.
It’s not a parallel universe, exactly…
To tell the truth, we don’t really know what it is.
>read fifth papyrus
You look over the papyrus.
* * *
At last, we have pierced the veil!
Like the sculptor carving away that which is not the statue, we have thrown aside mere appearances to “see” a true plane of existence, beneath our own.
Although this may confuse the uninitiated, we have decided to refer to this plane as the “Real World.”
By cleansing the doors of perception, we’ve been able to accumulate ample data to justify this designation.
A few details still need to be ironed out before we can reveal the Real World to the, shall we say, “conventional world.”
Most of the theoretical groundwork is firmly in place, though.
And our “Van der Nagel papyrus” can even reveal bits of the Real World to normal human perception (within a limited radius).
>read sixth papyrus
There are two distinct types of handwriting on this papyrus.
* * *
My husband and I have made a decision.
Existing in this world has no purpose—not while the Real World beckons.
My wife and I will leave our research behind, for you to complete.
Or you can try to follow us…
COUNT STARS in Z works the same as it ever did.
>count stars
There are eleven animals in the zodiac. A multitude of tiny stars are painted across the wall, but each animal in the sequence contains one or more larger, more important-looking stars:The mouse: one star.
The zebra: three stars.
The crocodile: one star.
The rhino: six stars.
The swan: four stars.
The tiger: two stars.
The giraffes: one star each.
The pig: one star.
The elephant: two stars.
The housecat: six stars.
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What about that same command in altered D?
On a separate tack—
WALKTHROUGH and WALK THROUGH are both recognized commands. The latter is default Inform, the former is custom for this game. I’ve tried repeating it a bunch of times, and doing it specifically in room O, but no dice.
Oh, here's something!
> x maps
The maps are all at different scales. The inside of a tomb, a town in Alabama, a road map of the US…
Emphasis mine. This is normal M, the same room with the huge spinning globe. ORBIT?
I hope this isn’t overstepping, since I think the author would like for this to be a sort of IYKYK thing, but seeing people get so hung up on the stars puzzle, I want to say that it (1) requires knowledge of something outside the game and (2) is not necessary and only gets you a bit of an easter egg.
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Solved it! @bkirwi you were, once again, so close.
-
Start by trying to solve as much of the puzzle as you can. If you’re doing it right, the game will print a message, “You’re on the right track.”
-
You solve this puzzle by entering and exiting specific rooms in a specific order. You don’t need to type any special commands, e.g.
WALK THROUGH. In the next hint, I’ll tell you exactly how to get the “right track” message. -
If you start in O and walk to R, B, and I, the game will print “You’re on the right track.”
-
As Ben noted, the Altar has only two exits, so you can’t connect A to L, B, and M all at once. Despite that, this puzzle can be solved.
-
You can spell
ORBITAL. O, south to R, west to B, west to I, west to T, north to A, east to L. -
Once you walk
ORBITALA, how could you get to room B? (In the next hint, I’ll spoil it.) -
After spelling out
ORBITALA, push A to room B, to spellORBITALABA. You can probably guess the rest from here. -
After spelling out
ORBITALABA, push blocks around to spellAMEMO. A, east to M, back to A, east to M, east to E, west to M, north to O.
We’ll be waiting for you!
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With responsibilities behind me, I am servicing my not-quite-OCD and explored this thread. Like Ben, I thought I had tried this without effect.
FTR I REAAAALLY went overboard. My map:
| | |
-R -F A- T O
| | | |
| |
G- W- I--S--?-
| |
| | |
U -Q--M--Z -?-
| |
| | |
K- V P--L--Y-
| | |
|
-E -?--J -N -?
| |
Could it really be that you must exit A directly to S to get it to work? The effort it took to wrangle the map into that shape was… dispiriting. Is it possible the effect is remote?
Personally, when I did this successfully after following Dan’s pointers, I did not get these particular rooms to be directly adjacent… I just screamed in S, then I, then M, and so on. I didn’t rearrange any rooms between all the screaming, however. And after screaming in Y, the parchment just appeared and fell to the floor.
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Yes, I also didn’t have to do anything “extra” to solve that puzzle, beyond doing exactly what the clue said (ie. I screamed in each of the S, I, M, P, L and Y rooms in order, but not immediately after each other or in any specific physical setup).
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