doug@certes.UUCP (12/23/87)
Return-address: ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug
Thanks to all who responded about saving games in Faery Tale Adventure.
(It turns out I *do* have the new version, but I had a mental block about
the user interface.)
I've got some tips that may be appreciated; they aren't really spoilers
in the usual sense, since none of them are necessary to win the game.
In fact, very likely most people who have won *don't* know most of these
tidbits. They nonetheless make it easier to play, and one of them is the
solution to a highly complicated (though, again, nonessential) puzzle:
item two. It discusses fine tuning of a subject which would be a mild spoiler
for someone just getting started on the game, but not for anyone else. It is
also likely the item of most interest. Even if you've totally won, you
may want to see this one (for curiosity's sake).
The first item following a ^L lists the subjects to be covered without
giving anything away, so as to satisfy curiosity but saving you from
tainting your play. Each further item is separated by ^L so you can stop
when you want:
The subjects covered are:
(1) An advantageous bug concerning a certain consumable resource
(beyond the one mentioned by Dan Green in his spoiler posting).
(2) How to *navigate* (almost) anywhere you want using, uh, I said
I wouldn't give it away yet, but we're talking about teleportation.
The item that allows teleportation is easy to figure out,
navigation is not. This item is a spoiler if you don't know how
to teleport at all yet, and so constitutes a mild spoiler for
novices. It was such a pain to figure out that I wish it hadn't
been a puzzle in the first place. Too much pain for too little
gain. I'm sure most people win without bothering to figure it out
fully.
(3) Shortcuts in Hemsath's Tomb to make life easier.
(4) How to "start walking again" (not giving anything away here).
Obvious in retrospect, but it took me forever to figure it
out...duh. This one is a mild spoiler too.
(5) A correction to Dan's spoiler about Sorcery Isle. This one is
a true spoiler. It is preceded by a warning to that effect.
If you already know about the two alternatives to walking (other
than teleporting), then it's only a mild spoiler.
(1) If you save a game, unlock a door, and restore the game, you of course
get your saved key back again, but the door remains unlocked! This remains
true only for so long as you are in the same general geographic area, I
think, because if you accidentally restore a game saved elsewhere, and then
restore the one you meant to, all the doors are locked again (oops).
Anyway, this means that you need never use up a key. (This bug seems similar
to the one that causes foe corpses to be roaming around when you kill them,
go inside a building, and come back out again. BTW there's no real point in
killing them again...for all intents and purposes they're still dead.)
(2) How to get where you want to go using the stone rings. There are 11 rings,
and only 8 possible compass directions to face, meaning that any given ring
can only lead to 8 other rings. Not including the starting point, that means
all rings have two other rings you *can't* directly reach from there. Which
two they are varies, but any time you go either north or northwest, you will
not be able to return to the previous ring (without first going through a
third ring). This logic leads eventually to a table of starting-point/compass-
direction/ending-point, which can then be simplified to the following nice,
simple method. (This is the highly complicated puzzle referred to previously.)
The following list gives a number for each ring (each named for some
local prominent geographic feature). To get to some other ring, subtract
the difference in their numbers, and look that up in the table of compass
directions. Exception: If the difference is either 5 or 10, you *have* to go
through an intermediate ring ("you can't get there from here, you have to
go somewhere else first"). If the difference is less than zero, add
11 first to bring it into the range 1 through 10. That's all there is to it.
Careful of the order; you want to do (Destination - Origin), not the
other way 'round. (The rings and the compass directions are listed in
parallel columns only for compactness; they are two entirely separate tables,
not two columns in one table.)
Ring (Ring Difference) Direction
--------- ----------------- ---------
1. East of Tambry 1 n
2. South of Tambry 2 e
3. East of Plain of Grief 3 s
4. West of Grimwood 4 w
5. Sorcery Isle 5 -
6. West of Swamp 6 nw
7. North of Lake of Dreams 7 ne
8. South of Marheim 8 se
9. West of Burning Waste 9 sw
10. East of Grimwood 10 -
11. West of Frost Mountains
For example to go from Sorcery Isle Ring (number 5) to South of Marheim
Ring (number 8), take 8-5 equals 3, which corresponds to south. Voila;
piece of cake. Similarly, to go from E.Grimwood to E.Tambry is 1 - 10
equals -9, add 11 to get 2 (east). You can't go from E.Tambry to the Frost
Mtns (difference = 10), but you could go, say, north to get to S.Tambry, and
from there s.w. to get to the Frost Mtns (difference = 9).
(3) Hemsath's Tomb shortcuts (in the section with all the gold doors):
there are a number of invisible doors that can be opened with red keys.
They can be identified by running into walls, and when it says "It's locked"
use a red key. This is kind of cheating, since they tend to lead you toward
the more "interesting" part of the maze, and my guess is that they were used
during debug by the author. There's one spot where you can walk through a wall
without benefit of a doorway, just like you can on the Keeps (oh, did you think
you needed keys for all of them?) This may be a bug (feature?) involving the
author's use of sprite collision detection.
Miscellaneous shortcut: if you have a huge number of health points, you
can walk underwater for a surprising distance. You are slowly drowning as
you do so, but hey, with 100 or 200 health points and 65 luck points, that
doesn't always matter too much. This might be useful for crossing a stream
or river; I doubt very much that you could cross an ocean before you died.
(4) Firing the magic wand causes you to dismount. Probably I'm the only
one in the world to whom this constitutes a spoiler; I kicked myself for
not trying it out right away.
True spoiler coming up next if you're still only walking:
(5) Correction to Dan's spoiler: you don't absolutely need the turtle
to get to Sorcery Isle; it is far more convenient to use the Rings. Turtling
over is very time consuming and a navigation problem. Especially once you
realize a nice simplification: you can call the turtle from the Watch Tower;
you needn't do it from Turtle Point! Note that the world wraps around, so
you can reach the Burning Waste quite directly from the Watch Tower via Turtle.
The turtle is pretty slow; flying is far faster (once you can do so).
P.S. If you read this far, please send me a message telling me whether all
this stuff was new to you or not. I've been assuming it's pretty obscure stuff.
Except for dismounting and turtling strategies, which you probably already
knew about.
Doug Merritt ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug
-or- hatcher@postgres.berkeley.edu