Finding Vents
- I actually did notice the vent before I figured out how to get there.
As you know, routine ship maps sometimes have circular vent grills with loot. Some of these are overhead. So I long ago ingrained a reflex to pan upward.
I must have waved the mouse around the top edge of every train car room. I saw the UI for the vent, then hunted it down by pixel binary search. Soon I realized there must be a way to get up there.
- Earlier in the train, there’s a ladder to … nowhere. Huh? Dead-end, no loot, not useful?
- The console with the 3 commands made me balk a bit.
This was during a 4-hour binge, and I was sleepy. I didn’t want a hard puzzle.
But I remembered the elevator puzzle on the Stella Marin. I figured this was similar. The epiphany I had was: why don’t I just set at random, then turn around and LOOK.
So I looked at the room for any obvious state change, like (say) an elevator rising in view. One of the settings does that! It blocks the center lane, which makes it impassable!
Aha! It’s a skybridge. It connects the rooftops, and merges two disjoint subgraphs.
After that, a couple minutes of trial and error solves it. This is a “kind” (benevolent) puzzle, with the controls and the elevator cars co-located. Your feedback loop is literally to spin in place 180 and look.
An “evil” (malevolent) puzzle would put the control in 1 car and the elevators in another.
- There’s a 2nd mini-puzzle on the train.
As you sweep the mouse around every new car’s interior, you see “OPEN” options flicker in and out. But you can’t pinpoint any. It’s as if a trash can is a loot drop, but as you approach it (by walking), it coyly ceases to tease, and goes mute.
Answer: It’s not the trash cans. It’s the shipping containers themselves. One side of them is a door. The upper corners can be opened. Then you meet what’s inside. And … it is some loot drops.
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