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Top General Discussions Announcements Twist the Season to Be Jolly Topic #30
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KlaakTue 10-Dec-13 09:24 AM
Member since 04th Mar 2003
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#48, "The problem with this method..."
Edited on Tue 10-Dec-13 10:31 AM

          

Is that there is at least one maze in the game that causes any non-coin items dropped on the ground to crumble within a very short time. In this maze, the ONLY thing you can drop as an effective method of brute forcing the maze is coins.

One tweak I would make to the brute force method is that when you come into a room with 4 coins, rather than just randomly choosing an exit there, I pick up all four coins, and start over again. This way, not only do I cover all exits in that room, but I systematically cover all exits from ALL rooms. This does mean that several rooms may be covered multiple times, which can bog down the process significantly. However, once you get good with this method, and if you're fast at touch typing, you can start to perform this process extremely rapidly, until you have brute forced every exit out of the maze, without giving the area a chance to reset.

Thus far, I have only found one maze where this doesn't work, and that's because it's a combination of a "path maze" and a random maze, where the "path" is not accessed on the first step into the maze, but you have to go through randomized rooms first to reach it, and the "path" rooms are not shown via the "look" command, OR via the "exits" command. Once you're ON the path, you don't even know that you're on it by room name or room description. I discovered this maze several months ago along with a group of others with whom I was exploring. The method I came up with for besting this maze was one I had thought of years ago, but never had a need to utilize until now.

Buy a whole bunch of scrolls, and several high quality pens that will last through many uses. On each scroll, pen a number using the PEN skill (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc...). Each time you enter an empty room, drop a scroll. Now, while sitting in front of your computer, pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil, and mark that room on the page. Pick an exit and go that direction. If the room is empty, drop another numbered scroll, and mark that room on your paper map. Repeat this process until you have numbered nearly every room in the maze area. During this process, the area will probably reset several times, as it seems to have a fairly short reset time, and each room has aggro mobs you have to deal with, which wastes more time. It doesn't matter if the area resets. The important part is numbering as many rooms as you can. Once you've numbered enough of the path rooms a pattern will begin to emerge. When the area resets, the exits of the randomized rooms will shift around, and those parts of your paper map will become outdated. The path rooms, however, will always still link to the same rooms, and you'll end up with a clear pattern of navigation on your page that you can follow with complete predictability. This is actually a much harder type of maze than a totally random one. I know of two, large, fully randomized mazes in the game (both in explore areas so I won't go into details), and I can navigate those two quite rapidly via my version of the brute force method described above. The one where I used the scrolls, however, our group spent 2 hours trying to brute force that maze before we realized the area was resetting faster than we could map it, due to the aggro mobs and a short reset timer. We also discovered that once you get ON the path, you ever step OFF of it, it's tough to find your way back onto it again unless you have some way to distinguish them as "path" rooms, which the coins brute force method doesn't do. FORTUNATELY, this maze doesn't crumble non-coin objects. If it did, we'd have been screwed.



  

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TopicDecember 6 - Mazes [View all] , Twist, Fri 06-Dec-13 01:13 PM
Reply A real method..., Tac, 09-Dec-13 06:00 PM, #7
Reply RE: December 6 - Mazes, Hutto, 08-Dec-13 08:48 PM, #6
Reply Holy crap, Zephon, 07-Dec-13 08:25 PM, #5
Reply I use the same method for brute force, KaguMaru, 07-Dec-13 11:42 AM, #4
Reply 4th Type of Maze - Disjoint Rooms?, Straklaw, 07-Dec-13 12:13 AM, #3
Reply How I do hard mazes:, Valkenar, 07-Dec-13 12:13 AM, #2
Reply The problem with this method..., Klaak, 10-Dec-13 10:31 AM #8
Reply Memories, Exit, 06-Dec-13 02:28 PM, #1
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