wizard.md

A Guide to Wizard Authentication and Maintenance Mode in The Colossal Cave Adventure (350 pt. version)

This guide was written for the Perl 6 and C ports of Adventure located at <http://github.com/jwodder/advent350>, and it should hopefully hold true for the original PDP-10 Fortran version as well as any other faithful reproductions of the game.

Wizard Authentication

Certain actions in Adventure may only be performed by "wizards," users who pass a basic (yet obscure) test of knowledge & skill. The game will ask you to verify yourself as a wizard if you attempt to do any of the following:

1. Restart a saved game before the mandatory delay period has elapsed (but after at least a third of the delay has gone by)
2. Start or restart a game while the cave is closed
3. Reconfigure certain game settings in maintenance mode (see below)

Proving yourself a wizard for task (a) will automatically give you permission to perform task (b) if necessary. However, if you use your wizardly powers to do either (a) or (b), you will still need to verify yourself as a wizard again if you then try to access maintenance mode.

In order to pass wizard authentication, you will need to know the current magic word ("DWARF" by default) and the current magic number (11111 by default) as they are currently stored in the game's magic file or equivalent (or their default values if there is no magic file).

Verifying yourself as a wizard begins automatically on trying to do one of the above, and it proceeds as follows:

Are you a wizard?

Answer "yes". If you answer "no", the game will reply, "Very well." and you will not be recognized as a wizard. If you fail the wizard authentication at any point after this, the game will say, "Foo, you are nothing but a charlatan!"

Prove it!  Say the magic word!

Enter the magic word. Only the first five letters are inspected; the port for which this guide was written is case-insensitive.

That is not what I thought it was.  Do you know what I thought it was?

Respond "no". The game will then print out a random five-letter "word." You must perform a series of mathematical operations on it to produce another five-letter word to give in response (This is the part that the frawd(6) utility included with this port automates):

• Take the current time (specifically, the time at which you expect to finish entering the result) as an hour h from 0 through 23 and a minute m from 0 through 59. Calculate h * 100 + m, change the last digit to a zero, and call this number t. In this port of Adventure, the game uses the time values returned by the localtime(3) function, which should be based on the user's timezone settings. Other ports may vary; consult your wizard if frustration lasts longer than four hours.
• For the following step, the "value" of a letter is a number from 1 through 26 corresponding to that letter's position in the alphabet (A has value 1, B has value 2, C has value 3, etc.).
• For i from 1 through 5:
  • Take the absolute value of the difference between the value of the i-th letter in the word the game gave you and the value of the letter immediately after that. (If i=5, take the difference between the values of the last & first letters of the word.)
  • Multiply this number by the i-th digit of the magic number, counting from the end of the number (i.e., the ones-place is the first digit, the tens-place is the second, the hundredths-place is the third, etc.).
  • Add the i-th digit of t, again counting from the end of the number.
  • Divide by 26, take the remainder, and add 1 to it.
  • The result is the value of the i-th letter of the reply.

Once you enter the new word, the game will recognize you as a wizard:

Oh dear, you really *are* a wizard!  Sorry to have bothered you . . .

Maintenance Mode

Maintenance mode (a.k.a. "magic mode" or "wizard mode") in Adventure is used to modify several game configuration values, namely:

• the hours that the cave is open (i.e., when non-demo, non-wizard games can be played)
• the time & name of the next holiday
• the maximum number of turns allowed in a demo game
• the magic word
• the magic number
• the minimum amount of time one must wait before restoring a saved game
• the message of the day

Maintenance mode is invoked by entering "MAGIC MODE" as the first command in a new game immediately after accepting or rejecting the offer of instructions. If you try to access maintenance mode at any later point in the game, the command won't be recognized.

The first part of maintenance mode requires you to pass wizard authentication (see above); if you fail, the game will go back to the normal command mode and act like it doesn't recognize the words "MAGIC MODE".

If you are indeed a wizard, maintenance mode will then proceed as follows: (Note that, for reasons I have yet to fathom, the game's messages will no longer be preceded by blank lines, except for the final "Be sure to save your core-image...".)

Do you wish to see the hours?

If you say "yes", the current cave hours will be shown. By default, non-wizards may play at any time other than between 8 AM and 6 PM on weekdays.

Do you wish to change the hours?

If you say "yes":

New hours specified by defining "prime time".  Give only the hour
(e.g. 14, not 14:00 or 2pm).  Enter a negative number after last pair.

The game will then prompt you to specify the "prime time" hours (the times that the cave is closed) for weekdays, weekends, and holidays, in that order. For each type of day, it will print "Prime time on [weekdays |weekends|holidays]:" and then alternate prompting between "from:" and "till:", to each of which you must respond with a positive integer from 0 through 23 (24 for "till"), giving the start and (excluded) end times for zero or more segments of prime time per day type. A day type may have more than one expanse of prime time assigned to it, and overlapping prime time ranges are merged together. If you enter a number less than 0 (note that this port treats non-numbers as 0) or greater than 23 (24 for "till", indicating that prime time should last through the end of the day), or if you enter a "till" time that is less than or equal to its corresponding "from" time, the game will stop reading times for the current type of day and move on to the next type. Once all of the cave hours have been specified, the game will print "New hours for Colossal Cave:" and display the new hours.

Do you wish to (re)schedule the next holiday?

The game keeps track of no more than one holiday at a time, so responding "yes" will cause the current holiday to be replaced. (By default, there is no upcoming holiday.) If you say "yes":

To begin how many days from today?

Enter a decimal integer. This number will be added to the current date to get the day on which the holiday begins, so, for example, entering "1" indicates that the holiday starts tomorrow.

To last how many days (zero if no holiday)?

Enter the number of days that the holiday should last for, inclusive. Entering "0" causes there to be no upcoming holiday.

To be called what (up to 20 characters)?

Enter a line of text. The first twenty characters will be used as the name of the upcoming holiday.

Length of short game (null to leave at %d):

"%d" is replaced by the current maximum length of a short game (default 30); if a player spends this many turns in a demo, the game will automatically end. Enter a positive integer to change the limit to, or enter a blank line or a number less than 1 to leave it unchanged.

New magic word (null to leave unchanged):

Enter a word. The first five non-whitespace characters (or fewer, if you enter a short word) will become the new magic word. If you enter an empty line, the magic word will remain unchanged.

New magic number (null to leave unchanged):

Enter an integer to change the magic number to. If you enter a blank line or a value less than one, the magic number will be unchanged.

Latency for restart (null to leave at %d):

"%d" is replaced by the current minimum number of minutes that a player must wait after saving before ey can resume eir game (default 90; the number is divided by three for wizards). Enter a positive integer to which to change the delay, or enter a blank line or a number less than 1 to leave it unchanged. However, if you enter a positive integer less than 45, the game will print "Too small! Assuming minimum value (45 minutes)." and set the delay to 45.

Do you wish to change the message of the day?

If you say "yes", the game will print "Limit lines to 70 chars. End with null line." You will then get to enter one or more lines of text to serve as the new message of the day, which, when not empty (as it is by default), is displayed whenever a new game is started. If you enter a line 70 or more characters in length (counting the newline), the game will print "Line too long, retype:" and discard the long line. If you enter 430 or more characters in total, the game will print "Not enough room for another line. Ending message here." and stop reading input. Otherwise, reading stops when you enter a blank line.

Okay.  You can save this version now.
Be sure to save your core-image...

The program will then terminate. For the original code on the PDP-10, the user would have to save the program's "core image," which contained the modified magic settings. On some systems, the core image would disappear when the program exited, so the game would instead be configured to print "Break out of this and save your core-image." as the last message and then prompt for input, leaving the the user to end the program appropriately.