In my day, sonny, we didn't have all these fancy-shmancy graphics. All we had in our games was letters and numbers. And the only color they came in was Fluorescent Green! And we liked it!

Z-Cache

The coordinates are not at the above location!

When I was young, I remember asking my father, who was bent over a really large sheet of paper with a circle template, a ruler and a pencil, what he was doing.

He then told me about this "game" in which you typed commands while walking around a virtual world. Happy father's day Spelunk, this cache is for you!

Adventure was the first game of its kind but a whole slew of them followed, the most famous of which was the Zork series. A whole culture sprang up around text based games that has lasted well into the modern age of graphics. There is still an annual contest for people that like to write these games called the Interactive Fiction Contest.

To find this cache, you will need to solve at least part of one of these types of games (which is MUCH shorter the zork and other similar games). You'll need a few things to get started in playing it. Specifically you need to:

1. Follow one of these sets of instructions:
2. 1. Online play (Warning: online has no save feature; less tested; may not work in all browsers):
      1. Play the game online in a java enabled webbrowser.
   2. Offline play (allows save and restore):
      1. Download a (free) Inform/Z-Code interpreter, which exist for just about every known computing platform (palms to windows to linux to ...)
      2. Then download the puzzle z-code file for this cache: here or here.
3. Learn how to play these types of games if you don't know how:
   • Basic overview
   • A great list of resources
4. Play the puzzle to find the physical cache! All the instructions you need for finding the physical cache is in this game. You don't need to completely solve it to find this cache (you should have about 200 to make it easiest, but you could do it before you get that high). If you complete the game and score all 260 possible points, you'll receive instructions for getting to a Bonus Cache
5. That's right, boys and girls, complete this puzzle and you'll get the chance to find 2 caches for the price of one!
6. It is recommend that you add this cache to your watch list while playing the game, so that if I post updates to the puzzle you'll know about them. Especially true for the first few weeks.
7. Minimum vocabulary that you will need (for everything else you're on your own. There is many other things you'll need to figure out. Commands are capatalized but you can type in either upper or lower case):
   1. LOOK
      • Special note: "LOOK trees" doesn't do much. You must "LOOK AT trees", or "LOOK IN trees" or "LOOK UNDER trees"
   2. LOOK AT noun
   3. LOOK IN noun
   4. LOOK UNDER noun
   5. OPEN noun
   6. GET noun FROM noun
   7. PUT noun IN noun
   8. N, S, E and W
   9. READ noun
   10. CLIMB noun
   11. TURN noun
   12. TURN ON noun
8. Most objects you can touch/twiddle/play-with/etc are talked about only in the descriptions. Almost every noun in the descriptions can at least be looked at.
9. It is, of course, possible to cheat. Most computer programs and games can be manipulated, decompiled, etc. In fact, someone already has (and admitted to it). I didn't obfuscate the code at all, nor is the purpose to make cheating impossible. If you don't enjoy solving puzzles the proper way, feel free to cheat if you like.

Good luck!

Special Acknowledgements

This puzzle would not have turned out nearly so well if it hadn't been for the wonderful help of Nylimb who play tested this puzzle and provided comments above and beyond his call of duty. [on a side note, interestingly enough, Nylimb was one of the people that helped teach me how to program when I was young. We coincidentally met up again through geocaching many years later.]

I also need to thank the Davis-area geocachers who let me reserve a block of space in Davis where I could put this puzzle together. I knew it was going to take a while to put together so I asked them if I could keep a section of Davis reserved for this cache since I couldn't change the puzzle easily once I had begun.

About the physical cache

The physical cache, when you finally find it, is a fairly large Ammo box with a fair amount of toys in it. If you do the entire trail from start to end, without leaving the path, you'll walk close to .8 miles or so. Bring any kids with you and plan for half a day as you'll pass 3 play structures and I'm sure they'll want to stop (especially at the first one).

FTF prize (taken by Jeo and Mc5): a Nero Wolfe mystery book, which is one of an excellent series written in the early-mid 1900's. They don't have to be read in order as each is self-contained.

(This is actually my 29th and 30th placed cache, so I decided it had to be special. I think the next few will be much simpler. Whew.)

Final PS: Bonus points if you solve the puzzle on a portable device (palm, laptop, ...) while physically walking the course. I doubt anyone will take me up on this, however.