Obsidian Hints

What should I do at the Church of the Machine?

  • 1 of 22: Go forward when you first get here, and Bismuth will give you a hint.
  • 2 of 22: You want to create a chip.
  • 3 of 22: You'll need to use the giant spider to do that.
  • 4 of 22: Climb inside and take a look around.
  • 5 of 22: Take some time and play around with the controls.  If you want to know how they work, read ahead.
  • 6 of 22: The icons at the bottom of the screen represent a program of sorts.  The arrows indicate the spider's movement -- the forward arrow tells it to move forward, the left and right arrows tell it to turn and then move forward, and the reverse pointing arrow tell it to turn around and go forward.
  • 7 of 22: The buttons in the upper-right corner change the program.  The single right arrow moves the cursor (the glowing icon) forward one spot, the group of arrows move it forward four spots, and the up and down arrows change the instruction located at the cursor.
  • 8 of 22: Try programming the computer and then pull the lever to see what happens.
  • 9 of 22: Whenever the spider approaches one of the altars, the chip it's carrying gains one of the three symbols.
  • 10 of 22: But there's another catch -- you have to return to the center of the church when the program reaches the chip icon.
  • 11 of 22: There's no way you can get to all the altars and back in a single pass.
  • 12 of 22: Fortunately, the program will repeat itself if you are in the center of the church when the chip comes around again.
  • 13 of 22: You'll want to reprogram the spider in the middle of a cycle, so that you can pick up all three symbols in one program.
  • 14 of 22: Did you notice the statues at the bottom of the church?
  • 15 of 22: Those work just like the buttons inside the spider when you walk past them.
  • 16 of 22: The basic idea here is to use the statues to make the program modify itself, so that you can pick up all of the pieces.
  • 17 of 22: You will want to get one piece per loop of the program.
  • 18 of 22: Look for some similarities between the commands that it takes to get to each of the altars and to the statues in the south.
  • 19 of 22: They all look like [move], forward, turn around, forward, [move] -- where or from.
  • 20 of 22: And if you make one loop through the south, you'll modify the first and fifth instructions in your program.
  • 21 of 22: With a bit of experimentation, you should be able to fine tune your program. I recommend you write down what you're doing, so you can remember your original (unmodified) program after the statues have done some reprogramming. If you can't figure this out, read ahead for the solution.
  • 22 of 22: Try _L_ F A F _R_ F L L L R.  (F = Forward, L = Left, R = Right, A = Turn around.)  The underlined steps are the ones that will be modified in successive passes through the program.