Witch's house chest puzzle

[salsaman]

And another thing - after solving the 3 clams in the Akadai underground, I assumed the symbol meant I had to insert 5 red gems...

[Vroqren]

And another thing - after solving the 3 clams in the Akadai underground, I assumed the symbol meant I had to insert 5 red gems...

I thought this same thing actually - I was glad for that spoiler on the forums, as it meant I din't have to buy 5 gems...

[MyGameCompany]

And another thing - after solving the 3 clams in the Akadai underground, I assumed the symbol meant I had to insert 5 red gems...

Me too! And I actually did buy 5 red gems. Oh well, I had plenty of gold at that point anyway...

[Painted Lady]

Had to downsize file and crop to make it legible (almost)

If I were you I would put the water skin in the upper leftmost slot in the chest and see if that works.

[Lord_P]

Well that was funny; you had actually figured it out but didnt know it.

[xolotl]

Interestingly, on my first runthrough, I'm 99% sure that I too had more than one collection of items in there which weighed five pounds total, without the puzzle getting solved. I eventually decided to try the waterskin and that did the trick for me.

I'll see if I can reproduce that problem later, but I wonder if it's something to do with float precision, and the trouble that machines can have with floats. To quote a canonical example in Python:

Code: Select all

>>> 0.1 + 0.2
0.30000000000000004

Perhaps under some circumstances, weights are adding up to something that's not exactly 5.0lbs, even though with the rounding in place on the UI side, it looks like they should be. Weights in Eschalon are stored as a "double" (a kind of floating-point value), so that's entirely possible.

In general when using floats/doubles, you want to avoid doing exact comparisons like "if x == 5.0", for those very reasons. You'll usually either apply some rounding functions, or test for a range, a la "if x >= 4.999 and x <= 5.001", or something.