The Castle Doctrine Forums

Nah, that was Blip.  Here's the tutorial if you want to look at that, but I'll explain Davidson's lock.

Here's an image with all of the wires highlighted, so you can follow what they power easily:

First of all, a quick note.  The circuits that I circled in green are called "latches"- once they receive power, they never stop producing power, and they're really the key to combo locks.

Now, back to the buttons.  There are two really important buttons- the fifth and the first.  You'll notice that the fifth (colored red) is the most straightforward.  It winds back and forth, but it never branches off anywhere- it goes straight to cutting the power to the grids.  All of the other sets of wires just reach switches that affect power flowing along the red wire.  The other most important button is the first, with the light blue wires.  Pressing it will always power the latch in the top left, and (following the blue down) that latch will always provide power to the electric floors, cutting off the robber.

Before we start following power flowing along the red wire, we need to notice one more thing.  All of the cool colors (light blue, dark blue, and purple) are actually connected.  That means that dark blue and purple (the second and last buttons) also have the chance to power the latch in the top left, making it impossible to unpower the electric floors.  The only thing preventing that from happening is the inverted switch connected to orange (the fourth button).  Once orange is pressed, dark blue and purple can no longer reach the latch.  So, we know that 4 *has* to be pressed before 2 or 6.

Now we can trace the red wire and solve the combo lock.  You'll notice there are two latches along it, A and B.  They essentially serve as "checkpoints"- once power reaches it and turns it on, you can cut off the power behind it without any worries.  That means that essentially 3 "stages" we have to get the power through: Start to A, A to B, and B to the end.

Start to A: There are 3 switches that can block power from getting to A, but only if dark blue, yellow, or orange are pressed.  If red is pressed first, A is powered, and we're through that stage.
Code: 5????

A to B: Following the wire, we see that Dark Blue, Orange, and Yellow have to be powered for the power to reach B.  Remember, orange has to be pressed before dark blue, but yellow doesn't affect anything else.  So, the next 3 buttons can either be 423, 432, or 342.
Code: 5423?

B to End: There's only one switch that has to be pressed before the power can reach the end- purple.  Press it, and we're done!
Code: 54236

Just one more quick note- if you do make a ordered combo lock, be careful not to make redundancies- they take up space!  In Davidson's lock, light blue blocks power getting from A to B; which is pointless, because light blue already makes power reaching the end of red useless!  Similarly, purple blocks power getting from A to B in 2 different spots (right branch and straight down)- obviously, only one is needed. (Although dark blue is seemingly also connected to that switch at the far right, its right branch actually cuts off power from reaching there, not to mention orange's two switches).

Anyways, I hope that helped you understand how Davidson's lock worked!  Good luck on your future iterations of it

You can use C4 to blast into the combo lock wiring, and can see about a third of it.  I was able to scout everything for $3800.  On top of that, once you explore that room you can brute force it extremely easily, since the wiring leads straight to the safe, with only 1 trapdoor (and a whole lot of dogs) in between.

(Here's my map- every empty space in the wire room has a dog.)

I'm guessing Davidson finally realized we had the code, tried to change it, and ended up killing himself (like how it happens to all of us).  The really weird thing is why there was that flaw in the first place.  I mean, without even reducing all the unnecessary wiring in that room, you could just move the two "latches" on the left side to the right to fill in the hole in the concrete, and there wouldn't be any danger of changing and possibly messing up the wiring.  I dunno, maybe he just never expected to be the top house.

EDIT: Oops, didn't realize eppfel had already explained the flaw on the next page.

Not quite, mostly because of a well placed dog.  Plus, there's still room for more stuff after.

I took another look, and it might not be as exploitable for 2k robbers as I thought (they still get partial info, though).  I'll try one more thing to see for sure.  Either way, I'm pretty sure you'd get everything for 3 or 4k.

I must say, I was having a lot of fun proceeding through your house .  I had the whole bottom half mapped out(Here's my map of it), and was just about to get started on what seems to have been a magic dance.  That catlock was really neat- order *and* timing *and* direction mattered- I would've spent forever there if I hadn't gotten lucky and gotten 2 crowbars.  The trident looks pretty cool, how you have to get diagonal vision of the dog and wait for him to open the doors.

Of course, the real reason I'm sad is because Davidson has a 6 bit combo lock more than $3000 of tools deep, closing off an area that would take at least $5400 to get through without the code... ugh.  That's not getting cracked on my budget

Well, there go my dreams of starting out with a 100k home =P Anyways, good luck with your next house and future robbing exploits

EDIT: Also, just wondering, what was the mistake JAAM was making before? (You mention it in this post)

Hahaha, yep, that was me!  Someone beat you to the ladder I had in the safe, though.  Interestingly, enough, the same person stole the ladder, the money you left on the wife, and some violent tools I donated in a Santa run.

Oh, I was mostly interested in restarting the server to let people play again, since some people seemed interested in playing.  I don't know if you know what new items were in FT, but there's a changelog here.

For powered blinds, I let clubs break it as well (I think normal windows can be broken by that as well).  I also added the Bucket o' Paint that could be thrown on a window to make it block vision.  As for disabling the powered blinds without breaking the window- I didn't have any way, other than cutting the power around it.

I also think the CAD (aka powered pitbulls) would be an interesting addition, although I think they really need a new tool to balance them.  How they worked originally was that water would basically turn them into a electric floor (sparks flying everywhere when it has power), and a torch would completely destroy it.  The balance to not being able to take it out at range was that you could just cut the power around a spot, retreat a bit, and then let it turn off itself.  However, like eppfel said, there was a way to set it up so that you couldn't do that safely- the only way to get past the magic dance in that house was the brute force the pits to the dog room.  That's one of the main reasons I added the EMP. For $800, you could stop the CAD for a single turn, letting you get close enough to water or torch it.

I liked the role of the poison gas canisters, but not how they worked (not sure if that makes sense).  How it worked is that it killed you if you stepped beside it while it was powered (there was also fake poison gas, but that didn't work out too well), but it had to be powered from two directions.  Since it could kill you on an empty tile, it's role was to be another wife protection tool (while also letting you protect your safe).  The problem was that there was no ranged way to destroy it- if it were on, you had to cut the power, which might be on the other side of it, so you'd have to tunnel through a bunch of concrete to get past it.  I actually think that the EMP would've fixed the problems I had with it, though- there just wasn't enough time to see its effect.  The EMP would disable it for 2 steps, letting you get past it safely (but you wouldn't be able to return), or give you a safe way to use your torch or explosives to destroy it.

If you'd also like a laundry list of ideas I had but never got around to implementing, here's a few:
Chihuahua that provides power (trapdoors are safe, grids are not, can't get by powered doors)
Slow pets (move every 2 steps)
Poisonous pets/traps* (cheaper than similar objects, kill you after a certain number of turns instead, there are items and objects to counteract poison)
Pets/traps that blind you* (everything is black, or very reduced vision)
Pets that block movement
Tiles that pets can move through, but you can't

*Not as simple as the rest to implement, and probably the least "different" tiles

I know it's been two weeks since you asked this question, but one idea that I liked personally was tools that you could use on empty floors (I had wires that you could lay down to make your own circuits, and paint for fun (although it was used to block windows as well).  Also, the "decay" transition, which changes an objects state automatically, can let you do cool things as well.  For example, a pet that only moves every two steps, a tool that puts pets to sleep for only 1 turn, an EMP that turns off electronics for a couple of turns, etc.

Also, I'll see if I can get the main FT server up again- the web host might've deleted everything, though, so I can't promise much.

Edit: Yep, looks like they deleted everything.  I'll wait a bit to see if it just takes a while to bring everything back after flagging my account as inactive, but I'm pretty sure it's gone for good I'll think about starting another server, but I'm not sure if I'll have the time.

Just backed popped in, and I wanted to mention that I used something (kinda) similar in my last house Unfortunately, the site that I used to host all of the pictures of the house deleted them, but here's an old CastleDraft of it:

http://castledraft.com/editor/gGwOgp

Specifically, the trap in the bottom right.  As you go up, the lower grates are off, but the top ones and the trapdoors are all on.  When you step on the first trapdoor, you can see both cats, but nothing past the cat on top.  You know that if you step down, then you can step back up and the cat on the right will power the trapdoors- you can be 100% sure of this (well, almost- there could be a pit with a dead animal there- in that case, the safest/cheapest bet is to go down, then saw through the wooden walls).  However, you don't know what the cat above is going to do- it could turn on the grates below you.  However, it *looks* safe to cut the grate below you, since the trapdoors are powered from above and the cats won't move.  So you cut that grate, and suddenly you fall into a pit because you just cut half of the power going to the trapdoors

All that being said, it has the same problem most of my houses do- taking up a whole lot of space for a single trap, as devious as it is (Exhibit A: complex jumble of wires to the left (which is actually my favorite trap I've ever designed- you can see what it does in the house's breakdown, section D.) )  Still, you might have fun and success with a adaptation of that trap

On another note: as much as I've looked for ways to make it work again, I think wireless communication isn't possible now What enabled it was basically that the game could treat a circuit in 2 ways, depending on whether all circuits were "settling" or not.  We were able to build a circuit that exploited that fact- if the game was in 1 mode, a door would be open, but if it were in the other the door would be closed.  Another (separate) circuit would let you essentially switch between modes.  (I can explain this in a bit greater detail, if you'd like) The way that Jason fixed it is by making sure electronics worked the same always- now there are no "modes" that we can exploit for wireless stuff.

Anyways, sorry for the giant wall of text

Just found this article on Jason's new game:
http://kotaku.com/a-mildly-satanic-new- … 1638083439

I think he's asking what you will consider to be success, not what you're trying to do.  Will you be happy if a thousand people buy it? If ten thousand buy it, but nobody's playing after a week? Etc.

One really nice thing to have would be a "House Loan", where you start out with a certain amount of money that you can only spend on your house.  It helps your starting life to be more secure at first, but doesn't help you after that (like halving building prices would).