The Castle Doctrine Forums

Hey guys. David Daniel Gravely here,
   
My friend helped me figure out the name. And no we didn’t use each other to exploit the game. But, has it ever been fun! I put a lot of work into creating the perfect house design, and the Grand Canyon Labyrinth was born! I set out, built it, and proceeded to wait to see how long it lasted.

Well, the results are in, and after surviving a couple days as the top house in the game, someone finally blasted through my masterpiece. After 736 people entered my house, 473 of which died a horrible death, Charles Sean Malloy took the honor of robbing me blind after 612 steps for $478,936! I have had so much fun playing this game, but I think I am finally good for now. SO! I am going to share the whole process with you guys. Yep, I am going to divulge all my precious secrets that I poured so much effort into. I will explain how I designed my house, and all the thought that went into planning each piece. I will also go through a few of the robbery attempts, as well as, of course, the one that finally ended it all. Maybe you’ll learn something, and maybe you already know it all. But I hope you enjoy exploring this work of art that, I will admit, I can truly stand behind, and say I am proud.

I will start off with a shot of the completed house in all of its secret glory. Bask in it:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B74SDlt … VlZR1Y4YVk

As you can see, there are three main sections. The top left quarter is the noob quadrant. Unless the correct magical dog dancing is performed, each of the electric floors in the first 3 hallways will light up as soon as they are stepped on, providing instant death. Entrance from the left or the right does not matter. The results are the same. The idea here is that no one ever sees the electric floors on, no matter how many times they go back and forth as long as they don’t cause the dog to turn around between the switches. They only see them turn on as they take their last step, ever. That first powered door with the electric floors behind it was partially meant to deter people from going in there so that they didn’t just aggravate that dog (placed just out of vision range), and have it chase them out to safety. You were in no danger if you actually went in there. Once you avoided that first powered door, and traveled all the way to the second one(which is closed), you aggravate the dog at the top, and turning around at that point will place you an even number of steps away from it, requiring a gun (or meat) to dispose of. At that point, if you tried to exit through the door down and to the left, the electric floors will get you, and if you tried exiting through the door directly south of that second powered door, the previously angered dog would kill you instantly. This doggy door took more lives than any other trap in the house. By far. Honestly 99% of people never made it out of this area. In the early stages, my safe was located in the little nook 10 columns from the left, and 9 rows from the top.

Then there is the top right quadrant. This is the cat herding 8 bit combination lock protected by the Grand Canyon. In order to properly input the combination, I must first close all of the doors on the left side of the canyon. If this is not done, you are unable to gain a separate line of sight for each cat (placed just within the edge of your vision range), scaring them all away at once, and making it impossible to properly input the combination. In order to power these doors, you must do a magical dog dance with the 2 window pups from the entrance. I’m sure you can figure it out now that you can see it. Powering these doors also opens that second powered door, and powers the first one at the top, as well as the electric floors behind it. After completing the circuit to do that during a self-test, I can safely aggravate the top dog, and fry it on the electric floors leaving me a way out in case I accidently screw up. At any point during a self-test, I have the option to turn around, and safely leave. Once the doors on the left side of the canyon are closed, you can make contact with each cat individually, and herd it onto the proper switches. You will notice that the top right of the combination area has an enclosed area free from switches to collect the fleeing cats, and make sure they don’t accidently travel onto an errant switch later on. I was really hoping that the person who eventually broke me would have done it by laddering across the canyon to get the combo. Then leave. Return. Ladder across the canyon again. Hit all the switches, and then cut power to the ones that needed to be off. Sadly though, this was not case. But, I did plan for this, and I made it very difficult to be able to do this in one go without permanently cutting power to all the lower trap doors.

Once the kitty combo is correctly inputted, you proceed to the third area of the house. The Labyrinth! When choosing the main type of security, I considered the fundamentals of what are required to get to your safe in a self-test. Essentially you need a walkable path from the start to finish, and so you want to make this path as long as possible (and hard to cut shortcuts though) and fill it with as many squares that become impassible or deadly if the wrong thing is done. This leaves you the choices of powered doors, trap doors, electric floors, and dogs. Also consider the fact that when brute forcing a house, it is very easy to forcibly cut power from something but impossible to supply power to it if the wiring does not already exist (or is cut). This makes powered doors very vulnerable even though crowbars are expensive since you can just make precise cuts with relatively cheap saws, and cut power to many doors at once. Same with electric floors, except that they also have the added risk of being directly forced with cheap water. This leaves you to choose from dogs and trap doors. Dogs can be difficult to herd, and deadly in a self-test if you misstep. So I wanted to avoid direct contact with dogs during a self-test. Trap doors on the other hand are great since they passively remain deadly. If you cut wiring to them, you still cannot pass them. So, this led me to focus on trap doors and hidden dogs! As you can see the Labyrinth is a bit of a cluster**** of trap doors, wired walls, and some hidden pups to keep you on your toes. However, it is a very carefully planned cluster****. When trying to brute force a line of trap doors, the obvious technique is to follow the line of wired walls next to it since every trap door needs to be next to wire in order for it to work. Also, the lower left and right corners are obvious targets for safes. If you will notice, the line of trap doors actually makes a complete circle around the outside of the maze. Thus, if you simply follow the line, you will come full circle and end up back where you started. It is impossible to get to the safe by following the wired walls next to the trap door path since the doors around the safe are powered from a line coming from the opposite side of the circle. So, if you simply follow the line of trap doors to one of the corners, and find the safe is not there, it will lead you to think it is in the other corner, and then force you to dig all the way to the other side to only find that it is not there either! And the randomness of the maze is meant to disguise the path of traps doors that deviates from the circle and actually goes to the safe. You will notice that this house has nothing but wooden walls. Not a single metal or concrete wall. It was designed so that the limiting factor would be your number of ladders. Maximizing concrete walls in the maze would only make it obvious what line of trap doors to follow since there always MUST be a line of wired wooden walls next to your trap doors.  So the maze is carefully planned for all sorts of deception and red herrings. And in the couple of very serious force attempts, all of this maze deception worked perfectly!

And that brings me to the final chapter. How it actually all went down in reality. I put together a few of the security tapes of botched force attempts. I mean people who brought tons of tools, and then got eaten in like 30 steps. You can find it on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQdANwH-5mc

Then there was another quite interesting attempt by Troy Russell Moore, RIP. He brought the firepower, and he was soo close. But…he ended up making a stupid mistake. Find it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFJLtw2CEvM

And finally, the actual security tape of the man who ended it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df2qiiPypiA
This guy forced his way through nearly 100 squares, exploring virtually every nook of the maze before he finally reached my safe. He brought $133,300 worth of tools, and used $73,250 of it. I challenge you to build something that can defend against that. Here is a shot of the dismal state he left my house in:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B74SDlt … 2RTLTVKZ2s

No hard feelings though. It was a wild ride, and I had a blast. Thanks to Jason, for bringing us this great game. I welcome any questions, comments, or criticisms you guys may have. Thanks!