Secrets and easter eggs¶

Everything hidden in Crimsonland Classic 1.9.93 that a player can find, and what each one gives you. Most give you nothing but the find.

Secret weapons¶

The Splitter Gun, Shrinkifier 5k and Blade Gun come from outside the quest list. Their conditions are on Secret weapons.

The Secret Path¶

A puzzle in the credits. Open them from the main menu: Statistics → Credits. The credits scroll one line per second and loop.

• Click every line that contains a lowercase "o": 37 lines, headings included, down to Click the ones with the round ones! at the very end. A capital "O" doesn't count.
• A correct click highlights the line, with a chime the first time.
• Clicking a line without an "o" unmarks the nearest marked line at or above it, with a grunt.
• Leaving the credits clears every mark.

While every "o" line is marked, a Secret button sits next to Back. Unmark one and it goes away until you mark it again.

The first time you get there, a riddle also replaces You can stop watching now. and the blank lines around it:

Inside Dead Let Mighty Blood
Do Firepower See Mark Of
The Sacrifice Old Center
Yourself Ground First For
Triangle Cube Last Not Flee
0001001110000010101110011
0101001011100010010101100
011111001000111
(4 bits for index) <- OOOPS I meant FIVE!
(4 bits for index)

It shows once per launch: solve the puzzle again before you quit and you get the button but not the riddle.

Number the 23 words 1 to 23 in reading order. Split the binary into 5-bit groups, read each as a word number, and you get:

Dead Center Inside The Triangle Of The First Blood Sacrifice Yourself For Firepower

That's the Blade Gun handout: in single-player Survival, your first three kills mark a triangle, and standing at its centre with your health below 15 gets you the gun.

AlienZooKeeper¶

The Secret button opens AlienZooKeeper, "a puzzle game unfinished ..or something more?". It's a match-3 game on a 6×6 board of alien heads in five colours.

• Until your first Reset, the board is all red, Game Over flashes, and the tiles ignore clicks.
• Reset starts a game: a fresh board with no ready-made lines, score 0, 9.6 s on the clock.
• Click a tile, then any other tile, and they swap. They don't need to be next to each other, and a swap that matches nothing stays.
• Three of a colour in a row or column clear, one line per swap, for +1 score and +2 s.
• Cleared cells stay empty until the next Reset.
• When the clock runs out, it's Game Over.

It unlocks nothing, and the score isn't saved. The board stays as you left it until you quit the game.

Orbes Volantes Exstare¶

On March 3, the Statistics screen can flash Orbes Volantes Exstare in faint green near the top-left corner. It's gone the instant it appears.

The game rolls once per launch, so 1 launch in 32 shows it. Each time it shows, the game rolls again, so it can come back. The original reads the date when it starts; the rewrite reads it each frame.

Holding G¶

In the original, holding G while you fire gives you 10 s of Fire Bullets on every shot, with no cheat mode needed. Each shot resets the timer to 10 s, even when a Fire Bullets pickup had left you more.

The rewrite ignores G; --preserve-bugs brings it back (original bug 24).

Hidden control schemes¶

The Controls screen lists three movement schemes and five aim schemes. Two more exist.

Mouse point&click movement. In the original, type cv_enableMousePointAndClickMovement 1 in the console and the movement list gains Mouse point&click. Your Reload key becomes Move to cursor: hold it to send your trooper to the crosshair, where it stops within 20 units. The rewrite doesn't read that console variable; it lists the scheme only when your crimson.cfg already selects it. Point&click runs rank.

Computer. An autopilot for movement and an aimbot for aim. No menu ever lists them; only an edited crimson.cfg selects them.

• Both lock on to the nearest creature, switching only to one at least 64 units closer.
• The autopilot walks at its target while you're within 300 units of the arena centre, and heads back to the centre beyond that. With no target it circles the centre.
• The aimbot drags your crosshair onto the target and fires on its own once the crosshair is within 128 units of it.

Computer runs never rank, and the Ranked box is off while player 1 uses either scheme (ranked rules).

Hotkeys¶

Fixed keys that no menu mentions and the Controls screen can't rebind.

Custom music¶

At startup the game runs music\game_tunes.txt, and the shipped file says you can add your own. Each snd_addGameTune <name>.ogg line adds music\<name>.ogg to the tunes that play at random during a run. A name missing from music.paq loads from the music folder. The rewrite does the same.

Later-tier ground¶

Survival, Rush and Typ'o'Shooter runs, and the menu background, normally use tier 1 ground. As you clear quests, each new ground gets 1-in-8 chances of borrowing a quest's ground instead, checked in this order:

• quest 4.2's, once you've cleared 40 quests;
• quest 3.2's, once you've cleared 30;
• quest 2.2's, once you've cleared 20.

Console¶

Press ~ (the key left of 1) to open the console, even during the intro. Type a variable's name to see its value, or the name and a value to set it. Tab completes names. Commands in autoexec.txt in the game folder run at every launch.

setresourcepaq, loadtexture and sndfreqadjustment also exist. None of them changes anything you'd see.

Dead ends¶

• The executable holds hints that never reach the screen: "Inside AlienZooKeeper" combinations such as CyanYellowRedYellow, "few secret weapons hidden inside the game", and "Brave little haxx0r aren't you?". They sit in startup code that never runs.
• The credits write Greeting to:, Chaos^, Matricks and Muzzy onto one line, then blank it, so the greetings never show.
• On September 12, November 8 and December 18 the game loads a balloon image at startup, then never draws it.
• The end note after quest 5.10 is out of date. On normal it calls Typ'o'Shooter a reward for finishing, and on hardcore it says you've just unlocked the Splitter Gun. Both actually unlock after 4.10.
• Typing reload in Typ'o'Shooter plays the reload sound and does nothing else.
• If the game can't save to the registry when you quit, its console log says "Kameli was NOT hairy."

Source notes: easter eggs, console.