The Card Loom — hints
One nudge at a time. Nothing opens unless you click it, so you will not read the answer to a puzzle you have not reached.
Back to the game · Full walkthrough
Act I — The Frame
What do I actually type?
A card holds one instruction. punch lift the first row, punch throw the cream shuttle, punch beat. Then run, at the loom in the new shed.
It laid a float.
Then the shuttle went across with no shed open. The order is lift, throw, beat, in that order and no other — ask Mr Cleave about the order and he will say so.
I need to fix card 1.
chain numbers them. unpick 1 takes one off, and punch throw the cream shuttle at 2 laces one in at a place instead of on the end.
Twelve picks off three cards?
The chain is laced into an endless band. It comes round and round for as long as the engine turns. Ask Cleave about the chain.
How does the act end?
One clean inch. Three cards, twelve picks, and the loom is proved.
Act II — The Pattern
Twenty-seven cards, twelve on the frame.
Yes. That is the act. Everybody in the building has noticed and nobody can help — except one person, who has not offered.
Who?
Miss Deane will tell you: ask her about Mr Cleave. He has spent four months not telling you your job.
So what do I ask him?
ask cleave about the motion. There is a casting with a ratchet and a notched wheel on his bench and it has been there since June.
The repeat card.
punch repeat from 1 seven times. It sends the reader back up the chain and does it as many times as the wheel is set for.
Seven, not eight?
Eight picks of ground is one card and a count of seven, because the card itself makes the first one. Get it wrong once and you never will again.
I have run out of blanks.
Ask Mr Tarrant. He counts them on Fridays for a reason and the reason is not meanness — ask him about the blanks in Act I and he will tell you.
Act III — The Fault
What is this act?
Eleven hundred picks of real silk, twenty minutes, and once the strap is over you cannot punch, cannot unpick and cannot reach in. Everything you can do, you do first. Type ready.
The three preparations.
Take the waxed cord from the cutting room and lace the band at the loom; take a cream cop from the dye house; and ask Alfie to count.
Why the band?
Wednesday was twenty-seven picks. This is eleven hundred. A dry lacing stretches, rides on the cylinder, and jumps a card — and you will watch it happen for twenty seconds knowing exactly what is coming.
Why the cop?
There are about six hundred picks on the cream cop in the near box. The run is eleven hundred. Ask Cleave about the shuttle and watch his face.
Why Alfie?
Because otherwise you do not know where you are in it. And because he has been asking Mrs Ballard for a week whether anybody would want him for anything at that loom.
The shuttle is sounding light.
Get to the box side of the loom — n from the middle of the shed — and change the cop. Four picks lost out of eleven hundred, and nobody will ever find them.
Can I stop it?
Yes, and it costs the crimson, and there is no more before Tuesday. Mr Tarrant told you at half past six that he would rather lose it. Say it twice if you mean it.
Act IV — The Other Loom
Where am I going?
Up Hill Top to number nineteen, the house you were born in. s, e, u, u.
There is a sack under the bed.
There is, and it is his, and you have known since you were twenty and never asked. ask father about 1831 first. He has been waiting eleven years.
Reading it.
read the chain. Four hundred and eleven cards, a repeat of thirty-seven picks, and four places in one sprig where a third row lifts and the cream shuttle goes across in the middle of the figure.
What are those four for?
ask father about the third leaf, then ask father about the binding. That is the act, and it took him a winter to find and nine seconds to say.
Worth asking about.
The machine, why he never sold it, his eyes, Silas, and tomorrow. And ask him about spoiling it, and notice what he does not do.
Act V — The Last Run
What am I doing?
Cutting Friday’s chain. Seven cards weaves the sprig as painted. Three more cards ties the float down. Type design — it has all of it.
Row three.
It has to be hooked up first. ask cleave about the third row in the new shed. An hour, perhaps fifty minutes, and he has been wondering since June.
The chain.
lift row 1 / throw cream / beat / repeat from 1 seven times / lift row 2 / throw crimson / beat — and then lift row 3 / throw cream / beat.
Run it first.
Always. There is crimson for six hundred picks spare and the game will not let you put an unrun chain in front of two men. Then run a thumb along what comes off.
The endings.
Send for the buyers with the binding in and the piece is clean. Send for them without it and it lies proud, and it reads as the machine and not as you, and nobody will ever find it. Go to the counting house and refuse and Cleave cuts it in nine days instead.
And the fourth?
After a clean piece there is one thing left to decide and it is not about tomorrow. Ask Silas Renn about cutting cards, in Act IV, before you decide it.
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