The Quiet Ship — hints

One bus bar, a fixed number of units, seven systems that want sixteen between them. power lights, unpower vesta, and the Power meter at the top of the panel tells you what you are spending. If a thing will not run, something else is already spending its unit.

It will tell you anything, and it will never raise a subject. The rule it is under is on the bulkhead in the mess: the ship will answer and will not initiate. Ask it about the crew, the log, the power and about yourself, in those words, and then ask it about whatever the answers name.

Pressure doors are on servos and the servos draw two. You have four units. Something else has to come off the bus, and the obvious candidate is the one you have been talking to.

The bus bar in the storage bay is the act's one required object. The drawing in the lockers, the roster in the mess, and the chart on your own berth are the ones that make the rest of the game make sense.

Trace heating is one unit and it is the difference between about zero and minus sixty. The hull temperature meter is on the panel: at −20 it starts taking your condition, at −40 it takes it fast. Going back through the lock into the ring always works and always costs you nothing.

Correct, at five units. Fit the bus bar you brought from storage — fit bar — and the cap goes to seven. Until you do, cross cold and quickly, or warm up and try the door.

Somebody's work, not the ship's: hand-cut saddles, cold-formed bends, dead straight for ninety metres. Look through the window at the truss hatch, and read the suit log when you find it, and the two facts fit together.

The laboratory, the water plant, the observation blister, the radiator gallery and the spine locker. The locker has a sheet of paper taped over a shelf of filters that is worth the walk on its own.

It runs off the laboratory bus, which draws three. At seven units that means two other things come off, and one of them is going to be the heating, and the bay is not as cold as the tube. Power it, play the recording, then put the heat back.

The notice on the hatch was taped at eye height for you specifically and it says not to, and it says why in the next line: play the recording first. The game will let you do it in the wrong order. It will not let you undo it.

Eleven feeds off one bar, dressed and labelled and torque-striped, done in a crawl space at minus sixty for eleven people who were already asleep. Nothing there is a puzzle. Look at it anyway.

Nothing has. That is the act. Go aft.

Because the limiter is set to the rating of the one bus bar that survived, and the card wired to it explains that the bar is the weak point on purpose. Backing it off gives you sixteen units. It gives you them for nine turns.

Whatever you have already decided to do, and nothing else. Work out the sequence before you touch the limiter — the game gives you every chance to walk the compartment and read first, and no chance at all to think it over afterwards.

The workshop, the coolant pump room, the cable run and the switchgear room, and the tag book in the last of those is the single most important document on the ship.

transmit sends all of it home. stay keeps it aboard and puts the units into being warm. The third one you will find on your own or not at all, and the ship asks you a question first.

The bridge log is open at day 411 with a pen clipped to it, the filter log in medical says which spares not to use, and the mess has eleven mugs on hooks and one on the drainer. None of it changes the ending. All of it changes what the ending means.

And you cannot have both. power lab, open the tin, then unpower lab and power comms. The allocation is the game right up to the last minute of it.

It is not a command on the panel and the ship will not offer it to you. It is forward, in the machinery space, and it is a thing you do rather than a thing you send — and the ship asks you a question before it lets you.