THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON

Tutorial — Tronsoft Interactive Fiction Engine, Core 2.3.0

You are Mr. Bedford. You have no scientific training, no capital, and one neighbour. The neighbour has a substance that is opaque to gravitation. The rest follows.

THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES

Press DRAW THE BLINDS on the cover. Narration and ambience are optional and are chosen there; you can change both later from the ACCESSIBILITY panel in the footer. Then type into the command line, or click the buttons under it.

TALK TO CAVOR — twice. He explains the whole plot and is glad to.
NORTH, NORTH — the lane, then the bungalow.
OPEN DESK, then SEARCH DESK. Containers in this game are opened first and searched second; searching is what reveals what is inside.
TAKE NOTEBOOK, READ NOTEBOOK, TAKE GLASS.
Stuck at any point? HINT. Ask three times and it will tell you the exact command.

THE COMMANDS

Movement	`N` `S` `E` `W` `UP` `DOWN` `IN` `OUT`, or `GO NORTH`
Handling	`LOOK` `EXAMINE x` `TAKE x` `DROP x` `USE x` `OPEN x` `CLOSE x` `SEARCH x` `READ x` `TALK TO x` `WAIT`
On the Moon	`JUMP` `CLIMB` `LISTEN` `SHOUT` `EAT x` `DRINK` `SMELL` `DIG` `ENTER x`
Information	`INVENTORY` `JOURNAL` `QUESTS` `ACHIEVEMENTS` `STATS` `SCORE`
System	`HINT` `SAVE name` `RESTORE name` `TRANSCRIPT` `RESTART` `ABOUT` `HELP`

USE is the verb that does things. If you are carrying a tool and standing where it belongs, USE it. USE PANE in the shed, USE LEVER in the sphere, USE CROWBAR at the lid, USE GLASS on the ridge. The game never asks you to guess a phrasing; if the tool and the place are right, the plain verb works.

TURNS AND MOVEMENT

One command is one turn. There is no clock and no opponent taking a turn against you: the world advances only when you act, so you may think as long as you like. A few things in the story are on a timer measured in turns rather than in seconds — the lunar sunrise thaws over several turns after you land, and the crater vegetation grows while you walk north across it — and for those, WAIT is a legitimate move that spends a turn and nothing else. Your turn count is in the top bar and is what par is measured against.

Movement is one room per turn, by compass direction or by UP / DOWN / IN / OUT. The EXITS panel always lists every way out of the room you are in, named, and each entry is clickable. Exits are never hidden from that panel, so there is nothing to map by hand and no maze anywhere in the game; the WORLD MAP panel charts what you have seen. Some exits are shut until something has been done — the lid must be prised open before the shaft below it exists — and the room will say so.

THE PANELS

EXITS and LOCATION — where you are and where you may go.
QUEST LOG — seven quests, tracked as they progress.
WORLD MAP — a chart of the region you are standing in. Rooms you have not reached show as a dot; the room you are in is bracketed. The map redraws when you cross into a new region.
INVENTORY, JOURNAL, CONVERSATION HISTORY — everything you are carrying, everything you have worked out, and everything anyone has said to you.
CONTEXT buttons — choose an action button first (say SEARCH) and the context row fills with the things you could search from where you stand. This is the whole game playable without typing.

THE THREE ACTS

Kent. Find the notebook, the field glass, the Cavorite pane in the furnace, and the stores in the crate. Fit the pane, carry the provisions, the oxygen and the crowbar aboard, and pull the lever. Cavor will stop you if anything essential has been left in the shed.

The crater. You land at the end of the lunar night, with the Moon's whole atmosphere lying frozen on the ground outside. Wait. Watch the sunrise through the glass. When Cavor tells you there is air, go OUT. Then walk north, and keep walking north: the crater floor sprouts, thickens and closes into forest behind you while you cross it.

Under the Moon. There is a lid in the crater floor a hundred yards across. Open it, go down, and find out what happened to Cavor — and then find your way back to a sphere you can no longer see, in a forest that did not exist this morning.

TWO WAYS HOME

The route back is deliberately doubled, and you only need one of them.

The marker. Before you go down the shaft, take the splintered stem from the jungle and USE STEM at the lid. With the handkerchief you have carried since Kent, that makes an eight-foot white signal — the only made thing for a hundred square miles.
The ridge. If you did not set a marker, climb north from the mooncalf pasture to the ridge and USE GLASS. One glitter on the crater floor will hold still while the others move.

THE THREE HAZARDS

This game can kill you in exactly three places, and it tells you about all three before it does. Read the room. If a description says a thing would be fatal, the game means it. Nothing is ever made unwinnable — there is no state you can reach where the story is still running but no longer finishable — so a save before anything reckless is the only precaution you need.

Opening the manhole before the lunar dawn has thawed the air.
Laying hands on the mooncalf, which weighs about as much as a terrace.
Stepping into the ferryman's skiff on the central sea.

WINNING

You win by getting off the Moon. That means: reaching the Grand Lunar and hearing him out, working out from what he says that the Selenites do not intend to let a second Earthman leave, getting back up the shaft to the crater floor, finding the sphere in a forest that grew over it while you were below, and climbing in. The story ends there, with Bedford falling home and Cavor still talking somewhere under the Moon.

The ending is the same whichever route home you take, and it does not depend on your score. A minimum finish is worth 125 points; collecting everything is worth 150. SCORE tells you where you stand, and the end of the game prints a full breakdown of what you found and what you missed.

LOSING

There are exactly three ways to lose, and each one is described plainly in the room before it can happen — see the three hazards below. When one of them kills you the game stops and offers you RESTART, or RESTORE if you have a save. That is the whole of it: no hunger, no running out of air, no timer that ends the story behind your back, and no way to put the game into a state where it still runs but can no longer be finished. If you are alive, you can still win.

SCORING

150 points: 75 for objects recovered and 75 for the seven events of the story. A careful full run finishes on 150 in about 80 moves. A lean run that skips the optional finds — the notebook, the puffball, the herdsman's goad, the chain of gold — still finishes, on 125. Your score, moves and elapsed time are always in the top bar, and SCORE will tell you at any point.

SAVING AND RESTARTING

SAVE morning and RESTORE morning from the command line, or use SAVE MANAGER in the footer for named saves with the room, score and move count of each. Saves are kept in this browser only, under the storage key tronsoft_tife_first_men_in_the_moon_save, and are cleared if you clear site data. TRANSCRIPT will show the whole story so far and download it as a text file.

RESTART, from the command line or the top bar, begins the story again from the downs above Lympne. It clears the current session — score, moves, inventory, journal and quests — but it does not delete your saved games, so a save made before something reckless is still there afterwards.

ACCESSIBILITY

Six profiles — standard, low vision, blind / screen reader, hard of hearing, motor assistance, cognitive support — with individual overrides for narration, captions, text size, contrast, control size, simplified layout and reduced motion. Every puzzle is solvable with sound off and with typing kept to the button rows.