The Time Machine — Tutorial

You are the Time Traveller. It is Thursday evening in Richmond, 1895, your dinner guests have gone home unconvinced, and the machine on the blocks in your laboratory is one quartz rod short of finished. This tutorial covers everything you need to play; it does not spoil the puzzles.

1. Giving commands

Type at the prompt and press Enter, or use the buttons under the terminal. Every puzzle in the game can be solved entirely by clicking — choose an action from the ACTIONS row and the CONTEXT row fills with the valid targets in reach.

Moving	`N` `S` `E` `W` `U` `D` `IN` `OUT`, or `GO NORTH`
Looking	`LOOK` · `EXAMINE MACHINE` (`X`) · `SEARCH BENCH` · `READ DIALS`
Handling	`TAKE ROD` · `DROP MACE` · `USE ROD` · `OPEN CABINET` · `INVENTORY` (`I`)
Story verbs	`PULL LEVER` · `SET DIAL` · `ENTER RIVER` · `LIGHT FIRE` · `BREAK CASES` · `TELL TALE`
People	`TALK WEENA` · `TALK ELOI` · `TALK EDITOR`
Records	`QUESTS` · `JOURNAL` · `ACHIEVEMENTS` · `STATS` · `SCORE`
System	`HINT` · `SAVE name` · `RESTORE name` · `TRANSCRIPT` · `RESTART` · `HELP`

The six story verbs above are the ones you will not guess from a standard parser. They are all listed in HELP, and the game names them in the room text at the moment they become useful. If a verb is ever needed, something will have told you about it first.

2. The four eras

The world chart on the right of the screen redraws itself for whichever era you are standing in, and the strip beneath it shows which eras you have reached.

Richmond, 1895 — four rooms. Finish the machine and leave.
802,701 A.D., the Upper World — twelve rooms of gardens, ruins, a river, a museum and a forest. This is most of the game.
The Under-World — three rooms beneath the wells, and the only place in the game where the clock genuinely runs against you.
The Furthest Shore — one room, thirty million years on. Optional, worth points, and not somewhere to linger.

3. The three things that will kill you

There are exactly three lethal situations, each warned about at least a full turn before it resolves, and none of them can be walked into blind. There are no dead ends: if you are alive, you can still finish.

Matches underground. You carry eight from Richmond, and one burns for every turn you spend below the well-mouth. Count them. A round trip to the deepest room and back costs five.
The night forest. Once you are carrying what the museum gives you, night falls the next time you enter the trees, and you have a few turns to do something about it.
The end of the world. The beach is very cold and there is a shadow coming across the sun. See what you came to see, then go.

4. Scoring

Seven core quests	135 points — all required to finish
The Furthest Shore	10 points — optional; stay long enough to watch the eclipse
Proof	5 points — optional; something in your pocket when you get home
Total	150 points, thirteen achievements, twenty rooms

A lean win takes 52 moves. A full 150/150 run with every achievement takes about 73.

5. Hints

HINT reads your current situation and offers a three-stage ladder — a nudge, then a direction, then the exact command. Ask again to go a stage deeper. Nineteen ladders cover every gate in the game, and using them costs you nothing but a line in STATS.

6. Saving

SAVE and RESTORE take an optional name (SAVE before the wells). The SAVE MANAGER button lists everything stored on this device with its room, score and move count. Saves live in browser local storage under tronsoft_time_machine_saves and are not shared between devices. TRANSCRIPT exports the whole session as a text file.

7. Accessibility

The ACCESSIBILITY button offers six presets — standard, low vision, blind / screen reader, hard of hearing, motor assistance, cognitive support — plus individual toggles for narration, captions, visual sound indicators, high contrast, larger controls, reduced typing, simplified layout, reduced motion and contextual hints, and a text-size slider. Preferences persist on the device and can be customised after choosing a preset.

Audio is entirely optional and entirely procedural — the package contains no sound files. Nothing in the game is communicated by sound alone.

8. Notes for developers

This package is a worked example of extending TIFE Core without forking it. js/core/, js/game.js and css/game.css are byte-identical to the TIFE Core 2.2.0 reference package. Everything the story needs is added at load time from js/interface.js, which patches the core prototypes before js/game.js constructs the engine:

Seven extra rule conditions — notRoom, hasItems, anyFlag, flagAtLeast, flagAtMost, notQuestComplete, eraIs.
Eight extra rule actions — teleport, lockExit, unlock, moveNPC, followNPC, adjust, era, markEra.
Custom verbs dispatched as verb.<type> rule triggers, so a story can add vocabulary without touching the parser.
Print ordering: the room description and the action's own text are written before rule narration, instead of after it.
Presence checks on USE, SEARCH and READ, which the core omits.
A fix for the Core RESTART crash — reset() nulls lastAction, and dispatch() then dereferences it.
The Package Specification §23 save key.

js/map.js and js/sound.js load after the adapter and wrap the running engine's render and print hooks. validate.js in the package root runs the whole verification suite under Node with no dependencies.