Official News - page 8

THE ACCIDENTAL SPLIT

by Hazed

If you're not careful when you type a Fed2 command, you can make a typo and end up telling the game to do something it doesn't understand. If you're really unlucky, your typo will transmute one command into another, so that you end up doing something quite different from what you intended. An example from the very early days of Compunet Fed: a player wanted to type 'SELL GAS CHIPS' to offload a bay to the Trading Exchange but accidentally typed 'SELL GAS SHIPS' - which the game immediately acted upon, and sold his spaceship!

Sometimes, this miscommunication of commands isn't caused by a typo but simply by trying stuff out to see what will happen, as an unfortunate CEO discovered recently. He was exploring the graveyard on the asteroid of the same name, and he came across an item that he thought he should be able to do something with: a pile of wood. He examined the wood, and got a response, so he wondered what else he could do with it, and thought about the kinds of thing you might logically be able to do with wood. He tried 'PULL WOOD', but that didn't work. Neither did 'DRAG WOOD'. 'CUT WOOD' had no effect, so then he tried 'SPLIT WOOD'... and the game promptly split his shares!

Whoops!

No real harm was done, because splitting shares is by no means a calamity, but it does highlight the care you need to take when experimenting and trying to figure out what to do in a location.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page