Elemental Workshop I
Ah, Elemental Workshop, the classic puzzle-only quest series that hasn't gotten an update since 2011. We begin our auspicious journey with a random book in a random shelf in some random house in Seers' Village, and I'm sure the occupant was getting around to giving us permission to root through their things any day now.
The book introduces the razor-thin amount of lore that backs this quest, but I found this particular passage interesting:
This is strange, because you'd think we'd see more evidence of elemental equipment in the wild, if it was this prevalent. I mean, I know that the start of the Fifth Age was a fair time ago, from where we're sitting, but there are still plenty of artefacts of, say, the original Wizard's Tower floating around. It just seems odd to me that the only Elemental equipment we ever see is the stuff we, ourselves, make. But anyway, the location of the workshop is pretty obvious from the layout of Seers' Village: obviously it's in the existing workshop-like structure, and the "suspicious looking wall" is a good guess for the entrance. But where do we find the key?
Cleverly, the book itself tells us: the way inside is "within this leather-bound volume." This was a harder puzzle before the introduction of the toolbelt, when you had to use a knife on the book; now that it's a right-click option it just feels a bit anticlimactic.
Key in hand, I descend into the elemental workshop. This is an interesting quest because the goal at this point, to smith an elemental shield, is unstated but is the natural endpoint of exploring the workshop. I can see the broken workshop around me, and I want to get it working again. But first I search crates, looking for hints about how to proceed, and I find a piece of leather. Okay, that would seem to go with the giant pair of bellows, so I head over and try to repair it. Quick trip to the bank for thread, and I've got a pair of working bellows. They're not doing anything, though, hmm.
Visually, it looks as though the bellows are operated by a device at the end of some pipes. Following the pipes back leads me to the northern room, containing a stationary water wheel, a lever, and two valves with red indicators. Okay, I can figure this one out. Sure enough, soon the water wheel is turning and the bellows are pumping. The pipe from the bellows appears to lead to the furnace in the southern room, so how do I get that started?
Well, I also found a stone bowl in the crates; maybe that would help? Pick up some lava from the nearby trough, pour it into the furnace, and voila! One furnace, ready to go. Now I just need ore. There's one room I haven't used yet, which contains elemental rocks. I need to kill an Earth Elemental once I start mining, but he drops some elemental ore than I can take and use on the furnace.
Quick trip to the coal trucks for some coal, and I have an elemental bar and then an elemental shield. Quest complete!
This was a neat quest; it's basically a pure design challenge, communicating the puzzle requirements with nearly no dialogue and all visual design. It was very well done from that perspective. I know later quests in the series increase the complexity, and I look forward to seeing how they accomplish that. Long way to go before that, though. Next time, we're back to long-running quest series with the continuation of the Morytania storyline!