Comment by quuxplusone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quuxplusone | Hacker News Reader

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Can someone fill in the missing link in my understanding here? It seems like the post never gets around to explaining why waiting for 14272 years should make the river passable. (Nor why this river in particular, as opposed to any other obstacle.)

The post alludes to a quirk that causes people not to get sicker while waiting; but it says they still get hungry, right? So you can't wait 14272 years there for any purpose unless you have 14272 years' worth of food, right?

IIUC, the blogger goes on to patch the game so that you don't get hungry either. But if patching the game is fair play, then what's the point of mentioning the original no-worsening-sickness quirk?

It kinda feels like asking "Can you win Oregon Trail by having Gandalf's eagles fly you to Willamette?" and then patching the game so the answer is "yes." Like, what's the reason I should care about that particular initial question? care so badly that I'd accept cheating as an interesting answer?

Hi, I'm the guy who discovered the quirk in the first place. You can survive pretty much indefinitely at the river, with or without food. You could cross the river at any point. I just thought it would be a laugh to see if you could get to a five-digit year. Then, upon resumption of the journey, the party very rapidly deteriorates and you can only survive about 5 or 6 days before they're all dead, even if you gather food immediately and wait to restore health. So the unmodded achievement was "I lived for 15,000 years in The Oregon Trail" and then I asked moralrecordings for help in reverse-engineering the game so I could get the satisfaction of a successful arrival.

Just a bit of fun.

edit: And the answer to "Why THAT river?" is simply that it's the last river in the game, and when I was hoping to complete a run without any modding, I thought it might be possible to play normally, get to the final river, wait 15,000 years, and then try to limp my decrepit deathwagon to the finish line before we all expired. This proved impossible, sadly.

Thank you for the context!

I also was a little confused by the goal, but that clears it up.

Could be the terrain and geology. About 15,000 years ago, after the last glacial maximum subsided, the largest flood in history carved out that part of Oregon. Maybe there is a similar timetable where the Columbia is silted up.

From Wikipedia: "The wagons were stopped at The Dalles, Oregon, by the lack of a road around Mount Hood. The wagons had to be disassembled and floated down the treacherous Columbia River and the animals herded over the rough Lolo trail to get by Mt. Hood."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Trail#Great_Migration_o...

How did the wagons avoid sinking / not take on water through the wood plank edges? Constant bailing while on the water?

They caulked the wagon[1] turning it into an impromptu boat, which consisted of removing the wheels and axles and then filling in the seams and cracks between the wooden boards of the wagon with soft materials and an oil like tar.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6ouy10/june_...

>"Oit came all the old clothes we could spare," he wrote later. "Out came the tar buckets, old chisels and broken knives. They stuffed scrap cloth into creaks and crannies in the wagon and tarred over them.

I think you take the wagons apart and put them on a ~boat~ edit: was it a raft? In this context, "Float them down" doesn't refer to the wagons floating by their own bouancy, but rather their position atop the water.

I think you're right, in Oregon Trail they float on a raft.

Incorrect. It refers to the wagons, which were temporarily converted.

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