2400 A. D. Walkthrough version 1.0.2 Copyright 1999-2000 by Andrew Schultz schultza@earthlink.net ****** AD SPACE ****** My 2400 A. D. page is at: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/2400/main.htm My games page is at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762/games/games.htm My main page is at http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762 2400 A.D. is copyright Chuck Bueche "Chuckles," Origin Systems, 1987. This walkthrough copyright 1999-2000 by Andrew Schultz may not be redistributed for profit in any way without my prior consent. I look over old Apple games for fun and don't really think there should be direct profit in it for someone who cuts-and-pastes without my permission. Especially since there wasn't much real _WORK_. This was fun to write and, I hope, fun to read too. Any mistakes, corrections, etc., even of blatant typos(I don't often have time to proofread), can be mailed to me at schultza@earthlink.net. ********BEGIN WALKTHROUGH******** The year is 2400 A. D. and the Tzorg Empire has enslaved the city of Metropolis for a while, using robots to keep the peace, in its quest for galactic domination. But wait! There's hope! You, with the help of the Underground, a covert resistance movement who never get organized enough themselves to put information together and stop the oppression, can overthrow the Tzorgs. I have asterisked out quests where you just need to find information. They are not strictly necessary, but they are neat puzzles. Also alternative solutions are labeled with "+." They may require knowledge found elsewhere in the game. First, start with intelligence=agility=endurance=30, and affinity=9. If you really need to improve affinity just talk to someone, cut off the conversation, and talk again. That's one-half of an affinity point--and if people ignore you, shopkeepers won't, and you can build affinity that way. However, with this walkthrough you will have the info you need to complete the game, so why bother with the people you're trying to save? For endurance, run or climb stairs--which lowers it short-term but raises the maximum long-term by a quarter of how far it is lowered. Agility comes from fixing or using weapons, and intelligence comes from fixing or using items. You can pretty much futz with a teleporter or a gridread or a scanner and get intelligence to 99. NEVER, NEVER use a booster pill. They're not worth it. Boost labs are too hard to get to if you want an efficient walkthrough, although they are a neat puzzle. Look for Fritz in the underground if you really want to know. [Insert cranky comment about how technology makes us lazy and fat and doesn't improve our endurance ONE POINT here] The first thing to do is to go to Joe's Bar. It's a building north and two to the east of where you start the game. Spider is in back, behind the bar. He's lying down. Now, he'll ask you to go to Johnnie's Corner to see Reggie, who willyou a password. You'll want to run east(Johnnie's is in the south of the east end) to avoid the Checker and a potential Social Demerit. It isn't necessary to get the password, but if you don't, you'll need to get a loan off Brehm's Bank at loan-shark rates or suffer through a lot of losing battles with a hand blaster. Even Brehm tells you the way you should be making money is by killing robots. Searching for and finding energy cells and selling them at 5 credits is another, but it's a little more tedious. However, if you're out of credits and guns, this is viable. It is less honest but more effective, once you have given Spider the password, to drop all your items and talk to him. Then drop the hand blaster you've received and talk to him. Some racket, huh? Having several hand blasters isn't useful, but selling them all and coming back again is. And if you're ever out of ammo, just reload, get killed, err, "knocked unconscious," and pick up your gun again in the southeast corner of the rehabilitation center(along the south wall is where contraband is hidden) maybe stopping to see Spider along the way. A quick way to find Tim, who buys stuff, is to use location 24 in the transporters. One other thing worth noting about picking up credits is that if you kill a robot and go to the correctional center, you can go back in a reasonable amount of time and search for its credits if you hadn't before. **At Johnnie's Corner: It's in the east sector. Run all the way east(to avoid the checker robot and social demerits) and Johnnie's corner is to the south of the end of the walkway. Johnnie's at the bar. He'll tell you Reggie's upstairs if you ask about REGGIE. Go upstairs and ask Reggie the PASSWORD. By the way, the stairs up/down are a great way to improve your endurance. Most of the places have tubes, which are strangely a bit slower for you--you have to wait for that noise to play. ++An alternative way to get there is to enter the transporter just outside of the check-in center and type "LETSGO" and then "01" which sends you to the transporter just outside Johnnie's Corner. Back chez Spider you'll get Plastiform(healing) and a hand blaster and a passcard FA74, which opens the door in the Novue Apartments, behind which you can get to the underground. Don't worry about getting energy, or that you can't load from an energy node without attracting attention. In the underground there is a place with unlimited energy cells. There's also another place in the Megatech warehouse that has lots of energy cells. Rudy tells you about them. The first thing you'll want to concentrate on is buying armor, perhaps a light shield. It is 500 credits and can be found in the underground. I'd advise picking off robots guarding the borders first. To sneak behind them, either run on the walkways or use the transporters(type LETSGO and then at the second prompt type 01, 02, 03, 04 to send you to the restricted zones, and 00 sends you to outside the Public Tracking Office! Read at any transporter to see its number.) The checker will follow you, and you will probably want to sucker him into a corner. Then attack him. A recurring strategy for fighting robots is to arrange things so you take on one at a time instead of several. Alleys are your friends, especially since robots can't shoot diagonally in them. By the way, if you get "killed," just search for the loose panel in the west of your cell. Climb down to the first level underground, then go west and climb back up. You'll be in administration(the west side!) Then go back to the correctional center. That's the first building after you leave the western zone, on your north. Your items are in a box in the southeast corner of the first level. Items are put there whenever you go to jail, so this happens if you Z(urrender) too! It's convenient and makes the game easier, but you can't help wondering that security's a little lax. (Also, confiscated items go here!) After you get the light shield you can attack robots with a little more abandon. I'd wait until you have 1000 credits to buy stuff from Wes(i.e. a Laser Cutter). In fact, you might want to buy a lot from Wes and sell it back to Tim so that he will give(that's right, give!) you the plasma rifle. Of course, the rifle will be broken, but we'll get to that later. Your next priority should be the blueprints. If you've been "working out" your energy by climbing stairs at Jonnie's Corner(or other stairs) it will be pretty high by now. Once it's over 50, you can break into the orange handled "heavy" door in Megatech. A high-powered weapon may work too--plasma rifles do but I'm not sure about lesser ones. Behind it is the blueprint room--there are some strange blueprints you should give to Les. Ask him to BUILD the blueprints, and he will charge the modest fee of 3500. It's worth it. The field disperser is great armor(you can ignore attacks from level 1 and 2 robots!) and will get you through force fields if you keep it charged. It won't break, either! With the field disperser the robots can't bug you any more above ground, unless you poke around in the upper levels of the correctional facility. After picking up the disperser, you should concentrate on getting the very best weapons with your credits, unless you feel like buying/selling to get the plasma rifles as mentioned above. You might want to pick up a jetpack. There's not that much else to buy, anyhow. But what about puzzles? Stop off in the south subway to find the transporter guidance device. Make sure you don't get hit by a train! It's worse than getting killed normally because you may lose money. There are some tough level 4 robots there so you may be best off to wait until they lose their "charge." This is a surprisingly effective strategy at any point when robots are behind energy fields. Robots have to recharge a lot, and they die out. Just walk past them then. Behind them in the second room, you find the TGD. Don in the hospital gives you the transporter combination, 18-09-12-15. I'll tell you what this means later. For the plasma rifle, you'll need to trade an energy regulator(700 at Larry's) for a microstat at Gilbert's and also find the multiplier tube Gilbert put in the trash out back. Fixing it costs 550. To raise the money, just waste a bunch of border guards if you don't have any better plans. Probably the ones to the west should be avoided, as level two robots may come from the correctional center on the alert. **Off to the west there's another part of the underground. For a superquick walkthrough you don't need to do this, just copy the deactivization codes, but the puzzles are rather fun, and I recommend trying them before "copping out." There are access terminals that give deactivization codes so you can win the game. Asking around at administration tells you they're behind Marion's office. It's one of those doors you need 50 endurance to break down, but don't worry. There are no robots in this part of the underground, so you'll get your endurance back with no trouble. Once you follow the hall and go downstairs, you'll have to climb over some pipes to get down to the second level. Again climb over some pipes to get to the first access terminal. As Jimmy told you in the west underground, "ACCTRM"(level minus 2) gives "ACCTRM0" as access code. Type CODES to avoid the humorous error messages, giving you the first deactivization code, CHLOBU. The tube to the second level reveals a bunch of conveyor belts. If you don't feel like mapping them out, here's the shortcut. Take the one to the east and follow it until it turns south. When you branch to the south and west, go west and then take the next turn to the north. Beyond the belt is an access terminal. Type ACCTRM1 and then CODES to get the second code, PERABR. For the third terminal go south and then east. You will find transporter 05(read when you're around the transporter!) A wild guess, or "seeing" the transporters beneath the garbage dump on the north side, might make you try LETSGO and 06. Voila! Level 4. Now there are a bunch of bins you need to push around. Basically, you can only push a bin onto an empty space. You'll want to get to a 2x2 room over on the west side, and on top of it, if you go over there, the disk may re-load and re-shuffle the bins to their original position, leaving you trapped. Don't worry about being trapped--you can push your way back out or even Z(urrender) if you must. Saving the game before pushing anything is probably the best precaution. The pattern to get to the third terminal is below("go W" means go all the way west): 2W, 3S of terminal 6. Push W 2x. Go N, Go W, Go S. Push W 5x. N. Push E 2x. N. W. Go 2S, W. Push W. S. E. Push E. S. W. S. W. Push N. Open door to W, go W twice. Talk W, "ACCTRM2" and "CODES" gives you EDDONE, the third and final code. Getting to the Tzorg complex is tricky--go to the waste dump in the north, but because there are a lot of guards, you might want to make sure you have two weapons loaded before you enter. Enter the dump from the north and go to the east. There is a maze, not too tricky once you realize which garbage you can walk through, but you will swing around east, south and west to the southwest corner where you'll find stairs down. Here's where you hit the "funny" transporters. If you don't have the Transporter Guidance Device, you won't be able to complete this part. Basically, you want to enter transporter 7. Teleport to transporter 18(type "LETSGO" and "18") and then 09, then 12, then 15, like Don told you in the hospital. Go east and take the stairs down. Then you'll encounter four teleporters. Doesn't matter which one you enter. They're teleporters 19-22. The one on the other side is, logically, 23. "LETSGO" and "23" gets you there. From there, don't enter any side rooms but go south. Then off to the west is a heavy-duty door. There are robots behind there but let the robots plug up the doorways, so you'll only have to take on one at a time. After opening three "heavy" doors there is a north-south hallway. Skip by the hallway, and don't go out until your endurance is high enough to take a few hits before you make it through. Most of the guard robots are stationary but they're not guarding anything. Just keep going west through the doors. There's only one way to go after that. You'll find yourself in a narrow hallway going north. Don't exit it--just fight the robots one at a time. There's also a possibility they'll need to recharge--in that case, to the east of the passage's end and the south is a place to recharge. If you keep going east, behind a heavy door you will find some much less difficult robots. Get rid of them, and then look for bookcases along the north wall. Behind one of them is a flight of stairs. Each time you go up, there'll be more stairs close by. Always take them. At one point you'll have a choice between a conveyor belt and the stairs. Take the stairs. The conveyor belt is a convoluted one-way ticket back to Metropolis, away from the secret entrance. Climb up the stairs again and note a heavy door to the right. If you enter the Authority Complex directly you can break that door open but couldn't climb over the garbage to get to where you are now. Go north through the force fields and save the game--just to be sure, as typos will send you to the correctional center--before you type in CHLOBU, PERABR and EDDONE to shut down the robots. You win. Enjoy the (primitive Apple IIe) fireworks! ++-there is an alternate solution as well. If you go through the front door of the Tzorg Authority comlpex and get to the conveyor belt, you can cross it with a jetpack, but you need to get the timing right so you don't hit any walls. Which means that the whole Transporter Guidance Device puzzle is technically unneccessary. Still it's fun to try this both ways. *********END WALKTHROUGH********* Credits: Thanks to an unknown author of the FAQ at http://games.msk.ru:8102/abc/0.htm, which showed me an alternate solution. Thanks to everyone who made me believe I *could* write a walkthrough and write the homepage. Thanks to kahei (www.kahei.com) for the hex editor that deciphered dialogs for me. And thanks to Chuck Bueche and Origin for making a fun, original game. Thanks to Al Amaloo at vgstrategies.about.com for providing an "Expert Site" link to my page above. Which gave me a certain amount of confidence. Change log: 11/7/99 re-solved 2400 on my Apple IIe emulator. Wrote up a very rough draft. 11/8/99 Touched up rough draft and submitted version 1.0.0 to gamefaqs.com 2/25/99 More minor cosmetic changes(1.0.1). Added alternate solution and homepage. 10/4/00 Yet more touch-ups(1.0.2)