Finished last night, or this morning to be honest about it. It was a little after two. I've made coffee and I want to talk about it with people who won't look at me the way my husband does.
Spoilers for everything below, all the way to the pump house. fenwick, if you're reading, close the tab. I mean it kindly.
How I got there, for comparing:
I had all four pear tags written down by the end of the first week. 1, 3, 4, 7. I tried every order I could think of at that door. The order I walked past the trees, the order of the numbers, backwards, the order they appear in Edwin's frost log. Nothing. I asked Marlowe for a hint twice. The first time she told me the code was already in my notebook, which was true and maddening. The second time she said, "Gardeners plant in one order and walk in another." I put the phone down and went to bed and woke up at four knowing it was the planting plan.
The 1931 plan lists the trees by variety, west to east, the way they were put in. Comice, Hardy, Conference, Williams. Match each variety to its tag and you get 4173. I'd been staring at that plan since day two thinking it was there for atmosphere.
Then the door opens and there's his cot and his kettle and the little electric heaters, and the frost log goes on for six weeks after the board voted to let the orchard go. He'd been living in there. I don't know why that surprised me as much as it did. He'd told us. Every entry is the temperature at midnight and at five, and then a line about one of the trees, as if they were patients.
The last part I'll say quickly because I'm sure we all felt it. The gas went off the night of the storm, Ruth Abernathy had it shut at the meter, and he walked out to the old pump house to get the coal boiler going and never walked back. And the trees lived. The trees lived because of him. I sat there at two in the morning and cried about pear trees.
Tell me how you all got there. And whether anyone else thought Ruth was the sister for about a week.
i put 1234 into that keypad so many times the boss started answering before i finished typing
got it when i stopped walking around the greenhouse like a tourist and read the plan like a gardener. so basically the hint. calling him eddie forever, sorry eddie
marguerite_s wrote:whether anyone else thought Ruth was the sister
no i thought she was the cat lady from the second email. there was no cat lady
Mine was less romantic. I put every document with a number in it into a spreadsheet on day three. The tags, the frost log temperatures, the dates in the board minutes, the meter readings. Then I sorted by everything. The planting plan didn't have numbers on it so it never went in, which is the whole trick. Fair puzzle. It got me exactly the way it was built to.
One thing for the record: the frost log skips from the 11th to the 13th. I asked Marlowe if that was a bug before I reported it. She said, "It isn't a bug." That was all she'd say. It's the night he went into town to beg the board again, which you only find out from the minutes. I like that she didn't just tell me.
Drew this as I went. North wall at the top. Tags are where the plan puts them, not where you find them.
Attachment no longer available: glass-orchard-map.jpg
Oh, this is lovely. You've even got the pump house path with the bend in it. I'd have saved myself a week if I'd had this on the second night. Thank you.
map is great. thank you
finished on my 3am break. read the pump house bit in the med room and had to put the phone face down for a minute
We split it. Jo got the door (she was right about the plan for four days before Tomas listened). Tomas got the pump house, from the coal delivery note.
We had a long argument on the couch about Ruth. Tomas thinks she only meant to stop the heaters and didn't know he was out there. Jo thinks she knew exactly where he slept. We asked Marlowe and she said the evidence doesn't settle it, and that she wasn't going to settle it for us either. So we're still arguing. Thanks for the map, it's going on the fridge next to the last one.
Finished. The writing is good, I'll say that without reservations. The frost log is the best thing in it.
The door was unfair. A puzzle where the answer is "read the document you already dismissed as decoration" works once, and only if the game ever hints that documents can be anything else. I got there from the hint, not from the case.
The hint was well judged, I'll grant. It didn't give me the answer, it changed what I was looking at. That's the one thing I'll give the AI this week.
for science: the keypad locks you out for an in-game hour after five wrong codes, so brute forcing 10,000 of them is a no. I asked Marlowe what happens if I just keep going. She said the door would still be there in an hour, and so would she.
I did the plan thing like everybody else
tomas_and_jo wrote:Jo thinks she knew exactly where he slept.
I'm with Jo, I'm afraid. Read Ruth's email to the facilities man again, the one about "the north end." She never uses the word greenhouse anywhere else. But I like that Marlowe wouldn't tell you. It would have been a smaller story if she had.
Did anyone else play the last frost log entry out loud? She reads it. "Midnight, 19 degrees. The Comice is sulking." I've listened to it maybe ten times. The little pause before "sulking." Whoever reads for her knew exactly what that line was.
thank you for the map.
The map is the only reason I finished. I'd have walked past those trees for another month.
Good morning. I am late to this thread but I have finished The Glass Orchard. I took my time with it, as I take my time with most things.
I want to thank quietcartographer for the map. My granddaughter printed it out for me and I kept it on the table beside the computer, and I believe it saved me a good deal of walking back and forth in that greenhouse. I had the tags in my notebook in the order I found them for nearly three weeks. When I saw the plan put them in a different order I said something out loud that I will not repeat here.
I agree with marguerite_s about the trees. I carried the same route for twenty-six years and I know something about looking after a thing nobody thanks you for. Edwin was a good man.
Lou
glad it helped, Lou.