Public Commander Keen Forum

The secret fuse in The Armageddon Machine's "Korath III Base" isn't breaking when I pogo on it. Is there a certain way I need to do it?

The fuse will not break on Easy difficulty.

Okay. Thanks.

That only applies to the original Keen5 executable. It can be broken on the updated versions of the executable.

Fuses can only be broken if Keen lands on them with the pogo stick and Keen has a high vertical velocity. Since there is almost no headroom above the fuse, it is difficult to gain enough velocity. Playing on easy doesn't just affect the number of enemies in the levels and how many shots you get for every pickup, it also lowers the gravity for Keen. This means Keen can jump higher, but it also means that Keen doesn't fall quite as fast as he would on normal or hard mode. That makes it very difficult to gain enough momentum to break the secret fuse in the Korath III base on easy difficulty.

I'm not sure if there are any differences regarding the fuse breaking code amongst the different versions of Keen 5. It's impossible to play this level on easy difficulty in the initial release (version 1.0) due to a goplat/volteface path error. I've also tried to break the fuse in the Apogee release and the GT release of "version 1.4" and didn't notice a difference when trying to break the secret fuse on easy. And my conclusion is:

Breaking the fuse is possible on easy difficulty, but it definitely requires multiple bounces and a little bit of luck. Lowering the CPU cycles in DOSBox down to 1000 or less seems to increase the odds of breaking the fuse. I think it might be (almost?) impossible to break that fuse on easy if you're playing the game on a "fast" system, but I'm not 100 % sure.

K1n9_Duk3, that is probably one of the most interesting things I've read about Keen's inner workings in a long time. I had no idea the difficulty level affected the gravity in the game (and of course the impact that has on the Korath III fuse). One of those things I've probably seen a hundred times but never really paid attention to.

Had been a long time aware that the Korath III fuse wouldn't (or was at least very difficult to) break on Easy mode, but had no idea that was the reason why.

I just broke the fuse on easy mode! All I did was lower the cycles down to less than 1,000 on DosBox and fast-forwarded while Keen was using the pogo, and the fuse soon went boom!

All this time I thought Keen couldn't break the fuse in easy mode because the game was programmed like that! I did know that Keen's gravity is lower in easy mode, but I didn't know that it's the real reason! K1n9_Duk3, I'm once again impressed by how much you know about Keen's inner workings!