[Lemmings 3] Quest From Kieran 3

[kieranmillar]

Welcome to my level pack, Quest From Kieran 3! It's a pack for Lemmings 3 aka The All New World of Lemmings aka The Lemmings Chronicles.

Lemmings 3 is the black sheep of the original trilogy, and for good reason. The gameplay is very different and the responsiveness of the controls are terrible. But hiding underneath the bad level design of the original game is a puzzle engine with a lot of potential. I hope to unlock that potential in this pack.

In this pack the aim is to save everybody and restore the tribe back to the 60 lemmings they started as in Lemmings 2. Some levels have very easy solutions if you choose to ignore the stragglers. Don't do this! The real puzzle is to save everyone! Remember: 2nd place is just 1st place loser!

This pack is designed for Adults mode, don't play it in Kids mode!

Each tribe starts off easy but gets a lot harder in a hurry. The top-end difficulty of this pack is extremely hard.

It's probably been a very long time since you last played Lemmings 3, or maybe you've never played it at all. There's a number of things you should know:

• The candle on the main menu screen is where you load and save the game. This game does not autosave.
• If you right-click on a lemming, you will highlight it, which makes it easy to select in a crowd. If you right-click anywhere else, you will cycle through highlighting all lemmings that have tools. Highlighting is vital to master for this pack.
• Jumpers are ridiculously unresponsive. Click furiously on the lemming so that it works.
• If a blocker is on flat ground, another lemming can jump over him. Use this to separate out a single lemming without having to juggle everyone.
• Each tribe starts with 20 lemmings, and some lemmings exist on the level already as "stragglers", trapped in ridiculous locations. If you save these stragglers, you add them to your total count.
• As long as the number of lemmings you have is 10 or more, only 10 lemmings will drop form the trapdoor at the start of the level, with the rest held in reserve. If a lemming dies, one of these reserve lemmings will drop from the trapdoor. As the aim of this pack is to save everyone, this doesn't really matter.
• You can cancel blockers with walkers. If they are on flat ground, they will carry on walking in the direction they were originally facing. If the ground is not flat, the blocker will balance over the edge, and will always return to a walker facing away from the drop.
• You can cancel shimmiers with the walker skill.
• You do not have to activate floaters and swimmers, they deploy automatically.
• Climbers can be activated very far in advance, as long as the lemming does not drop or do something else the lemming will store the command until he reaches the next wall.
• If you try to build straight down or dig straight up, the lemming will turn around. Often this is easier than trying to assign a walker, but you can only do it if there is at least one valid digging or building direction.
• If you are digging towards a cliff edge and will run out of spades when you reach the end, it might be safer to assign a blocker rather than a walker.
• Sometimes, for whatever reason, a lemming digging diagonally up or down will turn around when he can't dig any more. Usually you will try to turn him around thinking he will walk off the cliff, causing him to turn around again back towards the cliff. Very annoying. Be aware of this, maybe assign a blocker so you can more easily respond.
• The usual Lemmings advice of always having your finger over the P key on your keyboard applies as always. When paused the game will unpause on any click or button press, so you want to be pausing constantly.

An enormous thank you to Carl Reinke aka Mindless, for open sourcing lem3edit, so I could update and improve it, without which this level pack might not have happened.

Meet the Tribes!

Classic

Tool focus: Bricks, Spades



Stuck in their ways for so long, the Classic tribe have been forced to adapt to the new world, but old habits die hard. These guys maintain their expertise at building and digging.

Egyptian

Tool focus: Suckers, Shimmiers



You can't spend years building large tombs and pyramids and not become adapt at scaling large terrain and crossing large gaps.

Shadow

Tool focus: Umbrellas, Swimmers, Bombs, Hadokens



The masters of traveling where you least expect them, the Shadow tribe love nothing more than sneaking behind dangerous areas unnoticed and then dropping loud explosives. Hey, you can't be quiet all the time.

How to use level replays
Lemmings 3 will automatically record your moves, and let you play them back by pressing R. This will play back your previous attempt and you can cancel it and intervene at any time by doing something other than pause or fast-forward. Problem: in Adults mode, solving the level in this way refuses to let you progress, which is really dumb. Good news, attached to this post you will find a save file, which you can use to unlock all levels, therefore being blocked from making progress doesn't matter! When you solve the level, press the Replay Save button on the map screen and the level will get a red R symbol on it, you can use this to keep track of which levels you've 100%ed. Replays can be saved even if you solved them using the replay feature.

To watch a replay you saved, right-click on the level.

How to Install
Either:
1) Backup the contents of the LEVELS folder of your Lemmings 3 data directory (where you extracted the contents of the CD) and then extract the contents of the zip file into there, overwriting the existing files.
2) Duplicate your Lemmings 3 data directory, extract the contents of the zip file into the LEVELS folder, overwriting the existing levels, then point your DosBox instance to mount this new data directory as the D drive.

[kieranmillar]

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Boy I sure am interested in this pack but I really don't want to play Lemmings 3 myself because I don't have it installed / can't be bothered / don't like it because it's a bad game (delete as applicable)"

Then I've still got you covered, because you can watch it instead.

Here's a playlist with all of the official solutions. They are scheduled to release once per day, so you can subscribe until all the videos all released and then you can unsubscribe again because odds are good that other videos I make won't interest you.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjmQA_pi2AYSNU4I7PZ4kV4auw0ySgsHt

[Simon]

Merry Christmas!

I've played about 30 % of the maps when Kieran released test versions. The lovely puzzle design in QFK3 blasts everything in vanilla L3 out of the water. Warmly recommended to everybody who can get over the quirks in the L3 engine!

Busy with work <_< and then family dinner later. Have a great holiday season. Happy to have heard from you again!

-- Simon

[Ste Woz Ere]

Finished playing this one last night (took much longer than the others), and like the other packs it certainly delivered what I expected.

Firstly I would say that using this version of DOSBox (with savestates) is mandatory for QFK3 - not only to avoid tearing your hair out over the awful controls, but also because the puzzles can get really complex and you'll want to test and backtrack a bit.  It can occasionally lead you astray onto backroutes that involve silly timing/positioning tricks (see spoiler for examples) but the benefit is far greater.

Spoiler

Classic 30: Used the 2nd hadouken to hit the bird just as he was swooping down to the swimmer, and got the underground straggler out by digging/bombing/building from the other side.
Egyptian 30: Set up a reversible jumproute across to the stragglers with a precision bomb/brick trick, and used 3 lemmings to get all the climber skills down by the exit (via turning, jumping, shimmying and bomb-carrying) in order to get the missing bricks to make the straggler route safe. (the pack fell from the right, not the left)
Shadow 30: Didn't require any silly timing tricks, but I built all the way across from the timer/climber ledge to the stragglers and all the way back across the water to get them out.

I also recommend turning off the music and playing the Amiga mods in the background instead...they are just superb.

https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=1803.msg44855#msg44855

(note that every track is numbered wrong in the above link - the correct order is shortest to longest in each tribe)

Now, onto the tribes themselves:

Classic: First up it's the newly-transformed Industrial tribe. Manual labour is the appropriate order of the day, and you'll learn all the tricks of the trade as you go through (many of the puzzles that tripped me up involve new techniques, such as getting 2 lemmings up a shaft using 1 set of bricks). Highlights included 14 (longest bridge ever), 22 (tallest bridge ever), 23 (how do I dig up the way?) and 18 (think I backrouted it with a bomb trick). Many of the final levels also, despite not quite reaching the original 28 in terms of sheer size. I also think it's quite ironic that the only tribe without an attractor* ended up navigating two terrain types that are also music types. (jungle and metal)

* yes, I have seen the video...you can't really call it music. Still beats modern pop, though.

Egyptian: Next up are the only tribe that appeared to land in the right place. It's all about plungers*, though the effect on the levels is less pronounced than the previous lot (understandable, really). Still, you'll learn how to scrimp+save every last climb/shimmy just like you did with digs/bricks in the previous tribe. Highlights include 21 (big pyramid), 28 (how on earth do you get him out with no bricks?), and 30. (I really know how to make it harder for myself)

* dunno why they didn't figure out how to climb and shimmy with the same plunger...would've made for some really interesting puzzles.

Shadow: We finish with the tribe that swapped the Far East (via Europe) for the Far West.  Supposedly they specialise in blowing up monsters, but in reality you'll end up doing all kinds of fancy tricks before bumping them off in a different way (right from the customary no-skill level 01). They do use their other specs in plentiful ways though (esp. bombs...you'll pick a few tricks up here), and I really like how the buildings were woven into the levels...like the corresponding QFK2, they do look like part of a town/city. Highlights include 19 (almost symmetrical but so different), 20 (how do I get down town?), 23/28 (monstrous), 26 (epic), and ofc 30. (how many timers?)

Overall it was a blast...the game throws up some really good puzzles despite the vast changes from the format. And QFK3 takes that to new heights, with some wonderful puzzles that get just as clever and complex as in QFK1+2. I did get the occasional weird bug* but like the other problems, those are all within the game engine - it's definitely worth checking out if you can get past that.

* a specific lemming would suddenly go splat from any height...only way to fix was to "rewind" and assign different skills etc. or restart altogether.

[kieranmillar]

Thank you so much for playing this and giving your feedback. As Lemmings 3 is so unpopular, I genuinely thought nobody would ever play this beyond a small amount of playtesting from Simon. Most of the levels were not playtested by anybody else at all because there was nobody to get comments from. I suspected a lot of the levels might be completely broken, in a terrible difficulty order, and maybe not at all fun to play, but had no idea. Level 30 of each tribe in particular were intentionally designed as the hardest and most epic thing that I could, and I wasn't sure if anybody would beat them, I guess it's probably for the best they all got backrouted, hah.

Of course, given only one other person had ever made levels from Lemmings 3 before, most of what I was doing here was completely new ground. Who knows what makes a good Lemmings 3 level. I hoped at the least, if anybody did care about Lemmings 3, this was serve as a good experimental ground to try things that may or may not work, and maybe one day lead to somebody making a more refined pack in the future, taking the ideas that worked and avoiding the ones that didn't. Or maybe nobody cares and I basically exhausted every meaningful idea during this pack.

Something I realise I should have mentioned in the original post, there is a thread talking about every bug we've discovered in Lemmings 3, which might have made sense to point people towards. You can find it here: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=3661.0 This thread is important, because of the splat from any height bug that you found (bottom post of the first page of that thread). This bug is easy to trigger with certain uses of the swimmer tool, and it sounds like it would have helped a lot if you understood why this was happening.

Again, thank you so much for playing this entire pack. That meant dealing with playing Lemmings 3 in its engine, which I don't know if I could wish on anyone. It means so much to me that somebody actually played this all the way through. So much effort went into this to make a mod that had a real chance of nobody playing it, but the effort is not wasted, turns out coding a level editor in C++ is an "easy" way to get hired for a programming career.