Epic Hero #3, Venus Must Live: object scanned is / sentient

I’ve finished the game, and you’ll need to have read my previous three posts to understand this one. Rendition of Sapas Mons on Venus, a volcano 400 km across and 1.5 km high, using coloration from Venera missions. Via NASA. Last time I was thinking about the bug I had run across with the rod becoming two rods when entering the pool. Despite the glitch here, some further mucking about confirmed the rod is the only item that this happens with, and the special coding indicates that it is meant as a puzzle to get the rod into the cave. (This type of logic I’ve called “structural solving”, although there’s two kinds. One is where there are restrictions based on the structure of the game that force certain things to be true, like an exit closing off meaning a puzzle behind the exit has to be solved first. The other is the “author suggestive” kind where they put work to incorporate some element to the map or plot sequence which doesn’t make sense unless it gets used in a certain way. The…