Eye of Min: Verb-Hacking

I’ve finished the game; I was nearly at the end. My previous posts are needed for context. From the Microbee Software Preservation Project. I had left off on an apparent combination lock with four symbols, where you had to enter an “input” as a string of numbers. I had tried every permutation 1234, 2341, 4231, etc. with no luck. I decided after enough further struggle that I must be missing an item, so I re-checked every location and item in case some of the ones that were previously red herrings were not (the locked chest at the rope, a shield on a wall, the swamp that kills you, a random broken dagger, etc.) One of those items turned out to be the key, but I wasn’t able to reach a solution by thinking from that direction. What I did next was flip from thinking about nouns to thinking about verbs. This is something that I’ve written about long ago with mainframe Zork, although in that case I was thinking of simply finding which verbs work (which eventually changed into my “common…