I have opened the drain and the reservoir is half full. The button only says “click.” I noticed that the tide goes in and out, I assume in real time, but opening/closing the drain and pushing the button at high tide doesn’t accomplish anything new it seems, nor at low tide. Nothing else seems to open up any action (besides going back and forth among the three locations and using the linking book)–sand, floats, boat, seaweed, sea all just lead to each other in some combination.
When the drain is open, the reservoir will fill up as the tide comes in.
Something that’s even easier to miss:
UPDATE: “A mechanism activates when water flows out of the reservoir.” That’s what I said before, but it’s not true! A mechanism activates when there’s more pressure on the reservoir side of the drain than on the ocean side.
The solution:
UPDATE: Open the drain and let the tide come in, then close the drain. Let the tide go out (a little bit?), then hit the button. The pressure differential will BRIEFLY activate a path to another location. When I did it I only had like seven seconds before the path disappeared again, so watch out!
Ah! Well, I had not missed number one, but I had missed number two, because I had never succeeded in making that happen. However…
I just closed the drain, let the tide go out a bit, and opened the drain again, and I had no apparent newly opened path even when I pushed the button or something. Maybe I have to let it go out all the way or something? Is it apparent in the spiel at the bottom or something?
UPDATE: I was wrong about something! I was wrong about more than one thing!
[spoiler]Like I said before, close the drain while the water is high. When a message appears (in the chatbox zone) about the tide going out, don’t open the drain! That’s when you press the button.
You’ll have to click a couple links in quick succession to get all the way to the boat. If you fail a couple times in the process, well, you’re not alone.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Well, I clicked over to my Seltani page and the description at the bottom said the button was lit up! Then it wouldn’t accept any mouse clicks and after I had to do something for a couple minutes anyway it said that the connection to the server was lost, which is something that happens a lot because I usually close my laptop when leaving it a couple hours.
If the thing doesn’t accept mouse clicks, your connection to the server has hung up in some odd way. (It’s supposed to display an error when it loses the connection, but bad network weather can screw with this.)
Refreshing the page should put you back where you were. If not, the server may have died. But I don’t see any evidence of that in the logs. (People are currently logged on with idle times of two to five days.)
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest there was something buggy there. I think the connection was lost and the browser hadn’t gotten around to displaying the connection lost message yet (it displayed by itself within a minute or so).
Refreshing the page always puts me back in the Seltani homeworld. I just think that the fact that I keep putting my computer to sleep and opening it up again, maybe combined with my usual browser flakiness, is not interacting well with the real-time elements of the puzzle for me.
ETA: And of course, having posted that, I went back to Seltani and was able to solve it right away. Maybe getting back on my home network really was the answer.
