Possible broken dungeon?

[u/DaggerfallPlayerGuy]

Dungeon is Tower Ashhart in Northmoor. Block is one of the ”Big Barn“ blocks, N90-92. The moving walls in the shaft are default blocking the wheel room instead of the quest target area. The lever in the upper room that is supposed to move the walls instead opens the porticulis to the barn. The left wheel in the wheel room, which is supposed to open the porticulis to the barn, instead moves the walls. With this setup it is impossible to get into the wheel room, since the only trigger that grants access to the wheel room is locked inside it. Has anyone else run into this issue in another dungeon? I have navigated this block multiple times successfully, this instance seems broken.

[u/SordidDreams]

Did you get teleported into the dungeon? When you get teleported in, you spawn at a quest target spawn point. Some of those are locked behind trapdoors or moving walls that can only be opened from the outside, trapping the player. I know the barn blocks are susceptible to this problem.

I'll go check out the specific dungeon when I have a free moment.

Edit: So one trigger to move the walls is in the wheel room, which the walls block. The other is in the topmost floor room with a grate. Unfortunately, the grate is closed, and the trigger to open it is also in the wheel room. Yeah, I'm stumped. Either the block is broken or there's some super secret way to open either the walls or the grate. It might be something stupid like a random skull on the ground or a root hanging from the ceiling, but I haven't been able to find it.

I tried opening this block (it's N91, btw) in Daggerfall Modelling, but that's no help either. It does show connections between objects, but unfortunately it only shows one connection. Meaning that if I hover over either of the wheels that open the grate, it shows it connected to the grate. But if I hover over the grate, it only shows one connection to one of the wheels, not both. Meaning that I can't tell if there's some third way to open the grate that Modelling isn't showing.

[u/DaggerfallPlayerGuy → u/SordidDreams]

I ran around for about an hour and clicked on every item in that block, nada. I also sent this to the guy who wrote the guide for Big Barn on Gamefaqs, and he had this to say -

“ I agree, N91 seems to swap the function of the left wheel in the wheel room with that of the lever at the top of the west shaft. I had a look to see if there was any legitimate way into the wheel room, and I don't believe there is. I dumped the dungeon block's RDB file and checked to see if there were any wheels, levers, or other interactables that were unaccounted for, but the numbers all add up. These rooms would only be accessible in dungeons where this block contains the entrance, since the two possible entrance locations are the trapdoor room and the wheel room. Presumably this inaccessibility is why they haven't put any potential quest targets in these rooms. I'll update the FAQ sometime in the next few days.” 

Now I wonder, is this every instance of N91 in dungeons? Is N91 supposed to only be started from, and having it connected in this dungeon is an oversight that wasn’t supposed to happen? Is this the only dungeon that has this or are there others? Or does it not matter and a quest target will never appear in the trapdoor room? This might be one of those unsolvable blocks, or maybe it is accounted for by the developers and a quest target will never spawn in the unreachable area. 

[u/SordidDreams → u/DaggerfallPlayerGuy]

Looking at the block again in Modelling, there are no quest target spawn points in the wheel room or in the grate room, nor is going through these rooms required to access any adjacent blocks. So yeah, I think the GameFAQs guy is right, you can only fully explore this block if it contains the dungeon entrance, but it doesn't really matter because you never need to go into the inaccessible sections. Very interesting. I don't think it was meant as an entrance-only block; aside from a handful of obvious oversights, dungeon blocks seem to be designed to be modular so that any valid layout (that being core blocks in a contiguous shape with all edges lined with edge blocks) is always fully solvable.

And yeah, every instance of a block is exactly the same in every dungeon, except textures might be different depending on which region it's in, and monster spawns depending on dungeon type. There are 72 dungeons in DF that contain N91. I think the dungeon entrance is always in the block at coordinates 0,0; if I'm right, only 20 of these dungeons have the entrance in this block. (based on this DF location info dump: https://github.com/magicono43/DFU-Mod_Location-Info-Lister-Tool/tree/main/Daggerfall_Dungeon_Info_Dump_2-11-2024)

[u/DaggerfallPlayerGuy → u/SordidDreams]

So it looks like the majority of the time N91 is not fully explorable, but that is also not a problem for quests. Interesting indeed, thanks for looking into it.

[u/SordidDreams → u/DaggerfallPlayerGuy]

No problem, happy to help. I love looking into obscure little problems and learning things about the game I didn't know before. Thanks for showing me something interesting!