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Lemmings 3 glitches

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kieranmillar:
I've been playing around with Lem3Edit and discovered a number of bugs in Lemmings 3, so thought I'd document them, one post at a time.

Bug: Can dig beyond all level borders.
Severity: Harmless.

All areas beyond the level border can be dug with the shovel. As lemmings going outside the level borders kills them, this is completely useless and sometimes will result in the lemming dying anyway, so has no consequence for the player. Note that trying to dig off of the right side of the level causes the lemming to get stuck in an endless loop of trying and failing to dig. When digging off the bottom of the screen the lemming cannot be reselected once partway off the screen and therefore this cannot be exploited to reach areas by going below the level.

See attached animated gifs for demonstrations.

kieranmillar:
Bug: Lemming becomes unresponsive when trying to drop a tool, but can't.
Severity: Annoying, potential to cause level fail state.

When you ask a lemming to perform an action, it will wait until it is in a suitable position until it performs the action. Many of the actions seem to time out after a short while, but the drop tool action doesn't, leaving a lemming potentially waiting forever to drop the tool and not responding to any more commands in the meantime.

One simple way to set this up is to trap the lemming between two blockers or walls with exactly two grid squares between them, causing the lemming to constantly turn around. If you are able to free the lemming, it will drop the tool at its first opportunity.

See the attached animated gif for a demonstration.

kieranmillar:
Bug: Lemming lands on bottom level border if a walk action is queued.
Severity: Harmless.

If a lemming is given the walker action, but falls off the bottom of the screen before having a change to execute it, the lemming will very briefly safely land or splat on the bottom of the level. However if it lands safely there is not enough time until it falls again to do anything and so this glitch cannot be exploited.

Another easy way to see this is to cancel a shimmier with a walk command while above the bottom of the level, as the lemming will fall with a walk command active.

See attached gif for demonstration of walking on the bottom and splatting on the bottom. Had I taken more care extracting this, I could have gotten this to loop perfectly :p

kieranmillar:
Bug: Digging through steel.
Severity: Exploitable.

Lemmings can dig through steel under some very specific circumstances. The particular combination of circumstances are totally bizarre, but here they are:

* Lemming is digging either up and to the left, or up and to the right.
* The very first dig cannot go through steel as you are not allowed to choose to dig in that direction in this case, only subsequent digs will work.
* Just before the lemming takes a swipe, the terrain both one AND two bricks directly above his head must be both solid and diggable. This is particularly odd because the second brick above his head does not get destroyed during the dig.
When these conditions are met, the lemming will dig through steel as though it were regular ground.

This is exploitable by setting up these conditions using bricks. You can dig through a one-width steel wall by building a tower of 7 bricks directly upwards in front of the steel wall.

See attached animated gifs for demonstrations.

kieranmillar:
Bug: Building an impassable staircase. (aka One Way brick bug)
Severity: Annoying, potential to cause level fail state.

Usually when digging or building, the conditions to be allowed to perform the action are such that the lemming has room to move into the spot where it is digging or building. So when building, the lemming must be able to stand on the brick it is going to place. However when building diagonally upwards, the lemming fails to properly check if the ceiling is high enough to step onto the brick, and as such it can create a staircase that cannot be passed in either direction.

This happens when you are right next to the ceiling, and then the ceiling raises. You can build diagonally upwards, but the ceiling is too low to step up or down the resultant brick, although the lemming doing the building manages it during construction. Unfortunately, this can result in the player not realising the staircase is impassable until much later in the level. To avoid this, build outwards one more brick before trying to build upwards.

See attached animated gif for a demonstration.

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