In the versions I've played, including the
online one, only the first six letters of a word are examined by the parser. This means you can type "satche" instead of "satchel", for instance. 11 keystrokes are used on words longer than this limit.
EDIT: Nope, this trick doesn't work on this submission's executable. It does mean an earlier release might be faster, depending on luck manipulation.
I'm curious about the time needed to type vs. waiting for lines. Playing along with the TAS, I notice you "get gown" instead of "get all" which spends one character to save several lines of output, so you presumably didn't go strictly for minimum character count. In the pub area, you could sacrifice two keystrokes to skip one wait turn, which might be worth it depending on the time and how luck manipulation works. (You can buy the sandwich instead of "z" before "sip", but you have to type "cheese" instead of "it" at the dog.)
EDIT: If turns are instead faster than typing, you can wait twice to automatically ask Ford about your home. Perhaps these fall under "too many of these situations to test out", but I wonder what routing improvements may be lurking.
I find text adventures to be an interesting optimization problem, even if nobody "watches" this TAS in the traditional sense. (Even in other genres, I often find the descriptions more entertaining than the videos.) Thanks for making and sharing this!
