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Read this before annotating code. What the game is documented to do, with verification status against the binary. Statuses: open (documented, not found yet), traced (in the code, could not be exercised; say what was tried), confirmed (in the code, consistent with the emulator), live (observed directly), differs (the code does something else). "Absent" is not a status.

Sources:

• The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive, "Flowers Of Crystal", read 24 October 2026: 1984, 4Mation Educational Resources, by Mike Matson; educational adventure for one player; works on the Model B, not the Model A; no saved games; no disc image offered, because 4Mation still enforces its copyright. Its screenshot is reference/bbcmicro-co-uk-screenshot.jpg.
• 4Mation, "Retro Flowers of Crystal", read 24 October 2026: "the original 1983 BBC 32K version", converted to run on Windows without a separate emulator, sold on CD-ROM for £15.50 with a PDF of the story book and the teacher's guide; "an adventure on the theme of ecology and conservation" in which the player helps young Jim save the planet Crystal from greedy Mr Grubble.
• The story book, Flowers of Crystal by Mike Matson (4Mation, Barnstaple), a scan at mocagh.org, read 24 October 2026 (16 pages; never copied into this repository). It names Rumala, the four items she hid (a bag of soil, a sack of fertiliser, a bottle of magic spell water, an enchanted gold pot), the Crystal Flower she hid in what became the Danger Area, the Blids, Mr Grubble's bubble gum factory and gum forest, Grubble's Grabbers, Super Jim and The Centre. The teacher's guide was not found online.
• MobyGames' page (mobygames.com) answered with a browser check and was not read.
• The game's own screens and text, all of it read in the programs (work/files/*.lst) and most of it seen live in jsbeeb.

Features

Beyond the documentation

Found in the code, not in the manual.

• The adventure parts move themselves from &1900 to &0E00 with a function key the program defines and presses itself (orientation.md, "The loader").
• STORY is saved one byte short, and stops with Bad program on a Model B with the 8271 DFS (orientation.md).
• Fibber says three of his six instructions are opposites; four are (the first, "You will have to leave my lake", and three of the five that follow).
• The forest has no way out but the gold pot's square or a Zap Gate: the loop's flag, of, is set FALSE and never TRUE.
• Typing River or Danger Area at "Where do you wish to go next?" gets "Permission is not granted" and "It is FORBIDDEN" (AD1 lines 515-520).
• Part 1's "Press key F to finish" prints END and asks again: only S leaves the screen (AD1 line 19037).
• Part 2's six dream parts are kept in F%, L%, O%, W%, E% and R%, which spell FLOWER; each draws one piece of the last Flower's picture through the machine code (AD2 lines 26050-26095).
• The spells survive RUN as two 20-bit numbers, S% (held) and T% (used) (AD2 PROCspst and PROCspre).
• The equipment survives RUN too, in DIM e% 11, which BASIC places at the same address after every RUN; nothing else holds it.
• Declining the spell after the river's fee sets B%, which a fresh start does not clear, so the next game's first surviving flight ends at the castle (live, facts.md).
• The 19th Map or Carry at one place of part 1 is one REPEAT too many: error 44, and a fresh start (live).
• Part 2's descriptions read each word list RND(5) times, so the sixth word of each, the hippopotamus among them, never appears (traced).
• Three hazards say some of the belongings are lost and take all eleven (live for the Fright Freak; traced for the Pouncer and the Grabbers).
• LIST rings the bell, shows the copyright in green and turns the screen off with VDU 21 (live).
• A vanished storm, cave or sky spitter still says You are safe., through the ELSE of the next IF on its line (live).
• A flower spell in the bubble's flight sets Z% to 1, and a vanishing spell later in the flight then moves the bubble instead (traced).
• The disc carries an unused title program, !, and a file with no name that is probably the machine code it fails to find (orientation.md).

Open questions

• Whether 4Mation's own disc had STORY one byte short: no original disc has been compared.
• The teacher's guide is not online; what it says the worksheets are for is not known beyond their titles.
• Why every machine-code routine zeroes &70 and &71 before it prints: nothing in the programs reads either.
• A flower spell in the bubble's flight: the code turns a later vanishing spell into a moving one, and nobody has played it to see the screen.