Setting File Creation and Modification Times In MacOS
(Specifically to defeat the Archivist in Inscryption)
After a few months of obsessively playing Inscryption — and I mean obsessively — I’m both pleased and relieved to announce that I’ve finally completed all of its achievements! The game is mind-blowingly crafty, and grim, and it’s a hard lesson in finding the perfect balance between skill and luck. It’s also very, very difficult to write about this game without posting spoilers.
In addition to being a phenomenal tabletop card game crossed with a digital escape room, there are numerous and varied encounters along the way, and one of them is an opponent — the Archivist — that incorporates the actual files on your computer into a card game mechanic.
Like any good geek, my first instinct was to create a new file specifically for this purpose, and to modify its file creation and modification times. This seemed like it should be easy enough, so I used touch and updated its modified time.
touch -mt 197001010000 my-old-file
The Archivist is too sophisticated to be caught out by this. Not good enough.
