Treno — the Card Tournament

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

Treno again, and this time it is about cards.

The tournament

Three rounds. Win the first two and you face the champion, who is Cid wearing a disguise and playing nothing but Oglop cards.

Beat him and you get the Rebirth Ring, which teaches Auto-Life.

You do not have to win. Losing the final costs you the ring and nothing else — the story carries on regardless. One guide tells you to reload if you lose, and people have spent hours doing that for no reason.

If you are short of cards, Dr. Tot will give you more, so a thin collection is not a reason to skip it.

Fight the Catoblepas — you only get one chance

The Knight’s House has a monster in it. Beating it pays 15,000 gil.

This is a one-time fight. There is no second attempt, ever, and it is the single most valuable thing in the chapter.

The Knight’s House keeps offering new monsters as the game goes on — there was one here last visit and there will be two more later — and every one of them is one-time. Miss one and it is gone.

The Chimera Armlet

There is a four-armed man in the Bishop’s House. He gives you a Chimera Armlet, but only after you have watched the “City People” ATE.

Watch the ATEs. One of them is an item.

He gave you a Power Belt last time you were here. Same man, same room, different prize.

The Auction House

Dark Matter comes up, and it teaches Odin. It is expensive. So does the Rat Tail, which you want for synthesis later.

While you are here

The shops have restocked — Coral Sword and Brigandine at the weapon shop, a full item shop in the slums, and a synthesis shop as good as Alexandria’s.

And if you missed anything last visit, it is all still here: the Mythril Dagger on the walkway, 2,225 gil at the King’s House, the Yeti Card and a chest with one gil in it down the slums ladder, the Taurus coin behind the item shop stall, and the Gemini coin in the fountain — thrown in ten gil at a time, thirteen times.

Game Notes

The one-gil chest is the best joke in Final Fantasy IX and almost nobody sees the punchline.

Treno is a city where the rich live at the top and everyone else lives in a slum by the water. The nobles hold an auction where a rat’s tail sells for twenty-five thousand gil. Queen Stella will give you thirty thousand for handing her a coin.

And down the ladder, in the slums, behind the item shop, somebody has put a treasure chest with a single gil in it.

It is not a bug and it is not filler. It is a city with a sense of humour about itself, placed exactly where you would only find it by climbing down.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 4 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

We ran the test this time instead of guessing

Three areas ago we established that field id blocks record how the game was built and say nothing reliable about what a player walks through. Treno has two script blocks and two story visits, which looks like a clean match — and that is exactly the assumption that has caught us out three times.

So we diffed them, room by room:

Most of the second block is a copy of the first. The chests, the coins, the gil, the whole Stella ladder — all re-declared, because the town has to work whichever script set is loaded, and the pickups are gated by a flag that says “already taken” rather than by which visit you are on.

So a reader coming to this chapter is not looking at a fresh list. They are looking at last visit’s list plus about five genuinely new things.

This is the first area where we have used the rule before writing rather than being corrected by it, and the diff took one query.

The Bishop’s House is the cleanest thing in the batch

Same room, same four-armed man. Power Belt on the first visit, Chimera Armlet on the second.

Four publishers document the Chimera Armlet on this visit and the Power Belt on the last one, on pages that do not reference each other. Our two script blocks carry exactly that: one item each, same room, different block.

It is a small result and it is the ideal shape — a publisher claim and a data claim that could each have been a mistake, agreeing precisely. Nothing else this batch is that clean.

The Knight’s House is a four-fight ladder and our data holds all of it

The Knight’s House offers one monster at a time across the game:

Every one is one-time. One publisher is explicit: miss a fight and you cannot re-initiate it, ever.

Our Disc 3 script carries 15,000 gil, Running Shoes and a Circlet in three adjacent scripts — three of the four rungs sitting in one room’s code, only one of which is reachable now. The Disc 2 block carries the fourth.

Same shape as the Knights of Pluto ladder at Alexandria: a room’s script holds the whole ladder, and the visit decides which rung fires. Two ladders in two consecutive batches, and neither is legible from the awards table alone. It is now a named pattern rather than a surprise.

Our data settles the Griffin’s card

One publisher’s page reads as though the Griffin’s reward is a Yeti Card; four others say Tonberry Card.

Our Disc 2 Knight’s House script awards a card id that is not the same id as the Yeti Card — because the Yeti Card is the slums chest, sitting in a different room in both blocks, and the two ids differ.

So the Griffin’s reward is not the Yeti Card, the majority is right, and the odd reading is what it looked like: a page that documents both the Griffin fight and the slums chest, with the two collapsing into each other somewhere between the page and the reader.

We cannot say the Griffin’s card is a Tonberry from our data. We can say it is not the Yeti, which is enough to break the tie.

Queen Stella’s ladder, rung by rung

We identified this block back on the Disc 2 Treno page by inference, after mislabelling it an auction pool. The script confirms it completely.

The published ladder runs thirteen rungs, alternating: 1,000 gil, Phoenix Pinion, 2,000, Blood Sword, 5,000, Elixir, 10,000, Black Belt, 20,000, Rosetta Ring, 30,000, Robe of Lords, and the Hammer at thirteen.

The script reproduces that exactly. Each item rung is preceded by a gil award at a fixed spacing — six standalone gil rungs, seven item rungs — and the Hammer alone has no gil rung before it, because rung twelve is the Robe of Lords and rung thirteen is the Hammer with nothing between them.

Thirteen rungs in the code, thirteen in the guides, in the same order.

That is the most complete structural confirmation we have got of anything, and it came from a block we had originally called the wrong thing entirely. Worth remembering the next time an unfamiliar pattern looks obvious.

The Hammer is the one that matters — it is what Steiner’s best armour is synthesised from, and it needs all thirteen coins.

You do not have to win the tournament

Seven publishers agree the Rebirth Ring is the champion’s prize. One tells you to reload if you lose.

Two others say losing does not block anything, one of them a player reporting that he lost the final, kept playing, and nothing was taken from him.

That is a false conflict — the reload advice is for completionists who want the ring, not a statement that the story stops — but it reads as a hard requirement on the page, and there are forum threads of people reloading for hours.

Worth stating plainly because the cost of the misreading is entirely wasted time.

The Namingway Card in round two depends on a branch: which opponent you draw is decided by whether you let Vivi go home before the tournament. Two publishers name one opponent, one names another, and a wiki explains the split. A single publisher also claims an Oglop Card from the champion, uncorroborated.

What the corpus does not cover

No publisher prints HP for the Knight’s House Catoblepas. One FAQ notes these monsters are retuned copies of their field versions, so the bestiary numbers do not transfer — and we are not going to publish the field figure as though it does.

No publisher documents cards at Dr. Tot’s residence. Our data shows a five-card block there, listed twice. The only adjacent claim is one guide saying Dr. Tot hands out cards if you run short for the tournament, which fits and does not confirm.

Card content remains the thinnest part of this corpus by a distance.

A scope warning worth repeating

Several walkthroughs fold a Dali side-trip into their Treno chapter — the windmill chest, a 30,000 gil find, the Mayor’s Key, the Burman Coffee.

None of that is in Treno. It is a separate stop most guides bundle into the same narrative chapter, and a reader working from this page and one of those will otherwise go looking for a windmill in a city that does not have one.

Game Notes

The diff is the thing to keep from this area, not because of what it found but because of when we ran it.

Three times we have shipped or nearly shipped an area with the wrong boundary, and each time the correction arrived from outside — a researcher noticing an item-poor area, a publisher chapter list, a count that did not add up. Each time we wrote the rule down a little more precisely.

This time the rule fired first. Treno has two blocks and two visits, the match looked obvious, and obvious is exactly the condition under which we have been wrong. One query settled it, and it turned out most of the second block is a copy of the first.

A rule that only gets applied after something goes wrong is not a rule. It is a post-mortem. This is the first time it worked as a rule.