mlahut

I tossed it on my Google Drive. Have fun storming the castle. Let me know if there are permission issues downloading it.

Yes it's empty. So it looks like all the items in Castle Food Depot are gone, on both levels, and ditto with Portal Fort. Castle, Memorial Grounds, and Gnass seem unharmed.

1) Yes the problem does extend to chests. Gnass, as a zone, was not affected by my issue, but Nichol's desk in the Castle Food Depot is empty and I'm positive I wouldn't have removed the scissors or pen/ink from it. 2) I actually haven't finished clearing that area (was near the beginning of it when I made the decision to stop playing that save file). But the wheel connecting the Goblin Mine to Castle Food Depot still functions normally. Playing on Windows 7 using "DX" executable (it's not clear to me how that differs from the non-DX one)

I'm not that far into A6 - doing the Gnass/Dharmon quests - but recently a LOT of floor items have disappeared. Not all of them, but a lot. My stashes in the first town are gone, along with all the "not yours" items. Some areas are missing trash/junk items I remembered seeing there before. I can't enumerate all the places because where stuff has vanished because I only left one stash so far. I'm aware there's a 200 item limit, my stash was no more than 20 or so. Any known issues with the game that could trigger this kind of effect? I'm going to reload from a several-hours-prior save (because I don't know whether future floor-loot items might have been affected) but I wonder whether anyone knows if this vanishing effect could be avoided in the future.

I'm going to slightly disagree with this. The XP they get is NOT split among the rest of the party. (Singleton teams have been shown to get the same XP gain rate as a full party.) However, when your party contains characters of non-identical levels, the lower leveled people will gain more XP because all XP gains are adjusted by the difference between the character's level and the level of the monster/quest/etc that is awarding the XP. So if someone falls behind by 100 XP at level 1 due to being dead, they might only be 10 XP behind by level 20. Relatedly, the gain-XP talents are poor investments, because when your level begins to exceed the rest of the party, your XP gains will be similarly penalized by a small amount.

Suppose I hop into a suspicious corner, of any arbitrary dungeon, low on mana, and find some spellcasting enemy pack that I'm completely unprepared for. A few more enemies get summoned and things are looking bad. Time to leave. After rounding a few corners and making it a fair distance away, "Greater Shade hurries to keep up with you". The hostile summon teleports to my party as if it was my own. I feel like I can't be the only one that's experienced this bug.

Initially I couldn't find the stair down either. I ended up finding it after entering the wolf pen from the goblin area, then climbing back up into the bandit lair.

Can confirm that the scripted list above is not complete; I observed some of Kriszan's walls changed from normal to barrier sometime around day 10.

I had a similar problem, except my singleton's damage wasn't high enough, so I attempted to flee after clearing the path to Elhioc. Gate was closed. I ended up using the escape code (shift-D, backtostart) to get out of the castle. I did notice that on re-entering the castle, you get re-captured, but both doors are open. Sounds like a legitimate bug, though I'm not sure what circumstances are required to produce it.

Correction/details on Libras/Squiggas courier items: Fine Clothes (buy $64, sell $75)- after the 41st delivery, no further items will be accepted. However, the delivery containing the 41st item can be arbitrarily large and everything from your non-junk inventory will be accepted (up to 140 items). Fine Herbs (buy $84, sell $100) - same concept but the threshold delivery is 91 Max profit is ((75-64)*(40+140) + (100-84)*(90+140)) = 5660 coins But you'll need 8340 coins on hand in order to begin the process; using the 40 clothes, 140 clothes, and 90 herb transactions to work your way up to 11760, which lets you stock up on 140 herbs in the last phase, which will then cash out for 14000. I'm playing on Hard, in case the delivery thresholds change by game difficulty.

The minimap colors for "explored but empty" and "unexplored" are essentially the same shade of white. This is very frustrating to me, and it makes it very tricky to figure out whether I've completely explored an outdoor region. Is there anything I can do to change the colors and make them not identical?

If ugly portraits are a concern, that's easy to fix. Go to Avernum 6 Files\Graphics Core\G2xx.png where xx is a number between 20 and 44. Browse through to find the image you don't like, copy a different portrait overtop of the offending image, restart game, problem solved. (Presumably you don't also need the character animations replaced; that is a slightly more complicated project.)

So I'm clearing out the Monastery of Madness, and in the treasure room I find a Wand of Absorption. The description tooltip reads "Changes Experience When Used". Except, it doesn't. When I zap the thing, my "mind feels a sudden burst of clarity". My XP doesn't increase or decrease. Clarity is a word sometimes used to describe curing dumbfounding, but if I use the editor to feed myself an energy pulse crystal, the wand doesn't cure it. Does anyone know what this item is supposed to do?

You CAN make an arcane lore mule, it just goes against my personal ethics of playing a singleton. I just force myself to wait until my singleton can afford the extra points in intelligence or lore.

Drakefyre: Creating arcane lore mules doesn't let you access books that were otherwise unavailable to a singleton. You CAN always add more int and arcane lore to a high level character, it just takes effort. As for vahnatai lore, you've got a point. Dikiyoba: Some special skills are *quite* expensive. Also, in each of the avernum games, at some point, money can be spent on obtaining more skill points (sometimes a lot of money).

I'm running a singleton through A2 as well. In my book, it's okay to spontaneously make a party with three other L1 ten-strength PCs to clean up the chain mail at the Empire outposts after they're empty, but it's not okay to make three other L1 PCs that dump all their points in arcane lore so that I can read more spells.

While I eagerly wait for the Windows port to be completed, I thought I'd try brushing up on my German. This is the review posted yesterday in the "news" page. Disclaimer: I am not actually German, I've just studied the language about 5 years. Some mistakes may still be present. ------------------------- Among RPG fans and Shareware experts, the American company "Spiderweb Software" has enjoyed a good reputation. No wonder, since they have been supplying their fans with meaty new games, on and off since the days of Mac OS 8. After a somewhat lengthy break, they have released the fourth part of the Avernum series. A story of epic proportions There's plenty to do with your band of heroes, as you take either a standard group of 4 or a carefully tweaked custom party into an adventure starting at Fort Monastery. As the story slowly develops, each moment is packed with excitement about what happens next. The excitement doesn't let up until peace returns to the land, after an estimated 60-80 hours of gameplay. The duration of the game can vary drastically depending on playstyle and the number of side quests you complete. Practically every settlement, in addition to having its own purpose, also contains a so-called Job board, where one can obtain some diverse and more-or-less well compensated tasks. In this way, you can improve your reputation as well as acquiring some silver, which can be exchanged for better equipment, in grand RPG tradition. At character creation, there are many choices of character types such as mages, priests, warriors, berserkers, rogues, etc, and also three different races to pick from. You'll want to choose carefully, since only a balanced team will have a realistic chance of surviving the adventure. Hard, but fair When that first hour isn't going as well as you would have liked, the game conveniently provides an option to change the difficulty setting. Fortunately, reviving one member of your party is no problem at all, but it can be annoying when your whole party gets destroyed in an ambush. In that case, only frequent save-and-reload will help you, which is easy to do at any point from the game menu. During the game, the party members do not have individual personalities [in terms of interacting with the plot]. Some gamers may not enjoy this, but I thought it was not a problem; it allowed me to quickly identify with my virtual ego. To further develop your party, you'll get lots of treasure along the way, and with each level you'll get a few skill points to spend on one of several disciplines. In addition to magical and weaponry skills, there are other skills like Tool Use and First Aid to learn, so that you can cross any hurdle in case of emergency. A breath of days past Technically, Avernum 4 is unfortunately very dated. Or in other words, pure nostalgia! Depends on your perspective. The fact is, your party doesn't have much of a walking animation, and the combat animations are pretty spartan. The isometric 3-D landscapes are lovely and have many tiny details, but in the long run they get pretty boring. Life in the underworld isn't particularly colorful, and few things are more complex than a simple image alternation. The same is true about the sound; it's on about the same level as the graphics, and after the title screen, it's quiet enough for you to play iTunes. A significant issue with Avernum 4 is the language, which can't be changed from English. For those whose mastery of English isn't as great, there's a constant danger of missing important information in the dialogues. Summary For those who aren't thrown off by the "nostalgic" presentation of Avernum 4, it's an amazingly complex and engrossing adventure. With moderate system requirements, even users of old Mac models should be able to play - and for $25 you can't go wrong. You can decide for yourself with the demo link [at the top of the review page] and take your own first steps into the world of Avernum. Positives: - giant environment - engrossing story - low system requirements Negatives: - very dated graphics - poor sound - only available in English 81%