Laertes

It's an old game, but 'Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura' has a great story and a cool setting. It's set during an industrial revolution in a fantasy world, with magic and technology acting as rival forces. You can download it for 6 bucks on gog.

The best place to drop items is in the Tower of Magi portal room. It's the central hub of all your travels, so it's the easiest place to access. In my games, the portal room always becomes a huge treasure horde of with piles of unique items everywhere.

When I get worried about reaching the item cap, I start dropping items around the pylons of other cities, so it's all just a second of travel from the tower portal room.

Yeah, null bug/vampire isn't worth capturing. Plus, if you capture a drake, they sometimes summon null bugs during combat.

Eventually I was just switching between eyebeast or hakaai, depending on enemy immunities.

You can also use the junk bag to carry radioactive items without poisoning yourself. I used it to ferry uranium bars to my collection in the tower of magi.

How much of a tank was your melee guy? Were you trying to use him mostly for damage dealing, or as a damage sponge?

Went back and checked out the Efreet's goods. What's interesting is that in addition to weapons and armor, he also sells a gold nugget, which costs 540 coins and appears to have no purpose whatsoever, besides being able to sell it back for less than you paid for it. As far as I know it's the only one in the game. I suppose it's an expensive trophy item.

Here's what you can do to avoid deleting the wrong creatures. Save before a battle with a creature you want to capture. Go fight it and capture it. Then in the same battle immediately cast create simulacrum to see what your new creature list is. If it deleted something you want to keep, load the last save point and try again. You might have to reload several times. When it eventually deletes something you're okay with losing, finish the battle and then save.

Is there any way to reach it? I tried dispelling the barriers with piercing crystals on the journey to Vahnatai lands, but the inner ring of barriers was too high level to dispel. I don't believe there's any way to learn how to cast dispel yourself before this journey. Later, when I teleported inside the tower, there isn't a way to open the door.

Another little thing is that you get free passage on the Almaria toll bridge if your rep is high enough.

And city guards tend to be more deferential to you when you click on them (although this is just roleplaying flavor).

I reached a reputation total of 97 on both of my playthroughs, which should include all the obscure sources mentioned in this thread, so I would be quite surprised if that turned out to not be the maximum.

 

You can get some stuff by talking to the merchants near Spiral Pit and Totem Tunnels after clearing their respective dungeons, although I am not sure whether the latter one gives reputation.

The OCD part of me really was hoping to reach 100.

Oh, I haven't done the Rippel quest. Maybe that's it.

I also don't remember defending anyone in Patrick's Tower. Is there any combat there, other than in the demonslayer crypt?

Hm, I wonder what I missed. I think I did both of those encounters.

What's the maximum possible reputation? I finished the game and currently have 95 reputation. I've done every quest (that I know of) except for Dharmon Tools, which actually lowers your reputation by two. Are there any other ways of boosting reputation that I missed out on?

Well, I am playing at normal level, but maybe I didn't choose the right skills for everyone, because I just got killed over and over and over. Couldn't make a dent through the hounds and gazers, much less the ghasts. So, I'll use this forum to confess my sins. . . I used the healing cheat codes to survive and move through. I will definitely be playing the game through a second time and will try to learn from these errors. Now to find out how to retrieve the crystal soul that is there.

What's your party like? And what difficulty are you playing on?

As for saves, to be cautious I always have two current saves. One I'll save anytime it's convenient. The other I'll only update when I return to a friendly town. That way even if my primary save gets ruined for some reason, I don't get set back any further than the last friendly town I visited. I also tend to make separate save files after major milestones in the game and leave them untouched until I need the room for another save. That way I not only have some additional backups, but I can also revisit different points from throughout the game if I'm so inclined.

Well, I'm extremely frustrated because the arena monsters DO kill my party, over and over and over. I foolishly and stupidly don't have a save I want to go back to, but don't see how I can defeat even the first round of monsters. My characters are all level 33 and up. Is that not enough?

I found that to be one of the tougher fights in the game. They key is to kill those damn eyebeasts as quickly as possible, so they can't keep healing your enemies. To beat them I had to completely throw away mana conservation, and had my mage fireblast them each round. It's probably the only fight where I had full mana in the beginning, and ended up having to drink energy potions before it was over.

Do you have any potions on you? You could always spend an invulnerability potion if you got one.

Yeah, I was a bit bummed out I wasn't going to get to meet Khoth again either.

You are definitely not expected to clear out the entire Vahnatai lands on your first visit. You can travel back and forth with the portal, and do quests in whatever order makes sense to you. And some areas are better for higher level characters, and should probably be avoided when you first arrive.

That said, there are some things you definitely want to do sooner than later. There is a quest to get a spirit prism so your mage can cast capture soul and simulacrum. These are very useful spells, and you should try to get them as early as possible.

Some quests also require you to travel back and forth from Vahnatai lands.

Aside from all that, there's also the 25 coin stipend you can collect in the castle.

Until the time your tank gets charmed and one-shots your priest into oblivion... ;-)

What's even worse is when your priest gets charmed. It can happen even to a high INT character, even with a mental protection ward up.

Did a bit of testing, and here is what I got.

 

The route I looped around was: Tower of Magi > Formello > Fungal Clearing > Formello > Tower of Magi > Fort Dranlon > Moldy Cave > Moldy Cavern > Fort Dranlon > Tower of Magi > …

 

I did not use backtostart, since if you resort to that, you might as well just spam iampoor (or iwanttobestronger). However, I did employ a neat trick I would dub as ‘speed walking’, i.e. moving around with the wait button held down at all times. This makes the game time pass super-fast, without hindering your actual movement speed. Of course, speed walking also makes outdoor encounters really frequent, so if your party is not of high enough level to skip them all, you should expect some slow-down.

 

After half an hour of hectic clicking, I ended up with a decent haul of 59 Healing, 48 Spiritual and 46 Energetic Herbs, in addition to 38 pieces of Graymold and 38 Mandrake Roots. These could be turned into ~7 levels worth of Wisdom Crystals, or sold for a total of 6153 gold (with 4 Negotiator traits). For comparison purposes, I did another run without the speed walking trick, and managed to gather pretty much exactly half the herbs in the same time.

Nice! Even halved, that's still a decent chunk of change. Does doing the whole circuit give the first location time to regenerate by the time you return?

The teleport doesn't, but there are monsters in the south room including warded demons and empire soldiers being added every few rounds.

The warded demons were already dead, and another party member was holding the new empire soldiers at bay. I forget whether Garzahd can get in multiple attacks per round. Maybe he killed him with different attack, then banished him when he was already dead?

It's pretty easy to renew them quickly without too much traveling. What I do is go to fort remote for the runic blessing, swing by gnass for the cave blessing, then head to fort emerald for the crystal blessing. Then you can just head to blosk and teleport where you need to go.

Usually when Garzahd banishes someone they just get teleported over to the other side of the room. Without further information I dunno what happened to you there.

Does the teleport also do damage?

What exactly do they do? Are they worth going out of your way to maintain? Before tough fights I've gotten in the habitat of renewing all three blessings in case they stack and help.

In my fight there was on round where Garzahd was definitely not a noob though. He killed my level 34 high endurance 12 hardiness fighter tank in a single hit, down from full health The text said that Garzahd "banished" him. Was that a special attack?