Bryce

Area: Highground / Muck etc Bugs * The "Yet Another Shade" quest reported an error in the console when I completed it. The error was: "z75Thighgdlg.txt Procedure call error, line 1157" (Looking at that line, I'm guessing this is the part that dispels his magic barrier, but I had already dispelled it.) After that, I can't talk to ANYONE in highground either, getting a message saying "Talking Error: Dialogue Script broken or absent." So pretty much this breaks Highground until you leave and come back. I hope I don't sound overly critical, but perhaps your scripting system should be a little more robust in general? Wouldn't it be logical to have a procedure that kills an object if it is there and doesn't do anything otherwise? Likewise for the quests that give items, why not make a nice high-level function that gives an item and includes code to make it fall on the ground if no one has room for it? * Incantor Temple's Garden: jewled wand reward disappears with full inventory. Annoyances Stunning creatures are absurdly hard to deal with for singletons. Perhaps you shouldn't be able to be stunned down to 0 AP for more than 1 consecutive turn?

You can also get dispel barrier from Gladwell, if you accept his geas, but only after finishing the Anama lands anyway. (Which is only slightly before Highground with no barriers of consequence until then.)

Fight dirty (slow and acid). Use items. Get enough nature lore that the rat will join you. Buff/heal allies, not just your party. (That rat and the soldier are both tanks.) If it gets down to the last Lysaak and your mage, as happened to me on my first run through, spray acid and run away. Repeat. (Note: be sure you can get back to town with whatever characters you are left at when finishing, it is anticlimatic to defeat him then get killed by a bat.) If all else fails, go do some side quests and level up.

I'm going to start organizing these by location. This post is for anything I find in Anama lands. That way it won't be so many individual posts. Bugs: * Farmer Gillette quest: Reward disappears when completing with full inventory. Very nasty because if your inventory has a purging crystal slot, etc, you could end up loosing the knowledge crystal WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING IT. (That is, thinking that you got the complete reward.) * Transt the Anama priest you encounter after leaving Anama lands is refered to as Micklebur in the text. (Which is doubly problematic Micklebur is dead.) Annoyances / Possible Problems: * The Chitrach husk looks the same as a broken bit of husk. This is annoying since you have to open your inventory to see the name of an item. * The Chitrach claw is too hard to see on the ground. What happened to the orange one? (Of course, the orange one would be slightly hard to see on the green hive ground...) * The Mindwarp Chitrach is very dumb strategy-wise, if it has three creatures next to it it will never do a damaging attack. (In my case, 2 summoned rats plus a rabid rat that joined me). So it pretty much got gnawed to death by rats and pecked at with arrows. Tedious but totally safe. It only ever attacked when one of the rats died to its riposte and there were only 2 next to it. *(With Gladwell's geas and not going the sneaky route) Micklebur/Transt seems to have no knowledge of the fact that his entire city and the nearby peasants were wiped out ("burninated," if you will) by an amoral lizard man who discovered that the bodies of the Anama are made of XP. Comments: * I like the Chitrach larvae in the hive. Nice touch.

Approaching Solberg's secret retreat, message describing the sentinels standing guard appeared after the battle with them (they rushed down to attack). A similar problem also occurs in the Fang Clan test and numerous other places where the player starts with an attack from long range. Not really a big deal though. (Edit: I understand the message occuring after the battle begins, this is happening after it ends. (I'm guessing that the trigger is "when player is past this point" rather than "when player is past this point OR when golem takes damage.")

The wyrmkin infestation quest in tranquility also lacks a check for totally full inventory (the shield silently vanishes.)

Leaving Moref the Shade's lair after finishing the stone servant part (that is, after he manifests to attack you) results in the "driven from its lair" thing activating, leaving the amusing situation of 2 shades, one hostile and one not, followed by the stone servant thing all starting over again if you come back. (The original Moref continues to exist in addition to the one "inhabiting the stone servants.") If I had an awesome munchkin party I would try farming Moref for XP. Note that you can easily go back to town and heal after doing the stone servant stage of the Moref battle, then come back to finish him off, because it is quite easy to lure Moref out of his lair for the battle without triggering the stone servant part from the other Moref. (All the killing Moref consequences are linked to killing the final Moref shade, so even though the battle is nominally reset after leaving the lair, final-Moref is still there so it doesn't matter unless you walk far enough into the lair to set off the stone servant part from the new motionless shade.) Edit: not worth it to farm him

Hesper (or whatever the name of the Anama fungus tender girl is) died to chitrachs. Fungi attacked and killed me. If this is desired behavior, or if i triggered it by using icy rain on the chitrachs, maybe there should be a message of some kind? edit: i thought spidweb regularly read these boards?

Malachite's (maintainer in tranquility) gender is inconsistently reflected in pronouns (sometimes "she" sometimes "his")

I certainly try to remember to do so, but it's still a bug.

[edit] I am going to post any bugs I find in this thread. I encourage others to do likewise. If it is a bug that requires a workaround, please mention the workaround. (As opposed to things that are just minor annoyances or malfunctions.) I'm sorry I didn't think to start recording the bugs I found sooner. Frankly I didn't expect there to be so many but it's okay. STATUS MY CURRENT LOCATION: Muck PARTY: Singleton Slith DT+NM, lv 33 Bug 1: Full inventories Many quests do not check for totally full inventory when they give a material reward, and instead of the reward falling to the ground, it disappears entirely. This is very noticable as a singleton, where inventory slots are often totally full coming back from a mission with salable loot. A specific example is the ogre infestation quest in Tranquility.

For people using cheats (except, as mentioned, to escape pathological game behaviors), I suggest a much better game, which I release into the public domain for their benefit: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("You win.\n"); return 0; } If better graphics are desired, many such games of similar challenge level can be obtained at your local video rental shop. Avoid foreign films, however, as these may be too challenging for you and you might thus loose.

Thanks for your help. I got the bracelet from the mayor in Exodus. Good job Jeff. I was a bit concerned there that there wasn't a solution.

I made a mistake and I need to reset Harkin's Landing. Specifically, last night I finished the quest that makes the mayor there give you the bracelet, but somehow I didn't save and I thought I had. So, under the assumption that I now had the bracelet, I finished the drake quest for Gladwell. So obviously the mayor and town are dead and need to be reset. What is the editor command for this? (I realize you can force your way through Tranquillity but I'd really rather not, since I don't think I can do so without using the editor, plus I don't want to miss that part of the game.)

Same situation here, by the time I got to prime I was down to one character, but killed it with like either a ghast or a wyrmkin. Their magical damage is what makes minor summon so handy.

The crypt thing that is also a different color, east from the water room that has bridges going off in four directions? You get into that by teleporter only, there is a secret room opened by a button in the west passage. It has a teleporter in it that takes you to the crypt. Another teleporter inside it takes you back. There are nasties in the crypt but you can get a radiant shortblade out of it without fighting them.

Probably a more general means of propagating bad reputation would be needed to resolve that issue. As it stands, your bad reputation (as reflected by angry towns) is highly insular, i.e. it is local to the zone you made angry and there are little problems elsewhere because of it. In nethack, you can rob shopkeepers (in fact, there is a real art to pulling it off at low levels), but it isn't disruptive to balance because lawful characters are penalized for doing it (and certainly empire soldiers should be "lawful"), the shopkeepers are fairly strong and well-armed, and there are "cops" that pursue you under certain circumstances. There are plenty of ways to do it in a balanced and realistic/consistent fashion, the question is, rather, if it is a wise use of limited development resources.

It's part of a much broader (maybe-)problem, another case of the party exceptionalism (treating the player characters differently from monsters and NPCS) that permeates Avernum/Exile. Why do monsters never use the treasure they drop, or, on the other hard, rarely have the weapons/items they use if you kill them before they use them? Why can't you kill shopkeepers and take their inventory or the stuff you sold to them? (They may have sold the things you sell them to other people, so yes you can manufacture rationalizations for some of these things.) Consistency is not one of Avernum's strengths. There are other games that are much better with this general issue. However, while I think a little more effort should be put into handling things in a more consistent manner, Jeff's time is better spent making these huge epic worlds with an interesting storyline than worrying about it at this juncture. If he ever starts from scratch though...

Implementing smooth movement is also harder than you'd think. Not hard in the absolute sense, but the kind of programming task that can easily suck up a whole day ironing out the kinks.

Actually, through very careful manipulation of the algorithm that repositions you after ending combat, I was able to climb the stairs without losing them, but you still lose them no matter what (as far as I could see) the first turn you take in the village above. (I don't think I tried dropping them, but also there probably wouldn't be time. Maybe if you irritated a villager above so that you would automatically go into combat mode when you got up again, but that would be tricky to pull off and uncertain of success) Plus actually getting them out of the zone would be an impressive feat too, because there's no reason to suspect that the "take them away" thing stops working.

You don't have to find him, just check his claims. If you've really found and looked at all of them, talk to the claims woman in Harkin's landing and the quest will complete.

Apparently not. It is quite possible to get them over the runes through creative use of combat mode and such, but there is a simpler "your pack feels lighter" thing that deletes them once you make it into the village. I think there should be a way to steal them (angering the village), but oh well. You can still put their village to the sword and take all their stuff, which is arguably justified since they are planning to destroy Avernum and the Empire.

Well, whoever said that singletons are mostly about spray acid was right. A lot of the singleton game reduces to finding places to hide while the boss dies from acid. (Which is actually interesting, I don't mean it in a highly negative way. Although it is less varied than normal combat, it's still fun.) *I suspect that we will be limited to two castings of spray acid per battle in A6, since that's a "simple and direct solution" to it being too good ) So far so good, though. Haven't had anything really frustrating happen although I do run back to town quite a bit to recharge energy. HP restoring items are very common but SP restoring items are quite rare, at least in comparison. Still, if I'm conservative with them (run back to town rather than use one, whenever practical) I don't think it will be a problem.

Lark the Hedge Wizard is in new Harston, in the south-east quarter of the city proper. She occupies a roughly square building with pylons inside it, and looks like a wizard.

Has anyone done a singleton on hard? I'm trying that now. (Slith DT+NM)