Any tips I should know about before I jump into Darklands?

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Those responses are daily in most cases. The only way you can really botch things in a city is to burn down the inn, or something else just as terrible. If that happens, and is likely while training alchemy, you will need to relocat to another city.

One fun way to fight and get loot is to constantly attack city guards at the gate.
In case you haven't noticed, this thread started in Feb.

I prefer to play with older gentlemen with enough strength/end to wear chainmail. Combat is still too easy. But they have good non-combat skills so I don't have to train in inns.

No, lol, I didn't notice that this thread started in Feb. I just saw Darklands in the title and was drawn like a moth to the flame.

I'm trying to create an Alchemist who ends his career as a Knight, to get the best "free" weapons and armour, instead of no armour at all if he ends his career as a Master Alchemist. According to the cluebook: KNIGHT: Character must have a Virtue of 16+ and either (a) be a noble of age 20+; (b) have just finished an occupation as a captain, courtier, noble her, abbot or bishop; or (c) have any experience as a manorial lord or knight. My guy is nobility, is older than 20 and has a virtue of 18, but the Knight option does not appear, so I'm forced to take Noble Heir and then Knight.

But I guess in the long run it's better to make a specialized alchemist and fund his weapons and armour by selling the (hopefully) extra potions he starts with?

I tend to just leave'em unarmoured/rely on drops for the first stretch. Later, they'll typically inherit the old armour that my actual fighters were using.

From an old thread, can anyone confirm that this is the case, or was it fixed in one of the patches?

The time management aspect of the game is quite inconsistent.
When trying to attend mass in some churches, you are told to come back at Prime (6-8 AM), even if the time is Prime.
Curfew is supposed to be at Compline (9 PM), but it gets dark at Vespers (6 PM) at which time the Night Watch in their prime, will stop you.
Also, the time I've actually been able to attend mass it has ended at 6 PM, so going church can be costly if you meet the Night Watch.

And the whole business about skulking about in the night, killing endless bands of thugs while breaking curfew, in order to increase your reputation feels wrong.

And while I'm at it, I wish it was possible to do camp/inn stuff while on a boat, like Regain Strength and such. But to be fair most games suck at this. The only game I can think of that did it right was Magic Candle. In Baldur's Gate time does not even pass when you sail from Ulgot's Beard to the werewolf island!

Still, it is a great game, but it's defintely one of the games of which I'd like most to see a remake.

BTW, anyone noticed that if you talk to a priest in a regular church (not Dom or Kloster) and then virtuously give money you always succeed in getting Divine Favour back up to 99?
EDIT: I jinxed it. Now it doesn't work anymore.

For timing, you need to be there at the very first hour of Prime. That is to say, if you show up between 7-8, mass is already going on and you can't join.

Another oddity: when researching saints at a Kloster the research always ends at 1800, which mean if you start research at 1700 only one hour passes, but if you start at 1800 a whole day passes.

The game is full of terrible bugs, are you going to continue listing them as you find them? Try seeking sanctuary in a church and then do a jail break.

I haven't encountered any terrible bugs, only many inconsistensies.
For example on the map there is a road from Stettin to Frankfurt an der Oder to Görlitz, which doesn't exist in the game.
There are many small annoyances, but not any game breaking bugs (so far) or anything to make me rage quit.

Overall I thought Magic Candle did the "adventurer party simulation" thing better, with the need for food and sleep, without it feeling too much like work. But encounters is much more interesting in Darklands, since they are much more varied, ie not nearly all encounters result in battle, and I love how there are multiple ways of solving things.
And just as with Baldur's Gate, I have even grown to like the combat better. It will never be my favourite combat engine, but at least it's quite fast and in exchange for losing complete control you get characters who can handle most combats on their own without much intervention from me, once they get decent weapon skills and plate armour.

What does that do?

Oh, and why are the Hanse such arrogant assholes? Coming from an old Hansa town (with a surviving league hall) myself, I'm rather miffed by their behaviour.

Ha ha! There is a saint called Herve.



And he can sense evil.

So far it seems the only way to get high quality gear is to help merchants against robbers. I got Brass Handgun 43q and a Composite Bow 46q this way. No relics in sight - yet.

EDIT:
NPCs seem to be clones of each other. The Schulz and the Hanse NPCs have the same stats, and at 25 years of age those stats are better than those of my older characters.
Would have been cooler if the stats were randomized or even better: generated on the fly depending on a career that would lead to their current occupation.

Question:
After defeating the first black sabbat on October 31st we were told about the evil monastery north-west of Flensburg. Shortly after we stumbled upon another evil village and were told about a new black sabbat at March 21st.
Does it matter which place I go first?

So, are NPCs worth it?
It seems their only function is to make battles larger. Instead of the obligatory 4 bandits you now meet 5 obligatory bandits when prowling the streets at night.

Now this is annoying: if using the mouse for movement your party will just move straight ahead, instead of using roads, and happily bump into rivers instead of using that nice bridge 100 yards further south. But if you use the number keys to move with you are unlikely to see messages like this since they flash by so fast.



I wonder what other messages I might have missed?

, never saw that

Heh, just burnt down the Inn in Magdeburg and couldn't pay for the damages, so now we are wanted by the guards in that town.
Then we tracked down and slew the dragon Baruch ophidious (Ophidian Dragon?). I got some q45 Firewall potions from an alchemist which made the ordeal a bit too easy. The fire breath hardly did any damage.

I guess it's time to purchase some new armour with my new found wealth (almost 20K pfennies) and then pay a visit to that monastery near Flensburg, since I was unable to locate the second witch coven on March 21st, which was supposed to be south of Freiberg? Maybe it was south of Freiburg im Breisgau?
Or should I pay a visit to the mines near Goslar first?

Oh yeah, common mistake with Freiburg and Freiberg. AFAIR even some bug concerned these two towns. That's why it's not such a bad idea to use Darklands Quest Lister:
http://www.darklands.net/files/files.shtml
You can write everything down yourself, but what's the point if you have such a nice tool?

Hmm...fourth alchemy failure with a 99% chance of sucess. Just my usual bad luck, or are the numbers rigged?

Also, I couldn't help notice the similarity to the Nashkel Mines in Baldur's Gate when entering the mines. Kobolds, traps and fucking annoying pathfinding. I see there are still rumours about the mines, even after I cleared them, and got a huge boost to Fame.

BTW, what stats do you need to research alchemy at a University? Even with Int over 60, Alchemy 56, Speak Latin 75+ and Read/Write 70+ I keep failing.

100% most important tip for playing Darklands in 2012:

Learn to use the fast forward in DOSBox. World map walking and dungeon walking become non-infuriating.

OTOH I was able to complete a game from character creation to the end in like 5 hours.

Tons of stuff like the University and the Alchemist recipe trading are just not feasible to succeed at every time, the hit rate seems to be logarithmic or cap at like 30% or something and you can only try once a week or even once a month.

The mine rumors you're seeing now are for a different mine; the game has several variations of the Knocker mine quests. Like a different mine might be infested with demons or there might be a dwarf/kobold war going on for you to solve.

How do you do that?

That's impressive. I spent more than 5 hours just in the Monastery.
All in all I'd say Darklands is one of the larger CRPGs, and playing it "normally" it will take some time to finish. I think my characters would be woefully underequipped and underdeveloped if I went straight to the first Sabbat and than straight to the Monastery, although using choke points against the weak AI makes combat easier than it should have been.

Yeah, I thought that might be the case, but the rumours point to the same place: Goslar. Does this mean there are more than one mine at Goslar, or is the one I visited regenerated? The mine I cleared out had problems with dwarves who were driven up to the mines by vulcans.

The default command for the "turbo" button a la a console emulator is alt-f12. It is a new feature in dosbox 0.74

Now alt-f12 is impossibly unwieldy since you have to actually hold both alt and f12 down to stay in turbo mode. So, you should run the keymapper in DOSbox and change it to something you find reasonable. I actually used caps lock so I could toggle it instead of holding down a button, although it was slightly buggy. You can run the keymapper either by launching Dosbox with the -startmapper command line toggle or you can hit ctrl+f1 while DOSbox is running.
I think the same mine regenerated in your case, there are only a certain fairly small number of Knocker-able mines in the game and it just happened to roll the same one twice.

So what's the best way to deal with the Hell Dragon? I used missiles weapons; 3 Composite Bows, 1 Brass Handgun and the alchemist throwing potions and javelins. After the battle I collected 80 arrows.

EDIT: just finished the game as Legendary Heroes (644 fame) after less than two years of game time.

Outside the main quest the game got a bit repetitive at the end.
And it actually reminded me of Morrwind at one stage, with the weapon skills increasing too fast and being able to quaff unlimited amount of potions in battle. But the game is not so difficult, so I refrained from using any potions in battle; just healing between combats and quaffing some Firewalls before meeting fire breathing/casting enemies.

I really like how you you could solve encounters in different ways, especially when you know a lot of saint. I don't think I tried all the ways of killing Raubritters, for example.

I should have used it. Only after I completed the game did I learn that you can only have a limited (four?) quests active at a time.

Incidentally, while reading the forum at Abandonia, I found out that kmonster is actaully from Freiburg im Breisgau. Maybe he knows where the witch sabbat really was?