jmerry

Vanilla beholders have exactly one use of Death Spell each, which they will use as soon as they see a summon. It's not something they can spam, so the second wave does the job.

Depreciation varies from merchant to merchant, and it just happens that the most accessible shop for "miscellaneous" items has unusually fast depreciation. If you're selling at Feldepost's Inn (buy markup 50, depreciation 20), he'll give you 50% of the list price if he doesn't have any of that item in stock, 30% if he has one, and the floor 20% if he has two or more. Go to High Hedge instead (buy markup 50, depreciation 5), and the prices are 50%, 45%, 40%, 35%, 30%, 25%, and it only hits the floor of 20% when Thalantyr has six or more of the item in stock. But of course, batch selling gives you the whole batch at the price of the first, so you can get some nice hauls if you save a large batch. (Side note: gems and jewelry are exempt from depreciation. No worries about shopping those around.) As for the bandit scalp bounty, Officer Vai's shop has buy markup 100 and no depreciation. She's paying the full list price for those scalps, for as long as she sticks around. And once the way back to the big city is clear (or maybe even earlier in chapter 4), she leaves for Baldur's Gate and you never see her again. Unless you exploit the loophole and never talk to her without scalps in your inventory, bypassing that bit of dialogue. I think some versions of the game have had other stores that bought scalps. In the current EE, no other store in the game buys "tattoos" (the item type the scalps use) so the scalps are worthless once she leaves.. The original "limit" on the wolf pelts at Nashkel wasn't any intended feature; it was just a consequence of inventory mechanics that the developers probably didn't even think about. Give an item to a character, and it goes into the three quick slots, the sixteen inventory slots, and finally the magic weapon slot before running out of space so any further items added drop something on the ground. Letting things get to the point that the magic item slot fills up without an opcode 111 effect is just asking for bugs, so this was something that needed a fix. We just don't necessarily agree on what the right fix is. (Ever see a ferret with a quarterstaff icon for their attack instead of the paws? Yeah, that can happen if you let them pickpocket twenty things and then save and load. It doesn't change their actual attack, though - just the graphics.)

Let's see, the elder orbs in the game ... - Underdark beholder lair. One generic, one that drops the eyestalk. Can be skipped if you go for one of the other ritual ingredients. - Fear trial. You get a choice: go through a no-save fear trap to reach the tear, or fight two beholders and an elder orb to reach it. (Those two beholders are named "Elder Orb", but they don't have the spells.) - Watcher's Keep final seal level. The final green globe fight is an elder orb, a hive mother, and a death tyrant. Not required to complete the dungeon, because the first green globe is the one you need to progress. - Abazigal's lair. Fight three elder orbs for the gauth eyestalk, or hire a few low-level adventurers for it. Yeah, they're all optional. The "elder orb" in the Planar Sphere that the golem fights is functionally just a beholder that's not even focused on you. The beholder in the Twisted Rune hideout doesn't have spells in vanilla, though the SCS component for that fight upgrades it to an elder orb. And finally, the Unseeing Eye is definitely a spellcasting beholder, though it has a different list of spells and doesn't use the same script. Plus you get the artifact to nearly win the fight in one stroke.

Elder Orbs have the ability to cast spells, up to 9th level. One of the spell choices for a vanilla Elder Orb is Imprisonment. Normal beholders, gauths, and even Hive Mothers do not have the ability to cast Imprisonment. Which means that, in the big beholder lairs, there's never more than one or two of them that are capable of the spell, and those are only going to have at most one instance each. So, then, how to counter that spell? Putting up protections like you would against a normal mage ... not great, because beholders are very good at taking that stuff down. On the flip side, because they have a ton of other stuff they can do, elder orbs are less likely to use Imprisonment at any given moment. Also, it's a melee-range spell, so they can't cast it on you unless you get up in their face first. If your only anti-beholder tactic is to send in one character protected by something like the Shield of Balduran, they'll be trouble. But that shouldn't be your only tactic. There are lots of ways to fight beholders. Maybe you could send in magic-resistant skeletons or bombard them with AoE ranged damage like Cloudkill and Incendiary Cloud. Or protect more people and rush in against smaller groups, trusting you can take them down before they wear through your protections and make it truly dangerous.

And you're installing a component that's entirely new in v35 - it hasn't been translated yet. SCS is supposed to use English as a fallback in cases like that, but that's never a guarantee things will work, and this component needs some tricky UI hacking to work right - that also might need language-specific bits to function.

With the vanilla treasure tables, a ghoul or ghast will drop a level 2 scroll about one in every ten times. That's quite reasonable. With those same vanilla treasure tables, a ghoul or ghast will drop a level 3 scroll about one in every four hundred times. That's not. I tracked my kills one time, in a completionist run - everything cleared, areas generally not revisited. In all of BGEE, that came to 59 ghasts and 46 ghouls. Or, about one quarter of a level 3 scroll if I hadn't done this run with SCS. Yes, it's theoretically possible to get level 3 scrolls that way, but it's not practical by any means. This is not the sort of game that rewards extended, dull grinding. (Where do those numbers come from? The table for RNDTRE04 (ghouls, ghasts, etc.) has twenty entries. Two of those are RNDSCR02 (level 2 scroll). None of them are RNDSCR03 (level 3 scroll). But one of the RNDTRE04 entries is RNDMAG02, directing you to a "random magic junk" table. Most of the entries there are stuff like potions or magic ammo, but one of them is RNDSCR03. So if you hit that one in twenty chance, twice, you get the level 3 scroll.) Also: no, I didn't say anything about the overall scroll drop rates.

While you might be able to add the skills without too much trouble, adding the ability to use them requires modifying the executable (i.e EEEx) and is not otherwise accessible to ordinary modding.

This? This is unbelievable. I don't believe you. Random scroll drops in the normal game don't work that way. Sure, you can pretty reliably get the level 1 scrolls from random drops by respawning monsters (except for the few that aren't on the table). Just kill a few hundred gnolls and xvarts and kobolds and hobgoblins and the like. And you'll get some level 2 scrolls, though you'll have to supplement those with fixed drops (i.e, Web from Narcillicus and Borda) and store purchases if you want to fill out spellbooks properly - there aren't nearly as many monsters like ghouls and ogres that drop those. But level 3 scrolls? The only respawning monsters that ever drop level 3 scrolls at all are the travel encounter ogre mage in the southwest, the travel encounter greater basilisk in the east, and the doppelgangers outside Durlag's Tower. You'll get about one level 3 scroll for every ten treasures those monsters drop - three from an ogre mage, one from a basilisk or doppelganger. While you'll typically find a few random level 3 scrolls over the course of a run, you will absolutely not be able to fill up even one mage's spellbook with them. And they're really not amenable to farming. If you have your heart set on Invisibility 10' Radius ... no guarantees, that scroll might just not ever drop for you. In fact, checking ... my last full run, clearing everything in a largely unmodded game, had party mage Xzar without that spell when I reached the end. Because its scroll just plain never dropped. [Edit: oh, right, he's a necromancer that can't learn that spell. Well, I looked at the scroll case - no Invisibility 10' there either. And I would have kept it, because I had Baeloth in the party as well who could use it.]

Moving things in and out of the override can't completely break a save in the way other mods do. At worst, you might run into a missing resource situation. For example, if your save had a character with that item and you removed it from your override, that inventory slot would become an undroppable "invalid item". Some resources become embedded in saves once they come up; if you removed an ARE from your override after visiting the area, that save wouldn't even notice the change.

Possible, because the riddles are tied to specific faces. Difficult, because it would require reworking the dialogue structure so the different right answers don't converge on the same exit states. Not fixpack material, because it's not a bug.

NI can get at engine.lua; it's just under the "Special" tab instead of "LUA". Here's the entire (vanilla) content of engine.lua for BG2EE: engine_name = "Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition" engine_mode = 1 -- 0 = BGEE, 1 = BG2EE, 2 = IWDEE

Belated response ... Your problem with that function call is the first parameter. You only use the resource reference ~MISC60~, as that's what goes in the field in the CRE file. Adding the .itm ... well, either it tries to append that and runs into the problem that there's no resource "MISC60.I.itm", or there's an error check that notices that the parameter is either too long or contains a character . that can't be in a valid resource reference.

Regarding class checks, you can check for DRUID, FIGHTER_DRUID, or DRUID_ALL which is true for either of the previous two. On dual classes, this is what the IESDP has to say: So an incomplete F -> D dual will be detected by DRUID_ALL, but not FIGHTER_DRUID. And I'm not sure about DRUID; I'd have to test that. Are you still on game version 2.5? I'm not sure exactly what the bug was there, but it's fixed in patch 2.6. If you can't update the game ... my experience was that pausing a whole lot increased the chance of getting through without the crash. Also, don't repeat the fight, as the skeletons instantly die and the fight is trivialized if you repeat it in 2.5.

It's actually already level-gated in vanilla - the protagonist must have more than 10K XP for him to show up. If you feel like tweaking this, it's in BAINVI.BCS. The vanilla version of the Black Pits has both the scripted rests and the ability to rest by choice. Which you'll probably only take if you just leveled up (the XP is granted all at once at the end of the fight) and need to memorize new spells that you want for the next fight. Going nova every time is kind of baked into the scenario, for both BP and BP2.

The only mod I'm aware of matching that name is the BG1 NPC project. And that sounds like something interpreted from added conversation around Gorion. (He can't be raised, for story reasons. Not that you could cast the spell anyway, but in theory you could take him to a temple that offered the spell.)

It's specifically the component that extends random scrolls to all scrolls of their level, and specifically a particular version of it from earlier versions of v35. Vanilla, the v34 random scroll component, and the v35.10 random scroll component all allow the lowest-level random treasure in common use (dropped by the likes of gibberlings, hobgoblins, kobolds, gnolls, and many others) to become level 1 scrolls. The v35.7 random scroll component, however, did not allow that random treasure to become a scroll. As for level 3 scrolls ... in vanilla or the v35.7 random scroll component, you'll only get random level 3 scrolls from the highest-level random treasures in BGEE. Which means killing stuff like basilisks, doppelgangers, or ogre magi. There aren't very many of those out there. You just can't rely on random scrolls to fill up your spellbook at level 3, and the guaranteed scrolls at that level from drops and stores are very rare until you progress in the story. Now, the v34 and v35.10 versions of the random scroll component are noticeably more generous there, allowing level 3 random scrolls on the next treasure down - you can get them from ghouls and the like, if you're lucky. So random drops will get you something in those versions. The newest version of the random scroll component is still less generous than the v34 version in one way: v34 capped scrolls at level 4 in BG1 and level 8 in BG2, while v35.10 caps them at level 3 in BG1 and level 7 in BG2.

... OK, I found it. This one's in the "initial" component. From bg1fix.tpa: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //Remove the Nashkel merchant's amnesia /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ACTION_IF is_tutu BEGIN LAF install STR_VAR file=~nashkelwolf_tutu.d~ location=dlg END END ELSE ACTION_IF enhanced_edition=1 BEGIN LAF install STR_VAR file=~nashkelwolf_ee.d~ location=dlg END END ELSE BEGIN LAF install STR_VAR file=~nashkelwolf_bgt.d~ location=dlg END END ADD_JOURNAL EXISTING @22508 The dialogue files add that new line, cutting you off at one pelt. With slight variations for some older versions of the game. This ... does not belong in the initial component. It's not an essential bug-fix, and it's not setup for anything else. It should be one of those little tweaks in the "gameplay" grouping.

Both druids' sword spider form and mages' giant spider form have immunity to the "webtrav" projectile. They're already immune to Web - at least, all web traps and all variants of the Web spell. The single-target "Web Tangle" ability used by SoD's Gargantuan Spider uses the "WEB1P" projectile, which spiders (both shapeshift forms and real spiders) are not currently immune to. That might be worth a change.

In vanilla BGEE, most of the spawn points in the Lion's Way area have unusually low "difficulty" values, and as such only spawn one creature even if you come back later with an advanced party. SCS does not change this, or spawn point mechanics in general. Two of the area's spawn points are exceptions with normal difficulty values; they spawn black bears which are not immediately hostile. Basically, you're misremembering vanilla. The spawns there have always (as long as I've known the game, at least) been small.

See also here (https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/37833-faerie-fire-range/) and compare the Siege of Dragonspear version. English-language description from SoD:

There is no place for a name in the ARE file. There are three places that you can name an area: - (All games) Areas that are on the world map can be named in that entry in the WMP file. There are two slots for "name" and "tooltip" string references in the area entry. I see no reason to ever make those two different. These names are, of course, only visible on the world map screen. - (EEs) The cheat travel menu, if present, is populated in a lua file; BGEE.LUA in BGEE/BG2EE. Search for CheatAreas and copy an existing element; this includes a name for each area, as a literal string. If you don't find any ... well, then, it isn't in your game. - (PST/PSTEE) MAPNAME.2DA pairs area resource references to string references. Just add a row for your area. This is MAPNAME.2DA. It is available in PST/PSTEE, and not in any other games.

PLAT08 is not the Plate of Balduran - it's an unused undroppable Plate Mail clone in BG2. The Plate of Balduran is WA2PLAT. Which doesn't appear in that big list. So basically, what you've said so far does not bring us any closer to a diagnosis.

As for the menu where you can select an area and go there by clicking a button, it's populated in BGEE.LUA - look for CheatAreas in that file, including variants such as CheatAreasArena or CheatAreasExpansion for the different campaigns.

The Gargoyle Boots' ability has types TRANSMUTER and COMBATPROTECTIONS. Breach absolutely will take it down. The STONSKIN item used by characters such as Rayic Gethras doesn't simply apply skins; it casts OHWI408. Which is a clone of Stoneskin, so Breach will take it down. No action needed.

Poison damage from any source, whether instant or ongoing, is zeroed out by 100% resistance. On top of that, most effects that deal poison damage have a clause (opcode 324) that grants full immunity to all of their effects when the target is 100% resistant. Cloudkill is one of those; if you're immune to poison, you don't take damage and you aren't subject to the Slay effects. A level 4 mage under the influence of a Protection From Poison scroll can stand in a Cloudkill and cast spells safely.