whats your shaman item

hey whats the best items youve ever gotten from the kite shaman chest in the crash sit in the beginning of the game? mine was an unidentified enchanted plate armour nice eh

 

Same as Vorak, but only when I played the game with the patch from this site....

Otherwise, I always get some stupid quarterstaff and some shiny baubles.

 

Hmm , i think the best thing i got was some jewels and a enchanted sword.

 

I got arcane plate, an arcane greatsword, and a diamond.
I was playing a dwarven technologist by the name of Gerald Hilltop.
And I was unpatched.

 

Some big enchanted sword, some enchanted bow and a set of small armour. I think all three items need to be identified, but I forgot their real names.
Doesn't that chest work via a difficult formule that takes into consideration the stats of your character and his/her name? I always get those three items because I always play with the same name.

 

I think ALL chests in Arcanum work this way- race+background+name dependent.

Grossenschwaum- must've been heartbreaking to get such good magickal stuff so early in the game- and to be playing a tech oritented dwarf.

 

what race and backgpund gets you top equipment then if all chests work on that basis? i had a half orc who only got a emerald ring from that chest
lame or what

 

Nah, nothing as complicated as that. Each container is assigned an inventory source. The source is a list of items with a percentage next to them. Simple as that.

From Invensource.mes:
"Each item is described by a percentage, a comma, and a basic prototype enum (as from description.mes). Don't include a percentage sign."

 

I got an arcane helmet, an arcane bow, an arcane shield, a ruby, 100 arrows and three potions. I got so excited I took a photo of it on my cell-phone.

 

And yet if you start the game repeatedly with the same race, name and background you ALWAYS get the same stuff. I've experimented with it enough to know it's true. When playing my character Tobermory, a halfling gunslinger with a knack for Electrical, I always know more or less what I will find in which chest. Hell if I could be bothered I'd write down a list of items for each chest.

 

The best thing I've got was a useless enchanted sword and a ring of some sort. I think the game hates me...

I really wonder if the game really has a complex script* for cheast but a not-that-good script for AI characters.


*calculation race+class+name.

 

Solaris, I've done some investigating regarding the chest contents. I've found that proto chests are indeed dependent on the details of the critter who opens them.
There are a handful of proto chests (which include the magick, mystical and arcane chests). However if the chest has been laid down by the developer and then assigned an invensource the inventory does not change based on the critter.
I'm really surprised this isn't mentioned in any of the documents. In fact the docs basically say that this doesn't happen as you can see from my earlier quote.
You'd think they would be shouting about all the neat little features.

Also this is from the DoA walkthrough: "The Magick Chest contains random things. The seed seems to be based on a large number of variables, including race, background, character name, and your current attributes."

Anyone tried a character called Tim Cain?

(Nope. Nothing special. But I bet there is a secret name.)

 

I forgot to mention this earlier.
Just because you get above average stuff in the crash site chest doesn't mean you will get above average stuff in all chests.
I put down 6 arcane chests using WorldEd. When I opened them with a female half orc called "2" they contained (roughly):
1 of the chests had an arcane shield and gems
1 had mystic armour and gems
2 were identical and had a mace and gold
2 were identical and had a fatigue potion

So as you can see, the chests are based on the character's variables but also a random variable which has a limited range. So if you put down a thousand chests you might only get 6 different sets of contents.
I hope that makes sense.

 

I think the best item I've ever gotten was Arcane robes. I seem to be somewhat lucky with magick chests; when I play a magick melee-fighter I usually find several decent swords.

 

So is there a name-race-background selector?

If so, hows it determined what you get?

For instance, whats the best Dwarf combo?

 

Yes, there is. It's been proven many times. On the old Sierra boards they had quite an in-depth analysis of it.

I really wish I knew the details though... I remember someone saying one of them was more important than the other. Background I think, but I'm not sure.

 

It's not mentioned in the documentation or in the DAT files. It's hardcoded so there is no way to get the details (with the exception of endless testing).

It saddens me that all that knowledge has been lost. The boards vanished just around the time I started to seriously mod Arcanum. There are so many things I've had to discover for myself when the answers would have been right there.

 

Thats makes me wonder, would it be possible for Mathboy or DU to recover the Sierra info? I'm not sure how much storage requirements would be to get that, but Sierra's big and might have stored the old info away on some dusty shelf somewhere....(?)

Imagine what we could dig up from there? Where's Frigo, maybe he downloaded the entire site?