Decided to play this game yet again after being away for years. Tried to log onto my old account here but login keeps getting rejected. I know I have the right password because I have the original registration email. Oh well...time for a new account I guess. Anyway, I have hit the "healing salve" bug several times already in this game. Searching the net I see various people have run into this in the past (including myself - ha!) but there was never a consensus on how to fix it. The bug is, healing salves stop working on the main character. For some people, the bug goes away if they take a few steps. Not for me. For others, it goes away if you enter a new map. This worked for me once or twice, but I think it requires a map of an area you have never been to before, so this stops being useful pretty quickly. In the past I've gotten rid of this status by resting overnight in an inn, but this time, even that isn't helping. Going back to a previous save before it happened can also fix it, but is a pain, obviously. What I have discovered is that this bug is always linked to a particular NPC. I seem to recall someone posting once that it is triggered by an NPC trying to use a healing salve on the PC but getting interrupted before finishing/reaching the PC's location. What cures the bug is: the instant the "stuck" NPC dies, healing salves begin working again. The only way to tell which character is "stuck" is by trial and error (letting them get killed). Detaching that NPC from your party, even leaving the map where you left them and travelling overland on the strategic map, does not fix it. Only the NPC's death does - and it fixes the bug immediately. It's kind of a pain, but the best cure for this problem is determining through trial and error which NPC is causing the problem by letting them die one by one and seeing which death lets healing salves work again. Then go back and reload, get a Restore Life potion, and get the NPC killed, then use Restore Life on them to get them back. The bug goes away and does not return when you restore them to life. An expensive solution which may require hawking a bunch of healing salves and the like to raise the cash, but it works. Hopefully this helps someone who runs into this. As an aside I don't recall having this problem before using a high resolution patch. I've also noticed some other weird things which I think may be related to the higher resolution - if a bad guy is chasing you for example in real time combat mode, sometimes when you veer off they run right by you and keep running in a straight line right off the map into the great beyond. It looks pretty funny when it happens.
Sounds like a weird bug, thanks for sharing the solution. In terms of the enemies running off the map thing, I don't think that's exclusive to the high res patch. There's been plenty of times where my player character has run straight through a wall and I can't get him back which I'd imagine is the same thing.
I remember running through the wall and finding myself in an endless ocean, just to realize I had not saved for several hours. Boundaries are often easy to break in Arcanum under the right circumstances. As for the healing salve bug I have encountered that one before. Ultimately I found it was easier just not to give healing salves to my companions. They would often use them when I did not wish healing to be done so currently I micromanage who gets healed. Unfortunately Virgil still wastes his stamina healing techies to no effect.
