Hi guys, I just started playing this game a few days ago and have been enjoying it until after Black Mountain Mines I've started getting way too many wilderness encounters. I can often only move one pixel in the map so moving in the map is very painful. The encounters aren't hard and don't even give much experience, they and the monsters seem to vary depending on the area. Have you encountered this bug and found a fix, I'm becoming very frustrated with the game at the moment because I need to move away from Shrouded Hills and arriving in Tarant will take me about an hour.

Thanks in advance,
Jupe

That's a new one on me. It sounds suspiciously like a corrupted save file. Do you have any earlier saves you could revert to, to see if the problem happens again after you replay the mines?

No, I've been too lazy to use normal saves, I only keep spamming the quick save. I just managed to get to Ashbury by the train and I'll test if the encounters are also as common in this area.

I got 23 or 24 (lost count) encounters during the travel between Ashbury and Ancient Temple. This travel was much less tedious than my earlier travel from Black Mountain Mines. However, I still feel that the encounters are much more common now than they were before I tackled Black Mountain Mines. It's my first playthrough so I'm not sure if this is normal or not.

It's definitely well above average. On a typical walk from Tarant to Ashbury (or anywhere else) I might get from zero to six encounters.

To check the scope of the problem, try sleeping out in the wild for a full day at a time. Normally, you can expect to average one encounter about every other day or so. (Sometimes there'll be two or three of them in one day; other times, nothing for a week.) If you're getting one or more encounters every day, then that confirms that there's some sort of bug that's made your PC a monster magnet.

For future reference, I recommend getting into the habit of using the regular save option to create restore points along the way. Running F7 and F8 too quickly has been known in the past to lead to file corruption issues — and once an error has crept in, it never goes away since there's only the one save file.

Ok I slept a day in wilderness and got 9 encounters so something is clearly wrong. If there isn't a way to fix the problem should I expect a lot of wilderness travelling in the rest of the game or is it possible to use some other ways of travelling to avoid wilderness almost completely (Spoiler free please)?

About the f7 f8 thing, I guess this is just something I have to learn the hard way. I have played many other rpgs and only used the quicksave option without problem but from now on I'll start using backup saves.

Yes. Invest in the 5th-level Conveyance spell Teleportation (which has a prerequisite of 18 WP). You can teleport between any two points marked on your map, so you'll only have to walk overland if heading to a not-yet-marked destination. It also saves you from having to buy Scrolls of Exiting, since you can zap your way out of a dungeon whenever you like.

Thank you very much for all of your help. It will take some time since I'll need 11 more points for that IIRC, but it beats having to restart the game.

I always advise people never to use the quicksave. I have no hard proof, but it seems like every time someone comes around with a strange problem like this, they've been using the quicksave a lot.

I vouch for using the regular saves. The process becomes muscle memory after the first 10 times or so and it also allows you to go back to whatever point you saved before in case you messed something up in game. I haven't used quick save at all in this game and my encounter rate has been fine. Hope you overcome this issue soon!