Posted August 27, 2019
high rated
I have scoured several Darklands sites over the last few months and found a ton of useful info that would have helped me out a great deal when I was 1st getting started. Thus, I have compiled my ‘short list’ here for easy reference for future players in the hope this info helps you get into the game/game interface faster!
Please Note: There are a ton of ‘character creation’ guides out there so I’m not going to include how important Endurance and Strength are, getting Javelins early to build up your thrown ability, making your Alchemist your speak common ‘Face’ guy, etc., etc.
1. Short Swords and Military Hammers are a great way to go for dps and cover most situations in the game so build up your edge and impact skills using anything you can until you ‘upgrade’ to these.
2. Always carry 2 sets of armor (with different quality ratings). Some open world encounters will ruin your nice stuff (and thus your day) so I usually equip my scroungy flea infested plate when I get into these situations.
3. Long Bows are good enough, no real need for the expensive Composite Bows, but your choice.
4. Keep a close eye on your Encumbrance level…if it is higher than ‘Normal’, its time to quaff (yes, I said quaff) a potion or lighten your characters load so you are not fighting at the speed of a slug. Encumbrance level can be seen below your characters rag doll in the inventory screen.
5. Battlefield scrolling is done by holding down the Shift key while your cursor is at the edge of the screen (the mouse icon will change to indicate scrolling is possible).
6. Character Inventory: When you are in an inventory menu, you can click, drag and drop items up and down the list of equipment. Very helpful so you can place your ‘javelins’ above your zero value ‘Tusk of a boar’ or ‘Clothing’ items so they don’t get sold by accident.
- Holding down the Shift key while clicking and dragging/dropping will move the entire stack of that item to another character. Great when you have over a hundred arrows, etc.
- ‘Highlighting’ an item such as arrows, then hitting the 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 keys will transfer those items to that character one at a time as per their ‘line up’ on the left of your screen. Faster than dragging and dropping, at least for me.
- Use the D key to Drop an item
- Use the P key to use a Potion on your selected character
- Use the A key to Arm a weapon
- Use the U key to Un-arm a weapon
7. If you missed it in the manual….Camping is done via the C key or F8…the Darklands interface does not make this abundantly clear.
8. Look up and download one of the 'Quest Lister' programs...they are pretty much a necessity unless you plan to go old school with a ton of pen and paper notes. Darklands.net has a bunch of them listed, as well as other tools, mods and FAQs for this game...highly recommended you take a look at their site!
9. DOSBox: For better graphics/text, go into your Dosbox config file ‘dosboxDarklands.conf’ (found in your install folder) and change your scaler to ‘scaler=2xsai’ or ‘hq3x’…or whatever other one you like better.
- When in long dungeons or the Word Map, etc., you can speed up the game by holding down Alt-F12 (turbo mode for DOSBox). I highly recommend you go into your DOSbox keymapper (hit CTRL-F1 while game is running) and re-map turbo mode to your CTRL or ALT key. I mapped it to my right ALT key so I can hit the Space bar to un-pause the game and then hold down the ALT key to speed it up until my next encounter, etc. This is a huuuuuge time saver! I love this game, but the slow pace of large dungeons was putting me off so for me so this is the best advice I found to keep the game moving at a good pace (sorry, can’t recall where I read this, but great advice whomever posted it first!)
That’s it for now off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll think of a few more tonight when I play again, so will update the above accordingly.
If you guys have any worthy ‘gems’ to add (i.e., comments that you have not seen posted before…or comments that would be super helpful to include for a super newbie), please feel free to share them and I’ll add to the list.
Jetzt geht hinaus und erobert Deutschland!
Please Note: There are a ton of ‘character creation’ guides out there so I’m not going to include how important Endurance and Strength are, getting Javelins early to build up your thrown ability, making your Alchemist your speak common ‘Face’ guy, etc., etc.
1. Short Swords and Military Hammers are a great way to go for dps and cover most situations in the game so build up your edge and impact skills using anything you can until you ‘upgrade’ to these.
2. Always carry 2 sets of armor (with different quality ratings). Some open world encounters will ruin your nice stuff (and thus your day) so I usually equip my scroungy flea infested plate when I get into these situations.
3. Long Bows are good enough, no real need for the expensive Composite Bows, but your choice.
4. Keep a close eye on your Encumbrance level…if it is higher than ‘Normal’, its time to quaff (yes, I said quaff) a potion or lighten your characters load so you are not fighting at the speed of a slug. Encumbrance level can be seen below your characters rag doll in the inventory screen.
5. Battlefield scrolling is done by holding down the Shift key while your cursor is at the edge of the screen (the mouse icon will change to indicate scrolling is possible).
6. Character Inventory: When you are in an inventory menu, you can click, drag and drop items up and down the list of equipment. Very helpful so you can place your ‘javelins’ above your zero value ‘Tusk of a boar’ or ‘Clothing’ items so they don’t get sold by accident.
- Holding down the Shift key while clicking and dragging/dropping will move the entire stack of that item to another character. Great when you have over a hundred arrows, etc.
- ‘Highlighting’ an item such as arrows, then hitting the 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 keys will transfer those items to that character one at a time as per their ‘line up’ on the left of your screen. Faster than dragging and dropping, at least for me.
- Use the D key to Drop an item
- Use the P key to use a Potion on your selected character
- Use the A key to Arm a weapon
- Use the U key to Un-arm a weapon
7. If you missed it in the manual….Camping is done via the C key or F8…the Darklands interface does not make this abundantly clear.
8. Look up and download one of the 'Quest Lister' programs...they are pretty much a necessity unless you plan to go old school with a ton of pen and paper notes. Darklands.net has a bunch of them listed, as well as other tools, mods and FAQs for this game...highly recommended you take a look at their site!
9. DOSBox: For better graphics/text, go into your Dosbox config file ‘dosboxDarklands.conf’ (found in your install folder) and change your scaler to ‘scaler=2xsai’ or ‘hq3x’…or whatever other one you like better.
- When in long dungeons or the Word Map, etc., you can speed up the game by holding down Alt-F12 (turbo mode for DOSBox). I highly recommend you go into your DOSbox keymapper (hit CTRL-F1 while game is running) and re-map turbo mode to your CTRL or ALT key. I mapped it to my right ALT key so I can hit the Space bar to un-pause the game and then hold down the ALT key to speed it up until my next encounter, etc. This is a huuuuuge time saver! I love this game, but the slow pace of large dungeons was putting me off so for me so this is the best advice I found to keep the game moving at a good pace (sorry, can’t recall where I read this, but great advice whomever posted it first!)
That’s it for now off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll think of a few more tonight when I play again, so will update the above accordingly.
If you guys have any worthy ‘gems’ to add (i.e., comments that you have not seen posted before…or comments that would be super helpful to include for a super newbie), please feel free to share them and I’ll add to the list.
Jetzt geht hinaus und erobert Deutschland!
Post edited August 28, 2019 by Qbert55