Good afternoon,

I just finished the Clouds of Xeen part, not having entered into the Darkside yet. Even if the games are very catchy and invite to continue, there is something that I find extremely tedious, and that's the inventory.

Each time I finish exploring or cleaning a dungeon, when I return to town full of items, I need to spend more time that I would like identifying everything that I have and discerning which items would be the best for each character.

I miss how much easier this is done in MM6, where items once identified are forever identified. In MM4 I ended writting down everything my characters have, and still it was a dilema to decide what suits better to each character. I couldn't even learn which weapons and armors can exactly each class wear .

It's even worse when you've fighting those nasty diamond golems or red dragons, who destroys all your equipment, and you need to decide (identifying and writting down to remember) if it's worth to fix your equipment or to use the new one you got.

Did I miss something about the inventory that would make it easier? Is it even worth to keep the equipment up to date taking in acount all the effort that it requieres?

One thing I do when playing World of Xeen is that I don't worry about armor. It only protects against physical attacks, and will break anyway if a character is reduced to -10 HP, so I find it not worth the effort. There are many areas in the game, the first town being one of them, where no enemies use physical attacks, making AC completely useless in those areas.

Those red dragons will only destroy your equipment by reducing your HP to -10, and AC is useless against the attacks of dragons, so you might as well unequip your armor in those areas, even if you decide armor is worth the hassle in the first place.

(I might make an exception for one late-game area, but it's worth noting that the enemies in that area will always target the Cleric if possible, so I have only one character to outfit, and only for that one area. It's worth noting, however, that if you can't get your AC really high, it's not worth bothering with that, and anything less than obsidian is not going to be useful there.)

For many players it can be fun writing down what the items or modifiers do so you can calculate the usefulness quickly when you find a new one without having to ask the smithy. For many items you see the effect when you equip them and look how the character stats have changed.

If you don't want to make a list yourself there's also the option to use the MM4 cluebook.

Better equipment makes the game easier but it's not necessary for a skilled player so you don't have to keep the equipment up to date all the time if you don't want to. Weapons do matter more than the other equipment so if you can equip your characters with obsidian weapons do it, the rest isn't that important.

It's worth noting that:
* A certain special weapon that you get in Clouds of Xeen is sometimes better than obsidian because it ignores defense; furthermore, it can be equipped by anyone and won't break even if the character holding it is eradicated. (Note that you can't beat Clouds of Xeen without this weapon, even if you use mirror cheats (provided you don't just trigger the ending this way).)
* As I mentioned, the AC from armor is actually useless in many areas; in fact, most of the game's most dangerous enemies have attacks that AC doesn't protect against.

Actually it's true that armors, along with melee weapons, are what gives me more troubles. So keeping the same one for long, or not worrying so much about having always the best one, can make the inventory a bit easier to handle for me.

So far I haven't found the obsidian weapons. I have one character with the "special weapon needed in Clouds of Xeen", and the rest with the best I could get for them in Clouds.

I may had started a bit late writting down the characteristics of the items. If it get tedious I know now that I can rely on the cluebook.

Let's see how Darkside treats me.

Some advice regarding weapons:
Obsidian > Diamond > Sapphire > Emerald > everything else, the weapon type is secondary, in some situations the special weapon from the Cloud side is superior.

For the other items it's more complicated since the usefulness of modifiers depends on situation

I'm not sure I understand the question so:

As I recall, if a treasure gives you Boots they are Boots. But if a treasure gives you Amber Boots, then you've gotten some sort of magic boots.
If everything is broken, Boots will have a repair cost of 1GP and Amber Boots will have a cost approaching 30(?)GP; so the price of the repair tells you how valuable the item is. Sometimes this works to your disadvantage because some materials have a greater value than others that have better bonuses. But since you can only wear 6 things, isn't it obvious that the first six things on your list, the ones that are equipped, are the ones you decided to keep before they got broken?

Also, treasures are random. In the deepest part of a dungeon, or in the most difficult outdoor areas, you can get a brass sword or an obsidian sword. If you've saved your game, you can reload until you stop getting crap treasures.
PS: Obsidian Boots are a dime a dozen and so is Obsidian Plate Mail. You want Obsidian Plate Armor and just about anything else Obsidian that your party can use.
(I've even gotten Obsidian from the main Vampire's Coffin in Nightshadow .)

BTW. It's been a long time since I played this game, so perhaps the instant identification of a treasure is a property of the Thief.
Also, there are many places (like the Dwarven Mines) where either the monsters or some other event will break your armor and even your weapons. But if you unequip them first that chance diminishes dramatically.

I think the original poster's point was that he may know the boots are Amber Boots, but it's not easy in game to tell whether Amber Boots are better than Steel Boots or Silver Boots. I picked these examples intentionally, since according to the clue book, Amber has the best cost multiplier among them, but Steel has better attribute modifiers and Silver has worse To-hit and better Damage (relative to Amber).

Silver: To Hit: +2, Damage +4, AC +2, Cost: *5
Steel: To Hit: +3, Damage +6, AC +4, Cost: *10
Amber: To Hit: +3, Damage +3, AC +3, Cost: *30 Not necessarily. As other posters have pointed out, some equipment's utility depends on the situation, so the player might be holding on to it for the special cases where it's better to have no armor and high resistance, or a high speed, or a high personality.

Also, I think the original poster was unhappy with the difficulty of deciding whether an item is viable for any particular party member, which requires knowing its modifiers (which is difficult in game), then applying the game's rules (for example, +strength on a very strong character may or may not make a difference, depending on whether the new modifier moves across a threshold), and checking that against all the existing characters. The problem becomes more complicated if the optimal solution is to shuffle items among existing characters in addition to adding the new item. Thresholds are only indirectly visible in game: they are named, but even the cluebook does not tell you how the names map to intensities, so you cannot tell which ones are better than others, or by how much. For example, what's better: amazing, astounding, or fantastic luck? (There appears to be a fan page that answers this: <https://xeen.fandom.com/wiki/Statistics>.) Also, you cannot see in game where the next threshold is, so you cannot easily evaluate whether shuffling items to increase one character's statistic by +2 relative to now is worthwhile.

[Edit: the forum is terrible at automatic linking.]

I know I'm a little late to the party, but perhaps this will be useful. I forgot which FAQ I pulled this info from but here's a chart I put together. I look at this sheet when I am considering an item, and just do the math in my head real quick. A little memorization helps too.

https://pastebin.com/9fbcS5Pc

You can break items down into 3 things: base stat, material, and extra (like elemental).

Note that precious metal (Coral and up) is not necessarily better than normal metal, but costs a lot more to repair, since its sell value is very high. Also note that all weapons have a die rating (1d6, 2d4, etc), not a flat value. You'll see that if you do the math from the chart, it matches a shop's appraisal of the item.

Thanks all of you for the explanations and suggestions.

I admit that I ended enjoying Darkside of Xeen by applying the simplest approach: I mostly changed equipment only when i obtained Obsidian stuff.

Sadly, I started M&M3 afterwards and I had even more issues with the inventory. I had written down an Excel file with the propierties of my fully-packed post-dungeon inventory, but I got just so tired to decide what to give to each character and moving items between them that I gave up the game.

I am a bit late to the party on this post but better late than never. You can use an add-on like [url=https://www.eskimo.com/~edv/lockscroll/WhereAreWe]https://www.eskimo.com/~edv/lockscroll/WhereAreWe[/url]/ which adds a couple of quality of life improvements to the game, including automapping (thank you!) as well as stats for all items held by the characters.

Thank you effiofer for the information.

I actually finished both games (World of Xeen and Isles of Terra) long ago, but I remember when I opened this topic that the inventory was giving me many headaches, not knowing which items were useful, and spending lot of time to sort them.

This add-on seems to be very useful.

The GOG version comes with cluebook that gives detailed stats on ever single item "mod adjective" in the game. I always keep it open when playing, very handy. (that goes for MM1-5)

They appear in 4 categories (plus the item type, totalling 5) and thus you can have a weapon/armor with 5 names describing it. "Flaming steel strength Bardiche of Water Walking"

1) elemental protection (or extra elemental damage, if weapon)
2) material
3) stat boost
4) item type
5) spell it casts when used

That can't appear in World of Xeen, as only miscellaneous items can have spells or charges, and they can't have any other properties. Also, I seem to remember that it could only have one of "flaming", "steal", or "strength" (but could have a slayer property in addition to that).

It can happen in Isles of Terra, which does allow multiple properties and spells on anything. But then again, that game also has things like "wooden leather armor", "leather sword", and even "leather leather armor".

(Could you imagine a flaming *leather* bardiche of water walking?)

My bad, my example is from MM3 and I thought MM4-5 used the exact same engine as MM3 for everything, I guess not
or a Leather Strength Leather armor!

(for those confused about MM3 item naming: the first "leather" is the material, while "leather armor" is the actual item type
(which is mostly used by druids)