The "miscellaneous" items - notably Winter Wolf pelts and wyvern heads - can be bought by a few merchants. Off the top of my head, there's Feldepost, Thalantyr, and Halbazzer Drin. I don't think there are any others.
Bandit scalps, on the other hand, are classified as "Tattoos" in the current version of the game. Only Feldepost's Inn, Officer Vai, and the Nashkel Store buy them. Vai, of course, offers twice the standard price and no depreciation, so she's the best option.
The shop at Feldepost's inn is notable for having fast depreciation. You get one round of good prices before he's down to a fraction of his initial offers.
The "miscellaneous" items - notably Winter Wolf pelts and wyvern heads - can be bought by a few merchants. Off the top of my head, there's Feldepost, Thalantyr, and Halbazzer Drin. I don't think there are any others.
Bandit scalps, on the other hand, are classified as "Tattoos" in the current version of the game. Only Feldepost's Inn, Officer Vai, and the Nashkel Store buy them. Vai, of course, offers twice the standard price and no depreciation, so she's the best option.
The shop at Feldepost's inn is notable for having fast depreciation. You get one round of good prices before he's down to a fraction of his initial offers.
Which leads to the annoying compulsion to stuff Wyvern heads into a container, then later load them onto your strongest party member to try to sell them all at once ...
Which leads to the annoying compulsion to stuff Wyvern heads into a container, then later load them onto your strongest party member to try to sell them all at once ...
I hate doing that. Countless trips upon trips upon... all to sell loot. Nowadays I tend to give myself a bag of holding for convenience, with a tweak to make it bottomless. Saves A LOT of hours of portering trips.
Seems pointless. The game gives you more gold than you'll ever spend pretty much no matter what you do. No reason to go through such inconveniences to maximize your profits.
Seems pointless. The game gives you more gold than you'll ever spend pretty much no matter what you do. No reason to go through such inconveniences to maximize your profits.
Not necessarily. If you play without reloads, or only reload when Charname dies, you need gold to Raise dead companions and to buy tons of potions. Also, certain roleplaying restrictions like no stealing, or no scalping, or no killing unless attacked first or such things, make it more difficult to get endless amounts of money especially in the early game.
I only sell magic items (and full plate),don't steal, don't scalp, and take all opportunities to skip combat through dialogue. I still end up with somewhere in the ball park of 30,000 gold by the end of BG1. This is more than enough for raise dead needs.
Yeah, I can't say I've tried out every one of these playstyles in depth, but scalps are 50 gold a pop, stolen stuff is mostly worthless and can only be sold in a couple places that are difficult to access or inaccessible for most of the game, and almost every enemy in the game either attacks you unprompted, or comes with a dialogue choice to provoke them to attack first.
I'm having a hard time imagining any of these reduce your income to the point that running out of money is a practical concern.
Where the cost comes in is recharging wands, buying archmage robes and the like. I'm currently in Siege of Dragonspear and only have about 2000 and have used a large proportion of my potions just surviving. Of course I don't have to pay money to raise dead now, but I have already sold most of my surplus stuff. Perhaps its because I have a full party.
If you sell items to merchants and then buy them back at a loss ad infinitum, you will eventually run out of money. I can certainly follow your line of thought that far.
Siege of Dragonspear did seem like resources were a lot more scarce than the main BG1 campaign though. Last time I played it I came in with a whole arsenal of wands leftover from saving the sword coast, after having used them quite recklessly through that campaign, and then I burned through them pretty much just doing the Dwarf Dungeon alone.
Could just be because I'm less familiar with that campaign.
I remember the first time I played BG1, I had no idea what was expendable and what wasn't. When it was appropriate to use an item and when it wasn't.
I hoarded pretty much anything remotely noteworthy I could find in that storehouse south of Nashkel. All sorts of perfectly good equipment never sold, potions never drank, and so forth.
Now I'm in this finely tuned routine where I know exactly which battles are the premium spots to break out the consumables and what equipment I can probably let go of and so forth and I prattle on about how the game gives you this overwhelming surplus of resources, not considering that a portion of that is to allow the player to use them inefficiently. There's many health potions so that if you use them in the "wrong" battle you're not boned for the rest of the campaign for example.
Where the cost comes in is recharging wands, buying archmage robes and the like. I'm currently in Siege of Dragonspear and only have about 2000 and have used a large proportion of my potions just surviving. Of course I don't have to pay money to raise dead now, but I have already sold most of my surplus stuff. Perhaps its because I have a full party.
So you're burning all your money on expensive exploits. Alright, that makes a LOT more sense.
Where the cost comes in is recharging wands, buying archmage robes and the like. I'm currently in Siege of Dragonspear and only have about 2000 and have used a large proportion of my potions just surviving. Of course I don't have to pay money to raise dead now, but I have already sold most of my surplus stuff. Perhaps its because I have a full party.
So you're burning all your money on expensive exploits. Alright, that makes a LOT more sense.
I've never understood why recharging wands is seen as an exploit. They're magical items, why shouldn't you be able to go back to a store that produces and sells magical items and pay a lot of gold to have them recharged? It's so expensive that I believe it was intentional.
Why else would you get several wands with only one single charge in Chateau Irenicus? Seems like a waste otherwise.
If you think it's overpowered and don't use it, that's a personal choice, but to call it an exploit while it costs tons of gold is not an opinion I share.
As to Raise dead, I did say "especially in the early game".
In some unlucky runs, I had to return repeatedly with corpses from the Cloakwood (you have been waylaid...), and once I had to actually sell equipment I was using to Raise 4 people while doing Durlag's tower. As I said, unlucky runs, but it does happen.
The "miscellaneous" items - notably Winter Wolf pelts and wyvern heads - can be bought by a few merchants. Off the top of my head, there's Feldepost, Thalantyr, and Halbazzer Drin. I don't think there are any others.
Bandit scalps, on the other hand, are classified as "Tattoos" in the current version of the game. Only Feldepost's Inn, Officer Vai, and the Nashkel Store buy them. Vai, of course, offers twice the standard price and no depreciation, so she's the best option.
The shop at Feldepost's inn is notable for having fast depreciation. You get one round of good prices before he's down to a fraction of his initial offers.
Kind of surprised the Nashkel store can't buy more winter wolf pelts.
Kind of surprised the Nashkel store can't buy more winter wolf pelts.
I think that it's a mod that causes you to be only able to sell more winter wolf pelts at Nashkel. Another mod allows you to keep going back, don't ask me which!! I've had situations in my games when I haven't been able to sell more in Nashkel. I think that it is a mod that gives extra merchants that allows you to sell them in Beregost.
Your gold supply depends on a lot of factors. A cautious no-reload run will warrant many extra resources, from wands to potions to scrolls--and recharging the Greenstone Amulet in particular is very important in many runs, though it's not as expensive as a Wand of Monster Summoning, for example. You can do a no-reload run without recharging stuff, but you're accepting a greater risk in doing so. Arrows of Detonation and Arrows of Dispelling are really useful for eliminating certain risks, and they are not cheap.
If you're going through SoD, where you lose your entire gold supply after the first dungeon, hoarding resources to sell off at SoD's Sorcerous Sundries and Nazramu is very profitable, and there are a lot of important resources worth hoarding in SoD. The coalition camp invasion can be really sticky, as can the siege at Dragonspear Castle and the final battle.
There are ways of avoiding certain fights (run straight to Ashatiel to avoid the siege), or winning them cheaply (Webs and Skull Trap scrolls for the coalition camp), but they're not for everyone, either due to party composition or roleplaying preferences.
BG1 and SoD gameplay is VERY item-heavy, more so than in SoA or ToB. I always end each game with a huge gold surplus as well as a lot of unused items, but that's because I tend to grab every little resource I can. A player who doesn't go to the right loot drops, whether due to RP concerns, trying not to metagame, doing a minimalist run, or just not wanting to bother with the time, will have more strained resources.
Your playing style is the primary determinant of your money needs.
@semiticgod I agree 100%. Very insightful. Despite having fully charged wands when I started SoD, I had used nearly half the charges upon reaching the Coalition Camp in my last game.
Now that SOD is a thing, I rob every house in BG1, pickpocket as many people as possible, try to raise my rep and charisma to the max, and generally squeeze the Sword Coast for every last copper piece that it has so that I can stock up on as many wands and scrolls as I could ever ask for, then lay siege (heh) to all who oppose me in SOD by the sheer power of being filthy rich.
I dual class Safana in BG1 to Mage by use of the Tome so I have 1 more fire wand user than I normally could.
@WarChiefZeke SoD is so difficult to complete in No Reloads that I have found that such tactics become essential. In the Bridgefort Siege I placed Neera where I could enlist her easily inside the barricade before enlisting Dorn who I buffed and made invisible before setting him against the mages whilst the rest of us made a frontal assault. He was of course killed, but had already taken a lot of the worst spells so I enlisted Neera in his place which made his death permanent. Not a problem!
Desperate situations call for desperate measures.
The alternative is to remove the level cap which I am loathe to do.
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
Oh, and where, may I ask, you can find the godbow in the game, other than when you use the console?
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
They're not rare in BG1 - almost all types of wands can be bought freely. That suggests to me that the developer intention was not to limit their use by restricting the number of available charges, but through a trade-off with the resources required to purchase them.
They're not rare in BG1 - almost all types of wands can be bought freely. That suggests to me that the developer intention was not to limit their use by restricting the number of available charges, but through a trade-off with the resources required to purchase them.
Indeed, non-EE Sorcerous Sundries sells an unlimited supply (though with only 20 charges each, 10 for Magic Missiles) of every wand type except Polymorphing
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
Oh, and where, may I ask, you can find the godbow in the game, other than when you use the console?
There's a note in chateu Irenicus where Irenicus wonders on the kind of sacrifice it took to obtain such a weapon. The game recognizes it on import, so it clearly is intended by the devs to be consoled in during BG1 at some point.
Besides, Arvia's point above was that since wands have a price attached when recharged, they must be intended. I simply applied the same logic to another exploit.
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
Oh, and where, may I ask, you can find the godbow in the game, other than when you use the console?
Besides, Arvia's point above was that since wands have a price attached when recharged, they must be intended. I simply applied the same logic to another exploit.
Godbow is not an exploit. It is a tool, made by Beamdog, for testing purposes. It was never intended to be used in an actual, non-test run, playthrough.
While we're on the subject, I hear all those little goodies in the hidey holes like the Ring of Wizardry outside the Friendly Arm Inn and the Ankheg Plate in the Nashkel Farmland were originally for testing purposes too.
The idea, as it's been explained to me, was that the developers who had to make sure everything in the game worked as intended, were not necessarily supremely skilled gamers themselves. So they discretely placed little items like that here and there to make things easier on themselves, and then left them in the final product as little secrets for observant fans to find.
@Arvia The way I see it, if they were meant to be unlimited, they would be. They are rare and come with so few charges specficially because they are meant to be temporary boosts or emergency buttons. You can sell and buy the godbow as well (it sells for a million gold iirc), that doesn't mean it was intended for normal runs.
Oh, and where, may I ask, you can find the godbow in the game, other than when you use the console?
There's a note in chateu Irenicus where Irenicus wonders on the kind of sacrifice it took to obtain such a weapon. The game recognizes it on import, so it clearly is intended by the devs to be consoled in during BG1 at some point.
Besides, Arvia's point above was that since wands have a price attached when recharged, they must be intended. I simply applied the same logic to another exploit.
My point was not that they must be intended because they have a price tag. My point was that the very high price to rebuy them, in contrast to the very low price when selling them with few charges, makes it a fair trade and therefore either implies purpose or is enough of a justification for me to use that function without giving me the feeling that I'm cheating.
Comments
Bandit scalps, on the other hand, are classified as "Tattoos" in the current version of the game. Only Feldepost's Inn, Officer Vai, and the Nashkel Store buy them. Vai, of course, offers twice the standard price and no depreciation, so she's the best option.
The shop at Feldepost's inn is notable for having fast depreciation. You get one round of good prices before he's down to a fraction of his initial offers.
Which leads to the annoying compulsion to stuff Wyvern heads into a container, then later load them onto your strongest party member to try to sell them all at once ...
I hate doing that. Countless trips upon trips upon... all to sell loot. Nowadays I tend to give myself a bag of holding for convenience, with a tweak to make it bottomless. Saves A LOT of hours of portering trips.
Not necessarily. If you play without reloads, or only reload when Charname dies, you need gold to Raise dead companions and to buy tons of potions. Also, certain roleplaying restrictions like no stealing, or no scalping, or no killing unless attacked first or such things, make it more difficult to get endless amounts of money especially in the early game.
I'm having a hard time imagining any of these reduce your income to the point that running out of money is a practical concern.
I remember the first time I played BG1, I had no idea what was expendable and what wasn't. When it was appropriate to use an item and when it wasn't.
I hoarded pretty much anything remotely noteworthy I could find in that storehouse south of Nashkel. All sorts of perfectly good equipment never sold, potions never drank, and so forth.
Now I'm in this finely tuned routine where I know exactly which battles are the premium spots to break out the consumables and what equipment I can probably let go of and so forth and I prattle on about how the game gives you this overwhelming surplus of resources, not considering that a portion of that is to allow the player to use them inefficiently. There's many health potions so that if you use them in the "wrong" battle you're not boned for the rest of the campaign for example.
So you're burning all your money on expensive exploits. Alright, that makes a LOT more sense.
I've never understood why recharging wands is seen as an exploit. They're magical items, why shouldn't you be able to go back to a store that produces and sells magical items and pay a lot of gold to have them recharged? It's so expensive that I believe it was intentional.
Why else would you get several wands with only one single charge in Chateau Irenicus? Seems like a waste otherwise.
If you think it's overpowered and don't use it, that's a personal choice, but to call it an exploit while it costs tons of gold is not an opinion I share.
As to Raise dead, I did say "especially in the early game".
In some unlucky runs, I had to return repeatedly with corpses from the Cloakwood (you have been waylaid...), and once I had to actually sell equipment I was using to Raise 4 people while doing Durlag's tower. As I said, unlucky runs, but it does happen.
Kind of surprised the Nashkel store can't buy more winter wolf pelts.
If you're going through SoD, where you lose your entire gold supply after the first dungeon, hoarding resources to sell off at SoD's Sorcerous Sundries and Nazramu is very profitable, and there are a lot of important resources worth hoarding in SoD. The coalition camp invasion can be really sticky, as can the siege at Dragonspear Castle and the final battle.
There are ways of avoiding certain fights (run straight to Ashatiel to avoid the siege), or winning them cheaply (Webs and Skull Trap scrolls for the coalition camp), but they're not for everyone, either due to party composition or roleplaying preferences.
BG1 and SoD gameplay is VERY item-heavy, more so than in SoA or ToB. I always end each game with a huge gold surplus as well as a lot of unused items, but that's because I tend to grab every little resource I can. A player who doesn't go to the right loot drops, whether due to RP concerns, trying not to metagame, doing a minimalist run, or just not wanting to bother with the time, will have more strained resources.
Your playing style is the primary determinant of your money needs.
I died before the final siege.
I dual class Safana in BG1 to Mage by use of the Tome so I have 1 more fire wand user than I normally could.
Desperate situations call for desperate measures.
The alternative is to remove the level cap which I am loathe to do.
Oh, and where, may I ask, you can find the godbow in the game, other than when you use the console?
They're not rare in BG1 - almost all types of wands can be bought freely. That suggests to me that the developer intention was not to limit their use by restricting the number of available charges, but through a trade-off with the resources required to purchase them.
There's a note in chateu Irenicus where Irenicus wonders on the kind of sacrifice it took to obtain such a weapon. The game recognizes it on import, so it clearly is intended by the devs to be consoled in during BG1 at some point.
Besides, Arvia's point above was that since wands have a price attached when recharged, they must be intended. I simply applied the same logic to another exploit.
Godbow is not an exploit. It is a tool, made by Beamdog, for testing purposes. It was never intended to be used in an actual, non-test run, playthrough.
Trent Oster Dec 1, 2012
"We used killswords back in BG2 for testing speed runs. Godbows are way cooler in #BGEE . #EnemiesGoBoom "
https://mobile.twitter.com/trentoster/status/274764797986369536
The idea, as it's been explained to me, was that the developers who had to make sure everything in the game worked as intended, were not necessarily supremely skilled gamers themselves. So they discretely placed little items like that here and there to make things easier on themselves, and then left them in the final product as little secrets for observant fans to find.
Do we know if there's any truth to that?
My point was not that they must be intended because they have a price tag. My point was that the very high price to rebuy them, in contrast to the very low price when selling them with few charges, makes it a fair trade and therefore either implies purpose or is enough of a justification for me to use that function without giving me the feeling that I'm cheating.