Can't Loot

Zosimus

In the Firekraag quest, an important mage, who carries a key I need to rescue the daughter, has died. He has fallen behind a table, however, attempts to loot his corpse result in the looting character trying to see what's on the table. Some threads here have suggested some sort of a quick-loot triangle icon, but I see nothing of the sort anywhere on the screen. It is possible that I do not have the enhanced edition. Obviously I need that key. Is there any cheat code that will blast the offending table into oblivion or something? Any help would be appreciated.

joluv

The quickloot button is a red diamond, but you would probably know if you had Enhanced Edition.

If you have the console enabled, then CLUAConsole:CreateItem("key09") will generate another copy of that key.

Zosimus

I've upgraded to the enhanced edition, and I can see the loot button now. Is there a way to bring my saved game in from the non-enhanced edition version?

Tresset

That would be a very bad idea. You would be better off starting a new game in EE.

Zosimus

I have. I was going to use a character editor to at least restore the basic stats of my character, but I couldn't get ShadowKeeper to work with the Enhanced Edition. So I gave up on the paladin, and I've rolled a dwarven fighter/cleric.

Gallowglass

That's a bit harsh, @Tresset - when a player is well along in a run and heavily invested in his protagonist's campaign, receiving advice to abandon it unfinished and start over all over again is a very bitter pill to swallow.

@Zosimus - on technical grounds, of course @Tresset is right. The right time to upgrade is between one run and another, not only so that you can experience the enhanced system consistently for the whole run, but also because there are now a whole pile of new status variables stored in a saved game which relate to the additional content in the Enhanced Edition, and of course these variables won't exist in your old save. Even if you can manage to get an old save to load into the new system (I'm not certain how feasible that might be, but I hear that it can be forced to load, although it may require a minor manual edit of the savegame file), there'd probably be a distinct danger of some unexpected behaviours resulting from those missing variables not having been set to proper values. If you were really lucky, then whatever default values the game assumes for the missing variables might not totally screw it up ... but when you're in the middle of a game and have undoubtedly already passed some of the trigger points which would normally have caused new-content events to occur (if you had been in Enhanced Edition from the start, that is), there must be a significant danger that odd and inappropriate things may happen in some locations. I don't recommend risking it.

Assuming that you still have the old edition installed (which is likely since the new edition installs in a different sub-directory), I'd recommend going back to the old edition to try to complete your current run, then using the Enhanced Edition next time you play. (And yes, the Enhanced Editions are good, well worth it!)

To solve your problem within the old edition, you have a few possibilities:-

1) go back to a save before the battle with Conster and re-play until you kill him again (obviously hoping that this time he'll die in a more accessible location); or

2) a trick which sometimes worked in the old game for such situations is to try to walk a character over the place where the corpse is lying behind the table by positioning a character at one end of the table and directing him to walk to the other end of the table (not loot, just walk), then if he walks over Conster's body (rather than going the other way around the table), instantly pause the game and check that character's inventory screen to see if Conster's loot is shown as "on the ground" at your character's location - this trick requires very accurate positioning and timing, so you may have to try several times, but I remember it getting me out of trouble a couple of times in the old pre-EE days; or

3) leave Conster's corpse where it is, but instead enable the cheat console and (as @joluv suggested) use the command CLUAConsole:CreateItem("key09") to gain a replacement copy of the critical key; or

4) download Shadowkeeper (the pre-EE game editor, the EE version is called EEkeeper), a free download, and use it to add the item "key09" to your inventory ... actually I think the EEkeeper version is also meant to be compatible with the original game as well as the Enhanced Edition, but I haven't tested that. (Of course the console and 'keeper are both tools which can easily be used to cheat the game into meaninglessness, but no-one would regard it as cheating to use them to work around a glitch which ought not to have occurred, and Conster dying in an unlootable position is certainly a glitch.)

Best of luck, and I hope that one of these methods will enable you to continue your existing run. Even if you can't make anything work for you, however, failing the quest to rescue Garren's child doesn't fail the whole game, you can still carry on to a win ... although I realise that it'd be very frustrating to have to walk away with the quest permanently unfinished.

Tresset

@Gallowglass What I meant is that it is virtually impossible to import a save for a game in progress from vBG2 to BG2:EE. I didn't mean to discourage the continuation of the vBG2 game, just the import of it.

argent77

@Zosimus If the Mage's loot has been dropped very close to another container, chances are that it has been placed into that container by the game. You should take a closer look, especially if you have to scroll down a bit to see all items in the container. If that fails, I'd also suggest to use the game console to get the key.

Gallowglass

@Tresset - ah, I see. Fair enough, then. But I'm glad you've clarified this point.

Zosimus

Thanks for the advice, all of you. I wasn't really that heavily invested in the character. I had started a cavalier and had gone with Nalia to free the De'Arnise keep to get my stronghold (after some preliminaries such as freeing the circus, and returning teddy bears to dead halflings). I saved and reloaded half a dozen times, but I couldn't get the stronghold. So I came here to see what the deal was and it turns out that cavaliers don't get a warrior stronghold... so I planned to nobly return the acorns and that's when everything went screwy on me.

Nimran

I have seen that if an enemy gets killed behind a searchable object, like a bookshelf or, in this case, a table, you can simply click on the object, and the enemy's items could be found inside, beneath the container's original contents.

Gallowglass

Nimran said:

I have seen that if an enemy gets killed behind a searchable object, like a bookshelf or, in this case, a table, you can simply click on the object, and the enemy's items could be found inside, beneath the container's original contents.

In EE, yes. But the OP was playing the pre-EE game, which handles overlapping objects differently.

Tresset

Gallowglass said:

Nimran said:

I have seen that if an enemy gets killed behind a searchable object, like a bookshelf or, in this case, a table, you can simply click on the object, and the enemy's items could be found inside, beneath the container's original contents.

In EE, yes. But the OP was playing the pre-EE game, which handles overlapping objects differently.

As far as I know it works the same way in vanilla games...

Gallowglass

Tresset said:

Gallowglass said:

Nimran said:

I have seen that if an enemy gets killed behind a searchable object, like a bookshelf or, in this case, a table, you can simply click on the object, and the enemy's items could be found inside, beneath the container's original contents.

In EE, yes. But the OP was playing the pre-EE game, which handles overlapping objects differently.

As far as I know it works the same way in vanilla games...

My mileage appears to vary.