Cheating

Beware: Using or even learning about cheats may change your gameplay experience. Some players find cheating to be the final frontier for a game they have burnt out on.

Wizard mode

The easiest way of cheating is to use wizard mode. The advantages of wizard mode:

• Infinite wishes.
• You can wish for most precious items.
• You can gain access to all special actions and spells.
• You can gain infinite experience, fame, and money.
• You can save and load game states using the function keys without closing the program. (These saved states persist in memory when the game is saved and opened normally, as well.)

The disadvantages:

• Auto-save is disabled, so if the game or computer crashes before you save state or explicitly save-and-quit, potentially far more progress can be lost than when playing normally.
• You'll be unable to create a gene, meaning that no new characters you create will be able to inherit any items from your wizard-mode character.
• Your alias will become '*Debug*', and you will be unable to submit your alias for other players to vote on. The voting boards have not been updated recently, as Noa has stopped working on Elona, so this is mostly a cosmetic issue. (In Elona+ this can be negated by casting Mutation and picking a new alias. However, the voting boards still have not been updated and it is not known if the new developers will do so.)
• Other players cannot see your wish or death messages, presumably to avoid spamming them with repeated wishes.

Quitting the game without saving

Called "savescumming" in the general Rogue-like community, you can Alt+F4 or click the X button to close the game like a normal application. Either way, this allows reloading of a game from an earlier save without having to live with the consequences of some events, especially death. Unlike in Elona, death was often permanent in earlier Rogue-likes, thus the incentive for the technique.

The ability to save and load backup saves is considered a significant cheating method specifically because Rogue-likes depend so much upon random events and grinding for their challenges. If random chance is the difference between getting miracle equipment versus getting nothing, or the game loading a dragon for you to fight versus a putit, then manipulating that random chance through methods outside the gameplay itself can be considered cheating.

Savescumming can be used to re-roll random and semi-random events. The list below is not a complete listing of the random events in the game, only a few common examples.

• Outcomes while dreaming.
• Performance in some quests (Harvest, Party Time!, etc.).
• Results of materials crafting, cooking or pickpocketing.
• Fountains.
• Mutations.
• Ether Disease.
• Death, as mentioned above.
• Generated monsters and their loot, including random dungeon bosses.
• Shopkeeper inventories (which are reloaded when speaking to them for the first time after several days).
• Offspring generated on a Ranch, which are selected while the screen is loaded after enough time.

You can use the Esc key and select 'Save and Quit' to save at any location, or read a scroll that saves the game, such as Gain Material or Wonder. Save before drinking from a fountain, for example, close the game if you don't like the results, and you can get wishes, mutations, or stat increases with no negative effects.

Many events in the game force an autosave without prompting a player for key input. Most notably, when you are receiving quest rewards, receiving materials from any source (including the random event), entering a town, dungeon, or other non-wilderness location, or opening a container or buried treasure. Many of these happen specifically to prevent savescumming by updating your save to make you reload at the point just after.

Because Elona is a PC game, however, even this can be circumvented if you copy and paste your save folders to a safe holding location to create a backup, and overwrite autosaves with bad results by pasting in the backup saves. It does, however, add a layer of tediousness to the process that may discourage players from trying to savescum for trivial things.

EloScummer

EloScummer automates the savescumming process discussed above. It also allows you to manage 7-Zip archives of save files (great for testing/backup purposes). In addition, it monitors the art.log file and can alert you to generated artifacts - once the game saves, that is.

EloScummer was hosted on the Elona forum, but since the forum is offline, EloScummer is now hosted on Dropbox.

EloScummer 5.3 at Dropbox

Source code written in AutoIt Script language

Note 1: The author of EloScummer [ coopatroopa on Wikia, milon from the old forum ] herein gives full permission to use, disassemble, modify, etc the source code of EloScummer.

Note 2: EloScummer 5.3 is compatible with Elona+, and should be compatible with other variants too. When loading EloScummer for the first time: 1) Make sure your Elona game is running, then 2) Run EloScummer and 3) Change the filetype drop-down menu to look for All Executables (*.exe) and point it at your Elona game.

Note 3: EloScummer is mostly compatible with Wine (Linux users only). This was tested on CentOS 7 (64-bit) with Wine 1.8.6 (32-bit). Some of the timer functions and focus-restoring functions don't seem to function properly, and other issues may exist too. Your mileage may vary, especially with different distros or versions of Wine. 7-Zip was not tested, so archive save/restore status is unknown for Linux.

Inventory item duplication

This is a method for duplicating any item (or stack of items) which you can hold in your inventory. You should backup your save directory before trying this, in case you mess anything up. (NOTE: it might be easier to instead use EloSnack to increase the quantity of an item, especially if you want to increase the quantity by a lot).

1. Make sure whatever item you want to duplicate is in your inventory.
2. Save and exit the game.
3. Go to the directory <Elona-install-directory>\save\sav_<Character-name>, find the file inv.s1, and make a backup copy of it to another directory.
4. Restore your game, drop the item you want to duplicate, then save and exit the game.
5. Go back to the character's save directory, delete the inv.s1 file, and replace it with the older backup copy.
6. Restore your game again. There should now be one copy of the item on the floor under you and a second copy in your inventory.

Resetting a town or level

If you're on top of a town or the stairs leading to a level, you can reset it by doing the following: hold down the Backspace key, and while holding it hit Enter, then answer 'Yes' when it asks if you want to initialize the room.

• For towns, this will replace all of the small medals, lock and refill all of the safes, revert altars to their initial alignment, restore all dead town NPCs, remove all non-town NPCs, and reset the shop rank of all of the town's shopkeepers (thus wiping out any investment you had in those shops). Note that this does not reset any quests you get in the town, nor will it refill the holy well in Noyel (the variables for those are stored separately from the town file). This may make a quest impossible, as the target NPCs will no longer exist. If a quest NPC has died, use a book or spell of Resurrection to return them instead.
• For dungeon levels, it will make it as if you had visited the level for the first time, including regenerating random levels.
• This can also be done to floors in your home (including the ground floor) by standing on the stairs that lead to the level you want to reset.

Uses you can put this to:

1. Endless safes to open and endless altars to convert (assuming the town has no shops you've invested in). You can convert all the altars in The Truce Ground and then reset it.
2. Regenerate the first level of the Pyramid to generate another speed ring, one which might have better stats than the one you originally found there.
3. If you've found a random dungeon of a danger level which you wish to grind, generate endless fresh levels in that dungeon, like with the Puppy Cave, but you get to control when the level is regenerated.
4. Regenerate the bottom level of a random dungeon, so you can beat another dungeon boss.
5. in Elona+, if you've already used the King Heart dropped by <Frisia> the Cat Queen or the Magic Heart dropped by <Azzrssil> the Impure, you can reset their Fort of Chaos to bring them back to life, so you can defeat them again.
6. Eliminate summoned monsters from a town. Note that in Elona+ summoned monsters in a town will automatically vanish after a few game days.
7. Eliminate all alien kids on map and end pregnant status on town NPCs by erasing and recreating them.
8. Recreate a floor of your house to initialize layout, update item limit caused by generating the floor under a cheaper house type, or fix crash errors caused by too many monsters spawning around the stairs. Remember to collect all items on the target floor before doing so if able, else they will be lost forever.

Map editor

The map editor lets you change non-random levels before they're loaded into a game. Ways to use this for cheating:

• Create items and monsters, without using wizard mode. Simply add an item/monster to a non-random level and pull the "resetting a level" trick listed above. If you want to do this often you should put a storage house somewhere convenient and keep it empty, so you can use that for resetting.
• Make changes to your home before reading the deed for that type of home (or change the cave before starting a new game):
  • Add some more rations to the cave if you're having trouble getting started, or add some healing potions.
  • Put water tiles in your house for houses cheaper than the cyber house, so you can go fishing.
• Make changes to your home AFTER reading the deed. The changes will affect floors that haven't yet been visited or if they have been visited they can be reset with the method described in the above section. You can then do things like adding monsters to certain floors that won't be removed after a few days like summoned monsters (in E+), or customize/standardize the appearance of floors more easily than with the in-game level editor. Monsters added this way will not respawn naturally if they are killed and shopkeepers (that can sell and buy things) cannot be added this way.
• Make permanent changes to towns:
  • Add more fruit trees, for eating or for cooking quests.
  • Put an unaligned altar and/or casino machine in every town, for the sake of convenience.
  • Replace the ovens and food makers in inns/bakeries with barbeque sets.

EloSnack

EloSnack is a program which lets you edit game save files. Using it, you can change pretty much anything about any item in your inventory, change lots of things about the PC, and change slightly less stuff about NPCs (including your pets). Slower but safer and easier than memory editing (see below).

Memory editing

Memory editing is a method of cheating which involves making real-time changes to a currently running game. These changes include everything listed above, plus ways to modify game logic.

Though memory editing is the most flexible and versatile method of cheating, it is also the most difficult. You should see if EloSnack can do what you want before trying memory editing.

Moongate Abuse

Several moongates have a large amount of gold, luck giving items, or unlimited wishing, some of which can be used and brought out and used in game.

Recovering saves

 

*First make copy of your elona folder in other drive if something goes terribly wrong in  recovering save**

When you open your game all the information about the map your character is in  is stored in your 'tmp' folder.

Information is in s2 format and all files have a number corresponding to the area.

for example :in my game files related to Vernis map have [type of data] _5_101.s2

example sdata_5_101.s2

If something breaks terribly in your game for example all your storage houses reset and items get deleted and you don't have any usable backups.

Use any recovery software to try to restore your saves. If its not possible to restore all parts of your saves . Try to restore .s2 files from your 'tmp' folder its in your elonaplus folder.

Make a copy of your current save. In the copied save replace '.s2' files which are  needed (those containing lost items or allies )from the recovered files.

example

If you had dropped some items and allies to train in  Doujo

and the Doujo reset so you lost all items and allies.  Find code of Doujo. For me it's '  _67_101' replace all files in your copied save containing  '_67_101' in their name with those from recovery containing  '_67_101' in name and extension'.s2'  .

Load the copied save pickup all items and take all allies out of Doujo. Now these allies are stored in your cdata.s1 and sdata.s1 cdtan.s1  .  Items are stored in inv.s1.

copy these files (cdata.s1 ,sdata.s1, cdtan.s1and inv.s1) to your original save .If only items are lost you only need to copy inv.s1.

Open original save folder and paste these files there. If it asks to replace then select yes.

Now on loading your original save you would have lost items in your inventory   and also pets.