FAQ

For more advice, see Help.

General

I keep "disappearing" and teleporting to another place! Help!

This can be caused by a few things. First of all, identify all of your current gear and make sure you are not wearing cursed items. Second, hit Shift+F and make sure you are not experiencing a disease effect described as "You destabilize the space around you." Third, check your log / and make sure you did not step on a teleportation trap.

Identification costs too much! How am I supposed to do it with so little money?

Identification is actually very cheap once you know a few things:

1. There is little reason to identify most wearable items. Most of it will be junk, and each piece will set you back 300g. Instead, lug the equipment around with you for awhile. At some point, you may get a message telling you that the quality of something is "good" or "great" (Sense Quality helps quicken this process immensely). Focus on those if you need new gear (Miracle and Godly equipment should always be checked out). If you don't feel like carrying around so much crap, only pick up stuff that comes from important places, such as bosses, chests, and treasure balls.
2. Sense Quality will gradually identify all wearable equipment, although it may take some time.
3. Look for rods of identify in shops - they're usually only 100g or so per charge, depending on the number of charges.
4. Food does not need identification - so long as you have pets that haven't eaten in a while, you can set down food and walk them over it. If they don't eat it, it's cursed. Remember that food stacks with others of its type, even unidentified. If you have a stack of 15 healthy leaves another of 3 healthy leaves and another of 2 healthy leaves, odds are good the 3 or 2 leaf stack is the stack of cursed leaves.
5. Any non-wearable item identified permanently lets you recognize any other item of its type except for charges and curse/bless status. Books, scrolls, rods, and potions can sell for a great deal once identified. Initially, the selling price may not cover the 300g cost of identification, but you can sell any further such items without needing identification first. (Although not always; Once in awhile you will find the same item that has to be identified for one reason or another, such as tomes that require deciphering.)
6. Do the first part of the main quest (get to Lesimas level 3 and deliver the letter to the king) as you'll be rewarded with 2500g and a potion of cure corruption. Do not sell potions of cure corruption. They are worth 100k in shops and you can trade the potions with other adventurers for high level equipment early in the game.
7. Go grind an easy dungeon (like the Puppy Cave) or do easy quests - you'll eventually come up with goods to sell for the money, or get quest rewards that pay well.

Rogues continuously harass me and steal all my cargo and money! What should I do?

Always carry around a rod of teleportation or multiple scrolls of teleportation. Choose to "fight" them, and then teleport until you are close to the edge of the map (generally one or two teleports should do it). This will help you evade robbers should you encounter them. Also make sure that you are not traveling burdened or carrying more cargo (including food cargo) than your limit allows, as this decreases your traveling speed, thus resulting in more encounters.

How do I get a corpse to an altar without it rotting or having to hunt near the Truce Ground?

Since rotten corpses are currently considered less valuable to the Gods, the best method is simply to keep valuable corpses in the Cooler Box (See the Puppy's Cave Quest). Alternatively, keep in mind that certain towns and randomly generated dungeons have altars too. If you have a 4-dimensional mirror or know the spell version, food will never age in that pocket universe.

Eventually, with a high Weight Lifting skill, a few blessed flying scrolls, and some help from a number of equipment (e.g. Ring of Steel Dragon), you just might be able to take an altar home from the Ancient Castle or Crypt of the Damned.

My pets and I keep getting impregnated over and over!

Drink a potion of poison or dye. This will kill the alien. For your pets or other NPCs (such as town guards, etc), just Give them a poison/dye. NPCs who need it will take it, those who don't will refuse it (you can also use the interact key and choose 'Give' - or 'Inventory' for your pets). If you don't have poison or dye, you can also drink bottles of sulfuric acid - just remember to take off equipment first, since the acid can damage non-acidproof equipment.

If it's really a problem with happening very often, consider keeping some equipment that prevents aliens from entering the wearer's body, to give to your pets.

Also, carry some empty bottles for use B on wells instead of drinking (or letting your pets drink) from them, directly. It's much safer to get an identifiable potion from a well than to let the random effects happen to your character or pets (however, you'll be unable to get any wishes from wells using this method). If that's not an option, drop a junk item on the tile with the well - NPCs won't use, pick up, or eat any items when there's more than one item in a tile.

Are there any ways to train the Gardening skill faster?

The only currently known ways: Get a farm, random harvesting spots, and the harvesting quests.

Some town NPCs aren't where they're supposed to be and/or are disappearing.

The NPC is wearing cursed or doomed equipment. If you care enough to fix it, interact with the NPC and give him/her a blessed scroll of uncurse.

There's a monster in one of the towns!

This has one of two causes:

1. An NPC drank from a well, causing the "Something comes out from the well!" event. You can avoid this by emptying out wells in towns, either by drinking out of the well or filling up empty bottles from the well.
2. An NPC is wearing an item with the "It attracts monsters" equipment attribute.

Pets

My pet died. Is he gone for good?

In each town there is a pub (except for Yowyn), and in each pub there is a bartender. If you talk to the bartender, you can ask him to revive your pets.

My pets keep picking up gold. How do I get it back?

Pets will often pick up gold that lies at their feet. Currently, the only way to get it from your pet is by performing near them. This gold is not wasted, however, as pets can spend it to train their potential. Pets will not pick up gold dropped inside Your Home, presumably so they don't accidentally steal your life savings from your kitty banks.

In Elona+, you can use t a taming whip on a pet to prevent it from picking up gold. This will also prevent it from picking up ores, eating food from the ground, and drinking from wells.

How can I give my pet gold so he can train?

While there are no direct ways of dropping gold, the simplest solution is to put the desired sum of money to be given into a Kitty Bank, breaking it, and leading the pet to the square where the gold is. When you complete a job, pick up everything on the square except the gold, then displace your pet onto the square to get them to pick it up (pets will not take/eat items that are stacked). Your pet will also pick up and/or sell ores and crystals. You can also have the pet fight in the Pet Arena and they will automatically gain gold for winning fights.

In Elona+, you can go to the Doujou and pay gold directly to the doujou master to train your pets, bypassing the need to give the gold to your pets.

How do I see what my pets have trained? Is this what the informer does? If so, is the 10k a one-time-only fee, or will I have to pay it every time I want to see my pet's stats?

This is correct and you have to pay 10k every time. However, Gene Engineering also displays a pet's information when completed; buying a cheap pet and merging it with yours is a much cheaper way to view its statistics, although it requires the gene machine and the appropriate skill.

In Elona+, the investigation cost is lowered to 1K.

I tried to take back the engagement ring/amulet from my pet and s/he swallowed it!

Make sure you want them to keep the ring/amulet before you give it to them - if you try to take it back they will always swallow it angrily (destroying it) - You will also suffer a hit to relationship levels with the pet. See Engagement Jewelry for more details.

My pet casts bolt/ball spells, and they're killing me - literally!

Unfortunately, there is no way to command your pet to stop using spells, or tell them to act in any specific way for that matter without spending AP or a pet AI mod. - pick your pets wisely. Some pets come with the Control Magic skill, and others can be given that skill and train it up... but there will always be "accidents". If you can gain massive elemental resistances, that will help, but they may still fry an NPC and get guards on you.

Quests

The guy I need to deliver something to died! What do I do now?

Unfortunately, short of a Book of Resurrection, there is nothing for you to do except wait for the NPC to respawn. You will still receive the full penalty for failing the mission if you run out of time.

There's this guy in Derphy I need to find, where do I ask for directions?

There are no guards in Derphy to direct you to the person - better start searching. One thing that may help (and it works in every town) is to look in the jobs board - if you're not searching in order to get a reward from a job you did for them, chances are that they do have a job and you can teleport to them directly.

I can't take this escort quest because my party is full!

The NPCs you are escorting will count as pets for the duration of the quest. The number of pets you can have is limited by your Charisma (see article for more detail) - be careful not to fill up your party if you want to take escort missions.

Why am I being stoned to death in Party Time! quests? It's marked as green!

Performance is a tricky business - as a rule of thumb you would want to perform in crowds of NPCs that are of a lower level than level of your Performer skill. However, even the simpler Party Time quests tend to have strong NPCs in them, not to mention the tendency for Loyter to appear. Try to find the one or two cluster of low level NPCs in the room (old people and beggars are often present in the easier Party Time quests) and perform there. Just be careful of high-level NPCs wandering into earshot while you're in the middle of tooting your own horn.

Technical

It seems like a key on my keyboard is stuck when I play Elona! I'm sure it isn't my keyboard. How do I fix this?

Sometimes, Elona has trouble recognizing keyboard events. This is a known issue, and currently there are no sure-fire workarounds, short of rebooting. In the game, it appears as if a key has been held down; this can manifest itself as:

• the player character speeding through time (as if the spacebar were held)
• the player character picking up every item on the ground (as if g, Insert, or 0 were being held down)
• the player character running in a certain direction when no action is specified

This anomaly occurs most often on laptops.

Workarounds include the following:

• rebooting the computer
• restarting the game
• turning automatic NumLock toggle off in the Options panel
• pressing the key which appears to be held down
• plugging in a standard, full-sized keyboard

Elona

What is Elona?

Elona is a Japanese roguelike game created by Noa (known on the wiki as "Rfish"). With the help of some volunteers, Noa is working on translating the game into English and bringing it to a larger audience.

Elona reminds me of...

Ancient Domains of Mystery: ADOM is explicitly credited as an inspiration for Elona; so, yes, many elements of Elona are copied from ADOM. There isn't a definitive list, but the similarities are quite obvious to anybody who has played both.
 

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: The graphics for the weapons and armor in Elona are taken from the public domain RLTiles, which was designed for use in Dungeon Crawl (as well as Nethack).
 

RPG Maker: The rest of the graphics are from various RPG Maker communities; you can find a list in readme_JP.txt in your Elona directory.