Repairing Items

Unenchanted items can be repaired in a variety of places, but the Fighters Guild will do it cheaper than almost anyone if you are a member. To repair a damaged or broken item, click on the smith, click on "Repair Item" select the item to be repaired from your inventory, and click on "Repair". The smith will quote you a price and tell you how long it will take. An early bug would not let you retrieve the item from the smith or else it would disappear if you left town. These bugs have been patched.

Frankly, the only items I've ever needed to repair were weapons. No matter how battered I get in a fight, my armor is always "new", my clothing is always "new" and so forth. Weapons and enchanted items are the only things needing repair. If you do a lot of Hand-to-Hand combat, you will probably find that your Gauntlets need occasional repair.

Repairing a magic item can be a complicated process. First, you must have the latest patch (v.212 or v.213 [you don't need both]). Second, you must add the line "magicrepair 1" (no quotes and note that it is a space, not an equal sign) to your z.cfg file in the main Daggerfall directory. The z.cfg is a plain text file and can be edited with any word processor or text editor. Now that the techie stuff is out of the way, let's repair magic items.

Go to an item-maker and enchant an item, giving it the repair ability. Equip the item. Rest, rest, rest. The condition of an item appears to improve one category for each 8 hours of rest (that's an observation, not the formula). When the game selects an item to be repaired, it appears to start at the top of the inventory and work its way to the bottom. The only hitch to this is that in loading a saved game the order of the items in your inventory gets reversed so top items go to the bottom and vice versa.

If you would like to avoid this little problem, there is an alternative method. Remove all magic items you DO NOT want repaired from your inventory. Don't put them on your wagon. Drop them or store them in your ship or house. They won't go anywhere. Now start resting. By dropping the stuff you don't want repaired, you force it to fix the stuff you do want fixed and you don't really have to worry about order. Keep resting until the item(s) have been repaired. Equipping multiple items with the repair function will speed up the repair process.

Beasties and their goodies

According to the "Daggerfall" manual, "There are more than fifty varieties of adversaries you may face in the course of your adventures." By my last count, I've got 57 listed here (kind of like Heinz' "57 varieties"), so if I'm missing anything, it's not for lack of trying. I have included combat info from Bethesda's hint book regarding armor class and health. As far as I can tell, it's still accurate, except for the Health statistic, which tends to be toward the high end. My best guess would be that critter health works like level health points -- somewhere between 50% and 100% of the maximum.

A few things to keep in mind about critters and their treasures:

First, there is absolutely no relation between the type/class of critter you kill and the goodies they have when you search the body. Lamia and Dreugh (who have no legs) can be found with greaves. Thieves can be found with plate armor. Ghosts can be found with coins (I’d really like to know where they keep it). Archers almost never have arrows or bows. In other words, don’t look for logic regarding what the critter can do and what it carries.

Second, what you find on the body has a great deal to do with your Luck attribute and your level. The higher your Luck and your level, the more gold you'll find and the better your chances of finding stuff made of better materials.

Third, you’ve got to kill the critter to get its goodies. You can try to talk it out of fighting (if it has a language), but you can’t talk it out of its treasure. This would have been a great place for Bethesda to have effectively used the Pickpocket skill. Pickpocketing the critter could have actually taken items out of its inventory rather than a random 1 to 5 gold pieces.