Dollaran / Prince of Hell level, no centaur toes or corpse dust dropping?

[Beccat]

Hi,

I've just killed a bunch of centaurs and a grave in the overworld, and no toes nor dust have dropped. At least I can't see any toes or dust, and the spider legs and worm slime were both very obvious to pick up.

Am I missing something? Is it bugged?

I think I've run out of centaurs to kill, so I'm a little worried I can't complete the level if there are no toes ...

[BatistaNUU]

Actually for a minute I was thinking the same thing but if you look to the right side of the screen you'll see the items, just click and drop them into the pit. Now if that isn't working then I don't know :(

[Beccat]

AHA! Thanks very much Like, A Ninja!

You were correct, they were on the right side of the screen.

If you're reading devs, I'm not sure how obvious that is ... especially since the other "ingredients" are meant to be picked up from the floor. Please could you make the centaur toes/dust being on the right more obvious?

[Ambrosius]

Actually we dropped the centaur nails and the grave dust as items in the overworld and you had to collect them with your creatures in earlier versions of the game. But during playtesting a lot of players forgot to collect the items or didn't see them - also the objects were hidden by the fog of war when no creature was near. Therefore we added those big icons on the right side of the screen especially for centaur nails and grave dust ;)

But you're right - it is not ideal this way either.

[Beccat]

Hmm, that is a tough one. Could the Hand auto-pick up the dust and toenails upon their being dropped? That was what I thought had happened at first -- went and tried to dump stuff in the portal.

Of course, I could genuinely be in the minority of people who don't see the big obvious icons xD Whoops :D

Thank you for the answer, and so quickly too :)

[Warlord]

Hmm, I saw the icons right away, but I did investigate them at the start. When clearing out spider nests, that icon would increment by one and say I had a centaur toenail (bug), but still gave one spider leg when dropped into the pit.

[Flow.Core]

Originally posted by a kitten:

Hmm, that is a tough one. Could the Hand auto-pick up the dust and toenails upon their being dropped? That was what I thought had happened at first -- went and tried to dump stuff in the portal.

Of course, I could genuinely be in the minority of people who don't see the big obvious icons xD Whoops :D

Thank you for the answer, and so quickly too :)

That's unfortunately not possible, since the dust and toenails are dropped on the outside, where there is no Evil Hand.

Originally posted by Warlord:

Hmm, I saw the icons right away, but I did investigate them at the start. When clearing out spider nests, that icon would increment by one and say I had a centaur toenail (bug), but still gave one spider leg when dropped into the pit.

Yea, sorry that slipped through, false text was linked.

[plenderj]

+1 I had picked up these items, but never noticed the icons on the right hand side of the screen

[Voldski]

Originally posted by Ambrosius:

Actually we dropped the centaur nails and the grave dust as items in the overworld and you had to collect them with your creatures in earlier versions of the game. But during playtesting a lot of players forgot to collect the items or didn't see them - also the objects were hidden by the fog of war when no creature was near. Therefore we added those big icons on the right side of the screen especially for centaur nails and grave dust ;)

But you're right - it is not ideal this way either.

Why not have everything just go into icons would make it less confusing, i had same problem till i eventually noticed the icons at right side. If all just went into icons you clicked and threw in you're more likely not to overlook the icons during mission playthrough.

I mean if something underground drop you pick up for mission, you're first instinct would always be for the same to be the case surface side, right?

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Shazai:

I mean if something underground drop you pick up for mission, you're first instinct would always be for the same to be the case surface side, right?

But since you can't pick up anything on the surface (creatures, books, etc) it makes sense you can't "pick up" creature drops.

[phroggiepuddles]

I thought I was bugged with the second set of Centaur nails... the top right icon said 0 and I couldn't find them at the location. Turns out they were hugging around my Dungeon Heart, picked up 1 and that grabbed all 5 and into the hellhole they went.

Was tricky to see, all the other excess spider legs and whatnot were in the heart as well.

[michL57]

this thread saved me for searching longer, thanks =)

[Ravenleft]

Originally posted by Flow.Core:

Originally posted by a kitten:

Hmm, that is a tough one. Could the Hand auto-pick up the dust and toenails upon their being dropped? That was what I thought had happened at first -- went and tried to dump stuff in the portal.

Of course, I could genuinely be in the minority of people who don't see the big obvious icons xD Whoops :D

Thank you for the answer, and so quickly too :)

That's unfortunately not possible, since the dust and toenails are dropped on the outside, where there is no Evil Hand.

This thread pointed me in the right direction so thanks for that :-)

I believe the reason that players miss the big icons is because the mechanic is a bit unintuitive/unexpected. You're simply not looking at that area of the screen because very little, if anything, has been going on there so far.


If the items dropped in the overworld:

I agree that it wouldn't work/make sense to be able to grab the items with the Evil Hand as it can't interact with the overworld. However, why not allow snots to travel outside and have them pick items up?

Not automatically, that would make things a bit too "interesting" with snots trying to prove themselves by attacking the hero forces and other silly things, but you could allow the player to manually command a snot to go to the overworld and have it pick up items, maybe even bodies, and then deliver them back to the dungeon.

The snots would need constant manual guiding in the overworld cause of the same abilities that allows them to find items, know where to build, where to dig, etc in the dungeon that will instead cause a sensory overload when they're out in the open. Basically, they're extremely agoraphobic so without guiding they will freeze in place. They're also restricted to areas under Evil's influence, refusing to move into areas controlled by good.

From a game mechanical standpoint the snots should have most AI along with any memory/command queues turned off when outside the dungeon. To use them the player has to have them selected and manually tell them where to go. If the player deselect them, shifts to the dungeon view or try to have them move outside Evil's influence they will stop instantly and not move again until the player again select them and give them [valid] directions. They can use portals.

There should be some kind of prerequisite to allow snots to leave the dungeon at all, the "Too Pitiful" snot research for example (that way they're always ignored so they can't interfere in overworld battles in any way...other than get killed by aoe stuff if they get too close and such).

This is only meant as a suggestion on how it could have been done in a somewhat lore friendly and non-intrusive/game breaking way if you were to have the items drop in the overworld, I don't actually expect any changes like this to be made at this stage, at least not to the base game.

[Dragon]

I don't think it's a good idea to make the game require sending snots to the Overworld only to move them to the same exact spots to which your army has already been.

There is no reason why Thalya and/or the creatures can't pick up all the same items that the snots do.

Requiring snots to do that would just add a lot of needless tedium and redundancy a.k.a. aggravating gameplay.

The current system of displaying special icons on the screen when you have special items to use is perfectly fine as is. Like the saying goes, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it."

[GhostBain]

My wont let me drop the ingredients into the hellhole, even though i have enough of both ingredients

[Flow.Core]

Originally posted by GhostBain:

My wont let me drop the ingredients into the hellhole, even though i have enough of both ingredients

Hi GhostBain, so after you pressed one of the buttons and the ingredients appeared in your Hand of Evil, you can't drop them again with a right-click? Or can you not even pick them up?