The (non-official) handbook to the Iliac Bay: Exploring Daggerfall

A very useful guide for the world of Daggerfall, with useful tips and tricks for your roguelike adventure

Introduction

Daggerfall is an old game which has stood the test of time - while many other CRPGs of it's nature like Ultima and Arena fell out of favor for later games, Daggerfall has persevered due to the legacy of the Elder Scrolls franchise and the sheer depth of the game's content. First and Foremost, this game is not easy at first; you will struggle through the first dungeon if you do not know what you're doing, and you will possibly die many, many times if you don't understand your character strengths well.

This guide attempts to cover the basic tips of gameplay, and then attempts to give a walkthrough of the various types of quests, finally delving into the nature of dungeons. Yes, Dungeons are a large part of this game and will be the bread and butter of your playthrough, so is it important to understand the structure of one and the types. This guide will be regularly updated, and remember to notify me for any mistakes or content to add.

Now, my champion, rest well this night, for tomorrow you sail for the kingdom... of Daggerfall

Installation

For many users, it is important to read a guide on installing the Steam version to work seamlessly with Daggerfall Unity, as that has more replay value than the vanilla game (and fixes many bugs).

For those who want to enjoy the original Daggerfall, then there are three methods to do so:

• Original Hardware
  
• Dosbox
  
• Daggerfall Setup

Original hardware

This is probably the most masochistic and pointless option of them all, but I'll include it anyways because It delves into interesting insight: Daggerfall was designed for Native DOS or Windows 9x-based DOS, however the system requirements are extremely high for the era - a 486 will be painfully slow whereas a Pentium would be much more acceptable (The actual manual explains more on this). On the other hand, Daggerfall can work within Windows XP but has various glitches and issues, which is why any guide describing running the game on XP recommends you to dual boot MS-DOS to actually play it. Of course, this sounds ridiculous but it was also how many people played the game as DOSBOX was extremely intensive for Windows-XP based computers. Regardless, if you want to run it on Original hardware, then make sure you know what you're doing. The CD-ROM installer has exceptionally slow copy times, so it might be worth it to just copy over the /DAGGER/ directory to the computer you want to play it on. Finally, if you have installed the game from a USB or other removable disk, you will need to edit the z.cfg file to make sure your dfcd directory is also correct - and then run fall.exe z.cfg (fall.exe is a base executable with z.cfg introduced as a command line argument). This is assuming you have a CD with the installer burned onto it.

Dosbox

Becoming immensely popular during the mid 2010s, this was how many people played Daggerfall before the Unity port was fully functional. There are various tutorials on how to run the CD-version and install it but the gist is that you go through the install within Dosbox and then set your memsize to 64 (64MB of ram should be perfect for the game), while enabling the cycle speed to be around 45000. This will give you a pretty solid experience with little hitches or interruptions.

Daggerfall Setup

Daggerfall Setup is the recommended way to enjoy the game, and was the standard for many people who wanted a more immersive experience. Daggerfall Setup is a self-contained installer which installs the game and adds various patches, including additional mods like the compUSA patch and the eye of Argonia (Which increases the view distance). You can download it here: https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN

Important Resources and Links:

Here is a list of resources for Daggerfall which you might find useful. Please notify me for any errors or website outages.

Gameplay:

Daggerfall Wiki: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Daggerfall
Manual: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Books:Daggerfall_User%27s_Guide#Links

Patches

Andyfall: https://en.uesp.net/file.shtml?dagger/files/andyfall.zip
Daedrafall: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall_Mod:Daedrafall
Eye of Argonia: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall_Mod:Eye_of_Argonia
Important Patches: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files#Official_Patches_and_Utilities


Mods:

Daggerfall Unity Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity


Source Ports:

DaggerXL (now Abandoned): https://github.com/luciusDXL/XL-Engine
Daggerfall Unity (RECOMMENDED): https://www.dfworkshop.net/
Daggerfall Setup: https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN


Community:

DFU Fan-Discord server: https://discord.gg/W4gbuqyf6N
DFU Forums: https://forums.dfworkshop.net/
USEP Forums: https://forums.uesp.net/viewforum.php?f=2

Tips and Tricks

Before we delve deep into this guide, here is a list of tips and tricks you can use to help lighten your experience:

Controls/Camera:

1) To use mouselook, you can pause the game, go to controls, and then select the small mouse tab at the bottom. There, you can switch between cursor-based movement (i.e Ultima-styled movement), or a more modernized "mouselook" style. Mouselook is well suited for this game, and does not warp when you attempt to look up like many other FPS games of it's era, therefore making it optimal for gameplay.

2) In the event you want to use cursor-based movement, then holding ALT will allow you to mouselook and check your surroundings (i.e like classic quake). This only applies to the DOS version, so don't bother with doing this on daggerfall unity.

Gameplay:

-Always remember to save often. remember, have one quicksave for each particular scenario:

• For when you are exploring the overworld with no quests being done
  
• For when you are within a quest which has alot of steps
  
• For when you are in a dungeon
  
• For when you are poisoned

-If you use weapons which are not suited towards your primary skills, then you will most certainly hit far less effectively with them. To maximize your damage, always use the weapons which your character is suited towards. For example, if your character is exceptionally well-handed at blunt weapons, then use maces and staffs primarily (as they will do more damage, and as you level up, you will increase your stats, thus making it much easier to use them).

-If you need extra money, you can sell off armor and useless items you find to a pawnbroker. Pawnbrokers are found in most major cities in the lilac bay, and they accept nearly anything.

-The first investment you will buy is a horse, then a cart. Always save up for a horse so you can move faster through towns, and then buy a cart for storing extra junk you don't need.

-When generating a character where you're asked different questions, make sure you select the ebony dagger option to get it in your inventory when you start your playthrough. This Item is notoriously overpowered for the early game, and can deal damage against magical enemies. It makes a great weapon for assassins.

-For dialogue, always stick towards using the "Normal" option. "Polite" and "Blunt" are only reserved for particular individuals of a higher ranking, and when used on commoners will lead to sarcastic replies.

-All stores have a rating based on their wares, and you can actually see this indication through the dialogue message shown when you enter.

-Stuff like Talismans, Holy Tomes, and Lanterns are completely worthless gameplay-wise (unless you use daggerfall unity, which then lanterns do indeed work), and can be sold for a reasonable price. It can be implied that Bethesda wanted Lanterns to be used for actual lighting, but due to deadlines this was never implemented.

-Books, when you have them on your starting character, can be sold for a generous amount - besides this, alot of the books are long-standing in the elder scrolls lore and have been canonized over the decades of related installments. Therefore, If you want to know where the lore stems from, then read the books.

-When Entering a dungeon, make sure you save at the start, and if your character is magic-based, then place an "anchor" spell to make sure you can quickly exit.

-Always be wary of underwater regions in a dungeon, as they are notoriously difficult due to containing underwater creatures (and yes, they are nigh deadly). Make sure you save before diving in- and remember, your armor will encumber your swimming skill.


-Joining any knightly order (such as the Knights of the Dragon) will give you free lodging in that order's region, which can help save money when fast traveling to dungeons. If you go to the highest rank in that faction, then this perk extends to other regions.

-Dungeons are the hardest areas in the entire game, requiring concise exploration and spelunking to completely conquer them. Many were simply randomly generated via presets and therefore can have a pattern, but such a pattern is extremely hard to find. Just remember a few things:

• Even if dungeons are multi-block structures with no coherent structure, you can still attempt to use the "left hand technique" in maze-solving to find what you're looking for. But be careful, as you will probably get stuck one way or the other.
  
• Each dungeon reuses the same prefabricated rooms, then generated in a data structure known as a block. You can actually view these blocks individually within the game files, thus giving a general idea as to what most dungeons can look. All dungeons have a 2d matrix of blocks, with no vertical ones appearing, and each block contains 2 entrances/exits.
  
• Most blocks tend to have a general theme within them. Some are massive rooms with setpieces like an underground cavern, or are mazes of caves with underwater segments. The key here is that almost always, a block has a theme which can vary from level to level, but do not be fooled by the name of the dungeon being an indicator for it's structure - this is almost always false.
  
  
• All main-quest dungeons are entirely handcrafted. You can easily find what you're looking for by searching a walkthrough, which makes the entire process a breather. Some, like privateers cove, are actually contained within one custom block as they don't need random level generation.

-Some dungeons have secret doors which are otherwise completely hidden - you can find these either through the minimap (which they show up as a door), or through blind clicking.

-Some more "magical" dungeons have strange candles or altars which you can click on - as said, these allow you to teleport to different areas of the complex. Additionally, some dungeons have doorways with walled-in bricks which act as portals.

-All dungeons are classified by their type, which determines which enemy spawns are used. For instance, a Crypt will contain Animals and Undead enemies, while a Laboratory will contain Atronarchs and Daedra. However, this doesn't determine the appearance of a dungeon, meaning that a dungeon labeled as a "cave" may contain castle-styled blocks.

-You can tell dungeon types by their name (The Agryn Prison, Bedard Laboratory, etc), and their enter messages when you fast travel to the location. However, these messages are hard to read as they vanish for a few seconds.

-PLAY. THE. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. TUTORIAL.

Understanding the Gameplay Loop

Daggerfall has a quest-based gameplay loop which is driven by player independence and stat boosting. We can divide the quests into different "phases":

For most quests (Unless they're temple quests), you have a very basic loop which can be divided into 4 bullet points:

• Go to NPC of Guild/Random
  
• Get Quest, go to X location to kill Y enemy, or find X artifact in Y location
  
• Enter said location and find artifact / kill monster
  
• Go back to NPC and get quest reward

All your quests will revolve around this system, meaning that the majority of your journey will continuing and ending various questlines to gain equipment and loot. So without further ado, let's talk about where to find these quests, starting with guilds.

All about guilds:

Guilds allow you to do these sorts of quests in order to advance within their society, which allows you to get:

• Better prestige among other members of the guild/temple
  
• Special magical items like potions, soulgems, enchanted items, and spells.
  
• Summoning Daedra (Temples and Mages guild only, and yes you can meet the famous ones from Morrowind)
  
• Houses to live in

It's important to also note that all guilds allow you to repair items and sleep for free, while temples allow you to be cured freely. You can additionally make donations to the temples which can increase your rank within their society - but this doesn't give you much advancement overall.

Guild Quest Types:

Guild quests are typically divided into various categories, such as:

• Dungeon Crawling
  
• Killing Creatures or People
  
• Delivering an Item

All three quest-types share the same format: You must go to a randomly generated location or homestead which may be within the current city you're in, and then find / kill / retrieve an item the questgiver needs. It only gets complicated with Temple and Later-Stage guild quests where you will oftentimes gather a 'false lead'. In these scenarios, you might get to the dungeon, only to find the item and see that it's a fake: This will require you to backtrack and check other locations which the questgiver mentioned.

In some quests, you might need to ask civilians about a particular topic to get clues on where your next goal is - such sleuthing is again, only reserved for Temple and later-stage guild quests meaning this will be unimportant for Fighters Guild members.

However, almost all quests are timed - meaning if you're quest location is within a dungeon which is a month or so away, you will need to actively manage your time to make sure that you don't exceed the given quest due date.




All About Ranking:

Player ranking is done whenever you rest and your primary skills increase, from then which then the game notifies you and sends you to the character screen. Once there, you are given 5-10 more points and can spend them on your character attributes. It can be very useful for starting characters to get a few levels off of them in the first dungeon by grinding enemies, which can make it easier when you get out of the dungeon and venture forward.

As you rank up, you gain more experience with your primary and secondary skills, making it easier to kill enemies and complete jobs. The catch being that you will also face deadlier enemies, which can range from the more tankier atronarchs to the deadly and cunning daedra.


Don't fit a square peg into a round hole:

For some final wisdom: if your character is a thief then don't try to be a warrior or mage, and vice versa. You should always try to roleplay to the best to your ability, and I make this a piece of advice because games like Skyrim encourage you to juggle different playstyles to succeed - while this is fine for Skyrim (and it's not bad as an RPG mechanic), it will get you absolutely nowhere in Daggerfall.

For instance, if your character doesn't have the proper class/skills for archery, then you will not hit your targets whatsoever. Similarly, the game already restricts armors to certain classes, so you must keep this in mind when playing, and some weapons will suit your character better than others. Always keep this in mind, and sell off extra items you don't need.

Summary:

In summary, you'll find that Daggerfall has a very freeform gameplay loop - you will need to find your own fun within the systems the game provides. But, to keep it simple, we can divide it into 3 main steps:

• Join guild
  
• Complete Quests of Guild
  
• Level up and become more powerful

The Internals of a Dungeon

Dungeons are the bread and butter of any daggerfall experience, and this applies to every build you play as. While daunting, there are a couple of clever tips you can use to help alleviate the stress of finding an object through the world's hardest "needle in a haystack" challenge.

The basis of dungeons

Here is a long guide on how dungeons are created: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dungeons

Dungeons are massive underground structures with loot, enemies, and traps the player must explore to get a particular item or kill a monster. They were randomly generated during development and aren't handcrafted in the traditional sense (besides the main-storyline dungeons).

To explain how dungeons are made, we need to look at a fundamental component of every dungeon: A block (a piece of a dungeon handcrafted by the devs and then randomly arranged in an array). For example, let's look at block N0000001.RDB:


If one takes a closer look they can notice an exit on the top left and one on the very top. These exits are almost always fixed in the same places, and signal the transition to another adjacent block, which might look like this (N0000025.RDB):



To summarize, all blocks have the same points of entry, making it easier to connect them. But you might be wondering, how did they make these large blocks filled with rooms and passages in the first place? Well, when the game programmers made the dungeons of daggerfall, they took a large collection of meshes, like shown below:


And then assembled them much like you'd do with a model kit, with the exact same entry/exit points (Again, they did this by hand). For any bordering block which signals the end of a dungeon, then they do this (B0000008.RDB):







It's important to recognize that border blocks will have extraneous meshes on areas where there is no more dungeon to walk through, and this is entirely due to the algorithim they use to generate these pieces. But simply put, border blocks are quick stairwells from one level of a block to another, allowing for a user to traverse multiple floors.

When we understand how blocks work, we can then get this:



Each dungeon is made up of a randomly generated matrix of blocks, and all dungeons use the same ~500 meshes, with similar variations. You'll most certainly feel a sense of deja vu when you see pieces reused from the main story dungeons into the randomly generated dungeons you find, and this is because they are indeed reused.

To a similar extent, this means that all quest item locations are reused in the same place, with little differentiation. If you have played the game for decades, you will notice a pattern with how the game generates it's quests and where it places loot. To actually determine how to go through a dungeon however, you'll get the most mileage from dungeon crawling by slowly exploring these blocks one by one, and making acute notes of where to go next.

All dungeons aren't randomly generated again upon startup (minus loot), meaning that all the dungeons despite being randomly generated are virtually the same for every release copy since the game has been released.

Hacking and where to find questmarkers

In DOS Daggerfall this is not possible and it's better you use DaggerfallUnity to do this. In DaggerfallUnity, go to the console (`) and type in the command:

tele2qmarker

Which will teleport you quickly to the quest marker - only use this as a last resort.

Program used for viewing dungeon blocks: DaggerfallModeling, from here: https://www.dfworkshop.net/downloads/daggerfall-modelling/

[Wandering Mania]

@whodunit2004,
Yes, it's possible. I'm doing it right now. All you have to do is keep the default Steam files intact, by renaming the Steam install 'DosBox' folder to have '-backup' added or something. Then, put the DFU files in a newly created folder with the original 'DosBox' name.

[4nt]

@whodunit2004 For what its worth, you can find and download the Daggerfall installer for free on the UESP Wiki if the Steam release is causing issues. So long as Daggerfall Unity can point to it, you're good.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Files

[Tuaam]

If you name everything correctly (As in, you don't have any errors), then it shouldn't re-validate and destroy your work. I'd recommend looking over the changes you made for the steam release and be careful.

[nytesong]

When I modded my Steam Daggerfall install to run Unity, Steam saw this and over-wrote back to the default install. Is it indeed possible to enjoy the Unity version (plus mods) on Steam?

[Uncle Dead Rob Haywood V2.0]

A tip I'd like to mention: Joining any knightly order (such as the Knights of the Dragon) will give you free lodging in that order's region, which can help save money when fast traveling to dungeons. Once you're a high enough rank, that perk also extends to other regions.

[Tuaam]

Oh thanks for that, I'll put that in!

[bluemeep]

A tip I don't see mentioned often: books as starting items are great options to pick during character generation. They sell for a pretty penny when you're just getting started, so you'll have some padding in your finances.

[Infinite Pudding]

Thanks for making this guide. I think I now have a better idea of what to do.