The Call Of House Hardabar.

After your adventures in Khartum Mountains, you wanted to take some rest. You remember your uncle proposal: come visit him in his castle in the Malanian Empire.
Get your stuff, call your fellow companions and let's start your trip. The journey will be long ...

------------------------------------------------------
Prelude:

Before anything else, this mod is realy, realy, realy insanely big, unfotunately it is also long to load.
You wan't to finish a mod quickly? This mod is not for you. You have been warned.
Passing this limit is strictly forbidden to unprepared player.

------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
You will need to play the mod with texture quality set to low or you won't be able to save and get an error message. To avoid that, there is also the possibility to increase memory management
by allocating more memory to window users with the 4Gb patch, which can be found at: http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

(Note that even if you have a 64 bit os, you 'll have to do that, as the grimrock application is a 32 bit application. Mac osx users do not need do to do anything of that.

Make a copy of your grimrock executable, then patche the original grimrock executable. You can alway get back your original executable then, if needed.

After doing that, the game runs well, with full graphic details.

That solution is greatly recommended.

------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT SAVING TIME:

House Hardabar is a long mod and has tons of objects to save.
The save takes generally 4-8 seconds.

You can slightly improve this by removing the savegames that you don't need from the save folder, including saves from other mods (You can move them into another folder).

Also, in the very late mod, a friend of mine reported game crash when using the quicksave, or even after playing a long time without saving, and using the save menu from the game menu.

The quicksave seems to use more resource than the save menu from the game menu, so in this way it is better not to use the quicksave but the save from the game menu.
Nevertheless this doesn't resolve the crashes after a long play without saving. The only way to avoid this is to reduce the texture quality in the game preferences.
This is realy for the late game. There isn't any report of savegame crash before. By late game I mean when you're coming to the end of the mod, in the last part.

------------------------------------------------------
CINEMATICS:

You will encounter a few cinematics, NEVER press the escape key (to go to the game menu) while in a cinematic. Because the music will be desynchronised from the cinematic.
It doesn't do any crashes.

------------------------------------------------------
PARTY:
Recommanded party for regular player: level 1, normal difficulty.
For beginner player or if you don't want too much challenge, level 1, in easy difficulty.

The party should imperatively be composed of four character!

As the mod is very long, the average playtime is about 100-120 hours.

It is not needed to explore all levels to finish the mod, in fact there is sometime the possibility (alongside the main quest) to pass some of the key levels, area, bossfight...,
with secrets, but it is strongly recommanded to explore, if not all, most of them, since valuable things (such as powerful artifacts) can be found in each of
these place - it would be a shame to ignore them, don't you think?

------------------------------------------------------
SHOPS:
There are shops where you can buy items, or sell items. Most of the currency used can be found in secrets.

In the shops, when you want to sell something, NEVER, NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER sell the sack or wooden box that contains item(s), put the item(s) directly on a selling alcove.
If you put a sack with items within, the script will only give the price of the sack and you will loose permanently the items within.

On the other hand, if you want to permanently destroy some unuseful items, like old notes, maps, questnotes, or any unsellable items that are no longer required, you can put them into container like sacks and
destroy them by selling the sack.

------------------------------------------------------
SPECIAL ITEMS:
In the mid-mod you will have the possibility to sacrifice some of the epic items (except for a few, most of armor's part cannot be sacrified), for experience and a few items as rewards.
Those items regroup epic - legendary or even mythical items, tough some mithical and legendary items cannot be sacrified.

There will also be item marked has QUEST items, those are important to finish a quest and shouln't be dropped.

Then a last categories of items, those are few but are important for some late action, they are only noticed as (very)important in the description of the item.

------------------------------------------------------
SURVIVING:
You will need to feed your party with food and water.

If you got a negative condition, like bleeding, you must use special bandages to remove the bleeding. An healing potion won't remove the bleeding.
For instance, you can have burning, that deals fire damage, which can only be cured by waiting or by casting a fire shield spell, if you got it.

------------------------------------------------------
PNJ (NPC?): During your journey, you will meet people that will give you a quest: for instance asking you to retrieve something for them - it can be done (once the item found) by clicking
with the right item directly on the NPC.

Some of the doors do not act like normal door, for instance with a button or chain, you need to click on the door to enter the area (or open the door).

------------------------------------------------------
FORGES AND OTHER POSSIBLE UPGRADES:
You will have the possibility to forge some items, with various crafting components, that can be found, or bought, or even be as reward from a quest.
Special items may have upgrades, which are made with power gems.
Very special items can be upgraded/forged with power gems or other type of power gems.

------------------------------------------------------
BOSSFIGHT:
Some bossfight can become challenging, specially if you're not yourself an expert at combats. TIP: as always, the forcefield spell will be of a great help in this particular battles - don't forget to use and overuse it!

I can't tell if the mod is easy or hard, but my goal was to do an hard mod and of course long mod.

I can only recommend to start the mod in hard for those who want more challenge, though the mod was never tested in hard mode.

Following the main quest, you will encounter many bossfights, and some sideboss related to secondary quest or not.
The sidebosses has been made harder than the main quest's bosses.
If you still want to try them but fail, try to come back later with better equipment.

Personnaly, I have tested it in normal difficulty, without cheats.

------------------------------------------------------
LOADING TIME:

The mod is long to load, depending on what configuration you use. e.g: on a hdd/ssd with a intel core I7 7700k the loading time is about 80-85 seconds
(Textures quality set to high and other graphic options to full quality).
The loading time will increase later in the mod, because of unspawned objects by 10-15 sec.

------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT:
About cheats: That's up to you if you want to use some cheats, I got no problem with that, if its cheats like spawning items etc... BUT if you try to teleport the party (for any reason),
NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, save over you good savegame.
Teleporting the party can have critical issue as you may walk on invisible trigger that check scripts, scripts that can chek something on a level that you should have to do but you didn't do because you teleported yourself.
You can crashes the game in that way.

------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT (BIS) related to forges/upgrades:
This is related to spawning items from the console. Maybe there is possible to get the correct id name of the item (by guess) and spawn them in the console.

NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER try to reforge/enchant/upgrade a spawned (with the console) item, if you have already forged/enchanted/upgraded the original.

By doing that you will directly cause a crash of the game, because the requirements that where used on the first time you forged the original are now missing.

------------------------------------------------------
LANGUAGE:
The mod story, dialogues, etc.. are writen in english, as it is not my native language, you may still find some faults. Nevertheless a grand part of the writings has been corrected by some testers.

------------------------------------------------------
GAME RESOLUTION:
The perfect resolution to play the mod is 1920x1080 or higher (note that an higher resolution will lower all police characters and some vital bars will be not correctly displayed)

------------------------------------------------------
SECRETS:
Look everywhere, some secrets can be hard to find, just because of a small detail.

There is 318 secrets total.
The secret list is no more available, but you can find tips about them in secrets in the mod.

------------------------------------------------------
That's all, have fun while playing the mod!

Feel free to ask for help or to post for any remarks in the corresponding thread of the game forum.

Bongobeat.