Cheating

Chapter 11: Cheating

First I'll explain the different types of cheating, because some cheats are perfectly legitimate, depending on your reason for it.

The first type of cheating is downright cheating: Hacking your character to have 25's in every stat, 150% Resistance to everything, 900 hitpoints, all the best items in the game, etc. Everyone hates this. In fact, with BG2 you can have PC vs. PC duels over the Internet, and some people are so low as to enter the duel using two items that cannot be obtained legally, but must be cheated into their Inventory: A belt that makes them unkillable, and a sword that will kill almost anything in the game with 1 hit (and has the range of a bow, to boot). This is an excellent way to gain popularity and praise, and be universally esteemed by all.

The second type of cheating is cheating for roleplay purposes: Let's say you were doing the Multiplayer trick (see Chapter 12) to create a Lord of the Rings party, consisting of Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas & Gimli. It would be

understandable if you gave Frodo a CON of 22, to make him very difficult to kill, and Gandalf INT and WIS scores above 18, to account for his amazing Lore. Just be sure that you balance the party by paying attention to negative attributes, as well, like giving Legolas a low STR and CON, and Boromir a low WIS. In one of my Multiplayer games, I made an Elven Mage/Thief that I was roleplaying to be a short, ugly, irritating, rancid little pustule of a fellow. I hacked his CHA down to 4, whereas Elves legally can't have less than 8. (I did not put those points into his other stats�this was straight subtraction.) His sprite-set of Male Elven Thief was too tall & good-lookin', so I changed it to Male Halfling Cleric, and I gave him Quayle's voice. He was a darn good Thief and a darn good Mage�but damn, he was repulsive! It was part of the roleplay that he had a cat named "Stinky," but sadly there doesn't seem to be a way to

accomplish this (either to give a Familiar to a character who's not the PC, or to rename a Familiar). My PC for that game was a Human Thief, later to take the Assassin kit and Dual to Fighter, and I pretended he had a romantic interest in another party member, a Cleric/Mage with 18 Charisma. My PC had only 14 Charisma (due to the difficulty of rolling a good Human Thief), so it looked a little lopsided; so, when I had my PC use the Manual of Gainful Exercise, which increased his STR from 18 to 19, I hacked him 2 more points of CHA as well. The logic behind this was "His weight limit went from 200 pounds to 500 pounds. If that kind of muscle growth doesn't justify a 2-point Charisma gain, I don't know what does."

The third type of cheating is using cheats to change things that doesn't actually affect the game, or your odds of winning it: Cheating just for fun. For example, in BG1 I sometimes like go into the home of some rich noble (the ritzier, the better), and while I'm standing there on their fancy, expensive carpet, I'll CLUA in a bunch of Cows and Chickens, turning their glamorous

Reception Room into a barnyard. Or you can fiddle with your avatar (animation cells): You can edit your character to use the same avatar as an Ogre (right), and look really cool as you're bashing skulls in with your gigantic spiked Club. (The drawback to this particular avatar is that you're too big to walk through doorways. You don't believe me? Try it for yourself.) Or in BG2, you can give yourself the avatar of a Shadow Thief, just because it looks so cool: They're dressed all in black, and they have a graceful, almost balletic style of melee combat. This would look great on your Thief, particularly if he's an Assassin. Note: Play fair. The Shadow Thief sprite-set moves almost twice as fast as a normal character, and so would be the equivalent of

your character being under a constant Haste spell, which would obviously be unfair. While you're hacking yourself the Shadow Thief avatar, hack your walking speed down as well. Other interesting sprite-sets to play with include Rat, Squirrel....heck, in BG2 you can turn your whole party into a herd of Moose if you want to. (Warning: Giving non-spellcasting avatars to spellcasting characters could crash your game. The computer will look for the animation files showing a Moose casting a spell, but when it doesn't find one, it won't know what to do.)

The fourth type of cheating is cheats that do affect the game, in order to correct your own dumb mistakes. Say you need a certain key to finish a specific quest, and you had the key, but you forgot what you did with it. Hardcore roleplayers would curse themselves and be forced to give up on that quest, no matter what rewards/items they might have gained from

completing it, and extreme powergamers would hack the key back into their game after spending only five minutes looking around to see where they might have left the original key. This also includes cheats that help you in only a minor way, and are more for fun than anything else: Like giving a Familiar to a PC who can't cast Wizard spells, by hacking a scroll into their Quickslot. Things like that are still cheating, though.

The fifth (and last) type of cheating is accepted and condoned by everyone, even the strictest roleplayers: Hacking to fix bugs in the game. There are only a few bugs in BG1, but noticeably more in BG2, because BioWare was rushed to get the game completed by the deadline. I'll list some examples of bugs, and the hacking done to circumvent them:

Situation: You need to go down this certain staircase to progress further in the game. The door at the bottom of the stairs is supposed to open when you've completed this other task. The task was definitely completed correctly, but the door remains sealed fast, and you have no way of opening it.
Justified Hack: Use the CLUA Console:MoveToArea() command to teleport your party to the area on the other side of the door. Just hope you don't wind up in a huge cluster of enemies.

Situation: You Dualed your Thief to a Fighter in BG2. Now it's ToB, and you finally got your Thief half back�but the game has forgotten about all your Thieving skills! All your skills are roughly the same as a Level 1 Thief, even though you didn't Dual until Level 21.
Justified Hack: This is a known bug, and probably will happen to you if you get your Thief half back in ToB. I hope you wrote down what all your Thieving skills were before you Dualed, because you're about to open up Shadowkeeper and hack them right back to where they're supposed to be.

Situation: You need to talk to someone to initiate a quest, but for some reason, they're hostile to you. There's no reason why�you didn't attack or pickpocket them or hurt them with an Area of Effect spell�but they're hostile anyway, so you can't talk to them and start the quest. In BG1, Charm Person usually works in this case, but never in BG2. In this specific instance, however, the person is immune to Charm anyway.
Justified Hack: CLUAConsole:CreateCreature("name"). This will warp in a second copy of the person, and if you're lucky, they won't be hostile, and you can do the quest. You can even hack in the recruitable NPCs this way, but not really: If you try to save or leave a map area with a 'fake' party member, the game will crash. (BG1 will crash, anyway; I've never tried it in BG2.)

Situation: In BG2, you're fighting someone who refuses to die. You've got her at "Near Death," and your whole party is just pounding on her�she's taking hundreds and hundreds of HP of damage, but the game seems to have forgotten to tell her that she's mortal.
Justified Hack: Ctrl-Y the harpy. It might not work, though, as the computer seems to think she's invincible�in which case, Reload and then Ctrl-Y. You've already killed her legitimately�that fact that she didn't actually die is of little consequence. (Note: There is a creature in BG2 called the Empathic Manifestation, for which the behavior described above is perfectly normal. No amount of damage will kill the Manifestation, and this is not a bug, so you would not be justified in cheating your way around it.)

Well, now that you know the various reasons for cheating and not cheating, it's time to learn the How-To. The two main methods of cheating are the CLUA Console, and either Gatekeeper or Shadowkeeper (GK for BG1, SK in BG2). The Console is part of the game itself, and can be used at any time in-game: First you open up your Baldur.ini file, find the line that says "Program Options," and add the line 'Debug Mode=1' underneath it. This activates the Console. In BG1, Ctrl-Tab opens and closes the Console, and in BG2, it's Ctrl-Space. 2 examples of what the Console can be used for are

listed above, and here are a few more:
CLUAConsole:SetCurrentExp(89000) [Puts all party members at the EXP cap for BG1]
CLUAConsole:CreateItem("MISC42") [puts a Diamond into your party's first empty Inventory slot]
CLUAConsole:CreateItem("AROW01", 100) [Creates a stack of 100 normal Arrows, instead of 5 stacks of 20]
CLUAConsole:CreateCreature("VOINOR") [Creates Voice of the North, one of those chanting guys from Candlekeep]

In BG2, doing the 'Debug Mode=1' thing also activates a set of Cheat Keys: The ones I can remember are:
Ctrl-Y [Kills almost any creature under your mouse pointer]
Ctrl-Q [adds almost any creature under your mouse pointer to your party]
Ctrl-T [sets the game clock forward one hour]
Ctrl-J [selected character(s) jump to the mouse pointer]

The other primary hacking tool is Gatekeeper/Shadowkeeper. (I believe the same guy also wrote Dalekeeper, for Icewind Dale.) The Keepers are Saved Game editors: Save your game, then open them in the Keeper, and you can change pretty much everything you want. Your name, race, class, kit, gender, portrait, stats, resistances, Thieving skills, spells known and memorized, Special Abilities, natural AC, THAC0, alignment, Inventory.....anything, both for your PC and all your party members. Powerful tools, yes, but remember that power corrupts. About the only thing the Keepers can't do is create illegal Class combinations, such as Barbarian/Thief or Cleric/Bard, or a Fallen Paladin turned Chaotic Evil and Dualed to Necromancer, because the combination of Paladin/Mage does not exist (even though that would be a damn cool roleplay, and

not that different from the perfectly legal Fighter->Mage). You can play with kits, though: Either by erasing the kit on your Dualed character's 1st class and replacing it with a kit on their 2nd class (thus re-creating the Fighter->Conjurer you made in BG1), or by giving a Multiclassed character a kit on ONE of their classes. You can also put a kit on a class that wouldn't normally get that kit, such as giving a Fighter the Cavalier kit (I think all of the benefits and restrictions would be conferred just as if your character were a normal Cavalier, but you'd have to test it to make sure). You can play with your Race to create illegal Race/Class combinations, such as a Human Fighter/Mage/Thief or a Dwarven Ranger. You can also equip illegal equipment, but only for a short time; for instance, you can put magical Rings and Amulets on your Wizard Slayer, but these would be kicked back into his Inventory the next time he

Leveled Up.

My version of Gatekeeper also allows me to edit Exported *.CHR files (see next Chapter).

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