The menu bar above provides several other options.
From the ‘File’ menu, you can save the game. When you select this option, you will be asked to input a name for a file in which Exile will put a ‘snapshot’ of your current position, from which you can restart later. To restore this saved position, select restore. To chuck it all and start over, select restart.
You can save the game whenever you are outside or in a town or dungeon, and are not in combat or in the middle of casting a spell, looking at something, or some other such activity.
From the options menu, you can turn the sound on and off and change your character’s names and graphics. If you select ‘Speed Up’, the delays in the game will disappear and everything will go faster. Selecting ‘Slow down’ from the same menu undoes this. The settings for the sound and speed are saved when you save your party, so you don’t need to keep resetting them.
Finally, from the help menu, you can bring up screens with quick summaries of the information in this manual.
7.2 Material Wealth:
There are three sorts of possessions you can come across:
Gold: Well, this isn’t actually literal chunks of gold. Exile doesn’t use money quite as much as the surface world. The number of gold pieces you are said to have represents the various trade goods, valuable chunks of metal, furs, and other valuable, barterable items you carry around. Anyway, whatever it actually is, it’s what you buy stuff with. You start with none.
Food: Preserved giant lizard steaks, dried mushrooms, yummy, tangy lichens, and all the other rich bounty of Exile. Every once in a while you will eat some of it, one unit for each active PC. Not having enough food results in starvation, damage, and bad things.
Items: Each PC can carry 12 objects, such as armor, helmets, tools, weapons, etc. You can do various things with these items:
Equip or Unequip: To bring an item to hand, click on it on the PC’s items page. To
unequip it, do the same. You only have two hands, and some weapons take up both
of them. You can only wear two rings, and one necklace (too many magic items
interfere with each other in bizarre ways). Beware. When you equip a cursed
item, you will need to find a healer to take the curse off.
Give: To do this, click on the yellow ‘G’ button to the right of the item. You may
then select a PC to give the item to.
Use: Clicking on the blue ‘U’ button has you use the item, for better or worse.
Most usable items have a limited number of uses (the number in parenthesis
after the name of the item, should the item be equipped). When the last use is
used, the item disappears.
Drop: Clicking on the green ‘D’ button leaves the item on the ground at your feet,
unless you’re outdoors. When you drop an item outdoors it’s gone forever.
Mass Get: Collecting the loot after a combat is time-consuming. As a time-saver, hitting ‘G’ has your party run around and collect all visible items. This only works when there are no monsters visible.
Detailed Information on Items: To find out the details on an item, hit the 'More Info' button of it's owner, then press the button by the item on the 'More Info' screen.
Storing Items: Too many items to carry around? There are rooms where items can be stored in Silvar and the Castle. It may take some looking to figure out where the items can be stored.
7.3 Magic:
There are seven levels of spells. Your characters begin the game knowing all spells up to third level. They can cast a mage spell of a given level if they have that many spell points, and Intelligence and Mage Spells skill at that level (and the same goes for priest spells). Upon casting, the character loses a number of spell points equal to the level of the spell cast, and something happens.
Spell effects are cumulative, and build up quickly. If you bless a character twice, the effect will be much more than twice the effect of one bless. When you poison a monster twice, it will do well over twice the damage the first spell would have caused. If one fear spell doesn’t make a monster flee, the next one will have a much better chance of working. Casting two light spells makes the light last twice as long.
Mage spells require great delicacy of movement to cast. For this reason, they cannot be cast when bulky armor is being worn. Priest spells, consisting mainly of shouted prayers, do not have this limitation.
To find out if an item is bulky, go the to detailed information window of the item (get to this using the owner's 'More Info' button). If the item has an encumberance value of more than 0, it will hinder the caster.
Selecting a Spell: When you decide to cast a spell, you will get the spell selection window. On this window, you need to select the caster (to the upper left), the spell to cast (from the list of spells in the lower half), and, if necessary, the PC to cast the spell on (to the upper right). Hitting 'Cast' then casts the spell. Hitting 'Cancel' allows you to do something else.
This winodw only lets you select a caster who can cast mage (or priest) spells.
If you want to cast a mage spell again, hit capital 'M'. Hit 'P' to recast a priest spell. This will have you try to cast the same spell on the same person (if it is a spell you cast on a PC). If you try this when in town or outdoor mode, the caster stays the same. If in combat, the current PC will attempt to cast the spell (and if this PC is a fighter, it won't work too well).
