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I find that doing delivery quests is much more fun if you know where everything is in a town. So, whenever one of my characters 'discovers' a new town, I do some screenshots, query the wandering NPCs and photoshop the composite map to show the Equipment/Inn/Temple locations more clearly (in color!).

The Wiki states that each race has 8 starting towns, by experimentation I'm ending up in towns that are not listed on the wiki. The wiki also states that the town is generated when you enter it, however I've run the same character through the Imperial Dungeon from the start save, and gotten the same town. When I created another character of the same race/class but with a different install of Arena, I ended up in a different town.

There are some references in the wiki about 'building blocks' used for creating the dungeon mazes. i.e. if you do enough of them you begin to recognize the patterns. This sounds very similar to a mechanism used in the Nintendo Animal Crossing game, where parts of the map are preset, what is random is the selection of which pieces are pulled together to make a town. Identifying these building blocks seems like an interesting project.

Can someone please comment on:

1) What difference the character Sex makes in their abilities (some posters have indicated that success also depends on the sex chosen for a character)?

2) Are towns of the same name fixed in layout? Where my one character went through the blue gate twice, the town was the same name and layout. But I have not reached the same town with more than one installation yet (I have Arena installed multiple times in race/class specific directories so I can 'try them all' - example RWK for Redguard Warrior Knight).

3) Are the dungeons truly modular? Is there value in creating a tool to allow you to duplicate a dungeon outside the game.

4) Where the wiki states that there are 8 starting towns per race, are they equally random, or are they based on the sex/class chosen? i.e. will the Female Redguard Warrior Monk always get the same starter village? Is there logic to the choice or purely random.

Thanks in advance for you help!

Well, since nobody has replied, my research continued ...

I have some answers:
2) All the towns have fixed maps and Inn/Temple/Store names are pre-determined and *not* random. So, multiple characters starting at different towns but eventually visiting the same town will see the same layout. Which means that putting all 400 towns in the wiki would be useful, but tedious.

4) So far, just working with characters of the same sex, the spawn village appears to be completely random. There is nothing special about one town vs another as a choice for the first town used. I have yet to try a sample of characters of the opposite sex to see if a pattern emerges. At least with 6 male Redguard Warriors I got 6 different villages.

If all the towns are fixed... I wonder if the wilderness outside their borders is?

I've noticed entire little villages with Inns and Temples exist outside of towns. Do you think those are fixed?

I have read that the area outside the fixed villages *are* generated randomly. Normally the comment is made that the game would crash if you tried to walk from one village to another because of all the data generated and stored in the limited memory (in 1994). I have not tried to verify this yet.

At my current pace, it will be months before I leave towns again... and perhaps years before I get through Daggerfall/Morrowind/Oblivion, and eventually the Skyrim I bought that started this all, lol.

The good news is they are not MMOs, I can save and walk away without fear .

So, I was looking at the online Arena manual, and one of the tips they had was that there was a dungeon just outside Ebonheart, in Morrowind. There is in fact a dungeon straight from the city gates. Additionally, there's a lake on the east side of the city with a dungeon on it. I cannot confirm at this point, since it may just be an issue of memory clearing, but it's vaguely possible that at least some of the terrain is fixed...

I was reading the Arena:General Hints section tonight and the writer commented about the low level dungeons that spawn near each city, so their existence is known. As to whether their location is random or fixed, you could test that by using another account/character and go to that same city .. then go through the City gates and look. My guess will be that a dungeon will exist, but not necessarily in the exact same location. Take some screenshots of the 'outside the town' map you currently have and then do the same with another character and see.

Daggerfall*