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I've currently got two characters, although for now I'm playing almost exclusively on one of them.

One thing I was doing to help level up alternate low-level weapon skills, such as Short Blade (I generally use Long Blade), was to visit the smallest "dungeons" on the map, which are the crypts shown as the darkest red squares on the map. They're useful for leveling low-level fighting skills because their size makes them quick and easy to clear, then you can exit and reenter to reset them and clear them again.

They're also a good source for farming loot, such as weapons, armor, enchanted items (if you're lucky), potions, and ingredients. And specific crypts seem to have specific types of enemies-- although the types apparently change as your character level goes up-- so they can also be a good way to improve your skills with certain enemies, such as Impish, Orcish, etc.

Anyway, while switching between my two characters, I noticed that one character has some crypts on his map that aren't on the other character's map, and vice versa, because they're among the various unknown locations which get added to your map as you find map parchments while looting.

That made me wonder if I can discover specific unknown crypts on my own by traveling overland to the area where they should be. Unfortunately, each square on the map seems to cover a large area, and either the graveyards are too small to be easily stumbled upon that way, or perhaps they don't even exist until they've been added to your map by finding a map parchment.

Does anyone know which of those possibilities is correct? I suppose I could test by trying to discover a much larger site, such as a town that isn't on the map yet-- if there even are any "undiscovered" towns like that in the game.

SeaGtGruff wrote:They're useful for leveling low-level fighting skills because their size makes them quick and easy to clear, then you can exit and reenter to reset them and clear them again.

Just for the record, I've always considered reentering dungeons a kind of game-breaking, if not outright cheating practice. Bethesda did not put literally hundreds of random dungeons in the game world for the player to repeatedly loot just one of them. And it is clear that the dungeons reset upon exit not because this was by design as a game mechanic, but likely due to technical limitations which made it impractical to store somewhere in memory the state of each dungeon as the player left it.

If you like raiding crypts, at least make pauses between entering them for them to get infested with new vermin or undead (from the game world perspective, that is).

SeaGtGruff wrote:Anyway, while switching between my two characters, I noticed that one character has some crypts on his map that aren't on the other character's map, and vice versa, because they're among the various unknown locations which get added to your map as you find map parchments while looting.

Alright, this is entirely new to me. I have always assumed that all crypt and dungeon locations on the world map are fixed, and all dungeons are hidden from the player by default, while all crypts are always visible. Random dungeon locations may be discovered by finding dungeon maps in other dungeons, but I'm not sure if I ever found a map with a crypt location. At least, I've always thought that there should be no such maps for crypts. But I almost never raid crypts for role-playing reasons, so I never paid attention to their locations.

There is a cheat in Daggerfall that should reveal all dungeons by pressing Ctrl+F1. If you play in DOSBox (which I assume you are), you'll need to modify the internal key bindings to enable this key combination (as described here), as, ironically, Ctrl+F1 opens the Key Mapper in DOSBox. You can activate this cheat for both characters and see if the entirety of dungeons and crypts is the same for both or not.

You can definitely find maps for the "secret hidden locations" of crypts and other types of smaller dungeons, such as ruins, because I find them a lot. This is plain vanilla Daggerfall, whatever the latest official version was before the CompUSA one that added extra quests, with no mods or unofficial patches, and without running under Unity.

From what I can tell by filtering out everything except dungeons, doing a screen capture, then looking at the colors in a paint program, there are four types of dungeons. The smallest are crypts and graveyards, the next up are ruins, and I'm not sure about the second-largest. I find maps to all four types, or at least to the three smallest.

It seems like the largest dungeons (which have an orange marker rather than red) are usually quest locations, and I think they might be added to your map by the quest giver without actually needing to find a map to them.

As for whether or not exiting and reentering a dungeon is "cheating" or "exploiting," I guess that's a matter of personal view. In Arena you can farm a dungeon or house by simply going up and down the stairs, since each floor gets reset whenever you reenter it. To me, it's less a question of whether or not it's an "exploit" so much as it's a question of how boring it is. I know there are similar discussions about hanging around on a particular level of an arcade game and farming respawned enemies for points, rather than getting a high score "legitimately," but I'm not playing Daggerfall in a competition, so it boils down to how much fun it is (or isn't) to keep repeating the same bit of content over and over again. And that is not only acceptable but actually embraced in MMOs where you're "grinding" for something, so I'm not sure why it shoukd be any different here.

But as I said, it's a matter of each player's personal view and preferences.

MrFlibble wrote:Just for the record, I've always considered reentering dungeons a kind of game-breaking, if not outright cheating practice.

Wow! That is the most needlessly strong opinion I have ever read about that topic. And what a hill it is, I guess? Who cares? Most dungeon delving is for quests, and they almost aways pick a new dungeon each time (unless you are in one of those tiny tiny kingdoms). So it's not like this is cheesing for the quest locations. It's just loot and skill practice... Big deal! How is it any different from resting in the wilderness to fight what wanders by? Volume, I guess. Game breaking to... gather more of the leveled loot that abounds in the game anyways?

Like, play the game you how you want to. Leave the judgements at home.

Jormungandr wrote:

MrFlibble wrote:Just for the record, I've always considered reentering dungeons a kind of game-breaking, if not outright cheating practice.

Wow! That is the most needlessly strong opinion I have ever read about that topic. And what a hill it is, I guess? Who cares? Most dungeon delving is for quests, and they almost aways pick a new dungeon each time (unless you are in one of those tiny tiny kingdoms). So it's not like this is cheesing for the quest locations. It's just loot and skill practice... Big deal! How is it any different from resting in the wilderness to fight what wanders by? Volume, I guess. Game breaking to... gather more of the leveled loot that abounds in the game anyways?

Like, play the game you how you want to. Leave the judgements at home.

As I said, for me it's more a question of how boring or interesting it is. I actually prefer to do a specific graveyard, then go do a different one, then a different one, so I can see what each one is like. I decided to repeat the same ones a few times-- like, A, B, C, A, B, C, A, B, C, in a loop-- and noticed it seemed like a given crypt always has the same (types of) enemies, so I kept repeating the same one to confirm that.

Later, it occurred to me that this might be a way to increase your skill with a specific type of enemy, but it turns out that as you level up the types of enemies change as well. It might be interesting to keep track of that and make a list of which types of enemies appear in which dungeons at which character levels.

By the way, it seems like this is also true of the larger dungeons, not just the crypts.

And as far as what anyone considers "cheating" or whatever, I think we all have our own ideas about what we think is "okay" for us. For instance, I tend to disagree with the practice of saving your game before you check a pile of loot and then keep reloading until you get something you like. On the other hand, I won't hesitate to save before casting a spell that has a low chance of success and then reloading until I succeed at casting it-- at least, not if I'm in a situation where I can't rest to restore my power and try again, such as if enemies are nearby or I'm on a tight time clock for a quest.

Jormungandr wrote:

MrFlibble wrote:Just for the record, I've always considered reentering dungeons a kind of game-breaking, if not outright cheating practice.

Wow! That is the most needlessly strong opinion I have ever read about that topic. And what a hill it is, I guess? Who cares?

Hey, apologies if that sounded harsh! It was not my intention to offend anyone

I brought this up because Daggerfall has a lot of undocumented features, so to speak, and at the same time it has a lot of unintentional exploits. I started playing the game back in the early 2010s mostly out of curiosity, because in the mid-90s, when the game was new, I was completely alien to RPGs as a genre (I remember my classmates playing mostly Diablo, Might & Magic and Fallout, none of which seemed interesting to me). I would slowly get "into" role-playing, and even though I do not have such a vivid imagination as Jay_H in this creative playthrough, I appreciate the fact that Daggerfall gives the player so many opportunities to create and live in their own world, even though not all playing mechanics are perfected in the game and there are outright bugs, glitches and various exploits.

Roughly in the same time period when I started playing DF, I also introduced myself to various roguelikes, and again, while I never got to become a good player, I picked a lot of interesting concepts, including "conduct" from NetHack, which is self-imposed rules and behaviours followed by the player. I realised that DF also requires that the player follows a certain conduct to become what I believe to be a proper roleplaying experience, maintaining a certain degree of suspension of disbelief.

For example, early on I would abuse the glitch that forces NPCs to mark a location of a place on the player's map if you spam the same question about it, without realising that a) you're supposed to ask for directions until you get close enough to the location, upon which an NPC will mark its location on the map, if asked, and b) you can identify the location yourself by looking at it in info mode. Once I figured out the right behaviour -- which is not obvious of itself as I distinctly remember that I discovered the spam question glitch on my own, without looking it up in a guide or somewhere -- I decided to stick with it, while this approach also helps train your speech skills if you feel like it.

The more I got into the game, the more I'd discover of these little idiosyncrasies here and there, and tried to consciously avoid anything that I felt would break the immersion/suspension of disbelief for me. This also included pickpocketing animals and/or pickpocketing any enemy during combat (although it's a lot of fun), the Create Item spell and a few more other exploits or unintended laxness in game logic that reduces the feel of realism/breaks the illusion for me. This includes resetting dungeons, which I view as some kind of "necessary evil" which arose from technical limitations of the 90s, rather than due to developers' oversight, and try to avoid unless absolutely necessary.

I will never argue that my own playing style, which I developed from trial and error (and my own ideas what role-playing should be like), is a must for everyone or inherently "objectively" "right" or something. That would be absurd. But, as someone who came all the way from a complete RPG newbie to a more or less regular player, I think these ideas are worth mentioning, if only for others to argue with me and state their own opinion. I'm simply not a fan of mechanistic approach to RPGs. For the same reason, I never really liked it how Morrowind shows a lot of its inner workings to the player just as a matter of fact. Like, how many more time you need to jump/swing the sword/cast spell to increase your skill, or the exact figure of how worn your items are etc.

Jormungandr wrote:How is it any different from resting in the wilderness to fight what wanders by?

Well, I don't usually rest in the wilderness specifically with the intention of attracting an encounter, but at least this seems to be easier explained from the in-game world view (e.g. you knew where a monster/animal was sighted and went there to ambush it) than instantly resetting dungeons.

Jormungandr wrote: Like, play the game you how you want to. Leave the judgements at home.

I don't believe this is a problem with sharing experience of how we play. I might have sounded harsh and judgemental (oh the horror!) in my previous comment, for which I apologise, but this is because, as I mentioned above, doing the same myself would break the illusion for me, big time. And believe me, without the "conduct" thing I was talking about, DF of itself routinely does a lot to break it. Paradoxically, its semi-realistic, somewhat-incomplete state (by which I mean the grand ideas that were never fully realised in the game, like clothing or weather that affect nothing at all) is both a great advantage and a disadvantage when it comes to role-playing. Both suspension of belief and suspension of disbelief should always be at the ready here.

Jormungandr wrote:Most dungeon delving is for quests, and they almost aways pick a new dungeon each time (unless you are in one of those tiny tiny kingdoms).

I would not completely agree here, as I found it an enjoyment of its own to set off to a random dungeon after finding a map of it, and thoroughly exploring said dungeon without any time pressure from a pending quest. I'd say this is almost the same as random dungeons in Arena which you find when walking in the wilderness (except here they are more interesting), i.e. a great way to level up and stock on loot at your own pace.

I think I found the answer to my question while searching for something else:

The player can discover new dungeon locations in one of three ways:
1. Exploring the wilderness, which can take several days with no guarantee of success.
- Receiving a message which means you are close to a dungeon will unlock it for fast travel, and it can be traveled to immediately to locate the entrance more easily

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

Presumably I just never got close enough to the graveyard I was looking for to receive a message about it.

SeaGtGruff wrote:That made me wonder if I can discover specific unknown crypts on my own by traveling overland to the area where they should be.

I know you seem to have already found your answer, but yes, you can walk to undiscovered locations, which I have done myself. It can be incredibly difficult. You probably want to already know where a location is, then go to the nearest already-discovered location like a town, and then try to travel toward your target in a straight line. If you miss it, try again and alter your heading by changing the exact pixel you're aiming for on your compass.

Sometimes you will even get a dungeon message like "harpy feathers are strewn all around" or whatever, and you still won't be able to find the dungeon, you just happened to walk in range of the message. I think getting a message will then allow you to fast travel to the location, though.

SeaGtGruff wrote:Later, it occurred to me that this might be a way to increase your skill with a specific type of enemy, but it turns out that as you level up the types of enemies change as well. It might be interesting to keep track of that and make a list of which types of enemies appear in which dungeons at which character levels.

By the way, it seems like this is also true of the larger dungeons, not just the crypts.

I did it a while back, in addition to coming up with some methods for training against specific enemy types:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Ene ... _Locations
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dungeons#Enemies
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Hin ... l_Leveling

Thank you! I prefer leveling up my skills manually rather than by training, and for some reason I've been encountering very few Centaurs in my quests, so I might go visit some Centaur-infested locations to help level up that particular skill.

Edit: Oops, apparently Centaurs are known for becoming rare to encounter after Level 11, and I'm already at Level 17.