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Thorin’s Guide to Sacred: UnderWorld SP


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Introduction:

 

Since a lot of the members here have experience with Sacred in MP, I thought it might be a good idea to create a guide for this game in Single Player. Yes, that’s right, the “dull” version.

 

The biggest difference between SP and MP – other than the lack of someone joining your party – is that you’ll going to miss the support of other players. A lot. I even dare to say, an awful lot even. And that changes the entire gameplay, as completing and using sets is making things a lot harder as well.

To counter that, you need to rely on unique (golden) and rare (yellow) items a lot more as you did in MP and often that killer-build you used in MP isn’t possible because of that. However, at the same time this offers a far more challenging gameplay as MP had; despite that in MP the enemies got stronger the more players had joined the server.

 

Then there’s the fact that SP is done in Soft Core. I don’t think I need to explain that, do I?

 

The next difference is that you won’t be able to use the starter island portals to get to several spots in Ancaria, giving you access to easy to do quests and XP. Instead you start at some fixed spots near Bellevue, depending at which character you choose to play. That also means, that depending at your starting position, you got an easy (Dwarf) or a hard (Seraphim) start. The good thing about this, however, you’ll be starting in Bellevue, meaning you got an abundancy of merchants to visit. That is, if you got the gold for it.

 

The last difference is that you’re able to pause the game. That’s right, you can pause the game. And although it sounds useless, it’s a very useful feature when you must go AFK for a bit. We all remember from MP all to well that the “safe spot” we were using turned out to be not that safe after all, making us loose our character.

 

Starting your game:

Before we launch the game, we're going to adjust one thing and change another for that smoothier game experience.

First thing done is to open up explorer - or any other program designed to browse your game folders, and head to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sacred Gold\*.*

This will open up and show all files in the Sacred Gold folder, of which you're going to work with two.

First we're going to launch the Config.exe file. This file lets us choose an on/off option for some settings. Right now, the only thing we have to do is making sure the box in front of "32 Bit Color Depth" is checked. Click at  [OK] after that to safe the settings and it should auto close.

Second thing we do is opening the "Settings.cfg" file. This can be done with Wordpad or Notepad, so it's not a real biggie.

In this file we'll find a line close to the top, reading DEFAULT_SKILLS : 1

Replace this by DEFAULT_SKILLS : 0 and then safe the file.

What it does, is changing the two default starter skills from the ones the Dev's have set, into the option to choose those skills yourself. Which in turn gives you the ability to choose for instance Trading as a skill for your Dwarf or getting rid of that non-used Magic Lore at your Melee seraphim.

When you've changed the skill setting, safe the file and close it. You're now safe to launch the game.

 

Another one of those things I don’t think I have to tell you, is what to do next. It’s simply choosing a character, give him / her a name, select difficulty and go. 

I did a little search for the colour coding of the names and came up with something that is in fact far more useful: Night Wolfe's Sacred Site. It contains lots of good info, including how to use the colour and symbol codes.
For that, use this link: Colours and symbols in your character name

What is important is the difficulty. I know Bronze is considered “baby mode” because it’s so easy. Yet, bronze is the difficulty we choose because it’s easier. Starting at Silver is challenging, perhaps very challenging and I dare say, most likely too challenging. And since you start with only 3 health potions, bad weapons and no armour, death is waiting around the corner. In both ways of speaking in some occasions.

So, Bronze it is and when that’s set, start the game.

 

Depending at the character you have chosen, you start at different spots.

 

-          The Battlemage starts north of Bellevue at the stone circle. His first fight is pretty hard and demands a lot of running around and waiting for a spell regeneration. On top of that, after his first fight he’s got to deal with quite some goblins nearby, making the first trip to a merchant (west of his location) or picking up a quest not that easy. Yet, once he gets rolling, he’s able to survive the starting area easily.
 

-          The Dwarf, Wood Elf and Dark Elf start close to one another at a location to the Southwest of Bellevue. The two Elves at the plateau, the Dwarf a bit more to the Southwest of that plateau. Although being confronted with opponents soon, it’s one of the easier starts because the opponents are in general far away from each other.
 

-          The Deamon starts at the graveyard near the old manor, east of Bellevue. She can have an easy start if you don’t open the graves immediately. If you do, be prepared to fight a trio of undead at some point. It would be better to keep the graves as they are, since one quest would take you back to this location anyway.
 

-          The Gladiator starts in the Arena. The first fights are easy, the next one a bit harder, but after that he’s free to roam Ancaria. He’s also the only one basically starting next to a merchant, making his life a bit easier too.
 

-          The Seraphim starts to the north of Bellevue at the monastery. She’s got one of the harder starts, mostly because her starting quest is asking to kill quite some opponents. Fortunately for her there’s an easy to do side quest nearby ànd she’s close to a well, giving an additional health potion. However, one of her starting foes lurks near that well as well, so expect a fight over a health potion.
 

-          The Vampires starts at the old manor slightly to the northwest of the graveyards the Deamon starts at. Which gives her more or less the same starting method; do the personal starting quest, but don’t open up any graves….. yet.

 

Exploring and leveling:

 

As said, we start in Bronze difficulty because it’s easier. So, after we have entered the game and done the personal starting quest some of the characters have, it’s time to start looking around. That means walking a lot, picking up and completing quests, gathering loot, selling items and buying better stuff and visiting any dungeon possible.
With the exception of doing two quests, there’s absolutely no reason to cross the bridge to Silvercreek right now. Those two quests are “the Messenger” quest and "Book of Wisdom", the quest given to you by the combo master.

The first because after completing that quest, talking to the quest giver will reward you with an additional amount of XP.

The second because of RNG. Depending at the character you play, you may want to exchange a couple of runes for a jumping, flying or teleportation rune, which can be used to enter the MP starter island and use the merchant, combo master and blacksmith at that spot. For those of you thinking: “But when playing this game in SP I won’t need them after leaving Bellevue”, yes, you’re correct. However, we won’t stay in Bellevue for long. Or better said, in Bronze.

 

Once you have been exploring all in Bellevue and have been leveling up, you’re most likely level 5-6. This is enough to end the game here, by exporting your character first and closing the game after that.

 

A fresh, and harder, start:

 

Now you’ve played a bit in Bronze and created a slightly better prepared character, it’s time to move to the real part of this game: Silver difficulty and beyond.

Your adventures in Bronze gave you enough of an understanding of this game - again for some, I think – and how everything works.

So once again we’re going to start a new game, but instead of creating a character, we’re going to import one. It’s quite obvious how to do that, so I won’t explain it.

When the imported character is chosen, select the SILVER difficulty before starting the game. Otherwise you’d be doing a Bronze game again, something we don’t want to.

Let the intro movie play and do everything you just did in Bronze again. Except, this time we will cross the river to Silvercreek and we will venture more north, west, south and east of where we started; depending at where the main quest takes us, that is..

 

Keep in mind that by changing difficulty, your health potions all the sudden heals up to 60% of your health, instead of the full 100% they did in Bronze. Not to mention that the monsters now scale to your level, thus hitting you harder and occasionally be more annoying. It may be therefore a good idea to change some of the settings, for instance by setting the warning level to 41%.

Also keep in mind that once an area is unlocked, you can return to it using the teleporters. While it won’t be necessary in Silver, it may be in Gold. And now I mention it, make sure you export your character before doing the last boss-fight. If I remember it correctly, the game asks for it, however it’s always better to do it yourself as well.

As soon as Gold is unlocked, you can import your character to it and start all over. By now you should know how. 😉

 

 

 

Thorin :) 

Edited by Thorin Oakshield
Found and added link to name colour page
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I think the best advice I would give any new player would be to look at Sacred Wiki to see what skills are available for which class before you decide what you are going to play. Then DON'T try and use too many skills!!!! My best character was a Wood Elf and used exactly 2 combat skills, "Thorn Bush" was my main combat skill and "Call of the Ancestors" was my fallback skill which served for knocking the hell out of bosses and groups of enemies. That was the first character I took all the way. All of the characters I tried with multiple skills all got their butts kicked big time because I made them too complicated to keep control of it all.

That doesn't apply to support skills, such as shopping etc. You can use non-combat skills to your hearts content since you don't need fast reactions or to worry about cooldowns with them.

Edited by podgie_bear
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2 hours ago, Veracious said:

Quick question. I wasnt around for the servers. What made the island unsafe for you hc players? 

There were a few players who'd use the "undead army glitch", then teleport to the island to be safe and logged out. Leaving those zombies around for some reason and killing anyone trying to enter the island. Either by logging in, or to move quickly between two spawnpoints.

That island can be entered by some characters having a jumping, teleporting or flying CA (not skill, Podgie ;) ), but the underground area with all the portals can't be accessed in SP anymore. Still, having access to a smith, combo master and trader very early in the game and before you've unlocked the first two through their quests can be very useful. Reason why I mentioned it. It should still be accessable in LAN-games and perhaps I'll check that at some point. Might be a good time to rewrite that MP starter's guide I did a long time ago. :D 

 

 

 

 

Thorin :)

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9 hours ago, Thorin Oakshield said:

There were a few players who'd use the "undead army glitch", then teleport to the island to be safe and logged out. Leaving those zombies around for some reason and killing anyone trying to enter the island. Either by logging in, or to move quickly between two spawnpoints.

That island can be entered by some characters having a jumping, teleporting or flying CA (not skill, Podgie ;) ), but the underground area with all the portals can't be accessed in SP anymore. Still, having access to a smith, combo master and trader very early in the game and before you've unlocked the first two through their quests can be very useful. Reason why I mentioned it. It should still be accessable in LAN-games and perhaps I'll check that at some point. Might be a good time to rewrite that MP starter's guide I did a long time ago. :D 

 

 

 

 

Thorin :)

When I used tuungle a couple of years ago I was able to utilize everything on the start island in LAN games. I don't know if that helps you. I don't remember what level my sp toon was though. 

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13 hours ago, Flix said:

Nice guide.

It's funny to see SP described as the unknown, off-the-wall way of playing Sacred; that's all I ever played.

 

For a lot of the old players, MP was the only thing there was. I've played SP for a while, the moved to MP, kinda abandonned the game when Sacred 2 was in devellopment and I joined the BETA-team, played it a bit every once in a while until a Win10 upgrade made that possible and only recently have returned to the game.

IMHO, playing SP gives you a much better insight of the game, because you're lacking sets and often the char special uniques. Some items, like Thar's Axe, are available for all characters, helping you with builds, but even that one is limited to one per difficulty, unlike MP where you could do a run every time you log in.

I'm just hoping this little guide of mine will help some players returning to (imho) one of the best games of the past 15 years. :) 

 

4 hours ago, Augmint said:

No shared chest in single player made me sad :(

 

Yup, that's most likely the biggest disadvantage this game has compared to its successor. Fiding that one single piece you so desperate need at another and unable to give it to that character. However, if I'm not mistaken, you could load both characters in LAN and use the starting island to switch items; although I'm not sure if you also did safe them in the progress of doing that, or if you needed to export the character. And thus forcing you to start all over again.

 

Thorin :)

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4 hours ago, Veracious said:

Well disregard my comment. I was thinking Sacred 2

You're not the only one doing that. I've seen more comments in the Sacred Underworld section referring to Sacred: Fallen Angel instead.

I doubt you're also the last one making that mistaken.

In general content: I've found and added the link to a page explaining how to change the colour of your character's name when creating one. It turned out Night Wolfe's site is still up, having that very important information. The rest of the site might be very useful for players as well, I think.

 

Thorin :) 

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