: Welcome to our first side update for Risen. This update, we’re going after the most pointless piece of equipment in the game. I got a little lost trying to find the place I was looking for, so we do a little bit of weed hunting near Harbor Town and the Monastery in the process, and complete two sidequests that normally only a wizard would.
: Just beyond the farm that we went to for some sidequests before going into the swamp is a small, marshy area. It has two weed plants growing near it that we pick up. It is also full of higher-level grave moth palette swaps that are a total pain in the ass to kill. You might notice I’m using a different weapon. This is the bastard sword, which Oscar sells for 400 gold. I bought it to test some stuff, but it’s actually not any better than the Skull Crusher is despite having higher stats.
: The improved moths take about six hits to kill with the bastard sword.. which is the same amount they’d take with the skull crusher. If we were one level’s worth of strength higher, the bastard sword would probably kill them in five.
: Moving past that is this crossroads. One of these paths leads up to the monastery, which is where we’re going to go. I did some combat to get some quick EXP and also to make our lives easier when we go to Harbor Town.
: The monastery road is blocked by another Inquisition dig site. We could stealth by most of it by going to the far left of the ruin, but there’s some quest monsters up there we don’t want to disturb. The right side has more enemies that are likely to aggro, but we can deal with those.
: The right side is mostly uninteresting, but there’s some weed here.
: If we had tried to go right through, there’s about ten inquisition guys in there who will come out and attack. The guy with the armor near that fire is immortal.
: We’re almost to the Monastery, but the area is FULL of wolves and stingrats. These aren’t too bad with our strength score, but if you’re doing a wizard run this area can be a pain in the ass because you’re usually not pumping strength like we are.
: At the top, just before the monastery are two side areas. I cleared one out, but left the one with the gnomes alone as they are quest mobs.
: Finally, we reach the monastery itself. This is as far as we can go - if we tried to go up into the monastery itself, we’d get stuck in dialog with an NPC and be forced into the game’s third route, which we don’t want. This guard is someone we can talk to, though.
: His first sidequest is to give him a beer. I believe we have two more than we need to finish the swamp, so let’s give him a beer.
: Hopefully, we’ve turned him to the Dank Side. He also has a second sidequest to deal with those gnomes.
: Before we go down there though, there’s a very important plant near him - a Hero’s Crown. These are used in alchemy to make stat potions. There are only a handful of them in the game: I found three during this update and I can only think of one more. Four of these would make it worth our while to learn Alchemy near the end of the game as we’d get more strength from potions than we would from spending the 15 learning points on strength directly.
: We then go wipe out the gnomes for EXP, and cross the threshold to a new level.
: There’s a chest behind them that has a ring in it, but we’re not going to use it because we’re not a wizard… or are we? The reason wizards suck in this game, by the way, is that mana doesn’t naturally regenerate. You have to either use a potion or sleep.
: With that, we want to run all the way back down the mountain and go to the east coast of the island. The east coast is a fucking death zone for several reasons.
: Right near the entrance to the coast, I found this side area I somehow missed on my pre-LP playthrough of this. This is a gnome chieftain: just like regular gnomes only with more health and the ability to do slightly more damage.
: Chieftains are important because they carry a quest item. I don’t think I ever found the quest for these on my own, but we’ll find it for the LP. I think it’s in Chapter 2.
: More importantly, there’s a couple of dead guys behind the gnomes that have an item on them that is going to let us use Advanced Weed Sorcery to break the game in two.
: No, not this guy, though we’ll be sure to pour one out for him.
: It’s this guy. Levitation is an absolutely gamebreaking spell if used correctly. We won’t need this for a while, but it’s good to have. These guys also have probably two to three hundred gold in treasures on or near them, but we have Rhobart and weed magic.
: I then got turned around and went back to outside of Harbor Town, where I found some more weed.
: Also some boars that got slaughtered so I could get a second Hero’s Crown.
: Finally, I found the goddamn east coast. Finding the correct path takes a while when you don’t have the island’s layout memorized. We’re now on our way to picking up the most useless item in the game.
: This is the start of the east coast, and it is a goddamn death trap. Even with the worker’s clothes, there are enemies around here capable of oneshotting us.
: There’s some corpses over by the giant thing that we can loot, as well as our first locked chest… other than the one in Rhobart’s house I looted without taking screenshots. Whoops.
: Lockpicking is a very simple minigame: the game will give you a number of lock icons, and each one is either a left or a right. The combinations are always the same, so you can pick the lock and reload if you break your lockpick.
: By the end of this side update, we have a total of 39 weed. I know that in my previous file, I had around 70 weed by the beginning of chapter 2.
: I also finally found the spot I was looking for. This farmhouse is surrounded by gnomes. These gnomes are not like the ones we’ve fought so far, and let me explain why.
: For one thing, aggroing one tends to aggro all of them. At the same time, these gnomes will stand in place and throw stuff at you if you’re too far away for them to melee rather than running up to engage you. Worse, two of these gnomes are wielding the same sword we found in Jan’s house, which makes them do significantly more damage.
: I had to blow a couple of healing potions, but we’ll have a bunch of them later on.
: There’s another chieftain here with a bag of tools on him. You want to make sure to loot these, because if the corpse despawns I believe you get locked out of the sidequest.
: More stingrats on the other end of the farm. Compared to fighting five or six gnomes at once, these are nothing. We are going to want to use this water barrel by the house because our final fight for the useless item is coming up.
: Unfortunately, before we can get there, a Black Wolf gets in our way. Black Wolves are Chapter 2 enemies, but a few of them spawn in Chapter 1. They are several times stronger than regular wolves to the point where two of these can wipe out that inquisition camp by the swamp unless the immortal NPC steps in.
: This was after I hit the wolf with four full attack combos, and I got hit all of once. Black Wolves are nothing to fuck with.
: The item we’re looking for is in a chest in this ruined tower.. right by a bunch of skeletons. I have seen two skeletons take out half an inquistion camp by themselves. Even with our armor, the weaker skeletons can still two-shot us.
: With skeletons, you want to be very patient. The only real way to fight them is to have your shield up, and then sneak an attack in while they’re recovering from their combo animation.
: One of them had the upgraded wooden shield on them, which is why I’m glad that on this save file I hadn’t bought it from Oscar yet.
: For the rest of the skeletons, I got a little ballsy and decided to try and glitch them out. You see, our melee attacks can hit more than one enemy at a time, so long as they’re all within range. Enemy AI tends to glitch out in tight spaces like this, so what I did was lined the skeletons up and then comboed them to death while the game tried to figure out what to do with the skeleton in front.
: The skeletons have some pretty serious weapons on them. One of them has a Cutlass, which is the halfway point between our old sword and the skull crusher. Another has this spear, which would have instakilled us if it hit.
: As for our reward, there’s an ogreroot growing near the tower’s base.. and a locked chest. This is an extra kick in the dick just in case you managed to make it all the way out here without having lockpicking.
: Finally, we pick up the most useless item in the game: the leather helmet. This is the ONLY leather helmet in the entire game: you can’t buy them anywhere as far as I know. It offers.. a whopping one protection to two out of the three physical damage types. Keep in mind that it’s locked behind an area we weren’t even supposed to be in until probably Chapter 2, and also behind a bunch of really tough enemies for a Chapter 1 character. To make things even worse, you can buy a better helmet for like 300 gold as soon as you start Chapter 2.
: That’s more like it.. I guess.
: In our next regular update, we’ll finish the swamp and head on to Harbor Town for real. Weed sorcery may also be involved.