https://www.tk421.net/wizardry/wiz1maps.shtml
One of the invisible mechanics of Wizardry’s maps, which I haven’t seen marked on any other maps out there on the Internet, is that every tile is either considered to be part of a "room" or of a "corridor," determined by the value of a boolean flag. Everything not part of a room is a corridor. I’ve highlighted these rooms in red, based on data extracted directly from the disk images. Any contiguous region of flagged tiles undivided by walls or doors is considered to be a single room.
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| Pictured: Five rooms and three corridors |
When you enter a level, nine of these rooms (or all of them if there are fewer than nine) are randomly seeded with treasure chests. Due to the way the chest-spawning algorithm works (pick a random cell, if it is not in an unseeded room, then scan left-to-right and bottom-to-top until you find one that is), it favors large rooms, and rooms in or near the lower-left corners of red clusters. When you enter a room containing a treasure chest, you are guaranteed an encounter, and will be rewarded with a treasure chest for winning.
These maps also list the monster spawn rates. The monster spawning logic is needlessly complicated, and in some maps is even buggy, but I’ve broken down the logic into the approximate odds for each set of monsters, which are expressed by their monster ID. This represents the monster that will initially be selected for rank #1. Subsequent ranks are deterministic; e.g. Bubbly Slimes in rank #1 will always be accompanied by Orcs (or nothing) in rank #2. Lists of monsters by their ID will be in my next post.
As with other aspects of this breakdown, this only applies to the Apple II original, or rather to my copy of it. Later ports may have fixed bugs or otherwise changed things.
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
The fixed encounter spot goes away once you have won there five times, and will revert to a standard room. It will never come back, not even for new parties.
Level 4
The LVL 7 Fighters and their companions can ONLY be fought on this level, and can only be fought once, ever! If any party has ever won this fixed fight, then the encounter in this room will be missing the fighters, and will not drop the Deadly Ring when defeated.
Level 5
Level 6
Level 7
The game only checks for fixed encounters in rooms. Since the Fire Dragons are in a corridor, you will never get to fight them.
Level 8
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| Y-coordinates are shifted for navigation clarity. Do not Malor across the meridian. |
Level 9
Level 10
There's something weird about the anti-magic square on Level 7, different from the one on level 5. Its effect seems to persist after you move out of the square, but I'm not sure for how long. A page on strategywiki.org indicated that it might last until you leave the entire level, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
ReplyDeleteOn second thought, maybe the level 7 anti-magic zone isn't different from the one on level 5. The map I made of level 5 showed its anti-magic zone to be in a different room from the one shown on your map, but it just occurred to me that I had already *passed through* that other room and only noticed the anti-magic effect in the second room when spells fizzled in battle. A persistent anti-magic effect from the zone would explain this.
DeleteIf I understand the code right, the "fizzles" flag is cleared whenever landing on a square of a type other than NORMAL or FIZZLE (treasure rooms are NORMAL unless otherwise noted), or when returning to the castle.
DeleteYeah, a little while after I wrote those comments, I looked at the code, and came to the same conclusion. It would fit with what I remember seeing. On Level 5, just a little while after I had noted the anti-magic effect and concluded it was from the room I was currently in, I entered the dark zone nearby, which would have cleared the effect. But on Level 7, once I saw the effect was persistent, I ran all the way back to the elevator, staying in normal squares the whole time, then checked one last time and saw the effect had vanished. It must have been the elevator square itself that cleared it.
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ReplyDeleteI've enjoyed looking through your information on this game. I always limit myself to reading stuff like this until after I've finished a game for the first time, which I finally did very recently.
ReplyDeleteBut...I have a discrepancy between my map and yours (and nearly every other map I can find on the internet!) which I wondered if you might have some insight on.
My second floor elevator is not at the same coordinate. Riding the elevator to the second floor drops me at the place marked on your map, but I can't get reboard the elevator from that room. I have to go to one room further north to use it. (Which then makes the destination one space further north on the respective floors, which I occasionally used to give myself a shorter path back the castle--it took me longer than it maybe should have to realize this might not be the way it was intended.)
I played with the .woz files from the Internet Archive site for this game. I tried to Google known bugs that might have affected my playthrough, and came up short. But...I did get Google AI to find me a hand-drawn map on mocagh.org that had the second-floor elevator in the same place as my map.
Do you happen know of any explanation for this?
It's an error that had been copied over from Sen's maps linked to above. Level 2's elevator was meant to be placed at 8N10E, same as levels 1, 3, and 4, but had been placed at 9N10E instead. My map shows it at 8N10E which is the intended place but is not correct.
DeleteSnafaru's Wizardry 3.0 does fix the elevator position, so at least my map is accurate to that version. Except that it also makes several other map adjustments throughout the dungeon, so it actually isn't.
It's fixed now.
DeleteThanks, that's good to know. I was struggling to find any acknowledgment of this issue anywhere on the Internet. Before finding that hand-drawn mocagh map, I was beginning to wonder if my own map had somehow been corrupted.
DeleteI've really enjoyed reading through your articles on this site and getting to know the finer details of this game better.