Xanadu: Honey tongue, butter fingers

How much to pick my lock, stud?

Xanadu clearly wasn't meant to be beaten on your first try, and I'm restarting with a new build.

First and foremost, I decided that I need more charisma. This seems to be the only stat in the game that never goes up, and at 40, the unending need to buy increasingly expensive keys was just bleeding me dry. Charisma should help with that, not to mention give me a much-needed discount on gear and healing, the latter of which just hadn't been worth it compared to the fixed per/HP cost of resting.

Second, based on what the manual said, wisdom seems unimportant. You need some, or else items don't work, but having more than the minimum just means they last longer. I rarely use durationed items, and most of the time that I do, I only need the effect immediately. Long-lasting Demon's Rings will be missed, but there's only so many of them.

Third, dexterity seems like a dump stat. It governs your chest-opening ability, and again, you need some or you can't open chests at all, but past the minimum you just open them faster.

As it happens to work out, if I take the minimum for wisdom and dexterity, I can max out charisma and have just enough left over to have the rest of my stats be exactly as they were during my first playthrough. I might hate it when chests take forever to open, but money is more limited than patience.

 

Yes, this is also an Ultima trace.

The general price difference is striking, even at character level 1. At 40 charisma, a full 1500HP heal had cost $144. At 100 charisma, it's merely $88! Keys come down from $120/per to $75/per. Both will increase as I gain levels, but hopefully in proportion.

Gear and spells are also uniformly 37.5% off, same as level 1 keys. I'm very interested to see what a magic bottle does here, if anything.

 

I replay level 1, and I'm able to enter level 2 with 38 dirt-cheap keys (they won't be dirt cheap for long!), ring mail, deluge, and 11,500HP. After that, knowing I won't need better gear just yet, I'm able to enter level 3 with 53 keys and 44,000HP. Level 4 is entered with 72 keys and a screen-harming deg-fire spell (and 59K maxHP but I don't bother healing from the current value of 32K).

I wind up using most of these keys on level 4's towers (like I said, you never seem to have enough of them!) but for my thoroughness I have $67,050 in the bank plus a Large Shield+1 and Scale Armor, as well as the various pickups and skill points found exploring, which includes a truly impressive amount of food dropped by the shriekers.

Level 3 has a convenient shopping mall.

 

So now I have a choice. With the gold accumulated, and the use of a charisma-doubling bottle, I could buy any of the following:

• A $12,500 halberd, which is the best melee weapon in the shop, and a $20,000 full plate suit.
• Any spell in the shop except the last two, which are "Deg-Tilte" and "Death." I'm not really sure what most of them do, but the most expensive one I can afford, "Deg-Corrosion," costs $62,500. The preceding two, "Tilte" and "Deg-Poison," would cost $25,000 each.
• 134 keys, which would give me a total of 153. 

I think I'll poke my head into level 5 and see what nightmares await!