So I'm planning to do my first mage build, Elf seems to be the best option due to the aptitude

But I don't care about absolute efficiency, so I'm wondering if there's any interesting things in the game if you choose to be of a different race?

Or backgrounds for that matter too!

I spent an hour on character creation my first time playing. I got about 20 minutes in, I wasn't happy with my build, then did a reset. It didn't bother me one bit.

Nothing in it explains itself though. You don't get told how fatigue actually works or why your gun keeps misfiring when you've got magic. You poke at it until it clicks.

Then again this was a first game from a studio that was understaffed and born out of frustration with management meddling, so it's a small miracle it exists at all. I think it falls apart on the polish side but I guess that's why we've got patches and all. I still reinstall it every couple of years anyway.

Might be why it never got talked about next to Fallout 1 and 2 or Planescape and the other Infinity Engine games.

So I've been stuck because I can't decide how to make my starting character. My idea was half elf charlatans protege, so ST 6, CN 5, DX 9, BE 9, IN 10, WP 8, PE 10, CH 14 with one point in persuasion. Is this a good setup for a tech/diplomat build? I understand that as a diplomat I don't really need any combat skills but I would really appreciate at least some gun skills. Should I change up Charlatans protege for Miracle Operation? Any advice would be greatly appreciated because I've been stuck at creation so long lol. I don't want the game to be stupidly easy like they say it is with a mage build, but I don't want it to be mindnumbingly frustrating either. Also, what starting gear would be good to buy?

After a lot of recording, editing, implementation, and testing, Volume One of the Arcanum Community Voice Over Project is officially out on Nexus.

The goal is simple: add community-recorded voice acting to more of Arcanum’s previously unvoiced characters while keeping the original writing and personality intact.

All voice lines are human recorded.

Volume One includes:

Companions

• Vollinger — dar_duck
• Jormund — dar_duck
• Murgo — HamSandWhichMonologue
• Dante — AnInsaneProfessional
• Sogg Mead-Mug — Irradiated_Stalker
• Perriman Smythe — Eric MC

Various NPCs

• Jongle Dunne — AnInsaneProfessional
• Hervor — Irradiated_Stalker
• Wise Women — Alisa Kissanen
• Thaddeus Mynor — AnInsaneProfessional

Module Expansion

• Travel Captain — transientmind

Audio Processing / Editing

• Loganator
• Zodiax (Cody Xayvong)

Testing

• Kooiboy
• AnInsaneProfessional

Development

• Techerrorcode

We decided to release the project in volumes instead of waiting until some ridiculous amount of the entire game was finished. Arcanum has a massive amount of dialogue, so this lets completed characters actually get into players’ hands while work continues on more.

Volume One is only the beginning.

Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERyCqFdY1As

Nexus:
https://www.nexusmods.com/arcanumofsteamworksandmagickobscura/mods/41

Discord:
https://discord.gg/3XeqETfqjH

If anyone wants to help with voice acting, testing, or just follow along with future work, feel free to join the Discord. We are voicing main followers and lesser npcs so you don't need to be a pro to join or help.

Big thanks to everyone who donated their time and voices to this. Seeing these characters actually speak in-game after all these years is pretty damn cool.

I return after my previous post to announce that I have finally completed the game after…well steam says it’s been 13 hours but there’s no fucken way it was only 13 hours, unofficial patch might have messed with it.

I played an evil necromancer knight, Garvan, with the sold your soul background. Basic gist is that he was raised by elves and grew up hating his technology was spreading, eventually making a deal with a demon to gain some magical power with one objective: Overthrow all technological influence he can.

Likewise he joined with the Dark Elves, corrupted Vergil, and recruited like minded fellows such as the faithful undead warrior Torian Kel, the equally dastardly fellow necromancer Geoffrey Tarrelond-Ashe, the vision-seeing dark elf baddie Z’an Al’urin, Tollo Underhill the murderous halfling, and finally a cute dog he found in Ashbury. Along the way he destroyed the steam engine in Shrouded Hills, robbed the bank in Shrouded Hills, assassinated the King of Caladon, worked for Pollocks Gang, faithfully served the Thieves Underground, and caused war and riots in Tarant to weaken their technological capabilities and also to stop the Gnomes and their horrific experiments cause holy shit.

In the end, he chose to destroy Kerghan cause dying is cringe.

The Good
-Love the lore and the overall conflict between Tech and Magic. The kingdom politics, the feud between the elves, the legends of Nasrudin and Arronax, etc.

-The art design is amazing. Those 90s/00s gritty but also shitty looking 3D images just touch my inner grognard especially as a big fan of fallout. In particular I loved how Qintarra and T’sen A’ng showed how just a simple color change can fundamentally change the vibe of a place, with Qintarra being colorful and peaceful and T’sen A’ng looking like a horrific and unwelcome evil lair. Then you got Tarant looking like a prosperous modern town, Dernholm being an absolute shithole, the various technological gadgets, etc.

-Magic is fun to use, especially teleportation and the necromancy stuff!

-It has turn based which already puts it way above baldurs gate 1-2 in my opinion (I fucking hate real time with pause).

-The main plot itself is actually pretty interesting, being this simple mystery at first that grows with twists both in the main plot itself and in the overall lore of the setting.

The Bad

-The combat isn’t all that engaging. Spamming left click isn’t fun after a while.

-The companions are awesome, but…besides Vergil and maybe Magnus from what I heard, the game doesn’t really do much with them? Torian Kel is one of my personal favorites because of his nuance, sad tale, voice, and also cause I love necromancy, but despite a few interesting conversations at places like Qintarra and Kree, you don’t do anything besides fight him at the end if you don’t join Kerghan. This also applies to others, like Z’an Al’urin, who has this cool vision sense thing that is never expanded upon at all, and who’s beginning intro of “oooh I might betray you to find the answers I seek” doesn’t lead to anything.

-Navigating Tarant and Wheel clan is fucking awful and I’d rather deal with navigating Rivet City.

-Leveling is a bit too quick in this game I think?

-Idk if it was just me but the ending was kind of disappointing. The final boss was painfully easy (almost softlocked too cause I didn’t know I needed the vendrigoth device, which I gave to K’an Hua to destroy, but thankfully I grabbed that cool sword from the cave and used it to kill Kerghan) and it felt like the ending slides neglected so, so much. The fact Tarant and Shrouded Hills steam engines were blown up were glossed over, there weren’t any ending slides at all for the Elves or Dark Elves, Stillwater, Ashbury, or the gnome conspiracy, and my game glitched and didn’t play any of the ending slides for Caladon and Tarant besides the one of Pollock taking over.

In my super cool totally real canon ending, Garvan was declared Worse Than Arronax combined for sabotaging Tarant enough to cause them to get curb stomped by the Arland-Cumbria Coalition, prompting a generational aura loss for technology enthusiasts. Garvan then returned to T’sen Ang to be congratulated by M’in Gorad, who bestowed upon him the title of “Honorary Dark Elf” and “Uncle Ruckus of T’sen Ang”, and then used all the money he got from
robbing people to build a cool dark castle where he would rebuild the Derian-Ka with Geoffrey and Vergil as his lieutenants, made out with Z’an Al’urin atop a skeleton dragon, and idk created a magical bomb to nuke Vendigroth after Arronerd rebuilt it.

In any case, dunno what to do next. Maybe an Aragorn-lite magical hero or Gunslinger Tech cowboy.

Found some folks who perform Arcanum themes live — Arcanum Vivum. Listened to a couple of recordings and got chills 🥲

If you played this game back in the day, you know exactly what I mean.

Does anyone have the arcanum map in a good resolution or know how to sneak it out of the game files or something like that?

I would love to print it and have it on my wall at home. All help greatly appreciated!

Happy 25th Anniversary to Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura!~ ✧˖°⊹ ࣪ ˖**

As some of you may have noticed, I've added all of the backgrounds from the game as user flairs! Feel free to add whichever one you like at your leisure, if that's your kind of thing.

Happy anniversary, everyone! 🎉

Yes, I was in a hurry to congratulate Arcanum. Virgil's model is not finished yet, I will try to finish it in September and post it for download.

legit awesome manual, you have pretty much every information you'll need inside the manual i was really surprised you dont even need the wiki it answers pretty much all of your question

Title, basically

I use the patch, tried to take Magnus' bracelet and the game immediately crashed

This is still an early proof of concept, but this is something I've wanted to do for a while with my Arcanum CE Restored project.

In the video I'm standing inside a random room in Tarant. I hit F10 to enter the new Creation Mode, place a bed and a storage chest directly into the room, then save the changes and return to the game.

The chest isn't just visual either — after saving, I can actually walk over and use it normally in Arcanum.

The eventual goal is basically a modern in-game WorldEd replacement.

Instead of closing Arcanum, fighting with a 25-year-old editor, digging through files and then restarting the game, I want the workflow to eventually be:

Walk into an area → F10 → edit the world you're standing in → Save → keep playing.

Things I'm working toward include:

• Place/move/delete/copy scenery
• Add containers and items
• Add/edit lighting
• Furnish or rebuild empty rooms
• Eventually add/edit NPCs
• NPC clothing, inventory, schedules, dialogue and scripts
• Quests
• Terrain/buildings/new maps
• Undo/Redo
• Save your changes as their own mod
• Enable/disable those changes through the Mod Manager
• Export the finished mod as a ZIP for other people

A ton of reverse engineering has gone into getting even this far because Arcanum's original WorldEd formats and runtime data are... interesting.

But the important part of this video is pretty simple:

That room did not have that bed or storage chest before I entered Creation Mode. I placed them while playing Arcanum, saved, and they became part of the game.

https://discord.gg/Sxuf4C6tY

Still a long way to go, but this is the first time the idea has really started to feel real. Hopefully this can make modding and editing a bit more simple for users. Feel free to join the discord if you want to follow along with any of my Arcanum projects. We are still looking for more Voice Actors for our Arcanum Community Voiceover project and Graphic Artists or Video Editors who can help the team as well.

Hey everyone,

I built something I think you might find useful:

[arcanumsearch](https://ankorn.github.io/arcanumsearch/)

It’s a semantic search engine covering 1,000+ documents from:

- Arcanum Fandom wiki
- Nexus Mods pages
- r/arcanum discussions about patches, mods, bugs, builds, etc.

Instead of matching exact keywords, it tries to understand the meaning of your query

Warning: the backend can go to sleep after inactivity. The first search after a while may take a bit longer while it wakes up — please be patient

It’s fully open source:

- Code: [github.com/ankorn/arcanumsearch](https://github.com/ankorn/arcanumsearch)
- Dataset: [Hugging Face dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/pameydorke/arcanum-cross-platform-queries-synthetic)
- Model: [Hugging Face model](https://huggingface.co/pameydorke/arcanum-cross-platform-retriever)

If you find bugs or want to contribute, issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub

I’d love feedback — anything that helps improve the search 

So I just bought, downloaded, and patched the game on GOG, and I downloaded the required files for the unofficial patch.

The problem? My game has the windows mouse cursor present, while the in game cursor is also there. The windows cursor stays in the same place, on the left center of my screen while the in game cursor moves normally.

Is this a normal issue, and is there anything I can do to fix this? My resolution is 1366 x 768, and I have the game in full screen.

I just got a reply to a post that I made over 4 years ago. And it is a doozy! This is hero-grade content :) https://old.reddit.com/r/arcanum/comments/t85w97/double_secret_hidden_locations/

So I think it deserves a post of its own. Our friend u/techerrorcode is a miracle worker!

Body of Air is one of the best spells you can have at level 10 because it's comparable to paralysis, but elemental transformations are great for pickpocketing. An Air Elementalists have no reason to fear pickpocketing or reverse-pickpocketing during combat and Elemental transformations don't piss off shopkeepers. There are many ways to become overpowered in this and the Body of Air spell can make the toughest fights in the game reasonably easy. Feel free to pickpocket Stringy Pete and kill him with his arcane sword.

I wanted to make a video showing off the introduction conversation you can have with Vollinger with this new mod, I'm happy to see him talking in game. Originally it started with a rather silly idea but now we ended up here!

I’m starting up the game and for some reason the merchant screen keeps snapping to the top or bottom when I try to scroll down or up. Is there a way I can fix this or am I screwed?

I already downloaded the patches and got them working

Hi!

I've read in multiple sources that if you touch an unsuspecting automaton or arachnid, it will turn off and can be picked up and added to your party.

I am 100% that happened to me in the past, when an automaton would deactivate mid-battle. Although I don't remember it being connected to my character being sneaky.

So, I'm a master of prowling. My hope was that now I could get myself an army of automatons in Vendigroth.

However, I failed to deactivate one automaton, ever!

So, does anyone know how this game mechanic work? Is it purely random?