Tips and Tricks

Dance, for the love god, dance. The game was not designed with taking monster attacks to your face in mind as a winning strategy. Learn to side step and attack monsters after they miss you with their own attacks. Learn which monsters can charge at you. Learn which monsters can attack you WHILE turning towards you. You need to develop a great deal of spatial awareness and it helps to always have a light source in order to be a successful dancer who doesn't accidentally get themselves trapped in a corner or walk into a pit trap while fighting. Even if you stack Protection and Evasion to the moon you will be crushed into a pink mist by Trolls (and later, Wardens) if you try to just stand and fight them. Monsters with ranged attacks like Wyverns, Uggardians, and Goromorgs need to be dodged as well or your entire party gets hurt.Make sure everyone in your party gets at least 1 hit on monsters you fight whenever possible. Otherwise they only get 50% of the XP for the kill. This means make sure your Mage keeps casting spells, even vs. easy monsters, or they'll fall behind everyone else in levels.Not sure where this pit trap or teleporter in front of you leads? Better Quick Save using the F5 key. Do it often to reduce your frustration when learning Grimrock by quite a bit. F9 Quick Loads.Broadhead Arrows weigh only 0.1kg each, making them excellent to carry around for placing on pressure plates. There are only 2 kinds of pressure plates in the game, the least common kind requires either the player party or monsters to activate. The most common type activates when ANY item is placed on it regardless of how much the item actually weighs.There is a late game secret that REQUIRES 2 Stones in order to access it, though, if you care about finding all the secrets or getting the Valor chest armor. You can't use other items, they have to be Stones.There is a late game puzzle the REQUIRES a Skull to proceed, so be sure to have at least 1 Skull in your inventory even if you don't have any Minotaurs in your party, or else you'll have to back track and find one.There is a puzzle on floor 4 that requires you throw an object into a teleport square that appears 4 seconds after you stand on a pressure plate. If you try throwing the item from the mouse cursor (click on it as if you were going to place it in an inventory or hand slot), it will not have the same momentum as if you attacked with said thrown item. The only way to solve this puzzle is to actually equip a throwing weapon or Stone, and right click to attack with it into the teleporter square.You can take items, and place items on pressure plates that are behind gates by clicking near the bottom of your screen on the pressure plate itself. This is necessary to solve some puzzles and find some secrets.Do not be afraid of falling into pits. They are never instant death, and often have secrets of their own inside them with good items. Half the time they also have monsters in them waiting to eat you, so try to rest up to full health before dropping into an unknown pit intentionally. If your party started with high Vitality the falling damage becomes negligible by late game.Torches are annoying to manage, but you can ease that slightly by swapping your current torch with ones you find on walls every so often. Wall torches never expire and have the same light amount even if you place an almost-burnt-out torch from your hand into the slot. Just click the wall torch, click your hand torch, and click back on the wall. Note that there are secrets that involve wall torches or empty torch holders so look out for them. You can use burnt out torches on pressure plates to solve puzzles if you aren't using Broadhead Arrows for that.The only potions you ever might need many of are Health Potions. Energy Potions could be handy in a long fight, but it is only very rarely that you'll find yourself in a fight so long you need them, and only Mages lose the ability to attack entirely without Energy. Antidote potions are good, but get less important as the game goes on and your Resistances / Vitality improve. Remember that Vitality reduces the duration of bad status effects, trivializing them once you have 20 or more Vitality. Keep an Antivenom and Antidote potion on hand if you are worried about Poison and Disease, but they're annoyances more than they are deadly if you are following the advice in this guide. You can still heal using a Health Potion even if you are Diseased, it only blocks your natural health regeneration.You will find more than enough food to rest as often as you need to, assuming you don't screw around. If you want to go look up solutions to puzzles press Escape to pause the game while you do it instead of letting your food timers run down. There is a room about half way through the game that respawns Snails very frequently, making it a great place to go for food if you actually run out. I never did. There is another room further in that respawns Ice Lizards, and these also drop very filling (and heavy) food. By the end game I actually had to drop lots of food in order to carry around the Valor and Chiten armor sets in my 10 Strength all Lizard party, but I never did end up equipping them due to lack of available Skill points.Bags are a lot better for carrying stuff around than Boxes. Bags weigh a little more than 1/10 of what a Box does and has 6/10 the storage space. That being said, there honestly isn't that much lying around that you'd want to organize this well since you can't keep the Alchemy kit and a bag opened at the same time. If you're playing the Master Quest mod you actually get rated on the value of items you are carrying, so then it might make sense to try to carry more crap you don't actually need around with you. Food, game hint scrolls, skulls, torches, and treasures are the main things you'll want to store in bags since none of these things stack like Alchemy ingredients do. You seriously don't need more than 1 bag with 6 torches in it though, even without a Mage in your group, just refill it as you go and use the earlier tip about wall swapping to extend the life of the one in your hand without having to mess with your inventory. You also tend to find food so often it makes carrying a bag full of food on each character a moot point as well. I guess this is a long way of saying "don't feel like you need to waste lots of time playing inventory Tetris in Grimrock".There is an Iron Door on every floor of the game except the floor with the final boss, so make sure you look for clues on how to open them. Some require keys, other require special actions. Iron Doors tend to have high quality loot behind them, so it is usually worth the effort.Golden Keys are universal and work in any Treasure Room in the game. There are more golden locks in Grimrock than there are keys to open them, so I do recommend you look up a guide to figure out which treasure gates you want to spend your keys on. One I can easily recommend has a Book of Infinite Wisdom behind it (+5 skill points to the character that uses it). Besides that book, the best items in the game are not found in Treasure Rooms anyway, so don't stress about not being able to open all of them. Some have common Alchemy ingredients, some have armor you can find in other places and don't have the skill to wear anyway, etc...