Castle of the Winds/Cheats and Exploits

While fairly strong, and without the system of cheat codes deliberately added to today’s games, CoTW has glitches that can be exploited.

• Get a store to drop its contents: Go into a store and cast Phase Door or Teleport. Exit the screen. The pile of items will be sitting in a normally inaccessable spot for picking items up but there are two ways to get it. Go back to the store's screen, cast Summon Monster or Undead from a cursed wand or staff, exit the screen, go into the inventory screen and pick it all up. Alternately, keep using Phase Door or Teleport until you land on the space with the items and go into the inventory screen. (Trying to use the Get command to pick the items up will cause a crash.) If, in the inventory screen you cast Phase Door or Teleport, you can still access the floor of the space you were once in. This will be fixed once you leave the inventory screen.

• Regenerate a floor: Using the parenthesis keys — ) to go down and ( to go up — instead of the usual angle bracket keys or menu command will cause the game to regenerate the destination floor, including bosses that have already been killed.

• Two exploits that use negative-number overflows:
  • Extreme mana glitch: Get down to -2 mana then step onto a glyph of warding that causes you to lose mana. Your mana will be either very, very high or very, very low.
  • Maximize Constitution: When starting a new game, choose Magic Arrow as your starting skill and start casting it. Eventually, it will ask you if you are sure you want to cast it because your mana will be very low. Continue casting until you are around -16 or so mana, and your max health will jump quite high. Make sure if you to this to put your starting stats into something besides Constitution so as they are not wasted.