How to move NPC out of town

Authors: Kingpin & Afj666
Version: 1.10


You will need this tools and files to accomplish this tutorial.

Tools:
(If you don’t have these files you find them on the keep).

MPQExtractor
Paul’s win ds1_editor
Excel (D2excel/MS excel/staroffice to name a few spreadsheets)

Files to work with:
monstats2.txt - From patch_d2.mpq
caveroom2.ds1 - From d2data.mpq

Required Knowledge to accomplish this tutorial:
You need to be familar how to work with text files and how to add
new objects with WinDs1_Editor.


Open up monstats2.txt
Go down to the row where we have Gheed and look for alSel column. This
column tells if its a friendly selection you have made or not. You need
to add 1 here since we need to make Gheed allied outside town.

Now we are done in this file and we can save and close the file.


Open up Winds1_edit
Add Gheed to Caveroom2.ds1 (this is Cave level 2, that are a treasure level to Cave Level1 in Cold Plains). When we have add the object we save the file and close.

copy Caveroom2.ds1 to data\global\tiles\ACT1\caves
copy monstats2.txt to data\global\excel

Now we are done with adding moving a NPC out of Town.


Final Word:
With this we will have two Gheed, one in town and one outside town. If you really want to move out a NPC from town you need to remove the NPC from the town ds1 files.

There exist 4 different versions of a town ds1. These are townE1.ds1, townN1.ds1, townW1.ds1, townS1.ds1.

Also, even that this tutorial is for 1.10. You can make the same thing in 1.09.

You will work with monstats.txt and use IsSel2 column that has the same functionallity as the alSel column in 1.10. This are the only difference between making this work in 1.09 and 1.10.

thats good news, might have to "borrow" the subquesting ideas and use them with hidden npcs.

Some ideas you can do with this discovery :

* In a dungeon, made 1 small room without monsters but with 1 NPC. And you can even use a special music theme for this special merchant.

* A place without monsters but with NPC is ... a Town. You can add 1 or more towns to an act then, with again their own music. You wont be able to acess them by TP, but you can make a WP.

* If in a preset area you use Kingpin's idea of 6 variations for a ds1, then you can have a cave where 1 NPC can appear, but not always, depending on how the game build the maps, so it's an optional or "bonus" NPC.

There's a lot of ideas to this new discovery. I'm currently looking into adding new NPC's to the game. We have also found out that when cloning a NPC in monstats.txt you can actually make a new NPC with trade and talk menus. However the trade sceen is empty, and the speech is Akaras speech.