=============================== B L A C K & W H I T E F A Q =============================== ====== BY ====== ======================= M O H I T T A T E R ======================= ============================================ t h i s r o c k s m a n @ y a h o o . c o m ============================================ Software (c) 2001 Lionhead Studios Ltd. Black & White, Lionhead and the Lionhead logo are trademarks of Lionhead Studios Ltd. This document Copyright 2002 Mohit Tater This FAQ may be freely published on the web as long as it is not modified in any way. There must be no charge for the viewing or downloading of this FAQ.And be sure to inform me about publishing the FAQ. ============================= FAQ STARTED ON - 23-04-2002 FAQ COMPLETED ON - 02-05-2002 ============================= ============ 0.INDEX ============ 1. Disclaimer 2. Comments From The Author 3. Preview 4. Review 5. Introduction 6. Storyline 7. The Basic Gameplay 8. General Strategies 9. Creatures(Titans) 9.1 Creature List 9.2 Interaction 9.3 Creature Training 9.4 Basic knowledge 9.5 Basic behaviour 9.6 Basic learning 9.7 Rewarding Your Creature 9.8 Punishing Your Creature 9.9 Leashes 9.10 Attributes 9.11 Specific creature actions 10. Village Management 11. Diciples 12. Miracles 13. Belief 14. Tribes 15. Island Discrption,Tips & Secrets 16. Walkthrough 16.1 Land One Walkthrough 16.2 Land Two Walkthrough 16.3 Land Three Walkthrough 16.4 Land Four Walkthrough 16.5 Land Five Walkthrough 17. Cheats & Easter Eggs 18. Bugs 19. General Questions 20. Game Information 21. Credits _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Disclaimer You know it very well. You are not permitted to make copies of this without my permission, sell it without written consent from me. So don't do anything funny and no one gets hurt.You dont know that I have a lawyer in the family!!!! No copying of this guide without my permission. No modifying of the text in this FAQ. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. Comments From The Author This is my absolutly first guide, to any game. So tips on how to make it better would be much appreciated. I decided to write this faq because A: I had some tips I wanted to share with other people and B: I had some free time on my hands(not that much free).And if there are any grammer mistakes please inform me(I am sure there will be some or maybe many). _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Preview Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? Most every contemporary religion praises the virtues of an omnipotent deity. God always seems to be this swell guy, er, girl, er thing, this all-powerful, all-wise presence brimming with integrity and righteousness. Sure, we need to fear God, but that's mainly because God is perfect, while we are flawed. But as we all know by now, power is the stuff that drives good things bad. Give a man a gun and he becomes a threat; take that gun away and he becomes a victim. So isn't it a bit brazen of us to assume that God is a gentle giant? I mean really, omniscience is one heavy drug, and who's to say that the man upstairs isn't an addict? Spiritual tirades aside, the question of morality is one for the ages. It is a well- documented fact that good and evil cannot exist without one another...until now. Black and White attempts to answer the question of divine ethics by making you a god. Not just an ordinary, regular, run-of the-mill video game deity, but the actual almighty him/her/it self. The brainchild of legendary game designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, anyone?), Black and White presents a unique and original take on the strategy god-sim by blending two distinct gameplay mechanics into a seamless whole. The result could be one of the most stunning experiences in the history of computer gaming. The game is set in the fantastical realm of Eden, a fully 3D world that acts as your canvas. Your godly power is derived from your minions, the villagers of your tribe. They are your mana source, your resource pool, and ultimately, your guinea pigs to protect or destroy. The game's 3D engine is nothing short of breathtaking, with absolutely gorgeous textures and brilliant lighting effects. You can zoom in to watch the action up close, or pull out to gaze upon Eden from space. With dead-on physics modeling, Eden is an eerily real playground. Black and White follows a three-book story that will present the gamer with dozens of challenges and ethical crossroads. For instance, a worshipper has lost her brother in the woods and pleads for your mercy and aid. Do you help the woman by rescuing the brother, or kill the scurrilous peon for having the gall to ask a personal favor? Grab the brother and drag him back to the woman's home. Or just drop a boulder on her head and wash your hands of the whole mess. The choice, and the manner of its undertaking, is up to you. Battling adversarial deities is paramount to your success, and over the course of the game (and especially in multi-player), you'll encounter other gods. To maintain power, you must both protect your worshippers and vanquish your enemy. From fireballs and lightning storms to benevolent healing spells, magic plays a key role in your heavenly rule. Incorporating a unique 'gesture' system, spells can be made more powerful by specific mouse initiated movements. It actually looks like you're casting Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Black and White is the role of the 'creature,' a special unit that acts as your physical manifestation on Eden. Over time, the creature will grow from a normal sized unit into a towering titan. The creature learns from your actions; do good deeds and the creature will behave like a teddy bear; act like Satan and the creature will morph into a hideous monster. And like life, there is a plethora of shades in-between. Your creature can be taught to fight as well, which comes in handy when it meets other gods' creatures. With amazing hit detection and persistence (battle scars, baby), the details are incredible. If you thought Godzilla Vs. King Kong was cool, you ain't seen nothing yet. I just can't say enough about the originality and ingenuity of Black and White. It breaks through the mold and captures the essence of revolutionary design. Barring any serious development problems, this looks to be an absolute must-have for the PC gamer. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 4. Review From start to finish, Black&White is a game unlike any other, mixing elements of all of Molyneux's previous games into a truly unique experience. It all begins with a cry for help, as two parents pray for someone to save their child from a watery death. You emerge from the heavens, in a brilliant flash of light, and rescue the child. The villagers of the local town, astounded by your presence, acknowledge you as their god, and so the game commences. But, you soon realize, with great power, comes great responsibility, and trying to appease your populace becomes more trouble than you can handle. This is where Black&White gets interesting, as the way you handle these challenges is reflected in the way the world evolves. In Black&White, every decision made takes some toll on how you are viewed. The people will laud you because they believe in you, but their veneration can be from fear, or gratitude. For example, every time you interact with your town, you gain "belief" points, which are used to increase your influence and power. From planting trees to throwing stones, every action done in the village's vicinity is noticed. As an example, helping the villagers farm is a tedious task, so I make an effort to stir things up; I throw a few fireballs at a herd of cows. Their livestock now on fire, my belief points soar, but the people now revere me as an evil god, hesitant to ask for favors. Power in the world is reliant on beliefs, and in order to expand your influence to other villages, you need to make people believe in you, in any way possible. Your good side and bad side are represented as two consciences, a little old man and a demon. They advise you from time to time on how you should make your decisions, and they are hilarious. But that's not all; the beef behind Black&White's innovation is soon revealed, when players get their creature. Every god needs a pet, and Black&White provides you with one that will eventually grow to become a reflection of you! You can choose from three creatures in the beginning (a number that triples later on): a cow, an ape, or a tiger. Each has different attributes, but its personality and appearance will ultimately be decided by how you treat it. Equipped with shocking artificial intelligence, the creature can be taught to do basically anything; by either soothing one or beating it after it does something. My creature (a cow), for instance, started off furtive and shy, but after countless beatings and training, will attack neighboring villages and eat only rock and its own poop. Cool eh? Like children, creatures also require constant attention, as leaving one alone for a long time can cause it to revolt. Detailed statistics are kept on everything that is done in the game, and a creature's "alignment" between good and evil can be monitored on a point scale. Creatures are also kept on three different leashes, so you can take it for a walk or tie it to a tree. Each leash will evoke a different characteristic of your creature, as the creature will learn better while on the learning leash, and become aggressive while on the leash on aggression As the game progresses, a story slowly emerges, and you find that you're not alone on the planet. You're introduced to other gods, allies and enemies, who will work wit h or attack you to gain control of the world. Since you are a relatively new god, experience and power will be gained gradually at first with the help of another god and the maverick creature of a powerful enemy. But Black&White knows how to twist things up, and you'll soon find yourself alone, having to start from scratch. Which brings up another great feature of the game, the way you never get bored. Tending to your villages and creature is entertaining at first, but eventually things do get either tedious or too much to handle. Lionhead preempted these problems, and ingeniously inserted plot twists in the most appropriate places. Just when I was getting used to the daily routine of stopping plagues and growing wheat, my creature gets stolen by an opposing god (the "nemesis") and I'm pulled into a completely different island, where the game goes back to ground zero. While this can be frustrating at times, your progress is still reflected in your creature, whose immortal soul will forever reflect your past actions. Quests are given in the form of hovering scrolls, gold ones to push the story along, and silver ones for your pleasure. These can be pursued in a number of ways depending on how much work you want to do. For example, I was instructed by a villager to search for her brother, in exchange for a special stone kept inside her house. My good conscience told me to find the brother, as it would increase the villager's belief in me. I decided, however, to lunge a stone at the house, wrecking it, and stealing the artifact inside. In another case, I was presented with a band of travelers who needed wood to build a boat. I provided the wood, but soon after that, they wanted more. Each time I helped them, they would ask for more and more. Eventually, I fed them to my creature, effectively solving that problem! Innovation is what Black&White is all about, and this is true for the game's distinctive control scheme. Gone are the days when menus and buttons flooded the screen, as the game relies on only the movements of the hand, applied through the mouse. Movement, control, selection, and action, all can be accomplished with a click on a button or a twist of the wrist. Spells are conjured through simple actions; a circular motion will bring up spell options, and an inscribed "R" motion will 'r'epeat your last spell. Picking objects to drop or throw is all done with a flick of a wrist, and interacting with your creature requires only holding down the right mouse button. Of course, the keyboard does bring some conveniences, like shortcuts to locations, but the idea of simple control works, and works well. Graphically, Black&White is no Giants, nor is it any Sacrifice, no matter how similar the three games are. Focus is on the scale of the game, and it's quite a sight to behold. Zooming in from a distant birds eye view, the entire island can look like some deformed amoeba. Getting closer to where the villages are, the detail is unprecedented. Everything from people chopping wood to playing games is rendered, giving the characters a life of their own. During the day a village can be full of activity, while nearing nighttime, rituals can be seen around artifacts and campfires. Birds fly through the skies, and cows graze the grass in herds. So much to see exists in the game that one wonders if little people actually live in his computer (I've been playing this game way too long). All this detail comes at a price, as Black&White is quite taxing, even on higher end systems. Detail level can be turned down, but it's best to play at a higher detail and lower the resolution instead. You surely won't be disappointed. All that being said, Black&White isn't without its minor quirks. Saving can be a hassle, as the game preserves itself at timely intervals, each save taking longer than the previous. Micromanagement is put on the heavy side, making it almost impossible to take care of multiple villages, at the same time trying to give your creature the attention it needs. This kind of care that is needed to be successful at Black&White can be a bit overwhelming, leaving many too frustrated to continue. In the end, is Black&White recommended? Well, let's just put it this way. I was recently playing the game, and a little villager ran up to me, waving a letter. A feature in Black&White, your villagers are named after the people in your Outlook address book, and notify you when their corresponding person sends you an email. Well, I picked up little villager, still waving the letter, and chucked him across the ocean. Why? Because I was having too much fun. In fact, I don't remember having so much fun with a game since Dungeon Keeper 2 came out. So what are you waiting for? Go out and buy Black&White! The Goods: The Bads: - Awesome gameplay - Long save times - Intelligent creature - Creates insatiable need to continue - Unrivaled detail playing - Great story Final Score: 10/10 _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 5. Introduction Black & White is a god game. Packed with strategy, it gives you control of the destiny of an entire world. You must use your godly powers to rule over and look after your people. As you do so they pray to you and worship you more and more, and you use this power, this belief to carry out Miracles and to extend your influence over the world. You must impress other tribes to get more followers, and as your zealous power base grows you are faced with innumerable challenges. The people will pray to you to help them, make them rich, harm their neighbours of simply make their lives easier. Whether you choose to listen to them or help them is up to you. In Black & White you can be the god you want to be. Will you rule with a fair hand, making life better for your people? Or will you be evil and scare them into prayer and submission? No one can tell you which way to be. You, as a god, can play the game any way you choose. And as a god, you get to own a Creature. Chosen by you from magical, special animals, your Creature will copy you, you will teach him and he will learn by himself. He will grow, ultimately to 30 meters, and can do anything you can do in the game. Your Creature can help the people or can kill and eat them. He can cast Miracles to bring rain to their crops or he can drown them in the sea. Your Creature is your physical manifestation in the world of Eden, He is whatever you want him to be. Your people will build you a Temple and although you can go anywhere in the land, this Temple is your base. It's a mighty piece of work and contains all you'll ever need to be a god, run your world and look after or check on your Creature. But things are never simple. You are not the only god on Eden. There are others, and they will not have the same views as you. They, too, are intent on gaining the hearts and minds, and finally the souls of the tribes, and, like you, they have Creatures capable of great works or of mass destruction. There will be war between the gods. Whether you win is down to you, your Creature and what sort of a person you really are. Black & White utilizes brand-new graphics control systems, and you see the world from any angle, direction or height. It's fully scalable, has light sourcing and reflections, and you can even import real weather from the internet into the world. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And the game also boasts a new level of artificial intelligence. Your Creature is almost a living, breathing thing. He learns, remembers and makes connections. His huge range of abilities and decisions is born of a ground-breakingly powerful and complex AI system. The villagers in Eden also use revolutionary AI. Each has his or her own personality, and this can be altered by what they see, what they do and what sort of person they are. Another innovation is Gesture technology. There are no icon panels or on-screen controls in Black & White. If you want to carry out even the most intricate or powerful Miracles, you can do so by simply drawing the correct sign on the ground. It's quick, intuitive and adds to your power as a god. If you have an Immersion Touch Sense-compatible mouse like the Logitech iFeel Mouse, the virtual Black & White world will provide realistic tactile feedback through the mouse. Pulling up trees, powering up Miracles, stroking or slapping your Creature, zeroing in on faraway villagers, and many other interactions all have their associated touch sensations that will add to the overall immersive game experience. Finally, the game sets new standards in on-line gaming. Not only can you play with others, either co-operatively or against them, but you can take you Creature out of the single- player game and onto the web. You can also send and receive e-mail and phone text messages from within Black & White, using the all-new unified message system. And the game will even interrogate your e-mail package, import your contact names and assign them to individual tribespeople. So someone can come up to you and give you a message personally! Black & White is a genre-busting game which links resource management to strategy to combat to puzzles. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 6.Storyline The Land of Eden is a pretty amazing place. Not merely a 'green and pleasant land', but a lush countryside blanketed in exotic flora and magnificent features of natural beauty. In comparison, the most perfectly cultivated rose garden blooming in a rainbow of colour would seem like. Well, like black and white, really. Perhaps because their world is an idyllic land of natural beauty and harmony, the inhabitants of Eden are a contented bunch. Villages dotted about the landscape are populated with tribes of people happily going about their daily chores. Curiously, many of these tribes actually parallel some we are already familiar with: Aztecs, Japanese, African, Tibetan, Egyptian, Greek, Zulu - these are just some of the civilisations to be found in Eden. And each inhabitant treats his fellow Edean with decency, honour and respect. Unlike the world we know, inter-tribal disputes are unknown. In short, we're not talking Nirvana - we're talking double Nirvana. Seventh Heaven. Utopia to the nth. Pain, misery, poverty. these are unknown concepts in Eden. Everything is just perfect. Until a monumental event occurs which changes everything. YOU arrive. Of course, the young sorcerers (of which you are one) couldn't really be blamed for their attitude towards the innocent Edeans. Such behaviour is perhaps only to be expected. Just as a human child would look down on a bustling colony of ants with fascination, so the young sorcerers regarded the inhabitants of Eden with a kind of simple curiosity. Say, for instance, our human child spies a group of ants struggling to carry a section of fruit back to their nest. He might pluck up the fruit and deliver it to their door, saving hours of toil for the ant workers. Shortly afterwards, and for no reason in particular, he brings his foot down squarely on a cluster of the same ants, deliberately causing dozens of deaths. To the child's mind, the concepts of kindness and cruelty, good and evil do not even enter his reasoning. He has simply been playing with pets. In a similar way, the magic-users arrived in Eden and were fascinated by its inhabitants. From grand citadels created in remote corners of the land, they used their powers to taunt, amuse and aid the Edeans. Some sorcerers were kindly towards the villagers, using their magic to protect children and sending rainclouds seeded with healing elixirs to maintain their health. Others amused themselves by wreaking havoc amongst the villagers, sending plagues and marauding creatures to decimate their numbers. However, there was one thing the sorcerers needed from the Edeans themselves. Their individual powers were fuelled entirely by the lifeforce generated amongst the villagers. When villagers worshipped them, their powers grew strong. If ignored completely, they became powerless. Worship provided the lifeforce necessary for their spells. They also discovered that amongst worshippers, not all men were equal. Worship from the citizens of Egyptian tribes gave them access to powerful building spells; Tibetan tribes offered them mental magic; Zulu tribes offered battle spells. And there was something else the magic-users discovered in their new homeland. Each other. At first, the sorcerers believed they were alone on Eden. They considered themselves masters of all they surveyed. The discovery that this was far from the truth came as something of a rude awakening. Being a proud and arrogant elite, the resulting squabbles were inevitable. These soon escalated into heated conflicts. As a result, the hapless villagers who had once lived perfect lives in peace and harmony soon found they had become pawns in the epic magical battles raging between neighbouring sorcerers. Whenever trouble flared up, they were summoned by their overlords and required to perform their elaborate rituals of worship. These rituals provided the lifeforce needed to power the awesome spells which would boom and crackle across the dark skies of Eden. If the young sorcerers regarded the human population as our earth-child regarded a colony of ants, the Titans they created were the equivalent of our human child's faithful dog. Created originally from Edean animals, these awesome magical creatures towered over the landscape, instilling terror in the hearts of the mortal inhabitants. Under the influence of the sorcerer's magic, a cow, a sheep, a bird or even a tree would undergo awful changes as they transformed into grotesque beasts which could grow at an alarming rate. And they kept on growing. Until they were of a size which was truly gargantuan.. The sorcerers fed and trained their creatures with tender loving care and attention, teaching them how to behave according to their own inclinations. Some of these Titans would wreak almighty havoc as they stomped across the countryside, feasting on local populace as they went. Others would come to the aid of any Edeans loyal to their own masters, by helping with constructions, seeing off attacking creatures and generally guarding over them. Inevitably these Titans were drawn into the struggle between sorcerers, as a loyal dog might protect its own master against an attacking enemy. When the Titans were first trained for battle a curious phenomena was noticed. These huge magical creatures did not rely on worship to provide lifeforce for their sorcery. The energy needed for spellcasting was produced internally. The implications were at once realised by the sorcerers of Eden. These Titans would be the most powerful weapons they could muster in the personal conflicts. These creatures would hold the key to success. All this was clear. As clear as Black & White _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 7. The Basic Gameplay First of all, there is no way to skip the tutorial. By watching the forums and various IRC channels, I'd say that this is a very good feature (the manual is rather weak anyway). Always read the friggin' signs! Signs next to houses contain valuable information about what's in the house and how to operate it. Signs in the terrain can contain valuable information on how to properly train your creature, small gameplay tricks, or even hints on how to accomplish certain goals. The game teaches you the basic gameplay very well, if you'll just have the patience to look, and it will be much easier than reading a tutorial (and if you are intelligent enough to appreciate a long detailed tutorial, you have probably learned your basic gameplay already, so I won't waste space writing about it). I will say this for a reminder, though: Leaving your hand on an object is very useful (for example over a construction site where you'll find out the exact amount of wood needed for completion or over a village totem to find out how many people your village has room for). The sections below will go into a bit more detail. Note that these sections try to cover both extremes. That is, if you want a white, or even rainbow colored creature or hand, read how to play good. If you want a black creature with horns, and a red hand, read how to play evil. If you just want to stay neutral,mix in a little of both. Playing Good Now this is a challenge. Here you will need to spend a lot of time managing your villages, which is an utter pain. But you cannot neglect your creature either, if you want it to be good aligned too, and performing the two together can initially be extremely difficult. If you train your creature well, though, you might be able to leave it on its own for an extended period of time, while you are away managing your villages. Staying good means that you must have the flags of a village storage raised as low as possible, or even not raised at all. This is an enormous task in itself.But not only that, you will have to carefully watch all your worshippers at thetemple shrines so they don't starve and die,which even Blackie disapproves of! You must also act passive, and avoid any killing whatsoever. This means that taking full control of an island will be done by sending missionaries,traders, yourself and your creature to enemy villages to assist and impress them with miracles, food and wood. The Flying Creatures miracle and increased Heal also work fine to generate lots of belief. Note that the more people who witness your miracle, the more belief you will get. Casting lots of Heal miracles on villagers may cause them to live longer, and thus, in the long run, they may increase faster in numbers since less people die and disappear. You can train your creature to only heal sick villagers, though. Zoom in close and listen to pain sounds or watch for crawling villagers, then target a Heal miracle on them and have the creature watch with the Learning Rope. This may take time, though, since it is not often villagers get sick. Also, don't overfeed your villagers, since with lots of food comes the desire to breed, and with the desire to breed comes the desire to expand,and soon enough there won't be any empty spots on the island to expand upon (much less any forests left). As a good player, you can also sacrifice at the temple shrines to get prayer power, if you want. A shrubbery and any other plant will work fine. Never try to sacrifice a stone, though. It will cause damage to your shrine and scatter your worshippers! And even if you get attacked by an enemy, you cannot fight back! Use the Shield miracles to protect your villagers, and try not to have your creature attack another creature unless it is wreaking havoc in one of your villages. Your creature may get provoked into a fight as it is. So if it is so frustrating to play good, what are the rewards? Well, if you don't know the answer to that, my bet is that your creature won'tturn rainbow coloured anytime soon. Some of the visual effects of playing good are: a white temple, white hand,white creature, clear skies, longer days, shorter nights and a rainbow over your temple. A good creature will also glow white. Playing Evil First of all, evil isn't stupid and it isn't nasty. It's sinister and devious. If you kill for fun, sure you are evil, but you are mainly being blunt, and there's much worse you can do than that. Instead, try torturing people with fire. Starve them, wreck their homes, play catch with your creature using villagers or just leave the creature with villagers or just leave the creature with the Aggression Leash on in one of your own villages... Be creative. Since you can do pretty much anything while being evil, I won't dig deep into the details here. I will try to give out a few usefully tips, though. Being evil will finally let you ignore feeding the worshippers at your shrines.There are much better ways of gaining miracle power than dancing. Sacrificing new born children for example, is much more effective. Sacrificing your dead also works. If you want to wipe out a village, or atleast cause some serious damage, you can taint a food storage by throwing a toadstool or poop in it. Some of the visual effects of playing evil are: a black temple with spikes,red hand with long nails, black creature which grows horns, red skies,and everlasting nights. An evil creature will also emit black smoke. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 8. General Strategies In this chapter I have collected an assortment of tips,which don't relate specifically to creatures or villages.We discuss how time works in the game,as well as some tips on using yours controls effectively. Time Passes .... One year in the life of your villagers takes about three minuted of real playing time.As you'll surely have noticed a night in the game is far shorter than a day.In fact,a night is about three minutes long(equivalent to one years life for a villager),and a day is about 24 minuted long(equivalent to 8 years life for a villager). Since a villager's normal life span is between 70 and 80 years,a typical villager who dies of old age will live for about 8 game days(about 3 and a half hours of real gameplay). Creatures exist on a different time scale than do villagers,so the creatures age much more slowly. Control Techniques The fastest way to move from one part of a map to another(without using bookmarks) is to zoom out as far as necessary and double click on the map.This is often far preferable to using the move button alone to click and drag along the landscape at the usual height from the landscape. Using bookmarks is good.There is no need to bookmark your temple,however,since double-tapping the space bar will immediately bring you there. There is also no need to bookmark your creature.Tapping the C key will do this for you. Some good uses of bookmarks include marking a herd of wild beasts in case you quickly need to feed your creature; the village store in each village you own; and marking important silver scroll areas.For example,you should mark the singing stones spot on the first land so that you can quickly haul any rocks you come across to over that area to deposit them. Using One-Shot Miracles One-Shot miracle dispensers don't require worship power to replenish.If you remove a miracle bubble from a dispenser,after a matter of time,another bubble will take its place.You may remove a bubble from a dispenser and place it on the ground which lets another bubble begin forming.That way you can store any number of single-shot miracles you like.You can stockpile mainly useful single-shot miracles for future use or as needed(like a food or wood miracle for resources or winged creature miracle for village conversion and belief). If you store a collection of miracle bubbles,you can give your creature a crash course on a particular miracle,showing him an uninterrupted series of miracles and minimizing the number of tasks you have to keep in mind. Certain miracles,such as magic forest and shield spells,will remain in place until you grab the small icon hovering over the miracle.Another way to accomplish this task(especially useful if you want to quickly take away a bunch of such miracles without the time consuming process of finding each one and removing it individually) is to lower your totem to 0 percent,which cancels all worship.The miracles will all fade,and you can then return your totem to the percent it had been set to. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 9. Creatures(Titans) This is the real fun of the game. There are 16 different Creatures. These are: Ape Tortoise Cow Zebra Tiger Brown Bear Leopard Polar Bear Wolf Sheep Lion Chimp Horse Mandrill Rhino Ogre Another Creature that many people thought was in the game is the Crocodile. This was nixed in the early stages of development. It might be back, but as for now you can't get it. 9.1 Creature List The Creatures are arranged below in alphabetical order. The basic format is this: Creature Name How to Unlock Natural Alignment Appearance as Neutral: Appearance as Good: Appearance as Evil: Dance Relative Strength Relative Out-Of-Battle Speed Relative Intelligence Proficiency in Battle Proficiency out of Battle Overall Notes The Creature Name and How to Unlock are self-explanatory. The next point is somewhat controversial, but in my experiences it is pretty reliable. Natural Alignment is basically what your Creature is inclined to become, good or evil. So, basically, if you left it alone overnight with 0 training what alignment it would be in the morning. A lot of people say it's random, but from what I've seen it stays constant for each creature. I believe this is related to whether it's meant as an attacker or a defender. (By the way, this is just my opinion, but the perfect combination is a good Creature and an evil player. This way you canskip all the tedious micromanagement and concentrate on the fun stuff (killing!!) while your Creature canwatch the towns without you having to worry. Of course, that's just my opinion, and some of the evil Creatures look awesome.) The Appearances are self-explanatory. The Dance is self-explanatory. The next points are relatively self-explanatory,and are based on a scale of 0-10. They are just my (and helpers') speculation,not based on the numbers from the website or strategy guide. Note that these can change dramatically based on your training (besides intelligence, and some creatures' limits are lower than others').Strength, for instance, can be supplemented by carrying rocks around.Speed is increased by running laps around the island.This doesn't directly raise the creature's speed, but lowers his fatness, which in turn raises the speed (but lowers his battling ability).Proficiency in Battle is based upon a number of factors. One, how strong he is and how easily he gains strength. Two, how quickly and how powerful his actual attacks come off, and ease of use in battle. These can be tough to judge, but I'll do my best and any help is welcome. Proficiency out of battle is based on how quickly he learns, how much he cares for the Villagers, how likely he is to wander off(partly based on training,but Creature has a factor in that too), etc. These won't be numerical values,but detailed(as detailed as I can, anyway)descriptions. Finally, an overall view at the Creature Whew, finally, you're saying, the good stuff!! 1. Creature Name: Ape How to Unlock: Chosen at beginning of game Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: An orange monkey. Looks pretty neat when it's fat. Appearance as Good: A happier orange monkey. Appearance as Evil: A red and blue monkey. Dance: A macarena looking thing Relative Strength: 3/10 Relative Speed: 6.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 9/10 Proficiency in Battle: Not bad. The delay time on his moves is average but the Special Move is excellent (almost an instant hit). His Range is OK but he just isn't strong enough for it to be much use. Proficiency out of Battle: May not be so good, as the Ape supposedly has a tendency to wander off or be distracted and not feed himself properly. However, he does learn pretty quickly, so it might be a worthwhile trade-off. Overall: The Ape is probably the best Creature to start off with if you're playing good. It learns miracles (and how to use them) really quickly, which basically balances out any of its personality problems. 2. Creature Name: Brown Bear How to Unlock: Completion of "Pollution Clean-up" Challenge in Land5 Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: A brown bear. Appearance as Good: Coming Soon Appearance as Evil: Coming Soon Dance: Disco Inferno! See the Winamp plug-in. Relative Strength: 7/10 Relative Speed: 5.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 6.5/10 Proficiency in Battle: One of the best battlers. His moves look surprisingly reminiscent of martial arts for a bear; I'd have expected wrestling moves. I haven't seen the Special Move, but the rest seem pretty good. Proficiency out of Battle: Slightly above average. He learns Miracles at a moderate rate and if you train him a little he will watch after your Villages. Really there aren't any glaring deficiencie here. Overall: An excellent all-around Creature. Pretty smart, very strong, and great in battle. No real problems here.\ 3. Creature Name: Chimp How to Unlock: Bring the witch in Land 3 a child Natural Alignment: Neutral Appearance as Neutral: Um.. A chimpanzee. Appearance as Good: Coming Soon Appearance as Evil: Looks like a little gremlin. I imagine some of the more mischievous gods would like this. Dance: A macarena looking thing Relative Strength: 3.5/10 Relative Speed: 7/10 Relative Intelligence: 10/10 Proficiency in Battle: Put bluntly: terrible. He has a very short reach, the moves have quite a bit of delay, and it's nearly impossibl to get him up to full strength. Probably THE worst. Proficiency out of Battle: Probably THE best. He learns Miracles the fastest of any Creature. He can pick up Water in 2 showings; Water Increase in 4. He learns MegaBlast at 1% each time! If you equip the Learning Leash while doing something, he'll always pick it up after one try! What more do you want?! Overall: Coming Soon 4. Creature Name: Cow How to Unlock: Chosen at beginning of game Natural Alignment: Good Appearance as Neutral: A brown cow. Appearance as Good: A black and white spotted cow. Appearance as Evil: A red, bony, bull-looking animal. Dance: A River Dance! Relative Strength: 2.5/10 Relative Speed: 4/10 Relative Intelligence: 6/10 Proficiency in Battle: Coming Soon Proficiency out of Battle: Pretty good. He's naturally nice to Villagers and learns Miracles pretty decently. Plus the good form looks a lot better than the evil. Overall: Don't be fooled by the low stats. Though the cow starts off with low stats, he has the potential to increase rather rapidly. This coupled with an above-average intelligence (and inherent lovability) makes him a pretty good all-around creature. 5. Creature Name: Gorilla How to Unlock: Downloadable, then see Creature breeder in Land 1/4 Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: Hmm... I dunno, this is a stumper. A gorilla, maybe? Appearance as Good: Eww, it looks like a flower. Appearance as Evil: A silverback! Looks pretty cool. Dance: Disco Fevah! Relative Strength: 8/10 Relative Speed: 6/10 Relative Intelligence: 3/10 Proficiency in Battle: The Gorilla's a pretty good fighter. Besides the inherent strength, its attacks are pretty good. They have some delay but are powerful, long reaching, and will stun the enemy, either knocking them to the side (aim for the legs, it's great for disorienting a human opponent), away, or stunning them in place. Not to mention the very fast Special Move. An excellent choice as a fighter. Proficiency out of Battle: Below average. He learns miracles slowly, won't be very happy moping around the house, and has a knack for over-eating; when the sheep runs out, bye-bye Villagers. Keep him on the offense. Besides, the good incarnation looks stupid. Overall: One of the best fighters and attackers. Not too good as a town-watcher though. A pretty good Creature overall. 6. Creature Name: Horse How to Unlock: Downloadable, then see Creature breeder in Land 1/4 Natural Alignment: Good Appearance as Neutral: A blue and grey horse.. Sorry, I'm not up to date on my horse breeds. Appearance as Good: A unicorn with the same color scheme as the neutral horse. Appearance as Evil: An ugly, filthy, smelly donkey. Dance: An Irish tap dance Relative Strength: 4.5/10 Relative Speed: 9.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 7/10 Proficiency in Battle: The Horse isn't really that good of a fighter. His strength needs to be worked on pretty often to keep it high, and his attacks aren't very powerful. The Special Move is a double kick with the hind legs, but the first kick does no damage, so it's much too slow to be of any use in a fight. His other attacks come at a pretty average rate of speed, but nothing special. Note he has a good sweep (target legs at medium range) that can pretty easily be followed up with a step forward and a few close-up attacks. He may be able to hold his own against some of the Creatures, but it'll take work. Proficiency out of Battle: This is where the Horse really shines. After a little bit of training, you can let him off his leash and he will wander about healing Villagers, supplying the Village Store, all the while managing to keep himself in good health. It's perfect for leaving on overnight, if you have no qualms about missing 10 years of your Creature's life and/or being a cheater. Overall: The Horse is an excellent all-around Creature. It's best if used defensively, as its VERY high speed allows it to get from Village to Village quickly, and he will automatically have a caring and compassionate nature. Mediocre in a fight, it's probably best to teach him some good offensive miracles and have him keep his distance from the enemy's Creature. A great choice overall, though, I don't understand why it's not more popular. 7. Creature Name: Leopard How to Unlock: Downloadable, then see Creature Breeder in Land 1/4 Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: I need help on this one! Appearance as Good: Coming Soon (I really do need help on this one.. seriously guys) Appearance as Evil: Somewhat like a puma, but more evil looking. Dance: A break-dance! Relative Strength: 7.5/10 Relative Speed: 8/10 Relative Intelligence: 2/10 Proficiency in Battle: An excellent fighter. He has a pretty nice reach on most of his moves (shoot for the back-flip, it's great). The Special Move, which is sort of like a jumping slash, doesn't go forward very far but can be used to jump over sweeps if you know they're coming (like if you're fighting a cheapo who does one move over and over). Proficiency out of Battle: Avoid putting him in this role. He's not as dumb as the Tiger (please don't e-mail me with insults over this comment!), but still pretty dumb. He'll pick up Miracles very slowly and won't take training very well. If you really want a good Leopard it'll take quite a bit of work. Overall: The strength and speed are enticing, but it simply isn't worth the lack on intelligence. But you could get around this by training an earlier Creature and switching to him. Besides the lack of Intelligence, a very effective Creature. 8. Creature Name: Lion How to Unlock: Complete the Land 5 Lion Puzzle, where you must guide a blind lion to its meal of mutton. Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: Beats me... a male lion, perhaps? Appearance as Good: A happy male lion. Appearance as Evil: An angry looking, evil male lion. (I say male because of the mane.) Dance: Coming Soon Relative Strength: 8.5/10 Relative Speed: 7/10 Relative Intelligence: 6.5/10 Proficiency in Battle: Coming Soon Proficiency out of Battle: Coming Soon Overall: The lion is arguably the most powerful Creature. He learns relatively fast, has an excellent Strength stat, and is pretty fast. However, good luck getting him... 9. Creature Name: Mandrill How to Unlock: Downloadable, then see Creature Breeder in Land 1/4 Natural Alignment: Neutral Appearance as Neutral: A baboon! Well, actually, there's a difference between a mandrill and a baboon, but to keep it in layman's terms, I'll say baboon. Appearance as Good: Coming Soon Appearance as Evil: Coming Soon Dance: A macarena looking thing Relative Strength: 5/10 Relative Speed: 6/10 Relative Intelligence: 5/10 Proficiency in Battle: Another average score. His attacks have a delay, and don't do too much damage, but they don't do too little damage either. The Special Move comes off very quickly but is short range. Proficiency out of Battle: Yet another average score. It'll take him a little while to pick up Miracles but he trains rather well. An all-around Creature. Overall: Purely average. With work, though, he can become very powerful (also looks pretty nice). 10. Creature Name: Ogre How to Unlock: Hack him Natural Alignment: Evil... very Evil Appearance as Neutral: A one-eyed green bearded caveman. Appearance as Good: A slightly taller one-eyed green bearded caveman Appearance as Evil: A slightly shorter one-eyed green bearded caveman (lazy Lionhead). Dance: From what I can tell, it's none. Apparently we aren't supposed to use the Ogre. When I had him dance for a crowd he just started shaking (stage fright :). My guess is that since the AI Ogres will never dance Lionhead felt no need to program a dance. If anyone else has had different results please tell me. Relative Strength: 6/10 Relative Speed: 5.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 4/10 Proficiency in Battle: Pretty good. You can usually guess what he's going to do because most of the moves are natural human moves, which makes him pretty easy to control. I haven't tried the Special Move yet but some other useful ones are his sweep (aim for legs at medium range) and sidekick (aim for torso at medium range). Also, I dunno if this is just from lack of training, but when I took him into battle and gave him a command to attack he just shuffled back and forth for a few steps before attacking. Any more info would be appreciated (e-mail me and I'll send you a map to switch to him). Proficiency out of Battle: Not so good. Mine would never be good. I'd leash him to the Town Center with the Compassion Leash and he'd just sit down ("Your Creature has nothing to do so he is sitting down.") Keep him on the offense. I imagine he'd be much happier kicking things in (like me :). Overall: I'm still in the preliminary testing phase with this one. From what I can tell he's a pure offense Creature with average stats. Any assistance would be much appreciated. 10. Creature Name: Polar Bear How to Unlock: Complete the boat Challenge in Land 1 and they'll get marooned on Land 5 complete with the Polar Bear. Natural Alignment: Evil (not too sure) Appearance as Neutral: A polar bear (for those who lost their memory since buying Black and White, it's a white brown bear) Appearance as Good: Coming Soon Appearance as Evil: Coming Soon Dance: Disco Inferno! Relative Strength: 6.5/10 Relative Speed: 7/10 Relative Intelligence: 4/10 Proficiency in Battle: See Brown Bear Proficiency out of Battle: See Brown Bear Overall: Should be pretty much like the Brown Bear. I've only tested him once, so any help would be appreciated. 11. Creature Name: Rhino How to Unlock: Hack him until Lionhead releases a patch Appearance as Neutral: A rinosirus! (Me smart.. ME WANT FOOD!!!) Appearance as Good: It's light blue, it's happy... it's stupid! Appearance as Evil: It's dark red, it's spiky... it's awesome! Dance: Coming Soon Natural Alignment: Coming Soon Relative Strength: 7/10 Relative Speed: 6/10 Relative Intelligence: 1.5/10 Proficiency in Battle: He's basically a slower, more powerful Horse. Expect the same average moves but with MUCH more strength. Just never use the Special Move; it's useless. Proficiency out of Battle: Coming Soon Overall: These are preliminary estimations on my part. I've only used him once and haven't had time to do extensive testing. Any help would be much appreciated (e-mail me). 12. Creature Name: Sheep How to Unlock: Complete the Sheep Challenge in Land 1 Natural Alignment: Good Appearance as Neutral: A sheep/goat (depending on the fatness). Appearance as Good: A golden lamb. Appearance as Evil: THE MOST AWESOME CREATURE IN THE GAME!!!!! Picture Resident Evil.. now picture that Lambchops puppet show! YES!!! YOU GOTTA SEE THIS!! Dance: Coming Soon Relative Strength: 3.5/10 Relative Speed: 6.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 7/10 Proficiency in Battle: Don't be fooled by the low strength! The sheep can bring it up fast, so don't worry about that. As for his moves, the Sheep rivals the big cats and the Turtle. His Special Move comes off very quickly and is very powerful, leaving the enemy stunned and wide open to a long-range low kick. At close range he has a very effective jab which comes off almost instantaneously. Just be careful not to click to low and do the uppercut! Really, the sheep can stand up to just about anything they can throw at you. Proficiency out of Battle: Another strong point for the Sheep. A pretty good intelligence stat means that this Creature will learn miracles rather quickly, and learn to use them well too. He's naturally good and will watch after your Villagers without you having to tell him. The Villagers love him, too! What's not to like? Oh, yeah, if you can, you should avoid letting him go good. Put bluntly, THE EVIL SHEEP IS AWESOME!!! Overall: The Sheep is an excellent Creature. It looks cool, learns fast, fights well... He's the perfect Creature! Well, he does have a minor problem with not eating right, but that can be fixed by a good bout of training or even hand feeding if you have the time. Pick the Sheep! It's the best! (In case you haven't noticed, the Sheep is my favorite Creature) 13. Creature Name: Tiger How to Unlock: Chosen at start of game Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: A tiger. Looks REALLY dumb when it's fat. Appearance as Good: A lighter colored, shiny Tiger. Appearance as Evil: A hunched over, vermilion tiger with big claws. Dance: A break-dance! Relative Strength: 7.5/10 Relative Speed: 8/10 Relative Intelligence: 0/10 (yes, 0/10) Proficiency in Battle: He's probably pretty good but I don't like the style. His moves have a pretty short delay but not enough reach to be safely used. He does do quite a bit of damage, though. Proficiency out of Battle: OK, due to popular demand, I am updating this. Apparently the Tiger isn't so bad as I once thought. I've received 40+ e-mails about why the Tiger is good (some helpful and constructive, some not...) so I'll say this. A lot of people don't like the Tiger because he's too dumb. Apparently, though, many say that he learns just as well as the Ape. Though I must disagree with that, I admit he's not as bad as I said. He'll only eat 1 or 2 Villagers before getting the hint and if raised correctly will watch after your towns. Well, tell that to my old Tiger! Overall: I'm upgrading the Tiger to average. He's pretty good in battle and will usually listen if you want him to be good. I guess it varies pretty badly, though, 'cuz mine doesn't do anything I tell him. Best I can say if you want the Tiger is good luck. 14. Creature Name: Tortoise How to Unlock: Helping boy guide fish into net on Land 4 Natural Alignment: Good Appearance as Neutral: An ordinary turtle. Appearance as Good: A rainbow turtle. Appearance as Evil: A spiky, dark red turtle. Yes, I know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. Dance: Another break dance (from what I've heard) Relative Strength: 4/10 Relative Speed: 5/10 Relative Intelligence: 8/10 Proficiency in Battle: The Tortoise is one of the best fighters. His attacks, though lacking brute strength, come out lightning quick. Against smaller Creatures he has an overhead kick which, if you want to be cheap, can be used over and over in an infinite-hit combo. Against larger Creatures, he has a sweep which is almost an infinite hit combo. The only real problem is the slow dodging speed. You pretty much CAN'T dodge, though this can be circumvented by quick blocking. If you wanna win and don't really care much about your own personal likes and dislikes (or fun, for that matter), go with the Turtle. Proficiency out of Battle: This is where the Turtle is SUPPOSED to be good, but Lionhead gave him REALLY unbalanced moves so basically he's great in both areas. The Turtle naturally watches after Villages, impressing them, dancing, etc. He picks up Miracles very quickly and trains pretty well. Only possible problem is a low speed. Another *sigh* great point for the Turtle. Overall: The Turtle, despite its weaknesses, is still pretty cheap. A lot of people like it (and for good reason, the evil form looks pretty cool) and it's THE best battler. I recommend against it though. There's no real reason, I'm just tired of seeing Tortoises in multiplayer! 15. Creature Name: Wolf How to Unlock: Hack him... lol Natural Alignment: Evil Appearance as Neutral: The best of the 3.. Looks like an omnipotent timber wolf. Appearance as Good: Eww... A purple chihuahua. Appearance as Evil: A black doberman pinscer. Dance: Break dance! Relative Strength: 8.5/10 Relative Speed: 8/10 Relative Intelligence: 6/10 Proficiency in Battle: After working with my Wolf a bit more, it appears he's actually a pretty good fighter. He has an excellent strength stat and dodges with more agility than most Creatures (besides the Horse). Avoid getting too close as it's dangerous. Instead stay at medium range and use his sidekick move (aim for torso) or backflip (aim for head). Also the Special Move is very useful for jumping over sweeps and countering enemy Special Moves. He also has a swipe move which only works up close but is useful for pummeling a blocking opponent. Proficiency out of Battle: Average here. He learns miracles pretty quickly and won't eat villagers (unless you tell him to, but that's up to you...), but has a natural tendency to.. um.. kick things. Plus the good form looks terrible. Overall: An above-average Creature overall. He's still probably my second-favorite, though. Now how about a normal Dog Creature? C'mon, Lionhead, get it together! How could you leave out a plain Dog when you have a Wolf? 16. Creature Name: Zebra How to Unlock: Solve the Indian lady's riddle in Land 2 Natural Alignment: Neutral (not too sure) Appearance as Neutral: A zebra. Appearance as Good: Coming Soon Appearance as Evil: Coming Soon Dance: Irish tap dance Relative Strength: 4.5/10 Relative Speed: 9.5/10 Relative Intelligence: 7.5/10 Proficiency in Battle: I think it's just like the horse. Proficiency out of Battle: Ditto. Overall: It's basically a horse clone. Whichever skin you like best... 9.2 Interaction Ypur interaction with your creature,at its most basic level,is the touch of your hand. By hovering your hand over your creature and holding down the action button,you can zoom in and reward or punish it as you feel right.Rewards and punishments should be doled out in much the same way as parents do with their children---unless.of course,you're intent on raising an evil creature!! Rewards and punishments should also be administered immediately,or else you may teach your creature the wrong thing.The moment you see your creature doing something you approve of or want to discourage zoom in and give him some love(or pain). 9.3 Creature Training Be aware that you can only have ONE creature for each player profile and that creature will be constant in ALL games you play using it. It will grow older and remember everything you have done, no matter how much you load the game. It also remembers everything from a skirmish or multiplayer game. The only way to reset a creature is to restart your game. Your creature does not have to be of the same alignment as you do. The creature can be so good it glows white, while at the same time, your castle is growing spikes. Also note that the Creature Help doesn't initially show up in the game, even if you have it activated in the Options. The first time it will show up is after you have activated the final golden scroll on the first island, but it will stay activated after that, even if you restart a new game or load an earlier save. If you start an online game or a skirmish game though, the creature help will also get activated and stay so, at least until a part of the tutorial kicks in again, whereupon it will become deactivated (so just save, start skirmish and then load, to get it back). Food You have probably gathered that your creature has to eat from time to time.As a neutral god pushing on good, I don't mind my creature eating animals but if we are talking sparkling white temple stuff then slap him for eating a sheep, cow, horse, fish . etc. I don't slap my creature mundos for eating meat but i stroke him for eating grain. make piles of food around the village. Whenever i see him eat from a pile i stroke him. the first time i'll stroke him to 100%, the next 80%, then 60, 40 and then finsh with 20. He'll start eating on his own. Now in order to get a pile spare to leave in the village i steal from khazar, the god from the second island. He will constantly refill. once, I managed to teach my ape to steal from other villages. It was quite cool. slap him for eating villagers although they are the healthiest substance in the game for him to eat. you can't win. Sleep I always and i mean always have problems with trying to get my creature to sleep. He always colapses with tiredness. This is very bad because your creature will get a little smaller each time. All you have to do is stroke him for sleeping on his own. He will start sleeping every chance he gets but I suppose too much sleep must be better than none at all. Now I don't know about you but my creature won't go to his pen and sleep but who cares. Village Management This is where your creature comes in most handy. First throw some grain into the village store with your creature on the rope leash watching. He will almost always try it too. Stroke him for it. Same again (100%, 80, 60 . ). he will now know it is good to supply the village store with food. Then drop a tree in. He will only copy you if he is big enough and strong enough to pick up any of the trees in the village. Do the stroking thing again. I don't know for sure but I think healing the villagers impresses them because your creature will heal villagers when he wants to impress them so just wait for him to pick up a villager and stroke him. Do the stroking thing again. You can also teach him to water fields and trees. Impressing What you want to do is star a skirmish with a flock of birds miracle dispensor or a village that worships for it. Any ways, once you have it use it in a village with your ( on the rope leash ) watching. He will try to impress the village by doing handstands, throwing rocks, dancing . it dipends what creature you have. Do the stroking thing. this will really help you on your way to completing the game. Miracles In black and white you can use miracles but what took me a week to realise was that so can your creature and without a worship site and a handfull of villagers worshiping. Your creature does need energy though. Each miracle he casts increases hunger by 3% and tiredness by 5%. Your creature has the advantage of limitless influence in witch he can use miracles and can learn and use every single miracle you can. Teaching Miracles Teaching your creature a miracle is very simple. There is two ways of doing so. The first is to have your creature on the rope leash and let him watch you do the miracle. The time it takes for him to learn the miracle depends on your creatures species and the miracle eg. The ape can learn the miracle food if he watches you do it about 4 or 5 times but the tiger has to watch about 6 or 7 times. If you are a good god and don't want to have to frazle about twenty villages to teach your stupid tiger how to learn the fire ball, lightning or mega blast you should use miracle seeds. Just hand one to your creature and he will learn the percentage that he would have learned if you had shown him. Get him to drop it before he uses it. If you want to teach your creature every miacle there is download a good map that has every dispenser. Where to use them You can teach your creature where to use the miracle by simply showing him eg. If you want your creature to set alight your village store let him watch you do it. Fighting Even the nicest gods around love a good fight now and then. A fight normally occurs when too creatures are straped together with the spiky leash. They will taunt each other then a white circle will appear. This is the ring in, which the titans will go head to head in combat. Moves Your creature will automatically fight for himself but if playing someone on the net he will get mauled to shreds. To counter this your can direct your creature. Clicking on the enemy creatures body will make your creature attack there. If you click on your own creature he will block. Clicking on the ground makes your creature dodge in that direction. You will see a pentagon shape on the bottom right corner of the screen. Making that shape as if you are using a gesture on the ground will make your creature use his . wait for it . special move! Each creature has a special move. The primates ( the ape, chimp, mandrill and gorilla ) have a back flip kick. Short range and not very powerfull. The cats ( tiger, leopard and lion ) have a jumping both arm scratch. Long range and pretty powerfull. The horse, zebra, rhino and the ogre have a kick ass double kick where they kick you in the face the do a spin kick. Medium range and very powerfull. The bear, polar bear, cow and the sheep have a kind of lame punch where they their wrist then punch you in the face. Medium range and not very powerfull. I can't remember what the turtle does but i think it was a headbutt. Strength Every creature has a certain capacity for strength. The cats will get stronger faster and will lose their strength at a very slow pace. The apes will take absolutly ages to get up to get up to full strength and with lose it twice as fast. The horse, zebra, bear, polar bear, cow, sheep are all medium but the turtle loses very fast. You're probably thinking that i forgot to tell you how to get them to full strength in the first place but i haven't. The answer is exersize. Give him a heavy boulder and make him run about the island. He has to have a decent amount of fat to turn into strengh. Growth When you start the game your creature is pathetic compared to the fully-grown guide, don't worry sable was telling the truth when she told you they can grow as tall as a mountain and so can your little titan. Download the creature vacation map from www.bwcenter.com and you can check how close you are getting. How to make him grow faster He will have to eat and sleep properly. There are special mushrooms, the purply white ones, they help your creature grow. Any downloadable map will have a big batch of them somewhere. If not it's a crap one. 9.4 Basic knowledge In order to develop a healthy creature, you need to know about its vitalstatistics. Those are the stats which can be seen when you focus a creature,and are also the only stats which can kill it. The vital stats are Damage,Hunger and Tiredness. In order to develop a well-trained creature, you also need to know about anumber of other statistics. These can be found in the Creature Cave, andthough they are not vital, they still represent some sort of basic need forthe creature. Those stats which are non-vital are Exhaustion, Dehydration,Strength, Fatness and Poop. All of these stats should be kept as low as possible, with the exception ofFatness, which should be kept at an average level (note the amount of fata creature has when you receive it). In addition to this, there are a number of trivial stats, which aren't reallyimportant to the creature, but which may be important to you. These stats areAlignment and Growth. Further, the creature seems to use Energy in order to cast its own miracles,since it decreases when it casts a miracle. Feed your creature in order toraise that stat again. Illness and Warmth will be explained at a later point. When a vital stat gets maxed out, your creature will collapse and regenerateback in its pen at your Temple. The stat will still remain high after that,so you need to take care of your creature in order to prevent it fromcollapsing again. If your creature collapses too mcuh, it will shrinknoticeably in size (although it will grow back in size over time). Note that when a creature collapses, you may still have a few seconds totry to fix the situation (heal or feed it), if you are lucky.Also, the creature may forget things over time, and will have to relearn thatagain. The same goes for strength. The creature will need constant exercise in order to keep itself fit and keep its strength up. 9.5 Basic behaviour If you want the perfect creature, hang around on the tutorial island until ithas learned every possible thing to be learned there (some spells will beunavailable as well as certain methods for helping villagers). Your villageson the tutorial island won't have any high demands (since you can't buildanything) and as long as you don't active the final golden scroll, there is notime limit. Note that it is rather hard to become immensely good during the tutorialislands. This is probably due to not all features being activated yet. For those of you interested in AI, the game supports both supervised andunsupervised learning, as well as reinforcement learning. A decision tree is also used to select which action a creature will perform. 9.6 Basic Learning The first method of learning is simply to show your creature what to do. Leashit with the Learning Rope and carry out the exact action you want it to perform. Make sure that it is watching you, or your actions will have little effect. Note that you shouldn't stroke the creature for simply noticing what you justdid (it will point in the direction of your action, and then look at you).The real reward should come only after it has properly copied your action. Sometimes the creature will understand immediately and copy you, sometimes,it takes forever to get it to do the same thing as you. A second method of learning is to let the creature find things out by itself.But, if you let the creature wander around and it accidently manages to learnsomething you didn't want it to know about, you will have to spend a lot oftime supressing that behaviour, since nothing can be "unlearned" once found out. In order to properly control a creature's behaviour, you need to catch it at a precise moment in order to get a precise response out of it. If you are too late in praising or punishing your creature, you may affect a whole different action. This means that you may need to anticipate what your creature is going to do. Get to know your creature! This is the only way to be safe. You sometimes also have to plan ahead. When you start out, the creature will only perform basic stuff. Later on, you will want it to carry out more complex series of actions, and if you haven't taught it the basic stuff properly, it can be too late when one of the basic things it got wrong is part of a more complex series of actions (for example, when picking up a tree is a part of the being generous to villagers action in order to resupply the storage). Though the game says that handing the creature a one-shot miracle will cause it to instantly cast it, it has to be trained to cast those too (you will have to slap it for eating or losing the miracles). Note that your creature may see more detail than you are aware of. If you cast, for example, heal on healthy villagers and water on grown trees, the creature may do so too. A better way is to only cast heal on unhealthy villagers and water on tiny trees. All of the above applies for fighting too. Tell your creature to move around a lot, and it will do it by itself after awhile. The same goes for concentrating attacks on special body parts (note which targeted body part carries out the different attacks you want it to perform more). 9.7 Rewarding Your Creature Whenever you spot your creature doing something ,which you absolutely want to encourage. Reward it until the "Good Boy" percentage rises above 0 %.You can reward it upto 100% but you should take advantage of the available rewards.That is ,if your creature something you want to encourage, reward it to the full extent.And if does something which makes you happy but little bit then reward it a little bit.Your creature will tend to do those things for which it is rewarded fully in lieu of those things for which it is rewarded partially. Make sure you dont reward your creature too early especially when it is holding something. Otherwise he will eat that thing. 9.8 Punishing Your Creature If you want to discourage your creature's actions you'll have to punish it(even if you are evil)There are other ways to condition your creature for eg. keep it occupied when it is not so hungry or tired so that it learns to eat and sleep only when he really needs it. 9.9 Leashes The 3 leashes you have to work with will also help you shape your creature's behaviour and personality.until your creature is fully trained use the leashes frequentely.There is no penalty for leashing your creature.Note that unless you grab an attached leash and shorten it manually, your creature can and will wander quite some ways from where the leash is attached.Be warned that your creature may wander outside your influence if you leave it off the leash. In fact it may volunteer itself to completely convert a neighbouring village on its own. Learning Leash The learning leash has a quite different function than the other two.Whenever you want your creature to mimic your actions put the creature on the learning leash and direct its attention towards you.To get your creature's attention snap your fingers by clicking on the action button on the bare ground near the task you're occupied with.When your creature is curious(according to the creature's tips text)you'll have the easiest time teaching your creature different things.The learning leash is good for times when you want to move your creature to a specific location.If you snap your fingers on the ground your creaure will go there. Leash Of Compassion If you desire a creature that will be kind and nice to your villagers, keep it on the leash of compassion until its well trained(unless you're trying to teach it something). Until your creature is naturally generous, keep it attached to you village store with the leash of compassion.The creature willl spend its time responding to your village's needs, including casting wood and food spells into the village store.If you attach your creature with the leash of compassion to your own village store or center for long periods of time(if it knows certain helpful miracles)your creature's alignment will skyrocket to the good side. Leash Of Aggression If you desire a creature that will help you rule through fear and respect, keep it on the leash of aggression until its well trained.The more its on this kind of leash, the greater its long term desire will be for bringing pain to your people.When your creture is holding an item which you want it to throw, put it on the leash of aggression and click the action button on the ground, the creature will usually throw that item on that spot. Kicking is also considered as an aggressive act, which is more often if you use the leash of aggression.Much like the leash of compassion, attaching youe creature to your village structures with the leash of aggression for long periods of time can turn your creature to the dark side. 9.10 Attributes When you use the action button to zoom in on your creature or the temple to view your creature's stats, the attributes of your creature are described in detail for you.These occur in two types-those that you can alter through training and those that are inherent to your creature.While it is possible to whip a cow,for eg. into zero body fat shape, it is not possible to change it's basic character.Cows are greedy and not so smart.If you take your eyes off from your cow it will within no time gain fatness.Proper training can cure this problem.A fat creature will need to eat more often and will more quickly become fatigued which has no advantage in the game.So its wise to teach your creature only to eat when its hungry and to sleep when its quite fatigued.Sometimes an overzealous creature will go to the other extreme denying its own needs to the point where it collapses from 100% unger or fatigue.If you want to force your creature to rest you xan attach it to the learning leash with an object it cant interact with like a very heavy rock etc. your creature can rest for some time and then you can reattach the leash elsewhere. If your creature is attached to the village store(or any other village building)with the leash of compassion or aggression and you would like it to rest you can simply switch to the learning leash, and your creatureill rest. Note that if you send your creature to the temple during nighttime, it will always sleep there,even if it is 0% tired.It will also tend to sleep on the ground during the nighttime if it isn't sent to the temple. 9.11 Specific creature actions The previous sections were meant to be very general. Anything you read in those sections can be applied to any action -- no matter what creature you have. Andif you can't get your creature to do what you want, try again until it grasps the concept or change your method of teaching. The Urge To Feed & Sleep First of all, getting it to eat and sleep on its own is rather easy. However, trying to control how fast it gets hungry and how fast it gets tired can be a nightmare. Sometimes, the effects of slapping and stroking can seem to be totally at random. In this section, you will find some helpful tips, although you should still be very careful, since they will not always work. Only slap or stroke your creature a little bit at a time, in order to minimize the damage of a wrong outcome. Since the creature will initially eat anything, sleep anywhere and poop everywhere, the of basic training will mostly be to control these behaviours.You may have noticed that discouraging the creature from being just generally tired may either make it sleep less, lie down less on that location or become less tired. The outcome may seem to be selected totally at random. Careful consideration is a must before punishing or praising the creature. For example, when it sleeps you have to factor in several things. How sleepy was it? Was the creature exhausted or low on energy? When did it go to sleep and where did it lie down? Your creature will also initially eat any moveable object. However, it has a built in learning factor here, since it will puke up anything that isn't good for it (grain which isn't ripe, for example). The creature can also eat by its own initiative or by command (rubbing the belly when given food). But before you slap or stroke the creature for eating, there are a also number of factors you must consider. Consider what it is eating. Is it a food source which is good for him or not? Does the source replenish itself fast or slow? Is it stealing from someone? Is it eating because of hunger or greed? To get a creature to eat more of a certain type of food, just hand feed it with the food you want to increase its appetite for and stroke the creature after it has finished eating. This will always make it appreciate that type of food more (note that this isn't an exception to the above rule since you carry out the action here and then reward the creature for the effect). And yes, overfeeding will cause it to poop more and get fat. To get it thinner again, just keep it hungry a bit longer and don't feed it as much for a period of time, and its weight will go down. Water is lacking a graph in the creature info (although you can read its dehydration level in the Creature Cave), but it is not that important since the creature always knows how to drink and will do so when thirsty (and since it is not that often, you shouldn't need to adjust its drinking habits if you don't feel you simply have to). There doesn't seem to be any way to bring a creature water. Finally, fish would be the recommended food for any creature, since fish regenerate well without any care and it won't be considered stealing from the village. Cattle and other animals regenerate much slower and can run out if you're not careful (and though herders help, there is a strange lack of a herding disciple in the game). The Eating Of Villagers This can be considered a special case of feeding. Now you either want to or don't want to have the creature eat villagers, depending on your alignment. An untrained creature, even if it is a Cow or a Sheep, will sooner or later eat a villager if you have it wandering in a village while being hungry. Initially, this can work to your advantage if you keep a close eye on your creature. When the creature picks up a villager, immediately focus it. If it shows you that it is hungry, slap it silly. If it doesn't show you its intentions, unfocus and quickly click on the ground next to it to make it drop the villager. Stroke it for that action, if you wish. You can also slap the creature after it has eaten a villager, but only if you get the Help Text saying that "your creature will eat more of that stuff" (if you slap it without that text appearing, you may affect another action).Also, stroke the creature if you want it to continue eating villagers. Although, remember that an empty village belongs to nobody, and that strength comes in numbers. And note that even if you have taught your creature not to eat people from YOUR villages, there is nothing which stops it from eating people from other, neutral or enemy owned, villages. You'll have to teach it how to behave to other villagers separately. The Throwing Of Objects Throwing (as with kicking) seems to be an aggressive action, so if you want a passive creature, slap it for throwing stuff. The exception is when it is throwing trees or food into the village storage, which doesn't seem to count either as a throw or an aggressive action (same goes for when it is playful). The biggest question seems to be how to get the creature to throw stones. But if you are looking to increase the strength of the creature, remember that the sign said that the creature needed only to be carrying stones. To exercise it, simply give your creature a stone and action click on a piece of ground away from it. When it gets near the spot, click (or double-click) somewhere again to give it a new goal. Repeat this in order to walk or run it around the island for a while. The creature's strength will increase over time because of this (make sure it gets sleep, though). Anyway, if your creature can copy you throwing stones, all is well, and it should be praised for it. Note that the creature will take notice of where you aim your stone and even if you fetch the stone or not. If the creature refuses to copy your actions, things may get more complicated. Action clicking on an object with a leashed creature is supposed to be the command of getting it to pick the object up. However, this doesn't always work with stones. A reason for this may be that the stone is too large. But if you crush the stone into smaller pieces while the creature is watching, it may very well copy that action instead the next time it is told to pick up a stone, so be careful. A better course of action is to crush a number of stones far away from the creature and have it travel there only after they are the appropriate size. I personally can't see any use in throwing an object other than a stone, so when the creature tries that, just slap it to keep it from doing that again. Also, don't make the mistake of praising it too early. If you want it to throw a rock, don't praise it immediately after it has picked the rock up, since it will most definitely eat the rock instead (no matter where you stroke it). The creature can also be trained to catch stones (and other objects... such as fireballs). Have it in a playfull mode and practice with the beach ball. Just throw the ball at it at the appropriate height and it should try to catch it after awhile. Then move on to other objects you want it to catch. Sometimes, double-clicking on a spot on the ground when the creature is holding a stone will make it throw the stone there, but I haven't nailed down the details around this yet, as it may run to that spot also. The Helping In Village Duties Also, some people do say that the creature can make disciples other than breeders, but I have seen NO evidence of this. The creature always seem to create a disciple breeder if it cuddles a villager (even if there is nobody around of the opposite sex, and even if there is, action clicking on the ground to make the creature drop the villager will NOT produce a breeder). It must be a bug, or have a really weird explanation. When the creature brings home a villager, it might accidently drop it on top of the villager's house, instead of by the house (which, as explained earlier, you cannot punish it for). And, I don't know if this is a training thing or not, but the creature never seems to bring home the villagers who are actually on their way home... If you play the game by micromanaging your villages, you will almost certainly spend such a large amount of time doing it that the creature automatically will adapt your actions over time. However, if you do have trouble teaching it to help villagers, have the creature leashed to you using the Learning Rope, while you perform the actions you want it to adopt. Performing the same actions in different ways may also help. For example, the food storage can be filled by either dropping grain or livestock on it or by casting Food miracles. Note that having a creature leashed to a building won't automatically make the creature interact with the building unless you have taught it what to do. In fact, it seems to be a rather poor use of the leash (except for a well trained creature, but even then, unrestricting its area of movement will most definitely have it moving out of the village sooner or later). And, if you do have your creature leashed to a building in the village, make sure you unleash it when it needs food and sleep, which it otherwise might not prioritise. An area of trouble seems to be if you want to have your creature deliver food to the worshippers at your temple. This is very hard for it to copy, since there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between the different parts of the temple to your creature (it seems to regard the tower, the surrounding shrines and its pen as one and the same). If you have taught your creature the Food miracle, however, the best way is simply to leash it to the food desire flag on a temple shrine and have it figure out by itself that it should cast a miracle on the worshippers. Remember to stroke the creature when it gets it right. This method is very effective. Also, if your creature is kind to the villagers, it may pick one up from time to time, pat the villager a little and then put it back down. That villager will then have a very high chance of turning into a disciple breeder! This can happen very often with a creature which is kind to villagers, so be watchful of your creature so your villagers won't cause overbreeding, which is a nightmare. So, if you want your creature to continue being nice to villagers, but not create that many breeders, leash it the moment it picks up a villager. Then action click by its feet to make it put the villager down and make the creature do something more useful instead. The best thing is to assign all disciples yourself. Remember which villagers you put to work far from your village, and seek them out when you have your creature leashed to the Learning Rope. Disciples who work far from home have to travel great distances and will have less time to go to the storage for food or go home and sleep very often and because of this, their health will deteriorate. So, cast Heal miracles on these villagers and make sure your creature notices it. Then give it a big reward when it casts Heal on a villager itself. The deaths in the village will decrease over time if your creature learns this well. The Importance Of Housekeeping An untrained creature will have a rather high urge to poop anytime and anywhere. It is uncertain how the villagers react to having poop all over the place, but I suspect that they might not approve. You can actually teach your creature to stop pooping entirely. To do this, slap it immediately when you first witness the creature pooping against something. Hopefully, the creature will still need to poop, and will show you this by farting. Slap it again, but this time give it a good go. Sometimes, this is enough to have it give up ever wanting to poop again. (Though it is unknown if this will have any damaging effect on the creature.) Although it has been suggested that you should train your creature to poop in the fields, it seems to be of little use. Personally, I'd rather use the Water miracle, as it is much more effective and pleasant. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 10. Village Management What would be the fun in being a god without worshippers? Worshippers praise you and fear you. However, they're frightfully mortal and they require all the necessities of life that you don't. In this chapter, we take a close look at what keeps villagers--and their villages--running. Villagers It probably goes without saying that villagers are the most important (and complex) component of a village. Without them, almost all activity halts. Fortunately, villagers have a great desire to exist and proliferate, which makes it simpler to keep your body of worshippers alive. Remember that villagers are ultimately your source for prayer power, the power you need to cast miracles, either to impress new towns or terrorize prospective new followers. Without prayer power, your miracles are dry. How you treat your villagers to gain that prayer power is up to you. Do you sacrifice followers at the worship site to increase prayer power or breed peacefully and feed worshippers regularly to maintain prayer power? It's up to you! Attributes Each villager possesses a trio of attributes: age, life, and fatigue. (Women may have one extra attribute: pregnancy.) While villagers can't do much about their age, they'll monitor their own life and fatigue. Female villagers are quite interested in becoming mothers--they wait only for your godly permission. Age When children are born, they are 1 year old (which makes one wonder if the new millennium actually begins in 2002). For every three minutes of real time that pass, a year passes in the world of Black & White, and villagers who die of old age do so in their 70s or 80s. Thus, the average life span of a villager, in real time, is approximately three or four hours--unless, of course, they're routinely sacrificed or crushed by stones. Young children (under the age of 16) can't be made into disciples, and the elderly (over the age of 55) are disinclined to work on their own, but both of these age groups really enjoy dancing around artifacts. Put children to good use by placing plenty of stones inside your village for them to dance around. (Read our section on artifacts for further clarification.) When villagers die (whether from a natural or godly event, which makes their lives drop to 0 percent, or from old age), their skeletons remain on the ground for a few moments. If their village possesses a graveyard, their skeletons will vanish and tombstones will be added to the graveyard. Before the skeletons vanish, however, you can locate them and sacrifice them on your altar (this is the only way you can sacrifice a human on an altar without lowering your alignment toward evil). Life Villagers' lives are represented by a percentage and are affected mainly by catastrophic events, not by aging or work (although work does play a small role in loss of life). Life is returned to villagers through sleep, and this process is accelerated if villagers have homes to sleep in. A pregnant woman's life rises quite quickly, as long as she sleeps. The process of giving birth, on the other hand, takes a small toll on her life percentage. When villagers' lives drop below 30 percent, they'll begin to have trouble walking. When their lives drop below 10 percent, they'll begin to crawl around and cough. Villagers in this state will soon succumb to death unless they're placed beside their homes. Cast heal miracles on villagers in these states for large belief scores. When villagers' lives drop to 0 percent, they'll die. Unless a supernatural event causes this to happen, you won't need to worry about such deaths. Death, in a peaceful village, will normally come only when villagers' ages reach into their 70s or 80s. A dead villager may be picked up (and sacrificed); while the corpse is in your hand, it won't vanish but may be held indefinitely. Fatigue When villagers work, they become fatigued. When villagers aren't fatigued at all, their fatigue percentage is 100 percent (if this seems a bit backward to you, it may help to think of the percentage as a strength percentage instead). When a villager's fatigue becomes too great, he or she will seek out food, which will instantly remove all of the fatigue. Villagers will most often go to the village store and remove a bit of food for themselves, but you may also drop a pile of food on the ground nearby fatigued villagers (and they'll eat it). Villagers won't use the food supply of a neighboring village. Villagers who are completely fatigued won't die but will be useless for almost any task. If a food supply is readily available, however, you won't need to concern yourself with the fatigue of your villagers. Pregnancy A woman may become pregnant if she's a breeder disciple or if she encounters a male breeder who successfully breeds with her. A pregnant woman, if she isn't concerned with another task, will go home to sleep until she gives birth (if she has no home, she'll sleep on the ground outside). Pregnant women may, if interrupted in their tasks by a breeder, continue about their work, tossing aside their hoes or axes to give birth at the proper time. Their health isn't endangered at all by their continuing to work. If you find a pregnant woman lounging around, waiting to give birth, you can shake her, which resets the disciple, and then puts her to work as a farmer or other disciple.When a woman gives birth, she lies on the ground and a 1-year old child pops out, fully clothed (talk about a miracle!). A formerly pregnant woman won't immediately breed again unless she's designated a breeder disciple. Other Behavior Besides the above attributes that all villagers share, villagers display other characteristic behaviors, which warrant some discussion. Chilling Out and Nothing to Do There's an important difference between villagers who are chilling out and those who have nothing to do. The latter are disciples who temporarily lack a purpose--for example, a breeder in a village with full houses or a builder in a village with nothing to repair. Note that disciples with nothing to do won't permanently remain in this state; you'll often see disciples, who have lacked work for a substantial amount of time, turn to some other task that lies outside their assigned discipline. Villagers who are chilling out are relaxing, but alert, and may jump up at any moment and work on a task that the village requires. Their fatigue level isn't dropping, and they're making themselves available for work. Not only may villagers who are chilling out be useful for work, but they'll also participate in dancing if an opportunity presents itself in the form of a benevolent creature or an artifact. If your village is quite full of people who are chilling out, leash your creature to the village store or drop a rock into the town to create an artifact. Dancing When villagers are impressed with your creature, they'll often pause in their work (or in their chilling out) to worship the creature. This generates just a small amount of belief, but this is often better than the alternative (chilling out). Dancers are almost always either very young or elderly; children will leave the crŠche and come dance around artifacts. A creature that feels kindly toward your villagers may even summon nearby villagers with a hand gesture and lead them just outside the main village square. Once it has assembled them, it'll lead them in a dance. This activity is not only pleasant to see but also generates a small amount of belief. If you drop a rock in the center of a village, villagers who are chilling out may elect to dance around it (especially at dusk). Such a rock will, given enough time, become an artifact, which you can use to raise belief in your godship at neighboring villages. We discuss artifacts in more detail in another section. You may find villagers dancing around other objects that you've moved, whether you've rolled a beach ball into the common area or moved a piece of fencing as you made repairs. In general, dancing is a better occupation for villagers than chilling out, as it provides nice belief benefits--so give your relaxing villagers every chance to do so. Desire Flags Your alignment (especially in the good direction) is affected by whether your villagers have their desires met. Each desire is indicated by the desire flags, which fly over your village store or at your worship site. Balancing Desires Your villagers' desires interact to some degree. If you provide a village with more breeders, for example, you'll find that their desire to expand will increase. If you sacrifice your populace on your altars to keep the population in check, the villagers will desire mercy. The least time-intensive approach is that of a patient but hard-line parent-- note that your villagers have desires and that you can assist them in helping themselves, but don't cater to their whims. Remember that desires are just that: desires, not needs. Having a few desire flags flying isn't a problem unless they're flying consistently high. When it comes to desire flags, players of evil and good alignments will want to handle them differently. A player of evil alignment won't be disturbed by a high-flying mercy flag but will likely rejoice in it instead. Even an evil alignment god, however, must have worshippers around to wield power, so he'll need to keep an eye on the desire flags--they'll indicate the relative health of the people. If you're working for a good alignment, aim to keep your desire flags below the halfway point--but don't feel obligated to lower them to zero. What's better is to keep your villagers at a sort of semipermanent low desire so that they'll occupy themselves with meaningful tasks, such as fishing and farming. Villagers whose desires are always instantly met are likely to become lazy, thus demanding even more of your time. Low desire flags will equal more micromanagement. Keep the villagers working to serve their needs for food and wood, for instance, by assigning farmers and foresters. An evil god can quickly reduce desire in his populace by slaying some of them. The best method is sacrifice, because sacrificed villagers feed your power supply (which is what you use for casting miracles). Training your creature to eat villagers when it's hungry will free you up for other tasks, although this doesn't add to your power supply. Each of these methods requires some of the populace to be dedicated breeders, especially if you're in the habit of sacrificing the village's children straight from the crŠche. A quick way for an evil god to limit population is to slay some of it simply by hurling several into the sea or casting powerful spells on them so that their life drops to 0 percent. If you simply must drop the population quickly, you can construct a small fenced area with no escape route, drop villagers inside it, and destroy the area with a spell. A player struggling to achieve a good alignment, on the other hand, has a more difficult task ahead. If the goal is to balance population growth, a good player should use excess villagers as missionaries or traders, as this will get them out of town and doing something useful. The key to the desire flags is balance--it's fine for your population to have reasonable desires, and it's fine for players of either good or evil alignment to ignore low desires to free up time for other tasks. When responding to desires, take a gentle approach (unless you have an emergency of some kind). If you want to raise your population to respond to a desire for children, make just one or two villagers into breeders, not a dozen. If they're crying out for expansion, slay a few or build a house or two. One exception is when your worshippers need food; you should respond to this desire with a mound of grain dumped beside the altar. The worshippers will feed themselves from it gradually and then beg for more when they run dry. Feeding worshippers also tends to quench their desire for rest. Keep worshippers fed, and they'll continue to worship--and you won't have the good or bad conscience pestering you about any deaths! Village Structures Just like us (that is, the actual players, not the gods we represent), villagers need support structures to carry out their daily tasks. They like to sleep in homes, guard their children at the crŠche, bury their dead in the graveyard, and so on. In this section, we offer some tips on building a village, which will serve their needs--and therefore yours--well. General Structure Tips If a structure is damaged or is in the process of being constructed, you can see how close it is to completion by hovering your hand over the structure. The first piece of information you see is how much wood is required for completing the structure. If you continue to hover for a moment, the information will switch over to a percentage, which indicates the construction's progress. Clicking the action button over an abode will knock on its roof, triggering symbols to appear above the rooftop of each abode in your village. A similar symbol will appear when you pick up a villager who lives in a particular house: With a villager in your hand, look for a small blue symbol over an abode, which indicates the house where that villager sleeps. You can use this tip to return fatigued villagers directly to their homes, which gets them to sleep more quickly. Village Workshop Even if your village doesn't have a workshop, your villagers may take it upon themselves to build new abodes when their expansion desires are high. However, the best way by far to expand your village is to use your workshop to create scaffolds and then use the scaffolds to create buildings. You can assign villagers to be craftsman disciples, and they'll ferry wood from the nearest source over to the workshop. Alternatively, you can carry the wood yourself from the store to the workshop, depositing as much wood as you like into its supply. A workshop will create only as many scaffolds as its main area can hold, but you can combine scaffolds to create room for the workers to make more. In this way, you can stockpile up to seven scaffolds without moving them outside the main area of the workshop. Village Layout Your villagers don't have the ability to zoom across the landscape like you do, but they must rely on their stubby legs for locomotion. Thus, to increase the efficiency of the village, make their routes as short as you can. Build new fields near your village store, for example, and construct your village's workshop near the village store. This will make your farmers and craftsmen more efficient. Shorten the routes even more with a teleport miracle. Fences can be moved into any configurations you desire. Grab a section of fence, and rotate your camera view to orient it in the direction that suits you best. If you build small corrals, you can grab nearby herds of animals and drop them inside to keep better track of them. Note that villagers can't pass through fencing, so don't encircle your fields with fencing without allowing for a gateway in and out; plus, don't put fencing in well-traveled routes.Pull trees from the edge of your influence and relocate them into the center of your village. Foresters won't chop down these village trees unless you specifically order them to by creating a disciple next to them. Villagers become more content when their villages are so decorated, and fireflies will hide beneath these village trees (as well as rocks) at dawn, depositing singleshot miracles. Village Store The village store, where wood and food are stockpiled and desire flags flap in the breeze, is one of the village's permanent structures. Villagers like to have it filled with food because it puts their minds at ease, and you like it filled with wood because it lets you easily repair and build structures. The fastest way to replenish the wood and food at the store is to use miracles. A one-shot food or wood miracle, or a gesture miracle, can fill the store quite easily, which allows you to forget about it for a while. To get the most out of your miracles, however, you must go about casting them in precisely this way--activate the miracle and position your hand over the small cylindrical entrance building at the village store. Now, click your action button repeatedly--each click will provide a large amount of food, and a series of clicks will do this many times. There's no need to click quickly. Just hold the action button down for a moment and release it, repeating this process until the miracle is exhausted. This process, in contrast to a single click of the action button, will provide the store with an abundance of wood or food. If you plant forests near your village store, you'll reduce the walking distance of your foresters. To plant a forest, pick a sapling or tree from another area by grabbing it and pulling it from the ground and then hover it over a nice, open spot. Click the action button to plant the tree, and a puff of dust will erupt from the roots. If the puff is gray, you haven't chosen a fertile spot; if it's green, you can water it, and saplings will sprout from near its base. Village Center Drops A fast way to create new influence (and additional influence) is a new village center. Combine and pick up five scaffolds at the workshop. Move outside your influence. Notice you have a few seconds to drop the scaffold before you aren't able to interact with the environment any longer. Drop the scaffold as far from your influence as possible. As soon as the scaffold unfolds and the village center plans form, you gain influence. Drop some builders here and a supply of wood to get them started. To keep the new town afloat, you'll need food and shelter for your new minitribe. You'll also need to make sure they breed, or the builders you moved over could die and leave a ghost town, erasing your influence. Get the village up and moving before you ignore it; use healing miracles to increase your belief (and a hunk of food and wood wouldn't hurt either). You'll use the village drop to gain influence near enemy villages you wish to convert. You can move your creature there, but its antics will go only so far. You need influence there to cast miracles, drop artifacts, and perform other wizardry and tricks to knock off belief and convert the village. The Worship Site Manipulation of the worship site is key late in Black & White's single-player game and your skirmish and multiplayer games. You must somehow balance your need for prayer power (required for miracles, both offensive, defensive, and resources) with the pain and hunger that the worshippers suffer. Worshippers perform their duty full time and won't make time to eat or sleep. Feed your worshippers to keep them satisfied (as well as your alignment to the good side). Being fed keeps them somewhat rested too, though it's wise to use a healing spell every now and then to restore fatigue. If you're evil, the worship site takes on a different meaning--sacrifices! Drop a villager (especially a youngster) into the worship site's altar, and you gain a hefty chunk of prayer power. You can use this instead or in addition to suffering worshippers. Be prepared for a nose-diving alignment straight to evil! Your population directly affects how many people you can send to the worship site. If your village population is 50, placing the totem at 50 percent sends 25 villagers there. But if you take the time to grow your population--expanding and placing enough houses to hold them all--and reach a large village of 200 or 300, that same 50 percent could mean 100 or 150 villagers. Massive prayer power can prove dominating in village conversion or evil attacks. Here are the basics: If you wish to remain good, feed your worshippers by dumping food on the altar. Heal them occasionally to cure their fatigue. If you're evil, sacrifice villagers and youngsters (breed a lot for more sacrifices!) and ignore the worshippers' pleas. Artifacts If you pick up a rock (and in many cases, other items such as the beach ball, fences, or even poop, though we'll refer to all possible artifacts as rocks) from outside a village and drop it into the common area (where all the chilling out happens) and then leave it there for several game days, the elderly and very young will gather around it from time to time, especially at dusk, and dance around it. As they dance, they infuse it with belief. Eventually, the rock will begin to glow, sending off colored sparks--this indicates that the rock has become an artifact. An artifact carries with it the belief that it has absorbed from the dancing. If you use an artifact properly, the absorbed belief will exude from it, like a sponge that is wrung out. The best place to use artifacts is in neighboring villages, which don't believe in your godship yet. Toss your artifacts over crowds of unconverted villagers or plop them into their village squares. The belief that has soaked into artifacts will be used up during these actions-- it isn't unlimited. The longer you let an artifact be danced around, the more belief it'll soak up. If you let a glowing artifact be the focus of dancing for quite a long time, your own godly symbol will appear over the artifact. This doesn't create a permanent artifact; it simply indicates that the artifact is very powerful. If you use such an artifact in a neighboring village, you'll see the symbol disappear as its belief seeps out. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 11. Diciples Certain tasks lend themselves to devoted practitioners, and this is where disciples come in handy. By lifting up villagers and placing them next to a particular object, you can create disciples. When you do so, look for a small yellow icon to appear--this will indicate the kind of disciples you'll create. It's important to note that villagers who are not assigned to a discipline will still perform the work of farming, woodcutting, building, and other tasks. You're not forced to assign disciples to get the daily work of the village done. Breeders Breeder disciples generate children in the usual way. As long as there are spots open in the village's abodes, a breeder will attract mates and give them a big hug (this is how babies are made in Britain). Breeding isn't always successful, and the age of the participants has some impact. While you'll occasionally see a 70-year-old male impregnate an 80- year-old female, this is a bit uncommon. Thus, if it's a quick population boost you're seeking, choose males and females of typical breeding age (in their 20s and 30s). These villagers have a fairly high success rate. A pregnant female will carry a baby for nine months (about two minutes of real time) and then drop to the ground and give birth to a 1-year-old child. Understandably, female breeders can't breed while pregnant but will return to this task as soon as they've given birth (so long as there's available housing). A male breeder won't be ashamed to breed with as many females as housing allows, which means that a single male breeder will raise the population much more quickly than a single female breeder. It's often enough to have a single male breeder in a village to replace the dying elderly.Female breeders tend to lie down for the duration of their pregnancies, whether in their homes or in the middle of the village. If this isn't acceptable to you, you can pick up the pregnant woman and shake her, releasing her from her discipleship. This doesn't interrupt the pregnancy, and you can then assign her to another task or let her choose her own. When she's ready to give birth, she'll toss aside the fishing pole and do it. If a village has no breeders, the population will gradually grow older and die out. While it's possible to coax the elderly into giving birth, their success is quite limited. Thus, it's wise to have at least one female villager assigned to the task of providing the village with children (or a male who impregnates the lot). Farmers You might think that the task of providing a village with food is equally important as providing it with babies, but this isn't the case. Cranking out babies is beyond your capabilities as a god, but filling the village store with grain, fish, and meat isn't. Your food miracles can accomplish this task with relative ease. (See our chapter on miracles for some important tips.) You can, in fact, perform the entire task of farming by yourself, although this would be drudgery. Your villagers will take it upon themselves to farm their fields and bring the harvest in to the store, but it's wise to assign a few of them to this task full time so that the populace doesn't grow to depend on your miracles for keeping a steady supply of food in the store. Use the water miracle to assist in farm growth. Better yet, teach your creature to do it for you. Also, creature poop can facilitate growth. Teach him to go to the bathroom on the fields instead of the crŠche, for instance. Foresters Disciples of forestry will spend their hours chopping down wood from outside the village boundary. They'll cart their prizes to the village store and deposit them for the village's use. While your wood miracle adds far more wood to the village store than a single villager can in a day, it's wise to give a few of your villagers this task, if only to keep them occupied. Fisherman The sea surrounding each land provides fish to your villagers. Fish are visible along the shoreline and may even exist in spots where fish aren't visible. While you can certainly scoop up fish and drop the supply into your village store, it's wise to ask a few villagers to perform this task, as it keeps them from becoming dependent and lazy. Builders Drop a rock onto an abode, and you'll see several villagers stop their chilling and pick up tools to repair the damage. This is one discipline best saved for important building projects, which you would like completed as quickly as possible. You can't directly build a structure but can only indicate where you would like one to be built; however, you can assist your builders quite nicely by depositing a pile of wood next to the building site, reducing the amount of time they spend walking back and forth to the store. Don't worry about depositing too much wood, as any excess will be picked up by foresters and resupplied into the village store. If there are no repairs or building projects, a builder disciple will sit for a time in the village square with the status of "nothing to do." This isn't a permanent state of affairs, even if you don't shake him to release him from his discipleship. A builder disciple with nothing to do will soon turn to other matters, such as farming and fishing, if left alone for a while. This releases you from the burden of keeping close tabs on such disciples. Builders are essential to using village center drops (explained earlier in this section), which are used to gain new influence elsewhere on the map. Drop down a few villagers after the village center to speed construction. Supply them with wood so that they don't have to search. Craftsmen If you drop villagers beside your village workshop, they'll become craftsmen. These villagers occupy themselves with providing the workshop with wood from the nearest supply (usually the village store). They'll stop working if all available spots in the workshop's main area are occupied with scaffolds. The amount of wood taken is low, but it helps release the burden from you. If you aren't pressed for scaffolds but would like to keep the workshop in operation, craftsmen are handy disciples. Missionaries and Traders If you're attempting to increase the belief that a neighboring village has in you, missionaries and traders can be of use, occupying themselves with tasks outside their homelands. To create them, pick up a villager and drop him or her in the appropriate spot in a neighboring village (look at the small yellow icon for help in this task). A missionary can be used to take over a town with no belief. If you're an evil sort, terminate all the villagers in a neutral or enemy town (it's tough--you must get them all)--then the village becomes a ghost town with no belief. Drop in a missionary to convert the town to your cause. The problem is that there's only one resident, so fill the town with breed-ready villagers to populate the town. Other If there's a herd of animals near the village--for example, horses, pigs, or cattle--a villager may grab a shepherd's crook and go tend to them. There's no way to force a villager to become a disciple in this way. A shepherd will cull an animal from a herd and bring it to the village store. Dancing villagers can raise your village's belief supply and imbue artifacts with belief, but you can't request a villager to do this task either. All you can do is provide the village with rocks for artifacts and give them access to your creature if you want to create dancers. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 12. Miracles Miracles are your life force in Black & White. You use miracles to supply your village with wood and food resources as well as increase their happiness and belief through healing, a glorious fireball, or a wondrous winged creatures appearance. You'll also employ miracles to convert other villages. Nothing says "wow" like a fireball extreme flying over at night! This section covers Black & White's miracles and required prayer power and provides tips for use. Remember, though, that all miracles aren't available in each level. Also, the tips below apply to any one-shot miracles you discover. Food (7,000) Cast the food miracle repeatedly to stock your village store with delicious grain. Click the action button repeatedly to increase the amount of food with each cast. Holding down the action button nets just a fraction of what repeated clicking will reward you with. Food is also an excellent miracle to use when converting another village. Spot a shortage in the village store and cast food for lots of belief. Better yet, steal the villagers' food and get them hungry-- then cast food when they really need it! The Norse wonder improves the food miracle; the Japanese wonder decreases the appetite of your followers, which means you won't need the food miracle as frequently. Wood (7,000) Wood mirrors food--use it as much as possible. You'll consume enormous amounts of wood, especially if you're expanding your influence with houses, civic buildings, and wonders. As you would with the food spell, click the action button repeatedly to increase the amount of wood with each cast. Holding down the action button nets just a fraction of what repeated clicking will reward you with. Use wood to keep your village happy; nothing says "I believe in you" like a hearty supply of new wood. Don't hesitate to put upward of 200,000 in your village store--it's that important! It also works well in enemy village conversion. If the village is low on wood, drop in a miracle for instant belief. Steal the villagers' wood first and force the shortage. The Celtic and Norse wonder increase the potency of wood miracles. Heal (6,000) Your villagers always appreciate healing. Seek out sick villagers (look for coughing) for extra belief. Heal your villagers every so often to increase belief, which in turn increases influence. Teach your creature the heal miracle early so that it'll perform the same function inside your village or when trying to convert another village. Speaking of conversion, heal works well especially when saved for a massive audience. Also, look for the sick when you're trying to impress another village. The Japanese wonder increases the power of all healing miracles. Water (5,000) Cast the water miracle to irrigate fields and trees. You'll also need the water miracle to put out fires--then again, maybe you'll want to start fires and then put them out with the water miracle. You can use this technique for added belief, both in your own village and others. As you would with the wood and food miracles, click the action button repeatedly for extended rain. Stockpile water one-shots (after building a miracle dispenser) to offset fire disasters. Fireball (3,500) The multipurpose fireball can be used for attack or for belief purposes. Hurl fireballs at the enemy's creature to ignite him and cause damage. Teach your creature the fireball spell so that it'll do the same. Hurl fireballs over your own village and others to affect belief. Throw a fireball at night for a dazzling display. Toss the fireball as close as possible to the villagers and village to affect the most belief. But try not to set the village on fire--unless you're evil, of course! The Aztec wonder increases the power of the fireball miracle. You'll also find two variants of the fireball miracle: fireball increase and fireball extreme. Use them to further enhance or influence belief. Lightning (5,000) As with fireball, use lightning for offense and belief purposes. When used as belief, realize the damage you're going to cause. Lightning has a tendency to terrorize villagers and even set them and their structures on fire. Follow up the lightning assault with a water miracle to put out any fires. The Indian wonder increases the power of the lightning miracle, which you'll also find in two more variants: increase and extreme. Storm (8,000) Cast storm (form a circle around the affected land) to create rain, lightning, or even a tornado. Storm can also generate some belief; it's quite impressive to see a storm appear out of nowhere! Physical Shield (7,000) Protect your village from attack (even from fireballs or meteors) with the physical shield. Prayer power can keep the physical shield active, though bombardment from rocks and fireballs will eventually take it down. It's also impressive to protect a neutral or enemy village by using the physical shield-- this does generate belief. The Tibetan wonder increases the power of shield miracles. Spiritual Shield (7,000) Sick of the enemy's creature invading your village? Or tired of it casting food miracles inside your village store to sway your followers? Erect a spiritual shield to keep out supernatural activity. The Tibetan wonder increases the power of shield miracles. Forest (13,000) Need wood in a pinch? Cast the forest miracle, though the new batch of trees must be kept intact through prayer power. Water your new trees to increase wood output and then uproot them and place them in the village store. You'll receive much more wood from repeated use of the wood miracle; but if forest is your only option, use it! Casting forest can also increase or sway belief. The Celtic wonder increases the potency of the forest miracle. Winged Creatures (12,000) This is one of the most impressive miracles in the game when you're attempting to sway belief. The winged creatures miracle requires a significant amount of prayer power (and any dispensers take a long time to recharge), but the results are worth the effort, with the ability to sway more than 100 belief from each cast. Use the dispensers on land two and five and stockpile the spell to use for belief. Teach your creature how to use the spell. The Egyptian wonder increases the power of the winged creatures miracle. Pack of Wolves (14,000) Sort of the antithesis of the winged creatures spell, the pack of wolves miracle can be impressive in terms of belief, but it can also kill off a number of villagers. This is a perfect combination for evil players. The Greek wonder increases the power of the pack of wolves miracle, as does the Tibetan wonder. Teleport (5,000) Place teleports to speed up villager movement (like foresters to a long-range forest) or even to teleport your creature beyond a dangerous area. For instance, if an enemy creature is giving you trouble in a certain area, use the teleport miracle to bypass this area directly to your intended destination. The Egyptian wonder decreases the prayer power cost of the teleport miracle. Megablast (16,000) The quickest way to devastate a particular building: megablast! This destruction spell is best used for offensive purposes but can even be used to facilitate belief. For instance, just launch a megablast in the center of a village. Make sure there are a lot of observers, and you'll sway belief. Or use the megablast to devastate a structure and then feed the village wood for repairs. Evil players might want to annihilate a crŠche or a few homes with the megablast. The Aztec wonder increases the power of the megablast miracle. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 13. Belief The ability to affect belief is one of the fundamental gameplay concerns in Black & White. You must overturn belief to convert a village to your side. Also, you must enhance your own village's belief to ensure loyalty. There are dozens (maybe hundreds) of ways to affect belief. If you experiment, you may uncover some that no one has ever found. This section reveals some tips on overturning enemy belief and enhancing your own followers. Overturning Enemy (or Neutral) Belief Success in the last three lands of Black & White hinges on your ability to convert other villages to your belief system. There are dozens, even hundreds, of ways to accomplish this task. You'll find some of them listed here. Remember, though, that villagers get bored fast, so you'll need to change your tactics around to continue to gain high belief. Also, make sure there are lots of eyes for your miracles or supernatural events. Make sure you mix these up. Trying the same thing over and over will gain less belief. You can come back to them later and gain high belief, but try to not perform the same act over and over. For instance, the villagers grow bored of your creature after a short amount of time. Pull it away for a while and bring it back, and the villagers may be impressed all over again. ú Create artifacts. Place rocks inside your village, and the villagers will dance around them and eventually turn the rock into an artifact. Wait to grab them once your symbol appears above them. Drop the artifact in an enemy village. ú Toss an artifact over a village multiple times. Heat the rock and toss it over. ú Supply the village store with its desire (if it's empty, supply it with food and wood). Steal the food and then replace it moments later. Do the same with the wood. ú Pick up and toss a villager around. ú Shoot a fireball over the village. Do it at night. Use a fireball increase and then an extreme. Zoom the fireball as close as possible overhead for maximum impressive potential. ú Throw trees over a village. Try flaming trees. Use a bush. ú Cast the water miracle and water the fields, villagers, or put out fires. Light the fires first and then put them out. ú Try some healing spells. If you're evil, use heal just before you burn their village down--or after you've set them on fire with a fireball. ú Your creature can be adept at converting villages. Lead it into town for instant belief. Parade it around a bit for some belief residue. Attach it to the village store with the compassion leash, and it'll add food and wood, creating belief. Attach it to the village center with the compassion leash and it may do tricks, heal the townspeople, or lead them in dance. Make sure it's equipped with food, wood, water, and healing miracles at a minimum. Enhance it with winged creatures for even more effect. ú Destroy some buildings and then supply the wood to repair them. ú Winged creature miracles work really nice, scoring almost 100 each time. Teach your creature to do them by using the dispensers on land two and land five. As with most belief practices, make sure there are a lot of observers. ú Use the food or wood miracles to deposit either resource in the village store. Keep clicking the action button for more wood and more food. Then remove what you just donated and make the villagers think they're still starving or need wood. ú Erect a shield miracle or summon a storm. ú Blast the lightning bolt miracle to terrorize the villagers. Set out the resulting fires with the water miracle. ú A megablast in the center of town can prove effective in creating awe-- or terror. ú Steal the villagers' wood and then use a fireball or megablast to level an important structure (like a wonder); then supply a huge chunk of wood when they need it the most. Repeat as necessary. ú Enlarge your creature with the enlarge creature spell (makes sense, doesn't it?) and parade it into a town. Teach it to use the spell! ú On land three, hurl the invincible man around a town. ú Summon a forest with the forest miracle and then use the wood to supply the village store. ú Zoom in close and search for sick villagers (coughing or gagging) and heal them for nice belief. ú Donate some gifts to them. How about some scaffolds? ú Set fire to the crŠche, otherwise known as kid central. Not the nicest way of going about things, but effective. Douse the fire with a water miracle to put out the flames and then toss a rock overhead to show them you still care. ú As in many of these examples, fear followed by impression scores many belief points. ú There are many, many other inventive ways. Experiment! Enhancing Friendly Belief Black & White isn't only about convincing neutral or enemy villages of your belief system--it's also about maintaining your own villages. If you neglect your villagers' belief, they may be ripe pickings for an enemy god or may simply decide to follow someone else. Here are some suggestions on enhancing your villagers' belief: ú Heal your villagers! Friendly gods keeps their villagers healthy. ú Meet their resource needs. Supply the village store with food or wood. ú Keep the creature in town and use the compassion leash to attach it to the village store or village center and let it work its magic. Teach the creature how to supply the village store with the food and wood miracles (or to collect food and wood resources from the land) as well as heal the villagers. ú Heal the sickest villagers. ú Pay attention to the desire flags and their verbal requests. Need expansion? Supply houses. Want children? Add a couple of breeders. ú Your village will also respond to supernatural things, such as fireballs and tossing rocks. Hurl a fireball right over the village. If you're a mean god, start burning things. ú Water the fields with the water miracle. Put out fires as well (if you're evil, just let them burn for a little while). ú Enlarge your creature with the enlarge creature miracle and walk it around your village. ú These are just some examples. It's important to expand your belief as it, in turn, expands your influence. Plus, it makes you less vulnerable to conversion by an enemy god. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 14. Tribes While it has been said it is possible to win the game without using a Creature, the tribes that you will discover are the life blood of your powers and magic. As a God you must prove to your people that you are all powerful and could kill them with a blink of an eye or grant them happiness for the rest of their lives. If you convert a tribe they will worship you at your Citadel. Their worship creates and grants you Mana, which lets you cast your spells. Without Mana your spells will be useless and your position as a God is threatened There are eight different tribes who live in the Land Of Eden, each with their own unique spells, temperaments and life styles. The different tribes are easy to identify from the buildings that occupy their villages and the special powers that the different tribes grant you with their worship. The Greeks The Greeks are Black & White's average tribe. Not too strong, not too weak, not too intelligent but at the same time, not too dim. They do not posses any magic spells or special skills and make up the numbers in your army. Although the appear to be the weakest tribe on Eden. Wonder The Greek Wonder increases the power of the Pack Animals Miracle. It also enables children to be produced faster. The American Indians This tribe are the most helpful and peaceful of Eden's tribes. They process magic and skills that are based apon strong tribal history and can be very positive to your powers. Wonder The Indian Wonder increases both the power of Lightning Miracles and the speed at which the Villagers move. The Celts The Celtic tribe have power over Eden's weather specializing in such spells as the Electrical Storm and powerful lightening attacks. They may be ginger, but they have potentially great power! Wonder The Celtic Wonder increases the power of the Nature and Weather Miracles. It also increases the amount of wood gained from each tree. The Egyptians This tribe are a more construction based group, loving to build temples and other huge structures. Their most powerful spell lets you build a huge defensive wall around your circle of influence. Wonder The Egyptian Wonder reduces the amount of damage your Creature takes. It also reduces Prayer Power cost of the Teleport Miracle and increases the power of the Flock of Birds Miracle. The Norse The Norse tribe hold pride of place as the most fearsome tribe in Eden. These are the most feared of the tribes with special spells that create huge skeleton armys. Although this spell is very draining on your Mana it can cause great damage in a short amount of time. Wonder The Norse Wonder increases the yield from Farms and Fish Farms and increases the strength of Food, Wood and Water Miracles. It also reduces the wood cost of buildings. The Japanese The Japanese use their mental skills to grant higher level spells such as illusionary spells and confusion spells. These can be useful on the other Creatures's or the other villagers. Wonder The Japanese Wonder increases the power of all healing Miracles, reduces the appetite for food in all your Villages and increases the likelihood of children being born. The Aztecs This group are the most blood-thirsty of tribes on Eden, whilst they tend to go against the grain of the peaceful attitude of the rest of Eden, they do tend to have some powerful and also very violent spells. They would make a great asset to your circle of influence. Wonder The Aztec Wonder increases the power of aggressive Miracles such as Fireballs and Megablasts. Also, each Villager will provide more worship chants. The Tibetans Not much is known about this tribe, but all that is known that their magic is concentrated in and around the mystic realm. Wonder The Tibetan Wonder decreases the Prayer Power cost of all Shields, makes the Pack of Animals Miracle more powerful and makes all your godly actions more impressive. To conquer the game you must first conquer each of these tribes. They are certainly not totally loyal though. They can be converted by other Gods and other creatures, sapping your prayer and your area of influence. But, you can do the same back to your own Enemies. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 15. Island Discrption,Tips & Secrets Below I will try to give a general overview of the islands, with some strategy suggestions and tips on how win each of them. There will also be notes about gold scrolls and solutions to secret island quests (those without any scrolls). Note that I will write the general tips first, and only dig into the secret stuff in the last couple of paragraphs, so there should be minimal spoilers on the first couple of lines for each island. The First Island Since this is the tutorial island, all the features of the game aren't accessible. But on the other hand, the demands placed on you here are extremely low, so it is a very good place to hone your creature training skills and also teach the creature every miracle on the island. There is no time limit on how long you can stay here. But, there's also a drawback. Since not everything in the game can be accessed yet, you may not be able to teach your creature everything you want. You can, however, save the game and play a skirmish for awhile, and then load and take your creature back to the island with all its newly gained knowledge. You will have to do certain gold scroll quests in order to get a creature, but don't do the last one (the one the Guide creature warns you about) if you want to hang out on the island. Note that no quest should be of any trouble here, since the camera will always zoom to show you any important places of the quest, and both Whitey and Blackie will give you hints and tips. Also, the best way to help the farmer woman is to simply drop the sick brother by her. Wrecking her house is evil, but you can do better than that! Kill the brother and then drop the corpse by her. Or even worse, trash the house, kill the sister and drop her corpse by him (he'll then die of shock). When you decide to activate the last gold scroll, make sure you stack up on one-shot miracles (by picking them off the dispensers and dropping them) and anything else you want to take with you, since you can drop it all in the vortex when it opens and it will be there on the next island. Remember to bring all your villagers too! Note that the natural way to complete the Ogre quest would be after the Piper quest, but if you do it the other way around, the improved miracle dispenser you get as a reward will be given after the Piper instead. When you finally leave the island, make sure your creature is trained and ready to handle itself, since you may not have much time to spend with it on island two (the demands of the villagers there are bound to keep you busy for long periods of time). If you have downloaded new creatures, there is a hut with a silver scroll beyond the beach with the Ark, where you can exchange creatures. The Second Island Note that the tutorial isn't quite over when you first arrive on island two. You still can't construct buildings yet, even though your villagers will want them. Be patient, though, since you will soon be taught how to. In the meantime, it would be wise to teach your creature how to water forests, since they are so scarce on this island that BOTH of the other gods will steal trees from you! Also, you are probably meant to learn how to micromanage villages on this island, since you absolutely have to! The stupid villagers won't lift a finger except for doing massive breeding and devastation of forests. In fact, the closest primaeval forest to the village will usually be devoured in a matter of minutes, and there is no way to get it back. Use the Water miracle on the surviving trees quickly in order to regenerate as many trees as possible, and get your creature to help you! Also, once small trees pop up, target them instead of the larger trees and your forest will grow even faster. Once you do get a workshop and the ability to construct buildings, note that you will need to expand initially to get all the villagers from island one into houses. It is also alright to expand a bit further, since it will give you more power, but watch out so you don't run out of space to build new homes (it can happen, if you don't take control over their desires). If your expansion does get out of control, do everything in your power to keep forests growing, since without them you will be doomed. Also, when you have managed to house all the villagers you brought with you from the first island, you will get the knowledge of the Forest miracle. Because of all the lazy villagers on this island, you will have to keep a steady amount of disciples to get anything done. To be able to do this, you will need a good memory and a keen eye. Because, when a disciple dies, they won't transfer their knowledge over to their offspring, and thus, when you notice that the disciple count is dwindling on the scroll in your Temple, you must zoom around over every village to find out where it was that one of your disciples died. In order to be able to cast your own miracles and start using the Totem in your village center, activate the first couple of golden scroll as soon as possible. When you reach the right golden scroll (the one where you get taught how to use the gestures), Khazar will want you to impress a village. Note that you do not have to take over the village, you only have to impress them until the point where Khazar leaves. You can then go back to your first village again, and continue managing that until you feel comfortable with it. You do not have to worry so much about breeding initially in the first village, since the food levels will be low and you can keep them that way by constantly taking food from the storage to supply your temple shrines (or divert the villagers to other duties instead). Khazar will also urge you to conquer Lethys' villages far too soon, in my opinion. Make sure your own villages are well balanced first! So, this is the first island where you have to take over other villages. Depending on whether you are playing good or evil, choose your desired method of converting the other villages, but it won't require much belief on this island... it is harder to keep them satisfied (if you are evil, you only need to keep them, which is easier). However, there is a hidden quest near Lethys' first village. It's a tree puzzle, which will grant you a Flying Creatures miracle dispenser if it is solved, which in turn will make it much easier to impress the village. (To solve the puzzle, note that each moved tree changes all trees around it. So, work your way around the edges and have it so your last move is to change the middle tree.) Note the amount of lazy people in the village closest to your first one. When you take over that village, deal with them in a way you feel is appropriate. There is also an unclaimed Greek village near Khazar's realm, where there will be a person sacrificing children in order to keep the villagers constantly youthful. He will curse if you pick him up, and if you do kill him, all the people in that village will die. Once you take over the first village from the enemy god, Lethys, you are on your own. Lethys will rarely attack you, though, and will mainly cast protection on his own villages if you try to convert them. He will, however attack your creature with his arsenal of miracles if it gets too near a village of his. Make sure your creature can both cast Water AND Heal on itself (this may actually have to be taught during an attack). Also note that you cannot damage or destroy his temple until ALL of his villages are either neutral or under your control. And for disposing temples, throwing flaming boulders (heated with fireballs) are very effective. Casting a Teleport miracle outside far away villages and next to your Temple is also a very good idea, to save people the long walk to and from the worship sites (especially during the time that they are being built). When you have conquered all but the final of Lethys' villages, you will witness a small cut-scene and a Vortex will appear (and yes, what happens is unavoidable). This Vortex will only stay open for a limited amount of time, but all is not lost if you miss it. A second Vortex will appear if you conquer all of Lethys villages and destroy his temple. That Vortex will also stay open so you can drop artefacts, villagers, miracles, wood and grain to take with you. The Third Island Even though villagers supposedly shouldn't be cutting down trees (planted) inside a village, the people in the initial village on the island will cut down every single tree around the village no matter how many forests you plant around it. The Tree Puzzle also seems buggy on this island. After pulling trees for a while some of them will shrink and not display any change (although they do actually change in the puzzle, but still sabotage a correct solution). The behavior of Lethys is also extremely puzzling on this island. Sometimes he will Lightning Bolt thin air for minutes, sometimes he will walk back and forth for hours and I've even observed him and his creature standing still in a pile of burning food for about half an hour... Also, if Lethys' temple vanishes (along with the leashes), his creature may still be leashed to something, and that leash will never disappear. This island is a bit trickier, since it requires a lot of belief to convert villages, and some are quite far apart. Your initial area of influence is also rather small, but it will as usual grow with more belief and larger villages. You do have an initial village on the third island, even though it may not look like it at first. A couple of civic buildings are scattered amongst the hilly terrain and they need to be finished. This requires wood (and some workers). The wood can be found at the bottom of the waterfall next to your village on a strategically placed miracle dispenser. Only use this wood on construction sites though, in order to prevent disillusion. Since a workshop is one of the civic buildings, you may be tempted to start building housing for your villagers, but you actually don't need to do that here! The villagers will create construction sites for enough houses to keep everyone happy for awhile, and all you need to do is supply them with wood. However, when you do need to start to expand by yourself, consider leaving the mountain paths unblocked by new buildings. After your first village is according to your satisfication, it would be well advised to complete the Shaolin quest as soon as possible (before you try to conquer the second village, even). The rewards for that quest are triggered by events on the island, and once those events have happened, the chance of getting the rewards will be lost. By now, you should have noticed a small Celtic guy sitting by a campfire between the first and second villages (he is the one you always hear whining if you get close). This man is seemingly invincible and will challenge you to throw him around. If you do, you will notice that he has a small area of influence around him, which you can use to your advantage if you like. When you conquer the second village, Lethys will start messing with you again. He will cast a couple of fireballs to set some of your villagers on fire. This will cause them to start running around, setting fire to anything they come near. If you haven't got any worshippers at your Temple yet, you obviously can't cast the Water miracle on them. However, there is another tactic for this situation. Pick up someone which is on fire and drop that villager by a beach, about knee-deep in water (just so he or she doesn't start drowning). This will put out the fire and you can quickly move on to the next villager. A similar incident happens after you have conquered the third village. A possessed pack of wolves will be conjured up to attack the people in the village. As before, there are a number of things you can do to save Prayer Energy here. Setting fire to the forest they run through is an energy saving alternative, but since forests are valuable, it is not one of the better ways. A much more proficient strategy is to swiftly pick up each wolf and drop them in the village storage for food! Note that you can use your godly powers to freeze ("Pause", that is) or slow down time (using Alt + 1 and Alt + 2), if you don't consider that cheating, that is. After awhile, a tree puzzle, like the one on the second island, will appear above the invincible guy's camp. This one may be harder to solve (it has three types of trees instead of two) but will yield a Flying Creatures miracle at your third village, which will help a lot when trying to conquer the fourth one. On this island, you may also have to look out for thunderstorms, since lightning may hit your villages and kill people or set buildings on fire. If you have a lot of Prayer Energy, Spiritual Shield miracles will protect against lightning during bad weather. Also, don't underestimate your enemy, even though he may be down to his last village. He will sacrifice everything in sight to get Prayer Energy! And although Lethys' creature will still roam the land after he is gone, it should not be able to pose any threat or real danger. Note that you do not have to destroy Lethys in order to move on to the next island. In fact, Whitey will give you a compliment when you reach island four, if you let him live. The Fourth Island The fourth island is actually the first island, but everything has been shot to hell. Nemesis cursed the land with thunder storms, fireballs and a blood red sky. All is guarded by three Guardian Stones, each one assigned to power one of the island's curses. The most imposing problem here is that you are being bombarded by fireballs. Note that these can be temporarily avoided using shields around your village or simply by catching them. The easiest way to catch fireballs is to grab one off the ground first, and then point your view up towards the sky and locate the point from where the fireballs are originating. Then use your burning hand to absorb other fireballs as they come falling down. You can also use your godly powers to slow down time, same way as with the Wolves on the previous island. Blackie will let you know when the attack is over, and Whitey will warn you before the next one begins. Note that shields require a lot of Prayer Energy to stay up (if you run out, they will disappear, just as a Forest miracle), but there is also a Spiritual Shield miracle dispenser near your Temple. These one-shot miracles can also be activated, and then shaken off in order to transfer their inherent power to your Temple instead! Additionally, there is a Totem puzzle on a hill beyond the huge gates. If you solve it (by keeping all the totem poles at their highest level) you gain another Spiritual Shield miracle dispenser. The key to solving the puzzle is to note which totems only affect one other totem, and save the totem which doesn't affect any other totem for last. To stop the fireballs permanently, you need to solve a puzzle. This puzzle must be unlocked by conquering one of the villages first (it is the Japanese village next to the Guardian Stone with the physical and spiritual shield around it). A good tactic here is to bring a couple of Artefacts from previous islands, since they can generate several hundred in belief. However, it might be hard to lob them into the village from afar, and having the creature drop them into the village doesn't seem to yield any belief at all. So, the best way is to have a creature which is able to impress villagers on it's own. If you have trained it correctly, you should be able to leash it to the vilage center (or just leave it there) while you catch fireballs. Feed the creature between attacks and just wait for it to conquer the village. The bell puzzle itself is very simple and it is always the same one so even if you fail the first few times, you can always try again. However, the fireballs will initially not harm your village or the forests around it, so you should take care of a more pressing matter first. This is the attacks on the village by the gremlins. There are four gremlins who will storm the village from time to time to steal villagers from you. Killing them is evil, but there are other ways to make them stay away. Your creature can temporarily scare them off by its presence alone, and Physical Shield miracles will also help. Much better, though, is to block off their access to your village. This is done by building a hedge of stones or fences on the top of the hill at the mouth of the narrow passage they come from (have your creature guard the passage while you fetch stones, and remember that you can split large boulders into several smaller stons). After the hedge is built, you can ignore their raid attempts. To stop the gremlins permantently, you must stop the thunder storms. That stone is guarded by an ogre named Sleg and this time, a fight is unavoidable. Defeat him and the thunder storms will stop (but note that if you haven't stopped the fireballs when you do this, there will be no rain to help you put out the fires). Near the ogre is also a wolf maze puzzle. You have to guide a boy named Thomas out of the maze without having the wolf catch him. There are two mazes, but both are really easy. You just have to keep Thomas moving along the edges (usually away from the exit at first), until the wolf becomes stuck in an alcove. After that, the way to the exit should be free. The reward is the knowledge of the Creature Strength miracle, which can be a good thing to use while fighting the ogre. You may have noticed that nobody is dancing in your villages, and that people (even disciples) tend to stay at home rather than work. This is due to the blood red sky and that is the last thing you have to fix. In order to do this, you have to reunite Adam and Keiko. Adam is the lonely man on the mountain by the temple with the last stone, and Keiko is in the village closest to it (although the popup will only say Actor if you press "S"). You can, however, also kill her to solve the quest. Finally, you will be asked to deal with the cursed village with the skeleton tribe. You need to raise the buried village totems to their full height in order to reverse the curse. To be able to do this, you will need to extend your area of influence over the village, so you can reach atleast one of the totems. You then need to have your creature raise one of the Totems AT THE SAME TIME you raise the other one! If your creature knows how to use Totems, it should be able to figure out what you want it to do. If not, just try again. Note that the Skeleton tribe will die out because of old age, which may (or may not) seem strange, but it does not make any difference in completing the quest. If you want to change back to your original creature, the hut with the silver scroll from island one is still here. The Fifth Island Check it out yourself. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 16. Walkthrough 16.1 Land One Walkthrough Consider land one as the extended training grounds. Many of the quests serve to enhance your expertise in movement, interface, creature training, miracles, and tossing rocks. Complete as many silver scrolls as possible to gain as much knowledge as possible of the game as well as important miracle dispensers, such as water, food, heal, and heal increase. By the end of land one, you should have taught your creature how to cast water, food, heal, and heal increase miracles. All will come in handy during land two and beyond. Depending on your game style, your creature should also know how to treat villagers appropriately (do you want it to eat them or treat them nicely?). Your creature should eat when it reaches a certain hunger level and return to the pen to sleep. Finally, teach your creature the basics of using the village store (gathering wood and food). You'll find teaching your creature these tasks pays dividends later during village conversion. Gold Story Scroll #1: Choose Your Creature Take the time to grow accustomed to Black & White's control scheme or create your own by using the options menu and adjusting the control configuration. You can explore the island and watch the villagers work before you click on the first gold story scroll. You won't have access to many of the silver scrolls until you complete at least this first gold story quest and choose your creature. Click on the gold story scroll above the giant village gates to meet Sable, the trainer of creatures. Before she ushers you to the creatures, you must return three gate stones to the pedestal positioned just in front of the gates. She points the direction to the first gate stone. Move your view over to the game's start position and pick up the first gate stone. Haul the stone over to the pedestal and sit it down. She then describes the next tasks. Gold Story Scroll #2: The Lost Brother The lost brother follows the start of the Choose Your Creature quest. Sable points the way to the gold story scroll at the farm. Click on the scroll and hear a woman's plea that her brother is sick and lost in the woods. If you return her brother, she'll give you the gate stone she's been keeping. There are several ways to complete the quest. If you're a merciful god, simply locate the brother in the woods beyond the valley pass. Pick up the brother and deposit him at his sister's farm. She thanks you and rewards you with the second gate stone. If your wish is to side with darkness, just kill the brother (throw him into the water, smash him, etc.) and return to his sister and bear the bad news of his demise. Or ignore the brother (or kill him) and smash his sister's farm and take the gate stone. Either way, grab the second gate stone and haul it over to the pedestal. Place the second gate stone on top of the first to receive the final step of the gate stone quest. Gold Story Scroll #3: The Sculptor Sable points the way to the final gate stone puzzle. Click on the gold story scroll by the sculptor's home. The village sculptor reveals that if you bring him one of the special rocks that can be molded into a gate stone, he'll sculpt one for you. You'll find the rock in the "old hermit's quarry." Seek out this small hut near the coast near your village. Grab the rock and deposit it in front of the sculptor's shop. He'll start his work and request that you return later. Just hang around the sculptor for a bit, and he'll finish his task. Pick up the third gate stone and move it over to the pedestal. Drop the third gate stone on top of the others, and Sable opens the gates and ushers you toward your creature selection.At this point, you have a choice of three creatures--you'll be able to switch during land one (by unlocking creatures with a download or solving the lost sheep quest to its fullest extent) and be able to gain other potential switches during the course of the game. Here are the three creatures you can select: The cow: Implied as the creature for good players (though you can be an evil cow!), the cow boasts above-average intelligence and decent walking and running speed. The cow's weakness is combat and physical fitness--the cow is fat! You can trim the cow with some exercise (rock carrying, throwing) and increase its strength, though expect to spend much more time building muscle with the cow than with the more aggressive tiger. The ape: The smartest starting creature, the ape can pick up new tasks quickly and is a wise choice for players looking to instruct their creature as much as possible in land one. The ape also suffers from a weight problem (though not as bad as the cow) and weak strength. Be ready to train the ape and get it in shape! The tiger: Implied as the creature for evil players (though you can be a good tiger!), the tiger possesses one of the worst intelligence ratings in the game-- get ready for a lot of repeated instruction. What the tiger lacks in intelligence, it makes up for in strength, running and walking speed, and reaction time. Gold Story Scroll #4: The Creature's Learning Part 1 The next gold story scroll section covers the basics of teaching your creature. Sable first instructs you how to feed your creature and then punish it when it misbehaves. You'll receive instruction on the leashes, including the important leash of learning, which will be used to instruct your creature on a number of tasks, including how not to eat villagers, how to exercise, what to eat, where not to go to the bathroom, how to cast miracles, and much more. You'll also receive instruction on the leash of compassion and aggression. The leash of compassion turns your creature good no matter its alignment. If you attach the leash of compassion to the village store, for instance, your creature will do nice things, such as supply the village with food or wood. Likewise, the leash of aggression gets your creature's blood boiling, even if it's the nicest creature in the known universe. Gold Story Scroll #5: The Creature's Learning Part 2 The next part of the Creature's Learning quest begins once you click on the gold story scroll behind your temple--it's located at the entrance to a valley that leads to a very large, pacing creature. Click this scroll and hear about the giant creature roaming in the valley. The creature's model depends on your initial choice--you'll face a sheep if you chose the cow, a lion if you chose the tiger, and a bear if you chose the ape. The creature guide requests your creature's presence. Use a leash and guide your creature to the large creature, known as the creature guide. He'll teach you the art of creature combat. Take on the creature guide inside the arena and practice attacking, queuing up attacks, and defending against the creature guide's blows. You should also attempt to gesture your creature's special move (the star icon in the lower-right corner of the screen). Gold Story Scroll #6: The Creature's Learning Part 3 After a short break, click on the gold story scroll near the creature guide and follow him over to the Aztec village. The creature guide teaches you the significance of belief, how to change belief, and how to perform miracles. You must complete this quest before your creature will effectively learn how to cast one-shot miracles from the dispensers (which you'll receive during the silver reward quests). When you use the food one-shot miracles on the Aztec village, teach your creature in the process. Continue to impress the Aztec village with miracles or by adding food and wood to its stores (or a variety of other belief-changing techniques) until fireworks erupt, signaling that the Aztec village inhabitants have begun to believe in you. You're now in control of this village, and your influence adjusts accordingly. Gold Story Scroll #7: The Creature's Learning Part 4 After completing the instructions on belief, don't activate the next gold story scroll, which triggers instructions on the creed as well as introduces the Nemesis as Black & White's supreme evil one. Use your leash to lure your creature to the creature guide to receive the information. Follow the guide to the mountaintop, and the Nemesis will arrive. When instructed, run from the guide to avoid the Nemesis' attack. Your creature will be injured; use a heal one-shot miracle to mend the wounds. The arrival of the Nemesis signals the end of land one. A vortex opens just off the shoreline near your village while a lightning storm destroys most of your village structures. A gold story scroll appears over the vortex--don't use this scroll until you're ready to transport to land two. Silver Reward Scroll #1: Throwing Stones Throwing stones is the first silver scroll you'll discover, and it's positioned just behind your temple. It's a simple challenge, though an important one, and it'll help you get used to Black & White's physics engine. Don't think tossing a rock at a pillar is a simple task--you'll find the test quite challenging. Pick up one of the rocks, move your mouse back, and then move it forward with the action button pressed; release the button as you move the mouse forward. Practice different speeds and distances to watch how the rock reacts once it leaves your godly hand. Tossing a low arc "bullet" throw will have the best results. Keep practicing until you knock over the pillar. You'll receive a toy ball as a reward for knocking down the rock. You can continue to practice if you want (and get some one-shot miracles) or even play an evildoer and aim for the house on the right instead of the pillar. Silver Reward Scroll #2: The Explorers Check the beach for a silver reward scroll over a wooden boat in progress. You hear a little tune from the explorers sitting nearby. It turns out that the explorers built this great big boat but forgot that it needed a lot of a certain ingredient--a heck of a lot of wood. Move over to your village's store and grab a handful of wood--you'll need at least 1,500 to 2,000--and return to the explorers. Drop the chunk of wood next to the explorers and boat to begin the second part of the quest. It turns out that wood wasn't enough, even though the explorers managed to complete the boat. As the explorers' song says, "There's no food on the table!" The explorers need food for their journey, so oblige by returning to your village store and grabbing 1,000 to 1,500 food and depositing the grub next to the boat and explorers. You'd think this would satisfy them, but the singing explorers aren't done yet. And with another song, "We aren't going nowhere till we get some meat!" the explorers complete their final request: some fresh meat. Locate some cattle or pigs inside the village (across from the big village gate) and give the explorers two animals total. Providing the explorers with all three requests to complete the quest. The explorers sail off in Titanic fashion, leaving a water miracle dispenser. You can use the water miracle to water crops and trees and douse fires. Teach your creature the water miracle before exiting land one. Of course, you're being a nice god. If you're not interested in a water miracle dispenser (you can receive another by completing the hermit silver quest), you can torture the explorers and ruin their voyage. Just feed the explorers to your creature or toss them in the water. Being evil rewards you with a humorous line but also punishes you late in the game: the explorers return in land five to help out if you helped them here. Silver Reward Scroll #3: The Singing Stones The singing stones silver reward scroll challenge is twofold. First, you must locate the stones and then place them in the correct order. Thankfully, locating the stones is easier than finding those near invisible sheep for the lost flock quest. But keep in mind that you may locate some stones that closely resemble the singing stones but don't emit a tune. Ignore these stones. Here's the location of the five missing singing stones: 1. There's one singing stone near the village's graveyard. 2. Inside the forest, where you rescued the lost brother for the gate stone quest. 3. On top of a mountain just outside your village (the range along the gate side, close to the beach, and at the top of a river). 4. Near the hermit's hut, where you grabbed the gate stone that the sculptor used. 5. Very close to the singing stones puzzle. Next, you must align the singing stones in ascending tone. This segment will involve a lot of trial and error. Place the stones and then move them around (you can move only the stones you fetched, not the stones already in place) until the sequence plays correctly. You're offered a food miracle dispenser for your efforts--time to feed the village! Not ready to go through the effort of searching out stones and playing some music? Feed the singing stones man to your creature or smash his hut with a big rock. You won't get the food dispenser--only some evil satisfaction. Silver Reward Scroll #4: The Savior A deceptively tricky task, the savior silver scroll can be found on a cliff that overlooks the bay, where your village's fishing occurs. Click on the scroll to hear the pleas of a frantic woman--her husband and four others were struck by a large wave and are drowning in the bay. She requests your help. Unfortunately, you can't pluck them out yourself--your creature must assist! The savior is on an unknown time limit--if you take too long to save the drowning victims, they'll die and, naturally, disappoint the woman (though it'll please your devil-conscience sidekick!). Because of the time limit, it's wise to not start the savior until you've taught your creature some very important tasks, namely how not to eat villagers and how to drop them safely. Before activating the savior, use the learning leash to teach your creature how to pick up a villager and how to drop him safely. Make sure it doesn't eat the villagers after it picks them up--if it does, smack it around. Once you're convinced, it'll keep the villagers out of its stomach. Then activate the Savior quest. Walk down to the water and switch to the leash of compassion. Click the action button once you're near a villager so that the sparkle indicator appears over the villager. Don't attach the creature to the villager! If the creature starts drinking, move it back and try again. You must focus the creature's attention on the village. Once it has a village in hand, guide it to the shore, and it'll drop the villager safely. If you wish, you can teach your creature to throw villagers and work quicker, but that's not the act of a good god, is it? Rescue the villagers one by one with the same techniques. If you're not in the saving mood, just eat the villagers or let them drown. You'll receive a strength miracle dispenser for saving the drowning victims; it appears on the cliff where the woman stood. It takes a while to recharge, but teach your creature the spell at the earliest opportunity. Silver Reward Scroll #5: The Hermit The hermit and the corresponding silver reward scroll are found above a small hut near the coast. It's also the same place you picked up the unmade gate stone for the sculptor in the first gold story scroll quest. Click on the scroll to learn your next task: It's time to impress the hermit with your creature. Unfortunately, he's a pain to impress. He wants to see a big creature, and it'll take quite some time before your creature has matured to reach that level. You can exercise and keep your creature fit (and also notice its growth each time it enters and exits the creature pen), but it simply won't be enough. You can return to the hermit a few times, and he'll likely turn you down. If you keep returning, he won't even respond to you. Keep trying in case you've reached the appropriate size. You'll certainly know if the time is right if you've reached the end of land one and if the good conscience tells you that your creature now requires more food--that's the size you want! Impressing the hermit rewards you with a water miracle dispenser and an explanation about fireflies and how they're able to hide one-shot miracles (which includes a strength one-shot). You can even acquire the strength one-shot without completing the task; just read the signs and pick up the rock on the mountaintop behind the hermit. If you're tired of the hermit's whining ("I'm just not impressed!"), consider impressing him with your creature's digestive system. You won't win any friends, but if you're following an evil path, you won't care much, right? Silver Reward Scroll #6: The Lost Flock You'll find this silver reward scroll over a farmer's house and animal pen near your village's crŠche. Apparently, the farmer has lost his sheep. If you offer to find them, he'll offer two rewards--one for finding five of them and another for finding the other four. Sheep are very difficult to spot on the landscape; zoom in to ground level and listen for the distinctive "baa" sound to zero in on them. Here are the sheep locations: 1. Near the large gates that lead out of the village. 2. Near the sculptor's house from the gate stone quest. 3. Close to the hermit's hut on top of the mountain. 4. On the mountain along the valley path that you went through at the game's beginning. 5. Under some trees along the valley path that you went through at the game's beginning. 6. By the beach near the valley path that you went through at the game's beginning (close to where you acquired a singing stone). 7. Inside the forest that contained the sick brother for the gate stone quest. 8. Near the Throwing Stones quest (by the pillar and hut). 9. Inside another farm with some pigs. If you return five sheep, the farmer donates some food to your cause. If you manage to return all nine, the farmer offers a new unlocked creature--the sheep. The sheep aren't the best creatures in the zoo, so to speak. They mirror the cows--they have moderate intelligence but weak strength and other average statistics. Not interested in getting food or the sheep? Wish to be evil? Then just feed the sheep to your creature--or toss them in the ocean or put them in the village store. Silver Reward Scroll #7: The Ogre After completing the combat segment of the Creature's Learning gold story scroll quest, you'll trigger the silver reward scroll introducing Sleg, the ogre. You'll find the silver scroll near the combat arena positioned just above the ogre. Click on the scroll and learn that the ogre seems to be guarding something. You receive hints that the ogre is rather hungry. You can complete the task in two main ways. If you're up for a fight to test your newly learned combat skills, take your creature over and pound Sleg into submission. That's what a veteran evildoer would do. Then again, you can oblige the hungry hint and take Sleg over to some food. Two handfuls of approximately 2,500 will do. Move over to your village store and grab the grain and drop the pile in front of Sleg. After the helpings, Sleg takes a nap, allowing access to his wares. Open the chest to acquire a beach ball--a crappy treasure, considering, but thankfully, completing the quest also creates a heal miracle dispenser near your temple (or heal miracle increase if you've solved pied piper). Teach your creature the new miracle. Silver Reward Scroll #8: The Pied Piper You'll spot a silver reward scroll above your village's crŠche. Activate the silver scroll to hear a story about someone stealing the village's children. Yes, it's the pied piper! He lives in a small shack up the hill behind the crŠche. To solve the quest, you must either follow the pied piper closely to discover the hideout and the children inside or simply eat the pied piper without saving the stolen children--but at least you prevented further captures! To recover the children, wait for the pied piper to approach the crŠche. Keep your creature back and out of sight, or you'll scare the pied piper back into his hideout. When the pied piper nears the crŠche, attach your creature to the pied piper and, even though the pied piper flees, follow the children stealer closely to his hut. He'll hand over the children, and you'll receive a health miracle dispenser (or increase if you completed the ogre first). If you'd rather be a nasty god, just eat the pied piper, and you won't be able to recover the stolen children. Evil players will be rewarded with a lightning dispenser--extremely useful in terrorizing the villages in land two and forcing them to believe. Make sure your creature knows either spell before heading to land two. Silver Reward Scroll #9: The Creature Breeder The creature breeder isn't a quest but is activated by a silver reward scroll. Activate the scroll over the breeder's hut, and you'll be given a choice to swap your creature for another--if you've unlocked the new creatures with a small download. The three new creatures are the mandrill, leopard, and horse. The mandrill balances intelligence and strength better than the ape--the mandrill isn't quite as bright as the ape, but it offers better strength. The horse, fat like the cow, boasts excellent intelligence (a little better than the cow's) and solid running speed to offset a minor strength shortcoming. The leopard possesses impressive walking and running speed as well as outstanding reaction time. But it comes at an intelligence cost, though the leopard is slightly smarter than the tiger--and a bit weaker. The Vortex to Land Two The vortex not only lets you travel to land two, but also lets anything you stick in there to appear on land two as well. Thus, if you're extremely patient, you can load the vortex with as much wood, food, one-shot miracles, trees, and villagers as you can find. It's a tedious process, but the more resources you supply to land two, the easier the level. Each land ends with a vortex; taking the time to feed the vortex resources will invariably assist in your efforts on the next world. 16.2 Land Two Walkthrough Land two begins with tutorials, much like land one, but soon turns more difficult--you must begin converting villages and pushing your influence toward your ally Khazar and enemy Lethys. Learn how to use the worship site and how to keep prayer power high without killing off your followers from overworship. If you're an evil player, take note of the sacrifice challenge--with no morals, you can sacrifice your followers (or, even more diabolically, their offspring) for big prayer power points. Begin the level by constructing available buildings. Assign builder disciples to speed up the process. Start transferring wood and food to the village store (and instruct your creature to do so as well). The first gold story scrolls appear once the structures are complete. Your first village will begin flourishing quickly, especially if you're liberal with the breeder disciple. Remember, you'll have to house all those followers! Be prepared to use a lot of wood to construct the scaffolds required for the house (and further wood required to complete the house). Once acquired, gesture the food and wood miracles to keep your village store and future villages stocked. Then again, if you're an evil god, these things may not be a concern. Once you finish the workshop gold story scroll, construct any needed civic buildings and then prepare to use the workshop often to complete houses and assist in expansion or to add structures to converted villages. Gold Story Scroll #1, 2: Worship Site, Worship Site Part 2 Activate the gold story scroll by the temple to receive an important lesson regarding the temple's worship site. The builder of worship sites appears-- supply him some wood, and he'll construct the addition to your temple. The worship site is where your followers go to worship and generate the prayer power you need to cast miracles. Raise and lower the totem at the village center to adjust what percentage of the village followers will migrate to the worship site. Keep in mind, though, that worshipping takes its toll on the villager. Constant worship means not eating, sleeping, or resting. The villagers will get hungry and tired quickly and will eventually die if you don't give them some rest. Gold Story Scroll #3, 4: The Workshop, The Workshop Part 2 Upon completing the worship site story scrolls, activate the next gold story scroll to learn about another important piece of hardware--the workshop. The workshop builds scaffolds, which in turn construct your village's buildings-- small and large houses, civic buildings, fields, miracle dispensers, and, eventually, wonders. Supply wood to the workshop, and a scaffold is produced. You can assign craftsman disciples to haul wood to the workshop (at 250 a trip), though obviously, you can supply the wood much faster. Continue with both workshop gold story scrolls and follow all the instructions and tasks. Once you finish, the workshop expert provides a forest miracle to the worship site. The forest miracle creates a supernatural forest that must be maintained with constant prayer power, but it's useful for quick wood in a pinch. Then again, with the tips from this guide, you should never be low on wood! Gold Story Scroll #5: Khazar's Fireball Challenge Activate the gold story scroll near the village to activate two separate challenges--a scroll appears on each of the two islands off from your temple area. Activate the scroll next to the large houses to start the fireball challenge. You may wish to harvest all the trees from this island because you're about to burn it up. Well, at least you hope so! Khazar provides you with three fireball one-shot miracles. Time to test your throwing ability. Use the same techniques as you did in the Throwing Stones quest from land one. Attempt to hit the structures with the fireballs. You receive a couple more handfuls of fireball one-shot miracles. Regardless of success or failure, Khazar presents you with the fireball miracle to add to the worship site. Gold Story Scroll #6: Khazar's Shield Challenge Touch the scroll hovering over the second island, this time with just a single hut, to activate Khazar's shield challenge. Here, you must experiment with the physical shield miracle to protect a small hut. First, Khazar demonstrates the spell while you hurl rocks at the shield; take note that the rock bounces off, although it'll do some damage. Next, you must cast the physical shield miracle and protect the small hut from Khazar's attack. Complete the challenge and receive the physical shield miracle on your worship site. Gold Story Scroll #7: Impress Village After completing the worship site, workshop, and fireball and shield challenges, notice a new gold story scroll just on the outskirts of your village-- it lies fairly close to an adjacent, unconquered town. Activate this story scroll to learn about casting miracles, using gestures. The lesson also teaches you how to use the miracles to impress a village, turn its belief, and win it over to your cause. Practice with the food and wood gestures and start using them on the village. If all goes to plan, the food and wood miracles, along with other impressive feats, should win the village over to your control. It'll be your first village--and there will be many more! Within moments, you'll have a new silver reward scroll in the village. Gold Story Scroll #8: Destroy It! Use the lessons learned in the impress village gold story scroll to convert neutral villages as you expand your influence toward Khazar's villages and Lethys' stronghold. Don't rush, however; take the time to complete the new silver reward scrolls that appear with each new influence gained. Many of these scrolls reward you with invaluable miracles that assist in village conversion. For instance, the sea silver reward scroll provides the enlarge creature miracle--an excellent way to impress a new town. Solve the tree puzzle for a winged creature miracle dispenser, a powerful converting tool that can knock down upward of 100 belief with each use. Employ your new fireball in village conversion. Prospective followers are dazzled by a flaming ball hurled inches above their faces. Make your way toward Khazar's villages by using your new miracles and techniques. If you're of an evil sort, don't hesitate to take over Khazar's own village for increased power. As you inch toward Lethys, Nemesis arrives to quench some of your newfound power. Regardless of whether or not you took Khazar's village, Nemesis arrives and obliterates Khazar and his creature. If you were attempting to remain the good god and spared Khazar your influence, it's time to convert his village now. Convert remaining villages and push up into Lethys' territory. Convert (or annihilate) the remaining village and obliterate Lethys' temple to discover the vortex underneath. Silver Reward Scroll #1: The Plague You'll activate the plague challenge after conquering the third village (the first village being your initial town). The bad conscience alerts you to the quest with the declaration that Lethys has tampered with the village. Activate the silver scroll, and a sick villager emerges from his hut. Something is making the villagers sick. You must heal the villagers and locate the source of the poison before it spreads out of control. Finding the source of the plague is the easy part. Check the village's store and notice the green food--yuck! Grab all the green food and drop the poisoned grub in the sea. The next part of the challenge is a bit tougher. Start your second conquered village worshipping by raising its totem--you'll need its heal spell. Raise it 10 to 20 percent so that you have near constant use of the heal spell. Perform the heal gesture and return to the third town. Instead of casting the heal spell over the entire village, seek out specific diseased villagers. Zoom in close and take notice of the greenish villagers (they're also usually stumbling around in a sickly fashion). Cast the heal miracle on as many of these villagers as you can find. Successfully healing enough villagers rewards you with the lightning bolt miracle, now attached to this village's worship site. If you don't heal enough villagers or neglect the task completely, the sick villagers shun your negligence, and you fail to receive the lightning bolt. Ready for some evil fun? Instead of dumping the poisoned food in the sea, put the plague in one of Lethys' villages--or heck, one of Khazar's or an unclaimed village. Make sure you place the food in the village store. Spread the plague! Wipe out an entire village. It won't take many belief points for villagers to believe when no one's alive. Silver Reward Scroll #2: The Riddles Activate the Riddle quest near a circular formation of mushrooms. Clicking on the silver scroll here reveals a puzzling riddle. "Place in the ring... Something that howls at night... Something hot... Something unique to your creature... Then all must be protected." To solve the puzzle, you must collect a wolf, which howls at night. Gathering a wolf can be a daunting task, since those animals are small. Look around the lake (which houses the beach temple puzzle) as well as its grassy outskirts. However, search for the wolf last-- the creature has a tendency to run away from the puzzle. Next, you'll need to burn a tree or bush--which is certainly hot--with the fireball or lightning spell. Place the burning object inside the ring. Your next step is a piece of your creature's poop, which is certainly something unique. Finally, cast the physical shield miracle and trace a circle around the mushrooms. Once all objects are inside the circle and a physical shield is in place, you complete the quest. The only reward is an opportunity to switch to the zebra creature--a fast, smart beast but fat and physically weak (basically a mirror of the horse). Silver Reward Scroll #3: The Beach Temple Puzzle Activate the challenge by clicking on the silver reward scroll above the temple, which is positioned adjacent to the map's small central lake. You'll hear the story of a desperate villager (aren't they all?). He's worried about his temple getting flooded and needs help moving the structure up the shoreline. Sounds easy enough--but naturally, there's a catch. Instructions: You must move the temple to the column farthest from the sea, piece by piece. There are four temple pieces, and you may place a piece on only an empty spike or on a wider piece. The temple is labeled "first to fourth piece," with first being the top and fourth being the bottom. The columns are labeled as sea column (nearest the sea), middle column, and beach column (farthest from sea). Here's an example of one of many possible solutions: 1. Place the first temple piece on the middle column. 2. Place the second temple piece on the beach column. 3. Place the first temple piece on the beach column. 4. Place the third temple piece on the middle column. 5. Place the first temple piece on the sea column. 6. Place the second temple piece on the middle column. 7. Place the first temple piece on the middle column. 8. Place the fourth temple piece on the beach column. 9. Place the first temple piece on the beach column. 10. Place the second temple piece on the sea column. 11. Place the first temple piece on the sea column. 12. Place the third temple piece on the beach column. 13. Place the first temple piece on the middle column. 14. Place the second temple piece on the beach column. 15. Place the first temple piece on the beach column. Completing the puzzle transforms the temple into a gigantic heal miracle. Just walk to the temple and receive healing. Silver Reward Scroll #4: The Slavers Capturing one of Khazar's villagers activates this silver scroll quest; click on the silver scroll above the hut to activate the challenge. A circus group in training has captured some of your new followers and will return these slaves in exchange for exotic animals.Locate two horses, which can be found near most villages, and deposit them in the open pen on the opposite side of the slavers' pen. For each horse, the circus gang releases a single slave. Tigers are another good choice. You'll find some by the coast near Khazar's village, which you just conquered. Deposit two tigers in the pen, and the circus gang releases two slaves for each tiger. Mountain lions are another option. You can locate these creatures near Khazar's last remaining village near his temple. Deposit the mountain lion in the pen to release the two remaining villagers. You can experiment with different combinations (such as wolves, lions, etc.). Drop off enough exotic animals and release all the villagers to complete the task successfully. You'll receive, along with the followers, a pack of wolves miracle dispenser for your reward. Teach your creature the spell by using the learning leash. Evildoers may wish to neglect the slaves--leave them for a life of servitude in the circus or wipe out the circus gang. Toss them in the sea to punish them for taking slaves. Silver Reward Scroll #5: The Singing Stones At least you don't have to collect the stones! Land two features another singing stones puzzle, but it's not about fetching stones and aligning tones-- this time, you actually have to make music. Look for the semicircle batch of stones at the crossroads between Khazar, Lethys, and your own influence. Activate the scroll and listen to the story of the singing stones and the power they possess. To complete the puzzle, you must play three songs. To discover the songs you can play, search for "actors" around the gameworld. Press the S key to reveal the villagers' names and current duty. You'll discover some very old, whistling, or instrument-playing villagers wandering around the shoreline. Listen closely to their tune to discover what you can play on the singing stones. You need to play these tunes (numbering the singing stones from left to right): 1, 1, 8, 8, 9, 9, 8, 6, 6, 5, 5, 3, 3, 1: This switches the world to night. It's "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"! 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1, 2: This rewards you with a resurrection circle that can raise the dead. It's the "Funeral Dirge." 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: This brings on the snow! Yep, it's "White Christmas." You must play all the tunes to receive 100 percent completion for the quest. Silver Reward Scroll #6: The Sacrifice Once you capture the fourth village from Lethys, you activate a silver reward scroll over a hut. Click on the silver reward scroll to hear about a new way to increase prayer power. The quest informs you that you may deposit different living objects (including plants!) into the worship site to increase prayer power. This is a good way to increase prayer power without using worshippers--or if you just need more in a pinch. Your view switches to the worship site, and a follower announces that he plans to sacrifice his firstborn son. It's your choice, though. You can deposit the son inside the worship site and receive a huge boast to your prayer power. Or you can practice dropping other things in the worship site (shrubs, trees, cows, horses, wolves, etc). Continue to drop in other objects until the follower interrupts--this completes the quest without sacrificing the firstborn. As a reward, you receive an increase to the heal miracle.Evildoers may wish to sacrifice the firstborn to gain the prayer power and continue to send the villages' youngest members to the worship site. Increase prayer power with each sacrifice. Put the totem at 80 percent to keep those worshippers tired and hungry and then send their own children to the heavens to increase your prayer power even more. It's very evil, but possible. Silver Reward Scroll #7: The Sea Time to rescue more swimming victims! You'll find this scroll in the third village (including the initial village as your first) late in land two. Activate the scroll to hear a plea from a mother--a group of children are swimming just off a dock to the left of the village (if facing the village from your initial town). The mother worries and requests that you rescue the children. Locate your creature and guide it over to the dock with a leash. Switch to the leash of compassion and click on each swimming child. Click only once (you don't want to attach the leash to the child) so that the sparkles appear just above the child. Your creature will grab the child. Maneuver the creature to the incline back up the mountain and to the village, and he'll drop the child off. The child will report that he's heading home (if he doesn't, move him farther up the hill). Grab each child in turn and then wait for the children to reach their mother. You receive an enlarge creature miracle dispenser as a reward. Use the miracle to increase your creature to the size of the creature guide in land one. Your gigantic creature is an imposing sight and an excellent addition to your belief-assault arsenal. Walk into the remaining towns as an enlarged creature to impress the townsfolk. Don't want the enlarge creature miracle? Toss the mother in the sea with the children. Or grab the children and sacrifice them at the worship site. Maybe your creature is hungry--it may enjoy a change from its diet of fish and grain. Feed it the children. You can even take the mother to the children for another twist--this solves the quest easily and in a nice, friendly way. Silver Reward Scroll #8: The Idol Late in land two, check back near the first village you captured and spot a silver scroll just on its outskirts. It appears that some rebellious followers have begun worshipping a strange idol. Time to make them pay--or at least make the idol pay! If you're trying to be good, move the followers away and destroy the idol. To do so, gather some trees and bushes and place them around and on the idol. Hurl a fireball spell at the trees. The resulting fire and heat will destroy the idol. Should you wish to teach the followers a lesson, leave them there to burn with their desecration. Or just hurl them into the sea or down your creature's throat. Destroying the idol rewards you with a fireball miracle increase. Silver Reward Scroll #9: The Greedy Farmer In one of the villages just before Lethys' temple, you'll discover a silver scroll above a farmer's hut. Activate the silver scroll to listen to a farmer's tale. Apparently, a bunch of kids are stealing the farmer's cows. If you look at the area behind the farmer's hut, you'll spot the cows and the children leading them to their hut down near the sea. What's your decision? The children are hungry, so letting them have the cows is certainly an option. Want a lightning miracle increase? Toss the farmer in the sea (or burn him, drop something on him, etc.) for hording his cattle from hungry children. The Tree Puzzle You'll find the tree puzzle on a three-by-three tree formation (think tic-tac-toe) near Lethys' snowy villages. It isn't a silver scroll puzzle, and the rules appear on a signpost with a question mark, which is adjacent to the puzzle. Your task is to make all nine trees the same type. Each time you activate a tree, as well the others touching that tree, change to the opposite tree type. There's no direct solution. Just keep working at the puzzle until all trees appear the same. Solving the puzzle rewards you with a winged creatures miracle dispenser. Teach your creature the spell! Eternal Youth Press S to display villager names, ages, and duties and investigate the village below the ascent to Lethys' temple. You'll discover a village where all members are 18 years old, except for two people: an elder and a newborn. It appears that the elder is keeping the entire village young by sacrificing the newborn. As soon as the villagers turn 19, the youngster is sacrificed--then all the villagers turns 18 again. Killing the elder prevents the killing of children but wipes out the entire village. Make your decision, or just leave them be. The Vortex to Land Three Land three's wood miracle dispenser means you'll rarely lack the resource, so spend time dumping villagers, food, and any one-shot miracles you wish to take with you (winged creatures one-shots from the tree puzzle work well in the land three conversion). Also, toss in some artifacts to use for village conversion. 16.3 Land Three Walkthrough It's time to put your knowledge to the test. You're on your own here on land three, and most of the tutorials are over (though you'll learn about wonders). Land three is almost all about converting enemy villages and spreading your influence to a final encounter with Lethys. Oh, and you won't have the service of your creature, either! Lethys has frozen him within three power pillars. To lower the pillar, you must convert the land's villages. Your greatest asset on the map lies beneath the waterfall--a wood miracle one-shot dispenser. This miracle dispenser respawns quickly and can keep you completely stocked with wood throughout the entire land--and you'll need it if you're attempting to keep up with your village's demand for expansion and houses. Even if you don't use the wood miracle immediately, take the oneshot bubble off and place it aside for later use. Silver Reward Scroll #1: The Shaolin You'll activate the Shaolin quest after you start to impress the nearest village; the scroll appears on the mountainlike island just off the coast. Take the Shaolin challenge before you completely conquer the first village. If you investigated this island before the quest, you would have noticed the temple on the top of the mountain and the winding road path near the bottom. Activate the quest and meet the Shaolin, a mysterious man who seems to possess a lot of interesting information--if only he'd divulge some of that info! The Shaolin requests that you not follow him to his secret meditation place-- that means it's time to follow the Shaolin! To follow the Shaolin successfully, you must keep an eye on him at all times but you must also make sure he can't see you. Stick behind him and rotate your camera view to stick behind him. The first leg isn't tricky--just remain behind him but close enough so that he remains in view. Use the mouse to move forward and back; it's much more precise than attempting to use arrowkey movement. At some point, glowing sparkles appear around the Shaolin--this means you have reached a save point. Should you fail the challenge at any point, just restart, and you'll begin here. This second stretch is tougher. The Shaolin approaches a group of purple mushrooms ahead. When he reaches the center, he turns to face away from the mountain and gaze at the landscape. Rotate your camera behind him and face the same direction. The Shaolin continues onward and reaches a point under a rock. To complete this section, pitch the camera down to ground level. As the Shaolin passes underneath the rock, pause the game so that you don't lose sight of him. Adjust your camera while paused to retain view. Pausing works in any situation. If you're worried about being seen or losing sight of the Shaolin, pause and adjust the camera. Another save point lies beyond the rock. You must complete a last leg, which closely resembles the second. The Shaolin stops again at a group of mushrooms and gazes at the landscape. Rotate the camera behind him. He'll then move underneath another rock. Pause the camera to retain sight of him. Follow the Shaolin to the two pillars that form his meditation center. You receive no immediate reward for completing the challenge, but the Shaolin will be back later to help out against two Lethys attacks as well as give instruction on wonders. The Flaming Followers After you conquer the first village, Lethys plans some retaliation in the form of some flaming followers. A handful of villagers are hanging out on a shoreline, and Lethys decides to launch a few fireballs at them. Frightened and quite warm (and forgetting there's water nearby), the flaming followers charge into your newly acquired village. Should the flaming villagers reach your structures (and other villagers), they'll share the fire. If you completed the Shaolin quest, he offers a couple of water miracles to assist in putting out the flame. Click on the miracles and douse the villagers by clicking the action button above them. Put out the nearest flaming villagers first. Douse any flames that reach your structures to prevent spread. Naturally, you can let the villagers burn, but you may pay the price with several structures on fire and a lot of lost wood. Or you can toss the villagers away from the village or into the sea--that'll cool them off. The Possessed Wolves Lethys rears his ugly head once more after you conquer the second village. This time, he possesses a pack of wolves and sends them charging into your new village. If you've completed the Shaolin quest, he once again offers his assistance by firebombing the group of wolves. But it's not enough--there are more on the way! One way to take out the wolves is to pick them up and toss them as far away as possible (but quickly!). Grab the nearest wolf first and then hurl it away. Failing the challenge will cost you the village--Lethys will resume control, so now, the village will require nearly 1,500 belief to convert. In other words, be a nice god and get rid of those wolves because conquering 1,500 belief isn't worth the satisfaction of a few pesky villagers becoming wolf meat. Alternatively, you could have a fireball or lightning miracle ready to ignite some wolves and then pick up the rest. Silver Reward Scroll #2: The Rejuvenator Conquering the third village puts you close to the final silver reward scroll on land three. You'll find the silver reward scroll just above a small hut in an alcove below the hill that leads to Lethys' controlled land. Activate the silver reward scroll to meet a woman who claims she can make the old young again. Test out her claim and pick up an elderly villager and deposit him or her in front of the woman's hut. After some abracadabra, the former senior exits the hut a toddler! You can do this as much as you'd like--for instance, if you wish to take a bunch of kids with you to land four instead of seniors on their last leg. Or you can even attempt a new trick. After giving the woman a couple of seniors, send her a child (say 10 or 12 or so), and something goes a bit wrong. Instead of getting a younger child, the woman's spell turns the young villager into a creature (in our case, the ape from land one). If you wish, switch your creature once it's back in your possession. Capturing the Villages Land three puts your village-conversion skills to the test. You were taught much about the final art of belief during land two's gold story quest, titled Impress Village. From there on out, though, you're on your own--and in land three, even without your creature! Each village you convert drops one pillar, which surrounds your frozen creature. Convert three and free your creature! After impressing the first village, complete the Shaolin quest and then complete the village conversion with an array of resource miracles, healing, and hurled rocks and fireballs. After conversion, deal with the flaming followers with the Shaolin's help. Expand your new village's influence toward the next village or use a village center drop for instant expansion. Take over the next village with more standard belief tactics: deposit food and wood inside its village store, cast healing spells on the sick, hurl fireballs close to the townspeople, drop down artifacts, and otherwise impress the neutral village with your wizardry. Converting the second village signals the possessed wolves. If you completed the Shaolin quest, he'll assist in the wolves' removal. In the third village, you'll learn about wonders. Expand your influence there and convert the village with the tactics you've nearly mastered at this point. Use the wonder to expand your new influence toward Lethys' territory. Increase your new village's belief by more heal, food, and wood miracles, which in turn increase the influence. Should you need a quick fix, drop a village center near the next village. The final few villages are tough, though you should be able to convert them with these standard belief practices (as well as use of your creature now that it's been rescued). If you're evil, don't hesitate to obliterate Lethys' final towns to facilitate conversion. Removing the villagers makes conversion much easier. As you near ending his belief in the last village, Lethys gives up, and you're given a choice to spare his life or eliminate him. If you spare him, just go through the vortex when ready; if you decided to convert his final village, you must destroy his temple to locate the vortex underneath. The Invincible Man Look along the beach near your village (also around the Shaolin's mountain) for a strange man--he taunts you! If you have trouble finding him, hit the S key to search for a man down there; he's an actor, not a standard follower. Pick him up and listen to his strange pleas. If you mess around with him, you'll soon discover that he's invincible. Try to toss him against a mountain or drown him in the sea--he won't go away! You can actually put him to good use. Try tossing him around a village that requires some belief. You can even pick him up outside your influence and use the short burst of influence to cast a spell. It's an easier way to influence the villages on land three without actually expanding your influence. Try feeding the man to your creature. He even survives digestion! Have fun with the little guy--rumor has it he can even be sacrificed for tons of prayer power. The Vortex The beginning of land four is deadly, and how you wish to play through the chaos will determine what resources you should pour into the vortex. If you wish to save your initial village and land four, pour in tons of wood (which should be easy with the wood one-shot miracles) and even more villagers. You'll need the villagers for worshippers and prayer power to keep a spiritual shield active. Even if you don't want to save the village, it's wise to put in as many wood one-shot miracles as you have the patience to wait for. You can use them to fill up your village store once you gain a foothold in the land. Dump in all the food as well; you aren't coming back to land three, so it should be put to good use somewhere. 16.4 Land Four Walkthrough Land four sends you back to the first map--though much has changed. Enraged, Nemesis has ravaged the land; a once lush, green landscape has turned brown and dead. Fireballs rain from the sky and lightning scars the land--and you'll have to deal with both. Land four can be a challenge exercise of keeping your village intact to watching fireballs burn it into rubble. Guardian Stones The first section of the walk-through details some ideas on how to survive the initial chaos. There are three guardian stones affecting land four's environment and landscape. You must complete each of the puzzles to restore the map to its original beauty. Guardian Stone #1: The Totem Puzzle: Located underneath a physical shield outside of your influence. Capture the nearby village to spawn the scroll that activates the challenge. Guardian Stone #2: The Defending Ogres: Sleg, son of Sleg, guards the second guardian stone, and he won't let it go without a fight. Move your creature to him to initiate combat. Guardian Stone #3: The Heartbroken Man: Complete this quest after you've already destroyed two guardian stones. You'll spot the scroll above a hut in the middle of the map. Surviving the Chaos The beginning of land four is extremely difficult. You have fireballs crashing down from the sky, lightning bolts striking around your village, and pesky gremlins stealing your followers. Where should you start? As with all of Black & White, there are several options at the beginning of land four. Here are some of them: Saving the Initial Village: Can you save the initial village? The fireballs are coming down fast and furious at the beginning but don't hurt anything, which means you do have some time to get your act together before the real danger begins. Once the good conscience observes that some fireballs are coming close to your village, the problems begin. To save the first village, you can use the spiritual shield one-shot dispenser to erect protection around your village, but without prayer power, it won't stay up for long. So if you want to try to protect your village from the fireballs, you'll need villagers--lots of them! Toss as many land three villagers as you can find into the vortex at the end of land three. Once in land four, crank your totem up enough so that you can maintain the shield. While the shield is up, guide your creature to the nearby village above the shielded totem puzzle and start converting. Or you can send your creature to tackle the ogre and get rid of the lightning--and then the fireballs! If you don't want to maintain the shield, you can also catch the incoming fireballs before they strike your structures. This is very difficult, though, and it means you must concentrate on grabbing fireballs instead of something else (like converting the nearby village). Ignoring the First Village: Another way, though a tad evil, is to ignore the first village completely. Concentrate your effort solely on converting the nearby village that provides access to the totem puzzle that controls the fireballs. Guide your creature over there with the leash and attach him to the village center and their houses with the leash of compassion. Assist in the conversion by hurling trees from the hill above your village. You should be able to get some belief for most of the flying trees. If you have any artifacts from land three, toss them over the village too. Try to make the toss as low as possible; you can score a ton of belief for a flying artifact (we scored 230 with just one rock!). You can even try to toss the artifact so that it lands in the middle of town for a nice chunk of belief and a slow trickle thereafter. This means, though, that your first village will be leveled. Don't fret, though; the lines in the dirt that formed the village center and workshop can be repaired. Simply supply the builders and the wood (plenty of trees on the map). Surviving the initial chaos in this fashion slants you to the side of evil (you did ignore all those crying pleas for help, didn't you?) and means you'll have to start with just a handful of followers. Get them breeding quick! Spreading Your Influence Expanding influence around the map can be a slow process if you're just expanding using houses or compounding belief in your village center with nice miracles and gestures. Instead, use the village center drop. Make five scaffolds and combine them into a single large scaffold. With the scaffold in hand, move your cursor somewhere outside your influence. You can interact with the world for a few seconds after leaving your own influence. Use this time to place the village center, which creates its own influence. Build the center by adding builders and wood and then expand by using houses and other civic buildings--or by dropping another village center. Use this tactic to gain influence close to neutral or enemy-controlled villages. If you're close enough, you can drop wood or food in their village store, cast friendly miracles, toss fireballs, and do whatever it takes to overturn belief and complete the conversion. Guardian Stone 1: The Totem Puzzle To trigger the scroll that activates the totem puzzle, you must either spread your influence to reach the shielded puzzle or capture the nearby village, which will serve to envelope the totem puzzle inside a new influence. As it's nearly impossible to keep your initial village intact with so many fireballs and lightning strikes, you're better off trying to capture the other village as quickly as possible. Once the village is under your control, a scroll appears over the shielded totem puzzle. Activate the scroll to remove the shield, revealing the puzzle underneath. To solve the puzzle, watch the ringing bells. Once the sequence completes, you must duplicate the sequence by using your hand to ring the corresponding bells. There are five bells and four sequences. You're also on a time limit; you must ring the next bell quickly, or you'll have to start the challenge over again. One good tip: Don't try to ring the bell itself. You can ring the bell by knocking the pole that holds the bell instead. The pole is much easier to strike than the smaller bell. Strike the pole, and you'll ensure an easy ring and likely not get disqualified because of taking too much time. Sequence #1 (from left to right): Bell 1, Bell 2, Bell 3 Sequence #2 (from left to right): Bell 1, Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 5, Bell 2 Sequence #3 (from left to right): Bell 1, Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 5, Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 1 Sequence #4 (from left to right): Bell 1, Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 5, Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 1, Bell 4, Bell 1 Completing the totem puzzle destroys the guardian stone that causes the fireballs--what a relief! Taking out the fireballs lets you finally maintain your village in peace--well, mostly. There's still the problem of the lightning strikes and the annoying gremlins that steal your followers. Still, eliminating the fireballs lets you rebuild your initial village. Even if the structures were leveled to the dirt, you can assign builders and dump some wood to start the rebuilding process. Guardian Stone 2: The Defending Ogres Sleg, son of Sleg (the ogre from land one) protects the guardian stone that's controlling the rainfall and lightning strikes. The ogre lies outside your influence, but completing the puzzle doesn't require you to extend your influence around him. Instead, just leash your creature and guide him to Sleg's position. Attach the aggressive leash to Sleg, and the battle will automatically begin once your creature approaches Sleg. This is a straight-up creature battle, much like the one you practiced against the creature guide in land one or the one you may have faced during your trip through the other two lands. Click on the ogre to queue up attack moves while casing the heal miracle once your creature is low on health. Also, implement the special move (the star gesture) to perform a more damaging maneuver. Defeating the ogre ends the rain, lightning strikes, and the periodic gremlin raids by destroying the guardian stone. Guardian Stone 3: The Heartbroken Man You'll spot the scroll that activates the heartbroken man challenge once the other two guardian stones have been eradicated. Look for the scroll over a small camp located in the center of the map. To complete the challenge, you must escort a woman (Keiko) from the Aztec village on the hill to the lonely man from land five's introduction; he's positioned in his own hut on another hill. Here are a few ways to complete the challenge: ú With absolutely no influence in the Aztec village or near the heartbroken man's hut, you can guide your creature into the Aztec village with the leash and focus the creature on Keiko until it picks her up. Then use the leash to guide it to the heartbroken man's hut on the hill. This is a tough way to complete the challenge. Your creature must be well trained with villagers--teach it how to pick them up, not eat them, and put them down safely. If not, you may find Keiko eaten or thrown into a mountain! ú If you gain influence in both the Aztec village (by capturing the village) and the heartbroken man's hut (by extending your influence there), you can simply grab Keiko and put her down in front of the heartbroken man's village. Simple as that! This is time-consuming, however; it'll take you a while to push your influence around the heartbroken man's hut. ú The easiest way to complete the challenge is also the evilest way--just kill Keiko! Her death breaks the heart of the already heartbroken man (you're so cruel!) but completes the challenge and even destroys the guardian stone. Just pick up Keiko and toss her into the sea, feed her to your creature, or sacrifice her on your altar. All that matters is that she's gone. Completing the heartbroken man challenge breaks the final guardian stone and restores the land and sky to their previous beauty. Gold Story Scroll #1: The Undead Village After removing all guardian stones, a gold story scroll appears around the small group of huts located inside a deep crater. Click on the story scroll to hear the story of Nemesis' cruel act on this faithful village--he's turned them undead. You can help them by restoring the two totems positioned on the crater's rim. Before you can even think about the crater, you must gain some influence in the area so that you can interact with the totems. Use your workshop to construct five scaffolds. Use the scaffolds to place a village center in the crater as close to the rim as possible (though not too close to the undead village!). You'll be out of your influence when you first place the structure; remember, though, that you can affect things outside your influence for a few seconds. Use this time to place the village center. Once it's down, you gain the influence around the village in progress. Move some builders over from other villagers and place down a chunk of wood to get them started. The village center will likely not be enough. Use some wood to build houses or a village store to expand your influence. Cast some miracles to increase belief, which will also enhance influence. Drop down plenty of builders to speed up the process and feed them enough wood. You need to expand your influence around both totems. Once you have enough influence, you must raise both totems at the same time with the help of your creature. Guide the creature to the totem with the learning leash. Teach it how to raise and lower the totem--it should catch on fast. As soon as it starts to raise the totem, move your hand to the other and pull it up high. If both totems are at their peak simultaneously, the challenge ends in success. Completing the challenge ends land four and opens the vortex to land five. If you haven't completed the silver reward scrolls, do those now. Head to the vortex section of the land four walk-through for tips on what you should bring along to the final section of the game! Silver Reward Scroll #1: The Fish Puzzle Locate the silver reward scroll for the fish puzzle along the coastline near a circular formation of pylons. Activate the silver scroll to hear the story of a young fisherman; he wishes to net a school of fish to impress his father. To complete the puzzle, all you must do is guide the fish inside the circle. Fish respond when you tap on the water (they move away from the tap). Guide the small patches of fish into the net by tapping behind them. Remember, though, that the fish continue to move even after you've guided them into the net. This means you may have to continue to coax the fish back into the net repeatedly until all fish are within the circle. You may wish to combine groups of fish so that you can move them with a single tap on the water. Successfully completing the fish puzzle unlocks a new creature. Guide your creature here at any point on the land to switch to the turtle. Silver Reward Scroll #2: The Treacherous Path Find a silver reward scroll on a small hut located at the base of a dangerous path to activate the treacherous path challenge. A woman requests your guidance as she moves through three dangerous segments; she's making an attempt to bring her brother a healing potion that will cure his disease. Since you're doing a lot of picking up and throwing, it's best to have influence in the area. Thus, you'll need to have acquired the Aztec village on the hill before attempting this challenge. The first leg of the treacherous path contains dangerous wolves. Your good conscience will alert you of the upcoming danger, but you can anticipate this move by peering ahead on the path and locating the sleeping wolves. Grab each wolf and toss it over the hill and out of the path. If you wait until you're told about the wolves, they'll charge the woman--and you'll have to grab speeding, hungry wolves instead of peaceful, sleeping wolves. After you toss the wolves, don't wait for the woman--keep peering ahead! The next section (after a right turn) contains thick lines of trees along both sides of the path. When the woman gets close to this area, some of the trees will catch fire and will harm the woman if she gets close. Anticipate this by uprooting all the trees and bushes and tossing them over the hill. You may not be able to get all the trees and bushes, but you can get most of them. At worst, try to uproot enough trees and bushes to prevent tight clumps. The fire spreads quickly in these clumps. Once the woman arrives where the fires started, begin uprooting the flaming trees and bushes as quickly as possible. Dump them over the hill and out of the way. The final stretch may differ slightly depending on what has happened on the land so far. If your creature ran across another ogre (not Sleg) and you found and defeated him, the final stretch of the treacherous path will be simple. If not, you'll have to toss some sheep! The noisy sheep can wake up the ogre, who will notice the woman. Zoom in close to the ground, locate the sheep, and hurl them away as quickly as possible. The woman will reach the village and offer the healing potion for her brother. Unfortunately, in the retail version of Black & White, the challenge can't be completed successfully--each time you arrive, she's out of healing potions. You should have three tries, but it plays the first try as if it's already too late. Once patched, the challenge should work correctly. The eventual reward for the challenge is great--the wolf creature is unlocked. Silver Reward Scroll #3: The Creature Breeder Spot a silver reward scroll over a small hut (on a cliff near the coast) to locate another creature breeder. He'll offer some unlocked creatures (the same from land one). Lure your creature over to the breeder with the leash if you wish to switch your creature. Rescue Thomas Spot a maze on the top of a hill; click on the question mark for the instructions. In Rescue Thomas, you must get Thomas to the exit, avoiding the wolf by clicking on the ground in the direction you wish Thomas to go. Thomas will move only one square at a time, but the wolf will move two unless he reaches a barrier. The wolf will always head toward Thomas if he can. You may click on Thomas to miss a turn. The Vortex to Land Five Land five begins with very little wood--there's very little tree coverage around you, and you won't have access to a wood miracle for quite some time. Take the opportunity to feed the vortex to land five with as much wood as you can come up with. Drop in some villagers, food, and any one-shot miracles scattered around. You'll find wood to be most important, however; spend the time clearing out all the village stores on land four and drop in some of the trees if need be. Don't forget to toss in some artifacts; you'll need them for the tough village conversions that lie ahead. 16.5 Land Five Walkthrough You've reached the final confrontation with Nemesis. This large land is filled with neutral and enemy-controlled villages (though most are under Nemesis' watchful eye). Once again, your creature is out of commission--Nemesis has put a curse on the poor guy, and you soon learn he's drained of strength, switched to the opposite alignment, and is slowly shrinking. Don't expect much help! If you completed the Explorers silver reward scroll from land one, you're in better shape--you'll have a second town to raise, so you'll be able to use the followers for miracle power. Also, dumping a bunch of wood into land four's vortex will pay off--there aren't many trees around your start position. Once ready, start building your starting village. Assign builders to erect homes and necessary civic buildings (village store, workshop, crŠche, graveyard) and then switch some to farmers and some males to breeders to start multiplying. Black & White's final land is a slow process of gaining influence and taking over enemies' villages. You must overcome a lot of Nemesis belief--in one case, around 1,500, and in another, close to 6,000. That's a lot of belief, but you do have some handy items to assist. 1. There's a fireball extreme one-shot miracle dispenser underneath some rocks on the mountain in front of your first village. This spell comes in handy not only for attack purposes but also in converting villages--the sight of five fireballs flying overhead turns those heads in no time! Be very careful around the dispenser, however. Hitting those large rocks above the dispenser can cause a chain reaction that buries the dispenser beneath tons of small rocks. It's unlikely you'll have the time or patience to dig it out. Stockpile the fireballs when you aren't using them; just grab the one-shot each time it appears and place it in your village for safekeeping. 2. Complete the magic dragon silver reward scroll (after converting the Tibetan village underneath the spiritual shield) for a hefty prize: a winged creatures one-shot miracle dispenser. Use these one-shots to gain approximately 100 belief for each use. Just be sure to use them in a crowd; don't waste the one-shot for just a few observers! The miracle takes a long time to recharge. Start stockpiling them as soon as you complete the Magic Dragon quest so that you have plenty when needed. For more on converting land five's tough villages, check the end of this land five walk-through chapter. Nemesis' lion creature roams around the center of the map for much of the early game. Expect to encounter him if you move your creature around this area (for instance, when going to the Tibetan village). The lion will aggressively attach its leash to you and hurl fireballs. You may even be required to battle occasionally. After a while, the lion gets more aggressive and starts moving into your other towns. He may kick in the village store or toss a couple of rocks. Keep an eye on him. You must convert and hold Nemesis' controlled towns and wonders to complete the level. If you let Nemesis regain control of a town, you must reconvert the town and knock down approximately 1,000 belief again. Land five is tough enough; don't compound the difficulty by losing towns! Monitor belief closely and cast some friendly miracles, donate some resources, and otherwise keep them pleased (or scared out of their minds) to ensure high belief. Silver Reward Scroll #1: The Explorers Again If you completed the Explorers quest from land one in a nice, friendly fashion (you supplied, wood, grain, and meat, and they sailed off successfully), they return with their reward in land five. You'll spot the silver reward scroll inside their boat just off the shoreline. Click on the silver reward scroll to listen to the explorers' new tale. As a reward, the explorers offer a new unlocked creature, the polar bear, as well as another town. Use this town as a breeding center. You can then take the followers and place them in whichever village you wish. Don't fret if you lose this village late in the game; it's not vital to complete land five. Instead, concentrate on your main village with the temple and the other Nemesis villages you capture, which contain wonders. Silver Reward Scroll #2: Stanley the Wolf Stanley the wolf needs your help! He's hungry and he needs to be led to his food, the tasty sheep. To guide Stanley to the sheep, just ring one of the four bells positioned around the maze--he'll move in the direction of the sound. To successfully guide Stanley to his dinner, ring the following bells in order. Face the puzzle so that Stanley begins on the right and you're facing the maze with the signpost with the question mark at the bottom of the screen: 1. Bottom Bell 2. Right Bell 3. Top Bell 4. Left Bell 5. Top Bell 6. Left Bell 7. Bottom Bell 8. Right Bell It's an easy challenge with a great reward. Guiding Stanley to his sheep dinner rewards you with a new unlocked creature--the mighty lion! The Shield Protecting the Tibetan Village The close Tibetan village offers an inviting first target--its low belief shouldn't be too hard to convert with your creature or a few fireball extreme one-shots. But before you can even attempt to convert, Nemesis realizes the village's worth and erects a spiritual shield to protect the village from your influence. Thankfully, removing the spiritual shield isn't much of a problem. You'll notice three stones that focus power to the shield. To lower the shield, you must eliminate the dancing Nemesis follower around each stone--and you don't need influence, just your creature! Guide your creature to each stone and dancer. Command your creature to pick up the dancer (focus the creature on the dancer) and then command it to drop the dancer elsewhere (or even toss him or eat him). Remove all three dancers to remove the spiritual shield. Leash your creature to the village's store to start conversion. Assist with some fireball extreme miracles. If your creature has been taunting village store and healing spells, it shouldn't take too long. Silver Reward Scroll #3: The Magic Dragon Capturing the Tibetan village allows completion of the silver reward scroll located at a nearby mine entrance (you can activate the scroll before capturing the village, but you won't have the influence to complete the task). Activate the scroll and listen to the mighty dragon hunters' tale. They wish to fight a dragon inside the cave but require some assistance. First, the hunters need healing. Use a heal miracle one-shot or cast one from one of your worship sites (you may need to add worshipers to generate the prayer power). Once the hunters are healed, they're nearly ready to take on the dragon and reveal more of their plan. They plan to fill the mine with smoke to blind the dragon; the dragon won't be able to see their impending attack! The hunters need you to ignite the pyre at the mine entrance. Do this with a fireball spell. Gesture a fireball spell (or use a fireball miracle one-shot) and toss the spell at the pyre at close range (don't risk igniting the hunters!). The flame ignites the pyre and fills the mine with smoke. The hunters rush in. Follow the hunters' progress by listening at each blowhole. You must listen to the hunters for the challenge to complete. After listening to the action, zoom over to the mine exit and listen to the victorious hunters. As a reward, they offer the treasure inside--a winged creatures miracle dispenser, an essential item for converting the tough villages on land five. The dispenser takes a while to recharge. Pull off winged creature one-shots and stockpile them for use later. Silver Reward Scroll #4: Swap to Brown Bear Once you convert the small Japanese village near the coast (the same coast as the explorers), a silver reward scroll appears over an inhabitant's hut. Activate the silver scroll to learn of a terrible stench plaguing the village. Apparently, someone forgot to clean up some bear poop in the forest! Searching for poop isn't a glamorous job, but someone has to do it. Zoom close to the ground and scan the forest for poop. You may wish to clear out some of the trees first; deposit the trees inside the village store. If you're having trouble spotting the small poop, turn up your volume and listen for the flies, which surround each piece of poop. Hone in on the buzzing to locate the poop. Pick up the poop and toss it in the water. Complete the challenge, and you're offered a new, unlocked creature! It's the brown bear. Guide your creature to the brown bear by using the leash and switch creatures if you want. Silver Reward Scroll #5: The Informant After converting the Japanese village, you'll have access to this silver reward scroll, which appears only at night. You'll find the scroll above a small campfire in the forest (or what was left of the forest if you uprooted trees while searching for poop or for wood). Activate the silver scroll, and you'll receive some important information from a helpful follower. The first night, the informant tells you that a spiritual curse infects your creature. He shows you the wonder that's draining your creature's strength. Return a second night and learn that another curse affects your creature's alignment--it's opposite of your alignment. The informant also reveals the wonder that controls your creature's alignment. Finally, on the third night, the informant reveals that your creature is slowly shrinking into nothingness. He closes the discussion, revealing the wonder that's causing the problem. Meteor Shower Soon after you convert land five's central and very important village, the Greek village (which contains the wood miracle at its worship site), bad luck rears its ugly head in the form of a meteor shower--emphasis on the word "shower." It's a nasty predicament that will nearly level the Greek village. As soon as you convert the Greek village, make sure you have worshippers with the water spell at a worship site. The bad conscience gives the warning of the impending meteors. You have a few alternatives. You can attempt to catch them as they come in, which is very difficult. If they crash, ignore the damage they're doing to your buildings and concentrate on putting out the fires by using the water spell. Remember, you'll have nearly unlimited wood once the meteor shower ends. Don't fret--the meteor shower does end eventually, and it won't rear its ugly head again. Start making repairs to the village by sending remaining villagers to the worship site and then cast the wood miracle--use it over and over again to stockpile wood in the Greek's village store. Once done, get breeding so that you fill up those houses, and don't risk losing the village to everyone dying out. Converting Land Five's Tough Villages Overturning 6,000 belief is a daunting task--even 1,500 belief can be a challenge! Here are some tips on converting the tough villages you'll encounter during land five. 1. Don't forget the village center drop if you need to expand your influence. Construct five scaffolds and combine them. Move your hand just outside your influence (as far as possible) and drop the village center to begin a new town. You'll need to use this technique when conquering the last few villages (including the last well guarded by those megablasts). 2. Place the village center down, along with some wood, and assign builders. Give them homes and even a civic building or two. Don't forget to reinforce that village with followers (and get them to breed)--or it may turn into a ghost town upon the inhabitants' deaths. Use the village center drop to spread your influence within range of any enemy village and then use all available means (some listed below) to affect belief. You can also raise your new town's belief (cast heal miracle, drop in some wood, use a winged creature one-shot, toss over a fireball, etc.) to expand influence. Greater belief equals larger influence. 3. Here's a good combination for scoring some belief: Grab an artifact and toss it over the enemy village a few times (don't toss it out of your influence, though!). Once they're bored, drop it in front of the village center. Wait until the villagers gather around for optimum observation and then toss over some fireballs, fireball extremes, trees, rocks, flaming trees, cows, and whatever else you come across. Then use an ample supply of winged creature miracles. 4. Don't forget the most basic of miracles: heal. Cast the heal miracle on a lot of enemy observers, and you can gain 20 or 30 a pop (and sometimes more). 5. Here's a particularly devious combination: steal the enemy wood out of the wood store. Then use the megablast to annihilate the village's wonder. It'll scramble to rebuild the wonder even though you just stole all its wood. Replace it with a wood miracle or a hefty handful of 20,000, and that'll make the village happy and impressed. Once the villagers have the wonder almost up and running, start a fire so that they flee the village. In their absence, steal any wood and nuke the wonder again with a megablast. When they're all watching, replace the wood. 6. Villager stealing: Snatch Nemesis' followers straight out of his villages (after using a village center drop technique to gain influence around Nemesis' towns) and place them elsewhere or in your own villages. Follow up a round of successful captures with some impressive heal, wood, or winged creature miracles to impress your new followers; this compounds your village belief, which increases your influence. This might be seen as an evil tactic, however. 7. Even more evil: Instead of converting the villages, just level them. Take them out with fireballs, megablasts, and every other means possible. Taking out the entire town and every villager within places the belief at nothing. A missionary or two can then convert the town to your side. Getting rid of all villagers can be a challenge, though; Nemesis usually has a bunch of them at the worship site to supply his miracle frenzy. 8. Evil deeds score belief! If you're playing evil or even just occasionally evil, don't forget to use some lightning strikes, burn homes, toss rocks into the workshop, etc. to help belief. If a few pretty birds can't convince them, perhaps igniting their home with a fireball extreme will terrorize them into belief. 9. Use a spiritual shield to cover the village's store and protect it from Nemesis' tinkering. 10. Pick up rocks and drop them on the wonder, village center, or other buildings. You'll get belief for smashing the buildings with the floating rock--and even more belief for supplying the wood required to fix the buildings. 11. Strike the villagers with lightning and terrorize them. Then be a nice god and heal their wounds! Final Creature Battle Acquiring all the villages is only the first step--you must defeat Nemesis' creature in a final creature fight. Nemesis mixes things up by creating an exact mirror of your own creature. Furthermore, Nemesis' creature is well versed in spellcasting; expect to be attacked with a fireball spell as well as watch your mirror cast heal. Your creature should possess an array of offensive spells by now (fireball works well) as well as creature power-ups, like strength or holy flies. You must survive a few heals from Nemesis; his creature will heal itself several times. Continue to punch away and cast fireball, power-ups, and the special move as needed. Don't forget to heal your own creature to keep up with Nemesis' own heals. Eventually, Nemesis' creature will stop healing itself so that you can make your move. Finish him off and reach the final segment of the game. Do you let Nemesis survive so that he can conquer another land or do you unite the creed (your creature contains the creed) at the volcano and rid the land of Nemesis for good--but risk your creature's death? Lure your creature to the volcano with the leash to complete the last portion of the game. The creed destroys Nemesis' temple (though you could have destroyed it before with a few megablast miracles) and banishes him from the land--you're the one true god! _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 17. Cheats & Easter Eggs Custom villager names: Note: This procedure involves editing a game file; create a backup copy of the file before proceeding. Use a text editor to edit the "names.txt" file in the game folder. You can change the names contained in the file as desired, for example use friends or family. However, the number of names in the file must match the number listed in the first line. Get any creature: Note: This procedure involves changing a game file; create a backup copy of the file before proceeding. Enter the "\lionhead studios ltd\black & white\data\ctr" folder. Find the file for creature that you have (for example, the cow has filename "bcow.cbn") and the creature you want to have (for example, the horse has filename "bhorse.cbn"). Change their filename to each other (for example, "bhorse.cbn" becomes "bcow.cbn" and vice versa) Note: You can also get the ogre, but his filename is "bgreek.cbn". . Hint: Dizzy evil conscience: Start the tutorial and wait for your conscience to stop talking. Repeatedly move your mouse in circles and your evil conscience's head will eventually start spinning. Hint: Beach balls, bowling balls and bowling pins: Go to the God's Playground (press [F2] during game play) and exit out of the first tutorial by pressing [Esc]. Then zoom all the way out. Look for the small island off of the larger one. When you find it, zoom in on it. Rotate the camera so that you are looking at the small island and can see the large island in the distance. At the base of the small island you will see two beach balls, two bowling balls and some bowling pins with smiley faces on them. Hint: Dice and a teddy bear: In land one (the first island), go above the cache (the location where many children live), and zoom in until you are "in" the house. You should see two big dice, a small die, and a big Teddy Bear. Hint: Dice: On Gods' Playground, press [Esc], then move forward to the group of rocks next to a rock that resembles a pointing finger. Tap and break the large boulder to reveal a pair of dice. Hint: Smiley face footprints: Set your system date to April 1 and being the game. Your character will leave smiley face footprints in the ground. Hint: Teasing advisors: Wait without doing anything and the advisors will start making fun of each other. Hint: South Park spoof: Leave the game running without taking any actions. Eventually, you will hear the advisors in a spoof of South Park. Hint: Titanic spoof: Watch as the ark leaves to see a scene based on Titanic. Hint: Control logo: Move the mouse during Lionhead logo animation to scatter the particles. If you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, spin it to control the speed of the animation. Hint: Fireworks: Toss trees into the village storage in the Playground Of The Gods. Hint: Phone dialogue: On the first island, do the leash gesture, then motion up, right, down, right, up, right, down, right and up in straight lines with your hand. A red phone booth will appear on the north side of the island and allow you to hear a conversation between the game developers. Hint: Unlimited Lightning Miracles: Take the Lightning Miracle and go the the edge of your influence. You can win whole towns by jumping out long enough for a brief shot and back in before it is used up. Hint: Unlimited Water Miracles: Use the following trick to get unlimited Water Miracles on the first level. At the place where there is the first silver reward, scroll on land one. After completing it, knock over the rock again and it turns into a Water Miracle. Hint: Unlimited Miracles: Use a miracle such as Wood or Food and take it out of your boundary. You will lose influence, but if you are casting the Miracle while doing this it will start again so you can use it forever without it running out. This works for anything that is not a one shot Miracle. Hint: Unlimited food and wood: Activate a Food or Wood Miracle. Then hold the Hand over the door of the village store or workshop and quickly and repeatedly press the Right Mouse Button. If done correctly, a large amount of food or wood will be created for very little mana. Hint: Get wood faster: Start to create any type of building next to a large forest. While the building is being worked on, drag as many trees as you can over it to add to the wood pile for the construction site. When the building is completed, take the left over wood and deposit it in the village store. Hint: Alter time: Hold [Alt] and press 1 to slow down time or hold [Alt] and press 2 to speed up time. Hint: Easy miracles: You can teach your creature some miracles easily. Take either Food, Wood, Water, Lightning, Fireball, Teleport, or any other miracle you can use and use some/regrab it. Then put the rest back in the dish at the worship site. You will get the same amount of prayer power, so you can use it again. Hint: Finding one-shot miracles: You can sometimes find one-shot miracles under trees and rocks. When you see a firefly-like light at night, follow it until morning. They will hide under a rock, in a tree or something other object. Pick it up and you will get a one-shot miracle. Hint: Spells for creature: When you teach your creature a skill such as Summon Food or Summon Wood, it will remember it, even in another game. Enter a skirmish file and play God. When you want your creature to learn a spell, send everyone to the worship site after adding a large number of food. Grab the spell. You will be able to make your creature learn the spell in less than three to four minutes. Water, Food, Wood, Forest, and Fireball spells can be learned this way. Note: Skills such as Fishing will not be learned and will need to be re-learned. Hint: Easy belief: Have your creature pick up an unopened treasure chest. When you eventually get the portal, throw it through. At the other side, it resembles a cube with a kid's picture on it, and when thrown into a crowd you will extra belief. If this did not seem to not work, it probably fell in the water. Hint: Convert important characters to loyal civilians: When an important NPC character dies (including skeletons, Sable, Piper, Hermit, Hippy, etc.) and their body does not disappear, you can grab them and throw them in the vortex. They will become your loyal civilians in the next land. Hint: Save drowning villages: Put on the fluffy leash and make your creature go next to the men. He will then pick one of them up. If you move your creature onto land he will put down the current man. Hint: The living dead: When you here the "Deeeeaaaath" whisper, press S to find the dead person. Their name will be white. Find a "teleport site" (you will need to have two). Drop the skeleton in the portal, and on the other side on the portal, you should see that dead person crawling (or at least moving). If you pick it up and drop it, it will become a normal (non-moving) skeleton again. You will not have to care for it (it cannot die again). You can also have a live person of the opposite sex breed with it. Hint: Start out evil: Use the "Get any creature" trick, but first copy both creatures and send them to another folder for later use. Play the game as usual and become evil. Go back to the "ctr" folder and delete the hacked creature. Go to the folder where you placed the copied animals and put them back in the "ctr" folder. Start the game. Your game will begin again, but you will be evil. Hint: Kill a villager: Pick up a villager and throw them. If you throw them into gatesor down mountains, they will die easier. Keep on throwing them and they will eventually die. A ghost will appear from their bodies. Then the body will turn into a skeleton, and if you wait, the skeleton will disappear. Hint: Make your creature sick: To make your creature vomit, make him pick up his own excrement. When he is holding it, rub his stomach so he eats it. Zoom in and wait. If nothing happens, make him eat more. This will not damage your character. Hint: Tiger food: The Tiger basically likes all meaty animals including cows and sheep. If you try to feed it when it is not hungry, it will drop the cow or sheep. Hint: Kill Sable: Wait for Sable to give you the leashes. Then put on the spiky leash. Your creature might eat Sable, then vomit. Note: The Tiger will usually eat her. Hint: Special attack: You can use your creature's special attack in battle by moving the pointing hand in the direction of a star. This is very useful when defeating the Ogre in land one. Hint: Belief: Choose a village that you want to get some belief from. Make sure your and/or creature has Fireball, Water and/or Heal miracle. Then, use Fireball to get some belief. Next, with your and/or your creature, use Water and/or heal on the flaming villagers to get even more belief. To get more, you can rebuild the buildings that were destroyed. Glitch: Floating tree: In the first level after the sailors build the boat, but before you give them meat, put a tree on top of the boat and make sure it remains there.Then give them what they need. After they are gone, the tree will be floating. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 18. Bugs The first patch is out, but I haven't got time to test all the bugs. Well, the first thing I did when I got the patch was to activate the healing woman quest on island four... and I still couldn't complete it. So much for EA's Quality Assurance! Note that I would very much like to publish the name of the person who tested the bug (those who mail me MUST have been affected by the bug prior to the patch). Fixed in version: 1.1 "Even though the manual mentions it, the multiple clicking miracle casting trick was indeed a bug exploit (just as I suspected). I guess that prooves that not much effort are spent on manuals these days." "A maybe minor, but still annoying, graphical bug is that the original landscape textures are loaded and shown after each time you restore a game, and not your saved game's modified ones. However, if you zoom out and in over a patch of land, your saved textures do show up." "The creature, although having fully learned a miracle, stops using it after loading a game until you have shown it to the creature an additional time (whereupon a lightbulb will show up above the creature and it will start casting the miracle like normal afterwards)." "Miracles may fail to show up on the scrolls in the Creature Cave. Whether a creature sometimes totally forgets a miracle or not, I will leave unsaid, since I have not witnessed this myself." Fixed in version: 1.1 "The creature nearly always forget how to use the village store after you load a game. But then it quickly re-learns it when it sees the next villager who uses the store." "The creature can get stuck in a worship site if it walks directly from its pen into the shrine (while being small). If this happens, you have to leash it and click close to the ground by it in order to find a path to lead it out of there (which can be tedious)." "When the creature eats fish by itself, it will lower that creature's alignment!" "You cannot make disciple herders on your own." "Your creature also seems to get hungrier whenever it eats fish on it's own (according to the help text atleast)." "Sometimes when you try to hand the creature an object, an "extra" click will occur on the creature, telling it to drop the object before you have time to issue any orders yourself." "If your creature picks up a villager who has just died and turned into a skeleton, the skeleton will come to life and walk around the village! This may be a side-effect of the healing effect being picked up by a creature instills, but it is still a bug." "If your creature decides to eat a Dead villager, it will count as having killed a person!" "The creature always seem to create a disciple breeder if it cuddles a villager (even if there is nobody around of the opposite sex, and even if there is, action clicking on the ground to make the creature drop the villager will NOT produce a breeder)." "When the creature brings home a villager, it might accidently drop it on top of the villager's house, instead of by the house (which, as explained earlier, you cannot punish it for). And, I don't know if this is a training thing or not, but the creature never seems to bring home the villagers who are actually on their way home..." "If you drop too much food in a temple shrine, the ENTIRE PILE will be gobbled up in a second the next time a worshipper decides to eat." "The expand desire flag is unreliable. Once you create a construction site for a building (or drop wood on a construction site), the flag will slide down and disappear completely, but once the building is finished, it will pop right up to the top again! A similar behaviour can be seen on some fields. If you empty all food and then water it, the field will pop right up, and then slowly slide down again." "The sun rises and sets in the exact same spot on the horizon." "The transparent building on a construction site shows the building properly sloped against the ground, but a finished building will always be completely horizontal and thus may be "buried" under a hillside." "After a while on island one, Whitey will always say that you killed someone! This happens when an Actor turned Vagrant Start dies (press "S" to see their titles). Usually, it is the Singing Stone guy who dies of old age after some time, but all the other Actors eventually die too if you wait long enough (except the Stone Cutter, it seems)." "On the second island you can focus and feed other creatures than your own!" "An embarrassing fact about the enemy AI in the game: Creatures belonging to other gods have 100% hunger and thirst without collapsing!" "The time (and thus distance) an AI god can reach out and act outside its area of influence is questionable (grab trees across an entire island, for example)." "On the second island, the saving and loading times are extremely long." "Even though villagers supposedly shouldn't be cutting down trees (planted) inside a village, the people in the initial village on the third island WILL cut down every single tree around the village no matter how many forests you plant around it." "The Tree Puzzle is buggy on the third island. After pulling trees for a while some of them will shrink and not display any change (although they do actually change in the puzzle, but still sabotage a correct solution)." "Lethys behvaior is puzzling on the third island. Sometimes he will Lightning Bolt thin air for minutes, sometimes he will walk back and forth for hours and I've even observed him and his creature standing still in a pile of burning food for about half an hour..." "On the third island, if Lethys' temple vanishes (along with the leashes), his creature may still be leashed to something, and that leash will never disappear." "On the fourth island, during the second part of the wolf puzzle, there is an "extra" gate which really isn't a part of the puzzle, and which can make it harder to spot it's solution." "If you stack rocks upon each other and then remove the bottom rock, the above rocks will be suspended in the air." "Sometimes a transparent scaffold stays in the workshop even after the building site has been completed, thus preventing any additional scaffolds being built." "If you complete the game, the curse on your creature will still be in effect and there is no way to make it go away! Your creature's alignment will reverse and it will constantly shrink in all network, internet and skirmish games afterwards!" "The script for the greedy farmer quest on the second island will start running even before you have activated the Silver Scroll! If you take too long you may not be able to finish this quest and get a reward." "The healing woman quest on island four has a script bug. No matter how swiftly, or in what way you get rid of the obstacles, the woman never has enough potions to rescue her sick brother so there is no way to complete the quest." _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 19. General Questions What's Black and White ?!?! Game requirements?! When is it going to be released?! Why would I need a bunch of ugly looking villagers when I AM God!? Micro..what?! What can I do in this world? Sphere of influence? What are the creatures...err titans available? Where's the ogre, cause I heard there's one? Fight? What moves are they able to do? They can morph?! What are the variations it can morph??! Can they cast miracles?! So what if I want to change them?! Then how do I cast miracles(spells)?! Miracles!! I want miracles!! What is in the single player mode?! And do I progress to another level?! What do I need to do to win?! What other events will crop up? So can I choose any titan?! Hmm, what's the difference in the titans then? Hey! I've located some patches to the game. What's all this?! And how am I supposed to assist them in fighting? Slap them ?! Wouldn't that be painful?! Do they sleep?! Err..do they poo as well? Hey that's cool!! And if I want to change my titan back to the original? How will fire-flies help me get the miracles?! Tell me about playing online What features were left out of the game? The FAQ What's Black and White ?!?! This is the brand new game from the one and only Peter Molyneux. In this game you take the role of a god in the land of Eden, here you will need to win over the inhabitants to gain power.This power comes in the form of mana which you can use to create miracles and spells. Why is this useful you ask? Because to "win" the game you will need to defeat or befriend all the others gods in the land of Eden. You also have a companion known as a titan, but more about these little pets later! Who is publishing BnW? The giant publisher, EA, Electronic Arts. What's the game requirements?! Windows© 95/98/ME/2000 350 MHz Intel© Pentium© II processor 64MB RAM 600MB hard disk (plus extra room, duh, for saved games) 4x CD-ROM drive 8MB PCI or AGP 3D accelerator card compatible with DirectX7.0a Compatible soundcard Keyboard, Mouse If you think that's low, take a look at the recommended specs 500 MHz Pentium III processor of faster 128MB RAM 750MB hard disk space 16MB 3D Hardware Accelerator Card with full Direct3D driver When is it going to be released?! Well I'm sure many of you will be looking for this, since BnW had been delayed several times over, and finally surprise, surprise, BnW went GOLD on the 16th March 2001 (Fri). Anyway just for memory's sake, I've added the e-mail which LH mailed me on the eventful day. Dear Kalel, Lionhead Studios is very excited to share the news that Black & White for the PC HAS GONE GOLD!!!!!! "Everyone at Lionhead has been longing to see those words and it is with profound sense of relief that I am writing them. Black & White has been the most epic project I have ever worked on and it feels as though these past few months have been the longest of my life. Everyone here at Lionhead is very proud of what we have accomplished. I would like to pay tribute to each and every one of them for their creativity and hard work in making what started out as a two page description, become the stunning experience that is Black & White. I should also like to thank the press for their continued interest and enthusiasm for the game. Most importantly I would also like to say thanks to all the fans, it is has been their support that made the hard times worthwhile. I hope that we have repaid that support with a truly great gaming experience Yours faithfully Peter Molyneux" Thanks to all who have been supportive over the past 3 years, we truly hope you'll love the game as much as we have loved making it. - The Lionhead Team p.s. Mark your calendars and get your pre-orders placed - Black & White is scheduled for a massive worldwide release with a shipping date of Friday March 30th, it will be in your store on April 6th 2001. Well, if you've noticed the "p.s." part of the mail, you should have guessed the release date of BnW. There are rumours though that some parts of the world namely the US, and Asia Pacific are receiving it on the 27th March, and this certainly has caused much uproar in the BnW community. So what's in the game ?!?! In the game, you will be in the world of Eden, and act as a God. Besides the animals living there, there are also several people, and a titan, which you can call your own. People? Who are they?! Here they are.... Celts Greeks Egyptians Norse Tibetans Aztecs Japanese American Indians Why would I need a bunch of ugly looking villagers when I AM God!? To continue living in the world of Eden then you need someone or something to believe in you and to pray for you to give you mana. Both of these things are just as important as each other in Black & White. Why? Because with out them you are totally defenseless, with out mana then you are unable to cast spells to defend yourself and your people and with out belief then you simple cease to exist. You need to make sure that these guys fall into the opositions "hand". Tell me about these cute villagers. Well, the villagers play a vital role in the game. They basically do everything that you can think of, they laugh, cry, get married, die etc. They even play football or soccer if you set up a field, together with your titan. They behave and move about individually, and each has it's own unique A.I. Remember the game Sims, well they are just like that, except well they are smaller...but you get the point there. So in what way can I, as a God, affect them?! In various ways, actually. The things that you do will indicate to them the type of God you are, evil, good or neutral. Furthermore you can, if you choose, to micromanage their lives. Micro..what?! Ok, for example, you want them to be a fisherman, just grab hold of one villager and drop them near the sea. This will 'tell' them that their god wants them to be a fisherman instead of a farmer. They will then continue to be a fisherman for the rest of their lives until they die. And you are also able to play the role of a cupid by dropping a villager to one of an opposite sex, and yes they will have sex. And yes, for the rest of their lives. Hmm..if I kill a villager, does this mean I am evil, how can I be MORE evil? Yes, you showed that you are evil. To be more evil you can do several things. Try killing the villager in front of his family, this will add to the evil scale. So if you kill the villager away from the view of other villagers, you are still evil, though not much, but if you do it in front of the villagers, well that adds to a different story. The same goes for being good. Tell me about Eden ! There will be hills and valleys with amazing 3D detail you can ever see in a game. One of the main features is that you can zoom in and out of the game seamlessly! Take a look of the screenshots available on the net. There will also be weather patterns, with rain, snow, lightning, sunshine and clouds. Furthermore you can download the weather patterns from http:// www.weathercity.com and you will play BnW with the same weather your region is experiencing! What can I do in this world? Anything! But this is restricted only to within the sphere of YOUR influence. You can pick up villagers, throw them, uproot trees and roll rocks to play bowling with the villagers as pins and such. Hey have I told you that Aztecs make good home-runs J ? Sphere of influence? Well, basically when you are able to convince a tribe to worship you (i.e. they believe in you), the area within the village is your 'sphere of influence'. This area is denoted by the flashing red lines which moves within your area of influence. Wow! Now, tell me about those cute creatures! Well, they are not called creatures, in fact they are called 'Titans', and they take the form of animals with 4 limbs, that means no fish or birds! They start off small about the same size as your villagers and they do grow! It will take approximately 100 hrs to make it full size! They grow in accordance to 2 factors, they will watch the way you play the game so if you go around destroying or killing the villagers, they will tend to be evil, and if you do nice things, they'll do the same. Secondly you can 'guide' them by using the 'hand' in the game to stroke them gently or hit them hard to show you are displease with them! Am I right to say that at first the titans were not implemented in the game? So how did it start? The idea for the creatures came right at the end of Dungeon Keeper, as been told by the creator P.M. At that time he had one of those stupid Tamagotchi eggs, that he'd really grown attached to. He left it on the table, and one of the testers who was testing the game drowned his Tamagotchi in a cup of coffee, which caused some emotional traumas. Then the thought of creating an emotional attachment to a character, which you can interact with, something that learned from you. So that was when it started! What are the creatures...err titans available? They are basically 16 of them, and here they are: Ape Chimp Gorilla Mandrill Tiger Leopard Lion Horse Zebra Brown bear Polar bear Cow Sheep Rhino Wolf Tortoise Currently there are still rumors of the crocodile as being in, and that is still in the process of confirmation. I'll keep you updated. Where's the ogre, cause I heard there's one? Well, there was a time when P.M. stated of a secret titan, which can be unlocked, so this could be the ogre. Hmm, what's the difference in the titans then? Well, these are the basic differences, so choose well.. Ape -It is an intelligent titan, who'll learn fast. It's weak though. Tiger - It is a very aggressive titan which is fast, and a good fighter. Leopard - Same as the tiger, but probably more aggressive, stronger. Cow -It's a docile titan which is slow, and usually refrains from fighting. It also pays more attention to your villagers. Horse -Similar to that of the cow, but stronger and faster. Tortoise -Although slow, it's defence is high due to it's thick shell. They are the fastest learner. Mandrill -Similar to the ape, just a little bit faster and weaker. Chimp -Another primate, but the most intelligent. Wolf -It is an aggressor, with fast moves. Lion - Lions are strong and pretty fast which makes a good fighter. Zebra - Similar to the horse. Brown Bear - Bears are one of the strongest creatures in the game, but slow. Polar Bear -Same as the bear. Rhino -Great strength, but slow. Gorilla -Strong, but slow. The least intelligent of the available primates. Sheep -Basically an underdog in the game, pretty slow and weak. Hey! I've located some patches to the game. What's all this?! Hey, you've probably found the patches to unlock the horse, mandrill and the leopard. These are the patches which will unlock the stated titans in the game, (thus giving you access to it) and it is also believed that these are the files that will be in the Bonus CD. Just to clarify, these files are not the titans themselves as they are far too small a file (278kb) for a major complex program. So can I choose any titan?! Not at the start of the game. At the beginning, you will only have access to three titans, the ape, cow and the tiger. In battle they bleed right?! The titans bruise and bleed ('wherever' they get hit and not just at pre-determined points). The blood is calculated in game-time so that it flows downwards realistically. Fight? What moves are they able to do? It can do neat moves! Have you seen a cow do a back-flip? Now you can! When the titans are to fight, there will be a circle appearing on the land. This denotes the arena that the 2 titans will be fighting. You can just watch them fight, or you can assist by telling them what to do. And how am I supposed to assist them in fighting? When you want your titan to kick/punch on the face, click on the opposing titan's face, and if you want your titan to defend its stomach from incoming blows, just click on your titan's stomach, and it'll do just as told. You are also able to teach it certain things, say train him to throw rocks (or villagers for that matter), so when it battles with another titan, it will throw rocks (or villagers). You got to be kidding when you say they can dance...they can't....can they?! Yes they do, for example you put in a music CD playing Britney Spears, they will at first try to groove with the music and each animal will have its own specific moves. Well if you want to see an example try downloading the Winamp plugin from LH. Basically the game will detect music source from either the CD-Rom or from Mp3 played by the respective players. But I hate Britney Spears! So in this case, the next time your titan grooves to the music that you hate, give it a tight slap or knock it down. This way, whenever he hears a song, which you dislike, it will do things like covering it's ears and staying still. Slap them ?! Wouldn't that be painful?! Try slapping yourself, is it painful? Yes! Of course it'll be painful. The A.I. of the titan is so thorough that it will cry and remembers that you did beat him to a pulp the previous time. Your titan will do thing such as ignoring you, or walking away feeling sad if it feels mistreated. Plus, too much beating will also result in scars. They can morph?! Yes they do. No, not like that of 'Power Rangers' but that of transformations. Example, If you are a kind god, your titan will reflect this by being tall and upright with colourful features, or will be slouching with red eyes, claws and sharp teeth and it's back will be hunched if he's evil. If neutral, it'll just look normal! What are the variations it can morph??! Hmmm. Your titan can morph in real-time between any combination of the following; strong, weak, fat, thin, young, old, good, evil, neutral, small and big. The titans 'grow' in accordance to how you treat it, so if you train him hard and feed him well, it will be muscular and strong, and if you overfeed it, it will be fat. Any other special effects on titans?! Changes to the titan's physical appearance do affect his behaviour. Big titans are slower, while strong ones are (you guessed it, stronger). Thin ones take more damage, fat ones have less stamina etc. Can they cast miracles?! These titans are able to do lots of things, and they are able to cast spells without the devotion of the villagers, so it is vital that you teach them! They learn spells when you cast a spell repeatedly in the game and you can assist them by rewarding them with food, giving them a good stroke/pat or with quick slaps on the face. As been said before, titans are able to cast spell outside your sphere of influence, so this is the only way the spells can be used to attack the villages of the opposing God. Where do they live? These titans will have their own residence in your citadel, in which they will keep their things, and it is here that they will create their own website. Website?! You mean I have to look and make changes to it everytime?! No! They update it! On it will be things like the first spell they learnt or things that they like or dislike. Do they sleep?! Do you? They will usually sleep in the citadel, but sometimes they prefer the outdoors. Err..do they poo as well? Yes, they eat, and so they poo. Don't be surprised that they may just poo anywhere in Eden if not properly trained, and please tell it to stop if it starts to like the taste of poo. Just a word of advise, the poo can be used as a tool for fighting, a sheep is a toilet-paper, and poo is good manure for the farms. Do they DIE?! Your titans WON'T die, but it will retain the scars that it has attained in battle so if your titan injures its limbs, it will walk awkwardly due to its injury. And as time passes by, it will be weaker and slower. This is because P.M. thought that the player couldn't bear the thought of going back, and I realised that if his titan had died and he had spent all these hours growing him up, making him unique, having to do that all over again.. nobody would go back to the game again. So your creature gets hurt, he's out of action for a long time, many many minutes - there's a big downside - but he doesn't die. Which is probably as well, because the creatures in Black & White are like pets, and losing one after playing the game for days on end would no doubt be something of a traumatic experience. So what if I want to change them?! You can change your titan in the game, thru breeders in the game, in Land 1 and Land 4 of BnW. This happens after certain events or quests. The conscience, personality, skills and scars of the previous titan will be transferred to the new one, so you don't have to teach the titan all over again! But, you need to grow it again though. Hey that's cool!! Hey, wait till you read this. As you know each titan has it's strength, so for example you chose the tiger at the start, which is a great fighter with brute strength. Then, soon after, you change to a tortoise, which is one of the cleverer titans, hence it's ability to learn and cast powerful miracles well. So, at the end of the day, you will have a tortoise, who not only cast miracles well, but also a great fighter, which was inherited from the tiger! Talk about replay value! And if I want to change my titan back to the original? Just find the breeder and you'll get to exchange with the original titan, No question asked! What are these ?!?! You can attach a leash to your ickle pet, There are three different types, the "leash of learning", the "leash of hatred" and the "neutral" leash. Each one will let your creature know what you want it to do with the object it is attached to. If the leash is the "leash of learning", then the creature will look at what you are doing and try to mimic you , if it's the "leash of hatred", it means that it will try to kill or destroy whatever it is attached to, like a villager or another temple or animal, and the last leash, "neutral", lets the creature do what it wants. Can you download more titans?! Well yes, apparently LH is looking to hire another company to be in charge of producing more titans, which will be released monthly, so look out for more of em! Do they (titans) make any noises? Yes, they sure do! The titans will grunt and make all noises you can actually think off, and each titan will also have facial expressions, so if they need to 'shit', you can tell it from their face. So how do you move about in the game! Well, all you need is a mouse, yes just a mouse! No fancy icons or the need to remember keyboard keys. You move on x/y-axes by holding down left mouse button and moving the mouse towards you. Zooming is down with the scroll button on the mouse, and left clicking grabs the land to pull around you. What is a temple ?! Oh come on, you can't tell me you've never seen the Taj-Ma-Hal can you? No? ok, good, because this is nothing like it. This is basically your home in the land of Eden which is built by your subjects out of respect/love/fear of you. In it you will find several things that are very useful, there is a room for your creature and other things! The outside morphs according to your alignment in the world, from the sleak and smooth vision that is the good temple to the harsh and sharp one that is the evil version. Then how do I cast miracles(spells)?! The game utilises gesture recognition system, in which all you need to do is 'paint' in the game screen with your mouse, and walaa the spell is done! If you do a shield spell around a building, then the area of spell will be around the building. The larger the area, the greater the mana usage. There is also the keyboard shortcut for the desired spell. Cheater! Miracles!! I want miracles!! There are roughly 40 plus, and to cast it you will need to select it from your citadel (on the outside) and while it is in your hand, gesture it with your mouse. After which casting is done via the mouse. There will be power ups and you will be able to aquire new ones from the tribes that believes in you. To gain them you will need to accomplish quests, or do the extremes like doing something totally evil or something nice, which will make your villagers to give you the new spell. You cannot cast the spell beyond your area of influence but your titan is able to do so, thus it is vital that you teach him well. You can also get spells by finding fire-flies in the game. How will fire-flies help me get the miracles?! Before the night ends, try looking out for where the fire-flies hide or go to. Usually they'll go to trees, and in the morning, try shaking the tree and miracle-seeds will appear for you to get the miracles. So I need the villagers, how do I get the villagers to praise or worship me? Well, it goes like this, when you are in need of mana, all you have to do is raise the monument of your temple. This will 'tell' your villagers to stop whatever they are doing, and get a move on to the temple to pray. The amount of mana you received in turn is dependent on how vigorous the villagers dance or chant. I thought I saw two people hovering in the game screen?! Well those 2 are your advisors, and one is good and one is evil. Both will tell you things that will make you an evil or just god. You can follow what they tell you, but you can also do what you want to do..hey you're a God! Sometimes the 2 advisors even agree to each other. What is this that I heard of a vibrating mouse? Well it's an I-Feel mouse that is manufactured by Logitech with Immersion technology providing the vibrations of the mouse. BnW will be the first few games to incorporate the vibration technology into a game, so you will be able to 'feel' when you tickle your mouse or when you play with the fishes in the sea. Anything else?! It was fairly straightforward to implement the technology into the game due to the great support of Immersion. They sent a technician over to advise on the implementation in the later stages, but most of the time was spent in creating the database of different effects and testing how they felt in the game to get it right. Okay, give me the examples!! Basically there are three levels of immersion in Black and White: Minimum: Just the special Immersion Challenge that has been built into the game. Normal (Default): Key interactions for the game - with objects, spells and your creature. Maximum: Interaction with all game objects and terrain features as the hand passes over the land. In the game there are different textures on buildings, and TouchSense on spells and hand key interactions. This was able to give an extra level of feedback to the player when they have their hand over a villager, which proves especially useful when the villager is a large distance from the players position. Another example is when the heart beat as the rings of miracles chants charge up, and the fishes as they nibble on your hand. Wow, that's a lot! Will I lose out anything if I don't have the mouse? Well, there are specific challenges, which requires an Immersion mouse to feel solutions to the puzzle, but if the game does not detect the I-Feel mouse, this puzzle is automatically left out. So how does the game run?! The engine is fully scalable and is able to maintain a constant frame rate. So even if you have a low-end PC, the gameplay won't be affected except that certain details are scaled down. Thus the better your PC is, the better the graphics will be. The game engine is so powerful that it will be able to do reflections, transparencies, ray-tracing and a whole lot more, including the laws of Physics. Huh? Is physics involved?! You bet! Your titans hair will flow down if it is doing a hand-stand and rocks will bounce and roll with the elements of physics built in. Furthermore, the gravity of the world of Eden is made in such a way that it is similar to that of Earth. I want to know about the physics of liquid medium in the game (blood, water). How is it working? Surface effects on water reacts when things fall into it, for example. when you throw a tree into a lake or sea, you will be able to see ripples. Another example is when the titan's vomit falls and splashes across the ground. Blood in a fight can fly off as blobs and some blood will trickle down the body. About the physics in the game, what is the smallest object that has this property? Maybe a tiny rock or a small child villager, or a little piece of a smashed up building. And the buildings such as villages, forests, the Citadel, how vulnerable are they to our actions? Houses are quite strong but not when hit by a flying rock, or by a rock that is fiery for that matter. The temple doesn't get damaged by rocks but the damage is passed on to the temple's villages. Standing trees actually bend over when rocks hit them, rather than being knocked into motion. A villager may be killed by a rock if he is unlucky, but he may just get knocked sideways and hurt a bit. What is in the single player mode?! And do I progress to another level?! Hmm, well kind of. When you have completed a gold scroll, which enables you to progress, vortexes (or colourful hole if you prefer) will appear in Eden, that'll allow you to enter to move between levels. The fancy thing about this is that, it is up to you when you wish to go through the vortex. You can just bum around and build up your titan, and go when you feel like it. What do I need to do to win?! All you need to do is to beat the enemy Gods, by converting/destroying his followers or destroying his citadel. Duh! How else were you thinking? What other events will crop up? There are over 400 simple, or silver scroll quests within the game. Whilst there are a lot less "gold scroll" events, you will find it hard to ever get the same event happen more than once, even in several plays through the game! Gimme an example!! Ok, there is this story where a farmer from your village wants you to help him get more food as the villagers are starving, so you can a)help him out b)do something bad so as to aggravate the situation c)don't do anything at all as you are God and Gods believe people can fend for themselves. Another example, which includes your titans, is where you will need to gather all the sheeps together and this is done with the titan acting as a herder. Anyway these events are all scripted, and you can have multiple endings for different scenarios, thus adding the replayability value of the game. How do you know what to do to carry on the story? This is an easy one, most of it was explained above. These "gold scrolls" are the main driving point of the Black & White story line, click on one of those and the story will continue. The thing is though, you don't have to click on them straight away, you can simply take your time and click on them when ever you want to! Tell me about playing online. The neat thing about BnW, is that you can go online at any moment in the game. So if you wish, you can pause the game, send a message with BnW to your friend, and meet up with him online with your titan. In the middle of playing the single-game! Okay, so what's multiplayer like?! Okay now it's been heard that 8 people can be in a multiplayer, where each player battle each other out, via their titans or spells, just like Quake. What the F*c* is 'Black & White: The Gathering'? This is like a massive chat/entertainment program using the Black & White engine. But it goes deeper than that. Here your creature will be able to learn new moves, spells and talk to other creatures with...lip-syncing!! This will be consisting of the text that you type and then the creature creating the word with its mouth! That is, of course, if the gathering ever happens. Will the mouths of the titans move when they speak? Unbelievably, YES, the titans lip-sync to the words that are typed. Anything interesting about The Gathering? Well there will be several islands there, with each having it's own uses. There will be a track in one island where the titans can battle it out with each other by running, and games like chess, yes chess. Will there be a fighting arena? Yes, it is in one of the islands. When will I be able to play it? It will be released after B&W hits the shelves. It was originally scheduled to come out before Black & White as a sort of a demo. This has since been changed to come out after in order not to lessen the impact of Black & White when it becomes available in the shops. How much will it cost me? Nada. Zero. Nothing. ś5...no wait, its free! How can I get it then?! By downloading, it will be roughly about 10MB. I keep hearing people ramble on about something called 'Black & White Universe'. What is it? Forget about it, its NOT REAL! For the moment at least.... What sort of things are there for Clans? Well there is a mode where the players of a clan can share just one titan. One player will be taking care of the villagers, another person does the miracles, well you get the point. Is hardware Transform & Lighting supported? Yes. Is OpenGL or GLide supported?! Sorry, nope. But this should not matter as almost all 3D cards support DirectX which is D3D itself! Is there a software engine? Sadly...No. Does it run on Windows 2000? Yes, in fact at one presentation, P.M. was using Windows 2000/ME. Is EAX or A3D supported? Nah, the game uses its own software to adapt to any sound card. Mighty impressive and it sounds might nice! Are there cheats?! Yes,they are present in this FAQ. I heard of the ICQ which will be incorporated into BnW, is it true?! BnW integrates quite nicely with ICQ, and you can call up your friends and get them to join you on the server. How about that of the Outlook ?! It also works with Outlook. When you play the game while you are online, the game will look through your address book and each villager will represent a name in the address book. So if you've got mail from someone, that someone in your village will come up to you and tell you that his mail has arrived! Are those warez gonna spoil the game??!! The multiplayer mode will be protected by a CD-Key. Furthermore, BnW will be using SafeDisc 2, which uses a digital fingerprint on each CD that cannot be copied by a home CD-RW. The game will not run without the fingerprint being present. So if you are thinking of burning the CD, forget it! How izzit packaged?! Okay, to clear things up Black & White will be released in a DVD case in Europe and Australia and it will have a reversible insert sleeve which has a "white" cover on one side and a "black" one on the other. Yes! This means you don't have to choose a black or white box, it comes with a reversible sleeve! And about the donation thing, which P.M. said, forget it, it's been scrapped. Can I see the box cover? Sure go ahead to http://www.spiffing.net and take a look for yourself! How many CD's are there in it?! Well it should be one, mmmmm, yes one at the moment. Is there goin' to be a black version and white version? Haven't you been reading the FAQ at all! No! Is there a demo?! They are probably not going to release a demo now, as the Lionhead staff want a holiday. Damnit! Cheeky buggers ;) I need to see videos and screenshots..where?? Well for videos you can try http://www.fileplanet.com or BnW fansites such as BWCenter at http://www.bwcenter.com Other than the PC, what other platforms are the game going to be available? Well currently, there is also the PSX, Dreamcast and XBox. So far no news on the PS2 and IMac though, maybe in the future. Ok, ok, there will be a Dreamcast version, so are they able to play online with the PC users? Apparently no, due to the difference in hardware configurations and capability. Is there a place where I can chat or put my views?! Well, if you are reading this FAQ, then you probably know the answer to the question. What features were left out of the game? Well, beta or not, some planned things were indeed left out of the initial release of game, no matter what Lionhead says. The following information has been pulled out of different interviews in magazines (PC Gamer), from the official website (http://www.bwgame.com) and even out of the files (infoscript2.txt) of the game itself: * The Puzzle Master. A character which guided you through different puzzles. * Creature mini-games. "Sports" events you could play in multiplayer games. * Random map generation (skirmish and multiplayer). * Villagers talking back to you (or maybe mind reading, or thought bubbles). * Creature talking back to you (or maybe thinking or using telepathy). * More advanced Creature Help Text (more advanced creature?). * Additional Silver Scroll quests (island two Stones quest was also shortened). * Croc creature (left out for looking "too human", like the Human creature). * Diciple Protector for the villagers. * Docks civic building and boats for the villagers. * Village sports (and the ability to build soccer fields). * ICQ integration (was this ever official?). * More varied good aligned creatures (golden lion, white tiger, etc). Peter Molyneux has stated in an interview that "all features [they] wanted in the game are there", but then again, that is a rather empty statement if he didn't mean that all PLANNED features are in the game. To defend against flames and accusations of trolling, I must admit that some of these features may have been left out because of game balancing or design decisions (much like the decision to not be able to use any beast in the land as your creature). However, other features seem obviously cut due to other more suspicious reasons. Also, some of these features is promised to be activated in future add-ons, but since these may affect gameplay and game strategy (forcing me a rewrite of various sections), they will not be included in this FAQ for now. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 20. Game Information Developer - Lionhead Studios Publisher - Electronic Arts Genre - Action,Strategy,RPG Origin - United Kingdom _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 21. Credits Norman Chan PlanetBW.com Ben Silverman Robert Hagenstr”m Doug Radcliffe Dave Perkins XxMaXiMxX Gamewinners.com Kal-El Lionhead Studios EA sports Peter Molyneux Myself _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Please do mail me at: t h i s r o c k s m a n @ y a h o o. c o m