Divine Divinity

- If you save both soldiers in the starting village, you can learn a free skill point in a a healing spell.

- If you explore carefully, and have the Meteorstrike skill or a short bow, it's possible to go from level 1 to level 4 by killing Zombie Jake... twice.

- There is no casting delay on spells. You can cast as fast as you can right-click.

- Some people can give you free ranks in certain skills if you do a task for them.

- Spellbooks can be found always at certain places in the world, and randomly on bookshelves and from certain merchants.

- Always get Lockpick up to at least level 3, and Identify to at least level 3 as well, but there's no rush.

- Carry only the essentials into Stormfist Castle.

- Get Alchemy rank 1, which will let you mix potions together. This will let you create the Restoration potion, which even the smallest version restores 50% of your maximum health/mana. Alchemy rank 2 will let you harvest herbs and mushrooms (if you have an empty flask) to make potions yourself. If you buy empty potion bottles every chance you get in Aleroth, you can make enough potions by harvesting the plants in the surrounding forest to keep you in business.

- One point in the Repair skill will keep you from getting stuck somewhere with broken equipment.

- Prioritize Orc Drummers above all other orcs, they can fully heal all orcs in a radius with a drum beat.

- Agility is key for any non-magic user, make sure you have enough of it to keep your chance to hit high.

- The bosses hit hard, ESPECIALLY the magic-users, so don't neglect items to increase your health.

- You can get higher bonuses to health and vitality directly from items than you can by spending attribute points on Constitution and Intelligence.

- The Teleport Stones are your friends, use them wisely, like putting one by a bed for free healing when you rest, or a merchant for selling stuff.

- The Deadly Gift skill - specifically the Scorpion Trap version is very helpful at drawing enemy attacks. It's no longer insanely overpowered, but still helpful.

- Decide what you want your character to be good at. There are plenty of skill points to do a few things, but not enough to do everything. One or two Rank 5 skills are better than 10 rank 1 skills.

- Most importantly, make absolutely certain in the config that you set it to render through software, NOT Direct3D. Direct3D will make your character move like a tortoise and loading and save times will be excruciatingly long.

- Quicksave often - there is no autosave and areas are pretty big and you can stumble upon camps with much harder boss mobs by accident.

- I would suggest just picking up equipment with some color in their titles to sell. Those with white titles are just the base equipment. Especially in the beginning, you don't have all that much strength to carry things without being burdened. In addition, the merchants only have so much gold anyway, and they can run out pretty quick. And they don't seem to really restock all that often.

- Drop a teleport stone next to wherever you decide to set up base camp then hotkey the drop and use stone so that you can teleport back whenever you need to. North of Rivertown, next to the Ars Magicana teleporter, is a pretty good place to set up shop since the teleporter can transport you all over the map and it's close to a bunch of merchant shops where you can sell off your loot as needed.

- Teleporters are specifically linked to certain scrolls from the various races so if you can't activate it, you don't have the proper scroll yet. Whenever possible, you should try to activate them so you can get around the map quicker.

- While the map will sometimes set up (red) flags for you, usually when a NPC lets you know they're marking something down for you, they're fairly few and far in between. Use the create a (blue) flag to set up your own notes so that you can actually find things whether that be a chest you can't yet unlock or a cave entrance. You can always delete them later when you no longer need them. Note that the flags only appear on the big map that you open up, not on the minimap.

- Use ALT to highlight treasure and hidden doors.

- Cheesiest combo: Deadly Gift (steel scorpion traps) + Aura of Command. Deadly Gift releases a steel scorpion at lvl X * 100 where X is some number of skill points that you invested into it between 1 and 5. Aura of Command lets you control X number between 1 and 5 of creatures. Using them together allows you to force the steel scorpion to follow you around instead of just wandering off on its own.