Evil Islands: Tricks and Hidden Stashes

Tricks

This section mostly outlines some unconventional ways to get the treasure that you're not supposed to get, or supposed to get it later

Early Heavy Hammer

When you enter Foothills the first time, Free Hunters' Chief will also have the Lieutenant by his side. The Lieutenant packs a Heavy Silicone Hammer. Once you kill the Sentry Goblin, and leave the area, he's gone. So it's imperative that you do not kill him until you got the hammer.

You need to gather Tiger Skin armor set first, because without it most any critter on the map can kill you on a lucky strike. Also, Steal must be at least 16 to success.

The steps:

Put all XP that you have into Melee combat. Exit to Foothills.
Crawl to the middle island. Do not engage anything or anyone, unless it's necessary for you to pass. The only more or less safe kill for you is a poisonous toad. Though 2-3 of them will still take you out. Kill the Brigands one by one, gathering the loot. Once it's done, return to zone entrance and equip it.
Once armor is on, the combat becomes somewhat safer, so you can actually fight someone. You need to grind it. Stray north/south from the entrance and kill some monsters, until you get enough XP. Level your Steal to 16.
Return to the island. Do not approach the Lieutenant (or Chief, for that matter) until deep night. If there's still a lot of time, wander around and grind some more, but be careful. Don't try to cross the bridge, there are many goblins.
In the night, steal from the Lieutenant. Do not steal from Chief or his wife just yet, this will mess up quest order.
Return to zone entrance. Now it's safe to kill the Goblin Sentry. Enter the village, equip your hammer!

Alternatively, you can put everything into Steal right away, and kill the brigands like that, but this could be more dangerous if you fail a backstab.

Multiplying items

The stores normally lack the best items available on the allod, so you have to get them from the enemies. However, the enemies don't drop nearly enough for the main character, and even more so for the party. But you can sell those items, and after completing any quest, the shop will restock with many such items (barring unique ones). Example usage:

Estera doesn't have an Extra effect rune. Steal one from Brigand Chief's wife, and sell it to Estera. Next time you return (having completed a quest), she'll sell loads of those.
The best Armor on Gipath is dropped from Brigands during a certain quest, a single set. If you're running a party of 2 or 3, you can sell this set to come back later, purchase blueprints, and make the best armor for the whole team.

Note that after selling you have to complete any quest to have the item multiplied.

Early Ultra Effect rune

You get the ultra effect from a body in the tunnel, at the very end of the Gipath storyline. However, nothing is preventing you from opening the tunnel earlier and getting rune. Even though there are 3 Fire Elementals guarding it, you can simply grab it and run away. They run quite slowly.

It's really only useful to a mage, though, and it costs a lot to multiply it. So if you're a fighter, don't bother, just save it until Ingos.

Multiplying experience

At certain points of the story, various NPCs will (offer to) increase various skills and stats of the main character. Stat increase is straightforward and is of no particular interest. However, skill increase is where abuse reigns. The gotcha is that the skills are not simply increased, but rather the NPCs emulate adding extra XP and spending it on the skill. So, if your skill is 0 when you talk to the NPC, you "receive" extra 20-30 XP. However, if the skill is already high, increasing it by another 5-10 points may cost hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of XP points.

Thus, these opportunities may be used to gain a lot of extra XP, and as HP and fatique pools directly depend on total XP value, also considerably increase HP and mana. The downside to this technique is that skills that are being increased directly are not actually very useful in the game. Still, HP and mana make up for it.

Mages will probably make the best use of it, because they tend to hoard XP instead of spending it right away, plus they get more XP anyway (more kills). In any case, don't get too greedy and make sure your combat skills won't suffer too much.

Airy

After completing the Observatory quest, Airy will offer to increase Sensory Magic skill by 10 points. For a warrior, it's reasonable to have about 7k free XP points at that point, which you can pour into Sensory, and forget about this skill until Suslanger.

Point of no return Airy will get kidnapped right after you kill the Armadillo Mother, and when she returns, she will no longer offer the boost. So, before killing it, you should obliterate everything else on Gipath: orcs, lizards, harpies, boars, ogres, skeletons, etc. Purge the allod of life. Close combat of about 56-58 should be enough to achieve that. The only remaining species are going to be trolls, dragons and khadaganians. A mage should be able to take out dragons and green trolls as well.
Killing note Don't kill the 3 ogre brothers in the Sands, to make sure that quest order doesn't get messed up.

Trickster

Trickster will appear in the middle of Ingos storyline and he's not going anywhere, so you can safely wait until the very end of the allod, when you should be able to afford spending about 30k XP on Steal. Too bad it's useless otherwise, but HP and mana will skyrocket.

Stashes

Gipath

Money

Dead City, south-west corner. Guarded by 2 commoner skeletons and 1 warrior skeleton. Not very dangerous, but also not worth much risk, so you can hold it off until later.

Lightning spell

Middle mountains, north east. Very powerful spell for a magician on Gipath. Warriors don't really need it, so no rush. It's guarded by an earth elemental and some bats. You'll need to complete Green Crystal quest to get there. Make sure to up Steal to 17 before going for it, because that's what the obelisk requires. Or, just kill the earth elemental if you can.

Firewall spell

Remote mountains, south east corner - "Treasure of the harpies" hidden quest. They store a keystone for the Firewall spell. A mage will want it early, but it's fairly dangerous to get there, so you might consider just buying one from Estera instead.

Green dragon bones

Far south, on the island guarded by lake lizards - 2 green dragon bones. Enough to make a spear or a bow. It's a quest given by the Hermit Lizard, but you can really complete it at any time, provided that you're capable of killing them.

Ingos

Ultra Duration rune

Right after getting teleported, head south across the river, following the map to the treasure. Some snow tiger on the way. After having arrived to the town, sell to Karansul immediately for multiplication, along with Ultra Effect from Gipath.

Protection from Lightning

The labyrinth in Karansul's domain, guarded by some blue trolls. By the time you get there, though, you must've at least attempted to kill some unicorns, which very much requires such protection, so this will likely be useless.

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