I'm not entirely sure if it's a bug but I left Stiletto at the Sender Station bar before travelling to Anachronox and when I returned she was nowhere to be found.

Is she supposed to disappear like that? According to Fatima Stiletto is still a member of my party.

Edit: It's definitely a bug (and, by the way, I never use the autosaves). When I returned from the Hephaestus mission Stiletto was back at the bar.

Yep, I never load from an autosave as it's guaranteed to scrub your photos.

*sigh* ... so I've decided to give Anachronox another go after two years (gotta complete that fan art too). And of course I stumble acrosse the same bugs I did two years ago. Some not even mentioned in this thread I think.


Movement problems:

- characters temporarily suffer from epileptic seizures during walking. They'll bob up and down and won't move in the correct direction.
- they will often drift to one side you've not steered into.

All this is particularly unnerving during the time sensitive parts of the game.


Animation and cutscene problem

- after a cutscene, the camera often tries to "find" the right spot behind the main character's back for a very, very long time (20 to 40 seconds). Until it hits the spot, you can't move.
- a similar lag is often experienced during battles. E.g. when I throw a bindlebag, the camera often stares into blank space for 10 to 20 seconds before the bindlebag actually falls and hits the target.
- I know you can supposedly speed up animation, but whatever slash I press, it doesn't seem to work.


The big bugs
- Whackmaster and Lucko bugs are still very much alive.



It's high time all that did change. Any chance of a fix??

The fast-forward key is actually the one adjacent to the main "Enter" key (on a German keyboard it's probably the "#" key). As long as it's depressed, the game runs at 8x speed. This applies to exploration, combat and cutscenes. When you release it, the game speed goes back to normal, except if you keep it pressed past the combat victory screen, in which case there will be a slight glitch where the fast-forward persists with the button released. In that case you just have to press the fast-forward button again to reset it.

Very useful for the endless backtracking you have to do if you want all the power-ups.

In case anyone doesn't already know, it's actually possible to get most of the power-ups without back-tracking!

Apart from simply buying the power-ups in the shops - which although easy to do (since money is plentiful) typically means waiting till further in the plot than if you'd found the power-up yourself, not to mention the fact that heading to the shop where it's sold may itself involve back-tracking - there is a trick, essentially a cheat or exploit of sorts, that will work for both Rho's books and Paco's stones.

It's pretty simple too: it's possible to pick these objects up (books and hot stones) by simply holding CTRL down while clicking on the object. And that's all there is to it.

The object will be placed into inventory so it can be used by the specific character later. That way, you can pick up any books and stones you come across the first time with Boots (or any other character), saving a ton of back-tracking. Also, to "learn" the power-up for Rho, you simply have to have her selected and then use the item from inventory (same as getting power-ups for Boots and PAL in other words) - so that saves a little bit of hassle as a bonus.

Personally I think it's brilliant for Paco's stones - especially that one in OneGate. The backtracking that's completely avoided by being able to pick this stone up much earlier makes it one of the most awesome hidden features of this game IMO.

This works with the CD version updated to 1.02 build 46, so I imagine it would work with the GOG version as well.

Thanks a lot, I really didn't know that. I thought that the CTRL key was used only for world skills. That would have been tremendous help had I know about it before my first or second playthrough. However, you still need to get these stones irradiated, and there are slots to throw loonies into, computer interfaces to hack, people to yammer and unreachable objects to tractor, so there's still quite a bit of backtracking involved. In my opinion, an interface in which you can change NPCs "on the fly" (like in KotOR and Jade Empire) without needing to run back to Sender Station and back would have solved this issue.

Thankfully, weapons can be bought in stores after you've passed that plot point where you would've found them, as you rightly said, although IIRC this doesn't apply to each character's best weapon, or does it?

The solution is quite simple - let helpful Waltorious be your guide:
http://www.gog.com/forum/anachronox/main_character_choppy_animation_while_running/post16

On my laptop the fast forward key is the one featuring the two symbols * & ' located right next to the return (↵) key.

Num Lock allows you to pause during combat (and even select actions while paused).

Yes, a feature for swapping out the NPCs would have definitely come in handy!

I'm not 100% sure on this. Guess the only way to check would be to run to all the stores just before heading to the final mission. I do know that the main walkthrough that's available on the web definitely doesn't list all the things you can get from the shops, and that definitely includes at least some weapons - but I don't know which ones or which stores they're available at, or at exactly what point in the plot, since I do what most players would do and just hunt for them to get them for free.

Actually my first time through I didn't have Paco's best weapon due to lack of Bipidri photos (argh!). I vaguely remember looking for it, and I'm pretty sure I didn't find it - but I'm also kind of mostly sure that I did find at least one of the other character's best weapons. I think.

Paco's best is actually better than everyone else's best, so his second-best is fine as that's on par with everyone else's. And it wouldn't surprise me to find that the most irritating weapon to get would not be available in shops anywhere at any time - if someone DOES find Paco's best somewhere in shops I definitely want to know about it... ;)

Thanks for all the help - helpful thumbs will be distributed. ;)

Charon was 100% correct about the location of the fast forward key on German keyboards. Waltorius used an Nvidia term for an ATI description, I think ("vsync" versus "vertical refresh"), but after a bit of experimentation, that worked as well.

Anachronox catapulted back into the realm of playability. ;)

"Excellent" weapons are hidden in the game as if to reward only the most persistent of players, that's why it would be a cop-out if you could simply buy them in a store. Besides, where inferior weapons are found in new locations in the course of the main quest, excellent weapons are obtained in old, revisited locations. Paco gets his excellent weapons from the TACO and Red Bipidri quests (and he's the only one to get two), PAL gets his by idling for several real-time hours, with Stiletto you have to find a pretty obscure loonie slot etc.

However, in the end-game phase those weapons become really necessary due to the amount of HP enemies have. Still, if you missed everyone's, you can delegate the characters who lack them to support or MysTech functions instead of leaving them to struggle with inferior weapons.

But the difficulty of finding weapons without strategy guides isn't what bothers me about this game, it's the backtracking. I find it difficult to imagine how the Red Light District can be so booming when patrons who wish to spend their money there have to walk miles of ledges, pipes and platforms in the Routubes, not mention mad Gorians, drug dealers and those weird pipe creatures. :)

Well I know for a fact I've never actually played the Moon Burger to get PAL's weapon - even with the speedup it was too painful. And now that I think about it, I'm almost certain now that I WAS able to get PAL's Excellent weapon in one of the shops - either that, or I'm totally imagining it. If the latter, then both PAL and Paco would have had less than the best weapons for the final battle(s).

Luckily Paco's second-best is equivalent to everyone else's best, so only PAL would have been noticeably weaker than everyone else - which wouldn't have been a huge issue since he's one of the slowest characters anyway. Plus he can always use Mystech, and his Bogue skills still pack a punch, even if it's less of a punch than before. If all characters only had the second-best weapon, it would mainly just mean the battles take longer and/or you'd be using more healgrease plus/complete(which you'd have in spades by the end).

Besides, you can always just use your Mystech while you wait for your Bogue to charge, then just use your Bogue skills. It's not like you'll be short of glodents by the end game either.


The back-tracking can get pretty annoying.

And I always wondered that about the RLD too. Maybe the RLD also has "security" escorts in addition to the regular kind? :)

Adding a bug that happened to me and has also been reported by another user here.

Sometimes Democratus' tractor beam minigame doesn't work as intended. Basically, the game doesn't recognize your mouse input and inevitably you loose. Trying again for the same object or any other inside the same area get's the same result. Reloading a save or shutting down/restarting the game, even if you uninstall/reinstall it first, doesn't work either. The solution is to leave the area you are in and re-enter it. I guess that load between areas resets something.

Humm... Beat the dark servants or whatever on Limbus. Now can't find Paco. It should be one of the three places where the place was defended - the cannon, the backdoor and bridge, right?
The head honcho won't do his congratulations speech before the last of the three characters is present. Dammit.
I don't understand what's happened. I have searched the area... Tried to leave the planet but aren't allowed before talking with the chief....

edit: loaded a saved game and this time managed to "do it right" and got off the friggin' planet :) only a slight bug this time, I got Paco, but not Boots - not too easily at least - Paco was following Doctor and then I met Paco again standing behind the cannon, inside of whom I found Boots. Took a bit of aiming and clicking but I managed to hit him and so he joined :)

I had that happen to me, but I was using Democratus and was using an attack all psy pull