brunocar: the mechanic isnt a bug, in diablo 1 to prevent cheating, every new game transforms all unique items into full stacks of money, but hellfire broke that and they transform into shit items
Do you have a citation for that claim? The game is known to take some shortcuts for storing
all items - mundane, magical, and unique, but this is the first I've ever heard someone claim that morphing unique items was done for anti-cheat purposes. If that's what it was, it was not very well done, since the item morph/regeneration logic could easily have prevented one well known cheat (excessive spell charges on staves), and did not. Further, why would the developers go to the trouble to force select single player items to morph, instead of just stripping them entirely or forbidding reusing a character in a new game? If the goal was to prevent cheating, they put in excessive effort and got a fairly limited return on it. I think it more likely that they were trying to achieve some other goal, such as very minimal space usage, and failed to adequately handle some edge cases.