As someone posted in another topic, you can play Darkside of Xeen alone by renaming the XEEN.CC file out of the way. Here are some interesting observations:

You start at level 5. Starting stats are otherwise the same.
If you load a Clouds save file, you will be at the starting point in Castleview.
You can't travel to Clouds, of course. Trying to enter Shangri-La from Castle Alamar will not work.
Casting Time Distortion in the Castle Alamar basement may cause you to be stuck, unable to climb up (if you haven't flipped the switches yet), and unable to leave via Shangri-La.
Using Lloyd's Beacon to warp to Clouds will cause strange results. Castle Xeen Level 4 became Isle of Lost Souls Level 1. (Wrong Warp possibility?) Dragon Clouds caused the game to crash.
Typing "genesis" into the mirror will give you the World of Xeen ending. Typing "showtime" will crash the game.

I thought Lloyd's Beacon was side specific... anyway, Castle Xeen Level 4 is map number 78 on Clouds. Lost Souls Level 1 is map number 78 on Darkside.

Do you have a list of all the maps and their numbers? I'm wondering if this trick could be used to access Olympus early.

Sure:
[url=http://games.playazlounge.net/xeen_docs/MapNames(Clouds).txt]http://games.playazlounge.net/xeen_docs/MapNames(Clouds).txt[/url]
[url=http://games.playazlounge.net/xeen_docs/MapNames(Darkside).txt]http://games.playazlounge.net/xeen_docs/MapNames(Darkside).txt[/url]

Thank you.

To reach Olympus early, do the following:
1. In Clouds warp to Mine 5. If you don't want to be stuck in a wall later go south 1.
2. Cast Lloyd's Beacon and set a warp point.
3. Load the save in Darkside alone (ie. by renaming XEEN.CC out of the way.) You will be in Castleview.
4. Cast Lloyd's Beacon again, warping to your warp point. You are now inside Olympus! (No pass needed because that's only checked when you enter from the outside.)
5. If you are stuck in a wall, Time Distortion can fix that. If you fall when you arrive, Levitate can also fix it.
6. Have fun buying Obsidian equipment and training past level 50 without having to actually play through Darkside.

To reach other areas, you just need to find the Clouds area with the same number of the Darkside area you want to reach, and then use this trick. Note that going out-of-bounds in an overworld map may kill you.

Unfortunately, you can't use this trick to go to Corak's escape pod early because there is no corresponding Clouds map. You can use the Warzone to go to the third floor of the Dragon Pyramid, however.

Wow, interesting. Thanks for posting this info.

You could just use an editor.....
Or is loading Clouds, Lloyd's Beacon, renaming files, etc. considered an exploit and not a cheat? :-)

http://games.playazlounge.net/#MapUtilities

To be honest, I find exploits like these to be fun to figure out. While it does involve manipulation of files, it doesn't require any external programs (unless you count something as basic as the UNIX mv command as an external program) or hex editing, and is a lot easier to do.

Whenever I play Baldur's Gate 2 (a game I haven't been able to get into enough to finish), I actually like using the gem underflow glitch. It's so much more fun than just using the cheat console to get a lot of money.

In other words, I would rather use an exploit than a cheat program or obvious built in cheat.

Try Etherealizing out the door of Ellinger's Tower and see where you land.........

You can start at level 5 playing the full World of Xeen. Just take the pyramid to Castleview and create your characters there.