Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Technical Problems help with negative resistances

I have the dvd version so patch 1.34 was included. I was wearing and removing boots with magic barrier bonus and now have negative resistances. Are my only options reverting to a (much) earlier savegame or using a hexeditor? If the hexeditor is my best option how do i go about changing these values? Thank you in advance for any advice.

How negative are the resistances? You may be able to learn the survivor skill Magic Barrier, save, use iZakaroN's SaveEditor (or from Kiya's site, with description) to remove the points from the skill, reload the game, and re-learn the skill. I'm pretty sure it is like the sight bonus skills, in that the bonus is applied when you learn the skill level, so repeatedly learning levels would give you repeated bonuses. Of course this would only be practicle for relatively small boosts.

Even if you have too large a negative resistance for that, you may want to use the editor to un-learn Magic Barrier, if you know it, in case that is part of the problem with the bonus on the boots.


The topic Some more hex offsets... describes where in the data.000 file the resistance values are located, while Teleporting Anywhere, via hex editor and Reviving dead NPCs contain a bit of information on hex editing that part of the file.


Check your messages (click 'My Stuff' in the top menu bar, then 'My Messages').


Welcome to the forum.

Thank you for your response. Taking into account item bonuses and level 3 magic barrier already learned the resistances are negative 35. I have no experience with hexediting. I can roughly piece together what to do but I am not certain of the location of the resistance values and how exactly to affect the desired change. Due to my uncertainty, I will try your suggestion of sequential save-edit-save cycles (learning and removing skill points from magic barrier) and see if the resulting
resistances increases are persistent. Thank you again for your advice

Hopefully a couple save/edit cycles will fix the problem. If not, or you feel tempted to try some hex editing anyway;

In Hackman 7.0x you would open the data.000 file and search (ASCII mode) for 'AgentsV'. The 'A' will be selected when the program moves to that part of the file.
To move forward in the file by the given offset, select the menu 'Edit | Goto...' (or hit Ctrl+G), fill in the offset (6A5 in this case), in the Settings section select 'From this position', leave the Mode on Hex and hit the 'Goto...' button. The program will then jump forward to the start of the first resistance value.

Since you have negative 30 resistance, you should see something like 'E2 FF FF FF' repeated 4 times, forming a complete 'row', though probably looped around from where it starts to finish on the next line (the first 'E2' should be selected when you jump forward in the file; from there you would just click on that E2 to make sure the hex column has focus, and then start typing to overwrite the existing values). You would change that full 'row' (16 bytes) to all zeroes to get back to a base resistance value of zero; for a Magic Barrier level 3 resistance boost of 15, you would edit the four values to read '00 00 00 0F 00 00 00 0F 00 00 00 0F 00 00 00 0F'.


There was a serious filesize limit introduced in the freeware version of Hackman 8.x (it will only open the first 200KB of a file, or something like that). Here is a working link to the previous version of Hackman (7.02) (click on the largish blue button with the down arrow, then again on the next page). Other hex editors should pretty much have the same features, at least as far as basic search and editing is concerned.

I've run into the same problem with resistances, I believe, but before taking any action I'd like to make sure I've got it all correct:

1. There is no patch that fixes this problem? You have to use a hex editor to fix it?

2. To not get this problem again, you must avoid putting points in the magic barrier skill?
Or you must avoid all items with that skill?
Or both (never learn the skill and avoid all items with that skill)?

3. So skills increasing sight range might also be buggy?
If so, how do you find out what your current sight value is?
My range is annoyingly large, but I can't say if it's longer than supposed or not.

If you have a pre-1.0034A CD version of the game, then the patch should automatically fix the resistance bug. A small number of people reported that the patch did not help, or that they already had the latest version of the game when it occurred. In those cases, either hex editing or using the save editor repeatedly to re-learn Magic barrier is necessary.

The main resistance bug occurred in unpatched games, and was caused by unequipping something with a Magic Barrier skill without otherwise knowing it. Learning one or more levels should help with this, rather than make things worse. There have been other bugs or glitches that have caused negative resistances. To be safe you may want to avoid equipment with that bonus so this doesn't happen again, but I don't know if you would need to avoid learning the skill as well.
In any case, you should eventually get plenty of resistance bonuses from your equipment, and can always purchase Spell Shield spellbooks.

Some people have also run into problems with their sight range calculations, especially when mixing the passive skills and skill equipment bonuses. A couple people found that they could safely mix sight skills if the combined level wasn't above 4 or 5, but that wasn't the case in general.
I don't recall if your sight range is shown in the stats somewhere, but the 'hex offsets' link above describes where the value is in the data.000 file.
I learned a level or two of Elven Sight near the start of the game, but half way through (or so) I started avoiding equipment with sight range bonuses, to keep my sight range not too much larger than the screen size (so I could use the fog of war to help keep track of where I had explored). Your sight range doesn't seem to be bug related, unless you are clearing half the map, or something. DAD's item editor could remove sight bonuses from your equipment (don't know if it has been tested with the download version of the game).

Thank you again, Raze!
Yes, I have the latest (1.0034) patch but still caught this problem. Can't say when or how, but it's very possible I got my Magic Barrier ring before learning the skill. Didn't lose more than a few steps so it was easily recovered with that save editor. I'll try keeping the skill but ditching the ring (and avoiding any other items with that skill).

I compared a bit with old saves and it looks like my sight range is correct - I just got too exited and bought too many steps. And of course my equipment adds some too. I'll try change some gear and just live with the choices I made.

Again, thanks for the help!