When you entered the secret screen after finding the hidden mountain path in Zelda 1, the secret tone would play to let you know that you found a secret screen. This is rather simple to set up, so let's try it out.

Draw the screen below for Map 1→Screen 26.

Since there is a cave here, we need to set it up. We want to give the player the white sword.

Setting up the Cave Information

• Select a Guy (Screen→Guy or G)
• Set the Room Type to Special Item (Screen→Room Type or R)
• Set the Special Item to Sword 2 (White) (Screen→Special Item or A)

Setting up Strings

• Create a String (Quest→Strings)
• Assign the Message String (Screen→Message String or S)

Checking the Tile Warp

• Make sure Tile Warp A is Cave/Item Cellar.

Setting the Cave Exit Point

• Set Warp Return Square A.

Setting the secret sfx to play on screen entry is really simple. Go to Screen→Screen Data (F9) and navigate to the S.Data 2 tab. Check Play Secret SFX On Screen Entry.

In the original The Legend of Zelda, you could not pick up the White Sword until you had 5 heart containers.

In new 2.50 quests, the default settings are set to where you don't need any heart containers to grab the sword. In the interest of trying to emulate Zelda 1 somewhat or loading older tilesets with this setting already set, let's briefly cover how to change it.

To change this setting, we will need to edit the White Sword in the Item Editor. We won't be going into anything too specific about the item editor anytime soon, but we will probably be opening it at least twice in this chapter to set some minor settings to existing items.

Go to Quest→Items in the main menu.

In the Item Select dialog, select Sword 2 (White) and press Edit.

The item editor has a lot of options available for editing for each item. You can edit graphics, pickup behaviors, item specific behaviors, power levels, and all kinds of other things. But what we actually want to edit is in the Pickup tab.

If we want to make this item require a certain amount of heart containers, we would change it under Hearts Required.

Try changing this to a value and you should notice the white sword you placed inside the cave can't be picked up until you have at least however many heart containers you specified.