Chapter 5-2: (Continued)

Part 4: How to be a Cheater

The next two rooms of the tutorial quest are going to require us to have items we have not placed in the quest yet. Namely, triforce pieces 2 through 8, the bow, and the silver arrows. While you could go back and place those somewhere, that would be a bit annoying just to do for testing purposes. The triforce pieces would be particularly annoying since you'd have to make 8 throwaway levels under normal circumstances.

Thankfully, Zelda Classic includes a useful debugging tool known as the Cheats menu. You may have noticed this in many quests. Some quests even give you the cheats somewhere, so you might even be familiar with using it. We're going to take the time to enable some cheats for our tutorial quest.

In ZQuest, go to Quest→Cheats.

Main Menu Cheats

Editing Cheats

From here, tick Enable Cheats then enter some cheat codes for the various levels. We'll be briefly going over the levels in a bit, but for now it's just important to know that higher leveled cheats should have harder to figure out passwords.

Click OK when you are finished and be sure to save the quest.

In Zelda Classic while playing the tutorial quest, you should notice that Cheat has appeared as a menu. Go to Cheat→Enter code… and try entering the various cheats that were defined to get different levels of the menu. For the purposes of the tutorial, you will need at least the level 3 cheat entered.

Cheating

Cheating

Cheating

Here is a brief description of each level of cheats and what they offer. Note that levels stack, so entering the level 2 cheat will also give you the level 1 options.

Cheat levels

  • Level 1
    This only offers extremely basic refill options for life, magic, rupees, bombs (includes super bombs), and arrows (if the quest has the True Arrows quest rule enabled). It will refill whichever option is selected to the current max the player can hold.
  • Level 2
    This lets you freeze all enemies on the screen by instantly giving the player a clock item. It also lets you set some max values for bombs, heart containers, and magic.
  • Level 3
    This lets you edit Link's entire inventory in a dialog that is identical to Quest→Init Data in ZQuest (we'll cover that in the next part).
  • Level 4
    This is stuff you should rarely let the player access since it will bend a quest in half. It includes functions such as directly warping between DMaps and screens, walking through walls, killing everything on the screen instantly, toggling layers and debugging information, and such.

Once you have at least a level 3 cheat active, go to Cheat→Link Data…

Equipment Cheating

Under the Equipment tab, you might want to give yourself a few items in the future.

  • Arrow 2 (Silver)
  • Bow 1 (Short)
  • Optional: Sword 4 (Master)
  • Optional: Ring 3 (Red)

Misc Cheating

Under the Misc. tab, you should keep in mind this is where you can set the number of Triforce pieces you have. You probably should not set this until after you have tested the next room. You can also give yourself some more heart containers and then refill your health with the level 1 refill command.

Part 5: Init Data

If you want an alternative way of giving the player items without forcing them to cheat or having to shove them awkwardly into the quest as pickups, you can edit the Init Data (Initialization Data). This is the inventory that Link starts with when starting a new save game.

In ZQuest, go to Quest→Init Data.

Main Menu Init Data

Init Data Editor

This should look familiar. You can edit the player's starting inventory exactly like editing their inventory in the cheats menu. Most of the options are self-explanatory, but there are two tabs worth mentioning that we skipped over setting up cheats.

Level Specific Items

The Level Items tab allows you to set the Map (M), Compass (C), Boss Key (B), and number of level specific keys (K) you have for each level number. Remember that multiple DMaps are capable of having the same level number.

Constants

In Zelda Classic, all of the constants are greyed out and inaccessible. However, you can edit them here. But you should probably not touch these values unless you feel like experimenting with jumping or side view gravity and have the old values on hand if you mess up.

tutorials/main/ch05-02.txt · Last modified: 2017/07/27 01:24 (external edit)
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