Ruts vs. Battlespire CH14: The Amazing Disintegrating Wardrobe

By Rutskarn Posted Saturday Jul 2, 2016

Filed under: Lets Play 64 comments

So now I’ve made friends with a daedric captain by way of watching his flunkies blow themselves up. Have I mentioned I’m starting to get the hang of Battlespire?

It’s all about embracing the chaos, the gamebreaking, the murderous non sequitur. I’ve escaped a tower with no elevator, arranged the world’s worst inventory, mastered the art of uncovering secret doors by headbutting furniture, and overcome fireball spam parties by standing very still and counting to twenty. I’m not going to act like getting this far has been easy, or even that it’s getting easier, but I will say that the game appears to be running out of arbitrary obstacles.

On an unrelated note, I can no longer equip weapons.

Besides this SMOLDERING GAZE. And this sword! Except when I can't.
Besides this SMOLDERING GAZE. And this sword! Except when I can't.

Let me back up a bit. I can’t risk making this problem sound too straightforward or comprehensible.

It begins when I discover a plum pair of Silver Boots gathering dust in some scamp’s GI tract. The protective properties of silver being well known (if it works for dracula, it’ll work for blunt force trauma!) I immediately attempt to swap them out for my boring, supple, caramel-brown Iron Boots. But no sooner have I released my mouse than the game drops the Silver Boots and fires back with You cannot equip this item. Needless to say, I’m stunned. Since when does my inventory give me any kind of feedback whatsoever?

What isn’t immediately clear was why I can’t equip the new boots. I don’t remember visiting a werewolf podiatrist, I don’t have any allergies–God knows it isn’t on grounds of taste. Antipathy to silver is not one of the many cheesy antipathies I’d snagged at first level. So what’s up? I try it again. you cannot equip this item. Weird.

I take off the Iron Boots and try again with bare feet. Nope–not it. Guess Silver Boots aren’t in season after all. At least I’ve still got these rusty old clogs to keep my toes–

You cannot equip this item.

Uh.

See, that’s where you’re wrong, game, because…I…was…equipping them? I was super equipped. I’m almost positive I was.

I’m in some serious trouble here.

In for a penny, in for a pounding. I need my whole wardrobe to be on point if I’m going to be going up against the Spire’s many fight attendants, so if my boots are on notice, it’s really just as well that I stop and troubleshoot my whole inventory. Frankly, I can’t think of a single situation I’ve been in that would have been easier barefoot. At some point it’s just a matter of hygiene.

I quickly discover that my garments will for the most part smoothly unequip and re-equip. It’s my armor and weapons that fail to reconnect–or fail, then succeed, then fail again without obvious cause. I’d be lying if I said there was an obvious pattern, and quite a bit of fruitless, tedious trial and error goes on. Alone and furtive in a shadowy corner, I play hot potato with my own equipment and lose.

There are some successes. The good news is that a pair of snug suede Silver Boots are soon crinkling proudly around my ankles. The bad news is that at some point I lose the ability to equip my sword. I will say that hard-wearing and professional footwear, while delightful, has thus far not been my most mission-critical resource. I haven’t stabbed hardly anyone with my shoes so far. What I’m saying is that this development doesn’t bode well for any plans I have that involve Battling in the Spire.

So what’s going on, anyway? Is it a glitch? A feature? A curse? An elaborate prank from Todd Howard? Nobody knows. It’s legitimately surprising to me how comprehensively nobody knows. I comb the internet, read the wikis, even cash in my last resort and personally post on two different forums–nobody can help me. Just one of those mysteries, I guess.

(Except now, some time afterwards, I think I’ve figured it out. Which I suppose technically makes me one of the premier authorities on Battlesphurghk.

On Battlespiargh.

I’m fine. It’s fine. )

Well, I just found the last Voidguide piece. Portal’s already open to the next segment–and I know for a fact I’m not going to find another sword lying around here. So what am I waiting for? Time to press on empty-handed.

Let’s see if this game’s kitted for a 100% seduction run.

But first! A contest for you all, dear readers. If any of you can guess what the source of my item-equipping troubles was, I’ll award you a “fabulous” “prize.” Try not to wear out the casters of your chair quivering in anticipation.

NEXT WEEK: SHAKING HANDS WITH THE DEVIL(S).

 

 


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64 thoughts on “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH14: The Amazing Disintegrating Wardrobe

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    You got pregnant and that causes equipment mood swings?

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      A nice clutch of spider eggs!

  2. Max says:

    When I was a little kid, I was lucky enough to have a couple of game consoles with some really good games to play on them. I spent countless hours playing Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet and Clank, Ace Combat, Spyro the Dragon, Star Wars: Battlefront, Super Monkey Ball, and Star Wars: KotOR. Even the bad games in my collection got their fair share of play, because I didn’t know any better, and I had a lot of free time. I even beat Shadow the Hedgehog.

    What I’m saying is, I feel really, really bad for the kid who grew up with nothing but Battlespire to play. They probably sank hours into it, and came away thinking that they just weren’t very good at it. Of course, the reality is that the game was coded by bonobos, but how the hell is a kid supposed to figure that out?

    1. Andy_Panthro says:

      I actually played the Battlespire demo, and would probably have bought it, but other games caught my eye instead. I guess I got a lucky break!

  3. Mel says:

    I’m going to guess that it was letting you somehow click on things that weren’t in your inventory even while you had your inventory open, and you were trying to equip the floor or something because you missed the hitbox. And this happened because of some apparently trivial interface change you made, like changing your screen resolution or something.

    Second guess is it was something to do with how you rearranged your inventory.

    1. I’m going to guess that one or more of the items had an effect on them that contradicted some other effect on your gear, and the two items were thus mutually exclusive.

      1. venatus says:

        that’s too sensible for battle spire, and doesn’t explain the “you can’t equip the boots you were just wearing” thing

        1. WJS says:

          It could. If something else he’s put on since he first put on the iron boots has a “prevents you from equipping boots” property, but won’t unequip anything you already had equipped, that would do it.

      2. Philadelphus says:

        That’s what I was going to suggest. For whatever reason the boots and sword conflict, which is why they can’t be equipped together. Though I just realized that doesn’t explain why you couldn’t get the iron boots back on.

      3. Mel says:

        But! If that were the problem, it seems like someone else would have encountered it before. I mean, let’s look at this. Apparently this bug(?) is all but unknown to other people, yet Rutskarn was plagued by it repeatedly.

        If it were a matter of two items being incompatible–intentionally or not–it seems like other players would probably know about it. Besides, it wasn’t only those two items: other items would “fail, then succeed, then fail again without obvious cause”. Ditto if it were an actually cursed thing in his inventory that made him sometimes unable to equip things.

        I also consider it tentatively unlikely for it to have been a weight issue, since Rutskarn only JUST cleaned out his inventory (though, still, he might have picked up something unusually heavy without noticing). But, more significantly, that seems like something other people would have encountered–pretty commonly, too, considering “obsessively loot and hoard everything you can” is a common playstyle.

        The “mystery bug” aspect makes me think it’s one of three things:
        1)Somehow related to Rutskarn’s computer setup, like the software he uses to take screenshots or something. Or his mouse just started dying and that’s doing something weird to the game. That would make it something other people COULDN’T encounter, for the most part.
        2)Somehow related to something specific, and unusual, that Rutskarn did in the game. Apparently this is a new thing, so it’s not baked all the way into the game. He did just rearrange his inventory, so maybe he did something really unusual there, like putting two items in the same bag that weren’t in the same bag before…? If it’s a bug that depends on the player doing some really unusual and specific combination of things (maybe even with a specific type of character), that might mean it’s something other people WOULDN’T encounter, for the most part.
        3)Rutskarn might have missed some vital aspect of what was actually happening. Maybe other people do experience this bug sometimes, but the way he described it made it sound like something else. Like, I don’t know, maybe he was being attacked by a very weak invisible enemy at the time and the game doesn’t let you equip weapons and armor if you’re being attacked at that instant? (I’m only “familiar” with this game from this series, so that’s a purely speculative example.) Maybe he was standing halfway through a door?

  4. Cozzer says:

    Some of your equipment had a bonus/penality to strength, which means that equipping/removing it would change your maximum carrying capacity and make you overencumbered?

    1. pdk1359 says:

      My guess is something similar, that the equipment you move around was granting you stat buffs or something (without telling you) and once you removed something, you no longer qualified to re-equip it. something like that happened to me in Titan Quest, but of course, it was all clearly labeled and i just had to buy a strength ring to re-equip my strength buffing sword

    2. Munkki says:

      I think you’ve almost got it – my guess is that there’s a weight limit on how much equipment you can equip, but it only recalculates when you’re trying to equip a new item.

      My second guess (based on other things Ruts has encountered) is that there’s a ‘mimic’ item that mimics and swaps places with other bits of your inventory, but can’t be actually used or equipped, thus serving only to annoy and confuse the player.

  5. Neko says:

    An elaborate prank from Todd Howard?

    This is the answer. This is the answer for any question you might have about the game.

  6. The Nick says:

    Some sort of weird maximum equip weight thing?

    1. tzeneth says:

      Some type of weight limit makes sense to me. Too bad you beat me to it.

      1. Thomas Lines says:

        That wouldn’t quite explain why he couldn’t put his old boots on when he took them off.

        What if the items had bonus stats (like +10 endurance) that could raise the carry limit. So when he took the boots off it lowered his carry score and so the game didn’t allow him to put them back?

        1. Exasperation says:

          Unless he had some other item at some point in his past that boosted that ability, and it only does the calculation when you attempt to equip something with non-zero encumbrance. Consider the following scenario (numbers made up for simplicity): character has 9 equippitude. Finds ring of +2 equippitude and equips it. Finds boots (1 encumbrance) and equips them. Equips sword (10 encumbrance). This is fine, because it brings him up to 11 total (and he has 11). Trades ring for ring of +3 Daedra seduction, throws old ring in pile of unwanted bags (this is fine since the ring doesn’t have an encumbrance value, so the game doesn’t check to see what it does). Finds new boots (1 encumbrance), tries to trade for old boots (not OK, since this would put him at 11/9). Removes old boots, tries new boots (not OK, 11/9). Tries old boots (not OK, 11/9). Removes sword, tries boots (OK, 1/9). Tries sword (nope, 11/9). Removes boots, tries sword (sorry, 10/9). Etc.

          1. Syal says:

            Or some monsters can lower your carry weight. They could in Morrowind, they probably could here.

            But that wouldn’t explain why he couldn’t equip his sword particularly. Presumably he took everything off and tried the sword first, because that’s kind of an important thing.

            1. Geebs says:

              The ‘boots’ were actually a whimsically-named Daedric sword and Rutskarn’s item class forfeits wouldn’t allow him to use it.

          2. bigben1985 says:

            This would be my guess as well

        2. Fists says:

          I think I used to do that in Diablo one or two, get a weapon that’s beyond my stats but has a bonus to the stat I need, then equip something else that has a similar bonus but I’m not going to use then equip the weapon then unequip the armour or ring.

    2. Retsam says:

      This was my guess; it’s just not an ES game without some obnoxious weight system.

  7. Content Consumer says:

    Frankly, I can't think of a single situation I've been in that would have been easier barefoot.

    Disrobing for your first… encounter… with a Spider Daedra may have been a bit easier if your boots had already been off. Just, you know, to remind you of the event.

  8. Bespectacled Gentleman says:

    Are you turning into a spider daedra? That would be bad.

    1. swenson says:

      Just think of the possibilities, though! If he turned into a spider daedra, he could wear four pairs of boots at once!

  9. Andy_Panthro says:

    Was an item cursed, or broken in some way, which rolled over some integer and left you with a negative number for your equip load?

    Or is this some divine (daedric?) retribution for the way you exploited the character creation?

  10. Your character is cursed! Or Josh. It’s Josh, isn’t it?

  11. newdarkcloud says:

    I’m going to guess that your equipment broke and you never realized it. And that the Silver Boots you acquired came broken.

    Dumber things have happened in this series so far.

    1. Lachlan the Mad says:

      I’m going to vote for this one. A quick look at UESP has shown that there is some kind of equipment durability system in Battlespire, but there’s absolutely no sign of that durability measure in Rutskarn’s screenshots. I’m reminded of Fallout 3 & New Vegas, where if your armour took damage until it reached a condition of 0, you could continue wearing it, but if you took it off, you couldn’t put it on again until it was repaired.

  12. MrGuy says:

    “Take these silver boots, but beware they carry a terrible curse!”
    “Ooh, that’s bad.”
    “But they come with a free frogurt!”
    “That’s good.”
    “The frogurt is also cursed.”
    “That’s bad.”
    “But you get your choice of toppings.”
    “That’s good!”
    “The toppings contain potassium benzoate.”
    “….umm?”
    ” That’s bad.”
    “Can I go now?”

  13. Hermocrates says:

    Were you near your maximum carry limit, and for some reason equipping would actually make a copy of the equipment onto the equip slot, and then immediately delete it from your inventory, thus briefly putting you over your maximum carry limit?

  14. Deda says:

    Maybe there are times when you can’t equip, like if there is an enemy nearby, and an enemy was getting in and out of range?

  15. Frank Gennari says:

    I’m guessing it has something to do with carry weight/capacity, since that was a subject of a previous post. Maybe equipped items have a different weight from items in inventory? When you equip it the weight doubles (because it’s added to the equipped weight before it’s removed from the inventory weight)? Or weight goes to zero when equipped?

  16. evileeyore says:

    Effect Stackability Limit.

    Those Boots simply did not go with [Other Equipment] that has the same magic effect.

    1. Syal says:

      …I’m realizing somebody could make a game with an Aesthetics Limit, where you can only wear so many things that clash with each other before the game just says “no, that looks ridiculous, you can’t wear it in public.”

      1. Viktor says:

        That…wouldn’t actually be that hard. Give each item a primary and secondary “Color” designation and a pattern designation, then write a few rules about how they interact. Toss in an “Excessive” rating that can’t be higher than your level and you’re golden.

        1. Syal says:

          Or tie it to Charisma so you can only pull off that “dressed in the dark” look if you’ve got the charm to make up for it.

          1. Warclam says:

            I’m putting this on my list of game ideas to use, someday, somehow.

        2. LCF says:

          Hey, what about an attire system for RPG?
          People in determined areas are used to a certain set of colours and styles. They have various thresholds according to what they find attractive, repulsive, high class, bourgeois, low class, according to their vision of nudity, to the context, and so on. Then, what the player and other NPC are wearing is passed through these fashion and social filters and has consequences on reactions.
          For instance, a merchant approached by a player in fancy attire might jack up prices while having a friendlier dialog text. Or NPC may react with curiosity to different fashion and obviously foreign. Or they may socially shun them if they are wearing something gaudy, embarassing, risqué.
          Disguise could be simulated this way. If you want to infiltrate an embassy, you won’t be able to wear sweatpants. If you want to infiltrate a crime den, you may want to leave the tuxedo home.

          1. Mel says:

            Yeah! And for disguise it could take into account things like how specific/small/well-known the group you’re trying to pass yourself off as is, or how well they all know each other. For example:

            *In a village of fifty people, people are going to recognize that you’re a foreigner no matter how you’re dressed, because they don’t know you. But in a city of five thousand, you won’t have that problem… necessarily.
            *In that same city of five thousand, you’ll still have problems if you try to pass yourself off as a member of a small group, especially to other members of that group or people who deal with them a lot. Telling people you’re a cloth merchant with a shop in the northwest borough? Fine. Telling another cloth merchant, or a tailor, in that city, that that’s what you are? Try again, buddy. They’re familiar with their competitors/fellow guild members/people they buy from.
            *If individuals in a group are generally well-known, you can’t pass for one of them unless you get far enough away that people won’t recognize them on sight. E.g. you can’t effectively disguise yourself as one of the elite guard, a group of twenty whose faces are well-known even by people who don’t interact with them personally. Unless you leave the city, of course.
            *On the other hand, maybe the individuals in a group aren’t necessarily all well-known, or maybe the group is fairly open to people joining it, but the clothing is very recognizable. If you want to impersonate an officer of the city watch, you’d better have the exact uniform–but if you get that right, then having an unknown face doesn’t matter as much.
            *And disguising yourself as a specific person–well, that might be the only option if you’re trying to infiltrate a small, closed group where they all know each other and you can’t just disguise yourself as “an aristocrat” and give a fake name. And you might have to steal their actual clothes to pull it off–at least, to people who know them in person. (Not to mention magical disguises to change your face and voice, if you’re going to be interacting closely.) Even people who don’t know them, or who don’t know them well, might know things about them that you have to imitate correctly.

  17. Charnel Mouse says:

    Is it something to do with the bag system? Say, you can unequip into a bag, but can’t equip out of it.

  18. SyrusRayne says:

    I’d make a guess, but as with many things in life the only winning move when Rutskarn offers a Battlespire related “prize” is to stay well away.

  19. MichaelGC says:

    Is Whatsisface slowly turning the metal daedric, which is forbidden for him to wear?

  20. GloatingSwine says:

    Equip load sounds like the obvious and sensible answer.

    So it’s almost certainly the wrong one.

  21. Decius says:

    Some piece or combination of equipment was modifying your equipment prohibitions (possibly intentionally, likely by overflow), but not dequiping equipment that was newly prohibited.

  22. Da Mage says:

    I mean it’s pretty obvious what the problem is. When you are trying to equip something the UI is selecting a different item from the one you clicked on and trying to equip a sigil or something. You get a similar message in Daggerfall if you try to equip something thats not a wearable item.

    It may be a bug caused by emulation of this old software, or just the bad UI in general.

  23. The Defenestrator says:

    My guess: You were dragging the equipment over to the appropriate part of your character’s portrait to equip them, but the actual place you are supposed to drag items is your character’s center of mass. When you were dragging your boots and sword over to equip them, you were sometimes dropping them just outside the hitbox and the game thought you were trying to drop them in the “equipped arrows” box or something.

  24. Kent says:

    My guess: due to the terrible nested inventory the game thinks you are trying to equip the container the item is found in instead of the item itself.

    1. Groboclown says:

      It’s a container that contains all containers except itself.

      1. MrGuy says:

        Close. It’s a container that contains all containers that don’t contain themselves.

    2. LCF says:

      The blade did not pass through enough bags.

      It needs to go deeper.

  25. MichaelGC says:

    I like how basically every single suggestion sounds entirely plausible given everything we now know about this game.

  26. Rack says:

    I wonder if a buffer overflow happened somewhere causing junk data to be loaded into equipment limitations. The game doesn’t check while you’re wearing items but when you take them off the results got screwy.

  27. Huw Jones says:

    Have you become a werewolf and thus can’t equip silver items, and also a faerie so you can’t equip iron, and also a vampire so you can’t equip wood?

    1. Syal says:

      And also a monk so he can’t equip bladed weapons.

  28. Ramsus says:

    Since everyone has already taken the “good” and “reasonable” answers to the question, I shall provide this one. You were playing Battlespire. No matter what, I’m technically correct here and that’s a completely worthless technically not failure I can live with.

  29. Jarenth says:

    Ah, yes. Seasonal combat equipment allergies. Common Battlespire affliction, that.

    1. MelTorefas says:

      I vote for this answer.

  30. Ninety-Three says:

    My first thought was some kind of Diablo-esque “stat-boosting equipment qualifies you to equip other stat-gated equipment” but that’s entirely too sensible for this game. So here’s my real guess:

    There is some kind of insane, Dwarf Fortress-style order of operations you must follow to equip gear. You can wear pants with boots, but you have to put on pants first, then boots, because obviously your character can’t put on pants while they’re already wearing boots because the act of putting on pants while wearing boots would be awkward. You currently can’t equip your sword because you have shoulderpads on, or something.

  31. Zak McKracken says:

    It’s probably got something to do with the inventory, and too many or too few items/recursions of bags within bags being in it. You can’t have that type of system and not have anything wrong with it.

  32. Feriority says:

    Obviously, equipping works fine. It’s UNEQUIPPING that’s buggy; it wouldn’t let you equip items it thought you already had equipped, even though the *display* updated to show the items as unequipped.

  33. Mersadeon says:

    I’m going to say that there is a hidden Equipment Weight system.

  34. Lun says:

    Aww, I read through all the comments, and nobody’s figured out what the issue was? Now I’m curious! And I can’t think of an theory that hasn’t already been suggested!

    EDIT: Wait, looks like the secret might or might not be revealed on the next chapter of this series, which I’ve just begun reading….

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