The Witcher FAQ/Miscellaneous

This FAQ is intended for the fans who have enjoyed, played and finished at least once, and are now wondering what quests, and other goodies they may have missed. In short, the FAQ is written for those that want to get more out of the game!
Note: I am assuming you more or less know how the game works, i.e. you learned the basics from playing . If you want to be informed of things that go beyond "just winning the game", keep reading.
The FAQ makes extensive use of The Witcher Wiki, mainly highlighting things of note. Should you miss specific details, feel free to check with the wiki, it is quite content complete.
== Bugs and Workarounds? ==
:Presently (5/13/2010) with the Enhanced Edition Director's Cut released for the PC version of , the number of bugs are quite few. But heed to the following tips anyway to avoid possible frustration:
:Tips:
* Save your game often! Every 5 minutes is a good number. Doing so has its issues, see the Load Menu is Slow Listing Saves? Q&A.
* Take full advantage of quicksave/quickload, e.g. save before you enter a new area, or talk to a new NPC, or begin a game of dice, or start a fistfight. If you loose a fight or a game of dice, you can simply reload the state before the mini-game, and try again.
:Bugs:
* The game can sporadically crash, after playing for several hours. In my 120 hour run it crashed about 8 times (running the Steam version of The Witcher Director's Cut under Windows 7 (64bit)). Luckily I only lost a few minutes gameplay thanks to the abundant recently saved games. To continue playing, kill the game's task via , then restart the game, and load the last saved game state.
** There does not seem to be much consistency behind the crashes, in one case exiting a building would freeze the game when it was trying to autosave at that point.
** Or when talking to a NPC the game would simply stop.
** Or some cutscene late in the game (Chapter V, talking to Shani in the Hospital) would not trigger properly, leaving the game running but with a black screen. In this case at least, rebooting Windows and restarting the game would fix the issue.
* A few barrels in the game cannot be looted, because they are "out of reach" (one near Shani's house, another one in a cellar in Vizima).
* And in crypts (2-3 cases total) plants will show by name but not by model, again not letting you harvest them.
* See the Main menu without pointer? Q&A.
* There are more bugs in the game, but with the save tips above, you should be able to avoid most of them and complete the game.
== Main menu without pointer? ==
:Should you have installed and played Demo before installing the full game, you may run into some unexpected behaviour:
* First off, any settings you tweaked for the demo will be used by the full game (convenient for the most part).
* Alas this also means that the save game folder for both the demo and the full game is the same. Be very careful not to use the saved games from the demo in the full game!
* If you set up the demo to play in OTS view mode, then this can lead to an ugly bug. Each time you launch the full game, you may not see a mouse pointer in the main menu.Solution: Press and hold the -key while you move the mouse pointer to make it visible again. Later, playing the game for a while, this issue is usually fixed, until you restart the game executable the next time.
== Load Menu is Slow Listing Saves? ==
:Alas the so-called quicksaves in are actually full saves, meaning every time you quicksave (-key) a new file is created, and the file is not over-written! This can bloat your drive. At the end of the game I had 1659 files in the folder:
:: (Windows 7, 64 bit)
:With a total file size of 32.6 GB!
:What makes things worse: This many files will lead to painfully long load times when selecting Load Game in the game's menu.
:Solution: Create a new folder on another drive or partition, e.g.
:::,
::then use the Explorer (or some other file browser) to move out all the files with lower numbers, keeping the last 10 or so, highest numbered saved game states. Also keep the first four autosave files. This significantly speeds up the Load Game menu. Should you need older save states, simply move back the older files.
:Tip: The game autosaves when changing areas (load screen shown), e.g. when leaving buildings. Such an autosave may come in handy should the game crash, and you forgot to save the game recently. These autosave (4 files) are periodically overwritten, actually making them "real" quicksaves.
== Cheats? In-game Console? ==
:Alas there is no in-game console, so on-the-fly "cheating" or settings changes are not possible.
:A way to manipulate some of the player stats is to directly edit the saved games file, see the The Witcher Save Editor? Q&A.
:Should you want to "cheat" in a more conservative way, i.e. using special knowledge available in the game, then see the Gameplay Quick Guide instead.
== The Witcher Save Editor? ==
:Since there are no cheat commands for the only convenient way to "cheat" or manipulate Geralt's stats is to directly change and edit the saved game files located in this folder:
:: (Windows 7, 64 bit)
:This lets you change:
* Stats: Level, XP, Gold, Vitality, Endurance, Toxicity, Bronze/Silver/Gold Talents
* Attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Intelligence
* Signs: Aard, Igni, Quen, Axxi, Yrden
* Styles: Strong/Fast/Group Steel/Silver
* Equipment: Armor, Silver/Steel Sword, Trophy
* Inventory: Bomb, Book, Drink, Food, Gem, Grease, Ingredient, Jewelry, Magical, Potion, Quest, Upgrade, Other
* Quests: Started, Completed, Failed, Not Started
:Note: A few values cannot be upped beyond certain limits, e.g. maximum Endurance seems to be around 75.
:Skill Updates: The "cleanest" way to gain all skills would be to up the number of available Talents (e.g. 100 of each kind), save the save game, then load it from , to then meditate and distribute those Talents. Though this would not let you choose mutagen-related skills. You can activate every skill directly in the editor, though.
:Missed Quests: On the Quests tab, under Not Started, you can conveniently look up all the quests you missed in the game, if you load a save game state from the very end of the game.
:Weapons: If you want to begin a game with the most powerful swords, this is possible from the Equipment tab.
== Clean HUD-free Screenshots? ==
:There is no way to completely turn off the HUD (Heads Up Display) to take clean screenshots in the unmodified game. You will always see Geralt's stats on the left side and the mini-map on the right.
:Tip: If you move Geralt back towards a wall (or tree), in OTS (Over the Shoulder) view you will notice that the character model will become invisible. This lets you take screenshots with HUD, but at least without Geralt in them.
:Solution: Install the GUI Toggle mod by Flash, to toggle the HUD via key:
* Visit the Insane Difficulty Mod pack page.
* Download the gui_toggle.rar (49.11 KB) file.
* Unpack the file into your witcher folder, e.g.: (Steam install)Warning: I would recommend making a backup of the folder before you unpack the above archive into it.
* This overwrites the file, and creates a new folder with the file in it.
* Launch the game normally, and bind the new Options menu, Controls, Turn On/Off GUI function to e.g. the -key.
* Continue playing your game, hit the -key to turn off the HUD.
* Rotate camera by holding the -key and move the mouse to left/right edge of the screen.
* Take your screenshot, e.g. with the Fraps screen-grabber tool.
* Press -key again, to turn on the HUD again.
== How to play in-game .bik Movies? ==
:Since all in-game movies are in the Bink format, look for the free Bink player at RadGameTools. Download and install the RADVideo package.
:Tip: The in-game movies can be found in the and folders. The latter lets you watch the 24 Romance card movies.
== How to take Screenshots? ==
:For optimum quality, bitmap images are the way to go. Though this comes with a file size price of about 5 MB per image for screens running at a 1680x1050 pixel resolution.
:To take screenshots plus get a framerate counter as a bonus use the screen-grabber tool (Google for it, free version available). It takes screenshots instantly (no noticeable lag) in format. Note the tool lets you bind any key to grab screens. I use the -key to the right of the left -key on a German keyboard, very convenient.
== How to read up on Dialogues? ==
:Alas it is not possible to look up dialogues, information about recent quest updates, orens or XP earned. The Journal only updates all the pertinent information, marking new entries with an orange "!".
== Toggle floating Object Names? ==
:By default the floating Object Names help the player see what can be interacted with in the game world. Absolutely nessary to avoid wasting time. But the more aesthetically-minded player will often not want to see them, e.g. when taking screenshots. Plus they do cause visual spam in Vizima, and cost frame rate. So it would be best to turn them on/off via keyboard shortcut.
:Solution:
* First turn off Options menu, Game Options, Show Object Names in the menu.
* Next choose and bind a key to the function Options, Controls, Toggle visible object names, e.g. the -key or better a mouse button like .
* Then during the game, whenever you press and hold the key, the Object Names will show up. Let go of the key and you have a nice clean text-free screen..
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