I don't think he's dead. Just… almost dead :P You should be able to go back and return his whip to him (if you wish).

My husband chose that option (I didn't have that option since I'm lawful alignment).

Be aware though, if you choose this then you can't complete

So, if you played a custom party you could have 6 characters each with a pet for a 12 creature party. My main is a Sacred Huntsmaster and his smilodon is a wonderful tank. On normal difficulty I can clear several maps with just these two. It doesn't work well though because of the camping mechanic.

Yep. I actually saw someone elsewhere who multiclassed all companions to Sylvan Sorcerer to get a pets and more spells, lol. I think he use the pets to tanks.

Yeah, sucks that that happened, I wanted to finish that. As for the dead guy, I don't see him anywhere. There's just pools of blood in his basement but I didn't check over by that troll statue. Maybe he's there?

New curse started in my kingdom! So close to finishing off all contents I've covered in beta. This is where things get suuuuuuper interesting :D

Also, I finished a whole bunch of companion quests. Most of them are quite well-written. I really liked Harrim's and Valerie's. I love how Valerie's portrait changed accordingly as a result of her personal quest. So much detail in this game <3

Awesome! Can't believe that was all in beta. This game is huge!

Can you drop a spoiler to where that mage is now? I can't find him in his house. :(

And is there a way to change the custom portrait of your character mid-game? I picked the same portrait as Jhod for some odd reason, even though I'm a silver-haired Aasimar. o_O

LOL!! No, I tried, doesn't seem like you can change portrait mid-game.

Hmmm I thought the mage should be alive cause otherwise… why did he ask you to retrieve the whip? (Dead person don't need it??) In my game he was standing at north east corner of his dungeon.

He died and just said, "they even…took…my whip….*gurgle* *dead*" So I don't know what to do with the whip. He's not there anymore, just his blood, and I don't know of any other arcanists who would want the whip. He didn't want me to retrieve it, he just said that and died. Weird. Guess I'll hang onto it for someone who may want it. I want an Arcane Advisor + that advisor slot to open up, dang it! :D

Oh so he can die.. ah well. Guess I'm not going to return the whip then, pretty sure there will be other suitable people to take up arcane advisor role :D

You might be able to do so by editing the save. Might not be easy though.

If you go to C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\LocalLow\Owlcat Games\Pathfinder Kingmaker\Saved Games, you'll see a bunch of .zks files. That's the "save files".

1. Unzip your latest one and go in the folder created (use 7zip)
2. Open the party.json file in a text editor,
3. Search for m_Portrait
4. This is where I'm not too sure what you are supposed to do. I got a custom portrait in a folder called 110, so mine looks like
"m_Portrait":null,"m_CustomPortrait":{"$id":"330", "m_CustomPortraitId":"110"}
5. Re-zks the files.

No idea what the 330 is for… :/ You might be able to get the right values by creating a new character with the portrait you want and copying the data from the starting autosaves in your old character save. BIG WARNING, the game autosaves and quicksaves are shared across all characters, always save into a manual saves when you quite the game.

Okay, not gonna say where, but if you find yourself fighting a floating blue skull, it is very hard to hit. I'd suggest protection from electricity and then buffing the snot out of one person and keeping them healed as best you can. The battle probably took 20 minutes! I only play on normal too :)

I used Amiri but she had all of the buffs I could cast or she could chug. Fun fight!

Is that the fearing skull at



You will fight more of them as the game progress ;)

The number for me is 320 there. But the game just endlessly loads when I change anything. Do I have to change all those other numbers that follow? 321, 322, 323, etc. all the way down the list?

More numbers? I didn't have more numbers.

I made a quick test.

If I make a new character with Jhod's portrait this is what I get:
"m_Portrait":"3a664504f1764d040ba3340eb580253e","m _CustomPortrait":null

then I made another character with the Asimar dude portrait and I get this:
"m_Portrait":"13340a3c79e90004a9730bfeb9c7ad1d","m _CustomPortrait":null}

I took Asimar's portrait values and copy-pasted it over the Jhod's portrait in wannabe-Jhod's save party.json file. Then I reloaded the Johd's save and it was the new portrait that showed up in-game.

Note:
1. The portrait in the loading list will still be Johd's, you need to edit header.json to change that one, I suspect new saves will have the correct portrait.
2. Looks like you don't need to rezip the save, the game recognize save folders too and loads them but you need to restart the game to see the "new save" if it was running when you made the changes. Although, this means having two saves with the same name if you didn't remove the original .zks (aka backing it up somewhere else just in case).

Okay but how do I do that if I am using a custom portrait? Because m_Portrait says: null if I start a new character with a custom portrait.

And the m_Portrait that matches your Jhod's numbers are the same as me, but if I replace those with the custom ones, the game just loads endlessly.

If you want a custom portrait. Change the "m_Portrait":"3a664504f1764d040ba3340eb580253e ","m _CustomPortrait":null
to
"m_Portrait":null,"m_CustomPortrait":{"$id":"X XX", "m_CustomPortraitId":"YYY"

Where XXX and YYY match whatever you get in the save for the new character.

I did exactly that and my game just loads endlessly when I try to load the save file. Not sure what's up with it.

I could try once I get back from work tonight to move default portraits to custom to see if something else needs to be done.

Although, make sure you didn't erase a " or {} in the process.

I made sure to do it exactly right. I did get the Aasimar picture to work right, so thanks for that. I'd still like a custom portrait, though, #221. Also, Amiri seems to have doubled in the process! For some reason there's 2 of her in my character bar when at the kingdom. Strange…

Amiri doubling might be related to something they fixed in hotfix 4 (yesterday).

Her double disappeared when I left the kingdom so it's fine now. Although it almost let me take out a party with 7 characters, 2 of them being Amiri! :lol:

New tip - travel light. You'll not only get to your destinations quicker but your party will actually move faster on the map. Much better than Medium encumbrance. Use the storage chest at your kingdom to store goodies!

Loving this game so much but man, the bugs are bad. Weird text string errors when you try to take some feats, currently spells not showing up when you level a Sorc (devs are apparently working on a fix for this), Amiri flat-out just got removed from my party in a bug during the Barbarian war quest (she just sat in camp saying "let me know when you're ready to leave" - when you leave, she went missing) - and now, for a totally game breaking bug, Armag's Tomb simply isn't showing up for me no matter what Kingdom events I complete. Supposedly from Steam discussions a lot of people are experiencing this bug, which makes it impossible to complete chapter 4.

I think I'll come back to this game in a month or so when things are a bit more… uh, polished. It's more fun than I've had from a game since Baldur's Gate (the D&D/Pathfinder ruleset in a game just makes me swoon!) - but it's also more frustration than I've had in a game since I can't recall.

My tip for the game is that Heavy Maces are a really good weapon choice to specialize in, and Crusader clerics with the animal domain make for a really tough main character when built right. They can be front-line melee characters with a tower shield like I made my main, or they can be excellent archers when taking the right feats.

How are druids? Any opinions?

And do they fit pretty well with the companion characters?

Not sure about Druids, but there's so many companions in the game. So many. You'll definitely be able to find some combination that works, and if not you can also create mercenaries for a fee.

I'm a Inquisitor Sacred Huntsmaster and animal companions rock. I prefer the Saber-tooth tiger, called Smilodon. He seems to be my party's best DPS by a large margin. I wish you could name your pets….

There is no companions who are druids, so they fit well I think.

After that, depends which archetype you wants to take (they all have animal companions outside of the Blight Druid archetype). Some archetype, including basic Druid, get to spontaneously cast summon nature ally too, so you don't have to take those on your bard/wizard companions.

They have a nice spell list. They are the only spellcaster with a AOE CC spell at level 1 (entangle).

You could also go with Sylvan Sorcerer instead (a nature themed Sorcerer), doesn't have wild shape, but gets the animal companion and other bonuses.

Really depends why you want from your Druid.

Yea I ended up switching, for various reasons, to try the Sylvan Sorcerer with a wolf companion. I liked the whole theme behind a nature based sorcerer for some reason. Plus I tend to always like characters with good talking skills and with Charm at 19 and persuasion I am getting a lot of that - and enjoying it.

Although I read perception is really nice to have which my Ranger has … so may bump that up when I am playing him.

I still have my Ranger saved though and will probably try a Barbarian Mad Dog as well. All the ones with animal companions. Well except Druid as not keen on the dress they have to wear :p Well not really more that I played one a lot in Beta.

Not in any rush as everything I have read is that higher chapters have a lot of the bugs so just going slow while I wait for patches to come out.

Tips on kingdom management. Make sure you deal with troubles promptly, especially if these are tied to the main plot. Also, investigate some of the curses related to the main plot.

Definitely a good tip. Research those curses and solve those problems. :)

I ditched my monk and am now trying an eldritch archer build. The lawfulness was becoming too much, really.

Eldritch archer looks quite interesting. And he can be chaotic. Yay!

Pro tip (aka lesson learned): don't build characters that you don't like.

Very good tip! :party:

Edit: But the alignment change is subtle and takes a lot of choices I think. Or you could be a monk who lost his lawful ways maybe??

That, and they'll tire less. Hauling back all these leather armors to the trading post is really not worth it in terms of time and tedium.

@TheRealFluent I tried the not!custom to custom portrait and I get a loading error message. Seems that's more complicated than I anticipated. :/

Definitely not. I haven't had to do that once, it's just not necessary. But yep, tiring less is a good bonus too!

Yep, that's what others on the Steam forums are saying too. Thanks for trying anyway!

New tip - You can manage your party make-up from the world map. There's a button at the bottom. It takes hours for your party to rearrange but you don't have to travel back to the capital to change party members.

Possible, but then I could not gain Monk levels anymore.

Multiclass time! :P

This is driving me crazy. It always jacks my encumbrance all around. I mean I know I can get rid of one of my Amiris, but it's still annoying.

I hate encumbrance in loot heavy/heavy loot? games. I generally disable it.