So I recently transferred a 1.13 character over to version 1.16, without backing up or thinking about the consequences. After all, it's the same game. How much could have changed in 3 versions?
Immediately after the transfer, I notice BAD things happening. I'm unable to go into towns, my house, and sometimes the puppy cave. Elona instacrashed each time I tried entering new maps, telling me to copy-paste an error report onto the forums, where it could be ignored like the other 10000 similar error reports created by people fucking themselves in the face without thinking about it. Eventually, I got things to work by doing a couple harvest/hunting quests, which somehow magically fixed most of my mapload issues.
Most.
After a month of play, I realized something horrible: I couldn't pay taxes because I crashed upon entering the embassy. That's okay, I'll farm small medals, and get a box from Miral and Garok -- OH WAIT, I CAN'T GET IN THERE EITHER. Something about persistent, non-regenerating maps bugged the hell out of Elona whenever I got close to them. Eventually, after 9001 crash and reload trials, I somehow managed to get into the embassy to pay two months worth of taxes. I have yet to reproduce this miracle.
During this time, I noticed more version transfer oddities. For example, I had a high level adventurer following me EVERYWHERE. When I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. This guy is in my house, he follows me on hunt quests, he shows up when I get jumped by bandits, and he finishes half of my high-end arena fights for me by spamming some bajillion damage arrow spell.
At first, this is great. Having an adventurer "companion" without having to pay or use a party slot (2 charisma mutant) was the epitome of awesome, especially considering he could rape everything on sight. Unfortunately, as with all things Elona, good eventually turned horribly and irreversibly shitty. After running around with this guy for about 3 months, I started treating him like a companion, aside from the equipping and engagement-ringing. I forgot he would get angry if I hit him. This was a horrible, horrible mistake.
During a random hunt quest, one of my swords invoked nether breath twice. Both breaths hit the adventurer, turning him hostile. Now, instead of having a badass companion raping everything for me, I have a level 50 or so caster who SPAWNS ON EVERY MAP I ENTER AND MAKES A BEELINE FOR ME SO HE CAN RAPE MY FACE. Yup, I am fucked.
My first response was to start savescumming madly. I already savescummed to create the perfect 27-armed mutant, but now I savescummed because getting killed one turn after you respawn at your house sucks pretty hard. My next move was to get all my epic gear together so I could shove them into an heir character. Of course, making an heir requires a soul mate pet. Having a soul mate pet requires farming and engagement rings. At first, I tried to raise relationship by farming the puppy cave for kills. This failed pretty hard after aforementioned adventurer started spawning in the PC and killing me ten steps from the staircase.
The only solution left to me at this point was to grab unlimited numbers of engagement rings and feed them to my pet. This brought up another complication. I couldn't bring my pet anywhere, since he'd be instantly killed if I ever got ambushed halfway. I might be able to savescum and teleport to escape, but there was no way my pet could survive. In the end, I just dismissed the pet while I made the Noyel runs. To feed the pet, I would dash into town, talk to bartender, talk to pet, dump rings, dismiss pet, and then teleport out. My success rate with that strategy was about 60%, with a whole ton of getting killed and savescumming.
Also, repeated ring-dumping pet runs results in the adventurer following me out of town ONTO THE WORLD MAP, where he proceeds to kill me. I've reproduced this a couple times. If this was anyone else but me, I would laugh.
Anyway, I'm at my wit's end here. I'm running out of gold and inventory slots to dump engagement rings with, and I only realized I could hire a bigger adventurer to kill the hostile one after I dumped all my money into rings. Zip out of ideas and methods to stay alive, but if you guys have any, please share. PLEAAAASSSEEEE.
tl;dr Buggy Elona is some weird stuff. Please help.