Climbing has to be one of my favorite things in Daggerfall. It allows you to get to interesting places without levitation and it's the basis for all roof-jumping parkour extravaganzas. It even allows you to complete the main quest--even the Mantellan Crux!--without any magic. It's awesome and fun! But there are a few tricks that most Daggerfall players don't know...


1. You can climb from a fall. You kind of know this because you'll catch yourself if you mess up while scaling a wall. But there's more to that: jump off a ledge into a wall and you can start climbing up it without plummeting to the bottom. Yes, you'll take some fall damage when you first start climbing, but it's better than splatting on the floor! Let's say you find a shaft from the south where you want to get to the path above on the opposite North wall; you can leap into the shaft and start climbing the wall without falling all the way down. Just make sure you hit the wall perpendicular because you cannot steer yourself while falling!

2. You can look around while climbing. Most people are probably too afraid they will mess up and fall to try this, but you can look around while you climb--helpful to determine how far up you are or if you've passed that ledge yet--however if you mis a step while climbing, you'll start moving in the direction you are facing, so you may fall all the way down! Also if you look all the way left or right you'll stop climbing and fall in that direction.

3. You can sidestep out of a climb. if you sidestep while climbing, you will start falling in that direction as if you just walked off a ledge. This means that you can climb up the north wall of a shaft and then sidestep to fall into an opening in the east or west side. This is a very useful trick in Woodbourne Hall--don't bother trying to solve his tricked out staircase, just climb up the wall next to the upstairs door and sidestep onto the platform. Ta-da!

4. You can climb backwards or sideways. You don't even have to be facing the wall to climb it! So long as your movement is perpendicular to the wall, you'll start climbing it. So you can back into a wall and climb up it so you are facing the room. The benefit to facing the wall, though is that it is MUCH easier to keep your movement perpendicular because you can watch the alignment of the wall textures to keep straight--much harder to do this from behind and even more so when sidestepping!

5. You can leap away from the wall. Climbing up a wall, start moving in the opposite direction. You just leaped away from the wall--well, more like as if you ran off an invisible ledge. If you are high enough above the ledge you want to land on, you just might make it (and sprinting helps). The easiest way to do this is to climb facing the wall, and then look a little to the left and then sidestep to the left; the end result is you moving directly away from the wall and falling in the direction of the new movement. Another safe way to do this is to climb backwards so you can see where you are and then run forward away from the wall when you are high enough.


Want to practice? In Daggerfall Kingdom, search for Tower Buckinging (seriously spelled like that). If you don't have it discovered yet, use the map cheat (CTRL+F1) or travel to the Lynx and Priest Inn and run 2 map pixels due East. The dungeon opens right up into the "sunken tower" block which is a huge open room with plenty of climbing opportunity.

I've tried doing this before. I invariably end up clipping through the wall and getting trapped, when I don't just make the jump outright.

You forgot one: Ladders are impossible to climb (Makes going upstairs MUCH more difficult than it should be!)

Good stuff Jormungandr! I didn't know all that about climbing.

Luckily with ladders though, you can just click on them and you're at the top.

Some sunken towers are actually half immersed in water (by sunken tower i imagine it's the one with a tower in the middle and four bridges from each side), so you can practice there to climb to that special room that can only be accessed from climbing or levitation. If you fall to the water bellow it won't kill you. However be careful because the entrance to that room has a nasty floor trap which damages health. Then when yiu are finished exploring the room, you can't climb down and have to use a slowfalling potion or jump to the water.

Yup, that's the block I was referring to, and the one in Tower Buckining is indeed half flooded. I very rarely come across that block without any water in it; which is a shame because there is some cool siege equipment lying around down towards the bottom. What's funny about that floor trap is that it only hurts you when you move--so it's OK to rest in the middle of it to heal up!