I took a Mage Guild quest to kill a crazy mage in some dungeon. Found the dungeon, spent the whole day roaming through it, no mage anywhere. Just tigers and bears and rats and dreugh and slaughterfish. Nothing else. I keep checking the map for unexplored places but I seem to have explored everywhere, even underwater. Does the game sometimes glitch and not have the target creature appear?

They'll be down some hole you thought was certain death, or up the top of what you presumed was just a hole going down, or on the other side of a hidden door. Just enable cheatmode and use [ and ] to teleport round till you find them.

At the point you're at, I feel it's fair to work around the game (I would never call it cheating because of the way the dungeons have been designed). So hit [ (square open bracket) (assumes you have 'CheatMode 1' at the end of your Z.cfg!) to go through the 'treasure' rooms one at a time. In each room move from your position, because you can be standing on top of the 'treasure'. Each time, check the treasure if there's any in the room, kill the monster if there's one in the room then check your map. Are you in an unexplored area? Then start exploring it. If you come to another dead end, then hit [ again. Save each time, as the next room may have a strong monster that gets two hits in and kills you before you orientate yourself, or you may find yourself under water, etc. Many rooms you go to, you will find you have already searched there. Many times you are in a small room with a closed door, this normally turns out to be a new area.

I treat [ and ] as a special spell for treasure locating, and only when I get to the point you have got to. I don't have recall (not enough spell points) so I know I am going to have a long walk out, so once I find the target I use [ to find a room close to where I started (easier said than done!), so I don't have a long trudge back! If you have recall and didn't want to feel you were cheating, you could travel from where you find the quest item to roughly where you were when you stopped to post the above here. Only then use Recall.

Daggerfall dungeons can be notorious,so I think the above suggestion is perfectly acceptable!

thanks a lot! I swear I've explored everywhere, but there could always be some random hidden door I missed. This dungeon was one that had a lever near the entrance that I never found out what it was for, and a complex underwater tunnel that ended up only being a nest for dreugh and a wraith and some treasure. And I'm also positive that it is the correct dungeon...lol I've had it happen where I'll spend days in real time trudging through a fascinating dungeon only to realize it was the wrong one. While I was in the wrong dungeon, the quest expired, and I contracted a fatal disease. Talk about bad karma.

Let us know if you found what you were looking for, or found new areas to explore using the 'treasure hunting spell' I gave you!

Also, check out 'What I did today in Daggerfall #4' for an example of the dungeon i am currently in and feel sorry for me too!

Well I had already thoroughly explored that cave. There were only 2 locations with [ and ], and neither of them made much sense. 1 was in a tiny room behind a fake wall, which only housed a rat and no treasure, target, or other secrets. The other was a cavern room at the bottom with a fire, which I suppose would have made sense for the mage to be in, but he wasn't there. I'd already looked everywhere.

My conclusion is that I must have exceeded the time limit for the quest and the mage was no longer there. I got expelled from the Guild for this failure, but I won their favor back by finding a daedra heart in a different dungeon (successfully this time) so it's all good now. I just need to keep track of how much time I'm taking in these dungeon-crawling sessions.

I've noticed sometimes I get a dungeon name from a quest giver only to find the dungeon apparently doesn't exist. What's with that?

That is weird. Are you sure you spell it right when you search for it? And type out the whole name? That's strange.

Yeah, I've checked it four times in some cases. Some of them were very easy names too. I might just post a couple screens next time I see that happen. Invariably I end up reloading and getting a different quest from the guy. Other times I have no problem at all.

maybe it was in another county?

You'd sort of expect it to say if that was the case. Some of those quests have short enough time limits to make it impractical to be in the next kingdom over.

Do any of them have "the" in the name? For example, "THE coven of west wyrrlyn". I have noticed that sometimes if I don't type in "the" it won't pull it up. It doesn't seem to be consistent though.

I'm sure a couple of them did at least. Certainly a possibility and it would mean that behaviour isn't always consistent.

I finally found a dungeon where I can't find the mage to kill, btw. I swear I've cleaned that place three times. Got pretty good at it too. I figured there'd be a teleport or something but the only thing I found that looked like a teleporter (a floating skull -- I've seen those teleport in other dungeons) didn't do anything. I suspect I'm missing a hidden door, despite having found a few.

On the topic of dungeons is there anything special about glitches like the crypts with monsters behind the entrance wall? I've noticed some of them have rats or bats stuck in that wall. I even noticed one where there was a regular door on top of the entrance door, but not in a plausible way. The regular door was stuck in the wall.

I can't remember if I've seen monsters behind the entrance walls, although I certainly have seen a few wooden doors on top of entrance doors, that as soon as you enter the crypt, a wooden door opens. When I try to close it, it opens again. When I find crypts like that, it puts me on edge, as I think an enemy is opening the entrance to the crypt itself.

(Recently I was looting quite a lot of crypts and graveyards in numerous provinces)

I have a glitch where the entry disappeared from my log, so I assumed that I failed. I had a 45 day limit. But the Mages Guild just treats me like the quest never happened. Weird.

That happened to me too, so I went back to a save from when I was still in the dungeon, killed the target, and then high-tailed it out of there, going recklessly back to the Guild and got my reward. The first time I was barely a day late.

I think it's very easy to not pay enough attention to the days given to do the quest. I don't think many gamers keep a tally! After all, how many 8 day quests are we given, where it's 2 days to get to the dungeon and where the dungeon is so huge with so many monsters that in rest time alone you've taken another 3 days, leaving just one day morein the dungeon because it will take two days to return!

Well. That raises two questions.

1) How do you know that you failed? I seem remember "back in the day" (late '90's when I first played DF) that you received a message or perhaps an angry NPC. But you KNEW that you failed.
2) I never got the hang of TES calendar. How do you know how much time has elapsed?

Well usually in your log, the quest entry will tell you what day of what month you were given the quest, and wherever you are you can click on the compass in the lower right of the screen to see the current date and time. I think there are 30 days in each month. The months are Morning Star, Sun's Dawn, First Seed, Rain's Hand, Second Seed, Mid Year, Sun's Height, Last Seed, Hearthfire, Frostfall, Sun's Dusk, and Evening Star, in order. Knowing that makes it easier to figure out how much time has elapsed. Say I get a quest log saying it was 10 am 26 Frostfall that day, and you have 12 days to complete it. Takes 3 days to get there, 3 back. Leaves 2 days in the dungeon to do the deed. That means you'd have to be back by 7 Hearthfire to get your reward. I've gotten into the habit of noting down this sort of information before I even set out on the quest. Saves a lot of headaches for me.