Cheats and Exploits

Spoiler Warning: This page contains spoilers which may affect your IVAN experience negatively

Metagaming, degenerate behaviour and various strategies based on unbalanced game features are present in IVAN just as in any other game. Here you can find the ways how to bypass the game balance for profit and victory.

Note that many strategies described below can be denounced as outright abuse.

Exploits

Exploits are strategies considered by some to be against the spirit of the game, or certain intended features which border on the overpowered. There are no rules or protection against these actions, so other people may consider them to be a legitimate strategy.

Artificial Limbs

Scroll of Change Material can be used on more then you equipment - and as long as the material you change your limb into is not organic, your limb will get attributes based on the statistics of the material. High material strength increases your AStr/LStr while high flexibility increases Dex/Agi. Note that artificial limbs do not heal on their own like organic limbs do, but you can still repair them using a scroll of repair or the shops in Attnam.

Also note that it is possible to receive an artificial limb from a god you pray to if you are missing a limb. The god will pick one of its attached materials and create a limb of this material for you. Consult the list of materials.

In the table below, you can find a representative sample of some materials artificial limbs can be made of and the associated attributes, including the amount of Hit Points your limbs will have. The table assumes you have both limbs made of the material in question (e.g. two iron arms).

Material	AStr/LStr	Dex/Agi	Arm HP	Leg HP
Iron	100	4	19	25
Arcanite	180	12	61	82
Octiron	275	8	143	191
Valpurium	400	16	304	405
Ommel Hair	60	60	6	9
Phoenix Feather	80	120	12	16
Golden Eagle Feather	300	100	171	227
Rock Crystal	75	4	10	14
Green Light Crystal	150	4	42	56
Snow	2	160	1	1

Broken Bottles Trick

An easy and safe way of raising your Endurance, it also utilises the mostly useless trash in the form of broken bottles. As you gain Endurance from healing taken damage, it's normally associated with the risk of getting hurt too much by attacking monsters and dying. However, you can game the system by throwing a bottle at the wall, breaking it, and then stepping on the square containing the broken bottle barefoot. You will injure your leg on the sharp shards and can then wait until your leg heals. Rinse and repeat until you start seeing increases in your Endurance.

Note that you must do this trick without any boots on, as the damage dealt by a broken bottle is minimal. This makes the trick very safe, as you won't endanger your legs, but wearing boots will block the damage completely.

Genetrix Training

You thought Genetrix Vesana is a terrible fiend and a sworn enemy of yours you have to kill as soon as possible? Just the reverse is true, actually. Jenny is your friend and an invaluable sparring partner when it comes to training your attributes.

How so?

The Carnivorous Plants she constantly spawns can be used as infinite training dummies to gain experience for your skills and train your attributes. In addition, they drop kiwis, giving you an endless supply of food, as long as you can kill enough of them fast enough. You don't need to kill Jenny to get from the Underwater Tunnel to Attnam - you only need to get her out of the way. If you happen to find a wand of teleportation, zap her and she will teleport somewhere randomly on the floor, allowing you an easy access to the stairs she normally blocks while also letting you take advantage of the training on her plants.

Invincible Items

See here.

While unbreakable items are not easy to exploit, there are certain strategies that stretch the suspense of disbelief when the player uses them. For example, scrolls can burn, but cannot be dissolved in acid, unlike the majority of items. Thus it's possible to dip a burning scroll into a bottle of sulphuric acid to extinguish the flames with no risk of destroying the scroll.

Loricatus Banana Snack

You don't need to suffer hunger ever again!

Why?

The negative prayer to Loricatus can result in your equipped weapon being turned into Banana Flesh - which is edible and delicious. And if you happen to be wielding anything larger than your normal weapon, let's say a large chest, and then pray intentionally several times quickly in a row to anger Loricatus, you will be left with a huger chunk of banana flesh that will last you for many meals.

Be aware, though, that if you anger any god too much, they can send a hostile angel after you in addition to the normal negative effect.

Permanent States

In a strange quirk of coding, permanent Status Effects are declared in IVAN as simply an effect with a very long duration. This can be exploited by hoarding sources of temporary effects and then using them all at once, increasing the duration of the temporary effect over the permanent limit, at which point the effect will be stoppped from timing out and will be for all intents and purposes permanent. This is obviously very useful, especially as several types of monster flesh give beneficial status effects.

As an example:

• Three dead floating eyes are enough for permanent ESP.
• Similarly, three Blink Dog corpses will grant you permanent TeleControl.
• Harder to achieve, but with several wands of haste and a prayer to Cleptia, you might gain permanent Haste.

Danger Level Reduction

Danger level is a hidden balancing statistic that attempts to portray the current combined strength of your character's stats and equipment, which is then used to tweak the difficulty of the game. This is best visible through the generation of weaker or tougher monsters. However, as monsters are normally generated en masse when you first enter a level, it is possible to partially subvert this in your favour.

When entering a level for the first time, take off your most powerful pieces of equipment (especially highly enchanted weapons and magical armor). You will appear to the game as weaker than you really are, and it will generate the level populated with correspondingly weaker monsters. This does not outright defeat the danger system, as new monsters will slowly get generated taking your actual danger level in account and monsters will get more powerful at deeper dungeon levels anyway, but it might make your life a little easier at each new level for a while.

Cheating

Cheating is any use of a bug or unintended design flaw for player's gain and will be looked down upon if you have been informed and still tried.

Most of the bugs were present in the per-CVS version and were since fixed. However, as new features are introduced during development, new bugs are likely to crop up.

Save Scumming

The act of making a backup copy of the save file for the purpose of sidestepping the permanent death, save scumming is considered one of the worst ways any player can cheat the game.

Save scumming itself is quite simple; just save and exit IVAN, then find the save file in the game files and copy it to a different directory. Run the game again and continue playing until you die. At this point, restore the save file by copying it back from the temporary directory to the game files, and restart the game. Assuming the correct files were copied, the game continues as it was at the point of saving. This act basically breaks the spirit of the game, as you can try and repeat every situation as many times as you want, until the most positive outcome for you becomes true.

Save scumming can do more than allow a player to avoid death. Indeed, just about any random element (such as the result of a prayer, items generated on a new floor or how much damage a monster inflicts this turn) can be changed this way.

History

Those cheats and exploits were fixed in the newer versions.

Acid Rain

Due to an oversight, Wand of Acid Rain could destroy terrain without drawing any hostility to the player. In addition, acid puddles left by acid rain also did not draw hostility to the player if stepped in by neutral or friendly characters. Acid rain only turned NPCs hostile if it rained directly onto them. As such, it could be exploited in various ways, such as destroying the sumo arena and covering the floor in acid for an easy win, or causing wandering NPCs like the patrol guard to melt to death.

Banana Kicking

A bug in the design of the New Attnam banana industry prepares the way for an easy access to unlimited free food - if you don't mind eating bananas all the time.

Enter New Attnam and find the Levitating Ostrich landing platform in the south-eastern corner of the map. Here the growers drop bananas, while the ostriches take them away. What's important for you, however, is that as long as you do not break any bananas, you can safely kick them off the platform at which point they will no longer be counted as the town's property.

Done right, this essentially means you have an endless source of food. To make this more efficient, follow the ostriches to the location from which they leave the map, then stand on that square. This will block them on the map and cause them to clump up, which increases the window of opportunity for kicking bananas. Once there are three ostriches standing next to you, run back to the platform and start kicking the bananas off.

Library Exploit

It is a simple trick utilising a flaw in the game's shop mechanics involving the use of Attnam's library building, allowing for free repossession and thus resale of items in order to make a substantial amount of gold with no consequences for the player - provided it is done correctly.

First off, any eligible items for sale in the library (scrolls, books) should be dropped on the door tile of the shop, once the door has been opened. Once all items have been dropped, stand on the tile directly above the open door and kick the items downward so that they leave the store and sail forth into the snow outside. Once all items are removed from the store, pick them up and sell them again, repeating the process until the Librarian is broke. You can also buy everything in the library and gain your money back, allowing for access to many great items early on in the game.

Be very careful when you kick the objects out of the store, as they may collide with the patrol guard who patrols the outer walls - this will turn all of Attnam hostile towards you and you will be slaughtered in no time.

Ommel Cerumen Trick

It is a way to maximize the player's Intelligence and Wisdom with extreme ease.

First find a Scroll of Change Material, read it to change something large enough (Containers|large chests are the best) into Ommel Cerumen and eat it. Although you can't make other ommel stuffs or holy banana flesh, it works because DevTeam failed to forbid player to make ommel cerumen.

Variants

The variants are not immune to various bugs, of course.

CLIVAN

Free Vodka for Everyone

In the Attnam Catacombs, there are several shelves full of vodka that can be taken by the player for free. Selling it will net you enough money to last you a while.

Levitating Assassins

Assassins are a new monster with ridiculously low body mass, allowing them to dodge attacks very easily. However, they are so thin that when you manage to dismember one of their body parts, it will end up with negative weight. Thus hoarding severed arms and legs of assassins will allow you to carry more for a while, until the limbs rot away.

Knowledge of the Ancients

The developer command that lists various spoilery information about the game is made accessible to all players due to an oversight. Just press '*'.