Min-Max your Inheritance

Ok, the way to power game this is to use the inheritance system to create an incredibly over powered item. When you complete the game you can "pass on" one item to your next character who will then start the game with that item. It will also increases all of the magical effects of the item by 20%. So your +20 to Defense becomes +24 defense. Also if you use a gem, the item gets the 20% bonus attribute not the gem. This means that if you have a gem that adds 10% life steal, after the inheritance the item will have 2% life steal and you can replace the gem with something else as you see fit.

I was thinking, if you are going to retire anyway, you should spend all of your money. And what better thing to spend your money on than something to pass to your descendants. As for what item, definitely a necklace or a ring as neither of them have minimum requirements. And something ridiculously overpowered if possible.

After some figuring, the plan is to start with 20 assorted pieces of Jewelry and 12 Million dollars. Then one pass at a time, attempt to enchant each and every one until it gets an enchantment. After each pass discard any that got cursed. When you are down to 3-4 items, take a look at what you have. In my case, the winner was "Earthripper's Crushing Gold Chain of the Jaguar". (The item changes name after every inheritance).

So after all of that, this is what we start with, and this is what it becomes after it has been inherited 4 times.

Speed Runs

So, how did I do?

Below are the characters and how long it took me to finish the game with each. It's a bit imprecise as the game randomly gives you a "final" level between 44 and 50, so some characters have much farther to go than others.

Even with that, each run is definitely getting faster, but I don't seem to be getting fast enough for my goal of a 1 hr completion. It seems to be a matter of the types enchantments I have. Most of the ones I have are percentage based and not simply additions. The faster I complete the dungeon, the less experience I get, the less experience, the less levels, and the less levels, the less points in stats.

How to Un-Retired a Character and Journeys in Hex Editing

Born of necessity. I had completed the game after 14 hours, attempted to retire, selected the item to pass down and …. Crash. Not only was my original character marked as RETIRED and unplayable but the item I had tried to pass down was gone. I almost rage quite. Then I figured I would poke around a bit and I found that the save game files were stored locally and they were not encrypted. The file is in binary, but maybe I can work with it.

The first item is to find the save game file. While the original program stored the files under the program directory, the Steam version moved the file location. When the game is started it overwrites the old location, so make sure you are updating the file under the Steam directory.

Next up, is to find a hex editor. HxD is free and popular so it's the easy winner.

Now to find the save game file (which is more difficult than expected)

Only the program data is here
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FATE

This is the original location when Fate was a stand alone program not with Steam
C:\ProgramData\WildTangent\FateSteam\Persistent\SAVE\en-US

The Steam version uses THIS location
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\54203268\246840\remote\SAVE\en-US

And finally, to load the save file and see what we can figure out. After a bunch of false leads I determined the character is marked as "Retired" by "FF FF FF FF" after the character name. Setting this back to "00 00 00 00" will undo this.