To the mods of this game, would you be willing to create a category that allows any cheats that can be activated from the cheat console?

One caveat about trying to skip the Barrow Downs are the ring wraiths in front of Bree. It's possible (but difficult) to outrun them. I believe they're triggered off by the door that exits the Downs.

I played through the game without getting Aragorn. If I walk right about 14 trees due east, the woman is there with her magic pot. However, she isn't able to be interacted with.

I played it through with Aragorn. A cutscene is automatically triggered at the very beginning of the end area. Directional buttons are turned off but the other buttons can be used after a few of the text boxes go by.

Bringing up the password screen shows only Aragorn, no Frodo. I believe that the hobbits are left off of the password screen as well (I only tested Sam). The area letter for the end screen is N, the same as Moria. M and N don't work for areas, I've found.

However, if I go into the end area without Aragorn, Frodo and any people he brings along are not deactivated.

I suspect what the end game area is doing is turning off every character but Aragorn, and locking Aragorn into a walk right while flashing text boxes here and there. I suspect Aragorn not being present is causing the end game cutscene script to fail, which is why not having Aragorn softlocks the end game area.

In the room before the Balrog, you'll occasionally get this text box to flash up that says "DOOM! DOOM!". It's an annoying textbox that takes up a tiny bit of time.

I used to think that this was based on a timer, and that staying in the room for long enough would trigger it. Not so.

Instead, it's done by switches. The switches activate once (and only once) until they go off screen. If you walk out of screen and then back in screen again, you can trigger them again. This is, I suspect, done so that a player can't walk in circles and easily discover that there are, in fact, switches controlling the doom voice.

It seems that there are only two.

The first one is right above the fire pit. If you step anywhere over the fire pit from either direction, you're going to hit the doom switch and see the message.

The second one is where the room turns into a hallway. Exactly where the room narrows (draw a light straight up) is a doom switch. You're likely to hit this one because the next room has a northern exit, so it makes sense to move yourself more toward the north.

This doom switch is different. It doesn't cover the entire span of the hallway. It's more 2/3rds.

You can save a small amount of time (one text box, and a few frames) by walking toward the hall on the southern side. You don't have to be all the way to the south.

When Frodo re-enters this room from the East, he's situated at the bottom of the doom switch. So if you (as most people do when backtracking) walk west, you'll trigger it. If you walk just a tiny bit south first, you'll be under the switch and skip the textbox.

Throughout the game, the player is informed that opening the door to Moria involves several requirements:

You need to collect 5 gemstones

You need to collect the keystone

You need the Elvish Book

You need the Amulets

It also heavily implies that you need to talk to Elrond so that Gandalf will know that you want to meet him there at the door.

Well, about that.

Let's say that Frodo shows up at the door to Moria with nothing on his back, he never met the hobbits, etc, etc.

Who's there? Why, it's Gandalf. What does he say? He says we need the amulets and the gems. Now, a casual player will heed this advice and go get them.

We aren't casual players.

Let's say you come over to Gandalf and you haven't collected the amulets. Instead, you show him the book. Instead of telling you "yeah, buddy, you forgot the amulets", he instead tells you the riddle explaining how to put the gems in the door.

So you don't need the amulets. Hey, you don't even need to meet Elrond. Just, show up at the door and hand Gandalf the book.

Let's go a step further. You don't even need the book. Wanna know why? You can step up to the door and start shoving gems into it. Ignore the wizard, act like you know the combination and just shove 'em in the door.

If you know the right combination of gems, that's all you need to enter the door to Moria.

The combo is: Keystone, Purple gem, Violet gem, Yellow gem, Red gem, Green gem, then Keystone again. If you do that, the door opens regardless of books or amulets.

I'm still in disbelief that it's the first gate! Of all the gates, it's the first one, the required one, the easiest one.

I've heard the softlock mentioned before. I need to make that happen on my side as well. I'm wondering if there's some way to exploit around it with shenanigans, somehow. Maybe pulling up the password screen.

Some more investigation shows that some of the values are being corrupted when the game is restored. There's also one particular flag that shows up in passwords only if you reload the game. I think that's a developer oversight, possibly connected to the Moria door somehow.

It seems that if Merry and Sam are dead but were in your party at some point, the reloading gets weird. It might be visible somewhere in your run, but the short of it is that some flags are being set that shouldn't. That, I think, is why the door to the elf place is open (and that it isn't related to the Moria door).

Another topic I want to explore at some point is Balrog HP and the weapons that are available at the end. The gamefaqs guides say that the endgame weapons are cursed and roll over strength. I'm pretty sure the system only shows the last 2 digits of strength, and not that it rolls over. If that were the case, it'd make a solid reason to have Aragorn (huge hitting power).

A month or so ago, I checked speedrun.com to see if this game had a speedrun of it and couldn't find anything. So I've been working on routing the game on/off. I've also been working to crack the password system, since thus far the only source of information that I know of is the incomplete password guide on gamefaqs.

Passwords are divided into four rows with 6 columns on one side and 6 on the other. Each slot in the password system can contain a letter or number value.

The letter/number choices omit some letters such as A, and O (the latter because there is a number 0). These omissions are deliberate: There are exactly 31 different possibilities for any given slot to hold.

The first two rows contain hobbit information. Each hobbit gets a set of three slots which hold their armor, weapon, and level. The game calculates what their effective strength/defense is. The game only displays the last two digits of power/defense, but I think that the underlying value is allowed to exceed 99. I'm going to investigate that at some point.

The third row is the interesting row. I'm going to refer to this row as row C, with slots numbered from 1 to 12. So, for example, C1 is the left-most value on this third row.

C1: This slot determines where you start. B is the bridge after the shire, up to L for the Moria door. M and N are used for places in Moria, supposedly, but I can't get them to work.

C2 to C9 are used for event flags. Event flags are stored as a single bit in a single slot. Event flags are mostly for storing what doors have been opened, and what people you've got to join your party. Since there are 31 possible values, there are 5 different bits that can be independently of each other.

Since doors are never closed, and events never untriggered, this is why the values on row C tend to go higher as you progress (some coming to 9).

You may ask what stops you from entering, say, all 9's on the C row? C10, C11, and C12 are checksums.

C10 is a checksum of your current party. It's computed by adding the digit values of your party. An empty slot is 0, B is 1, and 9 is 31. Checksums in this game are computed by adding the slots together, then shaving off everything above 32.

C11 is a checksum of C1 to C9. The same checksumming process is used again.

C12 is a checksum of your inventory code.

You can use that to your advantage to manipulate saves to give yourself items. You can, for example, have all items in the game by setting your inventory code to all 9's and putting Y in the checksum.

I'll skip the inventory part for now. Once I figure out everything (I don't know what some of the flags are for), I'll upload a complete guide and maybe even make a web thing so people can set their own password.

So, what's all this have to do with the password glitch?

Some of the blame falls on the password loading system. If you have the flags for Sam and Merry set but they're dead, the flags go bonkers. Bonkers flags are why the gate to the elves suddenly opens up.

But what about the Moria door? When you're going through the Barrow Downs, you'll find a key early on, and have to open a tomb. The first tomb you open is on the right side of a foggy screen soon after you get the first key.

This tomb's open flag is the flag of the Moria door.

If you play through the game normally, the Moria door won't be open. But if you reload the game, the same flag that maps to that tomb door ALSO maps to the Moria door.