Gold Box Companion and The All-Seeing Eye Tools for SSI Enthusiasts

At the tail end of Matt Barton’s most recent “Matt Chat” installment, he brings word of two lesser known tools that immediately piqued our interest. The first of these is the Gold Box Companion, a toolset that will go a long way in reinvigorating your enthusiasm for going back to the entire series of SSI’s strategy-heavy RPGs, as it provides an automapping mechanism, the ability to read each game’s journal entries without cracking open a booklet or PDF, interface enhancements, and a variety of trainer-like qualities if your party needs some extra help.

The Gold Box Companion continues to see development updates as recent as last month, and appears to be a successor of sorts to The All-Seeing Eye, another toolset by the same team that has similar features for the original Eye of the Beholder trilogy. There is a lot of information about both of these tools on their respective pages, but I’ll quote their bullet point lists of features below:

Gold Box Companion is a tool for all the Gold Box games plus Unlimited Adventures and the two SSI’s Buck Rogers games. It offers automapping, easy-to-use journal entries and helps with some of the interface issues to make playing a little less tedious.

• HUD above DOSBox window with hit points, character icons, XP meters and effects. Shows good effects in green, bad in red. Also shows if a character is level drained.
• Fix-command for Pool of Radiance. Works with the other games as well. Instantly heals the characters. Optionally also fixes level drained characters. Can not be used while in combat.
• Temporarily change demihuman race to human to avoid experience level limits.
• Optional level up without visiting training halls and without race-/game-related level limits.
• Store the list of memorized spells and restore the spells with a single click. Can not be used while in combat.
• Automap with party location. Notes can be added to the map.
• World map view. Shows party location in some games.
• Combat view. Shows character / monster locations. Shows if character/monster is held or helpless.
• Journal entries.
• Optional auto-identify of items.
• Autodisable quickfight after combat. Some of the older games didn’t disable quickfight between fights so you could enter a dangerous fight with quickfight on.
• Character editor. Reads/modifies memory so it’s instant compared to save file editors. Can not be used while in combat.
• Teleporting. You can teleport to a chosen location on the map. You can also teleport on the world map in some of the games.
• Save Game Editor also included. You can edit party composition (swap members in/out), edit inventories and effects. You can also copy full inventories from one save slot to another so you can use this to keep your items in Pools of Darkness where most magical items get destroyed when moving through the Limbo.
• Some modding tools for changing the font and editing game data.
• Lists saved games chronologically with a description of the location (map name).
• Able to backup to latest save game with a description.
• Playing paladin or ranger in Pool of Radiance. Can be exported to Curse of the Azure Bonds.
• Very experimental monk class for Pool of Radiance. Can be exported to Curse of the Azure Bonds.

…

The All-Seeing Eye is an automapper for the PC MS-DOS versions of the first two EOB games, meant to be used with DOSBox on a Windows PC. It shows a real-time updated dungeon map on a separate window. The map is revealed as you explore.

• Real-time automapping meaning that if you open a door or press a button to reveal a secret area, the map changes correctly. The map window can be resized and docked around DOSBox or moved freely.
• Monsters and items can be displayed on the map.
• Official clue book solutions can be shown on the map (currently only on EOB 1).
• Backup save game. In EOB 1, there’s only one save game slot. You can use All-Seeing Eye to make backups of the save files.
• Explore whole level. You can reveal the whole map.
• Teleporting. You can teleport around the map.
• Character editor with spellbook and inventory editing.
• You can identify all items in the game.
• You can optionally tweak item usability so that every item is usable by every class and only requires one hand to use. So you could use a bow with your back row cleric and so on.