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In order to use an item in your inventory, just drag it over the 'hand' icon to the right of your inventory. If it's a usable item, the icon turns green and you can drop it on the hand icon (if it's not usable, the icon turns red). When you drop it on the hand icon, one of two things happens:

1. You'll wind up reading the item if it is a book, note, newspaper, etc.

    

2. Your cursor turns a different colour, and you are returned to the game world. The next object or creature that you click on will have that item applied to it. This is how you can use scrolls and potions on followers, creatures, and even yourself.

    

Getting out of town onto the World Map can sometimes be an anxiety-inducing affair. Usually, you just have to travel far enough out of town. You know you've reached the right spot when the map icon on the top left of your screen turns into a blue globe! Below, I've marked each important location with it's World Map coordinates, as you can find most places simply by wandering close to them. Sometimes people will tell you the location of an important place, and this puts it on your World Map. In a few cases, you can ONLY find a place if someone puts it on your World Map.

After dispatching all your foes in battle, just right-click to exit combat mode. Any followers you have along with healing skills will automatically begin the process of healing you. Speaking of which, if you get tired of waiting for someone's Fatigue to recharge, a handy trick is to just advance the time 1 hour using the Sleep menu.

Magical Chests and other such caches usually contain RANDOM magickal items. I've only bothered to document the items that are always at a particular location. Most often, these always-present items are 'hexed' (evil).

Combat is by far the easiest way to gain XP in this game. Just wandering around on the World Map for a while and beating up on whatever attacks you will often result in you going up a level before you even know it. Characters attempting to take a diplomatic route through will find it to be very hard going indeed, as the XP gained in solving quests pales in significance to that obtained by just killing things. Anyway, you need to be quite adept at either Melee or Magick to even complete most of the quests. You simply cannot talk your way around monsters no matter how high your Intelligence (IN) is, or how good your Persuasion skills are!

If you try to lug around all the interesting objects you find, even if you share the load with your followers, you'll soon find yourself running out of space and/or becoming encumbered. The best solution I found was to store spare items in the dressers of the inn rooms you stay at. No one seems to ever touch anything you store there! On a related note, you can store large items in your hotkey slots, without limit to the size of the item (but its weight still registers in your inventory).

A caution about schematics: just because you bought a schematic and you have the 2 ingredients necessary to make a new item doesn't mean you'll succeed! For instance, early on in the game I bought a Bullets schematic. But I soon found out that you need a lot more than Saltpetre and Charcoal to make Bullets. You also need to be quite a few rungs up the ladder in the Explosives technological discipline. So it is with a lot of schematics you find or buy. In a lot of cases you must have expertise in more than one discipline to be able to combine the items, so beware.

When you pickpocket someone for their Gold, you only get 100 coins per successful attempt no matter how much they have on them. I reckon this is fair, otherwise the game would be too unbalanced in the favour of thieves.

Wherever you go in your travels, always make sure to pump any bartender you find for info. They always know what's going on in the area, and their info is free. Bartenders can usually train you as an Expert in Gambling and Haggle.

Nearly all shopkeepers will train you as an Apprentice in Haggle.

Disclaimer: in order to train as an Apprentice or Expert in whatever skill, you need only fork out some cash. Usually, this is in the order of 100 Gold for Apprentice, and 500 for Expert. However, in order to train as a Master, you have to have spent 5 points on the skill, and be at Expert level. The Master will then give you a quest, which should you successfully complete, he/she will then grant you the rank of Master. Now... in bringing this guide to you, I was prepared to play all the way through Arcanum only so many times. Therefore, I couldn't spend enough points to attain Master level in every skill (and to be honest, I'm not even remotely interested in skills like Repair or Haggle), so I couldn't document the final quest to become Master in most cases; however, I usually can tell you at least who the Master trainer is for a particular skill.

You could enjoy the game while you are eatinghealthyfoodstuffs.