Dwarvish Translation Guide
| Dwarvish Translation Guide | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Museum donation reward |
The Dwarvish Translation Guide teaches the farmer to speak dwarvish, and it is the reward for donating all four Dwarf Scrolls to the museum. Before it is read, the Dwarf living behind the rubble at the mine entrance talks in a jumble of letters, refuses gifts and cannot be befriended. Afterwards he becomes a proper shopkeeper and a villager with a birthday, and his cousin on the fifth floor of the Volcano Dungeon starts making sense too. The book also deciphers the oldest gravestone in the Graveyard, which is one of the game's quieter pieces of lore. Since the scrolls themselves only come out of the mines, the whole thing is a reward for mining rather than for walking into a shop.
Overview
The four scrolls are artifacts with unkind odds, and each one hides in a slightly different place. The first turns up while tilling soil anywhere in the mines or Skull Cavern and from a long list of monsters. The second is restricted to the upper, earthen floors of the mines and to four particular enemies: Ghosts, Frost Bats, Dust Sprites and Blue Slimes. The third never comes out of the ground at all and has to be taken from monsters, with Blue Slimes the most generous by a good margin. The fourth drops from nearly anything that dies in the mines and also appears while tilling the deep floors.
Because the odds are low, the usual approach is a loop rather than a hunt. Floors fifteen, fifty-five and ninety-five all have tillable soil within a few steps of the ladder, and all three are elevator stops. Riding down, hoeing the patch, leaving and riding down again is how most saves finish the first and fourth scrolls. The second and third are left to normal combat, which is why they often arrive last.
Gunther takes the scrolls like any other donation, and the fourth one completes the set. The book appears on the rewards screen the moment it does, and from then on it lives in the Special Items and Powers tab of the player menu rather than in the bag.
Reading it changes the mine entrance. The Dwarf lives in a cavern east of the ladder, behind a glittering boulder that needs a steel pickaxe or any bomb to clear, and his shelf is stocked for the shaft below, with mining supplies and one of the rare scarecrows that collectors chase. He also starts accepting gifts, and he loves exactly what a dwarf should love, which is gems and Omni Geodes dug out of the rocks around his home.
The Volcano Dungeon has a second dwarf, five floors in, and he is the one who sells the recipe for the Warp Totem: Island. His stock is useless to anyone who has not read the book, so the museum work brings a reward at each end of the game.
Notes
The gravestone is easy to miss. It stands on the right-hand side of the Graveyard west of the Mayor's Manor, and the inscription only resolves into words once dwarvish has been learned.
Each scroll sells for almost nothing, so there is never a reason to ship one. A spare copy makes a decent gift for the Dwarf himself, who likes being handed the scrolls and loves being handed gems.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
