BoE Locked Door Keyboard Shortcuts

Motivation

In both Exile 3 and Blades of Exile, walking into a locked door triggers a dialog that presents Bash Door, Pick Lock, and Leave buttons.

In Exile 3, the desired action can quickly be selected from the keyboard with b and p shortcut keys. However in Blades of Exile, these handy shortcuts are inexplicably missing, and opening locked doors requires reaching for the mouse to click the dialog buttons.

Remedy

Make locked door dialogs in Blades of Exile respond to b and p key presses the way Exile 3 does.

Method

In order to restore the keyboard shortcuts in Blades of Exile, we simply insert the ascii bytes b and p at the appropriate location in the executable.

Windows 3.1 Version

Patching the Windows version of Blades of Exile v1.0.1 requires modifying two bytes in the file BLADES.EXE. The shortcut keys for the Bash Door and Pick Lock buttons are at offset 0x72912 and 0x72913. Use a hex editor to replace the two 0x00 bytes at those offsets with the two bytes 0x62 and 0x70 (ascii for b and p). Alternatively, use xxd or dd as a command line hex editor. For example:

echo -n bp |xxd -o 0x72912 |xxd -r -c 2 '-' BLADES.EXE
-or-
echo -n bp |dd iflag=count_bytes oflag=seek_bytes count=2 seek=$((0x72912)) conv=notrunc of=BLADES.EXE

Macintosh Version (68k¹)

Patching the Mac version is a bit more complicated because the data are in a compressed format within the Blades of Exile (fat) v1.0.2 file. For the 68k executable, the resource of type DATA with id 0 must be modified using a resource editor² such as ResEdit. Two changes are required:

1. at offset 0x0003, the byte 0x7b must be changed to 0x7f to account for the increased size of the resource in step 2.
2. at offset 0x777b, the byte 0x4c must be replaced with the five bytes 0x46 0x81 0x62 0x70 0x43 This will cause everything after 0x777b to shift forward increasing the size of the resource by four bytes.

Conclusion

Now we can open doors without reaching for the mouse.
Happy Adventuring!

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