Arcanum Data

Background

Tim Cain explains that since converting Arcanum to a modern Windows application (about a year prior to this video), he's been able to debug the game much more easily — setting breakpoints, running it in a window, and tracing how data flows through the system. This led him to catalogue all the data loaded by the base game, organized into four categories: art, general game data, sound, and text.

He emphasizes that the entire game was made by essentially 14 people on the core development team (excluding localization, production, box design, and advertising staff).

Art Assets

The art category is the largest and most varied:

• 846 unique interface art pieces (window corners, edges, backgrounds — everything that makes up the UI chrome)
• 40 unique NPC body types (combinations of race, gender, and clothing — not counting player characters, which had far more)
• 32 unique monsters (Tim notes this felt like fewer than he remembered)
• 73 containers (chests, bookcases, anything with an inventory that isn't alive)
• 32 light shapes (Arcanum handled lighting by projecting shapes onto tiles and changing tile colors)
• 88 unique tile types
• 16 roof types
• 7 wall types, made up of 43 wall segments (including corners, window pieces left/middle/right, door sides)
• 373 portals (doors and clickable objects that block pathing until activated — the high number comes from recoloring doors in different ways and saving each variation)
• 1,434 scenery pieces (non-interactive world objects that may or may not block movement, line of sight, or cover)
• 709 item ground art, 712 item inventory art, 415 paper doll art (paper doll count is lower because not every inventory item can be worn)
• 339 schematic item art (items appearing in crafting schematics as products or components)
• 373 facade art sub-pieces (large structures too big for single scenery pieces — like the crashed blimp or castle entrances — built from many small tiles with no-walk zones)
• 78 unique portraits
• 625 item effects (particle effects for hits, swipes, explosions)
• 9 cinematics
• 56 end slides (each connected to a piece of art and a sound effect)
• 456 "eye candy" pieces (decorative art that didn't fit any other category)

Tim notes that five or six artists produced all of this, which he calls "pretty impressive."

General Game Data

• 25 unique story states (Tim feels this was too many — Fallout had only three)
• 81 unique maps
• 163 quests (with one main quest per story state, the vast majority were side quests)
• 54 blessings and 52 curses (nearly balanced; these were supernatural effects imposed on the player for in-game actions)
• 502 spells
• 58 level schemes (auto-leveling templates for players who didn't want to manage leveling manually)
• 56 factions
• 36 skills
• 123 inventory sources (shop inventory templates — e.g., "Rural General Store" — that determined what shops stocked and restocked)
• 69 unique keys (including a skeleton key that could open any lock)

Sound

• 460 critter sounds (any sound an NPC, PC, or monster could make)
• 29 interface sounds (buttons, sliders)
• 106 item sounds (sounds tied to specific items, like firing a gun)
• 75 melee sounds (separated from item sounds because punching has no item, and because hit sounds varied by armor type — sword hitting metal vs. leather vs. flesh)
• 842 spell sounds
• 126 miscellaneous sounds (e.g., chest opening)

Each sound was hand-connected to something in the game.

Text

• 1,152 unique description strings (many reused, e.g., "sword," "dagger," "a rusty dagger," "a glowing sword")
• 25 combat text strings (poison level, critical hit, etc.)
• 77 character backgrounds with associated text
• 408 main menu and UI strings
• 330 in-game book strings and 24 note strings (books had turnable pages; notes displayed on a single page)
• 223 newspaper story strings
• 34 telegrams (Tim had forgotten telegrams existed in the game)
• 35 plaque strings (mostly used for puzzles, including the Vendigroth Wastes puzzle)
• 204 quote lines from the quote file

Dialogue: The Uncounted Giant

Tim deliberately excluded dialogue from his count, estimating roughly half a million lines. Counting dialogue properly would require opening every dialogue file and hand-counting lines, accounting for:

• NPC lines vs. player lines
• Gender-variant lines
• Combinatoric generated dialogue — a single dialogue node might say "Good morning, nice to meet you" with player responses "Can I see your stock?" or "I have to go," but the same node could be replaced with "Good evening, nice to see you again" with "What's for sale?" or "Goodbye." Even with just 10 combinations per line across three lines, that's 1,000 permutations per node — and many had more.

Why This Matters

Tim's purpose in sharing this data is twofold. First, it illustrates the enormous scope of Arcanum — a game made by 14 people that rivals the content volume of games made by much larger teams. Second, it explains why he frequently can't answer fans' specific questions about particular quests, art assets, or maps. After 25 years, with this volume of content, there are things that went into the game he never saw, or saw but doesn't remember and never documented.

As he puts it: modern games can have even more content, made by far bigger teams — but Arcanum's 14-person team produced a staggering amount of data.

References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmz6XSd7xGM