Various tips to make your EQ life easier.
A trick exists to vastly speed up the time it takes to change zones, and it works by loading only the textures necessary to see what you look at right as you enter the zone. The tradeoff is that when you turn around or explore new areas that use previously "unseen" textures from within the zone, they will be colorless/grey for a split-second until the texture loads, and your framerate will suffer for a very short moment. This is also called lazy-loading. The tradeoff is well worth it, and makes playing the game a lot more enjoyable.
Go to Options, click the Display tab, and click the Advanced button. In the bottom left of the Advanced Options window that appears, choose "Least memory usage".
The change takes effect the next time you zone.
To bypass the standard launcher application, run eqgame.exe instead of EverQuest.exe with the "patchme" parameter. To set this up, right-click your shortcut to EverQuest, and the property window should show the "Shortcut" tab. In the "Target" textbox, you should have something like this, depending on where you installed EverQuest:
C:\Games\EverQuest\EverQuest.exe
Now change this to the following:
C:\Games\EverQuest\eqgame.exe patchme
You will now go straight to the game, showing a few nag screens, and then the login screen. Note that if a patch has been released, you will received an error upon logging in this way, as you have bypassed the patch mechanism in the launcher. Simply close the client, fire up the launcher, let it patch, and you can again bypass it using the method described.
Use the command /camp desktop in order to camp directly to the desktop instead of the character selection screen. Camping will still take 30 seconds, though.
The old pre-Luclin character models can be enabled either via the Launcher or through editing the eqclient.ini file.
Using the Launcher, click the little gear icon in the bottom left. Click "Game Configuration" in the center, and a dialog box pops up. Click Next, and check on/off the models you want to use. Note that in order to use the majority of mounts, you must use the Luclin model for your particular race and gender combination. "Horses and Elementals" is required to be checked in order to use Luclin-era mounts, i.e. horses. Continue through the wizard and click Finish.
In the eqclient.ini file, you can toggle the models by setting the value (TRUE or FALSE) of the entries named UseLuclin___, where ___ is the race/gender combo, plus UseLuclinElementals for elementals and horses. For example, the following entries makes the game use Luclin models for Human males, and old models for Gnome females:
UseLuclinHumanMale=TRUE
UseLuclinGnomeFemale=FALSE
Other old models such as the old skeleton model and old animals models cannot be toggled.
Occasionally a slain monster will end up almost entirely inside a cliff, tree or other piece of geometry, making you unable to right-click it. You can use the console command /target <monstername> to target the monster without using the mouse, then use the /loot command to loot it.
When typing the name of the corpse, use underscores (_) instead of spaces, for example: /target a_skeleton
You can also just type a part of the NPC's name, for example /target a_skel.
You can bind a key to multiple actions, which can come in handy for certain situations. One example is a Monk wanting to be able to both perform a Flying Kick and click his Epic (Celestial Fists) at the same time. In order to do this, create hot buttons for the Epic and for Flying Kick. As an example, I have put them in the last two slots (button 11 and 12) of my Hotbar 3:
Next, bind the same key (R in this example) to buttons 11 and 12 on Hotbar 3 (the red R indicates that the key has multiple bindings):
Both hot buttons will now be pressed when hitting the R key.
Note that this trick only works with clickies and "old school" skills that appear in the Skills Window, such as Flying Kick, Backstab, Sneak, etc. All AA abilities and spells are checked against the server before they are executed, and thus only one of the hot buttons will be pressed, although you can spam your bound key to execute them in an unorganised manner.