About this codex

§What it is

The Iliac Codex is a fan-made guide to Daggerfall Online. It has hand-written guides, databases of items, creatures, spells, skills and more, calculators for the numbers that matter in play, class builds for nine ways of playing, and a map. It is meant to answer plain questions: what to pick, where to go, which key to press, and what the game actually does underneath.

It is not affiliated with Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Media or the Daggerfall Online team.

§This site was made with AI

The code, the guides, the database extraction and the calculators were written by an AI assistant, Claude, made by Anthropic, working in Claude Code under the direction of the site’s owner. The owner chose what to build, supplied the game files and reviewed the results; the AI did the writing and the programming. Nobody should read this as a hand-checked reference book.

What that means for you:

• The AI can be wrong. It has already been wrong on this project and corrected: for example, the first draft of the guides described the classic game’s rules instead of the ones Daggerfall Online runs by default, and an early spell-cost calculator used the wrong figure. Those were found and fixed, and others may remain.
• Prose is less certain than numbers. The sentences in guides were written by the AI from the game’s source and have not all been proofread by a person who plays the game.
• If the game and this site disagree, the game is right. Please do not stake anything important on a figure here without trying it.

§How it was made

1. The game’s own source. Daggerfall Online’s source code is public at github.com/Lattymoy/daggerfall-js-source. Every mechanic in the guides was read from it, and each page lists the files it came from.
2. Databases are extracted, not typed. A set of scripts imports the game’s own modules and writes each table out as data: items, enemies, effects, potions, quests, Legendary items, holidays and so on. When the game changes, the tables are regenerated.
3. The default rules. The game ships with about forty built-in mods switched on, and online several of them are forced on. The pages describe those defaults, and the classic rules are kept on a separate page.
4. Calculators are tested against the game. Each calculator is run beside the game’s own functions on tens of thousands of random inputs. At the time of writing that is more than 47,000 comparisons with no differences. This checks the arithmetic, not whether a page explains it well.
5. Links are checked. Every link, every class build and every database reference is validated whenever the site is built.
6. Built in Rust. The site is a small Rust program that turns the pages and tables into plain HTML. It can run as a server, or export a folder of static files or a single HTML file that works offline.

§Where the pictures, map and descriptions come from

Item icons, creature pictures, the world map, the box art and the in-game descriptions of spells, skills, races and classes are cut by the owner’s own copy of Daggerfall on their own computer, using the game’s own file readers. They belong to Bethesda Softworks and ZeniMax Media. Daggerfall itself is a free download from Bethesda. They are shown here as part of a fan guide. The tables, calculators and guide text do not depend on them; a copy of this site without them still works.

§Privacy

The site has no accounts, no tracking and no adverts. It remembers your light or dark choice, your keyboard layout choice and your map style in your own browser, and nothing else is stored. The only thing the page asks of another server is the three fonts, from Google Fonts; without them it falls back to ordinary ones.

§Found a mistake?

This site was made with AI and will contain errors. If something looks wrong, check it against the game’s own source: every page names the files it was read from, and every database entry shows the build it was read at. The game wins if the two disagree.

To report it, tell whoever shared this link with you. A page that is wrong is fixed by correcting its Markdown file or the extraction script that made its table, and the next update replaces it everywhere.

§Credits

• Daggerfall was made by Bethesda Softworks. Daggerfall Online and its source are the work of their authors, linked above.
• The fonts are Jacquard 12, Alegreya Sans and Pixelify Sans, loaded from Google Fonts.
• Built with Claude (Anthropic).

§Adding to it

See Adding to the codex for how pages, journeys and databases are written and checked.