So, long story short as a kid I remembered there being a way to use Phase door shopping to target which items you want to steal from shops, the problem was, you needed to have never left town. I thought it was something to do with the spell Rune of Return, since it positions you in the same space that you left on, but I couldn't figure out how to make time pass in the shop screen.

I was poking around today on some older forums, and discovered the rest of the trick: https://37911.activeboard.com/t2411657/cheating/?page=1

The gist is:

1. Phase door in the shops as normal.
2. Go back in and cast Rune of Return.
3. Move your pack to and from your belt until you receive the message that "you've been yanked" in a direction (works with any item and slot, this action is just the most optimal). Click OK.
4. You will notice you are still on the shop tile but out of the shop screen. Without moving your character, go into the inventory screen and collect all the items! Well okay, not all, that will crash the game and corrupt your save. Leave one!

This only works if you haven't entered the Dungeon, and likely is only useful in part 2 as Rune of Return is not a spell you can learn from level ups early on.

Here's a vod demonstrating it:

Hehe, activeboard used to be the place for early forums! It and gamefaqs was pretty much reddit for certain games. Simpler times.

It's way faster now. Also heavier items make the process faster.

I think as long as you get RoR, it now makes sense to use in part 2 and 1+ 2. Really trivializes the end part of the game and Surtur with the right glitches. Guess it's really a choice of where you want to deal with your RNG though, up front or later.

As for the warping possibilities, If there was a way to increment up or down, I could see using it to wrong warp to floor 25. But warping to the end screen probably isn't possible this way.

I've used resource hacking tools on the executables before to view the icons that make up map tiles and monsters, and can confirm that the end screens of both games are full bitmap images and not icons. There's event triggers that call the bitmaps that look separate from the process that calls the tiles and town bitmaps, so it's unlikely that Rune of Return calls these as well.

Can't be sure though. It's entirely possible that RoR changes a ton of stuff inadvertently, due to the way this was coded!