Doubt had been raised about the legality of the 'doe meister' password for the any % run. It is unlikely this password appears in-game; however it does appear in the official guide book published by new world computing: http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Wiki/images/9/97/Might_and_Magic_III_-_Isles_of_Terra_-_DOS_-_Cluebook.pdf
I think this makes it part of officially allowed play, though the community can discuss. The password is encrypted in the book, and there are others I am curious about; I will decode them to make sure the code actually appears here and see if there is anything else useful.
You can run a C program, or Basic program, to decrypt them, or do it manually with a simple cypher (reversed alphabet substitution).
Confirmed that 'doe meister' and 'orb meister' appear under the 'super clues' heading on page 236. The other passwords listed are not portal destinations and can all be found somewhere in game (eg joabary and smello). There is a portal code to skip directly to the end of the game (blastoff); obviously using that would be pointlessly easy and with input buffering there would be no difference between runs making the category pointless, as such it should be banned. Getting easy money and an easy orb is not game breaking, so I advocate for the meister codes being allowed. The alternative is a much slower run, not sure by how much, might be worth a look.
Sorry, just realised that everything in this run (for msdos platform anyway) is glitchless, so we could add a NMG category for not using the 'meister' codes. The start of the run would be different but the end would likely be the any% repeated, unless it is faster to get crusader for the thief instead of collecting the 100k gold to get thief for the Raven. Worth exploring possibly, though I would rather make a 100% category first.
Ok, thanks for looking into this for me. Sounds like the rules are same as in MM4 then which is nice.
For a category that doesn't use the codes NMG isn't quite right as it stands for no major glitches. MM4 has "any% no shangri-la" which is similar to "orb meister". If someone does a run like that I'll add the category.
Found a way to get enough gold for the hirelings without doe meister, takes max 1 min (haven't timed it) but might be a little rng dependent. Wondering how hard it is to replace the orb, keeping in mind we want to avoid refreshing the might buff if possible. Probably visit dragon cavern for gold and replacement orb, but not sure. Again probably some RNG where you don't need extra gold depending on how the first money grab goes, which is not ideal.
