Hail, reader.
EverQuest has been around a long time. Follow this guide to make your EverQuest installation play nice with modern hardware, multiple monitors and new versions of Windows. Some common problems have obscure solutions. While this guide will be somewhat comprehensive. I will try to keep this as concise as possible. So, in the interest of brevity I will let you know what levers to pull and how, but only the most key parts of the why.

The scope of this guide will only include changes that have objective performance, bug-squashing, and/or stability benefits. That as opposed to ones that might be to my personal taste. This means I won't be recommending Custom UI files or Maps here.

I will be using Notepad2-mod[xhmikosr.github.io] and Windows 10. Free free to fall in line and do the same, or not. It's up to you.

Windows hides some file extensions from being seen by default. File extensions are the bit after the last dot in the name of a file. So, before we begin I recommend you check this setting in the View tab of the File Explorer ribbon. It will be in the Show/hide group. As seen below.


This is where most of the magic happens.
Browse to your game folder. If you installed EQ through Steam, you can use the "Browse local files" option in Steam to open the folder. Good? Good.

Open the file named 'eqclient.ini' using Notepad. Notepad is likely the default program associated with INI files. If you have Notepad2-mod installed it will launch instead when you open it, as it replaces Notepad.


In this file we will change three lines, in three different sections of the INI file. Sections are the lines starting and ending with a square bracket, ie [Section].
Note which section is appropriate for the line you edit as you look at the screenshots.

You may want to fold the sections you aren't editing. This can help you navigate INI files.

So let's get the most important ones outta the way first, yeah? The bugs. These range from crash-to-desktops and improperly allocated system resources to small things most people just ignore.

The most important and common ones needing fixing are listed in this section. If I find any other ones, they will likely be minor compared to these.

Not having this entry can cause a slew of problems, and as far as I know it's never added automatically by the game. So let's do it ourselves. Like so.


The reason for this entry to exist is that EverQuest still has some legacy DirectX 6 and 8 things that still get called. So the developers made a custom DirectX dll file to use for translating these things to DirectX on modern operating systems. The dll file exists in the game folder by default, however it is not in use until this entry is added.

The most common crash to desktop is from an improperly set refresh rate setting. Often combined with fullscreen and multiple monitors.

So set the highlighted line like so. It is likely you have a 60Hz monitor. So 60 is what we set here. If you know you have better, do better /shrug. Also, while you are here feel free to set your desired fullscreen resolution here if you want to. You will be able to change it later in the in-game settings.

By default the game only uses one core set to normal priority. What we want is to spread the core usage across more cores and let Windows schedule the usage for us. We do this by adding a line for each core to the eqclient.ini file.

First find how many hardware cores you have.
In Windows 10 you can find this in the Performance tab of Task Manager in the CPU section.



Then add the equivalent number of lines like this.


Notice that their numbering in the INI starts at 0.

The entry 'CPUAffinity0=0' is likely already present. A quick way to do this step is to change said entry so that it ends with -1 and use CTRL+D to duplicate the line until appropriate, making the edits to the numbering after.

The reason to place -1 after the equals sign at the end of each line here is to declare explicitly that no priority level should be assigned to each core. This allows Windows to manage core usage.

Once this is done Windows will be able to shuffle resources around so the cores will be used as exclusively for EverQuest as possible while the game is running.

You're done! Go find and get stepped on by a hill giant or something.

CPU usage after tweaks. You can see that the six odd numbered cpu cores are doing the work. Taken next to main bank. Often cited as the laggiest area in the game due to people standing there waiting for buffs.

If the game isn't using more than one core check your 'Processor affinity' window from Task Manager by right-clicking eqgame.exe > set affinity while the game is running.
Check <All Processors>