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Colors
This is the palette used in Daggerfall. More exactly, this is the palette used for the graphics within the ARENA2 folder. The palette from screenshots will vary in colors 01–1F, as these are used for the sky. That's why the thumbnails on the savegame screen always show the same time of day, and why the sky is always yellow in them when you have just started the game. These sky colors are loaded from the SKY??.DAT files, which store this palette info and the sky graphics for the various climate zones, 64 in each file (thanks to Gavin Clayton for this detail, who has meanwhile completely decoded the file format). There are 32 of them, and they take up more than a third of the space on the CD.
Following are the color indexes that are especially interesting. I have numbered them hexadecimal, since they are easier to locate in the graphic above this way. If you are not familiar with hexadecimal numbers: The first character represents the row, the second the column. Both are numbered 0–9, A–F, making the first 0 and the last F.
| 00 | Transparent |
| 01–1F | Sky, as described above |
| 40–4E | Used for leather in the armor graphics |
| 60–6F | Variable color, used for clothes (see below) |
| 70–7F | Variable color, used for weapons and armor |
| 90–9F | Used for the gold trim on armor, and for the brass helmets |
| FF | Second transparent color, used in graphic for helmets and hooded capes to hide the hair |
As for the variable color, the game assigns every item one of ten colors according to the ten materials. If the graphic of the item contains any of the colors between 60 and 7F, they are replaced. Contrary to what I originally thought, this never results in a loss of detail. It only seems that way, because some of the palettes have rather similar colors. Note that steel is the default palette.
| Iron | 77 | 78 | 57 | 79 | 58 | 59 | 7A | 5A | 7B | 5B | 7C | 5C | 7D | 5D | 5E | 5F |
| Steel | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 7A | 7B | 7C | 7D | 7E | 7F |
| Chain/Silver/Elven | E0 | 70 | 50 | 71 | 51 | 72 | 73 | 52 | 74 | 53 | 75 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 |
| Dwarven | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 9A | 9B | 9C | 9D | 9E | 9F |
| Mithril | 67 | 68 | 69 | 6A | 6B | 6C | 6D | 6E | 6F | D8 | D9 | DA | DB | DC | DD | DE |
| Adamantium | 5A | 5B | 7C | 5C | 7D | 5D | 7E | 5E | 7F | D8 | D9 | DA | DB | DC | DD | DE |
| Ebony | 77 | 78 | 79 | 7A | 7B | 7C | 7D | 7E | 7F | D8 | D9 | DA | DB | DC | DD | DE |
| Orcish | A2 | A3 | C8 | C9 | CA | CB | CC | CD | CE | CF | D8 | D9 | DA | DB | DC | DD |
| Daedric | CF | F0 | F1 | F2 | F3 | F4 | F5 | F6 | F7 | F8 | F9 | FA | FB | FC | FD | FE |
The colors D8–DF (nearly indistinguishable in the palette graphic) are generic shadows, used in Mithril, Adamantium, Ebony, and, slightly different, Orcish. Only Steel, Dwarven and Daedric use a straightforward row. Row 3 may have been designed for Adamantium (it was purple in Arena), but is now not used for armor or clothes at all.
For clothes, generally only twelve colors are used, either the top 12 or the bottom 12. Therefore two different pieces of clothing may have two different shades of the same color.