In my opinion, the only way a knight can keep up with a spell caster is b\y getting rank 60 bow. With haste, you can reach 0 recovery and basically machinegun down every non-physical immune monster in the game. In fact, with a bow of darkness, you can maintain full hp while doing this, and this is what I am going for.

The challenge then, is to survive until you get all the skills and items you need to become unbeatable. This requires mostly high level, haste skill, and a good bow of darkness or quickness.

As usual with solo challenges, I gave all starting bonuses to my lone character. In this case, I allocated 20 to intellect and personality and 25 to everything else. I gave my knight bow and bodybuilding. I ordinarily would give my knight bow and disarm, but with solo challenges, health matters a lot at the start and disarm trap skill can be obtained in New Sorpigal.

Starting off, I drowned my three characters, and then spent the first half of the day clearing New Sorpigal of monsters while collecting herbs and gold. I left all the chests unopened as I did not have disarm trap yet. Fortunately, after 6PM, I was able to get dagger and disarm trap skills as well as all the useful misc. skills.

With solo melee character, white potions become your best friends. At the start, the most important three potions are Extreme Energy, Extreme Protection, and Super Resistance. These give a huge boost to early game powers and are also not on a timer, meaning as long as you don't sleep, they persist! I also made black potions when possible. The most useful ones are endurance, might, accuracy, and speed.

A further note, dagger is the best melee weapon for most of the game due to the faster attack speed. With haste potion and high speed attribute, you can get 3-4 attacks sometimes before your enemy can retaliate in turn-based mode. Once you get Mordred, it will be your main melee weapon for rest of the game. Furthermore, I won't be levelling any other weapon skills aside from bow at all, so dagger is the best. Furthermore, at rank 1, the other weapons are simply too slow to be useful.