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MdaG, on Nov 6 2005, 03:15 PM, said:
I need to learn how to teleport, id, find food, get magical stuff, not get cursed stuff, survive wilderness encounters, not get corrupted, combine magic/missile and melee users etc.
By the way, those are some nice screenies for the review!
By the way, those are some nice screenies for the review!
Teleporting:
You can teleport through
- triggering a teleport trap
- reading a scroll of teleportation
- zapping a wand of teleportation
- casting Teleport/Ethereal Bridge on yourself
- teleportitis (gained through eating a pixie corpse, pool-drinking or corruption)
Keep in mind, though, that teleporting without teleport control is very annoying. There are rings and amulets of teleport control, and a few artifacts give teleport control as well, but the easiest way of gaining it is to eat a blinkdog corpse.
IDing:
You can identify items by casting Identify or Great Identify, but those are fairly expensive spells and most of the time you won't find the spellbooks anyway, so you basically identify items through scrolls of identify.
- a cursed scroll of identify will only identify the item you select. It will not reveal its status (i.e. whether it's blessed, uncursed or cursed), though.
- an uncursed scroll of identify will identify all items of the same category (like all potions, all scrolls, all amulets, etc) as the item you select. Again, it will not give you their status.
- a blessed scroll of identify will identify your entire inventory and tell you the status of each item as well.
One of the first things to do is to find out what a scroll of identify looks like in the first place, obviously, so check whether the shop in Lawlenilothel has one in stock. If it doesn't, just keep collecting scrolls until you have about ten or so and read one scroll from the largest stack in a safe place. Chances are, it'll either be an uncursed scroll of darkness or an uncursed scroll of identify. If it's a scroll of darkness, try the next highest stack, obviously.
Once you know what a scroll of identify looks like, try to get your hands on some holy water. (Find a coaligned altar (or convert either the altar or yourself if it isn't coaligned), sacrifice until the deity is "very pleased" and then drop all your watery potions on the altar.) Then dip ('!') your stack of uncursed scrolls of identify into the holy water to bless them.
Finding food:
- Go to Terinyo and buy some rations off Muxnip.
- Go up and down the stairs in the ID for a while, picking up all the rations you see lying next to the stairs.
- Better get used to the idea of eating corpses soon... There's very few corpses in the game that you can't eat. If your character has the food preservation skill, more corpses will be generated.
- If your character has herbalism, look out for stomafillia herbs; they're very nutricious, especially when they're blessed.
- Some potions are also very nutricious, so when you're desperate, drinking a potion might help you survive the few extra turns you need to reach a food source.
- If you reach the Arena in the CoC, find the ratling traders selling cooked lizards and buy up all their supplies.
Get magical stuff:
Be lucky, basically.
Not get cursed stuff:
Well, it happens, especially at the beginning. Scrolls of uncursing aren't all that rare, though. A blessed scroll of uncursing will uncurse every single cursed item in your inventory. Alternatively, if you've got some holy water to spare, you can just dip the cursed item into it.
Survive wilderness encounters
Remember that you don't have to fight everything in sight. If you have a wilderness encounter early on in the game, the best thing to do might be to switch settings to coward (F7) and try to flee as quickly as possible. Use bolt spells and missiles to fend off monsters before they get too close and try not to get surrounded. If you have a potion of invisibility in your inventory, drink it and escape while the monsters are still searching for you. Later on, wilderness encounters won't be that much of a problem, luckily.
Not get corrupted:
- Avoid melee with monsters that have corruption attacks. (Use missiles!)
- Avoid using / carrying around items that corrupt you if you use / carry them.
- Avoid triggering corruption traps.
and of course, most importantly:
- Avoid spending more time than necessary in highly corrupting areas, like Darkforge, the tomb of the high kings, the rift library or the lower levels of the CoC.
Try to get hold of items that remove corruption whenever you can.
Combine magic / missile and melee users:
As a rule of thumb: don't melee anything unless you're absolutely sure you can deal with it. And even if you can, it might be better to weaken the monster with a spell or a missile first. Make sure you use the tactics settings. Switching to "berserk" (F1) can be very helpful when firing missiles at a monster from a distance, but switch back to normal (F4) or defensive (F5) once the monster is standing next to you. Magic is nice to have, but you shouldn't rely too much on it, because you might run out of spellpoints or castings. Try to make sure you train all three (for example by killing that tension room full of rats with missiles or with a bolt spell for a change).
Or then I'm not, but I just had to test after I realized that my randomly generated female characters seemed to survive longer.
