Ease up, this particular one isn't in the game yet. There are other secrets out in v0.31, though. If you find an odd grave and there's a hole down there...why not climb in? Let's just say I've been experimenting with illusory objects. In the current release, I added a room that appears to be filled with fire fields - the whole thing is a fake, of course, and if players walk through the wall of fire they end up on the other side unharmed. Naturally, the next step is fake walls you can walk through, although I WILL say you'll need a teleport to get to FaxRoom. The room that hides FaxRoom essentially looks like one of the common building block rooms throughout the dungeon. And yes, I perfectly intend for people to stumble upon this sort of thing by accident. It's a wizard mob, so it's intended to be weak in melee (try a spell and be surprised). I was considering giving it blink, but then there's be the chance it'd blink off somewhere unreachable, and I didn't want that. The only reason it's not spamming Infernal Torus, though, is because it burns itself to death otherwise. And I mean the burn condition, which deals damage based off max HP and ignores all resists. The ticker message is working just fine on my side, so it's probably just the combat log being funny again. How was it? Too tough? Not tough enough? Loot appropriately rewarding? All my screenshots are on the first floor because that's how I summon up the rooms using the testroom function. Nope, nothing there.
I'll keep what you said about the walls in mind. Also, the fight wasn't too difficult but that was only because I managed to get in close, and fast, before it could spam a lot of attack spells at me. Mostly, I blame my luck of getting the hand grenades on the floor in front of the altar area. They hurt it pretty good. The loot was good, even if I only got the Dragonbone Helm and a Crystal Carapace. If I was a mage, I'd love that Carapace.
Sure... That's what you want us to believe so we won't even bother looking on that floor. You can't fool me.
Damnit! I was just there... One of the candles had a corpse on it and I could not read what it said. (I was too lazy to wait for the corpse to disappear to read it.)
Ah. I see. Lol. I do very much like the attention to detail. Thanks for that. If ever you need a kidney... Mine are already shot to Hell and back... But good luck with that.
Just died to a 147 monster zoo. Single large room on sauna level. Used about 10 potions (replenishment, 2 regeneration, the rest buffs of various kinds), 2 squidbolts, the last 3 charges of my coral wand, a cake and an omelette. Retreated outside and fought them one at a time for a while. Got it down to 19 monsters, and back to full health, so I dared poke my head inside to fire bolts at any lingering casters. A green dragon starts spitting acid bolts across the room. I teleport over to fight him, and my weapons that had been killing everything on the floor in two hits failed to take a quarter off his HP before I died. The entire experience seemed a bit OP. Just a data point for your consideration.
Hrm, sir...that should not be happening. Here's the stats on swamp wyrmlings: DL6 monster, 5 fighter levels, 8 rogue levels 2 9 10 10 10 -10 3 7 10% gargoyle acid bolt 10% on-hit Vile Gunk Compared with a Swarmy: DL5 monster, 4 fighter levels, 9 rogue levels 6 2 -2 310 Overall, a swamp wyrmling shouldn't be THAT much tougher than a swarmy. The fact that it's two levels out of level on DL4 might have been a problem, as well as the fact that most of its damage comes from acidic, which as Kazeto points out, doesn't have that much in the way of base-game resists. I may shift some of the damage from acidic to blasting, if that's the problem. I've personally never had much trouble killing them even as a rogue (which they're supposed to counter), but I may just not have been doing the right thing, or simply gotten lucky in all my playtests. May I please have the skillset you were using? Never had a problem with 150-zoos on GRPD myself, but if there're builds which pose problems I'll have to fix them. Edit: Just nerfed the floor 1 zoo to have 4 less spaces. We'll see how it goes.
Wow. Then I just got RNG screwed. The dragon was on screen for four actions before I teleported to him, and he hit me with an acid bolt on every one of those four actions. I'd tried to back track, but he was moving behind me and the nearest corner was still a ways away. So, I'll admit teleporting to him wasn't a good idea, but my only teleport was from swiftstriker, so I could either spend half a dozen turns moving away from what looked like a 100% spell chance or I could teleport to him and expect him to go down in 2 to 3 hits. Which he didn't. In retrospect, I guess it's not surprising the dragon didn't go down. My evil chest weapon was dealing both putrefying and toxic damage, augmented with more presumably-toxic boosts from Poisoneer's neurotoxin, both of which your dragon has resist to. Plus, for the middle third of the zoo, my attacks were pumped by one of your pokemon protein potions, which had probably made me grow cocky. By comparison, there was one swarmy in the zoo, he went down in 2-ish hits like most things I was facing. Looking at the resists, however, I can expect that my weapon was doing about 8 more post-resistance damage per hit (plus whatever neurotoxin does) to him than to the dragon. Further, I had the misfortune of coming down the stairs to a room with 1 door, behind which was a large open room (your rectangular church with 3 shrines), and behind that the huge zoo. So there wasn't much in terms of chokepoints, and my only option to keep from getting surrounded was to put the stairs at my back. Nothing you can do about that. These things happen. It's all just data points. Probably not worth revising anything based on this alone, just keep an ear open for if anyone else has similar experiences. I do say though, with some builds in the main game (at least on GRPD), sometimes the default 100-monster zoo is really tough. Another +50% monsters without something to break that up is pretty harsh. Personally, if I were going to code a zoo with that many extra monsters, I'd probably do something to make it less likely to come up (such as giving it a single door, or restricting it to a single floor, or pumping up the size really huge with water/goo/ice so it was less likely to spawn) or at least build a choke point or cover into it. Of course, i haven't read your files, so for all I know it might only spawn on this one floor, or have just 2 door spawn points. If so, please disregard that criticism. Let's see, build was Dire Gourmand, Poisoneer, Silver Tongue, Swiftstriker, Viking Wizardry, and two others whose names escape me at the moment because I never put points in them. I'm not saying it's a great build or that those skills were chosen for their synergy or anything. It was my first time playing everything but Swiftstriker and Viking Wizardry and I literally didn't know what any other skill did until I purchased it. There was no game plan, it was just "fly by the seat of your pants" gaming. None the less, I'd kicked butt all over the first three floors and never really felt challenged until that zoo, where suddenly it went from "easy" to "damn hard". I'm sure a big part of my success had to do with this crazy kronged cookbook I was carrying, and the lone 'burst bolt' I'd found and used on the (much smaller) floor 3 zoo. But still. On the bright side, now I get to go try out a whole new set of modded skills.
Perhaps to avoid RNG screwing, you should stop playing on Permadeath for a bit? I may be a bit biased because I always play on Elvish Easy and Non-Permadeath, but that would allow you to both enjoy it more, and not worry about having your face melted off like that one Nazi guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yeah, Sir. Looking at it, the resistances probably were the problem. One of the complaints brought up (especially by Sniktch) when I first joined the forum was how evil chest weapons were potentially overpowered; as I mentioned, swamp wyrmlings are anti-rogue monsters, and the resists were built into it specifically to counter the physical glass-cannon builds that rely on evil chest damage output. Most of my boss monsters have significant resistance to toxic, necro and putrefying, too, but those encounters are purely optional. I'm not so sure if I want to keep the general "make the game extreme both ways" feel as far as it is currently. Sure, I give players good food and gear; grab bag wands were originally slated to spawn only in special rooms that would be level restricted, but unfortunately the game's spawning system refuses to cooperate where it comes to wands and potions and as such I had to dilute out the drops so that 50% of the time they're useless. On the other hand, hordes and ambushes are more common, and as you mentioned, zoos are larger. Still, there is the "I am an awesome god of war" feel I really, really want to keep. In any case, I've divided the 150-monster zoo in two like the 200-monster one, so players can catch their breath between each 75 before moving on. That change should go live in 0.33. Again, Sir, thank you for your detailed report.
I enjoyed your telling of your death. I would mourn for you too, but I am a callus bastard who is trying to steal a dungeon from a lich... Probably to torture kittens at that... I am glad you can now enjoy *All* the mods on your Mac. I promise you will enjoy them greatly. I have enjoyed yours too.
Personally, without permadeath, I find the game a little tedious. Every encounter will be resolved correctly eventually, with no set back more than a few minutes of play. The game currently allows a lot of different play styles (difficulty settings, PD or not, melee vs ranged vs casting, whether to mess with crafting or just fisk every low-value item you pick up, etc), and that's part of it's charm. So it's cool that you like it on Easy with no PD. For me, though, I want the game to sometimes slap me down, and I want every victory to feel hard-earned. Challenge is good. Danger is good. It just felt like a huge spike in both all of a sudden, which may or may not be good, so I gave him a data point. I had a great deal of fun fighting that zoo, but I was thankful when it seemed to be over because it was getting to be a bit of a slog and had used up a larger share of resources than most zoos do. I stepped in for wrap-up, and one monster in the back did me more harm than the 130+ guys before him. Having never encountered that monster before, I didn't know if this was just RNG screw or resist-mismatch, or if the dragon in question had ridiculous stats (which doesn't seem to be the case). So I reported it, and got a very illuminating response - I was using the exact worst weapon and skill combo for that particular monster. That's cool. That's part of the game. I approve. Kill me some more.
Evil Chest weapons also sometimes get boosts to Aetherial or Righteous. Do with that what you will. Really? I'm not sure I follow you. Feels like I'm missing something. Do wands not behave the same way as potions? Potions disobey a few basic rules other items use, such as star quality, but you can still set them to almost never spawn. I was just having a conversation yesterday about the haematic phylactery. It's got a tags that make it very unlikely to spawn on the dungeon floor, though it does from time to time show up in vending machines, shops, or starting gear of an alchemist. It's not ideal, but it's not terrible either. I would think that if you used the same tag(s) -- I think it's just special="1", but maybe it also has craftoutput="1"? -- you could accomplish the same result. Put a high enough pricetag on the item (about the same as a squid bolt) and the combo of rarity and price would keep it from getting out of hand, shouldn't it? About once every hundred hours the game flips out and puts something where it shouldn't, but it's hard for such infrequent and random effects to really hose game balance. I've seen 1 deep omelette and 2 phylacteries inexplicably lying on the floor in my time with the game, and once pulled a Crownstar Addendum from a fountain on floor 1, but even the later didn't wreck balance nearly as much as I expected it to. Thank you, but I'm not sure that was warranted. One guy says "this is too tough" is not really grounds for a major nerfing. It's just a data point. Clearly, my experience was colored by a random bad pairing of damage and resistance types. It's possible all the room needed was a small bit of cover in the middle, or one fewer door, or a slightly less whiny player. I would encourage you to stand your ground against lone detractors, even when I'm the lone detractor. There's no need to revise drastically just because one person got hosed, especially in a roguelike.
Sir: All wands, even if you add the special or craftoutput tags to them, still appear to randomly spawn, especially in cases where rooms call for a potion or wand to be spawned but don't specify the subtype. In the case of the grab bag wands (sealed box, deluxe box and lost loot) they all have the special and craftoutput tags, but still spawn randomly as opposed to weapons or armour, which work well (I've never seen a bone or obsidian item that randomly spawned, thank goodness. It would break the whole idea of those items) enough with those tags. Also, wands and potions appear to ignore level restrictions and the like when randomly spawning, so that was another problem. It created problems for me initially because the wands were split into three tiers of items: sealed boxes were appropriate for DLs 1-5, deluxe boxes for 6-10 and lost loot for 11-15. Having them spawn incorrectly would mean players would have too many out-of-level items, so I went ahead and diluted their chances with rice balls and grimy food. It also provided an interesting mechanic, to allow the player to sell the grab bag to Brax for a hefty sum of or risk getting something worthless out of opening the box. In the end, I think it's worked out reasonably well, though. It would be optimal if wand and potion spawning were fixed, but as-is, it's managable.
Weird that you should experience it that way. How often are you seeing Haemetic Phylacteries show up randomly on the floor? As I said, I find them really very rarely. Strikes me as odd that you can't replicate that behavior using those two tags. EDIT: Just noted that in the main game, the phylactery and alchemical inspiration potions are formatted: craftoutput="1" special="1" whereas yours have that reversed: special="1" craftoutput="1" Seems unlikely that that would cause the problem, given that most of Dredmor's syntax doesn't really care much about ordering of tags, but it's not theoretically impossible. Spells that are triggered have to be listed before the other spells that trigger them, for example. I've modded for other games that really cared about the order of such things. So it might be worth swapping the order next time you're fiddling with the items file, and see if that makes them rarer. On the other hand, it could just be that since you've got 3 times as many 'special' potions, the existing bug that causes the infrequent wrong-spawning of a main game 'special' potion just happens 3 times as often. Hmm.
Since I almost never get something good from the grab bag wands, honestly, they seem to be weighted to 80% bad, 20% good, if I'm lucky, can you point out where in the code to change that, so I can actually see what they give you, besides grimy food/jelly donuts. I have never gotten anything from them, that I would consider unbalanced to find randomly lying on the floor on floor 1 in the second room. Like those bolts of mass destruction that can spawn in packs of 3 in those archery rooms. Now that's unbalanced to find really early. I understand that you diluted them, but until I read what you said, I thought they were cursed to not drop good items a lot, as to make them mostly useless. And I do understand where you're going from, r_b_bergstrom, and I'm glad you enjoy the challenge. The only real reason I play on Elvish Easy, and non-Permadeath is because I don't like dying... And even on Elvish Easy, I do die a bit. Current game seems to want to spawn Mysterious portals on every floor. 4 floors in a row had them. Did I win the lottery? A Crownstar Addendum, and a mask of the Golden God are really nice things to find on the first few floors.
