Indirect nerf of crafting

Was it ever against it in rogue-likes?
In games where monster couldn't die out naturally after you killed some of them, it was only natural to farm certain monsters just because they were easy to farm or dropped something you wanted to have "just in case", or even because you needed some corpses to eat (don't ask for details, I was a fool back then and spent all my gold on some bauble on the black market, forgetting to buy rations for my character, using a scroll of recall to get back to floor hell-if-I-know-now-but-it-was-pretty-deep and getting hit with an attack that burned my other scroll or recall).

Well, if you get Perception or anything of the kind, you don't have to worry about using a few iron ingots occasionally. The only conundrum is, make them into steel or into rust (steel weapons versus healing potions).

 

Well, yeah, true. I don't mean to split hairs about it. Even Nethack had stuff like pudding farming and hanging around altars for sacrifices. Just I was more think of what it means for Dungeons of Dredmor that, with wizardlands, you have essentially infinity monsters and infinity loot drops. Even if you're a theoretical purist who never deletes the w_keys file, you still have like 90000 usable wizardlands per floor. That does kind of throw the resource management aspect of the game in for a loop. All you have to do if you're not ready to move deeper into the dungeon is trawl wizardlands until you're happy with what you have, both skill and loot-wise.

I'm just wondering if that's an intentional direction they're taking with the game.

 

I think it is. And we don't really need the wizardlands to get (potentially) infinite stuff - just take Perception and have some patience.

 

Well there's a balance issue as well. If you're willing to spend infinite time in wizardlands, your reward is infinite loot. Just like if you want to walk in a circle farming backspawns, you are rewarded (eventually) with infinite XP. The balance for both is time investment, and that's always been a constant if you wish to absolutely max everything.

I see the pocket dimension as the same... Nothing stopped you from dropping ALL your loot on the cleared monster zoo and just moving it from floor to floor, except willingness to invest time doing so. It's a boon for me, because I didn't have the patience to shuttle everything around before, and also now I can save potions of alchemical inspiration, chug one, then fiddle with my inventory all I want in the pocket dimension before it runs out... because it will never run out.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there some sort of hard limit on backspawns in the code?

I just want to clarify I'm not complaining. I love Wizardlands, and I even pretty much shamelessly reuse keys.

 

No, there is no limit on them. They just keep on spawning, and with enough patience you can kill a lot of them.

 

Honestly, given the current situation with crafting, I think bookshelves just should award you a different recipe if they hit a duplicate. It's not likely to unbalance things, and would make the situation where they feel less useful over time stop.

 

Ah, see, I was confused because I remember something about how rooms "use up" a certain supply of backspawns and that's why zoos don't have new spawns technically. But now that I think about it, that seems like way too much work to just keep players from playing the game the way they want to.

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Personally, I think encouraging farming is not a good thing. Who cares if past rogue-likes did it, it's simply a boring mechanic. "Well, everyone else did it" is not a good argument. (Besides, not everyone else did it -- some rogue-likes strongly encourage you to proceed to further levels using other mechanics, such as food rarity, etc.)

 

I wouldn't call this "encouraging" farming. I've beaten Dredmor multiple times without grinding anything, but I do clear out every floor every time, on FSF. I'd say grinding was encouraged if there was a sharp difficulty jump from every floor to the next, but it seems like a smooth enough progression to me that grinding isn't necessary. If you *really* want to walk in circles and kill everything, the option should be there. More options are almost always better, for the player.