Dredmor 1.0.10 Feedback Thread

Something doesn't sound right there. I Remember encountering that specific problem with that specific item, but there were in fact 2 of them stacked, it just didn't look like it. I don't recall if alt-click worked (pretty sure it did), but I was definitely about to split them and get my (insane achievement of tackling randomness).

 

On the belt. It will only accept an item, if slots 1-5 have items in them already, otherwise, the item will be placed in the lowest numbered free slot on the belt. It's not a big deal, and nothing I really get annoyed about. Certainly nothing to quit playing the game over.

 

That is a very weird bug.
I've never seen that.

 

Playing for Both Teams is still broken for me, as has been reported by a number of posters.

 

EDIT: Crownstar is level 14, and has Artifact Quality 27. So XP total is 22,680 when you send one to the museum. Which is huge, but not quite as much as I was imagining it to be. Probably takes two per level-up at that stage in the game (unless you're on NTTG). Maybe it's okay, after-all. Hmm..



Original Post:

This is no doubt a knee-jerk reaction to a post in another thread, but I'll share it anyway. It's a data-point for the devs...

I find myself a little concerned about the frequency of Crownstar Addendum drops. They're all over the place on the forest floor.

Obviously, that makes each individual crownstar feel less special (whereas in 1.0.9 they felt very special), and it puts the final nail in the coffin of the monetary system. Both of which are pretty minor complaints, especially given that not all players will even make it to the final floors.

More importantly, it means Archaeology builds can skip at least 3 or 4 floors near the end. They can grab the first staircase on each floor from Pandemonium on down until they hit the Forest, and once there can send Crownstars to the Museum for a level-up each. There's enough Crownstars lying around that there's no downside to them having skipped all those floors. Time and boredom are the only thing stopping them from maxing out all their skills at this stage, but since they've skipped 3+ floors and the monster zoos, they can hit the spacebar a lot and still come out ahead in terms of time and boredom.

I'm a bit split on what I think about this.

Seems kinda abusive on Archaeology in particular (it was already good enough in 1.0.9 that some players take it with every character, and got a scaling boost to Charlemagne in 1.0.10). Recent developments in Fungal Arts suggests the design philosophy is actively trying to prevent "man vs boredom" spacebar abuse optimization. And what's the point of having 15 floors if optimal play just skips a big chunk of them anyway?

On the other hand, I think the tendency for some builds to skip certain floors is a good thing, as it's a subtle bit of extra strategic depth and increases variety of play experience. Prometheans sometimes skip the lava level. Low-armor rogues (and low-patience Vegans) sometimes skip the muscle diggle level. Etc. Honestly, I wouldn't be upset if there were more of that sort of thing throughout the game. My only misgiving is that this is a big chunk of it given to a single skill, and isn't about the details of the specific floors being skipped.

Easiest possible fixes, should anyone else feel this is an issue, would be:
1) Up the level of the Crownstar to 16 so it doesn't spawn nearly as often on the final floors.
or
2) Set the Crownstar to special="1" so it almost never spawns.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go make an Archaeology character and find out if abusing this is actually worth it.

 

Sorry for the double-post, but I figured editing a post in a thread that's had nothing new in several days would go unnoticed.
Re: Archaeology and Crownstar Addendum
I tested the Archaeology-Crownstar abuse. NTTG, GR. Boy is it sick.

I skipped nearly all of level 10, half of floor 11, nearly all of floor 12, and a small portion of 13. Basically, if any of the monsters were annoying me (doing damage of a type I couldn't resists, stealing my booze, etc) I just fled down the first staircase I found.

I arrived on level 14 with 4 skill levels left to finish out. From basically nothing but sending Crownstars to Museum, I was able to complete those last four character levels before I found the zoo on level 14. It took 4 crownstars, and two artifact weapons that I'd been carrying until I got lucky with a Dwarven Express Post on floor 14 and no longer needed them.

When I stumbled onto the zoo, since I no longer needed XP, I closed the door on it and headed for the stairs down. Skipped about 20% of floor 14 in the process.

I still had an extra Crownstar Addendum in my inventory, because I'd found 5 in my time on floor 14. There were also 2 more in the shop that I could have taken if I'd needed them. So if I'd skipped another zoo or two somewhere, I still could have maxed out all my skills thanks to Archaeology.

Got to Dredmor himself, and took a beating... I was really low on health and mana, but then I remembered that I still had an extra Crownstar in my inventory. I sent it to the museum, and leveled up instantly. Sure, there were no stat bonuses to gain or new skills to unlock, but leveling up still got me 130 hp back (I was down to less than 50 at the time) and a however much mana I'd used up, allowing me to survive till Dredmor was slain.

I was expecting the archaeology-crownstar rush to be a totally viable strategy, but I wasn't expecting the free healing and massive mana-replenishment for the climactic battle. That makes archaeology even more busted than I already suspected it was.

 

Sounds to me like sending things to the Museum needs to have a limit on max XP it can generate. The XP could easily be reduced across the board, and I wouldn't be too upset. Or just put a limit on it that no artifact can generate more than 1/10th the XP needed for your next level.

Item spawn rates at the endgame are an issue, sure. But we can disentangle these fixes.

 

I'll agree there's more than one way to skin a diggle.

A general fix to archaeology would be awesome, but might be more coding than Gaslamp has time for at the moment. They've got a lot on their plates. Disentangling the issues requires an unknown amount of work. Just how difficult it would be is unclear to me, since large chuncks of Archaeology are hard-coded instead of xml-based.

Introduction of special="1" or level="16" on the Crownstar would prevent the most outrageous abuse without taking more than 10 seconds of effort from the powers that be.

 

I don't know how level 16 would fix it. Won't that just make it never spawn?
Unless I'm missing something, there's no 16th floor, so anything with a level 16 shouldn't spawn.

Also, according to the game files Crownstar is already. <level="14"/>
<artifact quality="27" />
If the problem is the fact it spawns too much, isn't there way to change it besides special= 1.

As I also said somewhere else, if someone is going to go to all the trouble to zergrush down to floor 14 and start saccing Crownstars, they're playing the the game wrong. So, let them have their fun.
So, punishing the vast majority of us, for something the minority does seems a bit dickish.
It's like how only a few people abused the getting more than 2 ingots per smelt, and because of that, we all got stuck with 2 regardless of skill level.

Like I said, punishing the majority for the crimes of the minority is a bad idea.

 

No, there's a deviation of three or four floors. That's why you rarely see thaumite nests on the first floor, for instance.

 

Oh. Okay. I didn't know that.

 

On further reflection, I strongly favor special="1" instead of level="16". Given the scarcity of high-quality items for the game to spawn from, level="16" might not actually decrease the spawn rate much. It's going to spawn items on floor 14, and there's really not much else for it to choose from. If such a change doesn't make the crownstars spawn significantly less often, the extra 2 quality rating points will result in just that much more xp... which isn't an issue on NTTG (where each crownstar is a level-up on it's own and you'd just waste the extra xp) but would actually exasperate the problem on normal-sized dungeon levels (as it would increase it from 22,680 xp to 25,920 xp per crownstar).

 

In the light of that, I agree, putting the special tag would be better.
Even if that will reduce the amount of them spawning to one or two.

I'm still a big fan of leaving it in due to the fact that not everyone is going to abuse it.
Those who abuse it shouldn't make the majority of the players almost never find a Crownstar.
Unless i'm not sure what the Special tag does. I assume it makes it spawn very rarely.

 

Items with special="1" rarely ever show up on the dungeon floor. It happens from time to time, but I'm not sure if that's a bug or just really subtle coding on Nicholas' part.

Special="1" items still show up as quest and zoo rewards, and as items for sale in the shops. Depending on item type, they can still show up in vending machines, be created via crafting, etc.

It would make the Crownstar roughly as common as Doul's Possible Sword, maybe a little less frequent since the level rating is higher and it can't spawn in an evil chest. Like a Haematic Phylactery, you wouldn't find it in the dungeon very often, and when you did it would feel special.

The Crownstar can also sometimes spawn when you drink a fountain and get the "you find something at the bottom" message. The first time I ever saw a Crownstar, it was from a fountain on a really early level (floor 1 or 2, I think). That character cruised through the next several floors and went on to be my first ever to actually beat Dredmor.

I don't think special="1" would prevent the rare fountain-spawning, but only the Gaslamp coding staff could say for certain.

I think special="1" would basically set the Crownstar back to it's 1.0.9 rev B frequency, instead of the new 1.0.10 version where you get at least half a dozen of them on floor 14 and handful more between floors 12, 13 and 15. The spawn rate on it in 1.0.9 rev B was just about ideal: maybe 1 or 2 per game, usually in a shop and priced so high you had to resort to theft and/or murder if you wanted to get it.

 

Still getting autosave crashes (Linux 64 desura, no mods or dlc). Read that Nicholas might have fixed it after 1.0.10, but haven't seen any Desura updates.

Game is still playable because the crash happens after the autosave so I can just load back to within a minute of my last move, but combined with the stat changing bug (1 2) it made my necronomicon build way overpowered with hit points.

Also noticed that the autosave screenshot is almost never up to date. Perhaps the screenshot post autosave is causing the crash.

 

I haven't been having auto-save crashes (unless that's what was happening in the level 13 zoo and i just didn't make the correlation)...

...but I have also noticed that my auto-saves when I do look at them always have the wrong picture. The image is always a female character on dungeon level 2, regardless of what character or floor I'm on.

That part (at least) of the bug is not just Linux- or Desura-specific, then, because I'm on a Mac (a fact Nicholas knows well) using Steam.

 

Thank you for explaining the situation better, R_B.
I then fully agree with you, setting it to the special tag would be good, and reduce the Crownstar spam.

 

Not to nag everyone, but does the Desura RotDG have a No-Macs policy? (I do not use a Mac, but I know of at least one dedicated modder that does.)

Here is my evidence. I hope it is just an oversight.




Price cleared to protect the guilty. I have no idea if Desura has a regional pricing policy like some companies do, but I hope I sidestepped that hurdle.

And yes, my image editing skills suck like a ... Let me just stop there.

 

They suck like a black hole? Like an addicting game sucks up your free time?