I've tried on many an occasion to get into it, but I always seem to get a combination of frustrated and bored after about half an hour of playing. I can see how it is similar to Dungeons of Dredmor (which I have more than 300 hours of play-time on, I obviously like that game), so I was wondering if there was a simple concept I am missing out on.
I actually have this problem myself - I've put about 15 hours in and haven't gotten more than a single crafting recipe, leaving 90% of my items useless.
It depends on your playstyle and your character. Characters do make a difference. But The Pit is... Arduous, I think that's the best word. It drains you, and it doesn't so much challenge you as present constant resistance to you. I've been fine with the Ranger, though. She uses most skills to some degree, but I've found focusing more on Blade, Melee, Decryption and Foraging to be quite useful, but you do need Electronics and perhaps Mechanical if you want to focus on getting recipes. And no, recipes are rare. Some you find, some you discover. (Hint: Raw Meat cooks to, uh, Cooked Meat. Tarka Warbread + Cooked Meat = Sotswich. You can put tainted meat into a purifier to get safe meat.) But really it's more you discover recipes by trying and working them out from decrypted messages rather than the DoD way of giving you the actual recipe. To be fair, it does kinda work against you because a lot of the logical options (e.g. cooking safe meat) don't work. It's kinda weird because whilst Dredmor is more involving in the combat, The Pit is more involving in the non-combat aspects. So whilst the combat's a bit simplistic and, well, kinda un-fun in a way, it's the other stuff that's meant to engage you.
Their wiki has a lot of info on it. If you don't mind spoilers, you can find crafting recipes here: http://sword-of-the-stars-the-pit.wikia.com/wiki/Recipes
I definitely recommend looking at the recipes on the wiki otherwise a big part of the game (crafting) will be missing for you. I never understood why they would gate recipes in such a hard way either. (Have to have a character with enough computer skill to repair most consoles, then with a high enough decrypt skill to decrypt the recipe, which is rare, and even THEN only some of the hundreds of messages are recipes.)
Always pick every lock on the floor. Don't pick up keys, they just deny you valuable door XP. Pump your foraging early, it's vital to long-term survival.
One way to enjoy the Pit is revisiting it when they update the thing! (KP just updated it.) Accordingly, I put some more time into my Liir run and snagged a few more messages. (I think they must have upped the spawn rate of the consoles- I just had a floor 11 with SIX of the things). A few new weapons, a few new items, and a new enemy round out the update, along with the traditional fixing of broken bits. In general terms, I'd echo the advice to pump foraging early and often. Also avoid that useless Marine guy. Its like a self-inflicted late-game additional difficulty mode. And the Psion is potentially the best late-game character, in terms of usable equipment and stats.
The Marine is easier in the beginning of the game but the other characters tend to be better later in the game unless you are lucky.
How far is "farthest?" You can, of course, win with the Marine. But the combination of his low skill point gain adds up after a while, and he is less likely to be able to open loot containers in the beginning, which means less loot and XP. Further, the Marine gains less XP than most (all?) of the other classes. So much so that it is not uncommon for a Marine on floor 40 to be level 36 or so, while a Psion could be 43. I had a psion (no blue room bump) that was level 47 on floor 40, according to the high scores list.
If you want the overall easiest run possible though, I recommend the liir, and invest in manifestation. The combination of metabolic control and manna can make food a non-issue. Between that, cure, and heal, you can basically remove any sort of clock and play the game at your own leisurely pace... and ammo isn't really a big deal either when your psionics can outdamage most high-end weapons. Manifestation is really key in my limited experience, fire is fantastic for wiping out packs of weaker enemies (particularly good for proteans after they split), and dissolve negates much of the threat posed by Spoiler cyborg hiver queens, masterminds, stim towers, indoctrination towers, and those awful garbage disposal things. It starts with such incredible overall skills that you can afford to neglect weapon skills and many of the scavenging skills, though I'd still invest in foraging of course.
What I don't like is that I heard about the new DLC on steam and that they patched the game and with that patch added a few items and I purchased it on GOG and it still doesn't have them. I heard about them either Thursday or Friday last week and steam had them and now it's Tuesday night and still no sign on GOG. The developers said they went to GOG at the same time as steam and GOG tended to be slow and it might be a few days. It has been at least 4 or 5 days and still nothing. It's very annoying as I want to try the new stuff out.
Steam's ability to rapidly deploy new content is one of the reasons I continue to use them. GOG, from what I recall, doesn't have the ability to allow devs to push patches and content like Steam does. Its been a sad trend for the GOG Pit users for most of the game's lifecycle. Despite getting gamefiles from the devs within hours of each other, GOG releases the material significantly later than Steam. Its even worse given KP's tendency to sneak in content updates with their patches.
That doesn't seem quite right. Lars Doucet announced a DefQ patch had been sent and was up on GOG within minutes of that. Or maybe it was a one-off It might be that GOG were pushing for a certain day for the DLC, but they've also had a few things going on and the delay of the Tex Murphy game did seem to create a bit of a mess. I think it's only just arrived on GamersGate, too. But the game's structure and updating is an utter mess outside of Steam. I got a second copy via that Humble Bundle simply so I could play it, 'cos I got sick of having to redownload the whole thing nearly every time it got patched.
Well in my experience GoG is slower too. On steam you can just upload stuff yourself, and you have control, while on GoG they want you to upload the stuff to them 24 hours in advance.
Gamersgate is similarly plagued by taking forever to update, yep. Thankfully you can just get a steam key and forget where you originally bought the game.
GOG has the new DLC The Pilgrim. I don't know when the 1.2.5 update arrived, it never told me but there isn't a patch. I have to download The Gold 1.1GB package again to get the update. I would have preferred a patch as I already have the game installed. Oh well, I am re-downloading The Gold package and will try installing it on top of my game and see if it works. I have also purchased The Pilgrim DLC and will download that 1GB file afterwards and will then install it. Oh well, I still have around an hour left on the download before I can install it.
