I decided to try to finish on Going Rogue with Permadeath. Finally I made it to level 15. While looking around for Lord Dredmor, I stumbled into the monster zoo but quickly retreated as I didn't want to deal with it on the last level. As I walked off with the door closed, I started getting random XP notices above my head, slowly at first and then ramping up to maybe 4 or 5 per step I took. I'd had monster zoos before with a gargoyle trap in them do this, but I never got kills at anywhere near this rate. I started just spamming the space bar to let the monster zoo kill itself. I don't know how many turns I skipped, but I kept hearing traps go off so I just kept pressing the button really fast. Eventually I looked up and noticed that the monster count for the zoo had dropped from about 90 down to 9 and was holding steady there, despite all the traps I heard going off. I went ahead and carved myself an entrance into the monster zoo with the digging ray (to get a 1-width entrance instead of 3 width to avoid getting surrounded). In there I discovered: [*]8 flying monsters that don't trigger traps [*]1 "elite" monster that does trigger traps but had so much armor it took no damage from traps, wandering around the zoo aimlessly [*]My frame rate dropped to about 2 FPS [*]Pretty much the entire floor was coated with caltrops and caltrop releasing traps: Apparently the "Dragonsbreath Caltrop Eruptor" has a fun "feature" where when it gets triggered, not only does it spray out caltrops everywhere but it also spawns another one or two Eruptor traps as well. With just one of those in a crowded zoo, they multiplied exponentially, murdering nearly everything in the zoo, and then the remaining one immune elite ran around just multiplying them over and over again even more. I cleared out the last 9 monsters in the zoo (took forever at 2 FPS) and then started picking up all the traps (I had a trap skill of 20). That took even longer. If I couldn't use shift-click to put the traps in my inventory automatically I would have gone mad, but even doing that it took maybe 15 or 20 minutes to pick up all the traps. When I was done, this was the result (note: I clicked the "magnify UI" option before taking this screenshot): That zoo had: [*] 1,282 Quantum Caltrop traps [*] 1,188 Dragonsbreath Caltrop traps [*] 608 Dragonsbreath Caltrop Eruptor traps [*] I gained about a level and a half doing nothing but picking up those traps [*] If I had sold the traps they would have netted me around 500,000 zorkmids I had to uncover about 80% of the level before I found Lord Dredmor. I killed him, and got the "Left For Dread" achievement with a final score of 3,622,316, #62 on the Steam leaderboard. At a rough guess, I think around 360k, 10% of my total score, was just from picking up all the traps in that room.
This epic tale is magcificent! Good work on not only accomplishing this feat - but also in thinking to grab screen caps for us!
Yeah, just ran into these for the first time, glad they're getting gone. It doesn't help that they're ridiculously tough to disarm even for 13 trap affinity.
That's why you walk AROUND them. I make no attempts at disarming traps with less than a guarantee, unless it's something weak like a steam trap, but to each their own I guess.
I was under the impression no traps should be out of the reach of a full rogue with dedicated statting to trap affinity.
You need 16 trap affinity for dragon breath caltrop eruptors(100% disarm). Or 17 to pick them up. So you need tinkering and something else(archeology/burglary). Or some gear that boosts it.
I had tinkering, Rogue Scientist, Perception, and a fair bit of gear, but I only had 13 despite levelling them all to max. *shrug* I guess if you don't prep for the end game, there will be traps out of reach.
Maybe some sort of consumable that gives a trap removal bonus for a limited time would be a nice way to help people not have the issue Shaxarok faces. Alchemy or tinkering, both even - potions, trap-disarming probes, etc.
Now there's a good mod idea if I've ever heard one. When I resolve the Plague Dottore/Plaguebearer/Magic Missile situation, if nobody else has become interested in doing it I'll take a look.
Heck, even a wand designed to do things like disarm traps, unlock doors and chests, and flip levers would be great. Basically something approximating the "Knock" spell from D&D.
Unfortunately all of those actions are hardcoded and not moddable. The closest you can get is using summons to trigger traps or knock spells to move them(the rest are completely untouchable). :/
