2 or 3 times now I will have been playing a character and be on floor 3 or 4 or so, and suddenly my character's health will drop from somewhere around half (which is usually around 30 or so at this point?) to 0 and they will fall over dead. The cause of death will be listed as a spell mine, but I can't work out what this actually is. It doesn't seem to be a trap because I'm sure it's happened while I've been standing still, and I've not seen or heard any effect being played for a monster using a spell or skill against me. I think it tends to happen when I'm clearing monster zoos, but I can't be too sure of that. Can anyone tell me what they actually are and how to avoid spontaneous death from them?
What skills are you using? A spell mine is typically a cast and forget spell such as Fire Rune or Gog's Tactical Pyre that has a single-target initial hit and then AoE, or just attacks any target that steps into its activation square. This also applies to certain traps.
I think acid puddles fall into this category as well. If you're standing in a bunch of zoo corpses they can sometimes be hard to see.
A spell mine is a class of effect in the game code, used for pretty much any effect that hits anything that steps in a single targeted square, possibly repeatedly. Obvious Fireball's flamefield? Spell mine. Those weird puddles of goo you sometimes get under your feet when fighting blobbies and clones? Spell mines. The cloud of gas you get from a Brimstone Flask? A bunch of spell mines. Rune of Exploding? A spell mine that creates a field of even more spell mines. So basically it could have been just about anything. If you're on level 4 and getting hit while standing still, my money's on the thermoblobby. They'll occasionally drop a pretty nasty spell mine under your feet when they hit you, and if you're just standing in it and don't have any fire resist it'll probably kill you within a few turns.
Could it be also a sort of blue square on the dungeon floor? I just saw a blue outline on the floor, but it had no tooltip at all. I stepped on it, and it promptly vanished with a sort of whooshing sound. I've no idea what to make of it. Why did it have no tooltip?
Oh, that's something different. It's not a full square, right, just the corners? That's a special room event where stepping on the square acts as, I believe, a full heal and full uncurse? Not sure of the exact effects, though. That's not a "spell mine" because it's not created by a spell and it's permanent.
Right. It's just the corners. I just found a red one; the other one I found was blue. They are in a room with what looks like some water and couple braziers. I don't know how to take a screenshot. The Steam overlay isn't working for Dredmor and nothing I press captures the screen. I don't know why the square doesn't have a tooltip.
Printscreen-Alttab-PasteinPaint works for most Windows users. The red square *usually* summons 4 monsters and gives you a Dim Vision debuff. Sometimes it does nothing. It seems to be random. Blue square as mentioned heals+cleanses.
