I always drink from fountains in hope for some experience or at least some shock removal. I’m glad it’s not Nethack so there’s no 1% chance I will have to face an out-of-depth monster that easily one-shots me.

I remember time when kicking objects wasn’t explained in-game. When the hint was finally added, I felt in-love with the mechanic. Kicking is great, it’s one additional keypress and so many added opportunities!

Speaking of realistic mechanics, throwing is pretty important in this game. I only learned about its’ strength when I was watching ToneHack’s playthrough of IA.

I’m glad you had a fun time with it! The issue with saves did cause me some bad experiences thanks to my expectations from better executed saving systems in DCSS and Brogue. My best run (17 floors!) ended up because of this haha…

I would say it’s the opposite of DCSS in many ways. Like:

• There’s a tight clock named “shock”. Shock increases at a steady rate and the main way to reset it is to move to the next floor. There are some alternative ways but they are either rare (a potion) or have a big drawback (drugs causing addiction). I’m generally not a fan of hunger clocks in roguelikes but IA has a really good one.
• Every encounter can cripple you in a long-term. Taking a big chunk of damage in one turn causes you to gain wounds which can only be removed by expending your medkit uses. So melee leans heavily into resource management. Guns use ammo and throwing weapons are eventually lost. Spirit (local mana) is very limited, takes some time to restore and will kill you if you reach 0. IA is one of the most management-heavy roguelikes out there.
• No auto-explore but levels aren’t as big and you can’t return to previous floors so backtracking is limited. I personally don’t feel a need in auto-explore in IA.
• Enemies don’t give experience. You gain it through exploration and identification of items instead. Stealth is a very viable play style here.
• Experience goes into traits - straightforward upgrades to your character like +10% accuracy with ranged weapons or +1 armor etc. The main form of character progression is through accumulation of items. Potions and guns are particularly important in my experience.

As for how much work it is to play, I find it surprisingly chill. ID game is simple and straightforward, no shops so I don’t need to think about selling anything, no scrolls of enchant thing so I can just equip my current best stuff. You will be primarily occupied with trying to explore as much of the floor as you can before shock and enemies overwhelm you.

My only problem with the game is how it treats saving. The ONLY way you can save is by reaching stairs and choosing to “save and quit” the game. If you choose to proceed to the next floor instead, or if you load up your save after saving and quitting, you will need to beat the new floor until you get a chance to save the game. Quitting in any other way deletes your save file. It sucks.

As far as I can tell the policy was established in the late 80s and lasted through the first half of 90s. Here’s a relevant link.

Wine isn’t the rarest and most expensive liquid.

It is the most expensive liquid that might be included in the recipe for curing Ironshank. I don’t know if it’s the rarest among them but it isn’t (easily) found on the ground the way asphalt and some others are.

You are right, I’m so focused on the post itself that I forget to check what I put into the link field :D

Dude’s literally .

Unfortunately I splatted in Ziggurat. “Just one more floor” - famous last words. Went all the way to Zig:17 and was destroyed by Gehenna-themed floor. Oni got hands!

DCSS shows just how bad humans are at interpreting statistics.

I like how Crawl gives a player really tough choices. For example, Death talisman prevents you from suffering a lot of annoying late-game punishments like Torment and Malmutate but it also prevents you from drinking potions making otherwise safe situations (e.g. being confused by a golden eye) into a dire threat.

Nope, SIf’s death message would be blue. Actually, you just made me realize Sif Muna doesn’t have a death message. Interesting.

At the moment when it popped up I didn’t know what that message was about so it gave me a good laugh. After some thinking I figured it happened because, at some point before dying I saw a staff but didn’t approach, died a bit later and all unidentified stuff I’d seen was IDed, and it just so happened that this staff was the only type I hadn’t encountered in this run (staff of cold magic, most likely).

I seriously don’t play often enough with Sif Muna, because Heplhjdtfhxhdh always seems so good… 🥴

I want to eventually get a win with every god so I keep trying new ones. Hepli was my most recent win btw, their battlemage carried my frog archer til the end. Very strong god indeed.

It is fun!

Pixel Dungeon was my first roguelike and Shattered was my first win in a roguelike too! DCSS in comparison is much more complex and combat-focused. No hunger, no inventory management, no consumable puzzles.

But it’s much more varied in ways you can approach combat. There’s melee of course, then there are all sorts of spells (shooting spells, summoning spells, necromancy, martial buffs…) plus every character will also join a god, each with their own unique gameplay. It might be a bit overwhelming but it’s very rewarding once you ‘get it’.

What class do you normally play?

I jump between different builds and have won with each ‘major’ build except stabbers (that make enemies vulnerable with stealth and magic then one-shot them with a dagger). My favorite is Shapeshifter who changes into different forms throughout play gaining unique innate abilities.

DPS is more important I’d say but high speed helps when you hit every deadend on your way through a comically large Caves 2.

To be honest, I never consider Boss Rush for items alone. Unless you have a lot of speed AND high DPS you won’t make it in 20 minutes, and even if you’re strong enough you need to skip a lot of opportunities (secret, cursed and challenge rooms, at the very least) just to gain two items from treasure item pool which is… not great. Every time I enter Boss Rush I just look at the items and am like “ugh, okay. I’ll pick the least underwhelming one.”

Hush gives you more time and is more viable to do consistently but the fight itself is way too tough to justify the (pretty neat ngl) rewards of Hush’s floor. I don’t do Hush unless I’m after the unlock.

Among the roguelites I have experience with I’d say TBoI is the most minmax-friendly and, from watching other people play, I think most players do fall into some basic minmaxxing.

Though, admittedly, my definition of min-maxxing is rather broad. I include returning to a treasure room every time your D6 charge up as min-maxxing, for instance.

Xom is always such a hellish ride lol! I didn’t play them since 0.32, need to check them out again with the new bazaars.

Amusingly, mayhem is a unique orb brand because all the other brands scale heavily with evocation skill nowadays yet mayhem still has a fixed effect. But it’s the one the most likely to backfire so that makes sense.

They rarely provide anything really good for characters who can clear them while also forcing you to burn through lots of your consumables. It can be fun though, a nice way to remind yourself that this game has permadeath and you can’t just smash two buttons until victory.

With all the new orbs I completely forgot about the orb of mayhem to the point that I was shocked to see it in one of my recent games.

the affected monsters get buffed.

Yara’s Violent Unraveling reasons B)

The closest to in-fighting in DCSS is a wand of charming that makes an enemy fight for you for some time. Unfortunately, it’s single-targeted and can fail against its target’s willpower.

If I would need to open this mess and deal with it, I’d do the following:

• Clear the entire floor first, making sure to not disturb anything inside with noise (they won’t open the blue doors but that’ll still mess up my plan, see below);

• Open the blue doors then make a few steps away from the vault (enemies are still not aware of me);

• Drink a potion of lignification that will turn me into a tree (we’ll need it for a later step);

• Probably drink some other potions like resistance (to not be one-shotted by the dragon), invisibility and especially haste;

• Shout to attract attention of the enemies;

• Read a scroll of immolation - it applies a special status effect to all enemies, making them take additional fire damage when they lose health and explode when they die, heavily damaging anyone who stands close;

• Read a scroll of torment halving everyone’s health in half (which is considered an attack, so it’ll trigger the immolation’s fire damage) - it usually applies to the player too but the tree form grants immunity to it;

• Read torment again if it wasn’t enough;

• Read a scroll of teleportation and then walk around the floor, killing off whoever is still alive.

With this plan, my chances to win would probably be higher than the risk of death.