Arendil, If your game takes 90% CPU permanently it only means one thing, you dont have one of those utterly modern thing called: a real opengl driver ...

Yes, but suppose I had overlooked that letter #100 (or something like that) - I would have searched the entire game world for it in vain until I finally try that very first area again? In that case I strongly suggest you reorganize the numbering so the players know when they missed something in between. Say, all lore items of the first quest (or area?): #1 to #10 (that is, including both the diary pages and the letter that otherwise would have been listed with a number of 100 or higher) , second quest (or area?): #11 to #20 etc.
EDIT: Mind you, I don't know how many lore items there are per quest or area respectively. I was just simplifying.

DarkGod, tried few different drivers in the past without any noticable results.
But, just gave it another shot couple of minutes ago, and last NVIDIA driver makes things better, like 50-60% processor usage at max, around 30% most of the time. Yay!

Unfortunately, still get frequent drops to ~10-15 FPS. With everything disabled in options.

Its a roguelike. Under no circumstances should it use 90% CPU no matter how incompatible something is. Have a text mode option or something, yikes.

I've written too soon. It was relatively good until Daikara, i.e. massive slowdown, constant 90-97% CPU used, like 5 FPS, massive slowdown. Did I mention massive slowdown? Not yay!

emulord, have you played ToME at all? Bother to read previous comments? Or are you just trolling?

I played one of the Tome 4 versions, and it felt kinda bloated and weird gameplay wise.
I liked the 2.* Tomes, and I usually don't like Skill-based levelling up systems. I didnt like Sangband or Crawl, but I did like Steamband and DoomRL. I'm not sure what causes me to like or dislike skill-based versus automatic levelups.

Actually, was it not for the performance issues and bugs, I'd say that ToME 4 is years ahead of most other roguelikes, or some commercial games. It's just fun to play.
That's why I check every other beta, hoping for crash fixes or performance improvements...so far, despite some slowdowns, this beta is quite promising.

Since its been awhile since I played one of the early betas, I gave the release candidate a try. It worked smoothly for me. Win XP 32 bit.
I was playing a dunadain (equivalent) warrior (equivalent).

I liked the unlocking/achievement aspect. Once I put my mind in the Diablo 2 mindset instead of the angband one I had a lot of fun playing and stayed up all night actually lol.

Sorry for the bitchy tone in my past posts.