Couple of interesting things.
 

1. This was on chocolate, so it might have been changed, but hrus will do their little destruct thing as they walk around, and this will destroy items in vaults. This seems pretty unfun and unintended, as is almost impossible to mitigate, other than genociding the hru before it can stomp around and break all of the shinies.

2. Killed the master tonberry as a tonberry, didn't get the tonberry gloves. What's up with that? I thought. So I took a look in the code, and saw this:

case MON_MASTER_TONBERRY:
if ((p_ptr->prace == RACE_TONBERRY) && (one_in_(14)))
{
a_idx = ART_MASTER_TONBERRY;
chance = 99; //Sauken comment. We'll still give you a 1% chance to miss it even if you hit the one in 14. We like to inflict pain.
}
break;

in other words, you have to roll a one in 14 to get the gloves? What? That seems so arbitrary and is actually very hard to roll. That means if you roll 9 tonberries, on the 9th successful run, you have about 50% chance to have received it on that kill or previous runs. Of course with the way probability works, you can kill him 20 times and still not get it. (About 23% probability).

This is really frustrating, as right below that in the code, it shows the demigod artifact chances, and every single one has 100% change to get a given artifact after killing their parent. (Zeus demigod character will always get special Zeus artifact after killing him, whatever that is.) Feels very, very unfair, especially given that tonberries are a more vulnerable than other races in the earlygame. Please increase the change or something. Hope this isn't too whiny. Thanks!

(Coffee Break) I have encountered Old Man Willow in the dungeon.
You can see in the dump he is dead but I had not done the quest yet.
http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=24224

I then did the quest and he was there so killed him a 2nd time.

A bug? Or just one of those things?

Also - first ever piranah trap. That was awesome!

General Feedback
 

(This was originally posted on the angband subreddit, someone recommended I post it here as well.)

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=24211

I have finally accomplished my long standing goal of beating FCB. Let's start with the positives:

I love all of the uniques. Killing a unique always feels good, and they are frequently very interesting and have often have unique mechanics which demand different approaches.

I love all the different possible race and class combos, there's so much to try out and explore and experiment with, I've only tried a small fraction of the classes so far and look forward to trying out more.

I really like the different artifacts you can get. Getting an unrandart (Something that is hard coded) is a great feeling, especially if it's a direct upgrade.

I like the character progression, and class progression. Growing stronger and unlocking new skills, mutations, abilities, perks, forms, is a really good feeling.

Now, for the bad.

Item destruction still sucks. It doesn't really serve a purpose in the game. Players are already heavily punished for missing resists (Since you will just straight up die after a certain point), and having your gear destroyed, stolen, or damaged always feels awful without it adding anything to the game.

The late endgame gets kind of ridiculous. The uniques leveled 90-100 just feel too strong, and the player is basically just forced to stockpile healing potions for this part of the game, and skipping as much endgame content as possible is optimal, otherwise you will burn through your healing and not have enough for the final boss. The final boss himself just feels like he is overtuned, and while I recognize that the final boss is supposed to be strong, it just feels unfair, which is a due a large part to:

Summons. Monster summoning almost singlehandedly ruins the game for me. Summon cyberdemons, uniques, amberites, kin... it goes from an interesting tactic to something that makes you groan everytime it happens. It seems that the general strategy that is implemented to make a fight more hard is to just give the monster summoning capabilities. And for some awful reason, summons are also allowed to summon, leaving the player character mired in a flood of summons. And then the game manual tells you that its bad to create anti-summon hallways, as the AI will not engage you if it detects you are in one. Summons are awful. Either reduce the frequency, remove it from a lot of monsters, or make it so that summoned monsters cannot, themself, summon. Or make the anti summon amulet more frequent. I have never seen one of these things in over 100 hours of combined gameplay. Really cannot overstate how awful this mechanic feels.

And my next point: Enemy AI. A lot of enemies like to teleport when they are low on HP. This is especially bad on thieving type enemies, who will attempt to steal from you then teleport away. I'll keep this brief. Teleporting feels awful, either remove the behavior or make it less frequent. Spending 15 minutes chasing down some unique is not fun or interesting.

I think that's a pretty good summary. Despite the fact that the bad section is longer than the good, I still overall really enjoyed my experience. I wish there was more documentation on a lot of the game mechanics, like for example, how exactly do rune swords get stronger? I hope you having some programming experience, because it seems like code diving is the only way to learn how a lot of the mechanics really work.

Tonberries are really cute and strong. Rune knights are pretty flexible characters that provided a lot of defensive utility. To get gamebreaking items in vaults, abuse genocide and banishment, then pick up the goodies :)

-------------------
I'm also going to copy the reply that someone (not me :p ) posted as I thought it had some great feedback as well.
-------------------

I agree 100% with everything you stated here (though I don't mind the item destruction). Really, the endgame in particular feels like it's still balanced for a game where Teleport Other, Genocide and *Destruction* are 100% reliable. While this is true for Vanilla, it very much isn't for Frogcomposband, and is a HUGE source of frustration and tedium.

Also, the manual lies about the ineffectiveness of anti-summoning corridors. If you dig one long enough, you can usually lure an enemy partway into the corridor, and then you can meet them halfway. They'll get a free round on you when you enter melee range, but it's better than being swarmed by summons.

The anti-summoning corridor AI is still bullshit though. That's the *one* technique this game gives to warriors for dealing with summoners that doesn't put them at the mercy of the RNG. And all the AI does is make it tedious.

Also I got the anti-summoning ego on a Barbarian Amulet once. It's not as great as it looks. I mean, it's nice, but it's not 100% reliable, and even one successful summon is usually enough to screw you over.

--------------------------

Thanks to all the devs for their hard work :) :)

Caaws?
 

Having fun with Thrall mode. Was quite excited to find Caaws in a room all by itself. But no matter what I do -- e.g. You do 100 damage -- I get zero xp. Is it all or nothing with this beast? 3465 hp is a lot to shave off for my weak hero.

Yes, caawses are one of the four monster races with the KILL_EXP flag. (The others are the Plain Gold Ring, the unique babble, and the regular babble.)

I've encountered a bug playing a Possessor, I no longer get experience for killing monsters. Savefile attached.

Are you sure its not just the body you're inhabiting now? Some forms you possess have a max level so you have to find a stronger body to ride in when that happens.

Thanks, that turned out to be what was happening. I somehow managed to completely miss that mechanic.

Option to include item weights in dumps
 

I'd like to request an option to include item weights in dumps. The reason for this isn't because I really love looking at item weights dumps, or expect anyone else to, but because including them would enable the Optimiser (which is now being maintained again) to take them into account, making it possible to set equipment weight as an Optimiser condition (great for mystics, etc.).

I noticed Recall works during pre-surface Thrall-mode. In FAAngband, pre-surface-Thrall mode recall doesn't work until surfacing and making at least Gondolin a home. Maybe FCPB's Thrall-mode should be disallowed until after at least surfacing the hard way?

Player Pumpkin Man/Death Pumpkin Flag Inconsistencies
 

There seems to be an inconsistency with the state of the innate Hold Life that player Pumpkin Men/Death Pumpkins get; as far as I can tell, the flag for the character sheet is turned on from the getgo, but the actual bonus doesn't come into effect until evolution.


(On a side note, hope you are well rodent; we've gotten a bit worried about you on the webserver. Well wishes!)

What Frog allows (recalling out of R'lyeh and landing in the middle of a level 60 deep-sea wilderness directly next to a perma-awake, teleport-immune warp demon) is pretty far from recalling from Angband to the safety of Gondolin. It's more like recalling from Angband to Anfauglith 56.

Thanks, MITZE. I miss hanging out with you guys, I'll try to be back at some point.

Don't worry too much, if my health had taken a sudden turn for the worse I'd have been sure to update Frog on github :)

I noticed these while playing THRALL-MODE Lucky Android Yeqrezh Disciple (i.e. Y'Android Disciple) on the latest FCPB nightly on angband.live. Yes, I 've been playing very specifically THRALL-MODE Yeqrezh Androids *a lot* since last week because they are actually very suitable to my extreme rapid level up playstyle:

1) I can't tell if my Android's hunger is affected by Regen or Slow Digestion equipment. When either are equipped, hunger status seems unchanged. Or maybe Androids have prema-slow digestion at a certain permanent level that cannot be changed?

2) Many of my Y'Androids can ?often cast spells via 'm' while Nervous or Scared....Is it because I passed the fear check while fighting a certain dlvl monster vs my current CHR, or something?

3) When I equip something that boosts my clvl to clvl 10 for example and yet lowers my INT to < 8, Yeqrezh still lets me choose a spell. If INT is already < 8, maybe that shouldn't be allowed?

4) Also, the Rod of Detection also detects invisible monsters when I don't have See Invisible or Infravision. I don't know if applies to Yeqrezh's mid-late game "Detection". Androids don't have See Invisible or Infravision at game start.

5) I noticed that Biketal spawns in Thrall Mode's R'lyeh even if Iketa is not dead yet.

6) When Yeqrezh offers the spell choices for the 'm' key, there should be a yes or no prompt after making the choice. Otherwise, if you make the wrong spell choice, then too bad.

7) Rfe: Chardumps should include the Disciple's spell list. Currently, they don't.

Quick question: Do rings of Wizardry affect Magic Eaters?

More questions before I forget:

1) Android Rune-Knight Runes are supposed to increase the Android clvl right? Similar concept with rebuilt equip for Weaponsmiths, right? Even though someone else will tell me go check the code, I'm more interested if those intentions for the Android are correct or not. In these two cases, I'm playing Thrall mode.

2) I noticed that artifacts can get destroyed by Scrolls of Destruction. (Probably applies to Staves and Spells of Destruction or Earthquakes, too.) Since when did this happen?

3) When I play Androids, I notice they don't have the Aggravation flag field at all...am I missing something? Example: Terror Mask gives no aggravation when I play Android Y-Disciples....

Some of their common attributes like Es and Dm have no effect on a Magic-Eater, but there's nothing specific to rings of Wizardry that would make them not affect Magic-Eaters at all.

Spell damage bonuses have no effect on a Magic-Eater's devices, but can potentially affect other things like mutation power damage.

Androids have innate Slow Digestion, which means Sd equipment has no effect (since Sd doesn't stack). Regeneration affects Androids and their food consumption the same way as everybody else.

It's just the normal frightened spell-casting check, which calls the standard fear save with your fear level as the monster level.

Yeqrezh gives you one spell every 2 levels, INT has nothing to do with it. INT only affects your fail rates and mana pool.

That's the whole point, just as with scrolls of Detect Invisible and any number of other tools for detecting invisible stuff.

There is and never has been any mechanic in the game that would prevent Biketal from spawning before Iketa. It's even entirely possible for Biketal and Iketa to spawn on the same level.

Sounds reasonable, though it's already very hard to pick spells unintentionally just by spamming keys.

They already do, it's always been included.

Right.

Hengband. (It also happened in early Angband, but was changed in later versions.)

You are missing the Aggravation flag field.

Troika weapons can spawn regardless of whether you serve the Troika or not, right? I've played an Android Yeqrezh Disciple that spawned a Troika weapon via *Acquirement*

They can spawn, but they're very rare, even after I lowered the rarity in the nightly.

I noticed that (Dwarven) body armor can have Stealth bonus. Is this intentional? If yes, why? I thought Dwarves are known for being unstealthy

Also, 'Dasai', while 'terrible', it does not have a curse that sticks to the player...by default...?

Dwarves were master craftsmen, and while they themselves were unstealthy that wasn't necessarily because of their body armor. Remember that Bilbo's mithril chain mail (which gives +2 Stealth) was dwarven-made.

That said, -Stealth isn't unusual on Dwarven body armor either.

I think that's because a_info.txt specifies Dasai as having a cost of 0. (The cost values as specified in a_info.txt are now almost completely obsolete; causing a few additional artifacts to pseudo-ID as terrible is their only remaining effect.)

Is there a way for a berserker to take off a perma cursed item? town people won't read a mundanity for me...

Don't think so. My intuition was that having the item blasted by a chaos patron might help, but it seems that doesn't remove the perma-curse.

It would be so nice if you could pay a scribe a stupid amount of gold to read a scroll for you. But then again, Berserkers are just that, and this would be a deviation from a rather pure (and successful) design

How many quests can you get in coffee break mode guys? There's of course the theives, wargs, and the orcs (I died to the last one as a level 19 android mauler. Probably too low leveled and a bit underequipped I guess.) And certain quests appear on certain floor to kill a unique I think.

And lastly, do stat up potions drop on coffee break mode?

Coffee-break mode has four main quest lines (Castle, Inn, Thieves' Guild, Trump Tower) with a total of 24 town quests, plus the 10 level guardians, plus the three node quests, plus Oberon and the Serpent; so up to 39 quests in theory if you do Spawning Pits and every node quest. Instant-coffee mode has 10 town quests, plus the level guardians and p/J. Neither mode has any limitation on stat potion drops (instant-coffee mode has special drop rules for healing potions).

Thanks for the reply :). When playing as a weaponsmith, are the items worth disenchanting/taking essence from the one of good quality and above?

Not entirely sure what you mean here; but in general, if you think you might equip the item at some point, don't absorb the essences on it yet; otherwise, do absorb them. (Note that destroying an item also absorbs its essences.)

Yep, that's the answer I was looking for :) Looking back, my question was a bit poorly worded x)

Is there a way to uncurse items when playing as a berserker guys? I can rip off one but I'm unable to remove the others.

keep trying. unless perma-cursed (very rare) you will succeed eventually

[21:53] HugoV: Improved The Glaive of Pain (9d7) (+10,+30) for 4480 gold. You are wearing The Glaive of Pain (9d7) (+10,+30).
[21:54] HugoV: I wonder how this cost was decided

That's quite a cheap cost, which didn't make sense considering the high score of The Glaive of Pain. Because of this, I decided to stop using The Glaive of Pain.

On the other hand, upgrading Sting at this Fighters' Hall is much more costly. Interestingly, cost of upgrading Narsil or even Careth Asdriag is the same as the Glaive of Pain.

Even weirder: cost of upgrading my Cap of the Fell Rider is like 7.7k for a single upgrade...

Also, race abilities i.e. via 'U' command aren't blocked by Anti-Magic, right? Should they be blocked by Anti-Magic? :)

This is not a bug; you're probably used to the cost of enchanting both to-hit and to-dam at the same time. In this case, you're only enchanting to-hit; and the weapon score evaluation algorithm gives a fairly low weight to accuracy, especially for lowish accuracy values of up to 10. (The value of a single point of accuracy more than doubles at +11.)

How about these unpopular ideas:
Make Destruction destroy stairs and destroy floor items beneath player?

Destroying under the player doesn't make sense, and destroying stairs can mean a list game for an Ironman character.

Questionable Virtue Workings
 

Not necessarily a bug, but perhaps disagreeable design depending on your view:

Line 3946 in object2.c, the Sacrifice virtue actually reduces the value of generated gold piles if it has a positive value; thematically, this arguably checks out, but mechanically, it's punishing the player for being "a good person". Only calling it to your attention in case you feel differently than about how it's currently working.

Also, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this one already at some point, but for posterity the Patience virtue currently has similar functionality; it actually increases natural monster generation if it's in the positive, decreasing monster generation if it's in the negative. Unlike Sacrifice, I can't logically understand this one (also Patience is actually really hard/tedious to get and keep a positive value for; to be punished for actually doing so further makes no sense).

? of Acquisition
 

So what is the ideal time/depth to read these? I'm continually disappointed in what I'm getting from them.

My current Hermes Rogue, CL 37, got lucky and had stockpiled 7 of them. So when I got to the bottom of Battlefield (DL 50, my deepest current dungeon) I decided to go wild and read all 7.

The result: nothing useful at all. A rod of lightning ball (of holding, whatever that does). A Fur Cloak of the Bat. Small shield of Elemental protection (FiPo). A Hell Harness. Dwarven shovel of extra attacks. Best item was Double Chain of Celestial Protection (LiCfCa) but its not something I can use. And a Scythe of Slicing of Sharpness.

So what does everyone else do? Hold onto them for deeper? Read them at DL 90 or something like that?

And am I the only who thinks their results should be more special?

Use them when you find them. The amortized value of just one more GREAT drop goes down with dungeon depth, as GREAT drops become more and more common. That said, it's a little more complicated in multi-dungeon variants, where your depth is not so uniformly increasing. If you find it at a shallow depth in the wilderness, wait to return to your previous level. (Or just sneak into the edge of the mountains or the like.)

For a stack of them I'd go to angband level 1 or so. Back to Telmora(?). Then Trump Tower to Angband level 98. Bring !enlighten and ?destruction and recall. That town service costs a lot. 100k iirc.

I've been playing a Weaponmaster specialising in slings and have noticed that I sometimes miss ranged attacks on painted targets. The exact wording of the ability description, "Your shots never miss your target once you score 3 consecutive hits when wielding a sling." definitely suggests that misses should not be happening, so I had a look at the code. There seems to be a 1/20 miss chance on painted targets if I am reading it right. Either the ability description should be modified to match actual behaviour, or the behaviour should be modified to match the description. Currently it is rather confusing to see a "You miss" message after getting 3 consecutive hits on a monster. I'd lean towards changing behaviour to 100% accuracy, since swordmasters have a similar mechanic in burning blade, which from looking at the code does seem to never miss.

Thanks, I'll look into it.

By the way, did you ever figure out what the Rapid Shot ability does? The description is "When using this technique, all of your shots will launch against a single opponent", but on my last sling master I couldn't figure out what it did differently than a normal attack.

FWIW I don't think there is a more fun class than a slingmaster once they get Shoot on the Run and then Greater Many Shot abilities on line.

Looks like it gives a penalty to accuracy and increases your number of shots by 1.2 times

Will there be enough supplies of health potions during the endgame of coffee break mode? Or is shuffling store stocks the key? And lastly, is no selling mode good in coffee break mode? I tried it from floor 2 to 5 and I've gotten 2k gold but I'm not sure.

There will almost always be enough !healing in coffee-break, although the number of healing potions isn't fixed like it is in instant coffee so it's always possible you might get very unlucky. (Shuffling store stocks is unlikely to help; you cannot directly shuffle for healing potions, and cannot effectively use resting to shuffle black market inventories.)

Thanks for the reply :) Regarding no sell mode on coffee break though; since there's probably a lot of ego weapons to grab and sell on later levels, would no sell mode yield less gold? But would they be roughly the same since some monsters like dragons and hydras already drop a lot of gold and if magnified by no sell mode...

They're designed to be fairly comparable. In a long game you'll probably end up with somewhat more money with selling on (supposing you actually sell items you don't need); but selling off might get you past the very first levels of a coffee run more reliably.

Issue/Bug Report: Psionic healing and poisoning
 

Hello, I have been playing the latest frog after a several year hiatus and found a weird interaction. Psionic healing does not seem to be able to cure poison, even if it the tooltip does say that it does. I'm imagining this is a pre-7.0 PCB feature that got under the radar.
Here's a screenshot of the description in question https://imgur.com/a/8ZwMk88

While I'm at it, is nature healing also not supposed to poison? I've been trying some nightmare mode challenges and even a young green dragon can breath for ridiculous amounts of poison, something like 350 without Rpois which the nature earlygame "cure poison" spell only seems to halve (and then if you get unlucky and they breathe on you again you've got an even bigger poison counter and you can't tele away without dying, but that's just nightmare doing what it does best I guess) so I can only shudder to imagine the sort of damage an ancient green wyrm might actually do.

Thanks for the game!

Thanks, the description for psionic healing was out of date. I have replaced the claim that it cures poison with a note that it can cure hallucination.

The nature spells "Cure Wounds & Poison" and "Herbal Healing" already note that they aren't fully effective against very severe poisoning. Is there another nature healing spell with a misleading description that I'm missing?

Invisible Monsters
 

The visibility of invisible monsters is not saved upon game exit; further, it's rerolled on game load, so you can exit and reload the game with an invisible monster nearby until you see it.

Thanks. This was already fixed in the offline dev version, I shouldn't be so lazy about updating the nightly :o

How does player's stealing works? Namely, Rogue's Burglary and Gnome's Pickpocket. Are you just taking the enemy's loot while it's still alive? Are you effectively generating a second loot roll?

Because if you are just stealing the enemy's stuff he would drop if he was dead... what's the point? You probably gotta kill it anyway. At least it will be so until pretty late in the game, I assume.

Effectively, you're just taking its loot while it's still alive. (Loot isn't generated until it drops, so you wouldn't get exactly the same loot from killing it; but the same generation rules would apply.)

Picking pockets does have some upsides. You can get loot from monsters you aren't ready to kill; you can get loot from monsters without waking them up; and occasionally, the teleport aspect can be nice too. Of course, none of those work 100% of the time...

This needs clarification:
Does dispel player mimicry, i.e. Player Mimic mimick, causes a game turn loss? I recall someone else saying this is true, but can't remember who.

Game turn probably isn't the term you're looking for here, but in any case the answer is no.

Found a bug specific to Thrall Mode (found in Liquorice, Salmiak, and nightly):
On game-start, there's a single random ASCII character of a random color, e.g. tan ?, at the far bottom-right corner of the screen. It's not always there. On angband.live, It's reproducible when I get killed and then quick start via birth screens. It disappears when I use Ctrl-r. I have no idea of its significance. I don't know if offline play is affected.

To Sideways/rodent -- I think I figured out what was causing this....It's caused by setting angband.live's subwindow right cols = 1. I don't what this has to do with anything, but there it is. Setting this value to 0 'fixes' it.

Thanks. I'll need to look into which specific subwindows can trigger this issue, and disable them if their width equals 1.

Rfe: Changing squeaky voice mutation description to, "Your face is rearranged!" while keeping the -4 CHR penalty! If not, I'll at least make this a part of Hugoband and make the CHR penalty steeper and/or add the opposite of reassuring image projection! :D

The help file for pets claims that they will not ever betray you. Pets have a chance of betraying you if you're suitably awful to them, which should be common sense, but isn't.

Beastmasters should probably start the game with full monster info.

The help file for pets says that they won't ever betray you. They will if you're suitably awful to them.

Beastmasters should probably start the game with full monster info.

Necromancers should probably be able to master shovel.

Where does it say that? I don't see that in either the salmiak help or the nightly help; on the contrary, they explicitly explain that pets require upkeep and may disappear or turn hostile if neglected too badly.

Verbatim, from Help: Pets: What could be nicer than a loyal pet? People sometimes worry their pets will trample them underfoot;

They will, and given the chance, they will remorselessly grind your bones into dust.

Temporary brand damage from craft magic isn't displaying on the character sheet for melee. It seems to display just fine on a shooter.

Does artifact reforging reroll an artifact's stats/effects guys? And what is the use of max power in reforging? And does it cost gold?

I've been playing in coffee-break for a while but I really haven't tried it since most of my runs get cut short in the late 30's to early 40's. Finally got a berserker to DLVL 54 though so I'm pretty happy with that x)

Reforging is pretty expensive. The max reforging power (determined by your fame) indicates how high-scoring an object you can use as the source item. Reforging does not keep any of the stats or bonuses of the source item, but does keep those on the destination item (note though that the destination item cannot already be an artifact or ego).

See the in-game FAQ (?d) for more details.

Quick question - how does Device skill impact damage from devices, if at all? When I look at the damage of (for example) a wand of magic missile, it seems the damage doesn't change regardless of my device skill (for example, taking on and off gloves with a device skill bonus). Does the damage really not change? Or does it change, it just doesn't reflect in the damage shown when you examine the item?

Small request, when you dismiss pets and it's says "x pets dismissed", it'd be nice to get the new upkeep value. It'd also be handy to have some way to tell which pets are hasted. Currently I have to stick numbers on hounds and spiders to tell them apart.

AFAIK, impact damage is predetermined when the magical device is generated and probably based on dlvl. Once generated, there is no way to increase impact damage.

Device skill has no effect on the damage or power level of a device. It is determined when the item is generated, and can only be improved by race/class specialities, super-rare +DevicePower egos and the Device Mastery spell.

Another device question, since I'm trying Devicemaster for the first time (wands in this case).

What is the use case for the Transfer Effect spell? All I can think of (though I haven't tried it yet) is to transfer a higher-level wand spell (say Meteor) to an ego-wand (resistance, capacity, etc) version of a lower-level wand spell, say fire bolt. Is that the purpose, or am I not seeing something?

Edit: LOL, it never occurred to me that I'd be able to use devices in Thalos Arena, since no other class can. Finally tried it a wand on a whim against Elder Thing, and what do you know, it works.

You can transfer effects to wands of higher power, to ego wands, or to non-ego wands of higher capacity (more mana). One example would be taking a power 50 nexus ball wand and transferring the effect to a power 100 wand, giving you a super-powerful nexus ball.

Ah, I see. What I missed at first is that it copies some parts of the source to the destination, but not all. I just looked at the source:

So it doesn't copy ego, power or mana, meaning those stay with destination object original values. Now I'm going to drive myself nuts trying to figure out how to optimize my wand collection. Thanks as always Sideways!

Been playing recently and really enjoying my current run. All of the new changes over the past few years are... wonderful!

I've got a level 43 Demigod Hades Blood Mage Sorc+Demon at the moment and am currently doing lvl 80 angband rerolls to snipe loot off the ground. Managed to get a ring with globe of invulnerability on it this way! Which, was super lucky, and is letting me push kills on harder uniques for more loot. Yay!

Still looking for my 4th sorcery book. I know there is some dungeon that I can beat to get it, but I can't remember which one anymore (hah!) and I'm holding out hope to find it on the ground somewhere instead, or in a vault.

Playing the game without a wand of cloning (yes, I haven't played since then), is tough! I'm actually 'experiencing' the game now. And, it's letting me experience all of the various mob strengths and weaknesses. Was interesting to see Atla the 'strongest' titan easily gets perma-confused... HAH!

Main goal right now is to gradually and slowly level to 49 to use Polymorph Demonlord, since I lucked out on the 4th demon book early... then use that to hopefully take down the level 80+ bosses because I do NOT do enough damage using wands/rods only. If I can get my 4th sorc book in the meantime, even better, as I really want those spells.

Astral Guide is amazing. And, regretting that I picked Cult of Personality, as it seems waaaay worse than it was in the past. I probably would have picked the movement speed one instead (action economy manip too op!).

Probably going to do some more quests too once I hit level 45. Just want to get more hp overall and that should push me over 800. If I can get a good speed ring above my current +6, that would also be really nice, though probably unlikely for a while.

Another strat I'm considering too is to get a few capture balls with decent mobs to help cheese out some kills. Staff of Summoning is good, but I see it has been nerfed as uniques have ridic mana reservation and mobs sometimes are hostile... so capture balls could be a good way to get a few beefy tanks to try and pop a few more uniques. Unique loot is good!

Tried a few other race+class combinations and I just love Blood Mage too much. The health is just so good. And, how can I live without the Sorcery branch of magic? And then, the appeal of late game demonlord status is enough to keep me coming back for more. Hades was just for more health, and I don't regret it at all either! Though, I see why Hermes could be good... the way haste + slow stack now is... quite interesting. But, health still too good.

My biggest fears right now are uniques with crazy high damage spells like mana storm, becuase they do like 500 damage... and if they get a double turn, how do I live? Well, I probably don't. So, I'm avoiding them and other uniques out of total paranoia. IDK, how non-mage players beat that kind of mess... I guess get over 1k hp and then spam tons of healing pots, haha!

So yeah, just having fun. Wanted to share my experience. Thanks for maintaining this great game!

edit: Can't cast spells as Demonlord... right. Well, that change ruined game fun for me. RIP. Will maybe play again another run in 8 or so years, lol....

edit 2: Pushed too deep and died to Nodens. Not much counterplay when he gets off 3 turns in a row while I have higher speed. Random speed is a biiit ridiculous. Oh well! Finally free :D

corrupted save game
 

Good morning, I was playing Frogcomposband salmiak and I can´t open the filegame, it seems it is corrupted or something happens. I Leave here the file in case it can be recovered.
Many thanks in advance.

Unfortunately the file is too badly corrupted, there are many problems with it.

Any idea what might have happened to it?

I was without internet for some days and played in my laptop with frogcomposband in a pendrive, I returned to my usual computer and I was able to play one day (yesterday) but today again in my laptop and it didn´t open. A think I noticed two days ago was, that frogcomposband was running very slow, zb it needed near half minute to load the city after recall or descending stairs.
Just a pity, it was one of my best attempts in frogcomposband, I learnt a lot playing it
BTW many thanks for the game although it is a difficult one!

I don't know if I just missed it guys, but is there any command to empty a quiver or is the only option to fire the contents? :o: confused:

Also, how do you go about assigning points from level ups and the bosses? For the warriors/rogues/archers, going for a str/dex/con rotation has mostly worked for me but for example when using a mage, should I assign one point to each of those stats along with magic or should I replace one of those?

You can empty the quiver with 'd'rop or 't'ake off. I believe it's / to cycle between inventory and quiver. My fingers know it but off the top of my head...

For mages most players just focus on int. The other stat to consider is str and this is all about how much you care about your carrying capacity. Late game con will matter for hps and chr will matter against fear, but for early game just pump the casting stat and maybe consider some str.

AAR - Monster Hydra
 

I like the game but I'm getting bored with my normal (melee/archery oriented) characters. What to do?

I recalled that monster Centipede was a fun win. Not because it is so awesome, because it isn't. But finding the right gear and play style was fun.

This time I chose monster Hydra because it plays as a warrior too and has a low xp penalty. The high regeneration is useful, especially if you boost it further with mushrooms and items.

The core strength of the Hydra is many but rather weak attacks. Initially not so impressive, but with the right gear it is more than enough. 11 attacks means that Terror Mask (+18,+18) or a single "Hell Harness will add almost 200 dpr. And you can wear a lot of those!

Hydrae get to use multiple helmets and amulets plus one light source and a cloak. Primarily, you want items that add to your Melee damage. After a while you need to focus on Speed too, but Hydrae are fast enough with a temporary speed boost until the mid/late game.

Strong gear is a must. So how do you get this? Killing your racial boss is a good thing so that takes priority just as completing the Old Castle does. But the easy way (too easy?) is to collect ?Acquirement and trump tower to Angband 98. Be sure to bring one or two ?Destruction, wearing stealth boosting items helps too. The surprise is that you will only get amulets, head-wear and cloaks. Yes! The good stuff keeps rolling in for quite a few scrolls until eventually all you will get is crap.

Archery isn't available so it is devices or breath for ranged damage. I relied mostly on _plasma bolt (eventually withouth the wands) for this. _Confusing lights helps too, once you get one of those.

Would I recommend playing a Hydra?
Yes, definitely for this of you who like brawlers. The ability to combine multiple amulets is quite awesome too. Anti summon AND anti magic/MR AND Hell Harness AND Trickery ...

[Edit: dump]

Rfe: Storm giants should be able to swim. Same for Elder storm giants. Why? Because of this: https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/storm-giant

Currently enemy Storm giants (and presumably Elder storm giants too) are unable to cross deep water.

Frog - Ring of Wizardry?
 

My Paladin just got a Ring of Wizardry from the Mushroom Quest with no attributes at all. As far as I can tell, its totally useless.

But, when I examine it, it shows a Score of 9.40K.

Is this score misleading? or is there a use for this ring that I'm not seeing?

If it has Easy Spell or Decrease Mana and you are a class that can't make use of them it wont show up.

Is there a reason someone would choose not to learn every available spell if they have the spell capacity? When I'm browsing the Ladder I sometimes see spellcasters who could have learned all their spells but for some reason didn't, and I'm curious if I'm missing some reason to do this.

One example (I've seen others):

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=23201

I believe you can "waste" a spell by learning another one twice. That speeds up getting better at it afaik.

Thraalbee's right; but also, that character you cite switched his secondary realm, studied spells in the new realm, and then switched back to his original second realm having forgotten (and needing to re-study) every spell in it.

Sideways, are you accepting pull requests or patches? It looks like development has been largely you for the past few years, and there's an almost year-old PR that you didn't reply to. https://github.com/sulkasormi/frogcomposband/pull/277

He replied on the character dump I ran to test my changes: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=24022. As well as in the thread itself http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=10280

He also pulled in one tweak I made to allow people to see all the possible Rage Mage spells in each book. Only being able to see the spells you can learn right now is silly on a class that consumes its books to learn spells.

So I don't feel like I've been ignored (and honestly I made the changes mostly for my own enjoyment, and figured I'd throw them up there for people to see).

I wrote in part of archolewa's pull request; and the rest of it got left in limbo because I did not want to either reject or accept it in its entirety, and was not sure which other bits to accept or adapt (even after discussing potential ideas with archolewa) without further personal play-testing of rage-mages, which I lacked the time for at that point. While development of FrogComposband is still continuing, I've been too busy with other stuff for much progress to happen lately.

In general I write all my own code and like it that way; but I will pay attention to any pull requests submitted, archolewa's one just couldn't be completely resolved without a much deeper look. If you want to submit a pull request (or propose code changes in some other way!) you are welcome to do so; but be aware I'll probably be even more busy in the next couple months than I've been so far.

Okay, thanks for explaining. If I submit a PR soon, it will probably just be code cleanup, so it shouldn't require any laborious playtesting to review. Autoexplore, even a very simple version of it, sure would be nice, but it would be challenging for me to implement. I'm decent at C, but I've never edited a 'band before.

Can you elaborate more about what do you mean autoexplore? How do you want it to work? Any non-*band examples?

The problem with autoexplore in *bands is that it causes players to die.

(To be clear, that doesn't mean it couldn't be implemented; indeed, it could fairly easily build on the existing travel code used by commands like H, *j and ]J. You should be aware of the minor drawback involved, though...)

Vanilla has movement by mouse which is kind of a primitive auto-explore. You click somewhere and the character will try to run there - normal run interruption rules apply.

DCSS is famous for its autoexplore. The old joke is that you can play DCSS with just two keys: O to autoexplore and Tab to attack the nearest monster. ToME 4 also has fancy autoexplore. In both cases, the basic idea is to move the player towards unexplored regions of the map and stop if a monster is seen. Once the whole map is explored, autoexplore walks you to a staircase. When items appear in DCSS, autoexplore walks you to each item once, so you can decide if you want to pick it up, and thereafter ignores it. ToME 4 is generally played with autopickup on because there's an item that lets you sell stuff automatically, prompting you what to keep. (For the record, Angband-style no-selling is way better than automatic selling.)

In a 'band, I think the obvious way to start on autoexplore would be to expand the run code. Move the player in a path to the nearest unexplored accessible square, using the same stop criteria as for running, but ignoring forks.

As Sideways says, though, autoexplore could be dangerous. In a 'band, generally detection magic is important, and waiting until you see monsters face-to-face is asking for trouble. So it would only really be useful for the early game for non-squishy characters, or if you were on a dungeon level on which you knew there were no serious threats.

I think expanding the travel code would be the more natural option, since the travel code, unlike the run code, already contains all the pathfinding needed. (It would need several hacks to be used by the autoexplorer; at a minimum, one to allow unknown areas as travel targets and one to keep going upon reaching the first target; but the second one could be borrowed from autoget.)

Writing a functional autoexplorer based on existing travel code would not be very difficult at all. More difficult would be deciding when it should stop, exactly which areas it should count as unexplored, how it should treat secret doors and areas hidden behind them, adding in a variety of options allowing the player to customize its behavior, etc.

Oh right, I keep forgetting that travel already exists. I should use it more often.

I just got killed by the mana bolt of a dark elven warlock. With easy_damage, I saw a message saying I took upwards of 120 damage, which is weird because the monster lore says "Mana Bolt (90, 1x)", which if I understand correctly means that the maximum damage is 90. But, I had a speed disadvantage (+2 for me vs. +10 for the typical dark elven warlock), so maybe the message summed the effect of several mana bolts.

90 is the average damage; mana bolts from a typical dark elven warlock are 1d80+50, so you rolled close to the upper limit of that range.

1d80 is scary high variance. Ouch! I think I prefer angband's use of max damage for lore, even for low variance attacks that can never actually reach it.

Ooh, so it's mean damage. The interpretation of it doesn't seem to be described in the help section about recall, so yeah, I assumed it was like vanilla. I agree with Pete that the maximum is more informative, even though it's less representative, since what you need to know for tactical decision-making is what you can survive. But it would also be quite reasonable to include both the mean and the maximum, if there's room.