Curved Swords are one-handed weapons.

Found a bug I think: Thorns ('&') are visible when player is blinded

This was a change made long ago. You can't see them, as far as accuracy is concerned, but the symbol stays as they are immobile.

Hey, thanks! Dunno about "fixing" melee/evasion, but the quick and dirty way to increase endgame diffiulty is probably to remove Treasure, Foe and Revelation staves altogether. Not being able to hunt down uniques and vaults for fun & profit would put a serious hamper on 950'-900' scumming.

This line in spells1.c looks strange (double negation):

bool supress_messsage = !!(flg & PROJECT_SILENT);

That's a C idiom to leave a value of zero as it is and to convert a non-zero value to one to match the expected range of a boolean.

Thanks! My level of C is too K&R :D

I was planning a big rework of staves and consumables but it turned out to be too much work for 1.5 - I don't have the time at present. However Revelations, or at least the Revelations effect needs to be available for the ascent in order to stop it dragging out too long I think. Treasures I have more issues with but the ideal would be to make scumming less optimal, not just harder, because making optimal play more tedious is frustrating for players I think.

One approach might be to make the turn clock tick a little faster when the player is far below min depth so rapid diving comes with some tradeoff. The balance could still be set to favour diving but to a lesser degree.

Rather than continue to shoot my mouth off about smithing in the abstract, I decided I should run a character so I could shoot my mouth off in the concrete. A few impressions:

I found that running a 50K "challenge" character was actually easier/better for a high smithing run, since I could make good use of any early forges, and could very quickly run down to the deeper levels which are bigger (and so generically more likely to have a forge somewhere), and also to find Revelations staves sooner.A standard run by contrast takes a lot more turns to build up the character leaving a lot less time to hunt for forges. More (useful) forges was more important than the extra experience points.

Smithing of 27 feels like a good compromise. I'd have 4 Grace, plus build a Smithing kit of items with +6 Grace, and 16 skill points. Plus one for the affinity. That's a big investment, but not an impossible one. And there's a lot of good stuff to be made at 27 smithing skill, notably +3 Evasion or Accuracy rings. A case could be made for 28 smithing skill,which would allow one to make a +2 Constitution Amulet (needs 31 skill) if you find an Enchanted forge, or burn enough Grace potions. But I decided against that.

Despite my earlier statements, smithing is still interesting and fun. It's just (a little) different. Making a really powerful character via smithing now seems to demand more forges, but that's not an unreasonable limitation. My winning chars would make a lot of gear, and lastly a Masterpiece weapon at the 900' forge.

Anyway: the changes are maybe not what I would have done, but probably every individual can say that about everything, all the time. And it's not like I'm actually doing anything about it, other than complaining. I really like Sil, and Silq, and am glad to see that it is under active development.


A couple of specific points:

You can *decrease* the "special" bonus of a War Hammer of Crushing, allowing one to make a 4d3 War Hammer as an ordinary (non-artifact) object, at high but not impossible cost. I suspect that this is an oversight (?). Other objects (notably Shadow Cloaks) do not allow you to decrease their bonus. Admittedly, you can make a 4d3 War Hammer by starting with the Hador Enchantment, but that increases the smithing cost quite a bit.

Song of Delving doesn't seem to work in the extreme lower-left corner of the map.

The "final form" of Morgoth is tough! I had characters that could get him down to 2 stars, but couldn't finish. This was a little unexpected (to me anyway), but is actually sort of a nice feature. Once I knew about it.

The ascent seemed harder, despite the shafts. Have the "3-sils" monster bonuses gotten bigger? Or is it just my imagination?

"Smite" is an interesting mechanic. It's certainly useful against high defense enemies (serpents, Kemenrauko), but the fact that you lose a turn even if you miss on the initial attack makes it dangerous. Particularly against Morgoth, where a mis-timed Smite can kill you.

One more thing: It's embarrassing to admit, but I'd never noticed that "resist poison" does not in fact protect you from poison damage incurred in melee (e.g. being bitten by a Werewolf), only against "pure" poison damage (like poison breath). This just seems wrong. Armor of "Venom's End" is nothing of the sort. Admittedly, this is pretty clearly a deliberate decision in the original Sil that has been continued in Silq, and admittedly fire and cold work the same way (e.g. extra fire damage when a Balrog hits you in melee is not reduced by having fire resistance). But for Poison in particular, this just seems wrong.