My first little victory

[celem]

Hah, bet you thought I won. Not at all...

After maybe four of five days playing about with Angband I got my first vaguely successful character last night. A Dunedain Warrior who made it to Clvl 10 and dlvl 10 ('500).

Happy with my progress I used a WoR scroll and headed to town, only to find they were all sold out of WoR (or so I thought, was actually checking the wrong shop)

Frustrated I decided to head down to '50 and wait about for a restock, as I had heard rumours that this was how it worked.

Put a heavy object on '5', went to make a cup of tea, starved to death.
I love this game.

[Psi]

Made me laugh.

If you haven't already, check out the 'R'est command for next time.

[celem]

Yeah, I think its time I stepped back and took a little look at the manual, i resisted thus far as im trying to avoid spoiling anything for myself.

A related death this morning when I pressed and held 5 in order to heal up after a fight. Some wandering monster came out of the darkness and killed me before my reactions kicked in. I only knew what it was through careful consultation of my tombstone

'R'est command it is then

[Max Stats]

Take it one step further and look into macros. You should define a "rest until healed" macro and map it to a convenient key, since you will be pressing it a lot (I use Tab). You need to press = m d then press the key you want to use (there will be a slight delay before it accepts it). The action you need is "\eR&\r" (without the quotes of course). Make sure to save your macros after you are done! It defaults to using your character's name for the prf file, which means that every time you play a character with that name, it loads that prf file. However, since you will likely also want to create other macros to automate tasks like casting spells, using wands/staffs, etc., and these will vary depending on the character class you are playing, I would suggest saving macros in a file named according to your character's class; in your case, this would be Warrior.prf. This will cause the prf file to be loaded whenever you play that class. If you are playing under Linux, you need to make sure you capitalize the first letter of the name; under Windows it shouldn't matter.

If you don't want to go through the game menu, you can also accomplish this by creating/editing the appropriate prf file and adding the following two lines to it:

A:\eR&\r
P:\t

This assumes you want to use the Tab key as the trigger, like I did. Now give that 5 key a rest!

[camlost]

Note to the maintainers: Since "rest until healed" is a keymap almost everyone should have/make/use, could you define it as standard keymap? Sangband does this with tab (I use 'x'). As a keymap, anyone can overwrite it if they want, but it'll make people's lives easier.

[Derakon]

Use keymaps instead of macros. Macros can trigger any time the game is waiting for input, which can lead to them getting misinterpreted (e.g. trying to pray while at a store, resulting in buying stuff you didn't want). Keymaps only trigger when the game is waiting for your next turn action.

I also don't generally bother making a keymap for resting, since it's not too hard for me to hit R<enter>, and I'd rather not be casually resting all the time anyway (it's more fun to push on without fully healing in many situations). But there's no real harm in it. Making keymaps for commonly-cast spells or zapped rods is a good idea, though. I generally bind "!" to "detect traps" using whatever means my character has for that effect (spell, prayer, rod), for example.

[Bostock]

As someone who plays like Derakon does, but plays Sangband, I can attest that the negative impact of having a rest keymap for people who won't be using it is exactly zero - and of course the benefit for everyone else is high.

[celem]

Key-mapping has proved great, thanks guys.

Whilst I have been manually resting with R,enter (since & is generally preserved)
keymapping my ranged attacks has been most useful. f,n,5 was getting tedious for firing my bow

Incidentally now clvl 16 dlvl 18. starting to get rough, having a blast

[Frood]

Originally Posted by celem

Key-mapping has proved great, thanks guys.
keymapping my ranged attacks has been most useful. f,n,5 was getting tedious for firing my bow

I have stopped macroing my ranged attacks. Instead I use the 'remember old target' option and the repeat last command key. This means that to fire multiple times I press f 1 ' the first time. Then I just press ' for subsequent arrows and it uses the same ammo. I use the roguelike keyset so the repeat key may be different in original.

I like that it is more versatile; it also works with spells and wands. It is also simpler when you have many kinds of ammo.

A drawback is that you have to change target first or it will automatically fire at the old target if it is in your LOS.

This way of doing it is of course a matter of taste so YMMV.

[Derakon]

Generally I have one lazy keymap that targets the nearest enemy, and my other attack macros use the last target. Generally, any spell you cast at all frequently should have a keymap if only to avoid fat-fingering and getting the wrong spell.