Iron Man

[sffp]

I finally beat big M with a Human Warrior last week.
Took too long because I kept on trying to perfect characters than getting to good enough.

The next frontier is ironman - which is something I haven't done much of - I'm more of a packrat by nature and like to store things in my house in case of need. So far early attempts have led to several deaths around 1000 feet due to running out of cure potions/escape or lack of free action.

But before I get too deep, what exactly is ironman?
Is it never returning to the surface? Or never going up an upstair case?Sometimes those things are useful to avoid chasing baddies.

What start up options do you choose?

What helpful tips can you give to manage your @?

[Estie]

Ironman used to be its own mode; it has recently been split into "forced descent" and "word of recall has no effect", so if you check those two you are playing ironman.

As for helpful tips, I havent played ironman with the latest releases. I remember ?phase being a bad bottleneck, but that clearly is no longer the case.

More generally speaking, ironman is about figuring out when to stay and when to move on. Stay if you think youll get good enough items and dont be afraid to move down if you dont. You might end up getting too deep and die from something you didnt have protection from, but you have to touch that side of the balance too to find the golden road; if you only ever full clear, you wont make progress.

Oh and play a class you are familiar with. In the end, ironman is still only Angband and if you know what youre doing and dont get a stumbling block thrown your way by the gods, you can win just like in default mode.

[Pete Mack]

Never return to surface, with forced descent. Significant hurdles:
1. Getting the first source of teleportation
2. Managing endgame consumables.

In Ironman, the perfect is the bitter enemy of the good.

[sffp]

Confused why it generates unusable upstairs

[Nick]

Originally Posted by sffp

Confused why it generates unusable upstairs

It's a much smaller change to the code. Preventing going up a level only requires checking climbing stairs and teleport level, as opposed to checking the many places where stairs are generated in dungeon generation and making sure it's only downstairs.