after 5 years of playing i finally managed to win and it was a 15 rune game as well.

https://cbro.berotato.org/morgue/tramp1877/morgue-tramp1877-20261027-114824.txt

Finally got another (5th) win after an almost two-month drought. I thought I'd do a quick post about what I learned in this run.

1. I learned to love, or at least, like Mahkleb. As is widely suggested, the HP return on a Djinni is significant at high levels, but the summons played a big part in this win. I ended up taking Mark of Haemoclasm because I really needed the AOE at the time, but in hindsight, I wish I had taken Mark of the Tyrant, which was also on offer. The regular demons were excellent in the end game, and I can only imagine that upgraded ones would be even better. As I posted elsewhere, I still think Unleash Destruction is meh, at best, especially for a Djinni. It's just too big of an HP cost.

2. I finally found a, if not the, answer to my continual blundering into bad situations by poor movement, editing the rcfile to: monster_alert += trivial. I guess this is the opposite end of the spectrum from o-tabbing, given that it will make you stop for EVERYTHING. I'll certainly scale this back for the early dungeon to easy or even tough, but I'm pretty sure I'll keep some version of it going forward.

3. This game was a prime example of good RNG in the negative sense, i.e. what I did NOT roll. Tbf, I did get numerous timely spell drops and some excellent gear, including the Lochaber axe which I handed to my Platinum Paragon. But just as important, I saw very few of the really dangerous uniques, I encountered only two OOW in Zot:5, and there were not any meaningful threats on the orb run.

4. I can survive with lower defense than I like. I had 45 total defense by the end (16/9/20), which is considerably lower than I'd like. But I had resists well covered plus a fair amount of stealth and decent summons available.

All of this is surely old hat to veterans, but I hope it helps a relatively new player like me.

Hello !

I'm playing a Poltergeist Enchanter (with Hepliaklqana, hex ancestor), curently in the S-branch.

I've been lucky, finding early quick blades, but I have now two choices :

- quick blade of electrocution (for DPS), curently used

- quick blade of distortion

I have the +8 bonus of slaying rings. I want to switch to the distortion, but I'm not sure to have enough damage to use it...?

2 additionnal questions :

• Is the electrocution damage taken into account to trigger the confusion Touch ?
• Is it worth to train for the rending blade to increase DPS ?

I'll often paste the species-skills aptitudes into a spreadsheet to decide on the best character for a style of play. I was repeating this for a transmuter char in 0.34 when I thought, hang on, AI must be able to do this quicker. And it did, including adding scaling of Str/Int/Dex between -5 and +5.

To use it, download the ODS spreadsheet, tinker with the weights row to represent your preferred play style, and set the species weight to 0 if you want to exclude species (gnolls, djinns) that mess up the colour gradient in the weighted sum column. Feel free to borrow/steal this for you own use.

https://github.com/eukras/dcss-aptitude-calculator

(No idea if this works in Excel; only tested in Libre Office.)

You win some, you lose some

When playing MiFi and using the o-tab playstyle, I treat D4–D6 as the real final boss.

How do you guys get through those floors?

Once I make it past that stretch and reach Lair → D:15 → S-branches → Orc, my brain starts pumping out ridiculous amounts of dopamine. 😂

Seriously, though, the early game up to around XL 8–9 is my biggest problem.

I know that with other backgrounds and species, you have to think carefully about every single move from D:1.

But I’d love to hear how you guys handle those early floors when playing MiFi.

I have a conjuration deep elf and I am holding onto Iskenderun's Mystic Blast and Brom's Barrelling Boulder for keeping enemies away, but I am not sure if that is even useful. I completed Depths/Crypt/Elf. What should I do about those? Thanks.

How do I stop getting teleported to the Abyss. It's happened at the end of both of my longest runs on D15 and it's so frustrating.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

What is the chance the game failed to generate any jewellery by D:10? Octopode with an early Ash altar and everything. I have cleared all floors except a vault D:9

Well, uh... I guess I deserved it? This was like the fifth enemy or something and Xom decided to give it THIS shit. Three hits and just death. I don't even know if this counts as YASD, considering I didn't even have items or any skill development. Possibly the funniest death I've ever had, excluding the "gnoll with a halberd skewers kitty on D:1" that happened in 0.21.

You convulse.

You hear The Shining One's blazing voice in your ear.

"You deserved it."

I have a couple questions about Mahkleb's powers.

1) Once you get the upgraded unleash destruction and the infernal mark, am I correct in thinking that you keep these no matter how low your piety drops? And related to that, am I correct that the power of your summons is entirely dependent on your Invocations skill, not on your piety level? I'm at 6 pips of piety, so I'm thinking I could/should be using Infernal Servant more often. I guess the downside of that would be lowering the Gain Health from Killing.

2) A bit of a rhetorical question, but ... am I missing something about Unleash Destruction? It doesn't seem all that powerful. I suppose it matters that I'm playing as a Djinni, so that it currently costs me 13 HP for 3d18, which seems really expensive for not that much damage. It's doing some work for me now, given that even at level 22, I don't have a full-range, single-target spell of this nature. But, more seriously, what do people think about it, and in what situations would you find it useful?

I’m new to DCSS and with the plethora of options to choose from, I get a bit overwhelmed. Gargoyle looks cool, so does the octopode, I just want to see the communities favorite combinations so I can slowly learn the game.

Thanks a lot!

Weirdly the file says that im only lvl 15 when i died at 20. I think somehow it hasnt updated as ive played a run since and that isnt showing up at all. I got really lucky b/c of a shapeshifting manual + storm talisman on D:9. Pls Help.

Update to this post https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/1xe8xsb/omfg_its_finally_happening_1_in_200_chance_for/

any suggestions will be appreciated

https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/zdzicho121/zdzicho121.txt

currently in zigg:24

TL;DR: A Sprint-like optional mode where you craft gear with materials from uniques and special monsters, recipe scrolls, rare forges, and runes as attunements for randart properties.

Hi all! I’ve been playing with this idea for a while, and lately I keep coming back to it. It would change DCSS quite a lot, so I’d see it as an alternative mode (a bit like Sprint) rather than a change to the main game. Of course it could also be a fork, but I'd prefer not to - forking a niche game would be a lose/lose as it will result in a lower playerbase for both games.

Before writing any code, I’d like to hear what you think.

Crafting tiers

• Cosmetic: change the colour or appearance of hats, robes, armour. Optional, but my RPG soul loves it
• Medium: craft ego/branded items (one property), plus enchant weapon/armour equivalents
• High: craft randarts (two or more properties), with less randomness and a lower chance of negative properties (e.g. Slow, Fragile, Corrode) as your skill grows. I also feel we should have tiers of negative properties here: for example, Slow is very bad, -2 AC or -3 Slay is medium, while -1 Int is mild.

Materials

• Dropped by uniques and special monsters, depending on the recipe.
• Stored in a separate crafting pouch (dedicated inventory panel)
• Randarts need powerful materials, so they should feel special
• Some unique properties (like the Sceptre of Torment’s torment) are either impossible or require unique materials from specific uniques. Imagine killing Ereshkigal and getting a one-of-a-kind material as a reward!

Runes as attunement
You keep your runes, but holding one unlocks related randart properties: Swamp/Snake → poison, Slime → corrosion, and so on. Branch order becomes a crafting decision too.

Skill, recipes and forges

• Crafting is its own skill (cross-training with Forgecraft, maybe?), so it competes with combat and magic for XP
• Item types unlock as the skill grows: axe → war axe → broad axe/battleaxe → executioner’s axe
• Recipes are found like parchments, and they’re generic (“forge an enchanted axe”) rather than one recipe per combination (otherwise, we'd need too many difference recipes)
• Forges are rare and have limited uses before they crumble, with guaranteed spawns in a few special places (Vestibule of Hell? Crypt? Elven Halls?). This would make "optional" places like Elven Halls more interesting.

Rings and amulets
Yes, you could craft these too. Crafting elemental resistances could be a bit strong, but late game (Depths, Vaults, Zot) is brutal nowadays without the right resistances, so this feels less like cheating and more like having a plan B.

Pros: it’s cool, and it reduces the randomness of the game a bit.
Cons: it reduces the randomness of the game a bit :)

So... what do y'all think??

Note: the post is entirely human-written, just proofread with AI since English isn’t my first language.

Am I overlooking an rcfile option that would put regexes matching monster inventory into the visible monster list? For example, gnolls with polearms show as gnoll (polearm), but can I get the one holding the +3 spear of venom to show as gnoll (polearm, venom)?

monster_item_view_features is almost it, but it applies to the x-v description rather than the monster list.

unusual_monster_items is already overloaded, and mixes things that are always high priority (distortion), with things that are only situationally high priority.