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I was not expecting a Total Recall reference in this game.
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# ? Jul 8, 2023 05:10 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 09:09 |
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RubberBands Hurt posted:Uhh, did you hear the foul things this "ape god" considered to be funny?? Oboroqoru, the Ape God is hated by the Posters of SomethingAwful for enjoying the wrong leftist podcast(s).
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# ? Jul 9, 2023 01:55 |
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Back in Ezra, it's time to prepare for our visit to the Rainbow Woods. Let's start by making a friend! Technology is amazing. Birds speak random text, generated by a markov chain like the random books are. He's cute but would die right away in an actual fight, so we'll let him just chill in town. We've also got a good supply of love injectors. That big rep historic site was a fungal patch, so a lot of legendaries we met were friends to fungi. Our fungus reputation is currently around -2,000, and while that might be small potatoes compared to the -14,000 we have with the cult, it's still very firmly in "kill on sight" territory. Pax Klanq is a fungi and I'm not actually sure if all this negative fungi rep will make him hostile or not - worst case scenario, we may need to charm him so we can talk. The rainbow woods are south of Ezra. Our first hint is to "seek the heart of the rainbow", which translates pretty literally: We need to reach the center screen on that tile. It's only three steps away, but of course there's a catch. When you try to cross the Rainbow Woods on the world map, you always get lost. So here's the Rainbow Woods. There's lots of mushrooms around. Most of them are just obstacles, but occasionally we'll see those purple ones that puff on you when you get next to them. Instead of water, there are rivers of primordial soup crossing through the area. But there are no other living creatures on the map, so it's easy to walk north to the next screen. Here we see the other main feature of the Woods: giant fungal weeps. Each weep gets a random liquid type, and generates massive pools of it within 2 tiles of itself. They'll only spawn with normal liquids (no 500 dram pools of neutron flux or cloning draught), but are otherwise not restricted and will replace missing liquid over time. You can even find freshwater weeps, giving you an infinite source of money, if you're willing to make enough trips ferrying waterskins back and forth. Going north again we reach the jungle and regain our bearings. Since we can't just walk in on the world map, it's best to line ourselves up ahead of time. We go here, as close to the center as we can get And then zoom in manually. This drops us in the center of a jungle tile, with our goal exactly 6 screens due south. We cook a meal with a rare ingredient we bought from the kipper in the stilt once we enter. You might think that with all the fungi around we'd want the itchy skin protection meal, but spores aren't actually much of a concern here. The puffing mushrooms aren't too common, and as long as we don't step through the mushrooms blindly we shouldn't have any trouble avoiding them. Instead, I'm going for an offensive mutation. Cooking with an elder *beard gland always gives you the level 10 version of their breath mutation. They're pretty great skills - good damage, huge aoe, very short cooldown. Just look at that area! This should be good if we needed to fight a large number of enemies, for some reason. When you cook for a breath mutation your face gear will get unequipped for some vapor, but you can actually just open the equip menu and put it back on - I think the unequipping is a holdover from when they blocked the face slot. Heading south a screen we find more primordial soup and another honey weep, but this time they're overlapping a bit. So far, you might wonder what's supposed to be scary about the rainbow wood, since nothing is very dangerous and the weeps can be extremely beneficial. Well, this is the answer. We head south, and make it to the next screen before anything happens, but we won't always be able to do so. The next screen is quieter, so we can catch out breath a bit. The way these mushrooms are laid out makes it so we can't walk past without potentially turning a blind corner into a puffing shroom and getting spores on us. But with a flamethrower it's pretty easy to clear a path. We grab some cider from a cider weep and continue south. The next screen doesn't look bad at first, but the message log warns us that something is up. We take a fairly direct path south, passing by an oil weep to fill up our flamethrower. Remember this terrain, by the way. We'll be back here later. The next screen south is the heart of the woods. Following us is our first monosludge, the product of those reactions we're tried to avoid. Sludges are born when any liquid mixes with a large enough pool of primordial soup, and have unique effects in melee depending on the liquid they're made from. Since the weeps and rivers both contain tons of liquid, any place they overlap is an effectively infinite spawning pool of sludges. The maps don't spawn with any mobile hostiles directly, but hanging out too long on the wrong screens can see you get swarmed by sludges. In a 1 on 1 fight, though? Turns out a flamethrower beats a living pile of oil pretty easily. In the center of the screen we find a strange looking patch of mushrooms with a nearby corpse. Whoever they were, they were carrying a credit wedge and a scroll. It's not really relevant to our quest, but let's read it and see if we can learn what happened to them. Scroll bound by a strand of kelp posted:9th of Kisu Ux This isn't the first time we're heard the name Ptoh, but it's definitely the most direct. By this point in the run an esper character will likely have been ambushed my Ptoh's servants a number of times, but as a physical mutant he's not really interested in us. This guy's tragic fate aside, we have a job to do. We harvest a couple of the elcatl and get some eater's flesh. We'll only need one unless something goes wrong, but a spare or two can't hurt. Taking mushrooms makes the screen start warping and distorting in a disorienting way. It also makes a road show up where the used to just be dirt. This is the coral path, and we'll be following it over to Klanq's place. There is one more side effect of being under the influence, which is easy to miss but very important to know. Being high absolutely destroys your quickness. Quickness acts as a general multiplier to your overall action speed. The default is 100, 50 means you act at half speed, 200 means you act at double speed, and so on. Our quickness is now 40, so enemies will get more than two actions for every one we take. This is a massive, massive debuff - the first half of the quest was our intro to the zone, but this is where things get dangerous. Following the path to the southeast, there's an asphalt weep spawning sludges right in our path. The flamethrower does a good job killing them, but new ones keep popping up. The south edge of the screen is right here, so we drop down a screen to try and shake the crowd off. We can see that the road continues offscreen to the east, so we can just head to that screen without reentering this one. A sludge follows us, and the screen warping temporarily pushes the top row of tiles under the status bar. We do get our first glimpse of the other thing sludges do, though - each additional liquid they touch will upgrade them, giving them more health, damage, and an additional limb with the abilities from their new liquid. These mono and disludges aren't too bad yet, but a sludge that gets to absorb a bunch of materials can quickly become extremely deadly. Fortunately only the one followed us, so we dispatched them and slipped past to the next screen. There's nothing in sight, but we know there's sludges being born somewhere on the screen. We make it to the top of the map without encountering any, though, so luckily for us they must be in a corner somewhere. The whole experience is very inspiring. The screen north is thankfully peaceful - there's no weeps overlapping with soup, so we can take our time. The road bends and exit the screen to the west. Now, stop and remember the path we've taken so far. We entered the woods way to the north, went straight south 6 screens, then found the heart of the wood. Then we followed the path east, then north, and now this next step will take us west. Which is back onto that screen we walked through before. Now, yes, it is pretty cool to see Klanq's house pop up on a tile we've visited before. But remember how the game works - the screens are generated empty, and sludges start spawning once you enter. Since we've already been through here, the sludges have already had time to start building up. Some of those weeps are right next to Pax's house, too. This is going to be rough. We see the first cluster of slimes as we turn the bend. We pop temporal fugue to even the odds a bit. For once I'm less concerned about friendly fire than the clones are. None of them use their ice breath, but we're able to hit a lot of slimes with it. By the time the clones time out we've cleared out most of the sludges. More will keep spawning, but we're a stone's throw away now so hopefully we can reach Klanq and leave before then. A water sludge pops up as we get close. And then some oil sludges start joining them. I kill one in a single hit, but that gives another time to get close poo poo. (Oil sludges disarm on hit) At this point my plan is to pick up our dropped daggers (not equip them, since they'd just get disarmed again), but since picking stuff up takes time and our quickness is so low... They're able to keep attacking, knocking stuff out of our hands one by one until they're all gone. Which, fine, that was always going to happen once the oil sludges started attacking. The oil sludges don't actually hit hard enough to penetrate our armor consistently, so despite being a huge pain, once we're fully disarmed we can try to push past, pray Klanq isn't hostile, then turn over the blueprints and leave. Just need to grab all our stuff and go. But while we're doing that, more sludges join up, with more liquids to use. The water sludges make us spend a turn vomiting, and the salt sludges make us parched. They're not hurting us, but we're trapped in a constant loop without getting to take a turn. After a couple rounds of this they get joined by a trisludge, who's strong enough to actually punch through our armor, and we're still too busy vomiting to fight back. What a way to go. In retrospect, I think the best thing I could have done would be to recruit an ally. I knew this area was going to be tough, since we have base movespeed and no great escape options, but with all our rep we could have recruited, say, a warden or two. An ally who still gets to move at normal speed could easily have saved us from that vomit loop. I probably should have used sleep gas before picking up the daggers, too. I wasn't thinking about the water sludges and wanted to save it in case we needed it for Klanq, but the safe zone would have prevented them from stunlocking us as well. I had a chance to escape, too - as soon as I realized the path looped back on itself and we had active sludges right next to Pax's place, I could have backed up to the peaceful screen and recoiled away to regroup. Well, that's roguelikes for you. Hindsight is always 20/20. RIP in peace, Deathsleep Stabtail.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 06:04 |
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I really enjoy how the very last words we heard from another living (?) person echoed the words of the last corpse we saw. and then we joined that corpse. at that moment the present echoed the past echoed the future. our fate really was in it, as the bird said. man. video games Ramie fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Jul 10, 2023 |
# ? Jul 10, 2023 09:31 |
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Ah, the rainbow woods. Now we know why we fear the slime.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 09:41 |
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I love the rainbow woods but I will never not believe that water sludges specifically are kinda horseshit. Giving an enemy the ability to potentially chain-stun forever with no chance to take action is a really frustrating decision. That would have happened to you even without the salt sludges (more reliably, in fact) - two water sludges can do it to a normal character, and at 40 qn, I'm pretty sure one can potentially autokill you like a bullshit 100% combo in a fighting game. Neutron flux sludges are understandably much worse, but they literally can't occur organically afaik, they only show up in hosed up circumstances like lategame sultan cult sites with ooze cultists or whatever. If you see one of those you just loving leave and never return, they're the chrome pyramids of oozes. But water sludges can show up in maps where you Must go, and where you Must be at -60 quickness, and as we've just seen, that can resut in you just kind of dying without much recourse. What else are you going to do? Quit the main quest and become a watervine farmer? Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Jul 10, 2023 |
# ? Jul 10, 2023 11:51 |
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always be a mutant and always take Heightened Quickness and/or Multiple Legs the old Clairvoyance + Teleportation combo is even better for the Woods specifically, but that's a lot of points and Teleportation isn't as good as it used to be for general use
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 13:12 |
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Having the Coral Path double back over your entry path to the Rainbow Woods is bad luck in a way that requires a really excellent (or really munchkin-ized) build to survive. I go the munchkin route: night sight interpolators to minimize surprises, sources of flying to keep me out of melee range, force bracelet to keep the heat off, multiple legs so I can book it.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 14:11 |
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What a way to go, that was a great run to read through start to finish
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 14:14 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:always be a mutant and always take Heightened Quickness and/or Multiple Legs This is also one of the unusual cases in which motorized treads can actually be kinda good for True Kin. Normally the loss of the feet equipment slot sucks (tread guards just can't quite stack up to spring-loaded high-tier boots), but that massive movespeed buff helps a lot with running past stuff in the rainbow wood. I suppose a true kin with the right implants (and A Lot of oil) could also just burn a safe path clean through the Wood by multiwielding flamers and scouring every parasang bare as they pass through. Primordial soup is kind of a bitch to vaporize, but three flamers and a thermo cask can dump a hell of a lot of heat really, really fast, so much so that quickly raising a square to 2000 degrees isn't actually that much of a challenge e: lmao yeah I looked it up and a flamer shot passing through a tile adds 8d20 degrees to its temperature, while actually striking something adds half that. IDK if that's "once when the cone of fire passes through/hits" or "for each individual damage-dealing flame 'pellet' (of which there are nine) that passes through/hits," but in either case, firing multiple copies of that thing with a thermo cask equipped should be enough to raise almost anything to its spontaneous combustion point in short order. And with the damage a cask flamer puts out at close range, you could reliably shred any non-magmatic sludges that approached you while you were cleaning up the soup (magmatic sludges are hilariously dangerous and should always be either fled from outright or killed, with extreme rapidity, at the maximum feasible range; unfortunately they really like being warm and are not bothered by fire matter how hot it is) Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Jul 10, 2023 |
# ? Jul 10, 2023 14:36 |
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Nice run, and yeah, you forgot to keep hitting da bricks, you can always get more daggers elsewhere, stopping to pick up is a no go in the woods.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 14:40 |
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I always search for the mechanical wings before I go to the rainbow woods Also lmao but also RIP Great run I learned a lot
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 17:39 |
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Most stylish move would probably have been to recoil away, sleep it off, come back and clear out any nearby sludges at full speed, then stand where Klanq's house shows up and eat the mushroom to pop straight inside. I still want to show off the late game, so I'm not done yet. I have an idea for who the next character will be, so I'll have another update in a couple days.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 18:12 |
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Well that was an unfortunate and unexpected end. Were any of your weapons you lost endgame uniques? If not, it seemed like trying to loot your disarmed stuff when tripping and slowed down is a bad idea in general if you could buy replacements that were as good or at least good enough. e: I wonder how much rep that trisludge gained with the sultan cult that hated you more than anything else has ever hated.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 22:10 |
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The flamethrower would have been the hardest to replace. They’re rare and we weren’t a good enough tinker to build one, so it’s pretty likely we could go the rest of the run without ever finding a replacement. The daggers would have been a bit tedious, but Sixshrew can sell crysteel and flawless crysteel weapons so we could have bought more eventually. But also, by that point even just running away would be hard. The sludges still move faster than us and we’d take a bunch of attacks pushing past them, so the water sludges would likely have caught up either way.
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 22:49 |
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the Rainbow Wood is the single weakest part of a game with otherwise fantastic dungeon design, because the solution is not to engage with a single goddamn thing in it other than the quest objectives, and you're just tested on knowing that + whether you have the mobility and/or immunities necessary to do it it's basically Golgotha without any of the fun parts or rewards
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# ? Jul 10, 2023 22:55 |
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I love the Rainbow Wood
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 01:18 |
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verbal enema posted:I drank way too much! I vomit!
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 01:25 |
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What the hell man!!
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 01:31 |
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Wow, never seen someone get attacked by a water sludge in a forums thread
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 12:13 |
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Die and
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 12:16 |
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Pigbuster posted:Die and Drown and Thirst?
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# ? Jul 11, 2023 21:13 |
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Drink and Vomit : A Caves of Qud SSLP, as per the last update
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 00:51 |
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If anyone else wants to take a stab (heh) at a run feel free to do so. I still havent fiddled with my laptop yet as I'm knee deep in Yakuza 0
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 01:02 |
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Our character for this run is Louis Cypher, a man with a beautiful face and a silver tongue. His stats are all average or below-average, except for ego, which is amazing. An Ego-focused truekin might seem like a strange choice. Normally the reason you want to stack ego is because of the free levels it gives your mental mutations, which a truekin won't have. But I think it actually works better than you might expect, especially with the great starting gear and skills a consul gets. We start in the desert canyons this time. Let's start by taking stock of our inventory. Our starting equipment is, for the most part, pretty terrible. We actually have 0 AV right now. But there is one really amazing exception that more than makes up for it. Consuls always start with a force bracelet. When activated, a force bracelet creates a 3x3 bubble of forcefields around you. The forcefields move with us, and they're selectively permeable; we can shoot through them just fine, but nobody else can shoot through them at us. They don't make us completely invincible - there's still some mental mutations that can hit us, explosions can reach through the shield, the bracelet can be emp'ed, and the forcefields themselves can be broken by normality effects or enough damage. But it's enough to shut down probably 90% of the creatures in Qud. The biggest restriction is that a force bracelet is extremely energy hungry. A full chem cell can only power it for 20 turns, and we only have one full chem cell to start with. Still, unless something disastrous happens to it we'll be keeping this equipped for the entire game. The rest of our items are pretty good as well, truekin generally start better equipped than mutants. We have several salve injectors, about 120 drams of water, a book, and perhaps most importantly of all: The Food Cube. Also with us is our loyal companion Gru-wof-ufo. Like all pets he's more or less doomed to perish in the early game, but he's a decent melee fighter until then. The book we started with is actually pretty interesting too - in a fitting bit of poetry, it gives some more context for the life and death of the corpse we found in the rainbow woods. Across Moghra'yi, Vol. III: Oth, the Free City posted:Preface We can find the other volumes of Across Moghra'yi, but I think this is the only one where we can get an alternate perspective on the society they describe. The other interesting part of our starting loadout is our skills. Proselytize lets us attempt to recruit an adjacent creature. The formula is roughly (our level + our ego + random number from -6 to +2) vs (enemy level + enemy MA). Since level is a part of it we can't go too crazy, but since most creatures have fairly low mental armor, pumping ego like this means we can recruit a lot of stuff at our level or a bit higher with 100% success. Inspiring presence gives our allies 4 more max hp for each point of ego modifier we have. We're currently at +6, so our allies will have 24 more hp than usual. That's a huge buff this early, doubling most creatures' health. These two together require 25 ego and 650 skill points to learn normally, so Consuls are the only class that can easily play with both of them in the early game like this. Like all truekin we also have the ability to rebuke robots. This works much like proselytize, but can only target robots. In addition to recruiting them outright, rebuking can also roll a lesser success that turns them neutral. Anyway, that's enough build talk for now. We pick up our two starting quests, as well as the quest to visit the stilt. The starapple farm is not far to the south. We walk there without any encounters. Free exp. Let's see what he can give us. Is that...? Why do you have a-? Okay, sure. Normally I would take the batteries for our force bracelet, but, I mean, if you're offered a nuke you have to take it, right? Now, will we ever be able to use this without killing ourselves instantly? Probably not. But our odds of dying an interesting death just went up dramatically. The mayor is disliked by the mechanimists, so we lose 50 rep with them, but we can just toss stuff in the well to make it up. Next, the grenade from the lilypad's lair. "Discovering" the lair gives us enough exp to level. On the surface we meet our first hostile enemy of the game. We politely explain to the worm that, actually, he should work for us instead. The argument is hard to resist. After that we spend some skill points to pick up another persuasion skill. Menacing stare is a ranged, single-target skill the makes the target flee in terror for a few turns. Unlike proselytize level doesn't play a role, so we can actually already terrify most stuff in Qud even at level 5. The cooldown is fairly short, so it's a great crowd control option. The grenade isn't on the surface, so we head deeper. The legendary glowpad turns out to be an uncontroversial guy who nobody dislikes, so a water ritual is free rep. Since we don't really need flower rep I spend some asking for a random secret, and it pays off. Becoming nooks always have a couple cybernetic implants with them. There's a couple implants that we can't buy from the normal merchants, so we're always on the lookout for nooks. The glowpad has the grenade, and he wants $50 for it. We talk to the glowpad. Do they really want to just stay here, in their cave, for their whole life? Just hanging out, telling bawdy jokes to frogs? Qud is a vast and mysterious place, full of unknown wonders and treasures. We should explore it together! The glowpad is convinced, and joins the team. As an ally, money is meaningless between us. He hands over the grenade for free. We inform Niechardiwillow that their services are no longer needed. We get our introduction to the Barathrumites, but naturally we have other things to do first. The rusted archway is a earlygame dungeon filled with the same creatures you'd see on your way to grit gate. We ignored it as Stabtail, but it's much more interesting for a truekin. The surface is a fungal patch, but thankfully the stairs are right there. The next floor down has a great starting gun lying around. Sniper rifles have to reload after every shot, but have great penetration and accuracy. Our weak, noodle-like arms make us very bad at melee combat, so when we're not letting our minions handle things a gun is the next best option. The stairs are right nearby again. And the third floor is no longer a fungal patch, so we can afford to explore a bit more. We learn how to berate stuff. The important thing about berating people is that it lowers their MA, which makes them easier to recruit. Since it's not a hostile act, if there's a friendly NPC just at the edge of what's possible to proselytize you can keep negging them until eventually it works. There's a baetyl here who we probably won't satisfy for a while, but should be doable eventually. The bottom floor has a pair of becoming nooks and a chest with two credits in it. Neither of the implants are amazing, but the credits are the important thing. As a truekin, the nook is much more polite. We upgrade our license to 4 and install the night vision. In the long run we'll probably prefer to just hold a glowsphere in our hand and use the implant slot on something else, but for now the night vision is a lot better than a torch. Night vision can be toggled on and off, and gives us infinite vision range in exchange for making everything green. With that finished, we surface and head for the stilt. We've learned a bunch of wayfaring lores at this point, so the trip is easy. Sheba's a turret this time. Cute. There's always a gutsmonger on the southeast screen. We ignored him as a mutant, but we'll be here a lot as a truekin. His wares are unidentified, but you can pay him a fee to learn what they are. That seems like a dumb business model to me, but I'm paying it so I guess it works. There's a couple that could be interesting, but nothing we want to buy right now. We stop by Kyakukya, the ai continues to not understand retreating. We visit the ruins of Joppa to find our earlygame historic site. What creature do we get? It's snapjaws! Low level, weak willed snapjaws, who could easily be convinced to follow a persuasive adventurer. Next time: Snapjaw Battle Royale
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 02:58 |
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I'm trying the sort of mutant version of this with pros and beguile and a beak and legs. It took a lot of patience to really get off the ground but I feel good about my current character
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 03:14 |
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So is there a limit on how many followers you can have? I'm assuming so and that you can't just recruit a literal army but I'd love to be wrong.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 03:47 |
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Evil Fluffy posted:So is there a limit on how many followers you can have? I'm assuming so and that you can't just recruit a literal army but I'd love to be wrong. There’s no hard limit, but the recruitment abilities are usually restricted to one at a time. When we proselytize someone new, our old follower goes back to being independent. Rebuke robot has its own one follower slot, and if we had the mental mutation beguile that would also have its own slot. Water ritual recruitment and cloning draught are both unrestricted, so you can get any number of followers that way. Also, if you recruit a follower who already has their own followers (a lot of legendaries will spawn with a posse of minions), their followers come along too.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 03:53 |
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Recruiting others is a perfectly valid strategy... filling grit gate with ape god clones to kill the invasion is perfectly fine.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 04:16 |
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I'll admit, recruiting folks is a type of build I've never tried before, but I see how it could get pretty powerful.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 04:25 |
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titty_baby_ posted:I'm trying the sort of mutant version of this with pros and beguile and a beak and legs. It took a lot of patience to really get off the ground but I feel good about my current character And I died shortly after posting
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 04:57 |
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Wow, a Hand-E-Nuke one a 27 ego character? That's probably going for like 12000 water right now. And for what it's worth, you can turn the green full screen effect on night vision off. It's part of the "turn off full screen filters" option in the options somewhere.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 05:16 |
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I want to play this but I'm a little leery of non-ascii tilesets
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 16:30 |
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E Depois do Adeus posted:I want to play this but I'm a little leery of non-ascii tilesets Show off the ASCII version, then. If you don't want to I might this weekend; I kind of want to take another crack at a pacifist win after my last one failed at the eleventh hour to a level generation bug. Plus it gives me a good excuse for only going for a "lesser" victory -- someone else can show off the deep endgame.
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 16:47 |
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E Depois do Adeus posted:I want to play this but I'm a little leery of non-ascii tilesets Qud was originally an ascii game, and while they've been putting a lot of work into the modern graphics and ui, you can still turn all of that off if you prefer. (I forgot to turn off the vignette and scanlines for this pic but they can be disabled too)
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# ? Jul 12, 2023 17:28 |
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The snapjaw historic site goes pretty smoothly. Our boar friend can beat any of them in a fight, and our sniper rifle is great for picking them off from afar. The boar starts fighting a tortoise, who take a while for him to kill on his own, due to their high AV. We help out a bit by taking some shots with the sniper rifle. Well, it's time for a new friend. We meet a legendary snapjaw wearing a girshworm disguise. He decides to join the winning side, and his minions follow him. To the north we find a pretty nice chest. That glowsphere will probably be our main source of light for a while, since we don't need our hands for much. Next floor down, and we get some lucky mechanimist rep. We're all set for Bethesda now. Nearby, the chest contains a mace for people who really hate lizards. Pushing forward, we find the location of another historic site. The east half of the map has a ton of bookshelves. Most of them are empty, but we still get a good haul of books. The southern branch has a becoming nook buried under more bookshelves. We have the points to spare, so there's no reason not to install these. Electric damage is kind of rare, but this is great to have when it does come up. The next floor down is, uh, cozy. We supervise while our friend digs a way out. There's a vent emitting clockwork beetles to the north. We rebuke one of them into joining us. Then push forward and close the door to stop any more from showing up. By this point our inventory is getting full, so we head back to the silt. Along the way we find some ruins with a new becoming nook, but accidentally break the implant when we try to identify it. Oops, looks like we didn't have quite enough water on hand. Whatever, it's only two tiles. We arrive in town only slightly dying of thirst. And Lulihart is nice enough to give us something to drink. I drop our books in a chest next to Sheba, but don't donate them yet. I'd like to try and get the reward for clearing Golgotha under level 18 this time. The gutsmonger is able to identify our broken implant, and has a couple new ones for sale. I buy the intravenous port - salve injectors are already a great healing item, and between this and the fact tonics in general are stronger for truekin, we'll end up recovering about 120% of our max hp from one injector. The random merchants in the stilt ended up giving us three bookbinders this time. The schoedinger page will be useful. The Dark Calculus doesn't do anything mechanically but it's a pretty interesting part of Qud's backstory. On the Origins and Nature of the Dark Calculus posted:Editor's note: this excerpt is published with permission from the notes of Barathrum the Old. We make our way back to the historic site and continue delving. Before long we arrive on the final floor. We meet a legendary snapjaw prankster. The artifact is nice. Most face stuff at this point only gives 1 DV, so 3 bonus stats is a lot more valuable. We'll probably sell it off eventually, but we'll wear it for a while. Now that we have a glowsphere and some extra credits, I swap the night vision out and install our new intravenous port. We found another early game historic site while exploring that last one, so after dropping off our stuff in the stilt we go to check it out. It's the same cult, but this time populated by tortoises. This is kind of a pain - they're not dangerous, but their AV is so high that killing them can take a dozen or more attacks before we finally get enough hits through. There's a becoming nook on the surface with some cool implants, though. The anomaly fumigator is situational, since we don't necessarily want tons of normality gas around that would pop our force bracelet's bubble, but against certain enemies it can be a really strong option, and you can freely toggle it on or off once it's installed. The fullerite bones would be great if we were a melee truekin, but for us they're just a valuable thing to sell. We make a pretty great recipe on our way down. As long as enemies can't kill us from over 20% hp in one hit this can keep triggering over and over. The way is blocked again. We don't have a pickaxe and these walls are a lot tougher than the shale in the last historic site, so we spend probably a thousand turns meditating while our friend gradually chips a way through. Thanks buddy! Eh, we'll just be pawning this off for implants. In addition to the turtles, the site also has a ton of sprouting orbs. Sprouting orbs are hidden until you step on them, after which they pop up a ring of plant matter around you. The plant matter walls are weak enough that even we can tear them down in one or two attacks, but it makes exploration go a lot slower. As we get deeper the turtles are joined by some subterranean snapjaws. They're stronger than their surface-dwelling cousins. Another floor down and the stairs are surrounded by a half dozen sprouting orbs, creating a really claustrophobic arena as a dozen turtles slowly file in. Eventually the turtles stop coming, and we prune down the walls. On the final floor our snapjaw companion meets his match. You kill my friend, you become my friend Now this is an interesting prize. As a weapon it's lame, but we don't need strong melee weapons anyway, and getting temporal fugue is great. Even though it's granted by an item it'll still be powered up by our ego, so we can actually summon a bunch of time clones as long as we're holding this. Although, since we're such a bad fighter even having a half dozen clones doesn't count for much. We could do some shenanigans with clones throwing their duplicated hand-e-nukes, but it's also really really likely that we would die in the process. We cash in our new credits, but don't install any new implants yet. The descent to Grit Gate goes pretty smoothly. Slugsnouts are a fantastic early game recruit if you can get one - they're basically pigs with a strong, infinite ammo gun. We also rebuked one of the waydroids to replace our old clockwork beetle. It's time for the rite of passage. We have four holes to choose from. Can we make it through Golgotha in one piece??
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# ? Jul 13, 2023 04:57 |
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What's the damage and blast radius on the hand-e nuke? Too big to be able to safely make clones, send them on a bombing run, and stay back in safety even in very open areas?
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# ? Jul 13, 2023 05:15 |
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Over 40000 damage and "about half the screen in size". Hand-e-Nukes basically instantly kill everything. No really, their damage calculation is 40000+2d6. That's just what they do.
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# ? Jul 13, 2023 05:29 |
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Can you drop it down a hole and make a much bigger hole?
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# ? Jul 13, 2023 08:35 |
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# ? Jun 10, 2024 09:09 |
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You might be able to trade it to a rebuked robot, use a ganglionic teleprojector to control said robot, run into the next parasang, and blow it the hell up.
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# ? Jul 13, 2023 12:43 |