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Angry Diplomat posted:Yeah everything the lore says about the Seekers is pretty loving bleak. Love to get ego-deathed into a murderous Quisling and eat the minds of my fellow espers. The Sightless Way: not even once On the other hand, if they like you: free mental mutations, so who's to say if they're good or bad.
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Aug 17, 2023 17:28
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my original motivation for making a pacifist build was, specifically, to see if it gives you the option of telling Tau-no-Longer "no, actually, i do not 'reek of predation.' i've never hurt anyone unless you count that time i turned on some automatic turrets that subsequently laser beamed some nazis in self-defense."
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Aug 17, 2023 17:32
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:my original motivation for making a pacifist build was, specifically, to see if it gives you the option of telling Tau-no-Longer "no, actually, i do not 'reek of predation.' i've never hurt anyone unless you count that time i turned on some automatic turrets that subsequently laser beamed some nazis in self-defense." You can do her quest before the grit gate defense, just walk on over to Chavvah
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Aug 17, 2023 21:24
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AtomikKrab posted:just walk on over to Chavvah me walking out of Bethesda Susa smugly after convincing an impossibly old sentient machine into performing DuoLingo on the CD I brought with me : yeah barathrum can cool it, I can get back to them whenever, what I should do instead is go check out that weird flickering purple spire way over yonder
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Aug 17, 2023 22:24
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theysayheygreg posted:me walking out of Bethesda Susa smugly after convincing an impossibly old sentient machine into performing DuoLingo on the CD I brought with me : yeah barathrum can cool it, I can get back to them whenever, what I should do instead is go check out that weird flickering purple spire way over yonder This is what moon kings do
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Aug 18, 2023 14:16
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 In Dragon Ball Z fashion, we head out into the desert to test our new power.  Slugbuster will follow us around and fight on its own, just like Slog and Kushruyumet. But it can do more than just that. In order to unleash its true power we'll need to fight together!   Interacting with Slugbuster lets us enter the cockpit.     It's its own tiny room. The inventory hatch lets us access Slugbbuster's inventory directly, letting us give or take items without exiting the golem and trading with it.    Of course, the real focus is the pilot seat. When we sit in that...   we become the slug.    Slugbuster is ludicrously powerful. Over 1,000 hp, 70 strength, and 31 penetration on its melee attacks. As an independent ally it has half quickness, making it move and attack at half speed, but when piloted it has its full stats.  If things are, somehow, going south, you can also eject.   It launches the pilot seat out of the golem, letting you instantly get back to fighting on foot.  You have to carry the pilot seat back into position to keep using the golem afterwards, though. (Or, in our case, slowly drag the pilot seat back into position. It weights 100 pounds!)  The slug gang find some issachar riflers who have grossly overestimated the power of their muskets.  And we get our first demonstration of the Slugbuster's power. Bear in mind that this is just a normal attack - Slugbuster has the full axe skill tree too, so it has some powerful options to use against the very few enemies who can survive a single hit.  Now to test out the crungling gaze:  When used by the player, it... charges up for 3 turns just to put stuff to sleep.  I guess the bright side is that it should let us get crungled whenever we feel like, without needing to head to the moon stair and hunt down a new dreamcrungle each time. And it's not like Slugbuster really needs more killing power. Anyway, you probably noticed that Slugbuster has an equipment screen, but doesn't have any items equipped. It would be nice to gear up, but we can't just hand it some of the crysteel gear the others are holding. The golem can only equip gigantic items. You can find them randomly in the wild, but they're rare, and "gigantic" is one of the mods that you can't add through tinkering. But there is a trick to finding a set of gigantic gear.  The slug gang slides up north to the asphalt mines. Our goal is 30 floors down.    The early floors are pretty mindless, since this is an early game area. We exit slugbuster so we can use the optical multiscanner to find the stairs faster.  At least until our evil twin shows up for revenge.  Time to show him the power of Slugbuster     The power of Slugbuster, in this situation, is apparently distracting him long enough for Kushruyumet to sneak around wipe him out. Evil Cypher's sky high ego vs the golem's mediocre willpower means menacing stare is a surprisingly powerful disable.   Floor 19 is a special floor, the Great Sea. The entire floor is covered in asphalt. No big deal for Slugbuster, since getting stuck is based on strength, but it's a lot slower to travel on foot.    There's a legendary Mechanimist somewhere who traps us in a force wall, but the rest of the team clean things up pretty quickly. Past the great sea is where things start getting more dangerous.   From floor 20 onward, all of the asphalt is replaced with lava. Slugbuster can swim in lava no problem thanks to its 100 fire resist, but the rest of us have to be more careful.   We also start encountering magma crabs, which are a huge step up from the flamesnouts and eyeless crabs we've been encountering before now. They can hit pretty hard, and their attacks ignore your AV and only hit your fire resist. Slugbuster is completely safe, but these guys could plausibly kill Slog or Kushruyumet if they're outnumbered.    We keep going down, rocket jumping over a lot of lava, until finally we reach floor 30. We can see a little bit of fence to the north, so our destination is up there.  Specifically, this guy. Hamilcrab is a special merchant who only stocks gigantic gear. With how rare it is normally, just checking his inventory once will give you more to choose from than you'll find through the entire rest of your run. Sadly, crabs hate us enough that he and his guards are hostile and wants to kill us. He also has a starshell as a hired guard, who threw out multiple space-time vortexes we'll need to dodge around.  We can try to calm him down with a love injector, but it's a coinflip whether or not we'll be able to penetrate his armor.  Well, we tried   When he died, he (or maybe lava that dripped off him) solidified into a block of shale, covering up all the items from his inventory. I guess we'll need to dig them out before  Oh poo poo! Change of plans. Forget the gear, we need to get in that spacetime vortex before it disappears, or else we might never see Slog again! I don't know how much time we have - the vortex is already kind of old.  We sprint down to the vortex. Thankfully it's cooperative and moves closer to us - if it had kept moving away we probably wouldn't have made it.  We jump through, and reunite with Slog in a cave 26 stratum underground. We spawned in right next to a gelatinous cupola and got engulfed immediately. We activated temporal fugue and tried to fight our way out, but I forgot that we still had the love injector equipped so we ended up charming it instead.  Except being in love with us didn't make it stop digesting us, and we can't order it to move away or release us. It doesn't leave us with any choice.  Sometimes, love is cruel.    We explore the rest of the floor, but there's nothing too exciting here. We need to recoil out. We could just use our good old Grit Gate recoiler, but this seems like a good time to show off another one of Slugbuster's features.    Slugbuster has a built in recoiler, and when piloting it you can activate it to instantly recoil back to Omonporch. You can also do it the other way around, and use the pad here to call the golem back if it got lost somewhere.   The Barathrumites have done some work while we were gone.   Slog, Kushruyumet, you guys sit tight. We'll take Slugbuster back down the asphalt mines alone - being able to just ignore all the lava completely will honestly make it easier than going with friends.     We head back down, this time walking straight through the lava, and dig out the rock to find Hamilcrab's inventory.  Not bad.  Of course, after all that we barely equip anything. There weren't any head items, and wearing something in the body slot would block the weapon there. As stylish as Slugbuster would look in some gigantic overalls, it wouldn't be worth the loss in attack.  We poke our head down the stairs, but once you go below floor 30 it's just normal caves.   Back to Omonporch. Now that we're all geared up, I think it's time to take on our last historic site. Moon Stair historic sites can be extremely dangerous, but that just means they're the perfect place to fully test our new mech.   We head back through the pass, and pop back to the world map to enter the historic site directly.   We arrive in a tiny room made of polished black marble, with the stairs down right there. How did we even get in here?  It would probably be smart to just go down to the next floor, but I'm curious what we're up against. We dig through a wall and are greeted by a leering stalker. Leering stalkers have 800 HP, 25 AV, 88 heat and cold resist, and a main weapon that does damage and stun in a huge aoe. Their raw damage is low, but they're so tanky that under normal circumstances we wouldn't have any good way to kill them.   A giant golem is not normal circumstances. Last time I said that I thought daggers were the best golem weapon since you get to attack more often, but I don't think I was giving the axes enough credit. I didn't realize it but when the metachrome axes apply cleave they give -3 AV, rather than the usual -1. This means that they pretty quickly give the enemy massive debuffs to their defense, which against bulky enemies like this ends up being lot of extra damage.  There's a couple more leering stalkers waiting for us outside.  When we step out past the hallway there's an ominous hum as the decarbonizer to the south warms up. Decarbonizers are another one of those enemies who mark where they're going to attack in advance, and even in the golem we really don't want to be standing in the path when it goes off.  We step back out of the way.  There's more leering stalkers to the west too. We clear them out, but I don't think it's worth clearing the entire floor. Nothing seems to be coming after up, so we head down the stairs.  The next floor is another tiny room, this time with a dromad caravan inside.  And a decarbonizer? There's no way for us to back away without swapping places and putting one of the dromads in the path.  I'm so sorry Mr. Saltback!  Oh, phew, the saltback did the same thing and swapped with the guard next to him. Ethically, I think that means that we're fine.   The decarbonizer's beam instantly dismembers a bunch of limbs. If you're lucky you'll only end up minus a couple arms and legs, but it's pretty easy for it to dismember your head for an instant kill too. The decarbonizors can't move, and the beam is on a long cooldown, so they're not too tough to play around, but they're definitely an enemy you always need to respect.   Decarbonizers have 25 AV and 2,000 hp, so killing them is usually not an option, but with mechs all things are possible.  I can't imagine you get enough customers here to be worth the risk.  The stairs down are in the corner, so we head on down.  The next floor is a bit bigger than the last.  There's an astral tabby nearby. These cute guys are permanently phased, and follow you around ready to attack if you ever phase out. Totally harmless to us, since Slugbbuster can't phase out even if we wanted to.  As we head to the west a decarbonizer spins up its beam.  When we step south to dodge a second one starts aiming too! Decarbonizer beams will ricochet off walls, so it's not always enough to break line of sight, but thankfully the ricochets will show up in the predicted path.   Once the shots have gone off we're able to step out and cut them down before they can shoot again.  We keep going west, and a bunch of hostile plants sprout around us. There's a hostile esper somewhere.    There she is.  She has syphon vim on top of her other mutations, but...  draining 5 hp a turn is not going to be enough, here.   We take her down, but there's still a couple space time vortexes floating around we need to avoid.   Past her we find a relic chest. This isn't the final floor so this is one of those random ones you sometimes find.  It's not bad at all.   There's a hostile monad around the corner, but it turns out you can kill algebra if you hit it hard enough.     After a bit more poking around we find the stairs in a room right by the start that we missed.  The next floor starts us in the tiniest room yet, although admittedly this one is only walled off by a tree.  There's another starshell on the other side, who doesn't waste any time summoning another vortex.  Around here is where I remembered that Slugbuster also has the berserk skill.  The capstone of the axe skill tree, berserk makes it so that for the next 5 turns, every single hit will dismember an enemy limb. Since we have the decapitate skill as well, heads are a possible target. It doesn't last long, but berserk is an incredibly powerful buff.     This floor doesn't have any decarbonizers, so it ends up being a pretty easy clear. On to the next one.  There's a spiral path when we arrive, with no enemies in sight.   Suddenly a visual ripple of distortion flows across the screen. That's the hallmark of chrome pyramids, Qud's most dangerous robots. Now it's time to get serious.  The path leads up to a door.   Well that was horrifying. Slugbuster is strong but we still wouldn't stand a chance walking straight in there.  We back off. Thankfully they don't seem to be following.  We back off to the stairs and hop out of Slugbuster so the optical multiscanner can tell us where the stairs down are. Unfortunately the answer appears to be "On the far side of the Chrome Pyramid Lounge". (The double Slugbusters are because another ripple was going past - I tried to time the screenshots so they wouldn't distort things but it's tough when there's four chrome pyramids all hanging out)  We try to dig past the lounge and see if things look any better on the other side.  But it looks like we didn't dig far enough north, and we open a narrow path into the lounge.  One of the pyramids follows us back to the corner. We might be able to take them one on one like this, though.  Chrome pyramids like to attack with their swarm rack, a sort of multi missile shotgun that fires off a dozen explosives. It does a lot of damage, but this close to us the pyramid will get caught in the splash and be hurt just as much. Of course, the pyramid has 4,000 hp to our 1,000, so it can still win the damage race, but it helps tilt things a bit more in our favor.  Then a second pyramid showed up.   The pyramid we're attacking is still "fine", and slugbuster is below half health. The one on one was already close, we're not winning the two on one.   We step away from the controls. Time doesn't stop while we're in here, so the screen shakes as Slugbuster is barraged with missiles. It's time to leave.  We recoil out of there.   Down to a quarter health, ouch. We take Slugbuster to the freehold's pool of convalessence to heal up.   At least we got a nice bracelet for out trouble. We're up to 44 ego now, which is pretty absurd.  It's been long enough that the Slynth should have moved in to their new home. Let's go check up on them. We need to attune with Chavvah again, since it moved away.     Way down south this time - it'll be faster to recoil back to Yd and walk in from there.  So we do that.     It seems like things are going well.   We can talk with the other chimes now that Tau is gone to see what they think about her departure.           They seem a bit conflicted, but happy it's done. I like _'s response the most.   Thah told us to come back once the Slynth have had time to move in, so let's check in with her.      I'd be a little hesitant to join a collective mind myself, to be honest.  Our reward is a good fit for Louis, letting the entire Slug Gang get a bit stronger without requiring any equipment slots. The effect you get from the asterisk is determined by where the Slynth decide to settle, while the strength of the effect is determined by the number of potential homes you found them. Since we only gave them the minimum 3 we have the weakest effect, but it's still a pretty great reward as is.  As we walk away we get lost in Lake Hinnom. This is a quirk of how the golem works - when we pilot the golem we use the golem's stats and skills for everything, which means that when we travel the overworld while piloting Slugbuster it's very easy to get lost, because Slugbuster doesn't have any of the wayfaring skills. Still, this is actually a good opportunity. I wasn't planning to show this off, but if the opportunity drops right in my lap, why not? We still have some of the neutron flux we gathered to use for the golem. If you step into a giant clam, while lost, and carrying neutron flux, this happens:      We arrive in a small lake surrounded by clams.  In the center is the biggest clam of them all, and the only highly entropic being you can meet.  You need static to do the water ritual with highly entropic beings, but we can still trade.  0lam stocks a bunch of extradimensional items from a bunch of different tiers.  Extradimensional items have random additional effects or additional stats - this psychodyne helmet has more AV than usual, for example.  0lam is also selling the Otherpearl, a unique piece of equipment and the most expensive item in the game.  We take back all the extra stuff Slog and Kushruyumet have been holding on to. 35,000 drams of water is a lot, but we can still afford it if we put everything together.  All the old crysteel gear is 15,000 on its own.  And one of those leering stalkers dropped a jewel encrusted blast cannon that's worth nearly 10,000 on its own.  It takes almost all of the spare items we had on hand, but we're able to afford the pearl.  Let's try it on!    It instantly jumps our psychic glimmer up to 55, making us visible to lots of beings that used to ignore us. Psychic glimmer is a mechanic that ordinarily only comes up for espers - as your ego gets higher and your mental mutations get stronger, you start attracting attacks from esper hunters and extradimensional beings hoping to absorb your mind. They work a lot like the evil twin attacks, complete with the warning when you enter the screen. Another fun fact about the Otherpearl - that effect that makes items 5x more likely to be extradimensional? It actually stacks multiplicatively, not additively. If you use polygel to duplicate the Otherpearl and wear both, you become 25x more likely to find extradimenional items. 3 Otherpearls makes you 125x more likely, 4 Otherpearls makes you 625x more likely, and so on. Stack enough, and you can hit the point where finding an item that isn't extradimensional becomes rare. Of course, the flipside is that doing that means you'll have hundreds of psychic glimmer. That's enough messing around, though. Let's leave.  No world map, huh? That's fine, we're used to traveling on foot. We'll just head to the edge of the screen here and step north.   No dice.  We'll have to leave the same way we came.   We pop out of a clam in a subterranean reef. From there it's an easy trip back to Yd Freehold.  For the first time in a long time, the Slug Gang have nothing they need to do. No quests to solve, no villages asking for help, no ancient ruins to plunder.  Louis sits down in the lounge and relaxes. Perhaps he and his friends can enjoy the rarest and most coveted ending for a roguelike protagonist - peaceful retirement.  Time for a well deserved break. Haha jk, we're gonna kill those chrome pyramids or die trying. Next time: Slugbuster's Final Battle!
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Aug 20, 2023 04:00
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 That's a lot of pyramids.
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Aug 20, 2023 04:46
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Have the developers given a timeline for releasing the Top of the Spindle? Will Louis ever make it to the top?
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Aug 20, 2023 06:02
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Boat Stuck posted:Have the developers given a timeline for releasing the Top of the Spindle? Will Louis ever make it to the top? Game's projected release is next year. No matter what, I've never been powerful enough to handle more than one chrome pyramid at a time. I'd be amazed to see someone be able to handle more than one. mdct fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Aug 20, 2023 |
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Aug 20, 2023 06:05
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Absolutely perfect turn-by-turn reaction to opening the door to the Chrome Zone, tbh
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Aug 20, 2023 06:24
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Boat Stuck posted:Have the developers given a timeline for releasing the Top of the Spindle? Will Louis ever make it to the top? Major content updates tend to break save compatibility, so Louis himself probably won’t be making it to the top no matter when it comes out. But yeah, planned release is sometime in 2024.
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Aug 20, 2023 07:36
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There's been a save breaking update on the beta branch since this LP started, so yeah we definitely won't see Louis on the spire.
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Aug 20, 2023 10:31
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Chrome Pyramids are of course unsurprisingly just a uh... hover tank. Turns out the most dangerous enemy in Qud is just leftover miltiary hardware. Leering Stalkers if you read the description are repurposed construction equipment with piston legs and a cannon set to autonomous mode. You can also harvest an armor for slugbuster from them.
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Aug 20, 2023 10:35
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I devoured this LP in the past couple days, I'm so glad to have caught up just in time for the Hyper Epic Mecha Final Battle. Great job to both verbal enema and Snake Maze!
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Aug 20, 2023 11:27
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This game is literally my favorite game ever and I hope Snake Maze's decent ya know it's ok LP run makes people buy this (Snake Maze I love you and thank you for taking over)
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Aug 20, 2023 17:11
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Further Reading posted:There's been a save breaking update on the beta branch since this LP started, so yeah we definitely won't see Louis on the spire. 
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Aug 20, 2023 17:31
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We can just make a new louis, with wishes... blackjack... and possibly slug hookers
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Aug 20, 2023 18:20
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DarthRoblox posted:Hmm, funny that "nuked the goddamn spindle, you psychopath" didn't make it into these particular annals... catching up on the thread now that i've finished the main quest myself and i just started giggling when they posted the inventory screenshot
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Aug 20, 2023 20:14
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AtomikKrab posted:We can just make a new louis, with wishes... blackjack... and possibly slug hookers Hear me out: what if we make Minmo again, but swap bodies with them...
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Aug 21, 2023 00:45
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Breadmaster posted:Hear me out: what if we make Minmo again, but swap bodies with them... An esper mind taker with purity of form and overpowering ego named Minmax
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Aug 21, 2023 14:43
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Louisa Slurper, the socially repugnant chimera humble pie appreciator with the lowest possible ego
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Aug 21, 2023 14:50
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It's time for our final battle against the chrome pyramid cultists. There's one very important bit of preparation we need to make before we set out.   Namely, crafting as many emp grenades as we have the bits for.  You might notice that Slugbuster doesn't actually have a thrown weapon slot. That's not as big of a deal as you might expect, at least so long as we stick to mk III grenades. (PS: did you notice that, while acting independently, Slugbuster automatically equipped the gigantic furs, blocking off its offhand (offbody?) weapon in exchange for an insignificant boost to defense? I didn't  ) We unequip the Otherpearl from ourselves and switch back to the relic bracelet we found. We'll have our hands full with the pyramids, no need to tempt psychic assassins to join in too.    We retrace our steps, back through the mountain pass and the already cleared levels of the site.  We step down the stairs to the floor with the Chrome Pyramid lounge and are immediately welcomed with a shower of missiles.  We can't throw grenades, but we can detonate them directly from our inventory. For most grenades this is a bad idea, since it means you'll be in the center of the AOE. But since Slugbuster is powered by psychic chiming from Chavvah that can't be disrupted, it doesn't matter if we get pulsed.  The pyramids, on the other hand, get completely shut down for about 10 turns. They can't take any actions, and their barrier is disabled. It's nowhere near enough time to kill one, but it gives us the opening we need. This is step one. Step two:  We activate berserk. For the next five turns, every attack that penetrates will dismember a limb. Chrome pyramids have regeneration 10, so they'll regrow a missing limb every turn, and can't be killed by decapitation, but it's still a very important step in killing one.   Because their big missile shotgun thing isn't an innate ability - it's a weapon. If we chop off one of the limbs supporting it, they'll drop it on the ground, and even after regenerating the limb they won't pick it back up.  Without the swarm rack, a chrome pyramid is much less scary. They're not harmless, of course, they can still hit pretty hard in melee. But Slugbuster will usually take about 60 damage a turn from their melee attacks, versus the 200+ from a point blank missile barrage, and not having a ranged option makes it possible to run away if we need to.   We lure this pyramid upstairs to fight - we don't need another pincer attack like we had last time.   We're still a lot more beat up than it is thanks to the missile barrage when we entered, so we pop another emp grenade to get some free turns.   We can't see exact health numbers while piloting Slugbuster, but 'Damaged' should be a lot more manageable.    We take a beating, but we finish the first pyramid off without using any more items.   It takes a day for Slugbuster to recover completely (the downsides of having over 1,000 hp), but eventually we're patched up and ready to continue.  There's another pyramid waiting for us close to the stairs, but their force barrier gives them away before they can get line of sight for missiles.   We detonate a grenade from around the corner and pop berserk. We've gotten lucky with our dismemberments so far - both pyramids lost their swarm racks on the first hit. We won't always be that lucky, so it's best to conserve resources when we can.    We attack until the grenade wears off, then lure him upstairs to finish off. Even starting the fight at full health and getting an instant dismemberment like this, we still need to use a second EMP grenade midfight in order to win the damage race.  Once more unto the breach.   The pyramid gets the first strike this time, but it's still in EMP range.    We dismember it and lure it upstairs with the others.  Our damage tends to be kind of swingy versus chrome pyramids. By default their AV is actually a little bit higher than our penetration, so it's a coin flip whether we penetrate at all, and when we do penetrate we're usually only doing damage somewhere in the teens. But each time we attack we have a 75% chance to give a stacking -3 AV penalty - that's the "cleaved" effect on its status. At -14 AV we'll always penetrate and generally do 70-80 damage per hit, so it's a massive damage boost in our favor. But, there's a catch - that same regeneration that lets the pyramids regrow their limbs also gives them a 4% chance per turn to repair their armor and remove all the stacks of cleaved we've applied, resetting our damage back down to the minimum. A pyramid that gets lucky and repairs their cleave multiple times will last a lot longer than one who doesn't.   We take a short breather after that last pyramid to clean up our spoils. We've picked up one swarm rack, and there's two more lying on the ground. They're not really practical for the player to use - even if you work around the 1,500 pound weight, getting and holding enough missiles is a chore of its own, and using it without friendly fire is difficult, to say the least.  But they disassemble into a bunch of the rarest bits in the game, so if you can get your hands on a few they give you a lot more options for tinkering. Two swarm racks is enough to build a hand-e-nuke or timecube.  Slugbuster's current inventory. We've used about a third of our EMP grenades so far.  Back downstairs we've cleared out all the pyramids in the immediate vicinity. We saw four in the lounge earlier though, so there's at minimum one more running around.  Yep, there they are.   We pop berserk, but don't manage to cut off the swarm rack this time. They have two missile weapon slots (dismembering either one makes them drop the swarm rack) and 8 non-missile-weapon slots, so we were bound to start failing sooner or later.  We keep attacking while they're disabled just in case we get another random dismemberment, but no luck. As soon as the pyramid comes online it hits us with point blank missile shotgun.  A third of our max hp in a single turn, ow.  We use another grenade and try to retreat to the stairs. We'll run out of grenades fast if we need to try and keep them permanently disabled, so for now it's probably best to run away and wait until berserk is off cooldown to try again.  It wakes up as we back off and tries to fire again, but this time we don't actually get hit at all.  Due to the way the projectile simulation works, it's possible but very difficult to shoot past a corner like this. Almost every single missile is hitting the wall and exploding before it can reach us.  Usually a wall would break pretty quickly when a pyramid is blasting it at point blank like this, but this is marble from the first sultanate, so it's actually pretty tough. If the pyramid is willing to sit there and keep chewing through its own health, we might as well sit tight and let it.  Pyramids can build more missiles at will, so you can never run them dry, but it costs them 100 health each time they do it.   It's all the way down to damaged now, mostly self-inflicted.  But it looks like that was all the wall could take.   We pop another emp grenade and finish the pyramid off before it recovers.  We heal up and start cautiously exploring the lounge. We've killed all the pyramids we saw when we poked our head in earlier, but there's still some distortion ripples going across the screen, so there's at least one more somewhere on the floor.   The stairs are clear, the pyramid is somewhere west of them. Still, we'll want to kill it before we go down, otherwise we risk retreating right into a face full of missiles.  Turning the corner up north, a decarbonizer lines up a shot.   It's a piece of cake compared to all the pyramids. On the far side we find... nothing? It looks like the pyramid is actually in the walled off area next to the stairs with no path to our part of the map. Well, I'm happy to live and let live in that case. There's no telling how much deeper the site goes, and I don't want to risk running out of grenades.   We look downstairs. The walls are even fancier, but the pyramids are the same.  Eighteen grenades left. We spend one to disable the pyramid here.   Someone out there is still shooting rockets though - there must be another pyramid out of grenade range.   We step forward to try and disarm the pyramid and see a galgal. Galgals are another of the high end robots, and they can be very dangerous to a player on foot. They highlight their intended attack range and then charge, like a rhinox, doing damage and stunning anyone they run over. Unlike a rhinox, though, Galgals are fast. By the time you step out of the way of one attack, they've probably already charged and started lining up their next attack. They only ("only") have 400 hp, so with Slugbuster we can afford to just trade hits and win the damage race, but on foot it's easy to dance back and forth until they finally clip you and then die instantly as they roll back and forth over your face before you can get up. Still, while a galgal probably can't kill Slugbuster on its own, being stunned could set up a very deadly combo with a fully armed pyramid. This one got hit by the emp, so rather than berserking and attacking the pyramid now, we back off and retreat upstairs.  We wait upstairs for a bit to see if anyone follows us up for a 1 on 1, but no such luck.  Poking our head downstairs, it looks like two pyramids have lined up in the same situation as last time, with their missiles all blocked by the wall and causing self damage.  The galgal charges into view, and I expected it to mess up the equilibrium and force us to retreat, but it doesn't seem to be targeting us?  It goes after the pyramids instead. It must have gotten hit by a missile earlier and aggroed on one of them - great news for us.  We keep an eye on the wall's health, but gilded marble is even tougher than the black marble on the last floor, so it should be able to hold out quite a while.   Not only are these pyramids pretty injured, every turn we see some explosions going off in the shadows beyond them. I think the galgal must have kicked off more infighting with the pyramids back there.    A little longer, and both pyramids end up dying to their own explosions. We lose out on the swarm rack bits, I guess, but it's hard to complain about two free kills.    There's another pyramid beyond them, but no sign of the galgal - I think it must have been destroyed. We do the usual EMP + berserk and see if we can remove the swarm rack.   No luck. We pop another EMP grenade and keep fighting.  This pyramid was already injured from the infighting, so in this case it's probably better to just burn some EMP grenades and finish it off than to retreat and wait for berserk to come back - it'll recover health too, and with regeneration 10 it heals faster than we do.  A great saltback shows up to try and help - is there a dromad merchant on this floor?  We get the kill, and find the stairs when we duck around a corner to heal. We should finish exploring this floor first before heading down, though.   Yep, there is indeed a merchant down here. Also a starshell and an ice frog cherub, just to keep things fresh.   The frog cherub can freeze us for a bit, but it's no match for Slugbuster once it thaws out.  The starshell wisely decides to run while it can.  Oh man, mirror bugs though? That might be the one enemy Slugbuster really can't fight well at all.  We retreat back upstairs and exit the mech.  One of the mirror bugs followed us up here. We try to take it down with our vibrokhopesh, but don't quite finish it off. Slugbuster annihilates it and loses a huge chunk of health in return. This is why I didn't want you to fight them, Slugbuster! Mirrorbugs have low health and armor, don't do much damage directly, but they have 100% damage reflect. You want to kill them with weak attacks as much as possible. Vibro weapons are great for this, since their penetration scales down to match the bugs low AV. Slugbuster's insanely powerful melee works against it here, so we'll have to clear the bugs out on our own.  We tell Slugbuster to stay behind. It's a little scary going down to the next floor without it, but there weren't any more distortion ripples, so at the very least all the chrome pyramids should be dead.   On our own, we were able to push through the crowd and take out the mirror spawning the mirror bugs. Temporal fugue is great for clearing out large groups of mirror bugs, since it doesn't really matter if the clones take reflect damage.  We suit back up in Slugbuster, but the rest of the floor is pretty empty, with just a leering stalker hanging out in the east.  We keep going down. There's no chrome pyramids in sight when we arrive.  Or at all! The only living things on this floor is a small group of cave spiders. Weird, but a reprieve is nice.  Downstairs again, and we arrive on the final floor. Oddly enough, the fancy marble walls of the upper floors have been replaced with ordinary shale.  We see the distinctive ripple of a chrome pyramid right away. The game gave us a breather, now for the finale.     A galgal is the first one to greet us. It runs us over a few times as we trade hits, but it can't hurt us too badly on its own.  While we try to heal up, the floor's first pyramid comes by to say hello.   We don't manage to disarm it while berserked.    Plan B is to lure it upstairs for a one on one fight. We take a beating in the two steps it takes to reach the stairs.   We use another EMP once it comes up, but as soon as it recovers it nails us with another burst of rockets.  Another blast like that would probably kill us. It's still only lightly injured, so we'll have to retreat and try again once berserk is ready.  We use another grenade, but this time we just run for the stairs.   We back off two floors. It shouldn't follow us this far, but if it does we'll have time to use another grenade before it gets to attack.  We heal up, go back downstairs, and EMP + berserk a second time.   Still didn't get the swarm rack though.  Ow  We're getting low on grenades.   But we finally take off the swarm rack with a random dismemberment.    It's down to the wire, but we're able to finish the pyramid off without using any more items.   We heal back up to full and break down his fancy swarm rack.  We go back downstairs.  Another chrome pyramid shows up. We still haven't made it past the first corner.  This one loses its swarm rack after the first berserk, though, so it should be much less trouble than the last.  A leering stalker shows up to watch. A disarmed chrome pyramid might be less dangerous than one with a swarm rack equipped but I'd still rather not risk getting stunned mid fight and giving them free hits, so we lure it upstairs.    It joins the Great Chrome Pyramid Scrapyard with its friend.  The leering stalker feels almost quaint after all these pyramids.   There's a starshell in the room beyond, but like its friend before it, it chooses to run away from the giant slug golem.  Past that we can see some more marble structures, as well as a chrome pyramid in the shadows.   We back off the try and deal with the weaker targets before the chrome pyramid arrives. There's a couple turrets to the north who die in a single hit, as well as a decarbonizer.  We start chopping at the decarbonizer when the pyramid suddenly teleports to the south. The good news is that this is probably the last pyramid on the level - we're not seeing ripples come from anywhere else.  It's not going to be an easy fight though, because this is a legendary chrome pyramid.  For now, it's pinned behind a marble wall and damaging itself with splash.  A leering stalker is approaching from the south, though, so things likely won't stay lined up that way for long - their cannon pushes things away in a large radius in addition to causing stun.  Sure enough, we're pushed out of position just as the legendary manages to blast through the wall in front of it.  Let's not waste any time.  Berserk is still a couple turns away, though - dismember has a much shorter cooldown, so we were using it against the decarbonizer to try and speed things up, but the legendary showed up before we were ready for it.  The emp grenade wears off, and we take a lot of damage from the missiles. We immediately use another one. Berserk is only 5 turns away from being usable, so we should be able to get it off before this one wears off.  The leering stalker manages to push us away though, and the phase cannon tinker who put up all those turrets got between us and the pyramid.  We push forward and use berserk. We really want to disarm the legendary before the grenade wears off.  Suddenly we're somewhere else entirely.  I guess there was another starshell on the map somewhere. It must have managed to summon a space-time vortex right on top of us.  We're all the way back in the flower fields to the east. We dismount Slugbuster so we don't get lost and start hiking back to the mountain pass.   We finally arrive and - wait, where's Slugbuster?     Okay, that's my bad. When I ordered Slugbuster to stay behind so we could fight the mirror bugs, I never actually ordered it to start following again - I just started piloting it directly. When we dismounted in the flower fields it stayed behind.   We go back to the historic site, and return to the bottom floor.  We can't see the pyramid, but it sounds like it's somewhere to the southeast.  *Tch... nothing personnel, kid*  We use a grenade to disable the pyramid. 4 left.   It's only lightly damaged from it's self-inflicted explosions earlier, but we're able to knock off the swarm rack right away.  But the legendary hits hard in melee - about 100 damage per hit. Even disarmed, we can't trade blows for long.  We use more grenades to buy time to damage it.  I, finally,  Wow, two attacks in one turn! Granted we only have the first level of two weapon fighting, so it's only a 35% chance, but that's still a lot of damage we've been missing out on.    Down to our last EMP grenade. The pyramid is at 'damaged', and we can't take more than a couple attacks ourselves- will it be enough?    We attack for a bit. The pyramid is still only at 'damaged', and the emp won't last much longer. There's no choice. Looks like we'll have to use our ~Ultimate Move~   If you freeze time while berserked, berserk lasts for the entire duration of the timestop. 5 turns of berserk is already incredibly strong - 30+ is unstoppable. Against anything without regeneration 10, this combo is a guaranteed kill. They'll run out of limbs before time resumes. Chrome pyramids do have regeneration 10, so cutting off all their limbs isn't enough to kill them on its own. But they can't regenerate during the stopped time, and they can't recover from cleaved either.  In a single massive flurry of attacks we dismember every single limb simultaneously, then keep going until the pyramid dies.   I feel like the villagers of Ekarappir could stand to be a little more appreciative, considering all the trouble we went to.  We go back upstairs to heal up, but that was the last of the chrome pyramids. All that's left is cleaning up and finding the relic.   There are some leering stalkers and that decarbonizer we didn't get to finish off last time, but nothing dangerous.   A galgal drops the sultan relic when it dies. I'm not sure why they were carrying it, but my guess is that the chest was destroyed by some rockets and the galgal picked it up.  It's great. The base item is a zetachrome lune, the best chest armor in the game, and it gives 100 ice resist and +1 ego on top of the usual stats. We're still using some cysteel armor, so this would be an upgrade no matter what effects it had, but immunity to an element and more ego are both very appreciated.   The starshell who warped us away before runs for his life when he sees we made it back.  The central room has a bunch of phase cannons set up in a circle. Phase cannons are the strongest ranged weapon in the game, so this actually hurts a lot - with how many can shoot at us we're taking almost 100 damage per turn. So screw it, no point holding back now.       When time resumes, we're the only living thing left on the floor.  Together, Louis and Slugbuster have faced the worst Qud has to offer and come out on top. There's nothing left to conquer.   They arrive back in Yd as the sun sets. It's been just over a month since they first entered that historic site.  Tomorrow they can relax in the lounge, and catch up with Slog and Kushruyumet.   Tonight, it'll be nice to just sleep in a real bed.  THE END There's no official postmortem, since we never died, but we can take one last look at our stats.  160,000 turns. Is that good? I don't know how many turns a normal run takes.  Our final stats. We had tons of skillpoints unspent by the end, if you're focusing hard on intelligence you eventually buy everything that makes a difference.   Our gear. I feel like we mostly didn't find too many fun implants, but getting the gun rack + giant hands combo is always a blast, and the power plant is a nice bonus. Great luck with the rest of it, too - we had that early fugue dagger equipped right up until the end, and the rocket skates and freeze ray were both great finds. Plus the hand-e-nuke letting us grab the kesil face for free.   So that's Caves of Qud! I hope everyone enjoyed the playthrough. It's one of my favorite games, and it was a lot of fun getting to show it off. I think it's really got it all - great gameplay, cool graphics, a memorable setting, and fun emergent stories each run - so hopefully at least a little of all of that was able to come through. Live and drink, friends.
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Aug 23, 2023 02:54
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 a drat good ending to a drat good LP.
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Aug 23, 2023 03:59
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Thank you for this amazing LP! I hope there can be a re-run when the Top of the Spindle releases 
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Aug 23, 2023 04:18
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Great stuff. What a ride.
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Aug 23, 2023 04:23
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Awesome, but leave the top of the spindle for the audience. Next time its private.
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Aug 23, 2023 04:36
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I should be getting another laptop soonish here so look forward to a slightly more coherent less drunk punch run v3
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Aug 23, 2023 04:39
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Fantastic stuff, thanks so much for the tour of this incredible game!
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Aug 23, 2023 04:55
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Boat Stuck posted:Thank you for this amazing LP! I hope there can be a re-run when the Top of the Spindle releases I'd definitely be up for posting another run in the future, although I'd probably want to wait a bit before spoiling the ending. verbal enema posted:I should be getting another laptop soonish here so look forward to a slightly more coherent less drunk punch run v3 Nice! I'm excited to go back to reading about other people playing Qud 
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Aug 23, 2023 05:40
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This is when i wish I could do a domination side LP goddamnit
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Aug 23, 2023 06:22
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What a fun, informative run, thank you so much Snake Maze!
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Aug 23, 2023 08:04
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What an awesome run!
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Aug 23, 2023 08:20
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That was great! Thanks, VE and SM!
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Aug 23, 2023 14:35
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Thanks for the great LP! Love this game and reading about the crazy things you can do (that I have not been able to do yet).
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Aug 23, 2023 14:45
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Thank you for your service
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Aug 23, 2023 15:00
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Thank you.
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Aug 23, 2023 15:55
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thank you for this excellent qud demonstration!
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Aug 23, 2023 16:02
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Great LP! I learned a whole bunch! Now do it again
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Aug 23, 2023 20:09
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This was a lot of fun, yeah—I forgot how much I enjoyed some classic roguelike SSLP action, and it ends at the perfect point for those of us who haven’t gotten into it. Now I’ve got time to get good myself before 1.0 comes out! Thanks to Snake Maze and verbal enema. While I’ve got some ideas of what sort of dude I wanna be, what are some of the interesting ways to play we haven’t seen much of ITT?
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Aug 29, 2023 01:42
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rko posted:While I’ve got some ideas of what sort of dude I wanna be, what are some of the interesting ways to play we haven’t seen much of ITT? You can neglect both strength and agility and instead max out willpower and toughness to make a mutant with tons of health and very short cooldowns - just pick some good offensive mutations to focus on and level them as high as you can. Flaming ray and corrosive gas can both be great 'main' mutations that do most of your killing for you. Chimera is another fun one - they can only get physical mutations, but every time they gain a new mutation one of the three options will also give them a random new limb. I like to play by taking a bunch of stacks of unstable genome at character creation and just using my mutation points to level them during the game, so you end up with 3-5 new limbs and a small pool of high level mutations, but you can also go all in and just keep buying new mutations to grow tons and tons of limbs. They're a lot more unpredictable and swingy than normal mutants since so much of your build is random, and not all limbs are equally valuable, but it can lead to some really fun runs. I've also made a couple of in-depth effortposts on builds I like in the main Qud thread, they're in the OP here if anyone wants to take a look. I tried to explain not only the choices I made but why I made them, so they should hopefully help if you want to tweak them or make your own builds too. In particular I'll shill the dragon build (melee mutant focusing on natural weapons and armor) - it's one of my favorites and Megane made a custom tile for it that I think looks fantastic. There's a (secret goons only) workshop mod for it up here if you want to use the sprite.
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Aug 29, 2023 03:17
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