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Qud is so strange and wonderful, yet so lived in. Dyvvrach asks if you're a waterhand and you understand what that means immediately.
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# ? Aug 13, 2023 19:10 |
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# ? May 7, 2024 08:43 |
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Caves of Qud ftmfw
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# ? Aug 13, 2023 21:10 |
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Unormal posted:It's a little sad to spoil the tomb climax for people, I think we really landed that particular design, especially when you go in blind. On the other hand it's extremely good for more people to see that the game goes from like a normal dungeon crawler to ... less of a normal dungeon crawler by the end; so in short it is a land of contrasts and a great LP. Caves of Qud LP: come for drunken antics, stay for competent gameplay, keep an eye out for developer commentary
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# ? Aug 13, 2023 22:43 |
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the hell
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# ? Aug 13, 2023 22:54 |
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Alright, we have a job to do: return to Eyn Roj and deliver Tau's chime to the roots of the tree. We'll teleport back to Yd and take our pass back in rather than walking back through the Moon Stair - we'll be able to find that waterskin for the village along the way. We check in with the merchants while we're here. Tilli is selling some anti-gravity boots. Our rocket skates are nice but these will probably be a bit better for avoiding static in the Moon Stair. We could sell off Tau's chime for them, but... that's probably not the best idea. Slog and Kushruyumet are still carrying probably 20,000 drams worth of crysteel gear, so I guess we can sell some of that. We mod the boots to be jacked, and now we can fly around indefinitely. Tilli is also selling some night-sight interpolators, which are probably the best source of vision in the game. The give night vision with infinite range, without the color tint from regular night vision, and they let you see through walls. The description is a little misleading (they let you see two tiles past the first occluding object, not the first two objects) but they're amazing either way. But, they're a face slot item, and as great as wallhacks are, it can't compete with the Kessil Face. We buy them anyway, but only so we can break them down for the 7 bit. Meanwhile, Bep, the village tinker, is selling two 8 bits. That's enough to build a timecube! 8 bits are very rare so we gladly buy these. With the shopping done, we head north The waterskin we're looking for is in a goatfolk haunt, the deep jungle equivalent of the goatfolk villages in the regular jungle. It's filled with goatfolk qlippoth, and the buildings are made of either crysteel plate or holograms of thatch, but there's nothing too scary for us in there. We find the waterskin in a chest in the upper right and head out. We head back into the Moon Stair. We already cleared a path last time, so the return trip should be easier. We're able to grab that warm static we missed last time. We need to carve a path to the other side, though - last time we got teleported by our bracelet. We find another glow wight apotheote a little to the north. This one's random mutation is corrosive gas, which works for us - we needed to clear a path anyway. So helpful! A zero jell gives us enough exp to level up, and we finally hit 36. Which means we finally have enough int for tinker III! It's pretty late in the run to be picking it up, but it'll still let up put some fun upgrades on our guns. We read the data disks we've been hoarding and get tinkering. We only have enough bits to put nanon on one of our rifles for now, but it shouldn't be long until we can have a full set and let the limbs start flying. The jell also dropped another dram of warm static, so we should be able to use it as a choice for the liquid in our golem if we want! We arrive back at the Tree of Life. We just need to cross the moat of dilute warm static and then we can head downstairs. Our allies wade through, and despite being a robot who can't be cloned through normal means, Kushruyumet starts budding. Our goal for this quest is to take the chime 40 strata down. That's significantly farther than we've gone before, but it's not as bad as it sounds. First, the root network under Chavvah doesn't have a unique enemy pool - it draws from the usual underground enemies. That means it will start out with weak earlygame stuff, and we won't start seeing really dangerous enemies until the final 10 floors or so. Second, the network of roots has lots of holes and openings to the lower floors. Rather than wandering each floor looking for the stairs down, we'll be hopping from root to root in a rapid descent. It's a really cool concept that feels a lot different to explore than your usual cave. The roots in question aren't just decorative, either. We can walk on top of them, but they deflect lasers, so we won't be able to shoot past them. Also, Kushruyumet's clone has been born. Welcome to the world, buddy. He's technically Kushruyumet's follower rather than ours, but a second time slug never hurt anyone. We hop down a couple more floors. Every fifth floor is solid and requires you to go down the stairs in the root rather than just jumping down. We continue the descent. The graphics can be a bit ambiguous sometimes, but thankfully the game will warn you if you're about to jump down more than one stratum. 10 floors deep - we're a quarter of the way through now. We still have a while before the dangerous stuff starts showing up. We keep diving. Around 20 stratum deep we're seeing enemies that are a bit more dangerous, like this gelatinous cupola. Around 25 stratum deep Kushruyumet's clone turns hostile. I'm honestly not sure why - I wonder if there's a bug around followers of followers leaving the party and resetting to faction attitude on screen transition? It would explain the troll foals leaving the party and becoming neutral to us earlier. Or maybe it's something to do with the warm static, and Kushrutumet got cloneling cloned rather than cloning drought cloned, or something. Whatever the case, this is a pretty scary situation. Kushruyumet's clone can kill us in 2 or 3 hits, and it has temporal fugue and high quickness. Our force bracelet won't last long with them attacking it, but thankfully it only needs to last until we can jump down to the next floor. We jump to freedom, and the clone doesn't follow us. We're deep enough that the enemies are starting to get dangerous, but they're still a lot less scary than a cherub. High dervishes use psionic melee weapons that target your mental armor instead of your AV, but they're also notable for being one of the very few enemies that can know decapitate, giving them a chance to cut off your head and kill you in a single hit (unless you have multiple heads, or enough regeneration to regrow your body before you die). It's pretty unlikely - they roll a random melee weapon to use, then random skills in the weapon's tree, and of course they need to actually proc decapitate when they hit, which generally has a proc rate in the single digit percents. A lone one like this isn't bad (and we can see from her effects that she's using long blades anyway), but a historic site full of dervishes has to be handled very carefully, due to how many times they get to roll the dice. We're 35 floors deep now, almost to the end. Kushruyumet's been getting worn down, and we can't heal him with items, but we just need to make it through this last push. There's a blast turret tinker here. The blast cannon do some decent damage and have a high chance to stun, and we can't shoot at him with the root in the way. We end up getting teleported away by our bracelet, leaving Kushruyumet to handle the turrets alone. There's a memory eater here, but that's much less dangerous. They can make you forget secrets when they hit in melee, but it won't get a chance - we have our guns and there's no roots in the way this time. We regroup down south. The turrets dropped an antimatter cell, which is a pretty nice prize. They can hold tons of energy, of course, but the real prize for us is the 8 bit we can get from it. To the east is a glittermensch brainer, the advanced form of the cragsmench. They drop a bundle of gems on death, making them pretty profitable to fight, but by the time you can encounter them you're probably set for money anyway. We head down for one final bit of jumping. This floor looked completely safe at first glance, but I think there must have been one of the more dangerous enemies in the shadows to the east. I didn't notice it at the time, but judging from the logs there must have been a gamma moth out there. Gamma moths are the advanced form of glowmoths. They're pretty squishy and don't hit too hard, but their attacks have a special effect that we'll be seeing first hand. We make it to the final floor. It's mostly empty but there is an antiprism nearby. Antiprisms try to engulf you like usual prisms, but while engulfed it will create a hostile reflection of you to attack you or your allies. It would be very dangerous if it engulfed one of us, but thankfully we can just freeze them and keep them from ever getting a chance. Around here is where I noticed our condition. I figured I would be clever about it. See, the gamma moth's mutating gaze gives you a random mutation. It will usually be a defect, permanently making your character a bit weaker, but there's a small chance it gives you a normal mutation instead. The outcome is seeded and can't be rerolled, but we could still use precognition to see what the result will be, and then rewind and cure it with an ubernostrum if it's bad. Well, Qud decided it had enough of my shenanigans. The precognition ran out before the mutation manifested. The prompt appeared to either return to the start of the vision or continue, and I chose to continue, planning to inject another sphynx salt and repeat the process until it triggered. On that exact turn, immediately after choosing not to rewind, there was another popup Welp! I'll give it this - evil twin is definitely the most interesting defect we could have gotten. Anyway, twins aside, we still have a job to do. There's a seeker here, but they're a quest NPC and are neutral to us. They have a clone of Saad Amus as a psychic thrall, which I'm sure Ptoh finds very funny. Tempting as it is, we have a job to do. The chime has been delivered. Tau has become Tau-no-longer With that, our work is done. Tau-no-longer sets off to join the seekers of the sightless way. There's no stairs up, so we recoil back to Yd. Bep is selling two 7 bits. We could use them to put nanon on a second gun, but with an evil twin running around that suddenly feels a lot less appealing. I spend most of our 7 and 8 bits on a timecube instead - I don't think the AI can use these, and it'll be a great panic button if we ever need it. Third time's the charm. We make our way back to Eyn Roj; now we just need to go turn in the waterskin and tell Dyvvrach how it went. Oh, here it comes. There's a zero jell and dreamcrungle near our entry point when we head south. We take them out fast, we don't want any distractions when our twin shows up. There he is. Our twin might have just as much technology as we do, including his dimension's Kesil Face, but there's one thing he doesn't have - the power of friendship! Our twin arrives here alone, but we have Slog and Kushruyumet backing us up. It's too bad we bought those anti-gravity boots that let him fly up where neither of them can hit him! Evil Louis manages to freeze us first, and our bracelet teleports us to the corner of the map. The good news is that our armor is stronger than his guns, so he struggles to actually damage us. The bad news is his armor is just as good. It's hard to make out here, but as we headed back north some of our evil twin's evil fugue clones froze us while a dreamcrungle took aim at us. We use a blaze injector to thaw out before we get crungled. We summon our own clones, and let the sixteen way laser death rave commence. The fight goes on for a while, but there's not really much to tell. Everyone has lots of armor, and everyone has a chance to teleport away instead of taking damage on top of that, so not of lot of progress is made by either side. Eventually both sets of fugue clones time out. We do manage to shoot our evil twin's hand off, though, so that's cool. He teleports away, but at least we got a souvenir. Kushruyumet wanders back over to us. The static really did a number on him, huh. Shimmering, glotrotted, shamed, in a war trance, and disguised as a cave spider. I think the disguise might be permanent? Usually that's tied to a piece of equipment, if you just get magically disguised by some static I don't know what you can do to remove it. Our evil twin broke a crystal at some point and triggered the reflection, creating Anti-Evil Louis Cypher (not to be confused with Regular Evil Louis Cypher). You might hope that Anti-Evil Cypher would be so evil he'd loop back around to being good, but he's hostile to us too so I guess that's not how it works. We've been fighting for a while now and we have more evil twins than we started with. I figure it's probably better to just leave before everybody's fugue comes off cooldown and we have a twenty-four way laser death rave on our hands. Allies usually follow you to the new screen, but the crypt sitter must have been frozen and couldn't leave. We managed to shake Regular evil Louis Cypher, but Anti Evil Louis Cypher is a bit more persistent. Fortunately we managed to get the first shot off here, so he's frozen in place. Our allies can't hit him (the anti-gravity boots still work while frozen), and we can't really damage him with our guns, but there's still one trick left up our sleeves. The geomagnetic disk! It's vibro, so it'll ignore his AV and do full damage! I give up. My defenses are just too good. We leave Anti-Evil Cypher in his floating ice block and continue south. We make it to the outskirts of the village without being followed. Now to just walk south and visit the friendly village. Hmm. The biggest risk here isn't our twin, it's having the twin shoot us, miss, and aggro the rest of the village. If the chrome pyramid starts shooting, we'll probably die even if he's not technically shooting at us. I want to turn in that quest though, and we need to pass through this area to reach the keter. We'll try to be fast and hope we don't see the clone, line of sight is pretty restricted here. It was a gamble, but we made it through without ever seeing our clone. Maybe he was lost in the darkness bubble from the vantabloom field? Evil Cypher can move in and buy a home, and we'll never visit the town again. Win win, really. At any rate, we finally made it back to the keter. Let's report in. 600 exactly, nice. That's the golem's power source handled. And now that we're loved, we should be able to ask them to house the Slynth too! Let's stop by Hydropon and tell them the good news. You can give them options, but the Slynth themselves decide which option to go with. We talk with Thah again, and... Nice! Although... this means we're going to have to walk back to the keter again to see how the Slynth are doing in their new home. Well, that's a problem for Future Cypher. For now, we have important work to do back at Grit Gate. We make a brief stop at the rainbow woods to grab 20 drams of primordial soup, the last ingredient we need for the golem. We the power source prepared, it's finally time to build the golem. But there's one very important decision that has to be made. What kind of golem should we make? The options:
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 07:53 |
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The best defect. Chrome Pyramid mech? Probably not. so: Slug Golem Also any plans to take off your anti-grav boots before your next encounter?
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 08:38 |
I am so very torn between a slime golem (never forget minmo) or a slug golem. That three way poo poo fight between yourself, evil twin, and anti-evil was just amazing
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 08:56 |
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Your evil twin showing up at chavah was strange - I know for the psychic hunters they show up only if you've never been on the screen before and I assumed it was the same for the twin. I wonder if it's because chavah moves so technically you haven't been to that screen yet. That may have also been why you didn't see him, like maybe he's in the version of that screen where the city has moved on?
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 09:36 |
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My vote is slog golem, praise slog, Slime Golem is my second choice
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 11:19 |
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attempt to proselytize your frozen one-handed anti-evil twin and base the golem on him (This is a needlessly risky idea, you probably shouldn't do this)
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 12:15 |
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Alternatively, get some cloning draught and make a clone of yourself to serve as the base.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 12:36 |
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Now your evil twin is truly sinister. I think future slug is the narratively correct choice. The past is dead, the present abides, but we must create the future. Of slugs.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 14:07 |
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Minmo 2: Revenge of the Omnisludge ...also that severed anti-evil-Twin's arm will make for a perfect Atzmus.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 15:00 |
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big minmo, strong and healthy!
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 15:28 |
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I like the idea of pope golem, but I like the idea of having the golem be a tribute to minmo even more
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 15:32 |
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SLOG GOLEM
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 15:48 |
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Sludge Golem. Bring on Big Minmo!
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 15:52 |
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Can you cure the Evil Twin defect? Does it stay past killing the evil twin?
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 16:30 |
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Boat Stuck posted:Can you cure the Evil Twin defect? Does it stay past killing the evil twin? No yes
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 16:31 |
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I believe if you get Highly Entropic Beings rep high enough then Evil Twins will eventually lose aggro, but only after they've spawned and you've been away from them for a while -- they always begin as hostile.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 17:09 |
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Further Reading posted:Your evil twin showing up at chavah was strange - I know for the psychic hunters they show up only if you've never been on the screen before and I assumed it was the same for the twin. It wasn't Chavvah itself, it was the random village we found along the path. Both appearances we've seen so far have been on screens we've already visited, though. My guess is that it only counts if you've been on the screen while you have the evil twin defect, so all of the places we explored before he started hunting us are still fair game.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 17:49 |
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I believe you can reroll negative mutations just like positive mutations with Warm Static, although I don't know if that works on True Kin, since I think they're locked to only rerolling their skills.
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 18:10 |
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I want to see Big Minmo!
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# ? Aug 15, 2023 18:11 |
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We must create the Slug of the Future!
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 07:08 |
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Guys minmo owned dont get me wrong but SLOG GOLEM
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 07:13 |
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I'll lock this goddamn thread
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 07:13 |
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SLOGOLEM
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 07:17 |
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These "time slugs" ya know, cherubic and beautiful ya know, but to who? Not me. I dont want idealized and mechanical representations of things. I want the real deal. And I ask you, dear watersib, who is more slug than slug? The answer is Slog. We rose this ancient beast from the muck and filth it loved and brought it all the way to Chuvvah. If anyone has earned it is is Slog. Let the old new become the new old. SLOG
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 07:22 |
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Voting for a full Slug team!
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 10:05 |
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I'm convinced. Go slug
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 12:41 |
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verbal enema posted:These "time slugs" ya know, cherubic and beautiful ya know, but to who? Not me. I dont want idealized and mechanical representations of things. I want the real deal. And I ask you, dear watersib, who is more slug than slug? The answer is Slog. We rose this ancient beast from the muck and filth it loved and brought it all the way to Chuvvah. If anyone has earned it is is Slog. Let the old new become the new old. i refuse to change my vote under any circumstances, but if that was not the case, this would have convinced me still voting minmo, but now publicly endorsing slog
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 13:46 |
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SLOG
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 17:17 |
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Voting is closed! The people have spoken: Open the slug gates.
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 20:50 |
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Praise Slog
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 21:08 |
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He will be Risen
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 21:16 |
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cloaca arise
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# ? Aug 16, 2023 21:26 |
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Cloaca and Dagger? Might be too early to argue for it.
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# ? Aug 17, 2023 03:07 |
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It's time to build the golem. Well, okay, we don't have all the items we want to use right here with us, so we'll make a quick pitstop to pick them up from where we left them, but then it'll be time to build the golem. We also unequip our relic bracelet and swap back to our rocket boots. Any future twins we encounter should hopefully be a lot easier with Slog and Kushruyumet helping out. We'll be a little more vulnerable too, but we have enough other tools to fall back on that we should be okay. Over in Yd Freehold, it looks like the dog next door is hosting some sort of party that's spilled over into our room. We grab our stuff from the chest and excuse ourselves. We currently have two drams of neutron flux, but it might be nice to have three so that it's an option for the liquid component of the golem. We'll stop by the legendary ichor merchant we met and see if she has any in stock. Our twin shows up to intercept. We feel shamed as soon as we enter the map. Some quirk of how the Evil Twin works means that he can berate us from anywhere on the map, which is frankly pretty immature of him. There he is. Oh, he still has the bracelet and anti-gravity boots. Maybe because they're still in our inventory, he was able to equip them himself? We make a tactical retreat to the world map rather than trying to fight. There's two ichor merchants in the stilt, let's just go there instead. Sure enough, one of them has some neutron flux for sale. We hand our boots and bracelet over to Slog for safekeeping. Hopefully this will actually stop future twins from using them. It's time to build the golem for real. There's a lot of fun choices to make here. First, the catalyst. We can use any liquid we have three drams of. There's a lot of great effects here - I end up going with warm static, which gives us two other effects at random. There's enough powerful effects here that I think having two will probably end up better than having a single perfectly chosen one. Next, the atzmus. We need the severed limb from a creature for this. Since we got nanon so late we don't have a ton of options here, but we do have some very interesting ones. Our evil twin's evil twin's severed hand is extremely cool, conceptually... but it's just so boring mechanically. Five int will give us a bit more skill points, but nothing we can do with those skillpoints will be remotely as interesting as getting a new mutation. I guess it would make it easier for the golem to take up tinkering? But there's not really any reason to do that. Sticky Tongue is probably the best choice from a gameplay perspective. It lets us grab an enemy and pull them into melee range, and the golem is very, very good at melee. But I'm very curious to see what a player-controlled crungling gaze is like - you can get sticky tongue via cooking, but I'm pretty sure this is the only way to get crungling gaze outside of bodyswap shenanigans. (And since dreamcrungles can't move, bodyswapping with them is pretty boring) It'll probably be either incredibly powerful, or totally useless. We need a zetachrome weapon for the armament. I think daggers are probably better - the golem can hit incredibly hard with any weapons, so daggers letting it attack more often is more valuable than the other weapons hitting letting it hit a little bit harder. I go with axes anyway though, this LP has been tragically lacking in decapitations. For the incantation we can choose any entry from our journal. There are a lot of options. They mostly fall into a couple categories, though - water rituals always give 15 quickness when unpaired, installing cybernetics always gives 3 random limbs, etc We tell it about the the Minmo ascended to her final form, giving it 6 extra levels. Finally, the hamsa can be any item with 5 weight or less. Note that you can't use liquids - it just uses the container and ignores its contents. This is another category with a ton of really tempting options. In the end I go with the crystalline halo Tau-no-longer gave us, for +6 AV. Power source is Chavvah, of course. We're ready to go! Building a golem is inspiring work! We have a couple days to kill, and I did mention earlier that dreamcrungles are an enemy that deserves its own update, so let's kill two birds with one stone and go get crungled. We head to the jungle and zoom in to enter the Moon Stair on foot. Our twin has hunted us down once again. We can tell that he's using the rocket boots this time, because they give away his location in the shadows. Looks like handing our stuff off to Slog worked. Our twin tries to rocket jump in for a cool entrance, but ends up faceplanting in front of everyone. We're not so different, you and I... We use the opening to freeze him. Kushruyumet summons his time clones, and he and Slog move in to attack. They kill Evil Cypher in a single round. That's a bit anticlimatic. Our twin must have felt the same way, because he pops up again on the very next screen for round 2. There are ruins here with a couple of arch dervishes. They're pretty dangerous, able to teleport and make powerful attacks that target your mental armor instead of your AV. We take two of them down, but lose about 100 hp in the process. Meanwhile, we can tell from the smoke that our twin is getting close. This time he opens with a point blank emp grenade, taking out both of our electronics and disabling Kushruyumet. It means we can't freeze him, but it takes out most of his offense too. He scares us off, but Slog moves in to fight. Evil Cypher scrambles to defend, but he can't keep up with the raw power of the slugs. The rest of the ruins are quiet in comparison. There's a couple more dervishes, but fighting them one on one and with longer sight lines means we can freeze and gun them down without getting attacked. Finally we arrive in the Moon Stair. Now to find a dreamcrungle. Oh hey, we finally found a legendary gutsmonger. Probably too late to really matter, but we can check it out. We also see another creature we didn't encounter on our first trip. Dawning apes can punch you into another dimension, literally - they have a unique version of slam that sends you back a dozen tiles and also makes you phase out. On the next screen we finally find a dreamcrungle. We sit tight as it readies its gaze. Ugh, what a weird dream. I was... the king of the moon? And my best friend was a slug? And there was something about plants hating me, but also I was helping them find a home? And, it's weird, but I feel like my hands were really big for some reason... Ah well, dreams never make any sense. Good thing I, Aclliroppus Nuphanethus, am awake now, and back to my normal life as a humble dragonfly! Sure, I might only be level one, but I'm really close to leveling up, and I feel like something great will happen if I do. Time to start the day! Oh yikes that guy looks really strong! I better head north instead! Aclliroppus Nuphanethus never saw the frog that caught it Well, it might not have been the longest demonstration, but that's dreamcrungling! You dream as a random creature anywhere in Qud with almost enough exp to level up. If you level successfully, you wake up rested and gain 15,000 exp. If you die in the dream you That's enough crungling for now, though. Our golem is waiting for us. As we head back, we get notified about Chavvah moving away. It is the "roaming" keter, after all - after enough ingame days pass, it changes location and you need to attune at the chime again to find it. We find the golem downstairs in Klanq's workshop, and it starts following us as an ally. It looks great, but we can't go around calling it slug golem all the time. It's time to launch the ultimate decisive weapon. Go! SLUGBUSTER!! Of course, it would be irresponsible of us to pilot such a large and powerful machine without reading the manual first. Sadly, like the book implies, this is the current end of the story. If you want to know what's atop the spindle you'll have to wait for 1.0 with the rest of us. But Louis Cypher's story isn't quite finished yet. There's still a couple things left to show off, and we'll have to see how Slugbuster measures up to the final few historic sites before we retire.
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# ? Aug 17, 2023 06:23 |
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I wonder if the crystalline jile is technically zetachrome tier… Aoyg-No-Longer was definitely the first time in Qud that I wanted to kill a non-hostile just because they were supremely rude, to say nothing of working for/within Ptoh.
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# ? Aug 17, 2023 07:24 |
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# ? May 7, 2024 08:43 |
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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
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# ? Aug 17, 2023 11:53 |