Acquirement

Version 0.32: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

For the scroll, see scroll of acquirement.

An acquirement is a specific way of generating an item in Crawl that, unlike most item generation, is based in large part on your character's abilities and possessions. It is guaranteed to be usable or equippable. The item is biased towards being both good and useful to your character, but your luck may still vary.

Sources

There are only a few sources of acquirements. Most are fairly rare, and those that are more common tend to be not as good. The sources are:

• Reading a scroll of acquirement gives the player an acquirement, with a choice of item type. These are quite rare and valuable.
• Three gods can give out acquirements:
  • Okawaru gives two acquirements at 6* piety: a choice of weapons and a choice of armour pieces. Each item is of the same quality as a scroll of acquirement.
  • Trog gives out weapons, usually antimagic branded, randomly as you gain piety. These items will be worse than Okawaru or a scroll of acquirement, but you'll constantly get gifts as you kill things.
  • Xom may occasionally give you acquirements, among all the other junk thrown at you.
• Items in vaults may be created using acquirement code; the most notable example of this would be items in treasure troves. As these items are placed when the trove is created, the player obviously cannot choose their type, but they generally are biased toward your predominant skills. Not all excellent items found in vaults are necessarily acquirements, though.

General Mechanics

Acquirements are affected by a number of different factors:

• They are biased towards items that match your skills. For instance, a character who has heavily invested in Maces & Flails is fairly likely to receive a weapon in that category. A conjurer with high Fire Magic skill will likely find a spellbook with more fire spells.
• They are biased against items that you have already seen, the logic there being that if you have seen it, you're probably either using it or have decided it isn't useful. This usually includes items in shops, but those which are far too expensive for your character to buy at present are excluded from being "seen."
• The item is guaranteed to be usable. This means that you will be able to equip it, and using it will not incur penance with your current god. Note that these guarantees are fairly minimal: acquirement may well give your Armour-based Mountain Dwarf a robe (although it will be biased against doing so if you have invested in the Armour skill).

Note that acquirements are not directly affected by your current depth or location. However, the bias against items you have already seen means that later acquirements do tend to give out rarer items, as the common ones have already been seen. This can often produce better acquirements later on, although how much better depends on the item type asked for, and saving an acquirement for later runs the risk of you dying due to poor equipment before you get the chance.

Possible acquirements

• Weapon
• Armour
• Jewellery
• Book (spellbook or manual)
• Magical staff (2/3 normal chance)
• Talisman (1/3 normal chance)

A scroll of acquirement, when first read, will roll items from 3 of the 5 categories, display them, and give you the option of 200 - 1400 gold. You can pick from one of the four choices. You can always cancel the scroll without destroying it. Scrolls are more likely to give you something "useful" (high-end weapons, etc.) than gods.

Troves can pick from one or more types of gear (e.g. "weapon trove", "armour trove"), based on vault selection. Then, it will give you ~16 items using acquirement code.

History

• Prior to 0.32, talismans were not available as acquirements.
• Prior to 0.25, scrolls of acquirement worked differently. Instead of 3 pre-determined options, you could acquire one of 8 categories (Weapon, Armour, Jewllery, Book, Staff, Evocable, Food, Gold) and a random acquirement would be generated from there.
• Prior to 0.24, Vampires could acquire 8-12 potions of blood as food.
• Prior to 0.21, Fedhas worshippers received fruit, and other species could get royal jellies as well as rations - this was removed when food was merged into rations.
• In 0.20, wand and misc acquirement were merged into evocables.
• In 0.19, ammo acquirement was removed, and randart jewelry appeared twice as often as before. Prior to 0.19, rods were obtained through [e] Staff acquirement rather than [g] Misc Evocable.