Boundless tesseract

Trunk-only: This article pertains to a feature of Crawl which is being tested. It will likely change before the next release, and may even be removed entirely.

boundless tesseract I
HP	138-280
HD	30
XP	1000
Speed	10 (stationary)
AC	10
EV	1
Will	Immune
Resistances	rPois+++ rDrown rMiasma rN+++ rTorm rSticky
Vulnerabilities	None
Habitat	Land
Intelligence	Brainless
Uses	Uses nothing
Holiness	Non-living
Size	Large
Type	boundless tesseract, boundless tesseract
Flags	Regenerates See invisible Insubstantial

An impossible shape that scintillates with unearthly colour. The power of Zot flows heavily through it, overlaying this reality with countless others where its domain remains pristine. Each tesseract is inextricably linked to the other, and destroying one will destroy both (and expel many of the creatures they have beckoned to this reality). But so long as they are allowed to exist, there will be no end to the forces which seek to keep you from the Orb..

Useful Info

Boundless tesseracts are paired unique enemy-spawning statues in the chambers of the Orb of Zot, with one placed in either half of the Zot:5 vault. They wake up immediately when you kill any X Orb Guardian on the floor; once they wake up, both of them will be automatically detected on the map, and start slowly spawning bandless Zot out-of-depth monsters out of one's line of sight. Destroying one will destroy both and stop any further spawns.

Once activated, the player will have a colour-coded Tesseract status, and tesseracts will start spawning monsters: while this starts out in a somewhat quick and randomized fashion, it will slow down linearly to a fixed 1 every 50 turns after making 15 monsters. The total number of tesseract spawns are capped at 60 present on Zot:5 at a time. After 80 spawns are made (requiring the player to both kill a decent number of enemies and taking thousands of turns on the floor) the Tesseract status becomes purple, and new spawns have a 25% chance to spawn in sight.

Effective spawning time spent off-level is capped at 500 turns, so resting on Zot:4 does nothing to avoid more spawns, and stair dancing can directly lead to making little net progress against the spawn timer. The cap, however, makes it possible to do other branches in exchange for some more spawns.

Each tesseract spawn subtracts from a initial 15000 experience pool. After emptying this pool, new tesseract spawns will be marked as unrewarding and provide no experience. Killing a tesseract both rewards any of the remaining experience in their pool and removes all unrewarding monsters made by those tesseracts. Tesseracts don't have any resists outside of those provided by being nonliving, though they do also have high regeneration: a quite notable +10 HP per turn.

Spells

Spell set I
Slot1	Planar Overlay	Magical flag

Tips & Tricks

• Once tesseracts wake up, don't panic. Each spawn can appear anywhere on the level as long as it's not in sight, so they are unlikely to individually chase you down and interrupt destroying a tesseract- especially if you avoid alarm traps and don't make much noise.
  • Zot:5 contains somewhat less monsters than previously, so buffing up after killing orb guardians, killing each monster on the way to the tesseracts, and then specifically trying to kill the tesseract before other monsters in its chamber will regularly result in facing less total threat inside the Zot:5 vault. There's very little else left to a regular 3-rune game past Zot:5- using up all your potions for buffs, plus spending most of your piety on flashy invocations, are entirely valid ways to win.
• Gearing up for hp regeneration or mp regeneration will signficantly reduce the time it takes to rest while tesseracts are active. Likewise, using various invocations like Channel Magic, Trog's Hand, or Heal Self even when monsters aren't present can save one or two spawns at a time, which can be worth trading piety for depending on the rest of a given character's strength.
• Tesseracts have a corner placement and significant regeneration, making it somewhat impractical to destroy them as soon as they wake up, but their completely indirect means of threatening the player means most characters who can make it to Zot:5 can safely destroy one once few other monsters are present.
• Tesseracts cannot generate base draconians, moths of wrath, or ancient and dread liches. As such, berserk orb guardians and lich paralysis, large threats to most players in Zot:5, are both reduced threats in the randomized tesseract spawns. The absence of bands also significantly reduces the threat of nonbase draconians, who otherwise come in groups.
• Their Planar Overlay spell isn't actually cast normally, and just provides an in-game explanation of their behaviour- antimagic will have zero effect on their spawning rate.

Trivia

Tesseracts are four-dimensional objects, tying into their description's portal flavour- their tiles are named `planar_tesseract` in the code.

History

• Boundless tesseracts were added in version 0.34 to deal with the removal of monster spawns over time in 0.21 and the removal of the hunger clock in 0.26 - in the intervening versions, it became a recurring and popular safe strategy to repeatedly shout in place for several hundred turns to lure floor monsters to safe spots. Zot:5 also lost 4 natural random spawns at the same time to compensate for the addition of tesseracts.