User talk:Spudwalt

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zOMG BEST ENTRY VAULT EVER

So, I just started up a new game, and about five seconds in, I notice that the Orb of Zot -- the magical world-changing artifact that I was going to have to fight my way through 27 floors plus sidebranches to get, the one that would force me to face incredible odds and nigh-insurmountable challenges, the one supposedly sitting in the bowels of the Realm of Zot -- is sitting practically right outside the entrance, along with three runes (gossamer, demonic, and golden, if anyone's curious). I wish I had a better way of screencapping this (PrintScreen doesn't really work on the console version), but I could at least get a textdump:

##################
#................#
#...##########...######
#...# ..}....#.........
#.<.# .0<}...#@<....... <-- that "0" right in there
#...# ..}....#.........
#...##########...######
#................#
##################

What. The. Shit.
I mean, yeah, it's inside a stone-walled chamber, so it's not like I'm going to be able to get at it without teleport control and/or a really good Lee's Rapid Deconstruction (I can't just corrupt things because this character's a Demigod), but dang, that potentially makes this the easiest run ever! It's gotta be a mimic, right? There's no way the orb would just be sitting there on D:1... --spudwalt 23:49, 3 March 2013 (CET)

Heh, yeah, I'm afraid those are all mimics. I've seen a bunch of random "rune" vaults in the middle of the early Dungeon. Tons of out-of-depth monsters locked away behind transparent walls with a random rune in the middle, but it's always fake. --MoogleDan 01:24, 4 March 2013 (CET)

Yep, they were all mimics, even the staircase. The one mimicking the Orb was a "monstrous" mimic, which I'm not sure we have in the mimic article. It was a nasty little bugger, too. Good thing I blinked out of constriction. --spudwalt 04:09, 4 March 2013 (CET)

I THOUGHT there was a fourth mimic type... If no one gets around to making one by tomorrow, I'll slap one together when I have the time. --MoogleDan 05:15, 4 March 2013 (CET)

Okay, I KNOW I've seen the monstrous mimic you're describing, but I can't seem to find any details on it anywhere. I'll keep looking... --MoogleDan 18:26, 4 March 2013 (CET)

Tastes like chicken

So, I was eating a bunch of stuff while wearing an amulet of the gourmand and randomly got this message:

This raw flesh tastes like chicken!

The Crawl devs are pretty awesome people. --spudwalt 07:10, 6 March 2013 (CET)

Lua error

I got an error message on my latest run of crawl (console version 0.11). The message is as follows:

Lua error: C:/Games/Dungeon Crawl/dat/des/altar/grunt_ashenzari_visionary.des:41: No vault found for tag 'grunt_ashenzari_visionary_shoals'

I guess there must be an error in generating that Ashenzari vault where he previews the two variable rune branches in the Lair. Anybody know if there's something I'd be able to do about this? --spudwalt 19:58, 20 March 2013 (CET)

You can report bugs to the devs here. --Flun 20:02, 20 March 2013 (CET)

2013 Tourney

Hey spudwalt, have you set up your .rc file with "#TEAMCAPTAIN Flun" at the top of the file? I don't seem to see it in your CAO .rc file. It should look something like this. --Flun 21:45, 7 May 2013 (CEST)

Did that get it? --spudwalt 22:26, 7 May 2013 (CEST)

Yep, you are linked now! --Flun 05:07, 8 May 2013 (CEST)

YASD HOGl

Hey Spudwalt, too bad about that guy you lost to Agnes... I've died to her before. I just watched the recording - I'm not sure if I would have tried to engage her at that XL. I would have put your chances at around 50/50 --Flun 21:05, 17 May 2013 (CEST)

Mmm, I probably could have managed it if I'd been a bit smarter about fighting her and/or a bit luckier with my swings. I had a scroll of blinking (but didn't use it because I was stupid), so I could have blinked away and pelted her with a wand of fireball. --spudwalt 21:46, 17 May 2013 (CEST)

Online morgue files

Is there a way to access my morgue files online? --spudwalt 19:29, 14 May 2013 (CEST)

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/spudwalt.html --Flun 19:44, 14 May 2013 (CEST)

Wins

Grats on your latest win! How come only 4 runes? Also I find the golden rune the scariest one to get! --Flun 15:43, 9 July 2013 (CEST)

Mostly I only went for 4 runes 'cause this is only my second win. I'll try to do more extensive rune runs in the future, but after I prove to myself that I know what I'm doing.

Taking on the Tomb was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I had rRot from one of my demonspawn mutations, Dispel Undead, and max life protection. I figured I could do the Tomb, so long as I was careful, and there were only a couple really dicey moments. --spudwalt 19:07, 9 July 2013 (CEST)

I was the same way at first; every game I'd stick my toe in one or two more branches just to see how horrifying they actually are : ) Congrats, and good luck on your next! --MoogleDan 21:39, 9 July 2013 (CEST)

Flavour Text

You have no idea how grateful I was the day I noticed someone else updating those things :P I think the moment that broke my will to update them was when they started changing Wiglaf's flavour text 4 or 5 times in a couple months. --MoogleDan 15:06, 24 July 2013 (CEST)

It's not that bad; basically I just double-check things as I go instead of making an entire task out of updating flavor text.

Still, every now and then you go to check the flavor text of something and suddenly there's a paragraph of impenetrable German staring you in the face. --spudwalt 19:11, 24 July 2013 (CEST)

Most satisfying Sigmund kill ever.

So Sigmund just hit me with a wand of polymorph and turned me into a dragon. Best day ever. --spudwalt 20:59, 26 July 2013 (CEST)

Weapon choice article

Good sir, I just have to say that your Weapon choice article is well done and exceptionally useful. I consider myself a fairly experienced player, but since I'd discovered that article I keep finding myself going back to reference it. The shame is that it's not all that readily findable to the casual wiki browser. How would you feel about having a link to it on the main page, most likely as a sub-bullet to the weapons article? Is that something you and the other contributors here would find acceptable? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would frequently show up to reference it. :) --Buddy23Lee (talk) 23:12, 27 August 2013 (CEST)

I just realized it was listed under the strategy guides section, so maybe that's good enough. I still think it should be made more prominent, but I don't mean to make things all awkward by suggesting it. Anyway, I guess the main take away here is props for creating a great article I use all the time. :) --Buddy23Lee (talk) 11:59, 28 August 2013 (CEST)

I added it to the list of articles recommended for beginners in the Walkthrough page. That should get it a little more foot traffic... --MoogleDan (talk) 14:29, 28 August 2013 (CEST)

Well, I can't take credit for the entire article -- I mainly cleaned things up a bit and added the section on ranged weapons -- but yeah, it sounds like the sort of thing where finding it easily would be helpful. --spudwalt (talk) 15:53, 28 August 2013 (CEST)

Thanks, random number gods

Guess whose Felid character just found a gold dragon armor on D:3? --spudwalt (talk) 23:41, 29 August 2013 (CEST)

Master Elementalist

So, I just found a vault with a monster called a "master elementalist" at the end (four elemental chambers, one with fire elementals/clouds of fire, one with water elementals/deep water, etc.; each chamber has a door leading to the next one). The master elementalist himself looks like some sort of variant thing (maybe a variant wizard), but I don't think we have him in the wiki yet. Flavor text is as follows: The primal forces of the universe dance at this demented wizard's fingertips. I killed him before he was able to cast any spells, so I don't know what spells he had.

I'd provide images, but unfortunately, screen captures don't seem to work well with tiles. The version is 0.12, in case anybody was wondering. --spudwalt (talk) 22:44, 27 September 2013 (CEST)

tiles database

Is the tiles database moving to a new server or something? I've tried checking back every so often for a while now (even after GDD and such came back up), but it's still down. --spudwalt (talk) 20:06, 6 March 2014 (CET)

Okay, seriously, is there a new link I have to go to or something? CommanderC's been uploading tiles, so he must have gotten them from somewhere. --spudwalt (talk) 21:45, 6 April 2014 (CEST)

The easiest way to get the tiles is to download the source code for 0.14 from http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads. The folder you want is source/rltiles. --CommanderC (talk) 21:17, 10 April 2014 (CEST)

I think you can also access them on this page --Flun (talk) 21:28, 10 April 2014 (CEST)

Thanks! Now I can get on updating stuff. --spudwalt (talk) 00:42, 11 April 2014 (CEST)

2014 Tournament

Psssst... Do you still want in on the tournament this year? --MoogleDan (talk) 16:43, 6 April 2014 (CEST)

I was kinda thinking of sitting this one out, considering I didn't get any wins in any of the last few tournaments. If there's still an open slot by the time the tourney rolls around, I might just jump in anyway, but otherwise, I'll let somebody who's better at Crawl have a go. --spudwalt (talk) 21:39, 6 April 2014 (CEST)

Adminship

So, now that I'm an admin, is there anything in particular that that entails? Or should I basically keep doing what I've been doing? --spudwalt (talk) 19:51, 11 April 2014 (CEST)

Connection issues

It's not just you. I'm not sure what's up, but if you want to talk about it, I'm usually on the CrawlWiki IRC channel. --Nabalzbhf (talk) 08:33, 7 September 2014 (CEST)

Adding new users

So, a while back Flun asked me to help out with adding new users, and I just realized I don't know how to create new accounts for people. Where do I go to do that? --spudwalt (talk) 07:16, 23 September 2014 (CEST)

Getting kicked offline

Is anybody else having problems with getting kicked offline while trying to edit things? --spudwalt (talk) 22:58, 28 September 2014 (CEST)

Errors uploading images

Welp, looks like my updates of the various image files might have to wait a while yet. I tried uploading the tile for the Majin-Bo, and got this error message:

Could not create directory "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/f/fb".

I then tried updating the file for Leech, and got a slightly different error message:

Could not create directory "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/f/f5".

At least now I can actually download the new image files so I have them ready to go. --spudwalt (talk) 05:37, 12 March 2015 (CET)

wyrmbane

The page was (and now is again) understating how great Wrymbane is. If the wiki is going to provide strategic advice, it should be good advice. Right now a newer player could easily read that section and conclude that the Wyrmbane he found isn't worth switching to.

I asked the current #2 and #4 players in the tourney (Walker, Morgan) about this before editing the page and they agreed. Rast (talk) 15:15, 20 March 2015 (CET)

PS: Using freezing over dragonslaying vs draconians is bad advice. You don't need rElec to murder storm dragons; it's nice to have, no more. When I asked the guys what the #1 unrand was, they said that a more interesting question was what the #2 was, because #1 isn't really a debate. Rast (talk) 15:20, 20 March 2015 (CET)

I hate to say it, Spuds, but he's right about the power level of the weapon. I was avoiding using absolutes when I wrote up Wyrmbane before, but it really is just an absurdly good item. I won a SpMo recently that decided in the late game to abandon short blades entirely so it could use Wyrmbane two-handed, and it was absolutely worth it. As for the freezing brand, that can be mentioned on the draconian page, as it's still good advice in most games (one can't guarantee Wyrmbane will show up every time); it's a little silly to argue against the weapon in an edge case like that. --MoogleDan (talk) 17:55, 20 March 2015 (CET)

Huh. Well, if you thought using it as a spriggan with their -3 Polearms aptitude was worth it, then I guess it really is that good.

When you say "late game", had you switched to Wyrmbane right after you found it, or had you found it earlier and waited a while before switching? Also, would it still be useful for a caster character that was going after one of the storm spells ('cause those require stupid amounts of experience to cast)? --spudwalt (talk) 18:05, 20 March 2015 (CET)

*checks the file for details* I bought it on turn 58400 out of 87016. Not sure how long it took me to level it up, but I basically swapped between stab kills using a +9 rapier of electrocution and standard fights with Wyrmbane. I had to sacrifice an rF+ buckler to do so and had no regrets whatsoever.

As for characters who have min/maxed themselves to the point where they can Fire Storm / Singularity combo anything to death at zero risk, sure, okay, you'll probably want to use an enhancer staff rather than a very deadly spear. The vast majority of characters do hybridize themselves to some extent, however, and the damage output, resistances, AC bonus, and berserk access on Wyrmbane are just unbeatable outside of absurdly overpowered randarts (and those don't happen anymore). Besides, most of the damage it deals is from the +18 enchantment, not the base damage, and you only need 12 Polearms skill to reach mindelay. That's really not that much (even with a =3 aptitude). --MoogleDan (talk) 18:19, 20 March 2015 (CET)

"spear"... The game calls it a lance. It's base damage (which matters) of 8 is closer to a trident's 9 than a spear's 6, though it has the min delay of a spear (.5) instead of the trident (.6). If lance was a weapon type that existed outside of Wyrmbane, it would be better than either spear or trident. Rast (talk) 02:48, 21 March 2015 (CET)

The earlier you find Wyrmbane, the more you should want to switch to it. +5 AC, rage, rPois in the early game? Hell yes. The fact that it will be "only" +8 through Lair and Orc is not a problem.

I can't comment on pure casters, except to say that the AC and resistances work the same for anyone, even if you have +0 in polearms. And your other hand is still free for a nice buckler. Rast (talk) 02:41, 21 March 2015 (CET)

Image Upload Fixed??!??

Kornel is telling me that it's fixed, but I don't have time to confirm at the moment. Want to try your hand at it and see if it's functioning again? --MoogleDan (talk) 01:28, 27 March 2015 (CET)

IT LIVES 03:01, 27 March 2015 (CET)

Woo! Now for me to not be lazy and actually add some images. --MoogleDan (talk) 13:49, 28 March 2015 (CET)

...Or for you to go ahead and automate the process for all of them :P Much obliged good sir. --MoogleDan (talk) 13:55, 8 April 2015 (CEST)

Automate wut? That was all manual. --spudwalt (talk) 20:37, 8 April 2015 (CEST)

...Right. Of course. How silly of me. *backs away slowly to the door* --MoogleDan (talk) 02:21, 9 April 2015 (CEST)

policy

Dear Spudwalt,
You're always welcome to correct errors. It is wellknown that you are a very experienced crawler and wiki teamer. I very much regret that all the other experienced wiki teamers/admins (Ion, Moogle Dan, CommanderC, Flun) have mostly withdrawn from active wiki editing. And I do appreciate that you tend to a compromising style of conflict solving. This is an integrative manner as any admin should prefer. We need more and better cooperation to keep going the crawl wiki! I'd -- Bwijn (talk) 13:53, 15 October 2015 (CEST)

book Script rerun needed

Hey, if you know the script procedure please rerun book script as the tables show obsolete parameters. -- Bwijn (talk) 15:14, 25 June 2016 (CEST)

Unfortunately, I don't know how any of the scripting stuff on here works. By "obsolete parameters" did you mean the spell lists haven't been updated? 'Cause we could probably do that manually. --spudwalt (talk) 23:57, 26 June 2016 (CEST)

new 0.20 version & tournament present

Hey, dear @spudwalt!
As the only known active admin, would you please update our crawl wiki to version 0.20? It was released 25 May 2017. -- Bwijn (talk) 15:02, 28 May 2017 (CEST)

I'm pretty busy with other stuff these days, but I'll keep doing what I've been doing -- occasionally dropping by the wiki to make edits, as well as making accounts for new editors that want them. --spudwalt (talk) 05:42, 30 May 2017 (CEST)

Hello there, looking to assist.

I recently got my account working, and wish to help out with getting articles and such updated for .20 You seemed to be pretty much the only active user when looking at changed articles, so...hello~ I'll be fixing up what I can when not at work or busy with current tourney. Is there anything in particular that needs focused on? Angani (talk) 17:55, 1 June 2017 (CEST)

Hello again! There's a couple people who hang around updating stuff -- I'm actually usually not this active, but 0.20 just came out, so I crawled back out of my internet hole to do at least some updates.

As far as projects go, I don't know that there's any one area that needs concentrating on over anything else. I usually just kind of pick one thing -- for example, I'm currently updating all the unrandart pages, and I'll probably upload some updated tiles after that. If you had anything in mind to improve right away, feel free to get started. Some good places to look for stuff to do would be things like the Special Pages; you can find a bunch of pages that detail things like pages with broken links or double redirect pages. You could also check the Category:Crystal Ball Articles, as those are pages we've flagged for updates once a new version comes out, but sometimes it takes a while before anyone gets to them.

Good luck with the tournament! I've mostly given up on competing -- I've been playing since 0.10 and only have 5 wins to my name, which says something about my general level of skill. --spudwalt (talk) 18:53, 1 June 2017 (CEST)

Been a while, but got back onto some editing here after a user requested a page update. Was curious how we delete pages, as I see no way to do so. You had the Classes page put up for deletion back in 2016 and I don't see a need for it either, but I don't know how to remove it. Angani (talk) 22:35, 1 December 2017 (CEST)

I think deleting pages might be an admin thing? I'm not sure -- I'll have to look at it later, 'cause I'm currently having some display errors on here (logged on to make an account for a guy and oh hey I'm suddenly seeing zero text on pages). --spudwalt (talk) 06:50, 8 January 2018 (CET)

Yep, deleting stuff is an admin thing. Took care of the Classes page, and I'll browse through the other pages that have been marked for deletion at some point. I think the display errors must have been from an in-progress site format change -- everything's working fine now and the wiki interface looks all shiny and new now. --spudwalt (talk) 06:18, 12 January 2018 (CET)

Wiki update scripts

Okay, does anybody know how the process that automatically imported monster stats into the wiki worked? 'Cause we should probably run that again, seeing as how basically all the monsters' stats are a couple of versions out of date.
I know CommanderC used to run this sort of thing, and I think that script he used has something to do with this, but I don't know how wiki scripting works at all. --spudwalt (talk) 16:24, 7 February 2018 (CET)

Dispel Undead Range

Hey, Mr. Spudwalt! I saw that e.g. your recently written article about Dispel Undead Range isn't working yet. No monsters that cast it are revealed, probably all those still enlisted in Dispel Undead. I'd say a script has to be run to activate it. Well, I trust you will know which.

BTW I'd like to thank you for your most valuable work here over all the years! Crawl Wiki would be lost without someone like you. Regrettably we don't even have implemented the 'thank you'-button or other recognition culture like wikipedia barnstars. -- Bwijn (talk) 11:06, 16 July 2020 (CEST)

The main issue is that the monster module hasn't been updated for 0.25 yet, which means the various new spell pages aren't pulling from it yet. I'll do that now. --spudwalt (talk) 04:11, 17 July 2020 (CEST)

Thank you very much! In the meantime I've noticed that spellbooks as well might need a script run. For example Book of Flames up to today contains two obsolete spells instead of Foxfire. Would you look to it too? -- Bwijn (talk) 19:19, 17 July 2020 (CEST)

Account creation

I'm talking on IRC to "jfcaron", who is a fairly regular player and commenter there. They tell me they have followed the usual procedure for creating an account - and, while I can't check what they have _done_, they describe following the right procedure - and nothing has happened although accounts have been created recently.

They emailed from a gmail address with the string "jfcaron" in it, requesting that Wiki username.

Please, can you assist? Pinkbeast (talk) 14:22, 28 October 2020 (CET)

Found the problem -- his message got caught in my spam filter. Taking care of it now. --spudwalt (talk) 04:58, 29 October 2020 (CET)

Is there a quick way to know if a feature is Trunk Only ?

--Kernmantle (talk) 00:14, 6 January 2022 (CET)

Unless you're familiar with everything in the stable release and are keeping up with the changes on the github or something, then you'll have to compare the stuff in trunk to the latest stable release. (I assume you mostly play trunk?)
There's a lot of information in the in-game lookup function (hit ?/), which can be handy for finding things out quickly. Even if you mostly play trunk and online, you can make a placeholder character for the latest release (currently 0.27) that you only use to look up stuff.
Sometimes, though, you'll have to physically go places in-game or test things out yourself. For those situations, it's useful to have an offline download of Dungeon Crawl where you can use Wizard mode. --spudwalt (talk) 07:54, 7 January 2022 (CET)

Advice Templates on regular articles

Hi, I had already made a template (Template:Advicealt) in order to put many potentially dubious strategy sections on gods/items/etc. in a more critical light. Not sure if this is great for the wiki, so asking if its ok. Added on a few of the gods but stopped to ask here (i'm sure theres a better way to do this) Hordes (talk) 10:24, 22 January 2022 (CET)

Let's have this discussion on the template talk page. --spudwalt (talk) 07:35, 26 January 2022 (CET)

Lua Quotes

You can have quotes inside strings in lua by using \"

For instance, "a \"string\"" should get displayed as: a "string" Pisaster (talk) 09:58, 10 September 2022 (CEST)

XP values for new monsters

You can get them in wiz-mode: spawn a monsters and use the xD targeting command to get all the debugging information, including the XP value. Ge0ff (talk) 22:40, 11 October 2022 (CEST)

Deleting Page

Basically I didn't realize that Glow was already a page, and redirected backlit to Corona instead. Could you move Glow to backlit? Thanks. Hordes (talk) 22:48, 14 July 2023 (CEST)