User:Hordes/Guide Appendix

Companion pieces to H's Minotaur Fighter Guide.

Appendix 1: Potions & Scrolls

Usage notes for every single potion and scroll of the game.

Potions

Restorative Potions

• Potion of curing - Heals up to 11 HP, and cures confusion and poisoning (and only these two statuses). May be lifesaving against early adders. The most common potion. Common enough that you can use it every time you get confused and still have plenty to spare. A single potion is pretty weak in combat past the first few floors. But chugging 5-10 lategame is some pretty good regeneration when you need it.

• Potion of heal wounds - Heals an average of 23 HP, up to 37. Incredibly useful in combat for the entire Dungeon/Lair/Orc run, slowly losing effectiveness as you progress. Heal Wounds is special for being the safest and/or only thing to do in particular situations (you are at risk of dying in 1 attack, you're waiting for a teleport to kick in), so they should be saved as much as possible. The second most common potion.

• Potion of ambrosia - Heals 3-5 HP and MP per turn at the cost of confusion; curing the confusion ends the healing. Useful if you know something else is or is potentailly coming, but not in combat range yet. You've created noise after being shafted, in the Abyss, on the Orb run. In naturally crowded areas like Vaults:5 (where you know enemies will come), you can use a scroll of fog before drinking this potion.

• Potion of magic - As we aren't using spells often, MP isn't much of a worry. However, Okawaru buffs require some amount of MP to proc. Ghost moths will drain MP to zero, so these potions can be used if you need Oka help. Also useful if you have an amulet of guardian spirit

Scrolls

Tactical Scrolls

Scrolls used to handle more difficult situations, or just to escape.

• Scroll of teleportation - Teleports you to any random square on the floor, including the space you are on, but excluding most of the locked door areas. This takes a few (3-5) turns to activate, so use it early; whenever a bunch of scary monsters you can't escape from otherwise appear. Delayed in Zot. This is the 2nd most common scroll.

• Scroll of fog - Creates fog clouds that spread out over time. Two or more clouds in a direction will block sight, if you're out of sight of a cloud then they disappear. As enemies can't shoot you if you can't see them, useful against most ranged enemies like centaurs. Sometimes replaced with the scroll of butterflies in 0.29.

• Scroll of blinking - The best escape item in the game, teleporting you anywhere you can see. Quite a valuable item but not terribly rare. This is primarially a reactive item, but you still need some amount of health to really be safe.

• Scroll of fear - Causes all monsters in sight to run away. Checks willpower; practically infallable earlygame, becomes less likely to work as you go on. Good as a "get off me", especially for crowds (where you're very likely to scare a good portion of them). Even in lategame, it's still effective against mooks like draconians. Enemies that are cornered/can't move will braven up and lose the fear enchantment.

• Scroll of immolation - The main reason why you don't want to blind read near monsters. Causes all monsters to get Inner Flame, which causes them to explode when killed, which can very easily one-shot low level cows. It's easier to just not mess with this until much later in the game and until you have rF++. Has some uses with ranged weapons, as Inner Flame also causes fire damage on every hit. We'll want to save at least one to handle Slime Pits.

• Scroll of vulnerability - Lowers both your and monsters' willpower by 1/2. Very useful with the hex wands (wand of paralysis, wand of polymorph); this scroll plus a wand will take out just about any unique throughout the entire Dungeon, Lair, and further beyond. Watch out for monsters with their own will checks; paralysis or Banishment are simply not worth it.

• Scroll of noise - Creates a loud noise, which tends to attract monsters. Useful for attracting enemies outside of vaults (such as Elf:3 or Zot:5), but remains one of the few "bad scrolls" left in the game.

• Scroll of silence - Silence stops wizardly and divine abilities, as well as scroll reading. Make sure to x v enemies to make sure that this scroll would actually work; recent versions have thankfully made this explicit. This can completely disable many spellcasting enemies (such as deep elves), but is also risky for very obvious reasons. Control is prefered. Can be ended with a potion of cancellation.

• Scroll of holy word - Weakens and damages undead and demons. Extremely niche, as demons don't really spawn in a 3-4 rune game, so these tend to be saved for the orb run. Removed in 0.29, but included in 0.28.

• Scroll of torment - Even more niche as it halves your HP (and all monsters vulnerable to negative energy in sight). Careful use can make this a decent item, but you can honestly just drop them.

• Scroll of poison - Creates poison clouds on any space not occupied by a monster. Can be useful in creating space to use throwing weapons. Midgame enemies like orc warlords will walk through poison, but take a fair amount of damage. Players and monsters with rPois are completely immune to the clouds. Introduced in 0.29.

Strategic Scrolls

Scrolls useful outside of combat.

• Scroll of identify - Covered in the Identification section. Instantly identifies one item (potion or scroll). The scroll of blinking is really the only scroll worth preserving, so use potions first. This is the most common scroll.

• Scroll of enchant armour / enchant weapon - See the Items and Gear section. Basically, don't enchant anything that would be replacable. You'll stick with: Broad axe for weapon. Plate armour of fire resistance/willpower, gold dragon scales, crystal plate armour for body armour. Tower shields.

• Scroll of magic mapping - Maps out the current floor. Most useful if you just got teleported or shafted, also useful for finding the Temple. Outside of temple finding, you shouldn't really need these for general use - save until the afomentioned scenarios or the final stretches of Zot.

• Scroll of brand weapon - Use it on a broad axe. Vorpal, Flaming, Freezing, Vampiric (not avail. from the scroll) are worth keeping, the others can be replaced. If you got 2 or more, you can also use one on the war axe. Even if you get chaos, Okawaru can give you a replacement axe.

• Scroll of acquirement - Generally good items. Once you read the scroll, the items are already set, though you can cancel even if you blind read. If you get it early in the game (pre-Orc), try to get items that will carry you (heavily enchanted broad axe or armour). Later on, prefer what you wouldn't get from Okawaru, like rElec or Will++(+) on one item. Also really good and/or overenchanted artefacts (+11 broad axe of flaming!). Don't expect to get these scrolls.

Useless Scrolls

• Scroll of amnesia - Forgets a spell. This is useful when you've learned a great early game/branch dependent spell like Mephitic Cloud, but want to forget it later (as each spell takes up a finite amount of spell levels). But we won't be learning any spells here.

• Scroll of butterflies - Creates a mass of butterflies, which can help gain space from monsters (preventing attacks of opportunity) or just blocking projectiles. Okawaru prevents allied summons, so it's useless. Mutually exclusive with the scroll of fog. Introduced in 0.29.

• Scroll of summoning - Creates a ton of friendly monsters which you'd expect to find on the floor. This is an extremely powerful scroll in raw monster-killing potential, let alone attack blocking, but Okawaru prevents this scroll from working.

Appendix 2: Older Versions & Mechanics

If you've watched some of the older videos of DCSS, you might notice a few things that are... different. This section will go over more of the major mechanical changes in (recent) DCSS history, and my interpretation for the rationale of removal. This focuses on changes that are relevant to MiFi^Oka specifically, though this is inclusive with changes that effect all/a majority of characters.

Food, Butchering, Chunks - Food was a mechanic in which you had to eat with the e command; food runs down as you explore and/or fight. The main source of food was to chop up corpses and eat their chunks. Food's main purpose (as an extremely soft clock to force players deeper) really could be automated, so... it was automated.

Food also served to punish spellcasters casting their biggest spells all the time via spell hunger. While this did create some amount of depth and had a noticable effect on balance, the devs decided that it simply wasn't necessary. For melee characters with any amount of competency, hunger did not matter past the first few floors - even for the hunger consuming Berserker, even for the corpse-destroying Gozag.

Most players automated most things via rcfile anyway so it really did not matter (on the surface) other than for flavor/traditional roguelike reasons. Now it is replaced by the automatic Zot clock, which is non-intrusive enough that you have to actively enable it via settings to see (it is extremely long and comes with a warning if you get anywhere close to ending, so the "don't worry" intent is right).

It's worth noting that the game feel and many mechanics were tied around food and its soft limit. For example, they had to give invisibility items and Formicid the wayyy more punishing drain in part due to food's removal, the aformentioned casters...

Curses - Cursed items would stick to you if you equipped them, rendering you unable to equip another one in it's stead. Weapons, armour, and jewllery were not identified until you wore them or used a scroll of ID. The mechanic served to create some form of strategic risk/reward (which I personally miss a lot) outside of battle, and limit how early you could use floor items. However, the dominant strategy was much too safe and optimal to pull off.

In versions with cursed items (before 0.27), identify scrolls as normal. When you find the scroll of remove curse, you can try on all non-weapon equipment slots, and weapons if you want to risk the extremely low chance for distortion. Scrolls of RC were in the top 3 most common scrolls and curses served zero risk once you had more than one, barring very specific artefacts like the obsidian axe and the curse-focused god Ashenzari. There was space to break this rule, but really only in the first floor or two (and no further).

Overall, if you knew the optimal strategy, there was too little of risk that applies for too little of the game. If you did not know it, then you just got randomly punished for wearing items. Plus, in the lategame, curses just served as annoyance: items were not identified, so you had to wear every single item that you could possibly want to use. Also, lugging around scrolls of ID/RC took up two inventory slots. The devs decided that the lategame burden and "noob trap" functionality were not worth whatever positives this mechanic had, and they were removed.

Random energy, Pillar dancing, Attack of opportunity - Mentioned in the guide itself, but included for completeness' sake. Random energy is/was a mechanic where monsters would randomly get +/- 0.1 turn; a 1/3 chance for +, -, or no change. Pillar dancing is where you run around a monster in a circle (requiring a wall to circle around to do so). Pdancing let you re-roll combat infintely so long as you can take at least one more hit, as both you and the monster regenerated. Both still exist in 0.28, but the former was removed in 0.29. Attacks of opportunity introduced in 0.29 heavily punishes pillar dancing as monsters have a 33% to attack you on retreat. Pillar dancing is still possible if you have some way to stop being adjacent to an enemy.

Exploration traps, Sourceless Malevolence - Exploration traps were introduced in the place of the more logical/conventional, hidden-traps-that-had-a-tile-associated-to-it. This causes some sillyness (like a trap activating while still on a staircase), so it was renamed to sourceless malevolence sometime later. Hidden-on-tile traps were annoying because it was more optimal to remember the exact tiles you traveled from and always take that path, which is way too much effort and not supported by the game's autotravel at all.

Floors of the Dungeon - DCSS likes to just remove floors from time to time, like it replaces species. It happens. No branch has been removed since the Hall of Blades over 8 years ago (and it still exists on Elf:2), though the portal Labyrinth was replaced with the Gauntlet sometime recently (due to being annoying; it was non-combat related).

Okawaru - Okawaru has existed for the entirety of DCSS, and then some. What changed recently (0.28) was that Okawaru now completely forbids allies, but gained the Duel ability. Previously, Okawaru did not care about allies, and even prior just hated you betraying allies (which didn't matter for 99% of the game). Also, in 0.29, Okawaru throwing gifts were halved, which I didn't actually have a place to put in the guide proper.

Shield penalties, Shield skill level, Large Shield - There were specific skill thresholds: Bucklers at 4 Shields skill, kite shields (formerly just shields) at 15 skill, and tower shields (large shields) at 25 skill. Once you hit that threshold, there would be no penalties for wearing the shield. Shield penalties are now only removed at Shields 27.

Rot, Skill drain - Rot happened with some "undeady" attacks and lowered maximum HP temporarily. Drain used to reduce your skill XP levels temporarily. Rot was removed and drain now lowers max HP; the only difference now is that rot could've been fixed with a potion of curing. This was done because it was harder to accurately gauge the effects of skill level loss compared to mHP loss.

Out of depth timer, monster spawning - Monster spawn post-dungeon generation was removed in 0.21. Previously, monsters (which somewhat quickly became way too difficult for the floor) would naturally spawn over time, which served to softly discourage pillar dancing and to get a move on. It was removed precisely because of its softness; you could still get easy monsters and had to wait a few thousand turns to gamble for them (though a monster which flat out kills you could also spawn).

Ammo (Arrows, Bolts), Fustibalus, Slings / Bows / Crossbow skill - In 0.29, ranged weapons went through (is going through) another overhaul. The seperate Slings, Bows, and Crossbows skill were unified into Ranged Weapons. As Slings was no longer its own skill, Fustibali were no longer needed. Ranged weapons also require no more ammo (annoying and did not matter later on; similar to curses), scale off DEX, and now are slowed by wearing heavier armour with less STR/armour skill.

Magic Resistance, MR - Now called willpower. Name was changed because "magic resistance" implies it also resisted offensive magic like Magic Dart (when it did no such thing).

Blowguns, Needles - Blowguns were removed, and were replaced with the functionally similar darts (a flat out buff, because you don't need to wield a dart).

Name Changes - Too many more to list. Some were renamed for clarity reasons (ring of Robustness -> ring of the Tortoise, where robust always referred to HP), some due to more overt reasons (wand of enslavement to wand of charming, done in 0.27).

The other big name changes were Wizard to Hedge Wizard and Assassin to Brigand, as the older names did not actually reflect the playstyle they implied ("I want to be a cool (offensive) mage" / "I want to sneak up on guys").