User talk:Bwijn

New year - new challenge! Alive and kicking (errors & mistakes) anew.

Curiosity killed the cat, sent the minotaur to the abyss and made a human a vegan. - Popular Saying

Bullshit Minivault

Ancient Lich Minivault

The unbelievable incident of the crawler's week

A) Just a pesky "vamp mosquito" experience of raven tar black developer's viciousness: You can cast Apportation to pull items towards yourself that turn out to be item mimics in the very moment they bite you. I had supposed those were just perfect delusions. But no, they have nearly no weight/mass but a powerful biting. - On the other hand I just stumbled upon a potion of experience lying around at Vault:2. Which one is the more surprising incident? -- Bwijn 18:51, 24 February 2013 (CET)

B) Which sort of mini vault could it be if you encounter on D:16 a gang of 5 humans, a wizard and a necromancer? (Each single might not be a bad challenge.) Have you seen anything like that? -- Bwijn 20:33, 18 March 2013 (CET)

The gang of five humans isn't too uncommon. I'm pretty sure that they can appear in small packs like that naturally. The wizard and necromancer, I'm not so sure about. Were there any unusual structures nearby? --MoogleDan 20:38, 18 March 2013 (CET)

Yeah, a stone walled 8x4 structure (temple?) to the left and a normal rock walled 3x2 fields chamber (treasure? barracks?) to the right. -- Bwijn 20:44, 18 March 2013 (CET)

That's not reminding me of any PARTICULAR vault, but if you have any scrolls of magic mapping lying around, I'd suggest you use one just to see what's inside. --MoogleDan 20:49, 18 March 2013 (CET)

None at hand. By the way the fighting abilities of a band of six humans surpass my SpAK capability to win. -- Bwijn 20:54, 18 March 2013 (CET)

It was just the entry hall to the Vaults staircase. No vault guards but a simple band of "humans" guarding it. And I had never before encountered such a "common" gang. -- Bwijn 10:51, 23 March 2013 (CET)

C) What a shocking scenery: I come around a corner and see the gateway to a bazaar. On three sides there are stone walls. The only entrance is occupied by a silver statue. Damned! No wand of disintegration available because this SpAK despite XL15 never ever found such a wand. If you'd flee the bazaar would be lost. Just by luck a ring of teleport control and a scroll of blinking and another to teleport are investable. So I've found a solution. *grin* -- Bwijn 10:51, 23 March 2013 (CET)

D) It never before was as dangerous as in 0.11.2 to explore Orcish Mines:4. I've met lots of simple orcs who carried axes of distortion. Never in 0.10.3 I saw anything comparable. No, it's not the ever possible one random case, it's sort of a feature to make it "hotter" in the Mines. -- Bwijn 19:02, 27 March 2013 (CET)

E) What a chasm of maliciousness is this BullshitMinivault I found at D:17. Walls of green crystal, translucent and normal stone prevent anyone who is not an earth magician (shatter, Lee'S rapid deconstruction) to get the randart double sword inside. Malicious design! -- Bwijn 02:56, 8 April 2013 (CEST)

F) Cruel arrangement: a minivault island at D:21. The only door lays behind deep water and - surprise - reveals a silver statue in the chamber center. Lots and lots of summoned demons of all tiers - if you are not happy and smart enough to carry a wand of disintegration. Secret doors lead to another two silver statues. Alas, wands of disintegration are rare and scrolls of recharging as well. Now the last door: an Ancient lich (sleeping!) guards the treasure: the ring of the Mage, an unrandart. My MfGl of Makhleb XL18 is very uneasy to battle such an endgame opponent now?. Later. -- Bwijn 23:12, 6 May 2013 (CEST)

I think one of the most important lessons of this game is to not kill every monster that enters your line of sight. Many times, the best decision is to skip a level or vault. In this particular case, you can just lure the lich outside of the vault and steal the ring. --CommanderC 00:33, 7 May 2013 (CEST)

Much better solution I found. As I had high stealth of 9,5 and the apportation spell I managed to open the door without wakening the Lich (GOOD luck!) and steal the ring without combat! Got away with it. -- Bwijn 15:50, 7 May 2013 (CEST)

G) I played an artificer and thought it harmless to use my base chaos wand in a closed area on a simple worm. But what a surpise: The worm evaporates and reforms as a steam dragon! His breathing brought a quick death. Never had I imagined that a worm could have the same base Dice like a small dragon. So I had to learn it. -- Bwijn 15:39, 20 May 2013 (CEST)

H) Began as a Lava Orc Artificer in 0.13a online Aug 2013. Ended XL7 mangled by a shadow (30 damage)! ... on Level 11 of the Dungeon. Hadn't known that the recently boosted trunk Shadow got such massive damage AND invisiblity at the same time. Some developers seem to have weird imaginations about *balanced* early game playing. BTW I saw in the morgue log: "D:4: uniq_edmund, uniq_sigmund, uniq_eustachio, uniq_menkaure, uniq_grinder". Some versions ago it was not yet allowed to have more than two uniques in early Dungeeon levels. Nobody can call this seriously "balanced"! Fair play was yesterday. -- Bwijn (talk) 15:53, 24 August 2013 (CEST)

how to avoid online game aborts?

I've finally done the step to have an account on CDO. Have to try it out, maybe take part on the tournament. Unluckily I've not even found initially the place to config "tiles" session for me and have experienced a series of crashes. Error message: "network error: software caused connection abort". My antivirus and firewall had been both changed to game modus awhile, so that is not the reason. Does the browser intervene? I need it to use the wiki or database. Any *useful* hints to prevent those crashes? -- Bwijn 21:46, 7 April 2013 (CEST)

Are you going to https://tiles.crawl.develz.org/ ? Is it here that you crash? --Flun 02:18, 8 April 2013 (CEST)

I used not openssh but putty, just along the instructions: http://crawl.develz.org/cao_key.ppk (putty) Basic SSH connection to CDO directions for putty: grab the second key mentioned above and putty. On the basic session page, make sure ssh is selected, and put "crawl.develz.org" for the host name (no quotes, of course). The port should default to "22" automatically." It worked. Nevertheless I suspect that a small "gap" undermines the stability. For example, should I write "tiles.crawl.develz.org" instead of "crawl.develz.org"? Of course I'd prefer https but don't know if putty supports it? Being not familiar with putty I was perplex that I could not change putty to fullscreen. Technically correct or error of mine? -- Bwijn 02:36, 8 April 2013 (CEST)

Are you trying to play tiles through SSH? If you want to play tiles, use your browser (i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc) and go to https://tiles.crawl.develz.org/ to play. You can only play ASCII through SSH --Flun 06:06, 8 April 2013 (CEST)

Oops, I'm stupefied. Did I overlook hints (to what you say) or are there none? I've just followed the given instructions at main page (CDO). Had never the intention to use anything but the tiles format. Are those instructions which never lead to tiles obsolete crawl wiki contents? -- Bwijn 20:51, 10 April 2013 (CEST)

The instructions you were following may be obsolete, but also they were instructions to connect and play through console. Note also that CDO is closing down webtiles for now because they can't handle the load. Unfortunately the other webtiles servers are in America and so you might experience bad lag in the game. For the most up to date instructions on how to connect, you can see this page: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/howto --Flun 22:29, 10 April 2013 (CEST)

Thank you! It's real bad news that CDO closed webtiles. The US servers will probably produce interruption dropouts like most long distance streamings. Bad luck. But really good to perceive the odds. -- Bwijn 21:46, 12 April 2013 (CEST)

I've tried webtiles 0.12 at CZ Pennsylvania - every 4 minutes at least the websocket stream broke. I could several times continue after leaving and reentering. But what a drag to game without a stable flow. Too far away. I did not forget to set my antivirus to gaming modus. And yet: frequent broken streams. -- Bwijn 23:39, 6 May 2013 (CEST)

Tournament

Hey Bwijn, did you put in the # TEAMCAPTAIN Flun in your .rc file yet? I don't see the line in your CAO .rc file here. It should look like this --Flun 19:21, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

Oh yes, I copied it in the CAO rc file. But I remember that I put away the "#". Because I took /mistook it for a comment line character. -- I just controlled the entry: indeed it has disappeared. A minute ago I have put in "# TEAMCAPTAIN Flun" and pushed the Save button. Should be allright now? -- Bwijn 21:59, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

I see the line now, but its on the 3rd line of the file. Can you put it at the top like this? --Flun 22:01, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

Sure I can! Next minute. - Are there any uselful hints to edit the rc file in even more details? -- Bwijn 22:34, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

The .rc files are highly customizable, take a look at my .rc or commanderC's and see if you get any inspiration. --Flun 23:14, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

Also this maybe what you are looking for. --Flun 23:18, 10 May 2013 (CEST)

Hey Bwijn, I looked at the morgue of your MfTm, and I noticed you trained a lot of unnecessary skills. Did you just leave it on auto? This might seem easier at first, but it helps your character tremendously if you set it to manual and only train the most relevant skills, in this case UC, Transmutations and a some spellcasting --Lokkij 18:44, 11 May 2013 (CEST)

No, I don't think that most are unnecessary. Stealth and evasion training saves your neck. High stabbing skill (I know that 0.13-trunk has kicked it out) makes sure that you can finish those basilisks and hill giants later on. Traps awareness is vital. To train Spellcasting is necessary to reduce spell hunger. Well, I admit that several weapon proficiencies or spell schools are not necessary. But as the chances what spellbook or highquality weapon you randomly find are so unpredictible, some trainings are more or less wrong placed. Ashenzari permits to readapt those. - And no, I'm not a fan of the proposed "manual" adjustments. I dislike that philosophy! -- Bwijn 23:22, 11 May 2013 (CEST)

I will agree that some of those are quite useful, but you don't have to train them all right from the start. What I usually do is train Stealth up to level 4 or so at the very beginning (that's usually good enough to start with, and you can always add more later); I leave off training Traps until I hit the Lair, where I get it up to around 8-ish and then add more as needed afterwards. Generally, I avoid training Stabbing unless I'm using Short Blades; otherwise, the bonus damage tends not to be worth it unless you get it to really high levels, and the experience is better spent elsewhere for Transmuters. Also, Transmuters really shouldn't do much with weapons -- a MfTm might maybe make use of a flaming short blade to hack off hydra heads, or a weapon of electrocution to deal with heavily armored threats, but that's only if you find either of those things.

The bulk of my MfTm's experience always goes into things like Fighting, Unarmed Combat, Dodging, Spellcasting, Transmutations, and whatever other spell schools are necessary (a few levels of Poison Magic for Spider Form, for example). Using manual mode is a really good way of making sure all your experience goes to where you want it to go, and that you don't add more to a skill after you have it high enough. Also, the more skills you train at once, the slower they grow; if you overspecialize too much at the start, you might not be strong enough to handle the bigger threats later on. --spudwalt 05:48, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

Hey spudwalt, I also looked at the morgue of your XL11 DgEE, and (in my opinion) you also need to focus your skills a bit more :). Spellcaster generally only focus on weapons later in the game, and your focus should always be at your primary magic school. 6 Earth Magic at XL11 is not a lot to be honest, and fighting, dodging and shields aren't necessary until later, so you could've put that XP into earth magic, which would probably make petrify and LRD castable, and increased power on the other earth spells. I understand you also want those spells in those shiny spellbooks you found, but few high-power spells > a lot of low-power spells. Although I will say, blink is really nice to have, and flame tongue for training fire magic isn't bad either. Oh, and more spellcasting would've made stone arrow hungerless (== spammable). But maybe it's just style of play I'm not used to :) --Lokkij 18:34, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

It's more of a play-style thing -- I tend to prefer hybrid characters rather than pure spellcasters, since spellcasters have huge problems when they run out of MP and I really hate having to run away to recharge MP. And yeah, maybe it's not ideal, but I did manage to get a DgEE to Zot:5 before dying from stupidity (and my skills were even less focused then), so it can work. --spudwalt 22:30, 19 May 2013 (CEST)

Really, trust me. It may look stupid/dumb/not fun at first, but it really does help your characters get deeper into the dungeon when you only train your weapon skill/spell schools in the beginning. Just try it for a while, and if you really dislike it, you can always switch back :) --Lokkij 15:31, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

Oh, and do you usually go down the first staircase you see, or do you clear the whole level first? I saw you killed very little monsters in your recent games. It might be quicker to the bottom to just rush down, but that way you miss out on a lot of valuable XP. Just something to keep in mind. --Lokkij 19:41, 13 May 2013 (CEST)

Diary and Observations on 0.12.1 online

A) More "shafts" needed and less bottlenecks! I've lost several avatars because of the "three stairs at the same place" arrangement feature. If strong monsters or even uniques block the one and only(!) way - as it happended to me much too frequently - this setting is a perfect death-trap. Sometimes you can get around such a bottleneck by using a shaft trap which bypasses whole dungeon-levels. But much too often shafts are completely missing. Why isn't it possible to produce your own shafts with a wand of digging? - Surely those death-trap bottlenecks are not new in 0.12. But the "randomization" has become fake(!) and much more harsh. In 0.11 and worse even in 0.12 the items to be found are less and less generous. Very few rings in the first levels and those mostly of poorest quality (e.g. ring of evasion+2). But remember: even a cursed ring of teleportation could help you out of a death trap in emergency cases. But even scrolls of teleportation and blinking are much too rare! -- Bwijn 23:01, 11 May 2013 (CEST)

I think that's more just a run of bad luck on your part. A great many of your characters will ultimately get killed by bad luck in the early game, such as running into powerful monsters or the game generating dangerous floor layouts. I don't even know how many characters I've run (probably at least 2000 by now), but only ONE of them ever managed to get out with the Orb. A few more of them might have made it, but all of them died because I made bad choices and didn't run away when I should have. I'm not sure what the success rate of accomplished players is, but I'd be willing to bet even the best players only win with one out of every twenty characters. Like most roguelikes out there, Crawl is not intended to be anywhere remotely close to easy.

In cases of dangerous rooms where all the staircases are in one place, escape hatches down from the previous floor (if they're present, but they tend to be more common than shafts) have a decent chance of getting you around the dangerous area. Then you gradually can lure things away from the stairs and clear them out without getting horribly swarmed.

Also, the lack of jewellery and useful scrolls in the early portions of the game sounds about average. Yeah, it's possible to find a cool ring or multiple scrolls of teleportation and/or blinking on the first few floors, but that's quite rare. Admittedly, I've only been playing since 0.10, but rings and escape scrolls have almost never been really common in the early game. --spudwalt 06:07, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

I haven't encountered ANY bottlenecks yet, although I could've just missed them because of the switch to console --Lokkij 16:51, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

Okay, mates, thanks for consolation intentions. I've never played online Crawl before May 2013 and my tournament results up to now were not heart warming. But nevertheless I'm not willing to bore with complaints. - I know quite well, it was a mix of bad luck and wrong decisions. Sometimes I'd wish the game updates to be more open, fair and humorous, less sadistic. E.g. to dig your own shafts when needed even if the downfall costs hitpoints would be great. But sure I'm learning to survive and get better results even while struggling in 0.12 conditions. -- Bwijn 21:07, 12 May 2013 (CEST)

online disruptions

It's not the number of stupid deaths that speak against online DCSS playing but the constantly high rate of having to reload CAO. Absolutely unnerving! In extreme moments it's 3 times in 2 minutes. Maybe it's more a problem of the tiles and of course the far distance server on the other continent? Do the console artists like Flun and CommanderC have less disruptions and much more flow in their game experience? - If not for the tournament I'd never chosen to try it out. Even if now it's hard sometimes to find out that you're more a beginner than you'd thought. No Save cheating ever makes it another game! The player ghosts are no fun in my eyes. Nevertehless I'll try to learn and make my tournament result less pathetic in the end. -- Bwijn 15:21, 20 May 2013 (CEST)

I play in console for the tournament (I'm in Europe and CDO webtiles is offline), and it's fine for me. The only problems I'm having are caused by my own stupidity. On which continent do you live? --Lokkij 15:25, 20 May 2013 (CEST)

In Europe like you. But I don't like and don't want to learn the console version where dozends and dozends of monsters are marked only by very slightly different colors. My real life work may be laborious at times but IMHO games shouldn't be alike. Too strenuous! And in DCSS you need to concentrate hard on your decisions, no fun to stumble on unknown glyphs all the time. The frequent online disruptions kill the nerves of my concentration even so. Offline DCSS games are much more fun! -- Bwijn 17:31, 20 May 2013 (CEST)

Yeah, I also tried playing on CSZO (which is closest to Europe, I think), but the latency and disconnects made me learn console anyway. --Lokkij 19:30, 20 May 2013 (CEST)

0.14a observations

Downloading some recent trunk version is still preferable to playing trunk online: no nerves-rotting disconnections all the time. Some observations can be collected and logged openly just here.

new frost-covered statue

A really funny, well-designed new ice statue I did screenshot these days. Will the Frost-covered statues replace the ice statues we have known?

Nah, those have been around for a while now. That Vehumet altar vault is pretty much the only place I've seen frost-covered statues, and it's a pretty rare vault. --spudwalt (talk) 23:22, 8 November 2013 (CET)

Thank you, Spud! As you say those statues are rare. So I never saw one before. Being exploring trunk I'd thought it could be a new feature. Now I know better. -- Bwijn (talk) 13:04, 12 November 2013 (CET)

• Mennas is still a nerve-wrecking opponent. Not even (Ash-enhanced) stealth of 18 (real 14) is enough to come close and stab him. What a luck that Dazzling Spray (spell power of 6#) blinds him at 2nd attempt. -- Bwijn (talk) 09:45, 5 December 2013 (CET)

• No longer possible for me to play it online. Reason unknown. But if zhe socket fails the servers (just the same on all of them) won't kick out my avatar but count many minutes as *idle*. So I can't reload and contininue playing after any hazard disconnect happened. - Now I'm playing trunk in downloaded versions offline, it's more fun anyway. -- Bwijn (talk) 18:07, 16 February 2014 (CET)

• I was astonished that I took the splendid unrandart Wyrmbane from a slain spriggan but my automatic logged 'Notes' didn't get that entry. All the time any other artifacts had been added though. A bug?? Wyrmbane is special in changing it's hit/dam values. And the character file's 'inventory' at the same time showed the entry. -- Bwijn (talk) 20:04, 17 February 2014 (CET)

014.1 observations

Precious design progresses are to be observed. Even the matter-of-fact runeforgotten Orcish Mines now have some gorgeous new maps. -- Bwijn (talk) 23:53, 23 July 2014 (CEST)

sharp Orc4 design

Crawl versions

I reverted your changes to the 0.15 page, because the purpose of that type of pages is to document the most important changes in the game from one version to the following one. The blog post you used as your source only contains weekly changes to the trunk version. Those weekly changes may not make any sense for someone updating from 0.14 to 0.15. --CommanderC (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2014 (CEST)

Well, I don't mind too much. OTOH I'd say it was exageration to revert that completely. The list displayed formidably the most uptodate stage of affairs in DCSS 0.15 shortly before the freezing point. And it was accurately marked out to be what is is. I'd expect that many of these feature changes make it into 0.15. -- Bwijn (talk) 00:01, 14 August 2014 (CEST)

I'm quite interested in upcoming plannings. -- Bwijn (talk) 13:54, 28 August 2014 (CEST)

0.15 observations - a bug?

I've been playing the 0.15 tournament and observed a damned bug! The character dump seems no longer to be reporting unrands. While found randarts get their entries as it should be, unrands are missing in the list. It's the recent subversion 0.15.0-12-gccce430 (webtiles) where I acquired an unrand and found only the dump entry "Identified a scroll of acquirement". Well, it's still theoretically possible that the config file needs a special entry to show unrands? If anyone is wise to give helpful rc file advice or to confirm the bug please tell me. -- Bwijn (talk) 16:02, 2 September 2014 (CEST)

Yes, it's a bug. The documentation for the note_items option says that artefacts should always be noted. --CommanderC (talk) 17:25, 2 September 2014 (CEST)

Thanks! -- Bwijn (talk) 23:07, 2 September 2014 (CEST)

Highlights and Downthumps of 0.16

The taking part in the tournament is indeed a very efficient means to pull people into the next set of changed rules and monsters. Without it I would stay much longer in old versions I'm accustomed to. The 0.16 Change list of Neil gives me easy access lines for a personal listing of the Best and Worst Changes in 0.16:

My thumbs down:

• 14: Monsters no longer avoid walking on shadow traps. (0.16.1)
• 28: Every time a player clears a ziggurat (exits from the top floor, Zig:27), all subsequent ziggurats become significantly harder.
• 112: Player ghosts & spellforged servitors can now have more than six spells.
• 161: Zapping wands that don't have their charge count identified wastes several charges.
• 205: Large rocks no longer have randomized range.

My favorite changes:

• 27: Ziggurats now only require two runes to enter, down from three.
• 49: Vampires now bottle blood with 'c', and can do so from the first level.
• 50: Butchering/bottling now only takes a single turn.
• 70: Mimics now cackle and vanish (forever) when discovered.
• 110: The "misshapen and mutated" status (from Malmutate and the new Irradiate spell) is now temporary, but more significant.
• 113: Player ghosts now have their weapon brands displayed.
• 144: Dispersal now affects a wider radius & has a chance of confusing its victims.
• 145: Force Lance is now L4 Translocation/Conjuration, and is more accurate and better at knocking enemies back.
• 147: Ice, Dragon, Tree and Fungus forms no longer meld octopode rings.
• 182: Corrosion resistance can now occur on artefact armour.
• 201: The Box of Beasts and Rod of Shadows are now considerably stronger.
• 224: All characters can now evoke decks from the inventory.
• 225: If one's god would disapprove of a card's effects, they will block the blasphemous effects in question as it is drawn.

Unsure about this:

• 148: Spell miscast effects have been hugely revamped.