Onei’s 15-rune Travel Guide on Thrilling Ventures in the Demonic Funhouses - FeSu^Jiyva

This walkthrough builds onto the 3-rune FeSu guide written by yours truly. It is recommended that you consult it before proceeding with this sequel, unless you are simply interested in general, non-Felid specific (psh!) advice on clearing the extended endgame of 0.29, including the extra spicy realms of Hell and all its denizens.

I once again reiterate that less experienced players are encouraged to attempt this strategy (starting with the first instalment of this guide), and should not be fooled by the sadly-too-common belief that Felids are “too hard for me”! Even one game of the squishiest race in all of DCSS brings many important lessons that will be applicable to any character.

The Journey Ahead

The "extended endgame" is a rather controversial topic among the community of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Some call it an "exercise in tedium", others, a "dull fest of exploding popcorn until you fall asleep and lose your 7 hour run". That may be true if you are some Minotaur Fighter sweating all over your crystal plate armour with 99 AC, 350 HP and a holy brand sword, or generic blaster caster #3029459 who has replaced every instance of "Hello" in their vocabulary with "Iron Shot" and "Shatter".

I personally find it exciting, full of surprises and a worthy final challenge for this infamously difficult video game. As a cat, you will constantly be tiptoeing the line between life and death, between supreme power and debilitating weakness; you will laugh as you oneshot, and cry as you are oneshotted. You will experience failure - but unlike any other DCSS character, there's always the next life to redeem your worth. You will never truly fall asleep with explosions bringing you to double-digit HP constantly, but will also not lose your entire run because of a simple mistake. And if you find yourself reincarnated a few too many times, you can realize you've bitten off more than you can chew, and leave with the runes you've collected so far.

But you won't do that, won't you?

You'll squeeze in just one more melee attack on the 10% HP Ereshkigal when you have zero lives remaining.

I would too.

Interdimensional Travel Checklist (or when should one attempt the extended endgame)

Now, not every kitty is enough of a tiger to test their mettle against the endless legions of Hell, the entire Egyptian pantheon contained within the Tomb, and the disco-party colourful inhabitants of Pandemonium. Sometimes, it’s best to swallow up your pride, collect 3-5 runes of Zot, and leave the holy crusades to your next karmic reincarnation. Here are some basic guidelines – these are listed in order of importance, from practically obligatory clauses to strong, but not forced recommendations.

• You should not be a pure summoner. You may be laughing as you watch a helpless gold dragon batter against your eldritch tentacles and your tentacled monstrosities, but your chuckling will quickly come to its end once your entire army gets ignored while demons play cooking chef with your HP bar: cut in half with Torment, cook to well-done with Damnation, season with Smite, serve. It is strongly recommended to have some kind of tool to rapidly delete scattered, low-HP but high-damage enemies across the screen (here’s a clue: it starts with Manifold and it ends with Assault). Otherwise, your journey will resemble what a level 1 character would experience going through a Dungeon where every enemy is an orc priest.
• You should have at least one life left by the time you have cleared Zot:5. Death comes quick in the scream-laden halls of Pandemonium (where you will begin your quest for that elusive 6th rune), and sometimes, taking the one-way portal will immediately materialize you in Cerebov’s sleeping room as he is listening to pop music. As it is against the Demonic Code to listen to anything else than death metal, he will proceed to blast you with three million damage Fire Storms until he is certain no witnesses have been left alive. Hence the reason why you should ensure such a twisted farce of fate will not cause the end of your 3+ hours run.
• You should have interesting artifact jewellery with at least rF+/rC+/rN+ on it. Akin to the portal vaults you may have encountered at the start of your journey (such as the Ice Cave that, I repeat, you should NOT go into, EVER), the branches of the extended endgame possess elemental themes. The branch of Gehenna, for example, is fully designed around pyroclastic missiles, exploding fireballs and raging infernos of blazing flame. Wearing even a simple basic rF+ ring here is practically equivalent to doubling your max HP. However, wearing such a boring and mundane ring will strip you out of your Slaying/Intelligence bonuses, significantly cutting your damage output and making you eat more fire blasts from the enemies surviving your unimpressive kitty-tickles, thus returning you to square 1. The sum of your 2 rings and amulet should be granting you at least one + of resistance to the element of the branch you are exploring, and provide substantial support to your combat and spells.
• You should have access to some of the ULTIMATE SPELLS listed in the Demonic Exposure Risk Self-Assessment Test below. The extended endgame is designed to kill you. There used to be a time where it was a dull, monotonous stream of rolling one’s face on the keyboard (and privileging TAB and O as impact locations), but recent changes are slowly turning the nether reaches into a never-ending stream of Zot:5-style death traps with machiavellian gimmicks. The answer to such villainy, of course, is to load your arsenal with the most overpowered spells and chuckle as you press a button and literally become invincible for 20 turns, or instantly delete the mightiest of the Pandemonium Lords like they are glorified quokkas. Please refer to the list below, and add up your points depending on which ones you have available among these.
• You should be worshipping Jiyva. Gozag is a fantastic divine patron, and the power of the rich is many times over sufficient to carry any character through the game. However, once you enter the extended endgame, battles will elongate from small hallway skirmishes to all-out bloodbaths in wide, open rooms. Your HP and MP reserves will be constantly put to the test, and it is crucial to have some way to replenish them constantly (this is why The Shining One is so popular for melee 15-rune games!). Aside from your gooey body constantly reconstructing itself, Jiyva brings many extremely important assets to the hell-diver, notably the pacification of amorphous enemies (in a place where the confusion/paralysis dispensed by floating eyes can be an instant death sentence), and the passive removal of negative mutations, which can be a run-ender for any other character. One realm of Pandemonium in particular is specifically designed to convert even an Übermensch into a pile of weeping flesh that teleports every 5 turns into death traps. (This is the reason why Zin is a popular alternative choice for melee 15-rune games!)

The Demonic Exposure Risk Self-Assessment Test

2 lives remaining (+10 points)
1 life remaining (+3 points)
0 lives remaining (-20 points)

Having both amulets only gives 10 points.
Amulet of the Air + Storm Form (+10 points)
Amulet of Vitality (+10 points)
Ring of the Mage (+4 points)

Having 33 or more Intelligence (+3 points)
Having less than 33 Intelligence (-5 points)

Worshipping Jiyva (+7 points)
Worshipping Gozag (+3 points)

Any out of Fighting/Dodging/Unarmed Combat being below level 15 (-20 points)

Points are scored if these spells are available for memorization or are already memorized.
Death’s Door (+10 points)
Dragon’s Call (+7 points)
Storm Form (+7 points)
Maxwell’s Capacitative Coupling (+4 points)
Borgnjor’s Revivification (+4 points)
Summon Horrible Things (+3 points) 
Malign Gateway (+3 points)
Statue Form (+2 points)
Dragon Form (+2 points)
Summon Forest (+1 point) 
Silence (+1 point) 
Passage of Golubria (+1 point) 
Yara’s Violent Unravelling (+1 point)

NOT HAVING MANIFOLD ASSAULT (-999 points)
NOT HAVING ANY FORM SPELL (-999 points)

If you have at least 40 points, I deem you worthy of embarking in righteous demon genocide. If you have between 20 and 39 points, the probability of triumph is not zero, but you may experience the phenomenon known as Negative HP Syndrome. Characters with less than 20 points should immediately seize the Orb and flee, never to return. If you don’t care about winning and just want to do a casual tour through the headquarters of evil itself until you meet a grisly fate, though, be my guest.

The paragon of the 15-rune FeSu run experience has Storm Form, Manifold Assault, Fighting/Dodging/Unarmed Combat all above 15, is worshipping Jiyva, has 2 lives, 33+ Intelligence and has either Death's Door or an assortment of random utility spells from the list. I will be writing this guide through the perspective of one such character. Deviants from the One True Righteous Lightning Paw Path will need to adapt. Despite Gozag being definitely viable for a 15-rune game, this is MY guide and I get to choose the flavour of eternal celestial servitude.

Fighting Unfairness With Unfairness (or how to become literally invincible with Death’s Door)

Read only this section if you have found Death’s Door, or its lesser counterpart, Borgnjor’s Revivification.

Demons? More like EXP piñatas. If there’s one great thing about demon slaying, it’s that it lets one move from ignorance to mastery of any given topic in a matter of minutes. Of course, since you care little for education and self-improvement (or you wouldn’t be playing a 1997 png-crushing low-res battle game for hours), you will not be using this amazing property to discover fantastical medical cures or improve the human felid condition, but rather further increase your selfish rampage capabilities.

• Death’s Door (LV 9 Necro): Upon pressing the button mapped to this spell (and NOT the one next to it like I once did, summoning a cactus in front of Dispater only to have my head bashed in immediately afterwards), you will become invincible. Literally, bluntly, utterly invincible. If you successfully cast Death’s Door, you are GUARANTEED to not read that fateful “You die…” for at least the next dozen turns. This cannot be dispelled, cannot be cancelled, cannot be removed through any other means that the spell itself running its complete course - certainly more than 10 turns, but rarely above 25. Once the duration has reached its midway point, you will receive the message “Your time is quickly running out!” and see the status effect turn from white to grey – at this moment, you have around 5 to 10 turns remaining before your power fantasy expires.

Of course, there is a catch. Once this spell ends, you will be left at an utterly pitiful amount of HP, sufficiently low to be oneshotted by the tickling touch of a feather. There’s always the possibility of recasting the spell, but you are guaranteed to be left vulnerable (and unable to cast) for 1 to 3 turns after the end of the invincibility period. This is where feline supremacy wins again: whereas an ogre with 400 HP would dread having their best line of defence tumble on the cliff between life and death, the Most Blessed Velvet-Pawed Race has already been familiarized with the bony touch of oblivion many times over. Unlike every other race in the game, messing up a Death’s Door play will not necessarily result in the end of your run thanks to your extra lives, and, after all, who cares about having 17 HP? It’s not that much different from having 103. It’s like this spell was made for Felids!

The most obvious use of this valuable time is to retreat to the nearest upstairs in cases of trouble, clear out adjacent pursuers, then breathe deeply as you realize you’ve just saved your 7 hour run. However, there are more eccentric uses available for the reckless and bold (which you are, since you are attempting the extended endgame as a Felid). If you encounter a particularly nasty stairwell leading down into a horrible ambush, which you think would result in your instant death should you return into the fray, you can preemptively cast Death’s Door on top of the downstairs (and try not to wince at the ~95 damage this will inflict upon you), move down, move back up, mow down the opposition, rest, cast the spell again, and repeat until your 0-risk stair dancing strategy has completely cleaned out the welcoming party. I strongly recommend you resist the temptation of hazarding a press of “tab” or “p” after you have descended the stairs - moving up and down takes 2.5 turns, and if you’re unlucky enough to have your Death’s Door be at the minimum duration, there’s a non-zero possibility that you will run out of time as you are disposing of your pursuers, who will be overjoyed to oneshot you. Move down, move up, kill, repeat. Nothing more.

Do NOT rely on a >20% failure rate Death’s Door for escape purposes. It WILL fail in your face, and you WILL be sad that you didn’t just use a 100% success rate traditional escape method instead. Don’t try to “save up Blink scrolls” by rolling the dice on Death’s Door – once it’s castable, you’ll be relying much less on those Blink scrolls. Only tempt fate if you truly have no other options.

• Borgnjor’s Revivification (LV 8 Necro): This is a bootleg, 50% off Death’s Door. These two spells are very commonly found together, so this is mostly used as a bridge between not having Death’s Door and having it, quickly forgotten with an Amnesia scroll once you can replace it with its superior counterpart. It will come online much earlier, making this an interesting option. On a successful cast, you will be instantly healed back to full health (though your status effects will remain in place). Once again, there is a catch - you will PERMANENTLY, and without any possible way of restoring them, lose a few points of maximum HP. The racial effectiveness of this spell is the opposite of Death’s Door – superbly effective for Ogres and the like, but unimpressive on a Felid where a full heal is an alternative way of saying “here’s 2 or 3 extra free turns until you die”. Still, those “2-3 turns” can be the difference between life and death – don’t be like me, at 8 HP left, 1v1ing an almost dead hellion with an 89% hit chance, and telling myself “surely I can’t miss this hit”. Use it. You’d need at least 10 Revivifications until you start to actually notice negative side effects and situations where you would have lived had you been greedier earlier. Anyways, once you have Death’s Door, those lost hit points will hardly matter, for even if you are a One Hitpoint Wonder, invincibility is still invincibility.

As a final note, know that casting Death’s Door, then Borgnjor’s Revivification while it is active, may make you feel really smart. The developers thought of that, of course. Do NOT ever do such a thing. You WILL be paralyzed. The duration of the paralysis is sufficient to extend past the entire duration of Death’s Door, making you receive enough damage to kill you many times over.

Finally, you should be relying on some of your good old spells, some of which will never lose their utility. To the extreme, the measly level 2 spells Blink and Wereblood remain invaluable. You should cast the latter before every single encounter.

Buckling Up for the Ride (or how to get started with transitioning from a 3-rune run)

Follow the FeSu gospel, ensuring you're taking the path of the Atlas and eventually abandon Gozag. However, once you reach the point where you would normally enter Zot:5, do a 180 turn and head to Vaults:5 instead. It is not extremely dangerous at this stage of the game, so should you have only 1 life remaining, I welcome you to try, and nominate you as a truly courageous acolyte. Perhaps you will accumulate the experience required to regain a supplementary reincarnation and pass the Demonic Exposure Risk Self-Assessment Test!

I have already outlined a Vaults:5 clearing strategy under the Third Lock segment of my previous writings. Not much is different here, aside from the fact that you will not be relying on cracking open your wallet to pacify the hordes of guards found in this infamous level. For skilling, your first objective is to train Fighting to 24, Dodging to 24, and Unarmed Combat to 27 no matter what.

Once your fourth rune, the Silver rune, has been secured, it is time for the fun to truly begin.

Melodious Screeching at the Edge of Reality (The Abyss)

If you ever wondered where the tentacles from Malign Gateway are coming from, I am sorry to say that I have no idea. But this place is probably a good first candidate.

As DCSS's only branch composed of infinite floors, you will be put to the test against a truly endless horde of industrially-manufactured creatures of all kinds, ranging from lost wizards who mispronounced a word during their incantations to unholy incarnations of disease, deformity and existential dread. The threat here is posed less so by the appearance of individual hyper-powered professional HP bar deleters, but rather by the constant swarm slowly whittling away most characters' vitality and magical reserves.

But as you know already by now, you are not "most characters". With the assistance of Jiyva, your body is an eternal blueprint, forever deconstructed and reconstructed to the whim of the slimy parasites slowly dissolving you into ooze. With immense HP and MP regeneration, all challenge in this branch will be mostly trivialized, safe from a few particularly dastardly encounters.

Begin your safari trip by heading into the gate found somewhere in Vaults. You can use "Ctrl-F" and search for "Abyss" to quickly travel to it. Enter, and see yourself dropped somewhere across the endless expanse of Abyss:1. Unless you were banished at some point earlier and your run, and managed to survive - in which case you may start on a deeper layer.

You mustn't stay on the first layer for long. Immediately begin walking, preferably in diagonal directions. Each tile revealed has a chance of containing a purple gate to the next Abyssal layer. Of course, just because you're actively trying to go deeper, the game will spawn a million pink exits. Ignore them, leaving them for the poor Minotaur Berserkers of this world that just got banished at level 8.

The various denizens of this plane won't be exactly happy to see you, so much that the fabric of spacetime may occasionally drop a few goons right on your scruff. Fight paradoxes with paradoxes, using Manifold Assault to continuously clear the way like an explorer cutting ivies in a thick jungle. You will want to especially prioritize Starcursed masses, Wretched stars and Neqoxecs, so much that it may even be beneficial to use your Blinkbolt to ensure the pixels composing their bodies stain your screen for as little time as possible. Let us have a closer look at the most threatening creatures you may encounter wandering across the non-euclidean sea.

• Starcursed masses have a knack for choir signing, but their application for church service was denied on account of them being an eldritch horror. Instead, they will be delighted to practice their tunes on you. Every turn, Masses will attempt to clone themselves, and the more Masses there are on the screen, the more the danger level increases. You should seriously start to worry when 5 or more have accumulated, in which case you will be smited every turn, and perhaps even be paralyzed with zero option of a Willpower save. If Manifold Assault does not eliminate them quickly, Blinkbolt to them, and delete as many as possible with your cleaving paw-strikes.
• Lurking horrors have only one purpose in life - to explode your HP bar with Torment and to immediately commit suicide afterwards. If you decide to put them out of their misery, they will do things the other way around, dying and then exploding your HP bar. There really is no way around this - you will have to endure their blast if you see them on your screen, it's just a matter of when. Torment will never kill you, but other happy denizens around will be more than happy to finish what was started.
• Wretched stars are Lugonu's answer to you cheesing the Abyss with your boatloads of regeneration. Instead of whittling down your HP, these prefer to flash like a disco ball every second and slowly distort your perfect fuzzy body into something indistinguishable from the horrors roaming this plane. The temporary mutations they inflict upon you are ephemeral, and your feline perfection will be restored the moment you have slain a few critters - but there are a variety of very unpleasant things you can be cursed with. You should especially be wary of having your Strength score reduced to zero due to the Weakness mutation, which may take away up to 4 points in one fell swoop. Losing all Strength will cause instant paralysis. If you have 4 Strength or less, browse your jewelry collection for potential steroid-bands to wrap around your legs before engaging in Abyssal combat.
• Neqoxecs (and rarely, Cacodemons): These two demons, annoyingly notorious for bending runs by looking into your eyes and instantly making you illiterate, are laughably trivialized by the One True Gooey God. Any bad mutations you may collect will eventually be wiped off your genome, but you should still treat this biochemical terror duo like you treat Wretched stars - capable of inflicting Strength penalties, as well as instantly dangerous afflictions such as random berserk on every hit. Yes, Manifold Assault can trigger berserkitis. There is a spell in this game that can make you go berserk. Trog is conflicted.

Descend to Abyss:2, then Abyss:3. Then, while still prioritizing diagonal movement, stop looking for Abyssal gates, and begin your search for the elusive Runelight - a beacon of hope across this horror-swept wasteland. You should avoid pursuing your descent into Abyss:4 and onwards, but random rips in the fabric of reality may occasionally force you deeper down Lugonu's funhouse. Console yourself through the fact that finding the rune is much easier in lower layers, but try your best to prevent further plunges. Abyss:7 is so brutal even a divine 15-rune feline (which you should become soon enough) would be challenged by the endless swarm.

You will eventually be notified with the message "You detect the abyssal rune!" Do not worry, the game makes it extremely hard to miss. At this moment, immediately look at your map. There will be a tiny one-tile spot somewhere, containing your objective - the Abyssal rune.

Carefully approach it, paying particular attention to strangely ordered architecture or death traps that could have only been designed by a developer's hand. If no entrance is in sight, circle around the perimeter until you discover something that looks like a proper door. Barge into the vault, Manifold Assaulting all potential resistance. Once the rune is seized, the Abyss will have been truly domesticated, and will beg for you to leave as quickly as possible. Exit through any of the pink gates that should start appearing soon, and return to the familiar stability of walls and floors that do not cease to exist on a whim.

Now, it is time to truly begin the Extended Endgame. Tremble in fear!

No, that comment wasn't for you. It was for your enemies.

Abandon All Cat Treats All Ye Who Enter Here (Hell)

In Tartarus, you will also occasionally discover some seemingly laughably weak monsters, such as a few Unseen horrors hopping about pathetically.

Do not be fooled. They are the most dangerous foes in this branch - for they alone have the power of stripping you of the rHubris resistance, and ensuring your ego peaks beyond the stratosphere only to smash you the next turn with a triple-torment wombo combo. Give them the most cold-hearted stare you can muster, plow them into the ground, and continue your rampage without ever letting down your guard.