I bring with me neither tip nor trick. Simply some artwork nobody asked for. Way back in the first part. I think. Vinny slapped together Orc and Kestrel to make Orchestral or Or'kestrel as I went with. For whatever reason the name stuck with me and I wanted an excuse to get a little better at pixel art. So after chipping away at it over time, here is, if you're a forgiving enough person, something that could be regarded as an interpretation of an Or'kestrel.
Great run! Just a note: rings consume food while they are equipped depending on their type. Rings of regeneration are top-tier rings, but will definitely cause you to starve to death if you're wearing them outside combat. Because of that, it's generally not recommended to run around with rings you aren't using equipped. If you manage to find two rings of slow digestion, though, it virtually stops nutrition from decreasing.
It's sometimes hard to blind-id rings so they should get priority for identify. Or at least have remove curse on hand if they end up being cursed. (which limits them to being -str, -dex, -dmg, teleportitis, aggravate monster)
You can use (c)all to rename an unidentified item, occasionally useful when you're able to identify an item without having read an identify scroll, like that wand ___of striking___.
Also, this feature inspired me to do this...
Not pictured: me going to level 27 because I didn't know you had to use < to go up. Also, starving to death during the ascent.
I wouldn't feel too bad about the ending though, that troll would have demolished Moist. Polymorphing was likely the best option.
Hey Ben and Vinny, you've almost certainly finished recording this series in its entirety, but just for posterity:
TIPS BASED ON THIS EPISODE
you don't have to eat as soon as it says Hungry. The statuses for hunger are "no status", "Hungry", "Weak", and "Faint". Hungry and Weak have no status effects at all, but as soon as you reach Faint, you faint and several turns pass where enemies keep taking actions and even when you "wake up", every few steps you will keep fainting until you eat. Also if you stay at Faint too long you starve to death. Speaking of which:
wearing rings increases your food consumption (except for one ring type whose sole benefit is reducing food consumption). This is some grade A bullshit 80s game design that isn't mentioned in the PDF manual on the Steam version, but every guide I've checked says the extra food consumption is a thing. Generally you want to leave rings unequipped most of the time, otherwise they will deplete your food stores and you won't have enough food to reach the amulet. This was already starting to happen in this episode, and you almost certainly would've starved within another 5-10 floors. Maybe just toggle a ring on when you see a particularly tough monster, or in some other cases, certain rings reveal hidden enemies or prevent Aquator effects.
maybe just look up what the damage ranges are for weapons, because it's not in the game or the PDF manual, nor does the damage range appear when you identify weapons. The spear you guys found is actually more of a throwing weapon and is on the lower end of melee damage. The game starts you with an enchanted mace that's already a very competent weapon, but generally any longsword or greatsword you find will do more melee damage than the mace unless the sword is cursed. All weapons you find other than mace/longsword/greatsword should be considered throwing weapons.
using unidentified wands and potions and scrolls midcombat is usually risky and unpredictable, though on the other hand it made for an entertaining save this episode. Most of the time, quaffing an unknown potion when you're at low health doesn't happen to be the healing potion, and instead you just confuse or paralyze or blind yourself.
absolutely never use a polymorph wand on a monster that is already touching you. You WILL die to a griffin, dragon, or jabberwock.
Based on messing around with the game and a few guides, I would save identify scrolls for wands and rings. You can try out wands to figure out their effect, but it can be safer to identify them, and identifying is the only way to see how many uses it has left. Don't want to try using your high damage wand only to find out that it's actually empty. Also some rings are cursed and lower your stats, so I wouldn't just put on every ring you find and assume it's doing something for you.
Some monsters aren't aggressive and won't chase you unless you start fighting them. You'd have to look at guides until you remember which ones, but off the top of my head, Orcs will often seek a pile of gold and then stand on it forever unless you start fighting them. Stationary Centaurs will never chase you until you hit them, though sometimes you will come across already moving Centaurs which are definitely chasing you because something caused them to be aggro'd earlier or they spawned in already aggro'd or something. Leprechauns and Nymphs often spawn stationary until attacked, so to avoid getting valuables stolen, you're better off walking as far from them as possible and blindly shooting arrows in their direction.
Some enemies actually do way too much damage and instead of fighting them with melee you just need to blast them with wands. Notably in this episode, trolls can often just murder you unless they miss an extraordinary number of times, so it was very fortunate you randomly picked a wand to fire at the troll that happened to do high amounts of damage (the unidentified titanium wand this episode, we'll never know what type it was). Some of the mid- and late-game enemies do amounts of damage where your HP pool and weapon damage really just aren't enough to match theirs. Other than trolls, there's also the griffin and dragon and jabberwock, some of which you've only met via polymorph wand.
END OF TIPS
Overall though, you guys did really well this episode, and I've only made it a couple floors deeper than you did this episode. This game is a fickle bitch where sometimes how well your run goes seems decided by how many Rattlesnakes and Aquators permanently drain your stats, and how often you miss a whole floor of XP because you immediately blunder into a trap that drops you to the next floor where you're gonna be underleveled.
Oh yeah, the GB QoL browser extension updated so that the "hide spoilers" option for This Is the Run now applies to Going Rogue, so it hides the seek bar and runtime on the video player!
I'm still getting a weird issue where videos suddenly stop and skip to the next one in the "queue" (the previous rogue episode in this case). I've only noticed it on this series. I recently watched all of the ranking of the worst 90's video without any issues at all.
Fun fact regarding Vinny's talk about the game's randomness. I haven't dove into the source code of Rogue to see if it's the same thing, but Nethack used to generate seeds based on the system time. So what somebody did was sync their machine's time to nethack.alt.org's server (used for online psudo-multiplayer nethack play) but in the future, then discover seeds that would give them the game's best item early on. Then you could just start a game when the server hit those seeds. This resulted in a bunch of deaths on level one of a player "Killed by kicking a wand of wishing" on d:1.
I'm pretty sure NAO has patched that out, but can still be exploited in the downloaded game (but why would you?)
Tip: dont walk over every room tile. In the rooms without a light source you can see in the dots next to you. So you want to find the walls but then walk the middle of the room to find items. Only bother revealing the wall if you are looking for a door. This is so you dont walk on ALL traps.
I think you noticed in this episode that the map is basically a 3x3 grid of possible rooms, so if you are in a room in the bottom row there is no need to look for doors on the bottom wall. (possible rooms include that corridor maze you found on one of the floors)
Story: When I played I always kept going instead of leaving. One run I was at the max level somewhere around floor 50. I walked into a monster filled room and was instantly caught by a venus fly trap. I wasnt able to kill the trap before the other dozen monsters killed me. It was a random kestral flitting about the room that got the last hit.
The glowy red hands thing was a scroll of confuse monster - when you hit that rattlesnake, that's why it started running away ( it was actually just randomly moving because it was confused)
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