Minor variation

[Derakon]

I agree with this, but the current meta is also, to produce a winner, scum 950ft for throne room gear and more consumables than you'll ever really need. I think addressing this will solve both problems.

Solution: forced descent. One shot at every dungeon level, no replays. Maybe compensate fast players by making the number of monsters in the throne room depend on how long the player's taken to get to it; I don't have a feel for how meaningful a change that would be though since I've (still) never played Sil.

[wobbly]

Forced descent Sil is quite good in some ways (for one it takes outs the certainty of killing Morgoth for experienced players) & bad (chasms come close to forcing leaping).

[ebering]

More changes to throwing, granting Assassination and Cruel Blow. Skill notes to Character dumps. Found and fixed another bug. Song of oaths was summoning emerald serpents and not oath wraiths!

Next targets are a no-auto-pickup inscription, focus and concentration Sil cutting, and maybe Lore-Master.

Like I said, I'm not really looking to tinker with the ascent at this point.

[Infinitum]

Nice. Another rather common request is removing the light and hunger clocks; maybe have the player start with a +1 light radius lantern, with jewels being +2 light radius and lamps +3. There's already a turn clock to discourage loitering on the upper levels.

An undroppable "adventurer's pack" type item containing rations, extra fuel, a shovel and rope for safely descending/traversin chasms (given a few uninterrupted turns) would also be nice to handwaive the above and making chasms less annoying for exploring.

[Patashu]

Note that while hunger is never a problem in an ordinarily played game, it discourages strategies where you stack hunger increasing enchantments (regeneration and vampiric for example). I would say keep the hunger/light clock, but have a cooldown on how often your adventurer's backpack can dispense new food/light sources, to prevent these strategies from becoming too easy.

Also, if you can produce infinite food, you now need a way to force the player to die if they get trapped by a cave-in. Either they can eventually remove rubble without a digger given a large amount of uninterrupted time, or being trapped in a blob of the level with no connected stairs or chasms causes you to slowly suffocate and lose HP.

[Infinitum]

Or just don't have those stack I suppose? I don't really mean for the adventurers pack to literally dispense items, just act as an ingame explanation to why the player can do without finding oil and food in the dungeon (and dig, bridge chasms if given time), eg:

"It's a worn cloth backpack. It contains several days worth of rations and lamp oil, as well as lengths of rope and a sturdy shovel. It cannot be damaged by the elements. It cannot be dropped.".

Or simply have rations, oil, rope and shovel appear in the inventory separately (which would also reduce the available slots nicely without mucking with the ui too much) as indestructible, undroppable props.

[seraph]

I've (still) never played Sil.

derakon, i hope you never play sil; this gets funnier every time you say it!

[Pete Mack]

Indeed. @Derakon--you are seriously missing out. It really helps with thinking about game balance... among other things.

derakon, i hope you never play sil; this gets funnier every time you say it!

[ebering]

Updated again. I didn't get any feedback on the throwing interface so I'm guessing no one tried it. Oh well. I've changed it again. 'w' wields an item into the main slot always, no questions. There's a new command 'W' for wielding into an alternate slot (arm or quiver, it will ask if a weapon can be both). Auto pickup is smart enough to re-fill empty quivers now.

Focused attack and concentration now apply to Sil cutting.

Bigger change: Lore-Master. No longer identifies all items. Instead it reveals a level feeling to you after passing a perception versus staircasiness (the hidden variable that traps the stairs if you try to scum). The resulting formula is a bit crawly and I might put in a simpler one. The goal is to put a brake on scumming. There are three levels of feeling, down from 10, mundane, valuable (forge or lesser vault), or important (ench. forge or greater vault). Once revealed the feeling can be checked with ^F (and the depth is colored).

The food clock feels like its in the right place, almost. I played a game recently where I found Anguirel at 200'. Wielding it constantly I had more food pressure than usual in a game. Of course this was mitigated by taking it off. I think the best solution is for hungry items to hunger even when not worn (mpa-sil discouraged swapping on/off region by turning off hunger when not regenerating), making it more like Danger. At that point it might even make sense to give a difficulty modifier to smithing hungry artifacts.

I'm intrigued by the light clock suggestions. Making lesser jewels light radius 2 makes them too good for their smithing cost, but so does making brass lanterns immortal. It's something I'm thinking about but probably not going to be the next change.

The next chance I get to work will probably be code refactoring. I'd like to also perhaps implement a crawl style vault-syntax allowing placing monsters by name &c. I'm not a good vault smith but I think that enabling fancier vault making would still be cool. Other QoL player-friendly features I'd like to add are an in-game version of the manual and a manual appendix documenting monster 'spells' (what is the difference between an accursed screaming and a shout? what exactly do the monster songs that exist do? what are the opposed rolls in each case?). Again this is probably easier after re-organizing the code base following the V4.0 refactor.

Another idea I've got kicking around is to return thrown-potion effects (mpa-sil took them out) to some bad potions and also flasks of oil.

[Serephina]

First question: is ebering also known as MarvinPA? Would explain a lot.

My feedback: Don't touch the light clock. Lore-master should continue to full-id everything.

A lot of these changes seemed aimed at at top 1% of Sil players, who've long since mastered it. Which is fine for a fork, but there seems to be implications that these would be good things to roll back into the main game. Which is terrible, as everyone starts as a new player and their first impressions are what leads to a more experienced player base.

Light clock: Is necessary to instill a sense of urgency to a new player. The min depth clock is gamey and quite hidden, light and food serve as more natural pressures. Sure there's actually plenty of light, but a mate of mine (who's never seen 500') likes getting smithing just to get a lesser jewel by 50', which says it all.

Lore-master: of the the unique things Sil does is letting players opt-out of the ID minigame at a reasonable cost. Advanced players can either game it, or ignore it for more objectively useful skill, but the options needs to be there, in it's entirety.

I don't use earthquakes enough to comment on that change, but the throwing change is a step in the right direction for sure. If throwing itself ever gets 'too strong' (doubtful) a lot of the perks could be locked behind throwing mastery, as it's quite expensive.

Ascent: I've done it once, it was cool as all heck. I'm not debo. Infact, most people aren't ;p

Neither here nor there: Having .5 item weight granularity come back from mpa-Sil to the main branch certainly helped with the item tedium of finding the 'right' weapon (And I think I recall a dev saying they think it's a shame .1 weight changes had to go, since the engine supported it and it was a waste), but why not keep dropped items at .5, and let forged items go back to .1? Win-win? Allows for .9lb short swords and other shenanigans without the item cruft.

[Infinitum]

Obviously if one removed the light and food clocks one would need to make a few accomodating changes to smithing costs etc. Again though, neither Regeneration or Vampirism are particulary powerful traits inherently and could do with the slight boost (especially if one removed regeneration stacking).

If you want another tradeoff for smithing/artefact purposes having something speed up the turn clock ("it draws the attention of the dark lord" or somesuch) accomplishes much of the same without the feature bloat.

Loremaster level feeling is ok I suppose, but doesn't seem worth 2 abilities. Maybe combine it with Lorekeeper and rename it "Intuition" or something like that? Personally I'd just remove the ID game altogether, but I digress.

[debo]

I'm not debo. Infact, most people aren't ;p

Thanks for the future signature material.