Hello all! Some questions

[tynan]

Greetings everyone. I have been playing Roguelikes for a long while off and on, and have some questions.
First, about dungeon depths. I have a level 16 high-elf mage whose deepest depth is level 13 so far. I have the first 4 books, a Sling of Power (+6 +17), resistances to fire/cold/acid/nexus (stability boots)/FreeAct (ring) and not much else of note. Still have my starting Dagger and have not found a suitably light weapon yet to replace it. So far what has kept me going is the Sling, plus Cure/Heroism/Speed potions (which I have not needed yet). No Poison resist either (I have cure poison spell though). Should I go all the way to my level in depth? Thanks.
Second, about editing the files (in Edit folder). I've tried to edit the starting Equipment for characters in the past but it never quite works right, such as the Phial of Galadriel will always appear in inventory as simply "Phial" - with no light powers or descriptors, even after Identifying it. Is there a way to include magic items/arts in a starting characters equipment? Thanks

[Philip]

As a mage, you shouldn't be meleeing. You have no STR, no HP and no CON. The sling is a great addition to your gear, since you can use your spells for detection and teleportation, and also kill tougher monsters. By the way, paranoia is how mages survive. Always be in your detection radius, and try to detect monsters regularly - every time you're at full mana is as good a time as any.

Your character is safe until significantly deeper. You technically have almost all the resistances (lightning is overrated anyway) you need till dungeon level 40, although that would likely be suicide due to your low hitpoint pool. You certainly don't need to worry though. Go as deep as you feel safe going, or if you want diving training, go as deep as you feel safe going, and then go deeper.

The problem of adding the Phial to starting equipment has been discussed before, but the search function on this forum is not exactly perfect. I recall there being a problem with "special artifacts", which are light source, rings and amulet artifacts. They all have a base entry in object.txt, and when you add say, the Phial to your inventory, it adds a base entry file. The easiest way to start with the Phial is to cheat it into existence with debug commands.

[Derakon]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!

A couple of notes:

1) Mages are hard. Really hard. They have no HP to speak of, which means that once you get to the mid-game (more or less 2000' (i.e. dungeon level 40) onwards), there are lots of monsters who can kill you from full health in a single action. If you don't know which monsters those are, and take steps to avoid them, then you're going to die, it's as simple as that. Thus they make a classic "newbie trap" -- that is, you need experience with the game to be able to use them at all effectively. Turning on the cheat to automatically know monster memory will help considerably, but you're still playing a fragile character with a fairly limited offense.

2) Instead of trying to make certain your character starts with the Phial, you can use the debug commands to grant it to yourself after the game starts. Once in-game, type ^aC (that is, shift-6, then lowercase a, then capital C); the game will prompt you for the name of the artifact you want to create. Type "Galadriel" and the Phial will be generated.

3) In addition to your spells and that rather nice sling, check out attack wands. You get a damage bonus when using attack wands of (your device skill - the level of the wand)%, which can be quite significant for mages, who have excellent device skill. Unfortunately the level of the wand is not exposed anywhere in the game, but as a general rule you should be getting at least a 30% boost on wands.