Z+ 0.3.3 released!

[Derakon]

Hold Life gives you a strong saving throw against experience loss, and also greatly reduces the drain if your save fails. There is no foolproof defense against experience drain except to not let draining attacks hit you. However, having hold life makes experience drain laughably ignorable; you'll get back the lost experience very quickly.

(Nether resistance is foolproof against experience drain from nether attacks, though)

[Mangojuice]

Good to know...I've barely been finding stat gain potions. Did manage to pick up a ring of poison immunity though...bring it on drolems. If there are drolems in this variant.

Also, it seems like all the dungeon levels I'm getting are quite small, like the size of a quest level - the size where if you show them on the map they fill the screen but are shown in full detail. Is that another aspect of themed dungeons?

Edit: Just got a quest to "find Ringil." Seriously. And they told me which dungeon to look in, so needless to say I started heading into that dungeon pretty quick. Before long I found it, clvl 30, dlvl in the high 40s. I had been thinking the quests seem pretty overpowered (thousands and thousands of gold, experience AND possible stat gain, just for killing some unique orc?!) but this seems ridiculous! Anyway, now I'm carving through monsters like butter that used to give me trouble even with "The Dagger of Fiona" which was also pretty kickass, but which I found legitimately.

Finally, Hold Life seems to greatly reduce the amount of EXP I lose from attacks (mostly freaking Bloodletters of Khorne) but it doesn't fully stop them. Is there a way to double resist it?

Yeah, I might want to make Ringil off-limits for "find artifact" quests... but then again, as long as super rare artifacts are chosen very infrequently maybe I don't mind so much.

Re: small levels -- some quest levels (though not regular dungeons) are forced to generate small dungeon levels. But generally speaking the chances of generating a smaller-than-full-size dungeon level are pretty good in the first place so it may seem like this happens a lot.

[Jude]

Presumed bug report: I'm a chaos warrior and under my character screen it says "Magic: Chaos, Arcane." I can't actually use Arcane spellbooks, but it still says it there...

[Mangojuice]

Presumed bug report: I'm a chaos warrior and under my character screen it says "Magic: Chaos, Arcane." I can't actually use Arcane spellbooks, but it still says it there...

Huh. I made a chaos warrior and this didn't happen. Was this after a rebirth or something? Or was this a fresh character with a fresh savefile?

[Jude]

It was after I had tried a few different types of characters with that same save file and gone back to Chaos Warrior...anyway the character died and I didn't think to save it. Not a big deal anyway but I'll let you know if I see it again.

Another one of those random things I keep wondering but never remember to write. What's up with Darkness? Scrolls and staffs of Darkness both seem like bad items - they darken the room and blind you if you don't resist blindness or darkness. Scrolls are considered bad items by the destroying function - it won't ask you to confirm destroying them if you have that option selected for "bad" items, but staves of darkness will ask you. This I would assume is just an oversight. But what about vampires starting with five scrolls of darkness instead of light sources? Vampires don't need lights, but what purpose is served by the scrolls? Their description says they grow stronger in darkness, but doesn't specify how, and that's in the same file from some really old version.

[No_U]

Bug Report in 0.33 beta: Potions of Self-Knowledge

This is my first time posting on these forums, but I've been an off-and-on player of various rogue-likes. Certainly not an expert by any means, but I feel I've gotten pretty far with my current build.

So I've just come across a potion of self-knowledge in a guarded dungeon, Lev. 37, in a vault. Twice I've come across it now, and twice it has crashed the game on me. No explanation, no warning screen, just a flat-out crash of the game.

I'm running on a Windows 7 Professional, Z+Angband version 0.33 beta. Let me know if there's more info I can provide.

[Snarka]

Dear Mangojuice,
I'm afraid only you can answer my question... or else, any other person who understand the code of this game well.

My previous char went as far as killing Oberon, and then stopped - after so long a play I still didn't have two items that were virtually impossible to miss: the Iron Mask (for a warrior) and the Jewel of Judgement. The first, I could live without, but not the second. It is too dangerous to wander at level 100 with no means to see instantly the entire level (with the Destroyer and other denizens : ). And I didn't pile the potions, because all my previous experience of a dozen or so years of zangbanding told me that JOJ is a very common thing. So I waited to get it. But even Oberon didn't drop it.

Well, I started to collect PoE's, and while doing that got a YASD:
Loki the Trickster flees in terror!
Loki the Trickster shouts, 'Why didn't I just stay in Asgard?'
Loki the Trickster teleports you away.
The Mouth of Sauron invokes a mana storm.
But for all his power he couldn't foresee his own demise. You die.
(...this happened with 492 hp, btw! bad luck indeed)

Now, the question is: are some items bound to quests, as quest rewards maybe? Is this determined at birth? I'm almost sure it is so, else how could I miss these two arifacts which I consider as garanteed as the Phial of Galadriel?

Is it possible to check somehow, if some item is bound or not? (Not by doing all the quests in all the towns please!!! I'd rather suicide).

[emulord]

Uhh I found Multihued DSM on dungeon level 3. I didnt even buy any armor yet.
It was a You nearly faint as visions... level feeling. Oh man a out of depth kobald :/

[Snarka]

emulord congratulations!!!

Now watch out for these kobolds...