Fleas/worms ruining vaults

[Zikke]

I have been running into this problem very frequently with my lvl 30 mage in FA (though it would happen in other variants and vanilla I'm sure). I find a nicely sized vault, detect a lot of good monsters and loot in it, and start working through it, but before I can clear it one of the nether worm masses or other reproducers have completely filled the rest of the vault, and I don't have the infinite mana required to AoE them all down.

I have been just abandoning the vault and moving to a new level (as I do when any infestation gets of out control). Any advice on keeping these vaulted reproducers under control (assuming I don't have banishment)? I hate to leave all those fun uniques and loot behind.

[Narvius]

Teleport all worm masses you see away?

[Zikke]

Teleport all worm masses you see away?

By the time I get to them, there are about 10 or more of them, and every action I take makes 4 more appear.

There may not be an answer, but I thought I'd mention it as a frustration. I need one of those "sterilization" spells or "snuff small life"...

[Mondkalb]

Scroll of Banishment for emergency.
But you should destroy them before they are too many. Haste and destroy on first sight!

[Arralen]

As a mage in FA, you won't have enough mana, ever.
That said, there are some things you can do:

0) Deal with breeders first. If you can't kill them all before they wake up, at least make sure they have limited room to breed into. If this doesn't work out, mentally prepare to run.

1) Use ball / beaming spells - carefully, though, you don't want to hit a powerful, sleeping monster too early. Ball spells from spellbooks come late, are difificult to cast and expensive. That takes us to

2) Carry one or more stack(s) of rods. Lightning, cold, lightning balls etc. IIRC there are few monsters that are cold and lightning resistant. Always prefer enlarging a stack vs. carrying another type of rods, to conserve slots. If you have 8-9 rods, you can fire away nearly constantly without depleting your mana reserves. Btw., mages are quite good at using rods ...

If you have used up most of your mana, zapped all your rods and that unique is bearing down on you, while everything is still full of breeders, hopefully you at least have remembered to:

3) Haste yourself, if you don't have speed from equipment: Best to be able to fire off 2-3 spells/rods before the next breeder multiplies. Haste comes late in the spell list, though.

.. with enough speed, you still may be able to run away succesfully

[buzzkill]

[FA] I've been running into this problem with the breeders too. With my warrior, I just speed myself and try to get to the breeders as soon as possible. If you can't eliminate them before they multiply, try locking them in a room before they get a chance to spread to other areas of the vault. As a last resort... just wade through them, good old hack and slash (they usually do very little damage per attack), pick up a couple of items then teleport away, rest up and come back for more. The brute force method may be hard to implement with a mage, but it works reasonably well with 400 HP and an AC approaching 100.

[Djabanete]

I have been running into this problem very frequently with my lvl 30 mage in FA (though it would happen in other variants and vanilla I'm sure). I find a nicely sized vault, detect a lot of good monsters and loot in it, and start working through it, but before I can clear it one of the nether worm masses or other reproducers have completely filled the rest of the vault, and I don't have the infinite mana required to AoE them all down.

I have been just abandoning the vault and moving to a new level (as I do when any infestation gets of out control). Any advice on keeping these vaulted reproducers under control (assuming I don't have banishment)? I hate to leave all those fun uniques and loot behind.

Rods of Light?

[Pete Mack]

breeders in vaults

There are 3 techniques.

0. If the vault has doors and the breeders can't BASH_DOOR, close the doors.

1. Worms should never breed faster than you can kill them. You need to move to where they are, then fight for a while, then phase out and step well away to regenerate HP. (They won't breed while you are more than ~15 squares away.)

2. Fleas can't hurt you if you have high AC. If there's any high-AC armor lying around, put it on and ignore them. (You don't need resistances to fight
them.)

3. Use area weapons. If you really care about vaults, carry a stack of Wands of Stinking Cloud. Most breeders don't have significant HP

And the general solution:

Just forget the vault. There's no way you are going to handle Neekerbreekers, Hummerhorns, or Fireflies without the right resists and or enough speed.

[Bandobras]

I hate breeders with all my heart. I've heard, or I dreamed about it, that in S after a breeder population reaches a set number, it all explodes. Actually forbidding them breeding after that point would help, too. That's even biologically believable (air, water, whatever supplies on the level run out).

When I recently banned most out of sight summonning in Un, I also tried to ban OOS breeding, but I failed for reasons I forgot (or was it summoning of breeders? also nasty...). Instead I made the combination of speed + breeding very valuable in the monster power algorithm, so they now appear much deeper. Others you can just hack and slash, if you are desperate enough to let them drain your stats or something else.

[Pete Mack]

To paraphrase Eddie wrt hounds:

I used hate Lice and Insects, but now that I have seen Lesser and Greater Wall monsters (ToME) I love 'l' and 'I' because they are not '#'.

[Bandobras]

Mutating breeders from TOME are also super-nasty. Brrrrrr, I'm glad I don't live in TOME.

[ThunderToads]

Chaos Tiles and RNGs in Zang are pretty annoying. I always single them out for early destruction whenever possible.