Help Requested!

[deana_in_texas]

I've been playing for a long time, but am a very impatient player which does not lend itself to actually doing well in this game. For the first time, I have made it down to Medusa! But from reading others' posts here, I think I am missing a lot of key ingredients (in particular levitation, but perhaps also greasing my cloak or other things that I

Comments

[dmorr]

1) Get unburdened. Lock your spellbooks in a chest somewhere -- they're heavy and you can go back for them later if you know what they are. Also why are you carrying around that spear?

2) Go convert some of those altars you found. Get holy water. Plus it will make your god happy.

3) Fully explore the levels you haven't mapped yet. That will become important if you're racing upstairs with the amulet and Rodney steals it. Plus you can find whatever good stuff is there you didn't see on the way down.

4) You're not close to ready for your quest. I usually do the castle first for a monk. It's not required, but you will need to be very fast and maybe have a good attack spell. If you want to actually succeed, I'd read spoilers on the quest. He's very hard.

5) Go do the mines. You're high enough level, you'll get treasure and a luckstone, which is obviously good. And you can bless it with the holy water you'll get from your new altar.

6) On the medusa level, you can get across by jumping (with jumping boots) from island to island, so you don't really need levitation or water walking. Just be careful when you do it, and don't forget to wear your reflection amulet when you see medusa.

Good luck!

[deana_in_texas]

Thanks, very helpful comments!

Re: the spear, I've been throwing it at things, as well as the daggers, like eyes and quivering blobs that I don't actually want to touch and be paralyzed while things kill me. Most of the wands I've found have not been the attacking type, even now the wand of fire I have is actually empty, so I just have the magic missile for things like that, and I have no idea how many (or few) charges are left on it at this point.

Converting an altar relies heavily on happening to find the right color unicorn close enough to the altar to get the corpse there before it decays, though, right? I've read about it, but kind of thought it was one of those very unlikely things that usually doesn't happen. I suppose an icebox would help if I can find one.

I will hold off on the quest then, but I suppose I'll head back upstairs and hit up the mines and the not-fully-explored levels and risk the baddies on that one level. Maybe I can get them in a hallway so I just have to fight one at a time.

Thanks so much for your tips :)

[memegarden]

No, you can sacrifice other things than unicorns to convert an altar.

[dmorr]

You can sacrifice any fresh (not rotten, not undead) corpse in an attempt to convert the altar. Don't try it with @'s, and be especially careful with unicorns -- probably best to wait until you have it converted, and never sacrifice a unicorn of your own alignment.

The easiest thing to do is find a level with monsters and an altar and get going. Bag of tricks and create monster wands/scrolls/spell can be handy for that too.

[damerell]

[damerell]

[deana_in_texas]

Done! Somehow I didn't realize that sacks and their contents couldn't be burned.

[deana_in_texas]

Sorry, I meant gelatinous cubes, not quivering blobs. Mixup.

I've stashed all the books and am going to attempt to convert an altar next. From the altar page on the wiki and the big write-up about unicorns and which colors are safe and when so I thought that was the only way to do it. Now that I know they can be converted with any higher level corpse, I'll get right on it!

Re weapons: since I am a monk when I try to hit with a weapon it's like I am plinking away compared to when I just whack at them with my hands. And I can only get basic skills in the weapons that I can even get any kind of skills in, and they are all stuff like morning stars and javelins which I almost never come across. So I never saw the point of using a weapon, since when I do I can't kill things, and apparently I will never improve. Am I mistaken somewhere?

[damerell]

[deana_in_texas]

I thought you could only get basic in the weapons listed when you type #enhance, which for me is just quarterstaff, spear, javelin, crossbow, shuriken -- in other words, nothing too useful. Is that not correct?

[damerell]

[deana_in_texas]

Ohhh! Cool! I am now ashamed to say that I have received weapons in the past through offering but just sold them because they are worth more gold and I didn't think I could use them.

There is just so much to this game that I still don't know. Thanks so much for your help and seemingly infinite patience!

[damerell]

[deana_in_texas]

Oh, I do that! And then I sell all his own stuff back to him (well, the stuff I don't want for myself) and sometimes do it again if the pet decides to grab something. Then I can use all the gold for protection from the priests.

[damerell]