Alright, back to playing. It's been a little while. When we last left our dwarf weaponsmith Urist, he had just cleared the unremarkable dungeon and was all set to enter the caverns of chaos and actually advance the main plot of adom.
Here's the overworld map! We started in the far northeast corner, went down to Terinyo, the brown "o" by the road, then entered the village dungeon southeast of Terinyo to save Yriggs and get healing, then went back to the small cave to the northwest of Terinyo to rush the unremarkable dungeon. After going through the UD we wound up in the high mountain village in the southeast corner there. There's a shortcut in the HMV allowing you to come back without going through the small cave. Taking the shortcut, we wound up just to the west of the entrance to the small cave. From there we trekked westward until we found the foreboding tunnel into the depths of the world. Here's the Caverns of chaos.
The Caverns of Chaos are the main dungeon of the game. We'll be coming through here regularly.
So it looks like the first floor of the Caverns of Chaos are already interesting. It's got both a beehive (the buzzing) and a pool (the splashing). I don't think it's too often a dungeon floor has multiple things of interest like this, usually it's one or the other. I'm not too interested in the pool. Too often I've drank from a pool in the early game and had a promising character ruined by getting cursed or doomed. Pretty sure that's how Dirtfarmer died, by drinking from a pool and getting cursed. And everyone remembers how fun it was when Dashing got a cursed ring of Doom.
I am interested in the beehive though. Lots of free experience.
Oh hey, I think I found the hive. Just follow the flood of giant angry bees.
Worth noting is that while killing bees, one of them dropped a tower shield. No idea how a giant bee was just flying around with a big metal tower shield strapped to its back, but whatever, free loot.
And soon we find the hive. I could just camp by the beehive and wait for bees to fly out one by one to kill. Or I could take a more direct approach.
Aaaaaugh, not the bees! They're in my eyes! Aaaaugh! Blaaagh! Auuurgh!
Yeah, I guess I kicked the hive a bit too hard. Fortunately Urist is practically an impenetrable wall of iron at this stage of the game and I can just wade through the bees until I get back to the corridor and can take them one by one.
After slaying a bunch of giant bees with my
pointy metal stick spear, I find the queen bee of the hive. And then I kill it without a problem. Urist is in pretty good shape for now.
And here's the spoils of our insecticide.
These are more useful than they might sound. With the hive cleared I go on to the next level. i have no interest in drinking from pools right now. Too risky.
And as if the game is mocking me, on the next floor there's another pool. Coooooooooool. Maybe I'll come back to these later.
Diving deeper, I find the only way further into D:3 is blocked by a trick door trap, which I don't want to try and mess with because if it falls on me it could destroy some of my inventory. I take a detour into S:3 instead, an alternate dungeon branch that will take me past D:3. In S:3 we find a tension room of kobolds.
You guys see a bunch of k's, I see a bunch of pinatas containing potential loot.
So after the kobold slaughter I got some food rations, some gold, and thick gauntlets I'll be holding on to for later.
Guess what we find in D:4? If you guess "a swimming pool", you'd be almost right! It's actually just a pool. That's the 3rd pool in 4 dungeon floors. What is it with the RNG today?
On D:5 we have the arena. This is a guaranteed floor layout with the big rectangular room on the far right of the map. You can take part in arena fights, where you're put 1v1 against a random creature. If you win, you get gold. If you don't win, you died, because it's a fight to the death and losing is generally bad for your health here. The big attraction for the arena is all the ratling traders. They sell junk food for gold. One of them sells cooked lizards. These are really nourishing and weigh a lot less than most nourishing types of food. For example, a single large ration weighs 200 stones. A single cooked lizard weighs 3 stones, and is about as nourishing as a large ration. Do the math, cooked lizards are a great food item for the nourishment:weight ratio.
We'll be coming back to the arena eventually, either for more food or to do the arena matches. I'll take a more interesting screenshot then. (I forgot to get one this update and didn't realize until right before I'm about to post. My bad.)
I buy everything the lizard dealing ratling has.
While going to the next floor I kill a hill orc who drops a potion of exchange. These potions switch stats around. Might be useful. Maybe. My last run in with these potions had me identify it after drinking it, and it completely swapped my stats around and basically ruined my troll healer. Switched my toughness with my learning. Left me with 50 hp. On a character meant to be a big tank of hitpoints and hp regen. That troll soon died. Moral here is drink id-ing potions can be dangerous.
On D:6 we have the cavernous level. This is basically just one huge room, and it always has various herbs growing here. But it's full of monsters. The monster spawn rate is high, and can spawn monsters that can summon or spawn more monsters, like dark elf priestesses and their hordes of spiders, or gray jellies who split into more jellies. It's in the player's best interest to avoid being surrounded and generally find the stairs down quickly.
Fortunately, because Urist is a walking wall of metal and shields and spears, we have no problems. Nothing manages to scratch us and we find the downstairs without encountering anything too dangerous.
On D:7 we hear splashing sounds. That means there's a pool. Again.
Another pool. Urist has insane luck with the rng today.
Also there's a room full of mist wolves holy shit what.
I kill them all, no problems. Just stand in the corridor, stick 'em with the pointy end of your pointy stick, and kill 'em one at a time. I'd estimate there were maybe 30 wolves? The room was 5x10, but it wasn't completely crammed full of mist wolves. I don't get any loot out of it aside from experience though.
While looking for the pool we get this message. Never encountered this before. If I had to guess, there's a royal vault on this floor too. Think those are chock full of gold. might be worth checking out later. for now, we dive deeper!
On D:8 we slaughter our way through an orc tension room and find a strange item with a strange smell. Also we find a lawful altar! Sweet! Finding a lawful altar out in the middle of the dungeon is nice because we can sacrifice various live dungeon creatures. It's a good way to get piety.
After dropping some bottles of water on the altar I get holy water. Then I dip my heap of 3 uncursed scrolls of identify into a bottle of holy water. Then I read one of the now blessed scrolls of identify and id all my items. Cheers. Amidst all the crap I've got on me I have a ring of cold resistance, blue gauntlets of dragonhide, red gauntlets of dragonhide, a potion of learning, and two fireproof blankets. the blankets are great, I'll need those. Can't believe I just picked them up from random dungeon loot. Still don't have a waterproof blanket but that's not TOO bad. Those gauntlets grant resistance to an element, like the red grants for resistance, the blue grants for frost resist, etc. Good if you have no other source of resistance.
On D:9 I hear more splashing sounds. I've lost count of how many pools I've found in this dungeon. I'll come back and find this pool later, for now, we dive deeper!
Ah, we've reached our destination. Welcome to Dwarftown.
Next time: "What is this, Dwarf Fortress?"
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Topic: Let's Play ADOM: Tower of Eternal Flames Round 2 Fight! (Read 26230 times)