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[Mandaril]

Thank you for the tips! I didn't realize spell casting skills and food had such a big role in casters world. Very interesting!

[Robsoie]

For a change regarding spell hunger, you can try an undead caster :

Try to play a Mummy, with a Mummy you can spam spells as much as you want (as long as you have magic points) without a care for food hunger
But Mummy are difficult to play because they are the worst skill learner, out of necromancy they have no learning bonus, they have -2 to nearly everything), it takes much more experience to increase a Mummy skill point than any other race.

A Vampire can be good too, it has better learning speed than a Mummy (they are very bad at learning conjuration, translocation and fire magic though), and spell hunger can "only" lead into a bloodless Vampire, as your character will never die from this (unlike a starving character)
Bloodless vampire does not regenerate anymore (need healing wand or healing/wound healing potion then or blood potion) but gain some nice gifts.
And you can always drink some blood to get back out of the bloodless state.

Ghouls could be good too, starving ghouls instead of dying will "gain" rot (can be cured by eating again rotting/contaminated food) , but i don't have experience with Ghouls.

[Mandaril]

*good info*

Thanks, hunger has seems to be my arch nemesis right now, even with corpse cutting.

In other news, multitasking is dangerous:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Goodbye, Mandrill.

        3248 Mandrill the Conjurer (level 9, -2/39 HPs)
             Began as a Deep Elf Wizard on Sept 9, 2010.
             Was a Follower of Vehumet.
             Killed by triggering a arrow trap (7 damage)
             ... on Level 8 of the Dungeon.
             The game lasted 01:04:00 (12626 turns).

Best Crawlers -
  1.    3248 Mandrill   DEWz-09 killed by triggering a arrow trap (D:
  2.     798 Mandrill   DEWz-07 slain by an ufetubus (D:6)
  3.     601 Mandrill   VpNe-06 blasted by an orc priest (D:4)
  4.     146 Mandrill   HOCK-03 blasted by Sigmund (D:2)
  5.     143 Mandrill   MDBe-03 slain by an orc wizard (D:3)

Nearly starved several times.

[Robsoie]

Yes, i hate hunger in this game really a lot, with even just fighting is increasing the hunger, not only spell casting, i think it is wrong when i have a feeling that my main enemy in this game is hunger and not monsters.
Would not be that big of a problem if chunks were not rotting as quickly as they do now.
Each time i play with a character for which hunger is a problem, i always hope to find an amulet of the gourmand so you can eat up to engorged each time, but it needs luck as you're not guaranteed to find one early.

Anyways, for a spellcaster that will have hunger problems, it is very important to increase Intelligence each time you have the choice when leveling up and not something else, and in your skill list (press M to display it) turn off every skills related to a magic and leave only spellcasting turned on, so most of the experience spent when casting a spell will go into Spellcasting (don't worry, turning off a skill does not prevent experience to go into it, it will just go slower).

The goal is really to get Intelligence and Spellcasting high enough the earlier as possible so you can cast the first few levels of spells (the one you'll use the most) without spell hunger hunger.
There's enough difficulty with finding food sometime so you don't have to add on top of it spells starving your character.
By example having intelligence 20 and Spellcasting to 8 (or any combination of both that go up to 160) allows you to cast level 1,2 and 3 spells hunger free and reduce the cost of level 4 spell hunger from 250 to 90.

Not something negligable when your main enemy is starving.

[beorn080]

That's one of the reasons I like start scumming Wanderers. I've seen them start with 6-7 spellcasting. Makes food much less of an issue.

[Taxus]

Re: Spell hunger...

The key is to focus on training only Spellcasting, and to train your Int when you go up levels. High Spellcasting + High Int means lower spell hunger.

You should only routinely cast spells that have zero spell hunger. Use higher level spells in emergencies if necessary, and try to minimize situations in which you need them. Your big day is not when you can finally cast Fireball, it's when you can cast Fireball with zero hunger.

To see your spell hunger for various spells, hit I twice.

Edit: What Robsoie said.

[beorn080]

The only exception to that rule is pretty much Mephetic Cloud. You shouldn't be spamming it, but if there are 3 or more targets, bunch em and cast it, regardless of hunger. As a lvl 3 spell, its not too bad, and early on is dangerous enough without trying to hold it back due to food costs.

[Soulwynd]

If you get the amulet that lets you eat pretty much anything, spell hunger is gone. =p

(Or play as a kobold poison mage. Pretty good set, but you will -need- to find a good small-blade early on)

[Frumple]

Or a bloody spriggan

Honestly though, that gourmand amulet (or carnivore mutation!) is indeed a major, major thing. Outside of the SpEn I won with (which isn't an accomplishment, honestly. That combo's bloody broken.), the only casting critter's I've gotten anywhere with is those that found that bloody amulet -- or were vampires or some crap. Crawl's food clock is way, way more brutal than pretty much every other RL in existence (Barring the 7drls I've never gotten around to playing). That it ties into absolutely every action you make just makes the problem worse.

'Course, I'm all for abolishing food clocks in general, for dungeon crawls of the roguelike sort. What kind of idiot walks into a dungeon -- notorious for killing people! -- with a single ration (Quiver/wand/potion of healing/etc/etc/etc)?

Anyway, my funny of the day is this

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup version 0.8.0-a0-985-g876b6af character file.

679 Jack the Frost Mage (level 7, 0/33 HPs)
             Began as a Deep Elf Ice Elementalist on Sept 9, 2010.
             Was a Believer of Vehumet.
             Slain by a chaos spawn (33 damage)
             ... in the Dungeon (Sprint III: "The Ten Rune Challenge").
             The game lasted 00:05:25 (1473 turns).

Oddly precise for a chaos spawn

[Robsoie]

The amulet of the gourmand is so important to me to actually enjoy and have fun with Dungeon Crawl that if i don't find it before Lair when i am using those races that can't eat if they're not hungry (human/demigods/elf/etc...), i just restart.

I have strictly no enjoyment in this game when playing one of those characters that will be "hungry" everytime i hit O to autoexplore 2 times, and counting on luck to find food other than chunks didn'lt helped a recent character.

The amulet of the gourmand fixes entirely that unfun part of Crawl to me.

I guess if there's no improvement about this in next version, i'm going to "templescum" the amulet of the gourmand again.

[Hawkfrost]

Am I the only one who never uses the auto-explore?

[Medicine Man]

Am I the only one who never uses the auto-explore?

Nope. I never use it because I just find it a waste of time.

[Mr.Person]

I can't play other roguelikes because manually exploring takes forever and is boring. I've been spoiled by auto-explore so badly, I'll even autoexplore Swamp if I don't have food problems.

[Robsoie]

It was the tournament that teached me the value of autoexplore, never having used it before.

Not only because playing 200 games in 30 days is very repetitive, but mostly because unlike the smooth tile version that is a pleasure to play considering how reactive it is, playing online lagged a lot for me (very strange for a turn based game) each time i pressed a key i had to wait 1 seconds or two if not more sometime to see the effect.

At least with autoexplore, it allowed to lower that insanity as it pulled the game forward with lots of empty zone explored without having to get the 1 or more second lag at each keypress, and allowed to cut the repetitive feeling of the first few floors being done again and again.

But autoexploring after a few floors (usually i ceased at D:6 or D:7) is usually nearly suicidal as often it can lead you into some bad positioning to start a battle, that manually exploring yourself would not have thrown you into.

Or before entering a huge open space, you usually prepare for whatever can be found there as big open space are very bad news in Crawl, while the autoexplore would have not left you the time to do so.

And running unprepared into 3 centaurs in the middle of a big open space far from a corridor or a corner is more than often a game over at d:6.

[Medicine Man]

Will wearing a robe of the archmagi anger Trog?And will Trog give gifts?