Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ral]

After being a little frustrated with getting started in adventure mode, I decided to try to update the wiki page (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Adventure_mode_quick_start) with some information that I would have liked to know when I first trying to get started. (I also tried to organize it a little.)

Unfortunately, since I'm a little new to this adventure mode stuff, I'm a little unsure of the factual solidity of some information I added, especially regarding attribute allocation.

So this is a request to correct any errors I might have made, as well as a request to add any additional tips that noobs might find helpful.

[RTiger]

Early survival is easy, even as a peasant.

Agility is god, but a few points in social awareness is never bad, and it is much harder to raise social awareness in game. skillwise, a few points in observation and swimming will save your life.

First, go to a fortress and grab a soldier. After that, go find a groundhog, or other small critter and wrestle with it. At least have a shield before trying this (You can also just take a soldier, and let something kill him, so you can steal armor. Just lay there, take hits, and build up your shield, armor, and fighting skills, as well as your attributes.

After that, you fight boogeymen, using them to train your weapon skills. Attack, move back, and attack again. Make sure you fight them one on one or you will die.

Once that is done, you can kill just about anything.

[ral]

I can understand swimming but what good are observation and social awareness?

Fighting bogeymen one on one sounds pretty difficult unless maybe you have a really high agility so you can outrun them.

[RTiger]

After critter wrestling, you could easily have superhuman agility.

Observation affects the rate you get ambushed. If you have low skill in it, you can very well get killed in your sleep if your not in a secure location.

Social awareness directly affects the number of followers you can have.

I fight boogeymen all the time. They don't bother me too much, and I have more then enough defensive skills, and usually full armor, before trying to attack them.

[ral]

When you say wrestle with badgers, are you talking about actual wrestling (like A, Enter) or bare-handed attacks? I made a macro to continually "A, Enter" grapple with a small animal and got Fighter and Wrestling up to master or legendary which was good but I didn't get any defensive skill doing that.

I also made a macro to sharpen rocks and throw them and got Knapper, Thrower, and Archer up to legendary along with superhuman kinesthetic and very high spacial sense (though the hit rate and damage of a Legendary +4 thrower still seems rather lame.)

[Naryar]

Hmm, so the social skills actually do something ? I thought they were dump stats.

I know Musicality/Creativity/Empathy are dump stats though.

[RTiger]

Yeah, just grapple with a small critter, then sit on the ground and just take hits. A small critter will not deal you any real damage if you have even just copper armor and a shield.

EDIT: You can pass turns by pressing period.

Also, how do you set up a macro.

[Ale and Axes]

Hmm, so the social skills actually do something ? I thought they were dump stats.

I never bother raising it from average, a few extra bods don't make a lot of difference.

[ral]

Also, how do you set up a macro.

Do whatever repetitive thing you want to do enough times to figure out what exact sequence of keys you keep repeating, then hit ctrl+r. Enter the sequence of commands and hit ctrl+r again. To replay the keystrokes you have recorded hit ctrl+p.

This seems to work pretty well for repeatedly grappling and releasing a creature, and for sharpening and throwing rocks.

Anyway, I fancied up and expanded the quick start article on the wiki a bit:

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Adventure_mode_quick_start

I didn't add the powerleveling techniques though because those might be a bit advanced for someone just starting to mess with adventure mode.

[RTiger]

Very nice, though with above average social awareness, your starting companion limit is three, not two. Fixed.

A few more survival tips.

When approaching a bandit camp, your best option is to (S)neak into the camp, and try to loot it before crap hits the fan. You might even find decent armor that way, and it helps to avoid the bowman [Always a pain]

In addition, if you wish, instead of using fast travel, you can sneak around to the next target, to raise your ambusher skill.

[ral]

Thanks. I added your suggestions at the bottom under tips and I also went through the whole tutorial myself to make sure it "works".

[Untelligent]

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Attributes#Skills_By_Soul_Attribute

IIRC those come directly from a post by the toad himself. Most of those don't apply to adventure mode, but some of the more relevant ones:

FOCUS: archer, observer, ambusher
WILLPOWER: "resists exertion/pain effects"
SPATIAL SENSE: "combat skills"
KINESTHETIC SENSE: "Most skills involving any movement at all (lots of them)"

And of course more will start to be used as more adventurer skills get added (soonest is maybe some merchant-related stuff further down the current dev list, unless Toady surprises us), but those are the ones I see right now.

[GamerKnight]

This explains why my characters suck.

P.S. How do you save characters for later play? I can't do an entire epic in one session.

[Seriyu]

There's an option to save on the Esc menu. I think it's the second one down? Not sure.

[ral]

FOCUS: archer, observer, ambusher
WILLPOWER: "resists exertion/pain effects"
SPATIAL SENSE: "combat skills"
KINESTHETIC SENSE: "Most skills involving any movement at all (lots of them)"

I did read about these, but I didn't include them in the suggested starting stats because these can all be raised relatively easily by doing stuff like sharpening and throwing rocks over and over. In any case they didn't seem as important as stuff like maxing out toughness and agility for maximizing survivability for those who aren't sure what they're doing yet.... I this point I don't know for sure if it's more important for defense to, say, max out toughness or if it's better to subtract a point from that and increase spacial sense or something.

Basically what I was trying to do was come up with the right allocation of stats/skills to come up with the hardest to kill character right off the bat, to facilitate getting through the tutorial, which isn't necessarily the best thing for longer term play. For example, I'm not sure I'd put any points into social awareness in a normal game since I'm not sure the extra companion slot(s) matter that much in the long run, but the extra companion in the beginning helps keep the noob alive enough to get through the tutorial.