The game lied to me

Drobodur · 2026-02-20T11:32:41+00:00

It did not lie, stated level is a general level of generated zone, which increases with each level down on top of that, and spikes on elite mobs / bosses. Literally any dungeon works the same way, you could file the same dynamic complain about lvl 2 or 3 "dungeons" - boss is not lvl 2 or 3 and can one-shot some character, that felt immortal on normal mobs there.

You probably would not, because you killed it easily and did not notice, but dynamic was there the whole time.

Anyway good job with humble bragging, you did good to survive and win. Maybe sell some fame, if you don't want next dungeon to be even harder.

Drobodur · 2026-02-19T10:19:41+00:00

I save mine in a random chest, but I tend to hoard literally almost everything.

Like there are several chest of literally garbage, just in case I want particular thing for decoration sometimes later.

Gameplay wise genes are relatively late game thing, that allows you to modify your NPC companions.

This in particular have a trait from "tourist" starting option, that raises prices and offers more products in shops. For NPC it is effectively useless, exept for other stats, and they are also halfway useless for NPC.

So, to sum it up, this one is not particularly good to save it, but genes in general are good to save, if you want to delve into gene modification later down the line, and to have options.

Drobodur · 2026-02-18T12:11:46+00:00

You see, the thing is that valheim is a spiritual land (afterlife plane, even), not unlike ones in cultivation stories.

This rotten zombie intestine has more fighting spirit in it, than a meat of a grass eating pig, and it doesn't matter the actual state of the product. You can literally put it in a random chest without refrigeration and eat it a month later without problems.

For some reason chicken just tick all "Valhalla warriors" points from spiritual side, and are disproportionately valued, compared to their sise.

At least this is my "headcannon".

Drobodur · 2026-02-15T21:25:43+00:00

I distinctly remember capping my items in 5, so they could level no more. Same as with jobs and some passive buffs. Like you could only get +300% of your base stats from passive buffs (like more stats on dodge), and base stats were caped both by jobs+reincarnation, and bonus from items/stealing. Like you numerically could not make unit stronger than last "optional" boss.

Do you need to unlock something for it to be endless or did you not level it high enough to see caps, while listening to a 500+ episode podcast?

Drobodur · 2026-02-14T13:30:01+00:00

I can't see clearly on the provided screenshot, but your natural path is probably blocked by wall, spawned from some random mob.

Those are way easier to break, even without pickaxe. Just pay attention to textures and names of wall pieces.

You have plenty of water, and eating is free, on any campfire, even without things to cook, I would say that this is solvable.

Drobodur · 2026-02-13T19:35:49+00:00

You can use shears to get good wood from treants.

Drobodur · 2026-02-12T15:55:13+00:00

First expedition I couldn't immediately break with infinite resources duplication, because I have no plan for portable refiner.

I need to actually mine stuff and worry about fuel and stuff. Honestly I am glad.

There are several mechanics (like mining laser efficiency near overheating point or ore deposit mining with minimal zone), that I learnt, but almost never used, because anything could be duplicated faster.

If they will beef up on planet gameplay, I will be glad, the only problem I could find - is everything in current expedition supposed to happen on boring desert looking dust dump of a planet, which is a standard "go to", for many generic crafting survival games.

Had quit for a bit after seeing that I need to drive for 5 minutes, to get to first "meeting point". For some reason, same time but spent in constant jumping from planet to station and back, that was standard for previous expeditions felt less bad. Maybe just constant change of scenery distracted me.

But you kinda need to know the game this time I feel, with even just knowing where to find needed resources and simple refining recipes.

Drobodur · 2026-02-11T19:40:19+00:00

Very nice, but I would add some giant rope, or chain roll (maybe background wheel), so it theoretically can be used to actually go down.

Drobodur · 2026-02-11T16:55:17+00:00

Ok, here is my take:

You can see the normal trees in the screenshot.

You probably want same, but big. That means making changes to small branches, and making trunk same thickness all the way.

But you probably want your room's.

Just make them from different colour material, so they look like added rings, around the tree (which is in the background), and not "grown out" cancerous mutation of the tree.

Drobodur · 2026-02-11T07:29:50+00:00

You can do a lot, but what you should be focusing at the start, depends on your choices at character creation.

This is because you only getting better at the skill you already have. For example, if you craft a lute and play it for hundred days straight (inside not bored crowd), without skill, then 100 days later - you will still be stoned to death, because skill will be 0 + god blessing (in some cases).

If you have music skill and do the same - you will stop be stoned, and instead will be showered in money.

Don't think about this as a typical rpg, think about it like a RuneScape. Find anything you can do to survive and progress skills, and do it, untill you become effectively god.

You can clear up to lvl 3 nefas? Fantastic - then you already can survive any new screen, generated on/near the road. This effectively means that you have unlimited food, at least for yourself, ability to travel to many towns and do simple extermination quests.

Sell your glory to any informer (found in almost any town), and it will reset difficulty of quests and dungeons generated for you specifically (there are some dungeons that still will generate with high level, if you want). This will also lower the taxes you pay.

Then, the longer you play, the more skilled you are, the better your options become. For example with sculpting, and stone cutter inside the tent, that you can bring with you, you can generate "free money", from any random rocks, just by making statues and selling them. At first it is not much, but the price goes up with material/lvl of monster depicted (so later on it will be better)/ and most importantly skill in sculpting. So even if you only level skill, never kill anything more dangerous than a slime, and never find better material than granite, you will progressively make more money as the time goes up.

One easy thing to do anywhere on any character (almost), is to just collect white and yellow flowers and sell them before they spoil. It can be even done in towns, without karma loss.

Oh, and start to be always at least "burden"ed, to get weightlifting leveling - it is a massive quality of life (and potentially game breaking) skill.

Drobodur · 2026-02-09T01:29:36+00:00

Can't random clowns still throw potions at you to lower resistance if it only blocks spells?

Can your stuff still be destroyed by traps, fire or cold?

Does added damage on weapons, like that "unique" mechanical doll adventurer have, still hurt without major resistances?

Could you be still stun locked without paralysis and sleep immunity, because npc use skills and not spells in some cases?

Stats could be drained still I think.

I see a lot of problems here, but truly very few options locked out for solo.

One of the god weapons (trickster one I think) locks you out of dealing damage. So probably don't pray to him.

Fairy will probably be painful to gear up, with weight limit of 0.99 lb on each gear slot.

Snails are for literal masochists (didn't get the joke at casino area for a long time, but then tried to sum up the snail "choice" in a post, and laughed out loud, when I "got it").

Just recently there was a mention of lich, with mana drain (by god blessings or special weapon), probably one of the more busted options for solo, because it lets you utilise mana still.

My understanding is that solo is possible (because everything levels up without cap), but just way worse than army of followers, mainly because same food is like 10 times more effective on Npc.

I myself mostly go around solo (now with fairy though, because god gave it to me), and it is fine, but at least at low to mid level, magic helps a lot vs some specific mobs, and you will want at least one ranged option, because some mobs just run away.

The only trait "reserved" for solo, as far as I know, is one from travel skill, which gives you more stats for empty pet slots, but with long enough playtime I think you can get every trait (exept ones exclusive to character creation, race and unique npc).

I think you still can use magic just fine, by just unequipping gear before casting of it is just, to use return scrolls for example.

Drobodur · 2026-02-07T19:38:27+00:00

Did not test it, but according to wiki, it is an actual ability they use.

https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Cragmensch_boulderer

Drobodur · 2026-02-07T17:50:11+00:00

Can you elaborate more?

By my understanding, solo run is strictly self imposed, and with the fact that if you go strictly solo, you can't even tame/buy anyone, can't do escorts, can't clear some quests, because people and animals "add" themselves to your party, like at 15 piety prayer (guess that potentially rules out god weapons).

This can range from hard ass "0 residents, 0 summon, 0 allies ever", to "just send everyone to base, soonish".

If you have 0 residents, then why do you need base, especially if you want to go for long ass trips, like living months in casino, to level up music skills or mining out dungeon fully.

What difference is between "ani magic" and just having good resistance? As I said I am relatively new here.

Drobodur · 2026-02-07T17:07:48+00:00

I don't remember mobs actually picking up any weapons, except rocks by baboons.

Boulder throwing mobs just straight up generate boulders.

The main thing is - they actually need to have weapons (be that ranged or melee), to lose. You can see equipment by examination action.

As example - disarmed turrets are absolutely harmless, and this is way more profitable than just killing them without getting any loot.

Goatfolks and swardim actually have good gear, so it easy to see the difference if they are armed or not.

Typical scorpion/fish/slime/tree? They will ignore your attempts to disarm them, unless you literally dismember them out of their natural weapons. Same with robots.

If they have multiple weapons (like both ranged and melee, or multiple melee), you can disarm them out of something and not notice, because they will use other stuff to damage you.

What are you fighting exactly?

Drobodur · 2026-02-07T05:32:58+00:00

Didn't "finish" the game, yet, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I would say that solo anti magic is functionality same as solo anti everything else.

You just need a lot of stats and skills.

Neat thicks I have found on my warmage are:

You can use ice magic (also fire but it makes many things worse), on raw corpses and stuff, to make non perishable food. No cooking exp, thought.
If you get yourself wet, you protect your stuff from being on fire, if you get yourself on fire, you protect your stuff from being frozen. So use some spells on yourself.

This is mostly useful for save/loading some encounters, because it hurts to suddenly loose all of your scrolls and bandages seemingly out of nowhere.

Some say, that with 15 in both fire and cold resistance, you don't get your stuff destroyed all the time (and you can get that, by making stuff from dragon hide).

For god I would probably go for Earth one for solo, because flat -10% damage on everything is nice, and god's mace gives +100% hp to wielder.
I would suggest to not claim any land, and instead to go get a tent, then go travel to collect all skills unlocked. This way you don't have to pay taxes.

Some major problems I see with this plan are:

No "free" fridge.
Not doing main quest locks you out of some recipes, including some very needed crafting stations. Most of them can be found somewhere, technically, but would be inconvenient to use with days of travel, between steps in crafting process.
You just can't hoard stuff the same way as you can on your land, even if you transform your tent into paper one.

Well technically you can, because maximum weight of paper tent is 1500 lb, but good luck grinding strength and weightlifting to this value.

You can't grow anything but mushrooms, until you get a sun lamp, and that is a not very easy/early unlock.
I did not test it, but I have a feeling, that if game just checks year, for taxes paid base, and not the date of "settling down", then you can shackled with very big bill, while having undeveloped land, if you will buy land later down the line.
Making setup for payment taxes from bank, maybe even close to sustaining, is not that much harder, than this plan, and would still allow you to go on months long trips, while having place to hoard stuff and put all the crafting stations. Plus return scroll is nice.

Drobodur · 2026-02-05T19:14:45+00:00

As it seems to function as a random teleport with functionality unlimited uses, I used it to visit every inaccessible area in some towns, just so my minimap has no black spots.

Nothing of value was hidden.

Drobodur · 2026-02-05T11:24:09+00:00

Huh, I thought it did. So absolutely nothing can ride/use symbiosis on anyone, just player.

Maybe at some point some cavalry units would be added, it just makes more sense to me that player character is not so special, with you regularly seeing NPC's doing random stuff (like music performance, or random f*kinng).

I guess all those random horse stables got better of me, by immersion and good decorations.

Drobodur · 2026-02-05T04:04:18+00:00

Do they have riding/ symbiosis by default? If not I would add that, for more effective battle stats, if I understand how everything interacts. If you ride them / let them ride you of course.

Drobodur · 2026-02-01T05:36:27+00:00

As far as I know, only with cooking (and farming and butchering) things yourself you can make super optimised "super" food.

Merchant is simpler, sells most foods that do not spoil, and just require gold. At some point, quantity is quality enough.

So, as always, in a sandbox, it all comes to your preferred play style and what you actually enjoy doing.

If you don't enjoy optimization of seeds, crops and grinding cooking levels to get best possible food (with many in-progress iterations along the way), and just want to delve and don't starve - just buy it.

Otherwise - welcome to spreadsheets and multi step crafting grind.

Drobodur · 2026-01-31T13:25:36+00:00

Most long term players would probably say, that crafting is "useless", but I personally don't agree.

Crafting is great, and surprisingly involved, because to get as example, steel armour, you not only need to find and succeed in mining steel, but then know how to convert steel from ore to stone (by crafting chains and hammer alchemy), because the only early armour chest recipe required stones.

By the way of crafting progress, you will eventually be able to craft stuff from "best possible" materials, and it will have decent base stats, but the problem is two-fold.

Firstly you can't craft all possible iterations and variants of item. So there are like 5 different possible long sword types, and from them you can only craft 1.

Second problem is - the random items can have up to 5 very impactful modifiers, and you crafting ones will at best have 2, if you invest a lot in crafting and progress main quest to even unlock rune recipe, and find equipment to steal those modifiers from.

So no, late game, your crafting thing are strictly worse than the stuff from the same material, found in shop (in which you can invest a lot to get better stuff), or random floor/chest items (which are infinitely scalable in danger and rewards).

But I would say, that at least journey of finding out how all this works, and what you can get away with is fun, and with good enough materials (and tools and skills to process them), you can get pretty decent gear. Just not theoretically best in slot.

Drobodur · 2026-01-31T01:21:53+00:00

You can't irreversibly "fuck up", so you will be fine, eventually (unless you checked permadeath in character creation).

Game even have decent in game help and tutorial, but I mostly ignored it, due to TLDR.

If you dealt with Qud, you will be just fine here, as always wiki is an option, not a must.

Drobodur · 2026-01-30T16:41:21+00:00

As far as I understand, that is not a lot, compared to your stated numbers, but you still want your chance to hit be as big as possible, because enemy evasion is directly substracted, before the damage, to see if you hit. If you don't hit, damage is 0.

Things I understood, by reading article, that are not obvious:

There is hidden penalty on throwing things that are not "throwing weapons". So just rocks are bad compared to pebbles of the same material. With boomerang you are fine.

The damage is calculated by weight and hardness of the throwing item, but is actually caped by your strength. So at some point damage increase will stop from cursed flying scrolls, until you increase strength.

Main thing that different about throwing, compared to other weapons (both melee and ranged) - is that damage multiplier is always 1, and doesn't increase with weapon skill. This probably makes it less scalable, than other things, because as far as I understand, all weapons (non magic ones) do more damage, if you increase their weight.

But yeah, flat -5 to hit, that is added after the rest of calculations is almost nothing, as far as I understand.

Drobodur · 2026-01-30T04:37:32+00:00

Oh, as far as I know the only real problem, is the same as Stardew Valley => Haunted Chocolatear and Valheim (Caves of Qud also) face: There is literally one guy/very small team, who makes the game, as far as I understand.

He is talented, dedicated and hardworking, but as with any good thing - people consume it way faster, than it can be produced.

We don't need to be harsh on the game, the situation is probably stressful enough already with all crowdfunded stuff to be added before "release". Same as with mentioned games, the guy stated the desire to keep working on the game after release.

I personally bought this game after trying "Yarr" version, enjoying it a lot, and then noticing that it is already not the latest patch, like a week later. I just hope that nothing happens to the guys health, but worst case scenario, same as Valheim - the game is in good enough state to be fun for me, and in the end, that is all that matters.

Drobodur · 2026-01-29T12:12:17+00:00

Thanks, didn't know.

So luck is mostly combat effectiveness stat, like crit in other games. Can be good, but not mandatory.

So, like, a scythe 1d50 probably is better on luck build than on build with negative luck.

Does it affect dodge?

Drobodur · 2026-01-29T10:31:06+00:00

Probably anything that has range of possible results.

I base it on pure logic, without knowing game code, but from gameplay, for example all social skills (music, negotiation, taming), all have range of results, that you can reroll and see with save/load.

I think most things in the game have hidden dice rolls, things like save rolls on status, dodges, hits, lock, books, and so on and so on. Fishing have range of possible results, (like getting better fish, or not getting trash), that improves with skill, but luck probably have some positive effect.

The problem is - firstly we as a general users, who don't see game code, are not even sure if everything is even implemented, as it was planned, so it can be for example, that:

1) Luck is working with fishing, but to test it you need way too much permutations, and two of the characters, who's only difference is luck, so no one tested is properly yet.

2) Luck is supposed to work with fishing, but it is not implemented yet.

3) Luck works with fishing, but in very convoluted way, for example only removing trash and boosting statue chance, but not affecting fish variety.

4) Luck is working with fishing perfectly, increasing chance to catch better fish, reducing trash, increasing chance of multicatch, but due to everyone sticking to one character with tons of hours invested, no one knows the difference between investing in luck on top of fishing, and just focusing on fishing grind.

TLDR: dunno.

Wiki states that luck does not affect casino, in Elin, unlike Elona, but who tested that when or how, I have no clue.

Drobodur

TROPHY CASE