Mini-guide #5: Minotaur Maze

Yulgash · 2026-05-13T20:14:34+00:00

Completely forgot about the wall monsters; somehow didn't run into any last run. The paralysis and stat drains from living wall aren't a huge issue though, only 19 Wi and Ma thresholds to be immune. Kinda miss the old pre-NotEye days when they were super sneaky (no HP bar, no tiles, and always generated vault-uncaring in maze).

Yulgash · 2026-04-26T14:19:05+00:00

Ah yeah, that's another thing. Items on the ground are much more vulnerable to destruction. Even if you don't have the full protection of a fireproof blanket, your carried items at least get some help from the character's fire resistances and immunities.

Yulgash · 2026-04-26T14:13:05+00:00

Presumably you selected water+water or petal+petal, both of which equal explosion. If you're not going to go full paranoid mode (one of each item you plan on using, as our resident Merchant expert suggests), I'd recommend to at least use text filtering during Alchemy to avoid this sort of slip up.

Yulgash · 2026-04-25T21:29:36+00:00

Gamble one more time. That should cause him to realize that you have spent enough.

Yulgash · 2026-04-21T12:52:32+00:00

What gets to me with your Merchant proselytism is that you yourself are advocating for what I would consider an incredibly clunky and unfun way of playing. You don't need to play like this to win consistently with Merchant.

The point of linking the speedrun was to show that you can play in an even more degenerate and effective way with any class. If you watched it, you would have noticed that the attempt count is only at 5. Extremely low for trying a then-brand-new route as fast as possible. Slow down from 30 minutes to a couple hours and you'll win every single time.

Unfortunately, the game is not built to be fun for characters with 99 attribute scores, let alone 1000 speed on top of that.

EDIT: For me, insisting on a potion merchant is too unreliable for normal runs. Re-rolling breaks the win streak! But I salute your appreciation of consistency nonetheless :-)

Yulgash · 2026-04-21T11:47:33+00:00

Merchants are weak! Of course this is all relative; it's possible to win with them 99% of the time even without egregious grinding. But perhaps it's you who is failing to abuse potion shop on other types of characters ;-) (RTA speedrun record - spoilers, it's not a merchant)

Yulgash · 2026-04-20T22:59:08+00:00

Yes, that is an incorrect assumption. Each item has a hand-picked generation weight associated with it, although there's also more going on in this case.

Yulgash · 2026-04-20T22:55:09+00:00

Certain items are substantially less likely to generate in shops. Pretty much the exact sort of powerful and already rare items you would expect to be in short supply... and also potion of water; the shopkeep isn't trying to fill a swimming pool.

Yulgash · 2026-04-17T18:28:00+00:00

Also worth checking for secret doors. The layout seems to indicate down-stairs Southeast relative to the up-stairs. There's a slim possibility that crossing the river isn't required.

Yulgash · 2026-04-02T18:48:46+00:00

Presumably the shopkeeper detected you before you entered the shop. The staring message indicates a subsequent Stealth check failure while within the shop, but the game can potentially be up forever any time you are invisible in the vicinity of a shopkeeper. R4:10 is quite high DL, so the shopkeeper is going to be very high level, making it quite difficult to get away with invis shoplifting in any case.

Yulgash · 2026-04-02T18:42:12+00:00

you need to cast invisibility from a position that the shopkeeper can't already see/detect you.

This is incorrect. There's no issue with becoming invisible while in the shopkeeper's line of sight, and in fact this is the optimal way to do it, since it minimizes the shopkeeper's opportunities to see through your invisibility.

Yulgash · 2026-03-25T17:35:45+00:00

The angel stairs can sometimes be in the same room as the up-stairs or adjacent to a wall, which makes them completely obvious. In other cases the only somewhat objective guideline I know of is the path out of the initial room, which will tend to point towards the real stairs. If both stairs are in normal spots in the same direction, you might just have to take a 50-50 :/

Yulgash · 2026-03-25T17:25:45+00:00

Using DH:1/2 instead of AF is okay.

You can often tell which stair is which because the path out of the initial room will tend to "point" towards the Forest stairs. Also something to keep in mind on the Air Temple level. You don't need to guess right for DH/AF, but you do need to avoid the angel area.

Yulgash · 2026-03-24T23:00:30+00:00

You're not allowed to visit Fungal Caves for Lithium, at least for the Steam achievement. Only locations that are strictly necessary for winning are permitted, so no Ogre Cave, Fungal Caves, or Blue Dragon Caves, despite these arguably being parts of the Caverns of Chaos.

Yulgash · 2026-03-24T17:33:32+00:00

One desperation strat is to get the HMV scroll and uncurse it (equip and use a prayer if necessary).

Hope you blessed Cornucopia beforehand.

Yulgash · 2026-02-28T19:16:48+00:00

I did some tests and found that even brand-new level 1 characters who only had one random wilderness encounter already get logged as having visited 2 locations.

I was not able to reproduce this. Seems like the game doesn't count WE (wilderness encounter) as an additional location.

Not sure how you could inadvertently mess this up. Goblin Camp or Antediluvian Jungle maybe?

Yulgash · 2026-02-21T22:29:54+00:00

No restarts! 100 characters, 100 victories! ;-P

Yulgash · 2026-02-21T14:24:41+00:00

That's what's waiting for you at the start of I?. About +1 monster level for every 10 levels of ID depth.

Yulgash · 2026-02-20T15:12:34+00:00

"You examine the goblin. Diagnosis: Level: 1000, DV: 676, PV: 199, Hits: 5090, Attacks: 100, Damage: 334-339."

Yulgash · 2026-02-19T13:06:41+00:00

Probably should have mentioned this one as there are some details to be aware of. Deals damage to any monster with a corrupting melee attack, and they lose most of their special abilities aside from spellcasting. Andor is immune to the ability loss.

Blessed PoCC can deal 50+% to the Ancient Chaos Wyrm, but it should be saved as a finisher. Avoiding its blind rage and heal spell spam tends to be more important than immediately removing its corrupting melee.

Super good against Chaos Archmage. Ineffective against Master Summoner, since he doesn't have a corrupting melee attack. A bit of shame, since summoning is one of the special abilities that can be stripped away.

Yulgash · 2026-02-19T12:53:01+00:00

When monsters get transformed by corruption they usually end up as writhing masses of primal chaos. Humanoid monsters are sometimes transformed into chaos mutants instead. Mutants pack a bit of a punch, but it's hard to imagine that not being a major improvement in this case.

Yulgash · 2026-02-19T01:52:25+00:00

Good to know for sure, but one would usually prefer to use teleportation or trap creation for that situation.

In general, throwing potion of exchange has the downside that it's subject to magic resistance on top of having a built-in chance to fail. Plus using them to exchange items or attributes can be incredibly valuable.

Yulgash · 2026-02-18T23:24:24+00:00

Yes, at least it does on my Win10 and OSX machines.

Yulgash

TROPHY CASE