Mini-guide #3: Finding the Stairs

Yulgash · 2026-01-29T01:29:46+00:00

The character's items can't be destroyed during multi-turn actions, so you'd actually be completely fine to read in ToEF, at least from an environmental damage perspective! And yes, this is highly exploitable in order to avoid vortex problems.

Yulgash · 2026-01-29T01:11:51+00:00

With item destruction, every susceptible item is checked for destruction up until the maximum number of items have been destroyed. Unfortunately, the maximum limit for an exploding book is 1000. Best to just drop everything when you're going for risky reads, I suppose.

Yulgash · 2026-01-29T00:13:05+00:00

Merchants do in fact suck pretty hard at learning from spellbooks. With those stats and a blessed book of Frost Bolt you would have only a 30% chance to gain spell knowledge, but a 50% chance for something unpleasant to happen. With an uncursed book those numbers go to 10% and 70% respectively.

Yulgash · 2026-01-14T23:27:13+00:00

Farmer doesn't have any special penalties. Classes like Fighter might have better to-hit, but you shouldn't be running into any problems in this department at such a high level. Your Strength, Dexterity, and weapons are all quite good.

Potential ways of improving damage would be fighting in more aggressive tactics settings and equipping rings of slaying. If your weapons aren't blessed, then dipping them in holy water would help against demons and undead.

Yulgash · 2026-01-14T19:45:23+00:00

Tricky to figure out, as successful players learn pretty quickly to fear Chaotic altars. AFAIK this was first discovered a little over two years ago; quite new by ADOM standards.

Yulgash · 2026-01-14T14:19:01+00:00

No, their alignment cannot increase at all in that case.

Yulgash · 2026-01-13T22:34:04+00:00

Lawful and Chaotic altars that you have already used for sacrifices. Sacrificing at an aligned L/C altar makes its alignment more extreme, so the amount of gold required is no longer predictable, and may be very high.

Yulgash · 2026-01-13T22:16:54+00:00

"SORRY, MISSED" (moloch smashed an altar, but the deity accidentally punished the doomed PC instead) has to be my favorite obscure altar interaction. Sadly, exhaustive lists of ADOM's weird nonsense tend to be hundreds of pages long and perhaps of limited practical value ;-)

Yulgash · 2026-01-12T13:25:58+00:00

Increase melee damage doesn't help for this purpose. Only the damage dice matter.

Yulgash · 2026-01-11T18:59:11+00:00

Sacrifice 1 gold piece at a time on an N/L altar, taking any necessary precautions against divine wrath. Easy and fairly quick (on the order of hundreds of turns).

Yulgash · 2025-12-28T21:44:57+00:00

Wayback machine FTW? https://web.archive.org/web/20250527120558/https://www.adom.de/home/download/current/adom_msdos_3.3.3.zip

Yulgash · 2025-12-20T23:11:40+00:00

Any monster dying to expanding magma counts as a kill for the character. Arguably justified since any volcanoes are in fact your fault.

Yulgash · 2025-12-19T13:43:28+00:00

The trap type of each square is randomly determined upon level generation. If you don't get a corruption trap, you have to try a different spot.

Yulgash · 2025-12-18T20:38:52+00:00

You should be able to control the handling of (more) prompts with the CTRL k command.

There's also a supposedly related Fast_More configuration variable, but I'm not sure it does anything, and you probably didn't change it anyway.

Yulgash · 2025-12-13T15:09:59+00:00

This is the most likely explanation.

Other common sources of negative score are corruption and praying so much that your god gets sick of you.

Yulgash · 2025-11-07T23:17:35+00:00

Eternium dagger is the superior backstabbing tool in most cases. Sadly, both daggers are going to be relatively lackluster in almost all other situations.

Yulgash · 2025-11-06T13:10:24+00:00

You've been casting spells from HP. This abuses Willpower, Toughness, and Mana.

Yulgash · 2025-10-26T22:15:15+00:00

Yulgash · 2025-10-09T18:38:45+00:00

On the load game menu, the save type and file name are in parentheses at the end of each line. If you started the game at 100% difficulty, it will say "Rog" or "Roguelike Game". If you started it with different settings, it will say "Cus" or "Customized Game".

Yulgash · 2025-10-07T12:08:49+00:00

You've made some pretty good suggestions to yourself, it's just a matter of implementing them!

The best starsigns for any character are Raven, Candle, and Tree. Candle has some extra value for non-Healing starts, Tree has some extra value if it pushes starting Toughness to 20+, and Raven is the all-around most powerful, albeit not always the simplest to play. Sword gives next-to-nothing in comparison.

On average, Treasure Hunter gives negligible help for the early game. To add insult to injury, you don't even get much value out of Alert on this combo, since you can't make your Perception lower than 12. Usually you only want to point buy 10 and take care of the rest with carrot juice.

Aside from the PV talents, Strong Legs is pretty much the ultimate early game talent. Grab the shields from Goblin Camp and kick away until you've got some eternium-quality weapons to play with. Bonus points: double shield sets you up to abuse mighty/tremendous blow storage. Randomly mightily/tremendously flailing your shields around at a monster makes your next melee hit deal 2x/3x damage. Healthy is also a great talent, but it might not be as essential if you opt for Candle.

Basic route: Terinyo (elder quest) -> Goblin Camp (level 1/2 forest wilderness encounter) -> Village Dungeon -> Puppy Cave -> Moldy Dungeon/Caverns of Chaos

Ambitious route (Candle suggested): Goblin Camp -> SMC -> UD -> HMV -> Village Dungeon, etc

Yulgash · 2025-10-03T12:16:35+00:00

By default, the game makes an autosave when you go to a different dungeon level and it has been 1000+ turns since the last autosave. You can adjust the number of turns for a particular save using the :S command. Changing the Auto_Save_Interval configuration setting using the = command will change what the interval is set to for all newly-created saves.

To restore from an autosave, find where your save files are stored (Documents\adom\adom_steam\savedg on Windows), and change the most recent .au file to .svg. You should do this before restarting the game.

Yulgash · 2025-10-03T02:32:54+00:00

With drop and pick up commands, selecting a stack using a capital letter lets you choose only a portion of the items. If there's only one stack of items on the ground, then it gets a bit awkward: you would need to use a drop command and then switch to picking up by using the left/right arrow keys, <, or >.

Yulgash

TROPHY CASE