Episode 3: Down the Caverns of Chaos
Here we are, ready to venture into the big 50 level dungeon that is the main location of the game.
We explore the first level, finding nothing remarkable apart from a random wand shop. All shopkeepers in ADOM are like posters in General Discussion, hopelessly racist, but gnomes are pretty good friends with elves iirc. We pick up all the wands so that if we encounter them they'll be already identified, but don't decide to buy any yet.
This is a look at our equipped items, we could really use a shield and some more armour, hopefully we'll get some soon. We're using a spear because they give pro bonuses to DV.
D2 again had nothing too exciting, but then we enter the third floor and
This little message means there's a (lesser) vault on this level, a bit like a tension room but bigger and in a cooler structure.
Looks like this is a goblin vault, no trouble for our elite skills, we can even bash most of them to death.
At this point it looks like we've eliminated them all, but really there's a secret inner sections for the really cowardly fuckers not wishing to fall to Andhaira's might (and magic harhar)
There they are! Wiping out all these trash mobs also levels us up, here's a quick snap of our skills now:
Healing and herbalism are our most important skills we have left to max, and are nearly there. Alchemy too is almost at 100 (At 100 we get a recipe for potion of gain attributes, which can be pretty awesome).
We didn't get much in the way of drops from this vault, but we did get a nice book, another offensive spell is always useful.
Down on level 4 we encounter the first guaranteed feature of the Caverns of Chaos, the arena floor, we don't want to fight here just yet, but here's a little look at the arena half of the level:
Around here there are also some ratlings selling food, most of which aren't very useful, apart from the obviously awsome cooked lizard which we stock up on.
D5 presumably sucked, but we encounter another vault on D6. The first vault mob we meet is a Least Daemon, which apparently is:
As it turns out this is a mixed vault, which is normally the most dangerous type, but there was nothing too scary here. There's one goblin wus that retreated here from the other vault. Bastard.
Well earlier I said we lacked a good shield, and then we find this:
pretty nice for this early on (The numbers mean +9 DV and +3 PV, btw). In reality the DV bonus will soon be bigger as we gain weapon skill in shields.
D7 turns out to be one of the key levels in the early CoC, the Big Room, where lots of quickly regenerating mobs roam among the various bushes. This kobold thinks he's a good as mage as Andhaira, oh how wrong he is.
Here's the first herbs we find, but unfortunately there are only two next to each other. Herb regeneration follows a slightly altered version of
Conway's Game Of Life, ideally we want to get a 2x2 square of herbs, a stable formation that will regrow as we farm it.
Luckily he get another level so we can pump our herbalism to max to get the max benefit from the Big Room
We also pick the talent "Hardy", which may seem rather shitty, only adding 3HP, but it also unlocks a series of talents that increase PV, which is pretty handy.
You can't tell from this screenshot, but we finally encounter a nice 2x2 square, after battling through the hoards of undead the necromancer summons, we find another nice square:
The herbs you find are determined by which row of the level they're in. Of the three rows we have stable herb patterns in (the rest of the level was clean btw
), one contains stomafilla/stomaceptia. When you pick the bush you get one of the two, the former is the best food in the game (also great for offering to the gods) and the latter does the opposite, makes you hungry. Stomafilla is in the top 3 most useful hers. For all herbs their effect is fairly dependent on their blessed/uncursed/cursed status, and with a high herbalism skill you get mostly blessed herbs. The second row contains pepper petal/burb root. Pepper petal heals a bit of hp, while burb root hurts you. The final row always gives morgia root, which can be eaten to train Willpower and Toughness.
After a bit of farming we descend down, and much some tasty morgia root.
I then remember how awesome herbs are so we go back up, and find a damn good shield:
Andhaira is shaping up pretty nicely
On D8 we find another guaranteed feature of the dungeon, the strange item, or Si. It's the first artifact we've found (yay!!!), but it doesn't really do another, other than asexually reproduce and sell for a lot of money. It's always on a trap, but i'm too cool to kick it off the trap or anything.
Our morgia munching kicks in, naise
Wow, yet another vault, luck certainly is in our favour (que random generator murdering us later).
There's also a river on this level, and our handy frost bolt allows us to make a frozen bride, and ooh look, that lizard dropped a book (that's what a " means)
Wow, the RNG certainly is gonna fuck us over, this is really sweet. Teleport is really really damn useful, well if we had teleport control (currently we can't select where to teleport to). If I was desperate to grind out a win, I would go to the infinite dungeon and hop until we find a blink dog, which would get us teleport control. I'm not quite that desperate to rock (yet).
I guess I forgot to visit the vault, espcially as it's on the other side of the river, so instead we visit the awesome Dwarftown.
Unfortunately the shop doesn't contain anything too remarkable, but still very useful for selling our shit. Dwarves are pretty good friends with elves. If we were an orc we would get absolutely fucked over by this racist midget.
Oh yeah, there's one lulzy thing in here:
:Omg let's read it and then wish for everything we want and it would be AWSOME.
If only poor Andhaira, if only.
We then go to visit the leader of the town, a Mr. Thrundarr.
:"Well met Andhaira! Me names is Thrundarr and I am the elder of this humble settlement."
"Good to see a hero. I want ye to slay a wight to prove your valour."
Fuck knows why he does, but oh well, we must obey our elders. A wight is farely rare in the CoC, luckily there's a guaranteed place crawling with them.
Next we stop off at the town church to sacrifice our spare stomafilla and food to our god, we also get our gauntlets of peace removed, thank god.
Afterwards we head back to the big room to restock, and while there we level up and also find a couple of books. Here's our spell collection now:
Looking pretty good, although the frost bolt castings are starting to run very low.
However, seeing as everything was going so well, it was inevitable that something bad would happen. Foolishly I tried to bolt down this vortex (angry explosive fucker) instead of casting darkness and beating it. However, the darkness could have killed the plants anyway.
That fire took down one of our herb gardens. Bastard.
On our way out of this floor we gain another level:
And we add Alchemy to the 100 skills
Unfortunately, Andhaira gorged himself on dwarven food, and his gain in weight shows:
Luckily we didn't lose anything bad, again, stupid me.
After this I decide to read my most popular scroll, which turns out to be scroll of identify (it usually is). Luckily it's also blessed so my whole inventory is identified.
The coolest thing is a tasty drink:
We dip the potion of gain attributes into holy water in order to bless it, then we down it
AHH YEAH
My metagamey instincts tell me we can now go explore a nice little pyramid nearby, we should have recieved an invitation to go visit, but it seems I didn't find it.
YELLOW WALLS
The whole pyramid is packed full of traps, we get hit by a few but nothing too bad
On the second floor we find an ordinary ring (that could mean something very very good) while clearing a swarm of jackals.
I'm so excited by the prospect of the ring that I identify it immediately, no luck unfortunately
We find the final staircase, after clumsily going through a few more traps. We've got a fairly hard battle ahead
The staircase magically moves away from us, i hate it when that happens!
Our gear is pretty nice though, we should be able to fuck these mummies over
Firstly we use Invisibility to give us a bit of added protection. But our invisibility is no match for the evil king mummy, who is very talkative.
:"Greetings, hero. Permit Us to welcome thee into our chambers. We have waited a long time for thee to arrive. Thy skin will make a nice new rapping worthy of Us. Prepare to release thy rights to thy skin."
He capitilises weird words, he must be really evil.
After our nice little chat, we get straight back to fighting, with a pesky golem fireing fire at us
Cowardly I cast darkness
And then even more cowardly I teleport away (just call me Abra)
We pick off a few mobs, but now we're up against Rehetep, the mummy lord himself:
Oh look, we killed [insert member's name here]. We pump the usual skills and pick the talent "Tough Skin", which adds 1 PV.
After constantly shaking off my attacks, I try to confuse the mummy with my ventriloquism
Didn't go too well.
However, by pure luck we stumble upon a clever solution. While my fire bolts don't manage to hurt Rehetep, it looks like my friend knows how to hurt him (and us)
Take that biatch. Repeat a couple of times and
He's vanquished, leaving us two artifacts. The Ancient Mummy Wrapping, which gives several useful intrinsics when worn, and The Ankh, pretty much the best amulet we'll find (probably)
Well that's it for this update, join Andhaira next time when he goes down that forboding tunnel once more
, update coming soon
Seven League Boots are the bestest boots in the game, they basically allow you to move much much faster (when blessed). You can outrun, comfortably, pretty much everything in the game with them on. No excuse for me to die now 
This game has a plot??? Metaplanes? This is practically like playing Torment. 
