[Anchor]

From the release notes: "Parchment and vellum are made from animal skin so change material composition and color for spellbooks with those descriptions from paper to leather; eating those books now breaks vegetarian conduct" (emphasis mine)

There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.

[logicprog]

Caves of Qud[1] is an amazing continuation of the NetHack/DF tradition in a modern game: incredible depth and attention to detail not only in it's mechanics and rules, but also in it's coherent worldbuilding and dialogue. It's also got a really great interface and cool, ZX Spectrum like graphics. The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).

Caves of Qud is still in active development, and available on Steam. If you do get it, make sure to go into the menus and enable the experimental UI if you want to see how awesome a Roguelike interface could be if it used graphics.

Also, if you're like me disable Permadeath in the debug menu, the first village you start at is the only non-procedurally-generated village in the game, so if I you don't want to retraverse it over and over, you need savegames.

Here's a Guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=48420...

[1]: https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640

[shrimp_emoji]

Caves of Qud is my favorite roguelike, hands down. It's like a mechanically-streamlined Crawl with fantastic writing and worldbuilding.

I'm 400 hours in but I still haven't beat the main quest. (But I also suck.)

>The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).

Or a grittier, LSDier Adventure Time

[logicprog]

> Or a grittier, LSDier Adventure Time

Oh boy, that's actually a fair description!

Any tips I should know about? I haven't even been able to complete either the watervine or the copper wire quests.

[shrimp_emoji]

Play Truekin. They're the best "meta" class; mutants are essentially hardcore mode. Truekins have higher base stats and won't aggro Templar when encountering them. I play with the same Ibul Praetorian build (code "AGOPPOHG11") exclusively, which I think is the easiest base class of the truekin classes. I named it Roland, after the Borderlands char. :3 (Ironically, though, I never use Deploy Turret; it's not that good outside of killholes.)

(As IRL) I only got as far as I have because this build is so inherently great: you start with great gear, a sweet desert rifle, you got blocking and sword skills for when the enemy closes in, and I take a focus on tinkering, which is one the most interesting gameplay aspects and quite powerful if you're smart/lucky (find good schematics and can afford them).

Red Rock and the Rust Wells should be a breeze with it. On other classes, they can be nightmarish.

Also, another tip: there's a convenient shortcut to Red Rock somewhere in Joppa. ;3 (I didn't discover this until embarrassingly recently.)

[mruts]

My favorite strat is taking domination and beguil. And then I choose my pokemon and level them up into a ferocious swoll monster.

[jdormit]

This is hands down the best way to play CoQ. And it really speaks a lot to the depth of the game that you can play the whole thing hopping from mind-controlled character to mind-controlled character and the gameplay just adapts...

[logicprog]

Muwahahah! Perfect. I'll try that next time I play.

[AnthonBerg]

I find Caves of Qud to be an especially good foreground for music. (Or background?) Its character of visuals and storytelling is somehow both strongly stylized and sparse. Serves as blank slate but also stimulates. Music resonates especially well with it I find. Impact of both game and music are multiplied.

[logicprog]

Agreed! I was going to mention the music but I know some people hate it so I figured mentioning it wouldn't really strengthen my case (:. Personally I think the very unique, heavily stylized art and music (especially the latter) add so much to the game. Plus, the dialog is actually really embedded in the world.

[AnthonBerg]

Yes!, I actually like the original music, but meant to express that it goes well with all music :)

[voldacar]

Caves of Qud is amazing! It's awesome to see it linked here

[chobobro]

I find that games that have that amazing intricacy are often passion projects by one developer or a very small team and have been in development for a long time, often decades. Besides NetHack and Dwarf Fortress, I would highly recommend Factorio to anyone with an interest in any kind of engineering and Aurora 4x to anyone who played Stellaris or other space 4x but wants an insane amount of complexity

[cwingrav]

Love those games too. Rimworld is the latest in my opinion. All the fun of Factorio and Dwarf Fortress plus a fairly good UI and space faring feel. Wasted/played too many hours. Make sure to use mods too. On steam.

[earenndil]

Personally, I could never get into rimworld because I didn't know what to do. Never /really/ got into DF either, but despite the awful UI it seemed much more like something that could really suck you in, that was really engrossing and fun to play.

[WalterGR]

> Make sure to use mods too.

Which?

[cwingrav]

Just search "rimworld mods" and you'll find lots of people talking about which to use. Most are quality of life improvements.

[nineteen999]

I'm going to mention "Oxygen not included" which I believe is by the same people as "Don't Starve". Power, gas and liquid flow has to be regulated across your entire base and it always eventually gets out of hand a bit like Dwarf Fortress. Either you run out of oxygen or are drowning in CO2 or Natural Gas, or your power sources are consumed before you can harness another one and everything grinds to a halt.

[logicprog]

I would classify Stellaris itself as having an insane amount of complexity, but compared to DF, NetHack and especially Aurora 4x, it is nothing!

[dmos62]

Thanks! This thread is a treasure trove of recommendations.

[haolez]

I prefer this one:

> Hero poly'd into rope golem form could choke headless or non-breathing monsters

Amazing level of detail!

[legohead]

> In Nethack, I’ve polymorphed myself into a cockatrice, layed cockatrice eggs, polymorphed back, picked them up (with gloves on) and used them as hand grenades of petrification.

> And to complete the chain of "the dev team thinks of everything": There's a luck penalty for breaking eggs you laid.

> The number of ways you can solve any specific problem is just ridiculous. I also love that a lot of them are pun based. (i.e., to make a quick escape you could drink a cursed potion of gain level, which will cause you to float up through the ceiling to the previous dungeon level instead of increasing your experience level, or removing cursed levitation boots by floating over a sink - which causes you to sink to the ground).

[anentropic]

I am curious about the techniques used by the code to cover all these bases

i.e. how much can be done from clever rules, how much has to be exhaustively enumerated, special cases etc

[fb03]

exhaustively enumerated. i mean. a lot.

you should dive into the Nethack source code. It's really well organized but in monster behavior code (mon.c), it's an 'if'-fest :)

[philsnow]

Nethack was the first large C codebase I ever got familiar with / tinkered with, and honestly I think it did some damage.

I mean it's great for what it is -- an organic codebase that evolved over decades (so there's a lot of performance/memory optimizations that make the code somewhat less clear like a lot of bitwise operations) and targeted a dizzying array of platforms (so there's a million #ifdefs that you have to climb through, many of them nested) and also compilers (so there's a legacy of really short file and function names that decrease clarity as well).

The attention to details is truly inspiring. But as a codebase, it's a mess.

On the other hand, Brogue [0]'s code is very clear and enjoyable to read.

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

[floatboth]

DCSS is also fun in some places: https://twitter.com/crawlcode

[sbmassey]

It sounds like a good use case for logic programming.

[chongli]

How about this one:

Succubus/incubus seduction might result in loss of levitation which in turn could drop the hero onto a trap that transports him/her elsewhere; seduction was proceeding as if nothing unusual had happened

That's just crazy! Wear ring/boots of levitation over a teleport trap and let the succubus remove them for you. Who does this?! Love it.

[ImJasonH]

Ooh, choking an ettin should do double damage then!