The Tavern

Minotaur beef jerky!

4x4, 5x5 or so room filled with bats on D2

five

uterus

e: should have blood fountains 3% of the time, tbh

Pre-nerf Profane Halls

Room with a corpse with a whip and a bunch of snakes.

I changed my answer.

I just found (for the first time) one with a bunch of large rocks covering some orc corpses. That was pretty great.

Ring of lava, in Lair, with fire monsters and a bunch of loot inside the "caldera". Cool look, and cool little puzzle to solve.

I didn't have flight pot or a surfeit of blink scrolls, so I stripped nekkid and slowly apported all the items despite a 30% fail rate.

It was originally a lot more graphic but gamma made me edit it.

nrook_zot_tub

You have to admit it does look better without the equivalent of the vaginal canal.

uniq_duvessa

all other vaults are bad

Xom sheep.

The shop surrounded by clouds that sell conjurations and explosive large rocks.

The room with bugs, snakes, mushrooms and webs that has a guaranteed "good weapon" in it and often spawns in early dungeon. Great source of executioner axes, eveningstars, I've gotten the singing sword from it once too.

Edit: Just got it, woop woop. Had a plain eveningstar.

That´s the vault which taught me singing sword is a meh weapon at best!

Inviato dal mio hi6210sft utilizzando Tapatalk

I'm not sure I've ever found that in game, but that is great!

The hexagons? one that appears in D:20+. It's like a bunch of adjacent circular or hexagonal rooms of varying sizes at the top of the map.

I never bothered to actually find out the name of that one, but I've always called it "The singing sword vault." I've found the singing sword in it probably about 2/3 of the times I've seen it. IIRC, the name has something to do with blacksmiths, but I can't remember what.

Only 3%?

The vault with a bunch of rats guarding cheese pizza. Admittedly it didn't fair too well in the food reform and will need a rework when food is removed.

Annoying vault: Ru altar with handicapped creatures. That hopgob always stay paralyzed, it breaks autoexplore and TSO prevents me from killing it!

Thats insteresting, what happens if you read fog and throw a stone in the paralyzed creature's direction?

Would it hurt SO MUCH to have cheese for just one vault? I like single-vault specific items. I'd like Crazy Yiuf's hammers back, too.

FR: remove jerky, call pizza cheese, replace maces with hammers

Holy Pan! Disco Pan!

I'd love that, but it's not worth bickering over bikeshed

On topic: I like the little altar flavour vaults: book burning for Trog, human sacrifice for Yredelemnul, Ashenzari Lair vision etc.

Can I change my answer again to Xom flaming sheep vault?

1. grunt's Profane Halls - This vault is a treat every time it is generated, which is admittedly quite often. It combines the three golden F's of vault-making into the perfect experience: Flavor, Fortune, and Fun. It has an enjoyable and consistent theme, it has a bunch of cool loot, and it's a fun challenge no matter what kind of character you are rolling. 10/10.



2. minmay's River - Ah yes, the only Tartarus ending that doesn't make you want to pull your teeth out with a shotgun. It's starts out with a hellish labyrinth before leading to a spooky river crossing, at which point you arrive at the spiral-y house of Ereshkigal. The layout has a variety of close and long quarters combat and a layout that manages to convey the unnerving nature of the afterlife. Well done.



3. Zaba and due's Hidden Volcano Bunker - This may not be considered a "good" vault by a distinguished vault coinesseur, but whenever I see it I can't help but get caught up in it's charm. Some enterprising ne'erdowells set up shop in a volcano, installing some quaint windows and agriculture and using their spare toenails to make golems to guard their stash. So kawaii.



4. kb's Arrival Jail - A delightfully meta way to introduce the player to the dungeon, this entry vault has a living specimen from each of the player species. I can only imagine what is going through those poor souls' heads as some level 1 scrublet wanders his way into his future hell.



5. hangedman's Spin Cycle - This depths encompass vault is an example of what hangedman can do when he puts his insane mind to it. It has a really awesome layout, a good assortment of challenging enemies, and a nice aesthetic with the central chamber. Who would have thought a washing machine would make such a good vault.

excellent username/post combo

I liked this vault: http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=commitdiff;h=1042b8806e4d27894cfffaa6b7473c83dbb65588;hp=beff17fe7e720ee606ba22e4ddcac5e12d845ec6

To really work that vault needed some glass walls and runed doors so the player actually sees the party. I got it once and all of the inhabitants charged out at me (past a fork in a corridor) before I even saw the vault.

It could probably also do with some custom monster names. Instead of a human with a robe, make him a "bartender" with a robe, etc.

owned

I never gotten the theme of the vault, I admit, and reading the description, I never would by myself. It's a bad vault in that regard. I just liked meeting all the low-level uniques that didn't generate otherwise in Vaults. I know other players liked it too, every time a new player would get that vault they'd post a screenshot of it.

I like the pakellas vaults that have stuff fighting each other.

Everyone knows castle vaults are the best vaults. Love the one in depths that's full of giants and dragons

trove_garden
Ruined though.

How lame, the whole point of that trove was to teach people that troves aren't worth it.

don't worry, dragon slaying trove still exists
river trove just didn't try to give you good items
dragon slaying trove explicitly gives you items that will not be useful, it actually tries to prevent almost all potentially-useful items from being part of its loot

I had fun making those. There's one with a monster fighting an orange crystal statue, and one with monster fighting a lightning spire. When I tested it with each monster getting like 20 fights, you'll never guess which of the following monsters went undefeated versus the spire:





I'm curious crate, are there any vaults that you genuinely like in crawl, or if there are several, any common theme to the ones you like?

I like the nethack castle vaults in Depths

I like all nethack vaults.

Especially sokoban.

There are only a few that I really like.

Ambush vaults containing all three < are good (must contain all three <, rip oldsnake ending, you are missed since you were the best but are now ruined), though I'm not sure those happen much (at all?) any more. It's not as good if the vault is bigger than the player LOS upon entering the floor (avoid spoilers). Ambush vaults containing fewer < are okay but really they should just have all three of them since otherwise the ambush is not very ambushy.

v:5 is fun for similar reasons. Some of the quadrants are spoilery but at least it is an obviously good place to use ?mapping anyway so you can see the terrain, and the goodness of terrain (for the player) has a strong negative correlation with the dangerousness of the vault so it's not too bad.

Portal "vaults" could be pretty cool if they weren't actually vaults, but I guess that is sort of not the answer you want.

Vaults that make me tempted to look up the vault description in the .des file are bad, in general. Encompass vaults are really bad, smaller ones can have redeeming factors especially if they place few or no enemies (I still might want to look them up to make sure they don't place enemies, but that's because the other vaults in the game place enemies, so it's not directly the vault's fault).

Vaults containing lava are the worst thing ever and should be removed from crawl until lava no longer makes random smoke clouds because wow is it ever "fun" to prevent the player from using autoexplore (no, autoexploring into multiple hellions or multiple orc priests or whatever is not an acceptable alternative). Shallow water is bad too, but at least you can prevent autoexplore from doing dangerous things in that case, it just comes at the cost of potentially breaking autotravel (in my current CAO game I'm pretty sure I cannot autotravel between orc and lair because I got a shallow water pools vault on the same floor as lair, and it actually cuts off the stairs). No, autoexploring into shallow water is not an acceptable fix for the vaults.

I don't complain about vaults in general much because I know they are not going away and I can understand why, even if I don't agree, so it's really mostly just whining at this point (since it won't accomplish anything). But you did ask.

The dragonslaying trove comment is mainly just me being mad since I've actually gotten it at least once and it was very memorable because my god the loot is terrrrrrrrible. I don't understand why it exists, since it is actually worse than a trove mimic, even a trove mimic that you didn't find until you were ready to pay to enter the trove. That particular vault is very deserving of complaints, especially since a trove that had better loot was recently improved for having loot that was too bad.

If you never got dragon-slaying trove but got river trove you might think I'm joking, but I'm actually not, especially since it can't even give good arrows/bolts any more since those don't exist.

dragon trove (trove_hunter_1) will on average give maybe two pieces of good_item armour, which is... something? agreed it doesn't look very good. it's apparently one of the oldest troves, added as part of the first set.

trivia: it originally had a chance of giving "hand crossbow good_item" and/or "dart good_item"

damn kraken killed them all !


edit: too bad I didn't record vault full with monsters, just started a game saw vault full of dudes, went to explore floor and when I came back all were dead

I like the vault with a Gozag altar, lots of gold and some shops that have especially high prices.

I don't want it to go to gammafunk's head but I really like that one Pakellas overflow vault with the lightning rod and the ood monster, I always like to hang out and see who wins.

It's not the only one, there are other types of "experiments" Pakellas conducts, and yes, they are a very nice touch indeed.

The Platinum Reserve is a reference to the Webcomic Achewood, which is the greatest thing in the whole world.

I've only ever seen the lightning spire one! But yeah, rereading the thread I see more of them too. Nice, they're a lot of fun.