The Tavern

So, I know jack diddly about coding, but I came up with this vault idea, clumsily created it in wizmode, and figured I should share it since it's clearly the greatest contribution to Crawl since the Orb of Zot. Please feel free to move the thread if this isn't the appropriate place!

The idea is a structure that can only be navigated via passwall(handily supplied via the yellow book outside the vault). The vault contains many potentially dangerous situations which are exacerbated by close-quarters and the reliance on a teleport or a Passwall to escape. The Rock Worms(which should've been in a neat little ring) harry the player from the walls as they deal with the other scenarios, and ideally the worms would not go any further than the exterior stone walls of the vault(perhaps a Metal exterior?), making them a constant nuisance unless they can be lured out of the walls.

There is some choice in how to proceed through the vault, but the meddling rockworms and delay on passwall movement should make the passwall direction choice not something easily backed out of.

The clear stone windows hopefully will foreshadow to a player that nasty monsters and traps will be between the player and the glimpsed treasure, and the scroll of magic mapping surrounded by rockworms is intended to be a hint to the player to use that item to discover the Zot-Trapped dead ends and overall layout. The bloodstains on the Zot-trapped wall on the bottom may be another possible clue, but are only from when I stabbed a rock worm, which is why there aren't any at the second Zot closet.

I think a lot could be done with a passwall maze of mini-vaults,certainly much more than my feeble attempt, especially if made bigger.

I like the idea, it sounds like a lot of fun, although there is something it absolutely needs if not already done: randomization. Is the maze different each time you play? If not, it would be considered spoilery.

(also, where is the des file?)

I think puzzle-type vaults of this sort have a place in Crawl (we can make them arbitrarily rare, if need be). As mentioned already: please provide the des file, unless you intend to work on it and are just asking for feedback. And yes, there should be randomisation in the end (perhaps most easily achieved with SUBVAULTS but for the first version, that's not necessary).

Cool stuff!

@pubby
He said it was clumsily made in wizmode.
I might try coding it up. Would probably have to make segments of the maze subvaults to add at least some randomization.

That better damn well be an ARTEFACT wizard hat and an ARTEFACT sabre after all THAT crap.

Well, it is a artifact hat, but I'm afraid that blade is just a boring old +1000 Sabre of Freezing, Wizmode standard issue

I don't have a des file, but I'm glad the concept tickled some fancies. My actual blueprints are utterly irrelevant so long as the concept is good, and I really like the idea of randomization. Would that just be in terms of layout, or would different monsters be selected as well? The watery Kraken room, for example, is designed to force a (non-flying) character into either standing in shallow water next to the "exit" or standing on the exposed dry ground where lots of tentacles can reach them, so that room wouldn't work as well with only a crystal golem, for example.

Putting a zot trap on the other side of a wall with no warnign like that is a bad idea. A tentacled monstrosity that the player is dumped right next to is even worse (you'll get a free turn if you passwall, but good luck getting out). You must not do things like this if the positions are fixed, and even if it's randomized, it's a bad idea to use zot traps this way in general.

The rock worms will not work. Even with a metal exterior, there will be space for the player to enter/exit the vault, and thus the best strategy will be to just retreat when you see the rock worms, and lure them outside the vault into the open. This is not challenging or interesting.

Giving away passwall like this won't make many players actually use it here. There are a lot of ways of getting through walls. Digging is the best, passwall is the worst (it's slow and you need to be adjacent to it), and there are a bunch of spells/items that fall somewhere in between those. Outside of the early game, players are very likely to have one of those available to them.

I think vaults which require you to dig (or otherwise bypass walls) are fine, as long as it's obvious to players that they can do that. But I don't think it's possible to design it for passwall specifically unless you do some extremely convoluted stuff.

Maze-like layouts are also fine, but it should always be designed with combat in mind. Zot traps at dead ends aren't interesting. Fights with monsters are, though. Think about which enemies work well in tight spaces. Rock worms generally do not, for example: they need a combination of narrow corridors and open spaces in order to work well, otherwise you can't fight them properly.

@Evilmike
I couldn't think of any other trap that would provoke much of a response besides "5," but I guess hidden Zots are just an unfair "Screw you" to the player.

I imagined the rockworms not being a combat encounter so much as an environmental hazard of the vault itself. You don't fight them, they merely worsen the actual encounters and prevent resting after every fight. If the AI won't use these tactics, however, I guess the idea is a bust.

An earlier design of the vault tried to set it up so that digging instead of passwalling through the walls would expose the player to a central Orange Crystal Statue, but then it just became a matter of Disintegration. I'm not opposed to players finding alternate completion methods to the vault, so long as those methods don't utterly trivialize it. Perhaps a design could discourage digging by having hidden statues/nasty monsters hidden in rock at the end of Dig trajectories. That's kinda convoluted, but it doesn't hurt the base vault design beyond having thicker walls to house the "Trap" monsters. But then, that might be considered another spoilery thing...


I had hoped that the clear window looking at the monster filled room near the entrance foreshadowed the potential horrors waiting within, such as landing near a tentacled monstrosity. Is the warning insufficient compared to the danger, or is it simply penalizing certain builds too heavily? Perhaps a Crystal Golem would be a more appropriate threat to force adjacency with? Many times, this vault's denizens are nothing but slow non-threats, so I was hoping that forcing melee might be interesting for characters used to long, safe battles- if usual tactics fail, its up to the player to improvise.

The concept of a layout designed for passwalling could work better as a Sprint or even a portal vault, where you can bend the rules a bit. This would be best as a Sprint where you can be very controlling about what tools the player has at their disposal.

I don't know the Crawl codebase, but I know quite a bit about maze-generating and maze-solving algorithms.

(This is me, though it's in Python not C++: https://github.com/theJollySin/mazelib)

If there is some interest, I could certainly throw my hand in on something like this and add maze-centric vaults or whatever to the game.

Just an offer. Love the game.