The Tavern

I wanted to try out playing a Vinestalker Monk. After dying 10 times I thought it might get some inspiration from this guy: http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/4t ... 234357.txt He did well in a tournament.

He reached UC skill 6 by turn 741?? How is that even possible? I just got UC 6 in turn 3164 and I was pretty proud of that. I only train Fighting, UC and Dodging (no focus). Am I down a fundamentally wrong path?

For completeness sake my char:

A monk starts with UC 4. That is 500 skill points. VS has aptitude 0 in UC, so that makes it 500 skill points for your particular character as well. UC 6 is 1050 skill points, so you need another 550 skill points. 550 XP is between level 7 and 8. Now skill points and epereince points do not correlate 1:1, but in the early game it's close enough that we aren't going to worry about it. So if you only train UC, then you will get to UC 6 at around XL 7.5 or so. But if you put only 33% of your XP towards UC, then to get the 550 skill points you need 1650 XP, and that is about XL 8.5.

Chances are he doesn't rest as much, either. I know that when I watch expert players online they seem insanely foolhardy because thy explore with way more damage or drained MP than I deem prudent. Permafood and turncount are not issues, but I do think that I get more piety decay than they do. And in time I expect I'll learn better when I really need to rest and when it's okay to heal while exploring.

That game is a speedrun - and one of the fastest ever done.
I am not expert in speedrunning, but certainly it requires, among various things, to take high risks and made suboptimal choices, in comparison to a normal game where the aim is to maximize the chance of victory without considering the turncount.
Because of that I suggest to not follow sctrictly whatever 4thArraOfDagon did in that run, because what works and it's necessary for a speedrun, it's often kinda bad for a normal game.

Btw, he got UC to 6 by turn 741 because it was already on floor 5 and beyond by that time. Early monsters provides very little experience, in comparison of some xp-pinata which appears few floors later, like an Ogre. However, it's much safer and useful for learning from mistake, for a new player, to fight "low"-risk, low-reward monster rather than diving and dying 99 times out 100 against a single exp-rich, deadly monster.

About your skill training: fundamentally you're right. Personally, I prefer to train early on only melee skill - UC in this case - because the rewards of fighting and dodging are lower; anyway it's not wrong to just keep active those three skills, you aren't crippling or making your game particularly harder.
However, with VS I'd suggest to train a bit of spellcasting - 5ish is fine - early on, even before fighting or dodging, in order to increase your mp reserve, because that drastically increase char's strength. This because mp are pretty much hp for a VS, so it's good to have a good reserve of it, especially because it can be filled again while meleeing.

Generally speaking VS are among the strongest race: they're squishy when take lot of damage per turn and can bite back, but as long as they can bite enough to offset the damage they take in same turn they're very sturdy.
This means to apply the same good tactics as ever: lure enemies to separate packs, fight one enemy at time, don't rush to ranged threat but let them approach you breaking LOS via corners, avoid big scary monsters, etc.

I'd have to watch the ttyrec, but I assume the frowny face was because he let it get adjacent, but instead of dying (a probable outcome for an XL1 VSMo), he killed it and went from XL1 to 5. Also note that he was on D:4 in less than 250 turns, more than 2,000 turns before your character got there.

I found VS a little tricky to figure out at first, but that's mostly because until innate regen and antimagic bite start really picking up, they're frail and must be babied a bit. Watch out for orc priests and ogres, and remember to run away before you get in danger, not after. nago's trick with the spellcasting training sounds interesting; I've never seen anybody do that, but it does sound promising.

Fascinating...
What's a ttyrec? And where can I find it? Looking at these morgue files sometimes makes me wonder what happened.

Speedruns are, by design, bad examples to follow if your goal is to win an individual game. It's impossible to get anywhere near the highest scores and simultaneously have a very high expected winrate.

Interesting trick wonder if it works, I'd normally advice to train fighting over spellcasting to 5 with a monk tho, especially early
I do however train evo a lot earlier and longer on melee Vs then on other species. Free hp and ranged solution package deal

A ttyrec is like the video of the game, but for console version...

To watch it, just join the IRC channel ##crawl (on freenode) and type

Edit : you'll notice that he found his endgame robe on turn 169 :p

No matter if novice or master
No matter if fighter or caster
No matter how cunning
And fast you are running
4thArraOfDagon is faster!

It's not hard at all, if that's what you're going for:

Took me two tries and the first one only didn't work because I blundered into the wrong place. "Unarmed to level 6 by turn 741" is *not* the impressive part of that morgue.

The secret is, don't explore, just go down the stairs and be powerful enough to kill what you find there, or smart enough to run away.

How the heck did a XL1 kill an ogre?!

Crawl combat is very random.

Holy shit, that limerick is awesome!

Since this character build relies on getting a lucky drop of statue form asap and casting it as soon as possible, the body armor you use doesn't really matter much. My own attempt at this build was far less impressive (40k turns) but still fast enough that I consider it impressive, even if it is no where near the record

4th learned statue form on D:11 and first cast it (3 times) in the level 10-12 range, so I assume that's around level 12. Interestingly, he only casts it between 34 and 38 times for each of the three level buckets until the 25-27 bucket. In other words, it's only taking him about 35 "serious" fights to gain three levels, that's how quickly he's diving. My values for those buckets range from 30 to 69; the 30 is for the first bucket when I might no have quite yet had statue form online for the whole level range. The 69 one shows I was clearly taking too long and fighting too much for those levels...