How Jiyva stat shuffling works


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Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 689

Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54

Post Wednesday, 25th August 2021, 00:54

How Jiyva stat shuffling works

As long as you are following Jiyva and not under penance, there is a chance your stats will get shuffled every 100-300 aut. If a piety / 4 in 200 chance and a 1 in 4 chance both pass, Jiyva will try to shuffle your stats. The way Jiyva decides how to shuffle these stats is pretty complicated, so here goes:

Step 1: assign a "target" for each stat. To start with, the str target will be either 9 or the er of the character's body armour, whichever is higher, and the dex and int targets will be 9. If the character has more total stat points than the sum of these initial targets, then continue to the next steps, otherwise jump straight to "fuzzing" (see below).
Step 2: check the character's skills and assign int points based on them. Sum up all the magic associated skill levels, sum up all the other skill levels, then set the weight of other skills to other skills - (magic skills / 2) or 0, whichever is greater (in other words, if 2/3 or more of skill levels are in magic skills, no weight is given to other skills). Figure out what fraction of total skill weight is in magic skills and assign that fraction of the remaining stat points to int.
Step 3: Assign whatever's left to either str or dex. Strength weight is equal to 10 * er and dex weight is equal to 10 + dodging skill * 10. Assign the appropriate fraction of whatever stat points are left to each stat target. Yes, this means armour encumbrance of 0 always gives a strength target of 9 up to this point.
Step 4: "fuzzing". Every stat target is randomly adjusted by random2(5) - 2, ie up to 2 points in either direction.
Step 5: adjust the stats. For each pair of stats, check if adjusting them will bring the stats closer to the target values, will not drop either the current or base value of a stat below 1, and will not push a stat over the stat cap. Choose one pair of stats that meets the criteria at random and then shuffle the stat points.

Conclusions: lmao

But in all seriousness, Jiyva stat shuffling has the trifecta of being incredibly opaque, relatively easy to abuse if you know how it works, and extremely annoying (at high piety it goes off *constantly* and can mess with your spell failure rates, make you want to swap equipment prior to resting, etc). This has gone mostly ignored for a while, largely because Jiyva is hard to follow and also annoying in a bunch of other ways. Since Jiyva is somewhat likely to get reworked soon and I posted this in dungeon crawling advice rather than gdd I won't bother advocating any solution per se, but I won't miss this one if it goes.

For this message the author Hellmonk has received thanks: 4
andrew, nago, Nebukadnezar, petercordia

Blades Runner

Posts: 616

Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19

Post Friday, 27th August 2021, 20:19

Re: How Jiyva stat shuffling works

Thanks for the details!

To whomever might be doing the rework:
I like the idea of Jiyva, because it's potentially an alternative to combating malmutation without Zin (otherwise several builds not acceptable to Zin can't do a lot except quaff and get necromutation). It's also fun to have good mutations, though, if they are constantly changing (along with the stats), I can see the mess associated with shuffling gear.

What I don't like about Jiyva primarily is that a lot of the "good" mutations that can shuffle in and out force out gear in many instances, so they don't actually feel like good mutations. I don't recall changing gear all that often to address spell failure rates as Hellmonk mentioned, but I see it could be possible.

Secondly, and about equal in annoyance is all the item destruction. It's one thing if I willingly feed slimes for piety, but I detest the mechanism that randomly eats items, from somewhere on another level, out of sight. It's been some time since I last played around with Jiyva, so I'm a little foggy on the details, but from what I recall, there are two mechanisms at work: slimes wander the dungeon levels, occasionally eating stuff. On this count, I think it encourages all manner of weird things. For instance, I remember getting my pile of items dropped on top of a permanent teleport (using a -Tele item), so that slimes couldn't ever eat the items. It seemed to work, I don't know if there might be other tricks. The other mechanism seems like it's just a straight-up delete an item occasionally, with no associated logic for slimes to eat stuff. This is the thing I couldn't stop, but with a big enough pile, and that it eats non-artefacts, it was more of an annoyance vs. considering a slime eating your entire pile of strategic consumables at once--which still begs the question, why aren't things like brand weapon and enchant armour goldified (but that's another topic).

I don't have any well thought out ideas for a full rework. It could come out as something completely different. But if it's to stay mostly the same, maybe something along the lines of using abilities to let you change up your mutations-but only when you want to, so basically having an endless supply of mutation potions (and it's like Ely for healing potions). The same could be true for stats by only have them shuffled balance when an ability is actively used. Maybe that's not "chaotic" enough, but hey - we have Xom already filling that role.

Disclaimer: since I haven't used Jiyva in awhile, I could be forgetting prior changes already made with regard to mutations. Sorry if that is the case!

For this message the author svendre has received thanks:
petercordia

Slime Squisher

Posts: 419

Joined: Monday, 12th September 2016, 16:25

Post Tuesday, 7th September 2021, 11:29

Re: How Jiyva stat shuffling works

svendre wrote:I don't recall changing gear all that often to address spell failure rates as Hellmonk mentioned, but I see it could be possible.


I think the issue is more that Hypothetically Optimal Man would rest in armour with an EV intended to guide their stats the way they want, which might not be the armour they actually did any fighting in.

I remember on TrHu (where it took me ages to find heavy armour) I found J stealing all my strength very irritating.
Ascension reports with too many words since 2016.

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