Please stop generating items under plants.

[le_nerd]

Problem:
Mostly prominent in lair, valuable items on autopickup like gold, scrolls, ammunition etc gets generated under plants. Current behaviour is to get a message after pressing o --> "level explored, could not reach some items" . Then one has to manually search for the items in question, travel there, destroy the plant etc. Boring+tedious.

Solutions:
The easiest would be to no longer generate items under plants.
Also possible: generate a message on the spot, while standing beside the plant "there is an item under a plant nearby." This still leaves the manual destruction of the plant, but takes away the search.

[Pollen_Golem]

I did not even know that the way to find out if some items were generated under plants is to simply press o and see it the message "level explored, could not reach some items" pops up.

[bcadren]

It would also help if the HD and AC of plants changed over time...so it wouldn't take so long to hack through them early in the game...

  Code:

plant (P) | Spd: 0 | HD: 10 | HP: 43-70 | AC/EV: 10/0 | plant, unbreathing | Res: magic(immune), poison, drown, neg+++, torm | XP: 0 | Sz: small | Int: brainless.

is insanely robust at lair time.

Even the strongest enemy at the time is nowhere near that defense level:

  Code:

komodo dragon (l) | Spd: 10 (swim: 60%) | HD: 8 | HP: 31-56 | AC/EV: 7/8 | Dam: 34 | amphibious, cold-blooded | Res: magic(40), drown | XP: 360 | Sz: Large | Int: animal.

[Siegurt]

I did not even know that the way to find out if some items were generated under plants is to simply press o and see it the message "level explored, could not reach some items" pops up.

Note that the message comes up only if the items in question are ones you would auto-pickup with your current auto-pickup settings

[Siegurt]

Also, are we sure this actually happens? I don't recall ever seen an item I didn't put (throw) there under a plant, is it possibly a new bug or something?

[duvessa]

Firewood should never be randomly generated. What purpose does putting 500 plants on lair level serve other than annoying the player?

[byrel]

I don't recall it in my last few games but it has been there since at least 0.13. Could have been fixed recently and I wouldn't know.

[le_nerd]

Nah, I just had it happen in trunk on CDO, hence the post. 49 gold or something. And it has existed since at least 0.10, I remember getting a necronomicon after having entered lair for the very first time and thought it was super cool to get this mighty book under a plant, like it was a hidden treasure.

[bcadren]

Firewood should never be randomly generated. What purpose does putting 500 plants on lair level serve other than annoying the player?

the positioning game with plants is different than the positioning game with rock, stone or trees; in that you can see through the plants and enemies can eventually destroy them to get to you. The lair placement of plants is WAY too random for this to actually work well, but that is a real reason for plant placement.

[Zooty]

Firewood should never be randomly generated. What purpose does putting 500 plants on lair level serve other than annoying the player?

Fedhas

[duvessa]

oh i see, lair needs plants because it isn't easy enough without them and the most overpowered god in the game isn't good enough without them

[Berder]

The god of the dungeon's plants doesn't make much sense if the dungeon doesn't have any plants.

Plants aren't really a problem or something that you usually have to think about at all - unless you're looking for a chokepoint in which case they're useful. Stop generating items under them, and maybe prevent them from entirely blocking off areas so you have to cut them down, but keep the majority of them.

[Hurkyl]

Plants aren't really a problem or something that you usually have to think about at all

... unless you are trying to zap something and the autotargetter decides to try and zap through the plant instead.

[duvessa]

The god of the dungeon's plants doesn't make much sense if the dungeon doesn't have any plants.

cheibriados is the god of deliberation but the dungeon doesnt have any deliberation in it
qazlal is the god of tempests but the dungeon doesnt have any tempests in it until qazlal makes them
so i think fedhas can be the god of plants, and have an ability to make plants, without the dungeon being full of plants already

Plants aren't really a problem or something that you usually have to think about at all - unless you're looking for a chokepoint in which case they're useful.

"plants aren't disruptive unless you have better tactics than a mosquito, in which case they are"

[bel]

About the OP, I am also not sure if this happens. The only time I can think of is when I shoot an arrow and it lands under the plant.

As to plants, Fedhas can of course take a nerf, but it would be weird if lair didn't have any plants. I have never had any problem with plants myself. They provide an interesting resource for Fedhas games, so why not?

[bel]

Ok, I can confirm that this happens. Just found a meat ration under a plant.

[Pollen_Golem]

About the OP, I am also not sure if this happens.

It can be hard to notice, though. You can obliviously go through a few games where artifact weapons lie below plants. Autoexplore doesn't even want to pick them up.

[wheals]

There's code to prevent this from happening -- specifically, items generation (which is basically the last step in level generation) prevents items from being generated under plants. I guess what's going on is that plants are generated on top of items that were originally placed in vaults, which happens in an earlier step.

[archaeo]

It may also be possible that plants are spawning on top of items after the initial map generation, something I didn't know happened until crate pointed it out on IRC following a player getting trapped in the Elf:3 vault when a mushroom spawned in the hallway as he was clearing it.

[byrel]

Wait, normal, nonwandering mushrooms spawn? I had no idea.

[wheals]

Fungi can spawn over time in Orc, Elf, and Swamp; plants can spawn over time in Swamp. (Lair gets its plants/fungi in level generation, in a step right after vaults are placed.)

[Chicken]

Plants can be kind of cool if you start out as an air elementalist and the first level is ring upon ring of plants, surrounded by Nasty Evil Monsters like Hobgoblins, and you blast away through them with your shock spell and rest and take them out before they can reach you. But after that there tends to be a big what's the point factor. Maybe if snakes could hide in the plants and be unseen even with seeinvis, and attack you by surprise, it'd be interesting. Tree nymphs might move effortlessly and unseen through the forests and attack out of the solid trees, come to think of it. Once they attack, you should get to see them until they move again.