The Tavern

Having just skinned a steam dragon on D:9 and enchanted the hide I was disappointed to notice that the item description of the armour says "You found it on level 9 of the Dungeon." Could it say "You made it on level 9 of the Dungeon" instead?
(Or something like that.)

A minor thing and probably not worth a lot of coding effort, but just in case it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Is this actually better? it seems like where you enchant armour is very arbitrary, and less meaningful than where you found the hide originally. (not that either is incredibly important information!)

I'd want the level where I got the hide.

Well, if it would be possible, I'd like to have both :) But actually, the point was more that I'd like it to be shown that I made the armour and did not find it.

(And I don't usually wear the hide before it's made into armour. Therefore, it's also relevant to know when the armour was made.)

"You made it yourself from a hide you found on level 9 of the Dungeon. What interesting needlework!"

You made it from Xtahua's hide.

PETA - expect us

A question to anyone in this thread who prefers the existing behavior of displaying the level where you originally picked up the hide:

Why?


There are only a few use cases that I can think of where displaying pickup location is interesting to the player:
1) You're autoexploring, and autopickup grabs something without you noticing. You check your inventory later, and are like "Woah, where did this come from?"
2) You got something from ?acquirement or as a god gift. People love to bash on the -2, -2 club of Okawaru's Attic (gifted to you in level 27 of the Dungeon).
3) You picked up something neat like a fixedart, a randart, or a particularly terrible randart. See above.

Have I forgotten something? Is there another case where players like to see where their items came from?


To me, under these conditions, displaying pickup location of hides seems pointless to begin with. They aren't particularly interesting items -- they're just mundane drops from any of the plethora of dragons or trolls that you encounter by late midgame. There is precedent here in Crawl's code; it doesn't show the pickup location of every potion or sling bullet or +0 hat. Are hides rare enough drops that they are standing out in players' minds as a milestone event within a game?


TLA/*DA is slightly different: If you've found or crafted an early hide armour, it might feel interesting to have that noted on the item. At least for this case, players might be viewing the armour with some excitement, similar to an early acquirement or god gift. To my mind, the OP's suggestion seemed pretty straightforward.

Evidently my interpretation doesn't follow the sentiment expressed in this thread, though, hence my question: What do people get out of seeing the pickup location listed on hides?


(As PF has said, this is a pretty unimportant issue. I'm just surprised to see defense of the existing behavior!)

Many types of hide are pretty rare, especially earlier on. Troll hide is the only universally common type; some dragon types become common later, but that still means it's potentially at least a little interesting to see "cool, i got this fire dragon hide on d:5". The place that you crafted the armour seems pretty strictly less interesting than that, to me.

"You made it on level 9 of the Dungeon from the hide, which you found on level 5 of the Dungeon."

could use a prop to do that, ya