Fr: Disintegrate Useless Items

[One-Eyed Jack]

After identifying useless items, you still have to drop them or else they clutter your inventory until you hit the cap and throw away all the grey/red scrolls/etc. This is doubly bad for equipped bad jewellery because you have to uncurse it, unequip it, then drop it, and likely have to do so repeatedly because each stat ring/amulet needs to be checked individually.

Proposal: When useless consumables or jewellery is identified, it immediately crumbles to dust along with the stack it is part of. When useless cursed equipped jewellery is uncursed, it crumbles to dust, leaving the slot free.

This is a marginal boost to player power (saves a few auts) but keeps gameplay away from the inventory screen. This could arguably be compensated by extending "useless" to negative items whose utility is broadly degenerate (e.g. -int rings lowering spell succesd to scum for desirable miscast effects, rings of loudness, etc) which would be a marginal nerf.

Alternate solution: some kind of rc flag with autodrop. This might exist already (?)

[VeryAngryFelid]

I disagree about jewelry. Mu of Ash still may want to use ring of rn or rpois

[Siegurt]

Yeah, presently the things the game considers "useless" are only *mostly* useless.

You'd have to distinguish between "things that are actually completely never usable by this char ever" and "things that are probably useless, or maybe only useless because of something that might change later"

[Hellmonk]

It would be ideal to remove the identification minigame entirely, imo. It's spoilery, it devolves into a pointless annoyance after the earlygame, and I'm not convinced that the decisions it adds are all that interesting. Compensate for the player power buff by generating less consumables (especially wand charges) and overall balance should stay about the same. Cut the pointless items that only exist as ID minigame padding, like scrolls of random uselessness. Autopickup would be able to avoid bad/useless jewelry if you don't have to ID it, I think.

[Majang]

To a Jiyva-follower absolutely nothing is useless, as it is still good to feed the jellies.

[watertreatmentRL]

The fact that Ash always comes up in discussions of QoL improvements to the identification game says a lot about the flaws in its design, but obviously it would be possible to make Ash prevent disintegration of garbage items that are potentially useful only to Ash characters. There have been many good suggestions that would avoid this degenerate situation of holding a -3 int ring, for example an Ash conduct that is based on locking equipment slots rather than item curses, which offer major simplifications to the Ash conduct itself and clear the way for improvements of crawl's item game in general.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Yeah, presently the things the game considers "useless" are only *mostly* useless.

I would make a distinction between "more or less strictly useless" and "not strictly useless, but useless enough that the potential utility of the item is small enough that removing it doesn't meaningfully affect player choice." I think that denying the player the potential utility of the latter category is worth minimizing tedium and interface issues for gameplay in general. Maybe right now you want sometimes to hold on to x/y/z grey scrolls, but if you just couldn't be able to do that, it wouldn't really affect the game much.

I disagree about jewelry. Mu of Ash still may want to use ring of rn or rpois

Sure, they might want to. Should they be able to, if as a consequence every other player has to manually drop a bunch of useless items? Is this kind of small edge case really important enough to the balance of the game that it is worth preserving?

[johlstei]

I would go further and not even spawn things are are identifiably useless as you go through the dungeon. Why should a felid have to ever read lines of text like "you see a broad axe here"? Don't display or allow the player to interact with stuff their character can never use. I realize this would have to be a best effort thing since it's not always constant, it wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a start.

I think rings are actually one of the worst candidates, because of ash. Armor for draconians/octopodes, weapons/armor for felids, etc are truly not worth rendering at all.

[ZipZipskins]

What it comes down to for me is, with the current state of Crawl, I don't want the game deciding what's completely useless for my character.

The underlying problems (the ID and curse minigames) require more drastic steps than this band-aid to alter.

[johlstei]

What it comes down to for me is, with the current state of Crawl, I don't want the game deciding what's completely useless for my character.

The underlying problems (the ID and curse minigames) require more drastic steps than this band-aid to alter.

The game has already decided some things are completely useless and thus forbids you from equipping them. Why render those? We can step back and determine where the bounds of "useless" are later - some items are unambiguously useless. I understand the OP talks about identification and, while ID game does interact with the problem, you're explicitly wrong to refer to the curse/ID minigames as "the underlying problems". The problem would still be there without those minigames. ctrl+f . would still show heaps of unequippable junk to a felid. The presence of stuff in the dungeon that your character can never interact with in even the most trivial way is the problem.

[Siegurt]

What it comes down to for me is, with the current state of Crawl, I don't want the game deciding what's completely useless for my character.

The underlying problems (the ID and curse minigames) require more drastic steps than this band-aid to alter.

The game has already decided some things are completely useless and thus forbids you from equipping them. Why render those? We can step back and determine where the bounds of "useless" are later - some items are unambiguously useless. I understand the OP talks about identification and, while ID game does interact with the problem, you're explicitly wrong to refer to the curse/ID minigames as "the underlying problems". The problem would still be there without those minigames. ctrl+f . would still show heaps of unequippable junk to a felid. The presence of stuff in the dungeon that your character can never interact with in even the most trivial way is the problem.

But there are no such things if you include all trvial interactions. Presently, for example, as mentioned above, anything can be eaten by a jelly under jiyva and heal you.

If you define a lower threshold for what is too trivial, then the interactions below that threshold need to be eliminated as possibilities first. And a lot of those "trivial" interactions have strong proponents. (Moreover who gets to decide which interactions are too trivial to keep around?)

[VeryAngryFelid]

This jiyva feature is bad because it encourages boring behavior - picking up stackable items like missiles and potions/scrolls.
I hope it willbe removed eventually

[watertreatmentRL]

Jiyva is another great example of a god design compounding design flaws and creating inertia against addressing them. There is really no reason Jiyva's healing and piety growth have to be bound to item destruction by jellies other than that at some point in the distant past someone thought that would be a "cute" idea.

[johlstei]

That's a pretty good counterexample. I guess just letting jellies eat even things that are not displayed to you would address it though - you still don't have to be able to see the items or pick them up. I don't think not being able to place junk for intentional jiyva healing would be a bad change - if anything sounds like removing optimal tedium to me.

Another weird example is doors, you can currently use junk items to block doors, I don't know if that's worthwhile or even ever advantageous but it's something I should mention. It does mean there's a clear distinction between items that are not displayed and items that don't exist. Do vault wardens shunt items out of the way just like they shunt you?

Since there's no more weight, you could turn useless items into a blanket "junk item" item. Jiyva (I assume?) doesn't care what sort of item it is, and neither should you if you can never use it. This is not nearly as elegant as not showing them at all but at least it would let us start the process of figuring out when and under what conditions a given item is truly junk.

[One-Eyed Jack]

If you define a lower threshold for what is too trivial, then the interactions below that threshold need to be eliminated as possibilities first. And a lot of those "trivial" interactions have strong proponents.

I was speaking in broad terms only with no specialized definition of "uselessness," which is distinct from grey items (I was perhaps not explicit enough about this.) "Useless" items for me include, most egregiously, negative stat items (ring of foo -x, slaying, protection, amulet of reflection -x, amulet of inaccuracy) and trap/filler consumables (scroll of noise, scroll of random uselessness.) I think it's notable that many items of both categories (e.g. rings of hunger, scrolls of paper, potions of poison) have already been removed.

(I was not talking about e.g. halberds on felids or bardings because you can just ignore them completely - they probably shouldn't exist, but I don't have to interact with them so it's more cosmetic than anything.)

Because of the complexity of crawl, some or all of these items have fringe uses - i.e., they are not strictly useless. Some items that are prima facie useless (e.g. ring of teleportation) are even plausibly useful in circumstances that aren't fringe hypotheticals, even if they're generally negative. I would say (and this is a separate, distinct argument that I'm not going to make here) that such items should be balanced from the ground-up to offer useful choices in many games, as opposed to being intended (presumably) as solely negative items and having potential utility is a byproduct of unforeseen scenarios.

With regards to "thresholds," it seems to me that the threshold should be evaluated on the backdrop of a gradient balancing the depth afforded by having items or mechanics that potentially contribute to meaningful player decisions with the additional investment of mental energy needed to effectively master, catalogue, and understand them. If something is useful one out of ten thousand games, and is generated and autopicked-up one out of ten, you have a problem (these numbers are arbitrary.) You can either make it more useful or generate it less or never.

Vis-a-vis eliminating the interactions of elements that are considered "too trivial," I don't see why a bad solution would be to just disallow the player from interacting with them (which disintegration would accomplish.) Items like negative stat rings and the robe of misfortune exist because they give the id minigame some kind of meaning (whether or not they are successful at that.) If all items were identified by default, how often would players pick up rings of loudness or amulets of reflection -4? Surely they would be removed; it wouldn't make sense keep them in the game solely for the fringe utility that they potentially exhibit. Yet in the current game, once they have finished their role in the id minigame, they still exist and need to be manually disposed of.

(Moreover who gets to decide which interactions are too trivial to keep around?)

Who gets to decide whether Mountain Dwarves are interesting enough to occupy design space?

[Shtopit]

I think that greyed items due to species (not acquired mutation) should not even appear. Why? Because of how stashes work in this game, obscuring what's beneath and making the game slower.

It's true, Jiyva uses this kind of junk. But Jiyva has a number of problems, and I don't think she can be taken as an example (one being that she's absurdly heavy on my machine; other game-related ones are the message spam, the weird shapeshifter behaviour, and the way in which transient mutations just don't work well gamewise). Besides, the interesting thing about her is that she reduces the number of useful items you find and pick up. Which are those which you didn't leave lying around in the previous levels.
Jiyva could simply give increased piety for item if your character has many useless item categories (e.g. felid) and so leads to decreased total of generated items.

I have said a number of times that two steps identify is bad for the game; it's now almost gone for wands, but it's still there for rings, I believe. So, if you identify a ring of intelligence, you will have to identify all other rings of intelligence to know their score. This is probably to allow cursed items a faint trace of relevance. The result, however, is that, once you have a +3 or +4 ring, you find yourself tired and uninterested, checking out rings you expect to be inferior to the ones you have. It would be better if, once you have found two rings of the same attribute, all nonart rings of that same attribute that would be generated on the floor with a score lower or equal to the lower one of the two you found simply are not generated. So you have less stops, less clutter, less uninteresting actions.

I think that this would be OK for Ashen, too.

[duvessa]

Changing which items appear based on species is bad because it makes it harder for unspoiled players to figure out how common items are. They'd get 50 wins without ever realizing that bardings even exist, unless they only play nagas and centaurs, in which case it will only take about 10 wins before they find a barding for the first time

[le_nerd]

There is also the thing that Octopodes currently cannot get armour treasure troves, a change that I strongly objected to. If that ever gets reversed, octopodes will sometimes have need for "useless" armour.

[Shtopit]

Changing which items appear based on species is bad because it makes it harder for unspoiled players to figure out how common items are. They'd get 50 wins without ever realizing that bardings even exist, unless they only play nagas and centaurs, in which case it will only take about 10 wins before they find a barding for the first time

This seems to me more of a problem with designing species one of whose advantages consists of exclusively usable, vanishingly rare items, and in how the species are described to the player (no indication of being exclusively able to use certain items, for example). "Centaurs may find rare, armoured bardings suiting their body".

Naga and Centaurs probably also are the only two species having species-tailored items. All other non-universal items can be seen through many other species -- potions of mutation, sources of blink, drain, teleport, rage, armour, weapons. So, unless you are hell-bent on a few races, you are likely to learn their distribution anyway. Trolls and ogres also can use a line like "they can wield the giant clubs used by the larger denizens of the dungeon".