The Tavern

Currently, once every few games you need to press ctrl-a. (this turns autopickup back on)

I noticed when teaching people that this caused confusion, they didn't realize they were not picking stuff up anymore and also didn't know how to fix it. Once they realized that they were not eating food with autoexplore they started looking for the key to fix it but they didn't even know what it might be called.

Perhaps we can adjust autopickup to be a bit smarter so that most players never need to know that ctrl-a exists.

2 possible fixes:
Autopickup turns back on if you go upstairs and the invis creature stays downstairs.
Or
Autopickup turns back on if the invis creature becomes visible, even if it is on a different floor.

Making the game more user friendly seems like a consistent design goal.

Mike.

Just make autopickup come back up on a timer (roughly as long as invis lasts). I am not sure if this can be easily achieved.

Or one could just remove the interaction of autopickup with invisibility. The case where you are running away from an invisible monster and autopickup makes you lose a turn is an very marginal case. It's much less common than the case where you simply lose the invisible monster somehow and forget to turn autopickup on.

Of course, one can remove monster invisibility altogether, which would be better.

Picking up and dropping items should take 0 time.

I agree that this is an interface screw.

Both of your suggestions leak information that invisible is supposed to conceal from the player.

However, unconditionally re-activating auto pickup on taking the stairs should address the problem. If the invisible monster followed the player up the stairs they'll find out soon enough when they get attacked.

Edit: Done in trunk.

The issue for me is with monster-invis, not autopick.

Please remove monster invis, replace it with old phase shift or any other EV buff. It would be a buff with some summons but anything to improve the current situation.

We've got at least two other threads about removing monster invis, can we have one that's just about autopickup?

Making it instant to pick up and drop items is really good because it means normal play won't ever have to turn off autopickup. Right now there are many cases where you want to turn off autopickup even without monster invisibility: with ranged combat, on the orb run, often in Abyss, basically whenever you want to move fast even though there are no monsters on screen. But if picking up and dropping items doesn't take time then you don't need to worry about this anymore.
It's true that this gets rid of some decisions - currently you have to decide whether picking up an item is worth the turn cost - but the interface improvement is just so big that it's easily worth it, imo. And for items that aren't directly in your path, you'd still have that decision of whether it's worth the turn cost of walking to them (or apporting them).

(There have also been previous threads about that...here and here.)

But that removes one of the thrills. Even early on you have mage orcs that can cast speed and invisibility, and the sky monster is both naturally fast and can become invisibile. From time to time I find myself running away from them and up some stairs. Then -- like in a good thriller -- the wondering starts: "am I alone here"? So I'm forced to move around a bit to see if anything hits me, which is a risk in itself as I'm usually very low on HP. If it re-activates I could very easily check the activation status: no tension.

What if instead it simply asks if it should be reactivated or not, whenever you go up/down some stairs?

You still have that experience. It doesn't re-activate until you get hit again.