Remove Books

[bcadren]

Two related points:

1. When you choose to read a book, the book is destroyed and you permanently have access to the spells inside. (To reduce inventory clutter and stashing in the average game).
   • Though unlikely to be necessary (who actually uses books for amnesia?) a slight increase in available amnesia scrolls could be put through to compensate.
2. The spell interface is very difficult to use; we need to be able to sort in different manners than just by fail rate - and - being able to filter by spellschool would help a lot, especially for when there's a lot of spells available in late game.
   • Similarly, being able to see the hunger and spell-power of a spell before memorization would be very helpful.
   • And for the new, unspoilered players, reading the effect from the memorization page instead of having to read the specific book.

[Pollen_Golem]

When you choose to read a book, the book is destroyed and you permanently have access to

ONE of the spells inside by virtue of having memorized it. To compensate, books and amnesia scrolls generate more frequently in the dungeon, and mage backgrounds start with multiple copies of their book.

to reduce inventory clutter and stashing

I don't know if you'll get much support for this, man. A lot of people around here seem quite set against reducing inventory clutter and stashing

[Ayutzia]

Absolutely ridiculous. If you removed Books then you'd be nerfing piety gain substantially.

[dowan]

Huh? For who, trog? Who cares? Book burning isn't exactly a big source of trog piety(at least, it hasn't been in my trog games)

Not that I'm for removing books necessarily, I just don't get the piety nerf argument

[jejorda2]

An if there weren't plenty of Trog piety, then multiplying piety per kill by 1.005 or whatever value seems right seems like an easy solution to balancing piety loss from book removal.

[and into]

I'm pretty sure Ayutzia is joking, not only because piety loss from removing books would be minor, but also because the OP (despite title) is not actually proposing that books should be removed. Books would still generate, still be bought, still exist as items, and could still be destroyed for Trog piety without using them. OP is only proposing a change to how spell memorization interface would work.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that a late-game character would have a hundred or more spells to scroll through, which doesn't seem ideal, particularly for new players who are not familiar with all the spells. Of course, the current situation is often worse, and is not particularly friendly and convenient for newbies, either.

[dowan]

Haha, I didn't read the OP carefully enough.

I kind of like the idea, but I share and into's concerns about the giant spell list. But I also share his view that the current situation is sometimes worse.
I guess you'd have to come up with some clever way to group the spells to make this list manageable. And ctrl+F should somehow search this list, so if I want to know if haste exists in this game, ctrl+F would need to search both shops, which contain books, and my available spell list.

I guess you'd have to slightly increase piety decay to compensate, after all, we won't be running back and forth to our book stashes all the time anymore.

[Rast]

And ctrl+F should somehow search this list, so if I want to know if haste exists in this game, ctrl+F would need to search both shops, which contain books, and my available spell list.

Ctrl+F "haste" already finds spellbooks containing it.

[Blobbo]

We need a "Found spells" list much like the "Found items" list. To tell you which spells you've seen in the game (including spells in unpurchased books in stores) and which spells haven't. Then you can CTRL-F to look for it, if the book still exists.

[dowan]

And ctrl+F should somehow search this list, so if I want to know if haste exists in this game, ctrl+F would need to search both shops, which contain books, and my available spell list.

Ctrl+F "haste" already finds spellbooks containing it.

Right, I was saying this new list of found spells would also need to be included in the ctrl+f search. And pointing out that books in shops should still be searched, in case someone went a bit overboard thinking books weren't necessary to search anymore.

[neil]

We need a "Found spells" list much like the "Found items" list. To tell you which spells you've seen in the game (including spells in unpurchased books in stores) and which spells haven't. Then you can CTRL-F to look for it, if the book still exists.

Blackcustard implemented this at one point, but the implementation scanned the entire dungeon every time you pressed M, making it very slow. If that were fixed up to instead use the stash (or otherwise cache the information) without looking at other levels—and to work with more recent Crawl—that would be awesome.

#7843 on Mantis