vaults


If you are interested in helping with tiles, vaults, patches or documentation, this is the place for that.

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Post Monday, 10th December 2012, 20:47

vaults

Hey all,

I'm planning to put together some new vaults over the next couple weeks, but I'm not sure where new vaults are most needed. Anyone have any suggestions for areas that need more vaults or types of vaults that are most needed?
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Dungeon Master

Posts: 46

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Post Wednesday, 12th December 2012, 23:43

Re: vaults

Here, have a look at some thoughts guiding my many, many work-in-progress vaults.

* Early-game (pre-Lair) vaults are always appreciated to increase the variety of the most often played section of the game. Of particular interest are builder-based vaults such as Orc and Lair entries, food vaults, and overflow altars: a lot of them are rather gimmick-based and possibly too threat-based for such early and common vaults, and while it's nice to be flashy more subdued vaults would balance them out better.
* Open-ish vaults with minimal gimmickry, mostly plain or decorative use of decoration features, and using 098 monsters solely for new Vaults, since the branch being made of vaults doesn't mean that what would normally be a vault in other branches should be extremely common. This is a trunk-focused issue and one of the highest priorities, probably.
* [Hells]:1-6 vaults: while stair vaults, ambush vaults, and isolated upstair-downstair bubbles will ensure people actually see the vault and are somewhat fair-game in meanness for such branches, vaults that try to visibly change the level or otherwise shape travel would not be nearly as spoilery or as skipped, and would thus be more interesting. The vaults certainly don't need to spam 1s or approach [Hell]:7's difficulty, though.
* Swamp and Shoals could use more vaults, perhaps because to really blend into the levels takes a lot of effort with the layouts reducing the overall efforts made for vaults. Slime would be even worse in this regard, but the branch doesn't really need vaults and is pretty solid as is; Abyss as an endless mess of randomness faces the same issues and even further limitations but needs vaults even more then the other three because of the monotony of said random mess.
* Pan vaults that aren't pan lord vaults: recognizing nearly any explicit structure as having some big threats in it gets kind of silly with the inability to make autoexplore aware of this, and dilution via lesser vaults would help a bit, as nice as it is that Pan is defined by said pan lord vaults.

At minimum, there's nothing wrong with a big 098 vault for late D. Crawl has a lot of bloat, so outright new content like vault-redefined monsters is usually quite questionable and usually unnecessary: A unique conscious combination or arrangement of elements not often seen from the level-generators, aiming to be memorable or dangerous is more then enough of what a vault should try to be without needing to fill holes in design.

For this message the author claws has received thanks:
Galefury

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Post Thursday, 13th December 2012, 20:46

Re: vaults

Thanks for the ideas, claws! I'll use those thoughts to guide my ideas. Here are a few that I've whipped up so far. Feedback is very welcome.

  Code:
# corrupted god altars with Abyss creatures wandering around
# and a few dispersion kobolds to keep things interesting
NAME:    lasty_lugonu_altar temple_overflow_lugonu
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen mini_float
DEPTH:   2-14
MONS:    patrolling kobold; dart ego:dispersal q:4, patrolling place:Abyss att:neutral
KFEAT:   _ = altar_lugonu
NSUBST:  x = 8:. / *:x
NSUBST:  . = 3:1 / *:.
NSUBST:  . = 6:2 / *:.
MAP
  xxxxxxxxxxx
 xx.........xx
xx..._..._...xx
x.............x
x.._..._..._..x
x.............x
xx..._..._...xx
 xx.........xx
  xxxxxxxxxxx
ENDMAP

# spiral of increasingly dangerous humanoids
NAME:    lasty_humanoid_spiral
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen
DEPTH:   6-27
MONS:    goblin, hobgoblin, orc, ogre, troll, hill giant, merfolk impaler,
KMONS:   b = deep dwarf berserker, c = hell knight, a = stone giant, d = deep elf blademaster, \
   e = nonbase draconian caller / nonbase draconian shifter / nonbase draconian annihilator / \
   nonbase draconian zealot
KFEAT:
KFEAT:   + = runed_door
MARKER:  + = lua:props_marker { \
                door_open_prompt= "This door is covered in warnings. Open " .. \
                                  "it anyway?", \
                door_description_prefix= "warning-scrawled " \
   }
MAP
xxxxxxxxx
x3+4+5+6x
x+xxxxx+x
x2xd+ex7x
x+x+xxx+x
x1xc+b+ax
x+xxxxxxx
 @
ENDMAP

# spiral of increasingly dangerous insects
NAME:    lasty_insect_spiral
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen
DEPTH:   4-16
MONS:    butterfly, killer bee larva, worm, worker ant, killer bee, soldier ant, vampire mosquito,
KMONS:   a = queen bee, b = red wasp, c = demonic crawler, d = spined worm, e = ghost moth
KFEAT:   | = runed_door
MARKER:  | = lua:props_marker { \
                door_open_prompt= "This door is covered in warnings. Open " .. \
                                  "it anyway?", \
                door_description_prefix= "warning-scrawled " \
   }
MAP
xxxxxxxxx
x3+4+5+6x
x+xxxxx+x
x2xd+ex7x
x+x+xxx+x
x1xc+b+ax
x|xxxxxxx
 @
ENDMAP

# spiral of increasingly dangerous lizards
NAME:    lasty_lizard_spiral
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen
DEPTH:   4-27
MONS:    newt, giant gecko, iguana, crocodile, basilisk, komodo dragon, swamp drake / fire drake, death drake,
KMONS:   a = alligator c = dragon / ice dragon, d = storm dragon, \
   e = gold dragon
KFEAT:   a = W
KFEAT:   | = runed_door
MARKER:  | = lua:props_marker { \
                door_open_prompt= "This door is covered in warnings. Open " .. \
                                  "it anyway?", \
                door_description_prefix= "warning-scrawled " \
   }
MAP
xxxxxxxxx
x3+4+5+6x
x+xxxxx+x
x2xd+ex7x
x+x+xxx+x
x1xc+b+ax
x|xxxxxxx
 @
ENDMAP

# Give a weak unique a strong wand, and ideally get them to self-shaft immediately
# The player will generally run into them again a floor or more down, but know
# that they're a bigger threat now.
NAME:    lasty_wanded_unique
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen mini_float
DEPTH:   4-10
KMONS:   1 = Jessica; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Ijyb; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Terence; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Sigmund; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Menkaure; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Eustachio; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Blork the orc; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Edmund; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   Maurice; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other, \
   human; wand of fire | wand of cold | wand of polymorph other
KFEAT:   ' = known shaft trap
MAP
xxx
'1x
xxx
ENDMAP

# wizard mutated himself until he became an ugly thing
NAME:    lasty_mutated wizard
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen
DEPTH:   5-16
KITEM:   . = potion of mutation q:1 / potion of mutation q:2 / potion of mutation q:3
KITEM:   1 = staff w:70 / staff good_item, wizard hat w:70 / wizard hat good_item, \
   robe w:70 / robe good_item, potion of mutation q:2, sausage / pizza
: if you.absdepth() < 11 then
MONS:    ugly thing
: else
MONS:    very ugly thing
: end
MAP
xxxx
x.1x
x..x
xx+x
  @
ENDMAP

# get a sweet piece of armor OOD, but with a heavy malus
NAME:    lasty_broken_armor
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen mini_float
DEPTH:   2-15
ITEM:    crystal plate armour plus:-6 / gold dragon armour plus:-6 /\
   storm dragon armour plus:-5 / fire dragon armour plus:-4 /\
   steam dragon armour plus:-4
MAP
.....
.G.G.
..d..
.G.G.
.....
ENDMAP

# get an early rod -- if you can defeat its owner
NAME:    lasty_rod_priest
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen
DEPTH:   6-16
: if you.absdepth() < 10 then
MONS:    patrolling orc priest;rod of destruction / lightning rod / rod of demonology \
   / rod of summoning / rod of venom
: elseif you.absdepth() < 14 then
MONS:    patrolling orc high priest;rod of destruction / lightning rod / rod of demonology \
   / rod of summoning / rod of venom
: else
   patrolling elf priest;rod of destruction / lightning rod / rod of demonology \
   / rod of summoning / rod of venom
: end
ITEM:   
MARKER:  F = lua:fog_machine { cloud_type = "flame", \
             pow_min = 10000, pow_max = 10000, delay = 1, \
             size = 1, walk_dist = 0, start_clouds = 1 }
MAP
xxxxx
x.1.x
xF.Fx
x...x
xF.Fx
x...x
xF.Fx
x...x
xF.Fx
x...x
xF.Fx
xx+xx
  @
ENDMAP

# get a sweet piece of armor OOD, but with a heavy malus
NAME:    lasty_
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen mini_float
DEPTH:   2-10
MONS:   
ITEM:   
MAP

ENDMAP

# Fedhas misty altar
NAME:    lasty_fedhas_misty_altar
TAGS:    no_monster_gen no_item_gen mini_float temple_overflow_fedhas
DEPTH:   2-10
MONS:    patrolling wandering mushroom
ITEM:    pear / apple / choko / snozzcumber / apricot / grape /\
            orange / banana  / rambutan / lychee / sultana
KFEAT:   _ = altar_fedhas
MARKER:  F = lua:fog_machine {cloud_type = "thin mist", \
             pow_min = 5, pow_max = 12, delay_min = 4, delay_max = 28, \
             size = 2, spread_rate = 2, start_clouds = 3 }
SUBST:   . = .W F:40
SUBST:   t = . t:80
SHUFFLE: Q/S/R
SUBST:   Q = .
SUBST:   S = t, R = t
KFEAT:   Z = t
MAP
tttStttttttQ
ttSttttttQQt
tStttttttQtt
tSt......ttt
ttS.Z.Z..ttt
ttt.._1..ttt
ttt..Z.Z.ttt
ttt......ttt
tttttttRtttt
tttRRRRttttt
tttRtttttttt
ENDMAP
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Dungeon Master

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Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 02:32

Re: vaults

...

Well then.
Not trying to be hostile, and mostly using this as an excuse to blather further on about vaults design, but, well, these are either extremely work-in-progress vaults or you really need to practice with more restricted types of vaults, such as 089 vaults; the vaults are also very boxy aside from random lines, and I recommend looking through other vaults for ideas of more tactically interesting shapes. I don't want to discourage you outright from making vaults, it's just that there's a lot to learn; I started out a little bit better then this, myself, and anybody can get better.

--- In general you seem to not have much of a grip on what's acceptable levels of danger for vaults placing quite early. There's not much chance for escapes or much of a reliable minimum level of power pre-Temple, and thus I'd be extremely careful with explicit danger placed in such range, especially with monsters that are more then double out of depth. If you want to practice with strong monsters to be the main base concept for a vault, take it away from early D please.
--- Please, please be inclusive in where a vault places, not exclusive without any exclusions. These vaults will place in a lot of places besides D, and they already will look "off" in D
--- There are minor syntax errors all over these vaults, and instead of pointing out all of them I recommend putting the vaults into local console .des files and seeing what crawl says, then comparing it to the vault-building docs and other vaults instead of waiting for others to fix these mistakes. Plus, then you can, well, actually test out these vaults, which is pretty important in making and editing vaults.
--- _lugonu_altar temple_overflow_lugonu
-- The idea of some part of the dungeon being Corrupted is certainly an interesting if difficult to pull off idea; but here, I'm drastically concerned that one could get a neutral lich on d:2 killing anything that passes by on the floor, possibly including the player. It'd be a lot less ridiculously lethal if the neutral wandering monsters were limited to the "abyss 5s", but even then if anything wakes up the monsters before the player sees them the abyss monsters will probably tear the kobolds apart regardless. I'm not sure how one'd completely fix such uses...
-- Definitely deserves a lower weight as such a gimmicky vault.
-- Two names at once one of which refers to Lugonu having a overflow altar? What?
--- _foo_spiral
-- I don't like the structures of these spiral vaults: there's no loot, a series constant prompt to open up to excessively dangerous monsters for most of the depths involved, and a great degree of spoiler issues resultant from both; plus, while there can be strength in sheer variety of encounters the vault's layout is extremely boring, which makes up
- This certainly isn't useless as a concept though. What I'd do to the vault is make it a more open spiral with less discrete rooms and three groups of monsters around the center, with the center being a stone room with loot and a stronger bunch of monsters; each group would be selected from sets of monsters that are placed by depth checks.
--- _wanded_unique
-- You'd need a corner and a very thick shell of walls to make sure that the unique doesn't drop down the shaft before one sees it and gets such a knowledge of danger, and one might not even see that the unique has the wand even if the player sees the unique drop down the shaft. I'd prefer making a wand spawn just in front of the unique, then the next space being the shaft; you've overwritten the original equipment of most of these monsters (poor Sigmund's scythe!), and this would kill two birds with one stone. Also: cut out the wand of polymorph other because early mutations are much too aggrieving to be purposefully present in an early vault, randomize the wands with a little further dilution so people can't rely on spoilers showing the vault shape as the source of an early good wand, and preferably trim the uniques to Ijyb/Jessica/Terence so that the wand alone can matter more.
--- _mutated wizard
-- Plain staves are gone in trunk; just use a weak weapon that wizards are stereotypically prone to use, like daggers. Also, an ugly thing in a box seems rather minimal and out of depth in the provided ranges, which probably need tightening.
-- While one could probably argue that it can be predicted that the potions in the vault are mutation, there's too much of a chance of not noticing which potions came from where for it to be acceptable that reliably bad items spawn un-identified as such an obvious spoiler: pre-identify them.
--- _broken_armor
-- I don't like the gimmick and it's a bunch of spoiler information for one to end up usually brushing the armour aside since the maluses are going to be either ignorable enough for it to be free amour or too thick to ever wear the armour. The potential gimmick is already covered well enough in the old_forge anyway.
--- _rod_priest
-- Excessive length in size of vault, flame duration (just make there be no delay in generating a new cloud), and placement of flames. It's nice that the exclusions block accidentally finding the priest by autoexplore but said blocks are otherwise annoying to keep walking through to actually enter the vault: please use excl_rad = -1 to shrink the exclusions. Also! The rods are extremely excessively powerful and reliable loot even if the monster can kill you with it, the monsters are weirdly chosen since deep elf priests are not stronger then orc high priests, the monsters are out of depth mostly anyway, and most importantly noise will make the priests wander and roast itself before the player even sees it.
--- _fedhas_misty_altar
-- Doesn't look finished enough to even comment much on.

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Joined: Sunday, 5th August 2012, 14:52

Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 14:38

Re: vaults

Hey claws, thanks for taking the time to look over the vaults and give feedback. You're absolutely right that I haven't yet loaded them all up in Crawl to test yet; I had hoped that I could present them here as a first draft, with the goal of getting to sorts of critical review you provided. I can see how seeing typos and other errors could be distracting for a veteran vault-maker, so next time I'll make sure they're typo-free before I post anything. I have some questions about and responses to some of the things you say below.

claws wrote:you really need to practice with more restricted types of vaults, such as 089 vaults; the vaults are also very boxy aside from random lines, and I recommend looking through other vaults for ideas of more tactically interesting shapes.


By 089 vaults, you mean vaults using standard monster placement to avoid getting suckered into novelty monster layouts leading to unpredictable OoD monsters? I'll confess that these are mostly expected dungeon shapes: oblongs and rectangles. Is there a consensus that there are already enough rectilinear and oblong vaults that more should not be added?

claws wrote:In general you seem to not have much of a grip on what's acceptable levels of danger for vaults placing quite early.


Could you be more specific? I did put thought into what I would consider to be reasonable danger when I am playing (though you make a fair point below about the rod vault). Are you thinking of the wands in the wanded-unique vault?

claws wrote:Please, please be inclusive in where a vault places, not exclusive without any exclusions. These vaults will place in a lot of places besides D, and they already will look "off" in D


I'm not sure what you mean here. It sounds like you're saying that as written the vaults could end up in any branch, that they will look out-of-place in other branches, and that they also look out-of-place in the main dungeon. The first two points are technical ones, and I'd love for you to clarify them. The last piece I'm confused by, since the shapes and terrain and monster set are entirely consistent with the sorts of vaults found in the main dungeon. Maybe you're just trying to tell me that you don't like the vaults, and if so, that's fine, but please distinguish that from substantive criticism so that I'm not confused.

claws wrote:I'm drastically concerned that one could get a neutral lich on d:2 killing anything that passes by on the floor, possibly including the player. It'd be a lot less ridiculously lethal if the neutral wandering monsters were limited to the "abyss 5s", but even then if anything wakes up the monsters before the player sees them the abyss monsters will probably tear the kobolds apart regardless.

Definitely deserves a lower weight as such a gimmicky vault.


I'm not particularly concerned about the neutral lich killing anything that wanders by, but killing the player would certainly be bad. My experience with neutral monsters is that they tend not to target the player with any attacks intentionally, which makes this the Lugonu equivalent of the Vehumet altar set in a fire cloud -- you can get in and worship, but there's an ambient danger that you must overcome. If the monsters are too dangerous, I could see turning them friendly_neutral so that they never intentionally harm the player.

You're right about the kobolds -- they're a) unnecessary and b) likely to die before the player gets there. They should be removed.

You're also right about the low vault weight.

claws wrote:_foo_spiral
-- I don't like the structures of these spiral vaults: there's no loot, a series constant prompt to open up to excessively dangerous monsters for most of the depths involved, and a great degree of spoiler issues resultant from both; plus, while there can be strength in sheer variety of encounters the vault's layout is extremely boring, which makes up
- This certainly isn't useless as a concept though. [... omitted revised concept]


The idea behind the vaults is to have a progression of difficulty of a given sort of monster throughout the dungeon: humanoids, lizards, and insects. Any player paying the slightest bit of attention should be able to see that the difficulty is increasing with each successive door they open, and stop before they hit anything actually OoD, so I don't see a spoiler issue here. The first door is prompt-to-open in the vaults so that the player doesn't auto-explore into the vault; the rest are normal doors except in the humanoid vault, where the doors are all prompt-to-open to prevent the humanoids from opening the doors themselves.

I agree that the vault is somewhat boring in design, but to make it less boring it has to take up a lot of space on the level, which doesn't seem like the best idea for a vault that can't be fully explored right away.

I'm fine with adding loot, but I don't see it as strictly necessary. I see the vault as being an ambient challenge which some players will enjoy engaging and revisiting when they're ready for it (assuming it spawns at low depth), and other players will be scared off by the first mildly OoD monster and never return (which is fine -- discretion is good in Crawl).

The only piece of this vault which your proposed revision seems to preserve is the idea of rooms with monsters in a spiraling shape, and I think we already have a few of those.

claws wrote:_wanded_unique


I think all of your suggestions here are good ones, and I'll make those changes.

claws wrote:_mutated wizard
Plain staves are gone in trunk; just use a weak weapon that wizards are stereotypically prone to use, like daggers. Also, an ugly thing in a box seems rather minimal and out of depth in the provided ranges, which probably need tightening.


Fair point on staves -- I hadn't realized they were already gone. I take it good_item staves won't be enhancer staves, they'll just be staves with egos. Swapping for a dagger is probably best, then.

You're right that it's minimal, and perhaps slightly too OoD at D5. Perhaps D6 or D7 would be a more acceptable minimum depth (lone ugly things hit less hard than an ogre, but move slightly faster and have about 1.5x - 2x hp; frogs move way faster, hit a little less hard, and have less hp, but are a common enemy at that depth). It's not meant to be a vault that dramatically changes the dungeon structure; it's meant to be a vault that has a bunch of mutation potions (for fans of mutations), and which can be understood to tell a story encouraging you not to drink the potions. In short, it's meant to be relatively minimal, but to pack a lot of player experience into that minimal space.

claws wrote:-- While one could probably argue that it can be predicted that the potions in the vault are mutation, there's too much of a chance of not noticing which potions came from where for it to be acceptable that reliably bad items spawn un-identified as such an obvious spoiler: pre-identify them.


I do think anyone who loots 5-10 potions from a vault generally notices when they're all the same type. The nature of the vault should make anyone know what the potions are if they haven't already ID'd them by that depth, and anyone who does miss it will almost certainly realize that they were foolish to miss it once they quaff it blindly. That said, I have no particular objection to making them known potions.

claws wrote:I don't like the gimmick and it's a bunch of spoiler information for one to end up usually brushing the armour aside since the maluses are going to be either ignorable enough for it to be free amour or too thick to ever wear the armour. The potential gimmick is already covered well enough in the old_forge anyway.


How is it spoiler info? You put on the armor, and if you don't like the (quite reasonable, IMO) maluses, you take it off. Problem solved. It's not like it's cursed. You say that the maluses are going to be too light or too heavy in every case, but I disagree. I think I've put them at more or less exactly the right place to make the armor useful without being just a give-away of a too-good piece of armor. That said, maybe I got the maluses just slightly wrong -- they can be tweaked until they're right. The armors involved are good enough to be potentially worth enchanting up, and the maluses are such that they armors give okay but not stellar AC from the moment they're found -- which is good, since they're handed to the player on a plate, so they shouldn't be an unequivocal advantage.

I haven't been able to find old_forge -- which .des file is it located in?

claws wrote:_rod_priest
Excessive length in size of vault, flame duration (just make there be no delay in generating a new cloud), and placement of flames. It's nice that the exclusions block accidentally finding the priest by autoexplore but said blocks are otherwise annoying to keep walking through to actually enter the vault: please use excl_rad = -1 to shrink the exclusions. Also! The rods are extremely excessively powerful and reliable loot even if the monster can kill you with it, the monsters are weirdly chosen since deep elf priests are not stronger then orc high priests, the monsters are out of depth mostly anyway, and most importantly noise will make the priests wander and roast itself before the player even sees it.


Regarding the flames, I'm happy to make those changes -- I copied the fog machine for those flames from an existing vault with a single-space flame, thinking that those would be good default settings.

The length of the hall was designed to put the monster at the end out of sight range from the door when it is opened. The idea is to create a sense of trepidation in the player as they approach the far end.

I felt that the danger of taking on the rod-owner was sufficient to offset the power of the rod (since the danger should be proportional to the rod's power), but I can understand that others may disagree, and they may well have a better understanding.

Are any of the monsters I selected willing to walk into fire clouds without being confused? I'm sure orc priests and elf priests are not. That said, you're right that the progression is wrong -- it should probably be orc priest -> elf priest -> orc sorcerer or orc high priest. Elf priests do have more hp than orc priests, and better evade as well as a slightly better spell set, making elf priests slightly more dangerous.

claws wrote: _fedhas_misty_altar
Doesn't look finished enough to even comment much on.


It looks like I did forget to place the fruit, so I assume that's why you say it's to incomplete too comment on. Since it's apparently not clear, the idea is to have a Fedhas altar in a forest clearing filled with thick mist. There's some fruit, and a wandering mushroom camped close enough to the altar to nearly bump into it in the mist. The mushroom is often OoD, but mushrooms are the easiest monsters to escape in Crawl, and can be killed by anyone with a ranged attack or polearm. The mushroom is also patrolling, making it even easier to escape than normal.

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Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 20:50

Re: vaults

Just found old_forge. I see where you're drawing a comparison, but you might as well say we don't need any Vehumet altar vaults because one already exists. They're different in appearance and in scope, they contain different items, and they have a different purpose. The only real shared element is that they include items with maluses, but so what?

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Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 22:20

Re: vaults

Your lizard vault is, to be blunt, HORRIBLY unbalanced.

D4 Golden Dragon.

A GOLDEN DRAGON ON D4. Something you normally don't see outside of Vaults:$ and Zot for good reason, on a floor wherein your biggest worries are still orc priests.

I don't even know how you're supposed to kill one at that depth outside of being a MuSu and taking it down with summon spam, and even then you'd die the second it breathed in your direction.

At least scale it down depending on your depth and put some loot in.

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Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 22:47

Re: vaults

Lightli wrote:Your lizard vault is, to be blunt, HORRIBLY unbalanced.

D4 Golden Dragon.

A GOLDEN DRAGON ON D4. Something you normally don't see outside of Vaults:$ and Zot for good reason, on a floor wherein your biggest worries are still orc priests.

I don't even know how you're supposed to kill one at that depth outside of being a MuSu and taking it down with summon spam, and even then you'd die the second it breathed in your direction.

At least scale it down depending on your depth and put some loot in.


You realize that the only way to get to the golden dragon in that vault is to fight through an escalating series of monsters, right? There's no way you get to the dragon on your first visit if it spawns on D4.
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Post Friday, 14th December 2012, 23:26

Re: vaults

Lasty wrote:By 089 vaults, you mean vaults using standard monster placement to avoid getting suckered into novelty monster layouts leading to unpredictable OoD monsters? I'll confess that these are mostly expected dungeon shapes: oblongs and rectangles. Is there a consensus that there are already enough rectilinear and oblong vaults that more should not be added?

Boxes are fine if there's something of interest in them in the end, they're just not as exciting as they could be. Using 089 vaults makes one have to rely more on layout and randomization, freeing up thought to consider aspects of equal importance such as monster and player movement and sight.
Lasty wrote:Could you be more specific? I did put thought into what I would consider to be reasonable danger when I am playing (though you make a fair point below about the rod vault). Are you thinking of the wands in the wanded-unique vault?

Vault docs wrote:Be fair!

Crawl is hard but try to balance your monsters. While it is true that Orc:1 can show an orcish knight, this is very rare. Hence it's probably a bad idea to use orcish knights for an entry to the Orcish Mines.

Phrased more generally, do not use OOD (out-of-depth) monsters unless you really know what you want.

Lasty wrote:I'm not sure what you mean here. It sounds like you're saying that as written the vaults could end up in any branch, that they will look out-of-place in other branches, and that they also look out-of-place in the main dungeon. The first two points are technical ones, and I'd love for you to clarify them. The last piece I'm confused by, since the shapes and terrain and monster set are entirely consistent with the sorts of vaults found in the main dungeon. Maybe you're just trying to tell me that you don't like the vaults, and if so, that's fine, but please distinguish that from substantive criticism so that I'm not confused.

Without specific branches, Depth as numbers will place vaults in anywhere that matches the depth: while branches once would have a depth number starting from their branch and now just have an absolute specified depth of the first floor, the numbers are still there. It's extremely annoying to remember branch depths for checking the places a vault is placed, which is why such a technique was somewhat recently removed out of, say, unique placement. Just specify the branches to place in DEPTH.

Ignore the last bit, I was running low on steam after typing up so much.

Lasty wrote:I'm not particularly concerned about the neutral lich killing anything that wanders by, but killing the player would certainly be bad. My experience with neutral monsters is that they tend not to target the player with any attacks intentionally, which makes this the Lugonu equivalent of the Vehumet altar set in a fire cloud -- you can get in and worship, but there's an ambient danger that you must overcome. If the monsters are too dangerous, I could see turning them friendly_neutral so that they never intentionally harm the player.

Friendly abyss spawns stops making sense entirely, and people can lure monsters over to the neutral monsters if they want certain equipment or to remove certain degrees of danger around.

Lasty wrote:The idea behind the vaults is to have a progression of difficulty of a given sort of monster throughout the dungeon: humanoids, lizards, and insects. Any player paying the slightest bit of attention should be able to see that the difficulty is increasing with each successive door they open, and stop before they hit anything actually OoD, so I don't see a spoiler issue here. The first door is prompt-to-open in the vaults so that the player doesn't auto-explore into the vault; the rest are normal doors except in the humanoid vault, where the doors are all prompt-to-open to prevent the humanoids from opening the doors themselves.

I agree that the vault is somewhat boring in design, but to make it less boring it has to take up a lot of space on the level, which doesn't seem like the best idea for a vault that can't be fully explored right away.

I'm fine with adding loot, but I don't see it as strictly necessary. I see the vault as being an ambient challenge which some players will enjoy engaging and revisiting when they're ready for it (assuming it spawns at low depth), and other players will be scared off by the first mildly OoD monster and never return (which is fine -- discretion is good in Crawl).

Foo spiral vaults as is won't work because somebody doesn't necessarily know when the monsters and the vault *stop* without spoilers (seriously.), and if people want to go fight varied new monster things for a challenge they further into the dungeon and branches instead; few people are going to backtrack to a door box on d:6 because they might be able to fight a few more monsters for zero immediate reward when there's the rest of the game to be getting on with. Not seeing a golden dragon on D:4 because you got killed by the basilisk first is not much of an improvement. There's also the scenarios where for whatever reason (zapping unknown areas or unknown wands for digging, boring beetles) the monsters are just outright freed.

Lasty wrote: How is it spoiler info? You put on the armor, and if you don't like the (quite reasonable, IMO) maluses, you take it off. Problem solved. It's not like it's cursed. You say that the maluses are going to be too light or too heavy in every case, but I disagree. I think I've put them at more or less exactly the right place to make the armor useful without being just a give-away of a too-good piece of armor. That said, maybe I got the maluses just slightly wrong -- they can be tweaked until they're right. The armors involved are good enough to be potentially worth enchanting up, and the maluses are such that they armors give okay but not stellar AC from the moment they're found -- which is good, since they're handed to the player on a plate, so they shouldn't be an unequivocal advantage.

It can spawn cursed; they need the uncursed flag, as I should have mentioned.
The moment they're found they're not any better then plate armour with an ego, and if one is relying on ac they may choose plate armour anyway. Using up more enchant armour scrolls would be less beneficial in pure ac than enchanting up an example plate armour, and resistances are overrated when you've got ac anyway.

Lasty wrote: I felt that the danger of taking on the rod-owner was sufficient to offset the power of the rod (since the danger should be proportional to the rod's power), but I can understand that others may disagree, and they may well have a better understanding.

Power spiral. If a strong character can quickly kill the rod owner before they do anything, they get a rod and probably get noticeably stronger with such an early rod. If a weak character sees the rod owner and can't deal with the monster and its rod, they're not going to get any stronger, and possibly dead.

Lasty wrote:Are any of the monsters I selected willing to walk into fire clouds without being confused? I'm sure orc priests and elf priests are not.

Orc high priests will.

Lasty wrote:It looks like I did forget to place the fruit, so I assume that's why you say it's to incomplete too comment on. Since it's apparently not clear, the idea is to have a Fedhas altar in a forest clearing filled with thick mist. There's some fruit, and a wandering mushroom camped close enough to the altar to nearly bump into it in the mist. The mushroom is often OoD, but mushrooms are the easiest monsters to escape in Crawl, and can be killed by anyone with a ranged attack or polearm. The mushroom is also patrolling, making it even easier to escape than normal.

Thin mist is not thick enough to block LOS. Smoke seems kind of weird for fedhas to have and there's not many other types of clouds that'd work, but I do like the idea of wandering mushrooms and fog.

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Post Monday, 17th December 2012, 20:02

Re: vaults

At this point I've gotten all the vaults working in a recent build of Crawl, and I have them working to my satisfaction.

Re: the broken armor vault, I've added the uncursed flag. I see it as being good that the armor is not better than plate armor w/ an ego. Plate armor with an ego is very good, and it seems like a bad thing to have a vault simply drop something of that quality without any risk. The idea behind this vault is that it drops something which isn't great at the moment it's found, but which could be great if the player puts in the effort. It's a way to provide an unexpected, unusual choice on the player after generating a momentary initial burst of excitement.

Re: rod vault, I see what you mean. That's probably just not a good idea for a vault.

Re: misty Fedhas altar, you're right about the clouds. I wasn't able to find a cloud type which works, except smoke, which makes no sense. There's probably no way to make this work without adding a cloud type. I've thrown a proposal to add a new cloud type in the dev ideas forum, because it seems both useful and easy to do.

Re: the spirals, I can prevent premature monster release by making the walls permanent stone, and I can prevent players from stupidly going in too far by making them alternate between translucent and regular, so they have full knowledge of what comes next. That said, having seen them on the map, I'm inclined to agree that the layout isn't great. I may try to do revamp the concept to a series of small caves instead, which would take up a much larger portion of the level, but which would probably play better over all.

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