it’s only taken me uhh… approximately >300 dead Bimbaps, but! I’ve finally managed to get far enough to find some runes!
does it get harder from here?
ah. walked into the slime pits and immediately got killed 100000 by infinite confusion. alas.
Ah yeah, slime pits, the hole of horrible death. We never go down there unless we’re going for a 15 rune win. It’s horrifying, the scariest branch before pandemonium.
The correct place to go after the normal S branches is normally vaults 1-4 (vaults 5 is terrifying and needs to be done after Depths for the rune). Sorry you fell for the big trap that is Slime.
oh, you don’t have to go down there???
huh.
yeah, yknow ive died there a lot. i wasn’t aware it was optional what runes you got i thought it was just like well, here’s all the areas you get this run!
i think i will stop going there.
Yeah, no. The lair has 3 branches: Snake/Spider (rune), Shoals/Swamp (rune), and Slime (death)
There’s a rune in slime but even if you try to get it, you’d try after clearing Dungeon all the way to 15, Vaults 1-4, Crypt, Elf (probably) and Depths all the way down before giving it a shot.
At that point you’d be choosing between options for your third rune, and the most accessible options would be Slime, Vaults 5 and Abyss, and Vaults 5 is by far the most reasonable of these for most characters, as horrifying as it is.
I usually do do Slime when just going for a win. But it’s become annoying scary since they disabled the upstairs until you have the Rune. No real way to know whether you’ve got what it takes to before you go in, unless you’re stupidly overpowered.
Still I almost always do Slime:1 before Vaults:5.
If you’ve got rCorr, good Will, and a plan for killing TRJ, it can often be worth doing Slime before Vaults:5. The loot is good, and helps you survive the other parts of the game.
But I’m realising just now how much the Devs shafted you new players who joined after they made the staircases one-way. I used to be able to go into Slime, try to kill TRJ, and then bail when I find out Slime:2 is too hard. Then go do some other branches, get more tools, xp and power. Go back, try to kill TRJ, fail because I hadn’t build the right tool set, and then win the game anyway. You can’t get any of that experience.
Yeah, i never really found any like, guides or explanations for everything that was understandable and not overwhelming (or out of date) so I’ve been just freestyling my way through this making the same TeBr Yredelemul again and again and again until i figure things out, so its literally all been trial and error!
im getting the hang of things like knowing you’ll find some god rooms between floors 5 and 7 and knowing the lair leads to the shoals, swamps, snake pits and spider nests in some order and that I should use limits on my skills so im not using xp on things that don’t matter, but I’ve never gotten to the runes yet so knowing that some places just suck more is good knowledge!
DCSS is very much the kind of game that you learn by hitting your head on things and asking other folks about. We do like that the game doesn’t have a usable wiki, but that’s our grognard talking.
But hey, you’re in the right spot to ask questions! The Slime rune tends to be harder than the vaults one, but third runes all have Weirdness about them. The Royal Jelly is the only actual boss battle in a 3 rune game, and can be incredibly nasty and mostly requires trickery to kill safely. Vaults 5 is a horrifying ordeal if you try to tackle it straight on. And Abyss causes the most dangerous strategic damage in the game: it damages your desire to keep playing.
In the beginning the dungeon is linear and when you get to the lair and orc branches just checking them out to so what you can handle works fine but beyond that learning by try and error gets very hard.
The next set of options are either a few more levels of dungeon until the entry to the depth or any of shoals, swamp, snake pits, spider nest (any game will only generate 2 out of these 4). Swamp and shoals are much saver if you have flying or are aquatic, snake and spider you generally want poison resistance.
Once you did all of these and have 2 runes, vault 1-4 and depths are reasonable to do. Then you need to find a third rune to be able to access Zot and win. The most common options are vault 5, abyss and slime pits. I’ve only ever succeeded on vault 5 but that takes a char who can handle the onslaught with little resting or running away. There are more dungeon branches and people gather a lot more than the minimal 3 runes but I don’t have any experience with that.
