JoKe's Guide to Elpuri

Spoiler Warning: This page contains spoilers which may affect your IVAN experience negatively

There seemed to be some interest in gameplay guides from the community, so here's one for those of you still struggling to get a freedom victory.

Over the course of this guide, I will cover most of my tactics for reaching and successfully taking down Elpuri in 0.50. The guide will focus on strategies for certain levels, locations and enemies, plus go through possible equipment choices, item usage and some stat training. Note that this guide is not the be-all and end-all for beating IVAN, but rather my own personal way of attempting to do so. I will also assume you have some degree of understanding of the game's mechanics and stats.

All of the info presented here is based on personal experiences or the community's findings. While I am fairly certain there are no gross inaccuracies, I may recall some things wrong - take any numbers or similar with a grain of salt.

Short rundown of the general strategy

• no artificial limbs
• no ommel cerumen exploit
• new attnam banana kicking
• library exploit
• elite guard taming

Various hints, tips and recommendations

Combat

• Always be aware of how much damage an NPC is capable of doing. Often this is sadly something you can only reliably tell with experience. Use 'l'ook to check the gear of tough humanoids like orc squad leaders or mistresses, and adjust your tactics accordingly. Keep that chance of a one-shot death to minimum.
• Only fight on your own terms! Skip any risky NPCs for later if you can't safely take them on, and fight as few at once as you can.
• Always have a way to escape when SHTF. Everything from safe escape routes to teleports with telecontrol works, as long as it's reliable and takes you out of combat the moment things go sour.
• Wands of teleportation are excellent for escaping, but require at least one usable hand to work. If you can't pray to Sophos for a getaway, reading a scroll of teleportation does not require hands. Note that unlike zapping, the effect of scrolls is not front-loaded - it takes a few turns to read one out.

Loot

• Every run has a limited amount of items spawned. Use polypiling to increase this amount for more chances at those great items like ommel substances, scrolls, wands and magical equipment (5*5 items in a row for 25 per zap). Get a pickaxe and mine out some rocks for easy items and a safe room for polypiling.

Gods

• Lawful gods are often of situational use only, while chaotic gods give more consistent bonuses.
• Never pray to Valpurus or Mortifer before you're hailed as a champion when offering.
• Once reaching champion status with Valpurus, praying to him grants you either an unenchanted valpurium two-handed sword or a shield of the same material. The shield is worthless, the sword can be useful if you haven't found anything better yet. Terrible rewards compared to Mortifer.
• Praying to Legifer causes a large explosion around you, which becomes less useful the further in you are. Mostly useful for reliably and quickly clearing out physically weak but dangerous opponents like mystical dark frogs. He can also replace missing limbs with illithium ones. Very rarely gives out helmets of piercing perception and scrolls of detect material.
• Atavus can very rarely give out scrolls of wishing or oil lamps. More often than not, you won't get any during a run. Often enough only useful for the arcanite plate mail he always gives once hitting champion status, which is worse than the mithril +2 one from an elite guard when reaching Attnam. Does not replace missing limbs.
• Dulcis can charm enemies around you. Other than that, he's useless not counting the possibility of getting magical whistles or horns of bravery/panic. Does not replace missing limbs.
• Seges is arguably the most useful of the lawful gods, capable of providing sustenance, healing, curing and new limbs. Effect priority as follows: limb replacement > curing if poisoned > sustenance up to satiated > healing. Make sure to eat up to satiated and to have all limbs on if you need the healing effect. Very useful in conjunction with school food. May possibly give out healing liquid if no other effect can happen.
• Sophos
• Silva
• Loricatus
• Mellis
• Cleptia
• Nefas
• Scabies
• Infuscor
• uh, that one god
• Mortifer

Equipment and items

Armor

When choosing armor, you should aim to strike a balance between enough armor value and mobility. Leather branch armor is very light and doesn't limit your stats too much, whereas iron alloys weigh a ton and cause a large hit to your stats. Arcanite alloys come between the two - they are decently strong while remaining light and flexible enough to not be a hindrance. For the most part discluding UT1-3 and the end-game, you are usually best off with the third option. Leathers should be avoided except for when nothing better is available, as the loss in AV in comparison to arcanite alloys is too high for the few points of agility or dexterity. Likewise, iron alloys tend to be too restrictive and heavy for the AV they provide over the arcanite branch. Iron alloy chain mails lessen the effect on stats and can generally be safely used as an alternative to arcanite. However, since the gap between meteoric steel and adamant intelligence requirements is so large, arcanite alloys pull ahead with the possibility to upgrade into mithril or octiron.

For very high-end materials, the best choice for armor is valpurium + golden eagle feather for cloaks at 55 INT for a SoCM. One tier down, octiron + spider silk at 45 INT for a SoCM (40 for harden from mithril). Two tiers down, dragon scale + angel hair at 40 for a SoCM (35 for harden from phoenix feather - dragon scale). Three tiers down, mithril + phoenix feather at 25 for a SoCM (20 for hardens from arcanite - mithril and ommel hair - phoenix feather).

Note that when using phoenix feather of any sort, you will need to take care to not get acidic substances spilled on your equipment. PF breaks very easily on contact with dark frog blood, slimes or even vomit.

Walkthrough level-by-level

Starting the game

Yes, this is very much worth mentioning.

So you've just started the game, skipped through the intro as quick as possible and spawned a fresh character just outside New Attnam. Before you do anything else, take a look at your stats. Which of them are high (>11), which low (<10)? In general if more than two stats are below 10, you should just quit the game and reroll a new character. Furthermore, if you're lazy and don't wish to spend that much time on training stats, you should look to have at least 12 leg strength with decent stats everywhere else. If you are willing to put more effort into training, you should instead look to have high intellect and wisdom scores.

Each character has a set of possible stat aptitudes, which causes certain stats to increase faster than others. These are arm/leg strength, agility/dexterity and intelligence/wisdom. You can often identify these by looking at the stats upon starting the game. If any of the combinations have higher scores than the other stats, chances are your character will gain those faster than usual. This also means that by choosing a strong character, it will be easier to train your leg strength, something that otherwise would take a large deal of patience and a good source of food. However, picking an intelligent character will increase your natural gains from reading and dealing with gods, letting you reach better materials naturally through hardening and material changing without ommel cerumen. I personally rarely have the patience for proper training, and usually take a strong character.

Once you've managed to generate a suitable character, proceed to enter New Attnam for the first bit of training.

New Attnam training

Training agility naturally is rather slow and takes a large amount of food to do properly. Even then it's only possible to reach a certain cap determined by your character's aptitude for agility, which in general will be around 16. Some characters may go as high as 19-20, some will be stuck at a mere 14.

Luckily, the easiest way to reach this cap is doable right in the start of the game. Enter New Attnam and find the levitating ostrich landing platform in the south-eastern corner of the map. See how growers drop bananas on the platform, while the ostriches take them away? As long as you do not break any bananas, you can safely kick them off the platform at which point they will no longer be counted as the town's property. Done right, this essentially means you have an endless source of food. Do note that this is somewhat exploit-y and was likely not intended by the devs - use it if your conscience allows. To make this more efficient, follow the ostriches to the location from which they leave the map, then stand on that square. This will block them on the map and cause them to clump up, which increases the window of opportunity for kicking bananas. Once there are three ostriches standing next to you, run back to the platform and start kicking the bananas off. Anything from 60 to 90 is usually enough.

Once you've got your bananas, take them all and leave the town and come right back. This will place you back at the entrance to the town. Drop all your bananas here, and leave the town again. Once outside, toggle running on and run back and forth around the island until you reach the hungry-status. Eat just enough bananas to get satiated, take all the banana peels, drop them out of the town and repeat until the cap or you get bored. Reaching the cap may take anything from 3 to 4 days in-game.

Once you're done, get back to town, command your dog to stop following, wield a banana peel in each hand and enter the first level of UT.

Underwater tunnel 1-2

The first two levels of UT will be used for dexterity training, something which the banana peels are excellent for. They do very little damage, but are very light and count as whips, meaning you will get a lot of hits in for each opponent for large amounts of experience in dexterity. Pick up and use any equipment you find, even 0 AV armor is better than nothing. Do not replace your peels yet, but pick up the best weapons you can for the situations the peels aren't good enough for. Take extreme care around intact zombies and humanoids with weapons better than balsa spears. If you've taken more than a couple HP worth of damage, retreat back to the stairs, drop your peels next to them to avoid spoilage and return above ground to run around while your health regenerates.

If you find a plate mail made of metal, you may want to consider taking it to give it to a limbless zombie. Drop it on the ground next to one and hide, and the rolling zombie torso might equip it. If it does, you've got an almost invulnerable punching bag that cannot harm you in any way for very efficient training.

If you find bottles of healing liquid or troll blood, you can split them into smaller portions by dipping them into empty containers. Even half of a bottle is enough to fully heal you early into the game.

Other than the dexterity training, UT1 and 2 are rather unremarkable and shouldn't prove too difficult. Exploring every corner to not miss any usable equipment is crucial. UT3 will be your first challenge.

Underwater tunnel 3

The constant plant spawns by Genetrix can make life on UT3 a bit dangerous. While the normal carnivorous plants are not a threat, it does not take long for greater plants to start spawning. Upon entering the level, ditch your peels if they still haven't rotted away for some unarmed training, but keep real weapons close. If you haven't yet found body armor and/or a cloak, make exploring the level quickly your priority.

As the plants can only spawn next to you, try to keep the amount of spawnable squares as low as possible as you make your way through the level. This is especially important when facing greater plants: you will not want to be stuck in middle of 8 of them by having them spawn while standing in an open room. When two or more different variants spawn, always kill the weakest one first, then reposition to only take on one at a time to minimize incoming damage.