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. The neutral gods are always useful.
• As long as the gods are content with you, you can safely pray to them every 3-4 hours. Praying too early will still grant the reward if they're happy enough, but this will increase the prayer cooldown dramatically and cause a hit to your standing with them.
• Never pray to Valpurus or Mortifer before you're hailed as a champion when offering. They also have extensive prayer cooldowns, you will need to wait a few days before praying again.
• 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 prayers are a good, instant emergency teleports that do not require limbs to use. They're too strong to be controlled by the player with telecontrol, which limits its usefulness outside of SHTF-situations somewhat. Replaces limbs most often with hardened leather, but can also be of stronger materials like arcanite or mithril.
• Inside dungeons, Silva causes earthquakes that open new pathways, set off mines/traps and break doors and fragile objects like lanterns and bottles(!). In NA and Attnam, she summons a pack of friendly wolves. Replaces missing limbs with natural materials like stone, wood or most leathers. Not a very useful god.
• Loricatus is one of the most useful gods, with free repairs for broken equipment and occasional hardening for weapons that does not depend on your INT. Item to be repaired needs to be equipped in any slot, hardening only works on items wielded as weapons. Replaces limbs with iron alloy metals.
• Mellis exchanges a total of 5 empty containers (bottles/cans/banana peels) to filled ones, make sure you've got enough empty ones before praying. Naturally this results in a whole lot of healing liquid, troll blood and banana flesh along with rather often school food. School food is poisonous, but has a chance of increasing your endurance. This synergizes very well with Seges, who cleanses poison. You will probably also receive ommel substances at some point during a run. She will also often grant you knowledge of other gods. Replaces limbs with commercially valuable materials like expensive fabric, gold or gemstones.
• Cleptia grants haste, invisibility or ESP, along with rarely rewarding you with enchanted daggers or shortswords. The buff duration is slightly shorter than the prayer cooldown. Does not replace missing limbs.
• Nefas spawns friendly mistresses and torturing chiefs, which are very strong early in the game. If you lack some piece of armor, you can pray to her and grab the missing gear from the mistress. Does not replace missing limbs.
• Scabies will most often attempt to polymorph you into a strong monster, but may also rarely spread leprosy around the level. Unlike with Sophos, the effect can be controlled by the player with polycontrol. When standing near hostile NPCs, she may drench them in poison. Replaces limbs with mushroom flesh (and possibly something else?).
• Infuscor grants you ESP, telecontrol and polycontrol. She may also grant you three scrolls of teleportation or very rarely enchanted staves of wondrous smells. Does not replace limbs.
• Cruentus most often gives you a bottle of troll blood, or causes panic in hostiles nearby. May also somewhat rarely enchant a wielded weapon or increase your standing with Mortifer. Does not replace limbs directly, but can regrow them through troll blood.
• Like with Valpurus, Mortifer only grants his reward when you're a champion. His rewards is Neerc Se'Ulb +6, a very powerful mace with a life stealing attack.

If possible, I suggest praying to everything from Seges to Cleptia if you do not wish to go for Valpurus's or Mortifer's rewards. The Mellis-Seges combination is too strong to pass up easily. Having a broader range of gods to pray is possible, but requires you to carefully manage your standing. If going fully lawful or chaotic, you can safely pray to all aligned gods.

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, part A

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. Greater plants are rather dangerous in large numbers without anything to block their attacks with. If you haven't yet found body armor and/or a cloak, make exploring the level quickly your priority. If you find Genetrix's room, leave her be for now.

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.

If you need to rest but are unable to head back upstairs for some reason, you can use a wand of door creation to close yourself off from the rest of the level. If there are no spawnable squares next to you, there won't be any plant spawns. Lacking a wand, even a dead-end tunnel is better than a random corridor or room.

Once you reach unarmed skill around 6-7 or start facing too much greater plants, head back up to New Attnam. You're now ready to get the belt of levitation.

Sumo Wrestler

Once you reach NA again, if you haven't got enough bananas left to get you to bloated + about 20 extra, kick some more until you do. Grab all the bananas, and head to sumo's house. Drop one banana 8 squares south from his door, then one 4 squares away, then one on the door. Get inside and while the sumo runs out after the banana trail, vomit 14 times on the spot he usually stands on. You shouldn't lose strength doing this. Once the sumo comes back, eat up to bloated and wait. The sumo's legs will start dissolving. Once he panics or loses both legs, challenge him by going downstairs. The fight will be very easy. Drop the shirt Decos gives you somewhere, equip the belt and head back to UT3.

Underwater tunnel 3, part B

If you managed to explore the whole level before heading back to NA, there isn't a lot left for you to do here. If you didn't, keep exploring.

Some people like leaving Genetrix alive for training on the spawning plants, but personally I can't be bothered with it. If you wish, you can skip her for now by just flying over the sea from the NA island and come back later with proper gear. If you don't, head to her room now. The fight should not be too difficult if you've found at least a troll hide armor, cloak and some weapons, but can be a hassle if you haven't. Kill the two greater plants near the entrance first, then focus on beating Genetrix herself. If you take enough damage to go red, back off and heal up before continuing. Wands of lightning and acid rain are useless against plants, but striking and fireballs works if you're really lacking in equipment. You can also confuse the plants by throwing and breaking a bottle of vodka or valdemar on them, causing them to fight against each other. Lacking everything, remember that you can always just skip her with the belt of levitation.

Once Genetrix is dead, finish off the rest of the plants in her room, eat up to barely satiated if necessary and head up.

Before you go off wandering in a random direction, 'l'ook around for Attnam if you can't see it yet. This saves you from an embarassing end by starvation on the world map.

Attnam

Upon reaching Attnam, first things first: take that encrypted scroll to Petrus. There's nothing more annoying than doing everything else, forgetting to give the scroll to him and leaving.

If you've managed to find a scroll of taming, head to one of the seemingly empty corners of the cathedral picture here I suppose and read it. Assuming no patrolling frogs get too close, you'll now be able to take the invisible elite guard's equipment for yourself. Worst comes to worst, the armor especially should be enough to carry you through all the way to Elpuri.

Regardless of whether or not you got the equipment, go find the library in the SE corner of the map for the library trick. Like with the bananas in NA, this can be classified as an exploit so use as your conscience allows. You should have some scrolls from UT on you, so drop them all on the doorway to sell them. Next, buy any scrolls and books of your preferred gods you can and sell them on the same spot again. Repeat until you no longer have enough money, then kick the items out while making sure no NPCs are in the way directly to the south. You can re-sell the kicked items and repeat the process until you're in possession of the whole library and its money. If you didn't have a scroll of taming yet, chances are you'll now have one. If that's the case, go back to the cathedral and tame that guard.

If you've got any broken equipment you wish to use, the two shops west of the cathedral entrance house the tailor and the blacksmith who can repair your things.

Once you're otherwise all done, sell any extra stuff you've got to the general shop and buy any useful things in there. If you like pets, you can buy the slave in the shop for 50 gp.

You should now be ready to enter the Gloomy Caves, so head out of town and 'l'ook for it before moving on.

Gloomy Caves 1-4

The first level of GC has nothing special about it outside of being the first of the larger levels. Explore around quickly to avoid losing possible carrots or ommel substances to hungry hedgehogs, but stick around for some skill training on new spawns after finishing. Once you feel there's nothing new spawning, head downwards. If you've been doing well, you're also likely to face Rondol as your first named NPC here.

GC2-4 are the first more interesting levels. There are three main elements randomly generated around them: the wolf room, the chest room and the dwarven minefield. Outside of these, they're still rather plain and do not differ from GC1 much gameplay-wise.

The wolf room

Upon entering a level, you may get a message of hearing wolves howling. This means the wolf room has been generated somewhere on the level. The room itself is a small-ish oval-shaped room full of wolves and a single werewolf carrying some enchantment scrolls. Assuming you've managed to get the armor from an elite guard back in Attnam, it's not going to be a problem, but with poor armor on your limbs you may have a hard time. Fight in a tight corridor, don't get surrounded and keep a means of teleportation handy. Remember that you can still read scrolls if you lose both your arms, so keep one easily accessible if you've got one.

The chest room

The chest room is a rectangular room with a 3x3 steel box in the middle. Inside is a large steel chest with some goodies. You probably don't have a pickaxe capable of digging through it at this point yet, so you've left with a few choices of breaking in:

• Two teleports with telecontrol
• Acid (sulphuric or vomit)
• Explosives

Sulphuric acid is obviously the preferred method; it doesn't have that many uses to begin with and it eats through the wall like nothing. Teleportation is another easy way to get to the chest, just tele in, grab the chest and tele out. Lacking either, you can pile explosives (mines, used wands of fireballs, backpacks of gunpowder, vodka) near the wall and blow them up with a fireball or striking. Last option is to vomit on the wall, wait for it to rust and dig through with a pickaxe.

The chest inside is locked. You can force the lock by kicking it with enough LSTR, throwing it at a wall with ASTR or by polymorphing the chest. Polymorphing only affects the chest itself, so the contents pop out intact. Other ways include changing the material to something softer either by praying to an angry Loricatus or (god forbid) using a scroll of change material.

Dwarven minefield

Yeah, it's there. Don't step on mines. Huge rooms. TBC