Best item found near the start of the game?

Understanding is indeed unicorn horn. Brilliance is made of arcanite.

Riiight, Arcanite. Which is a good thing because while gold will harden to diamond at around 40 INT, arcanite will harden to mithril at only 25 (30? god, it's been too long since I played IVAN), and can be further hardened to octiron.

Which would be nicer if a) mithril gave more than an extra 2 AV and b) octiron didn't require the same amount of Int to harden to (according to the wiki) as diamond does (and since diamond helmets give 6 more AV than the octiron helmets, generally speaking a more useful use of harden material). A scroll of change material and the right amount of Int will make all that a moot point o'course.

You're also forgetting the stat that is increased. A helm of brilliance +5 can become octiron 5 INT earlier than a helm of attractivity +5 (assuming you don't have both).

Here's my full set as I walked into Attnam. Luckily a pet took care of the skeletons carrying those axes, I'm sure I would have been one-shotted. They ended up being my weapons for quite a while.

It's a shame there aren't any axe artifacts in vanilla IVAN.

Is that a screenshot from 0.50 though? The default weapon for a skeleton is a bronze axe -2 (with slight variations). Those enchantments are almost preposterous.

Can be. Later in the game it's the same as in the case of veteran dark knights in +9 iron armor.

Yes, it is regular 0.50. My only guess as to why they were enchanted so high, is because I had a pack of wolves following me from a fountain and an angel... I didn't have Atavus's armor yet. Actually, I don't think I had any body armor at all.

Not exactly near the start of the game (I'm down to GC4 now) but I've found THREE Oily Orpivs so far
Needless to say that raised my danger level higher than I desired at first but by now most of my equipment has balanced that out. Agility is also very low

Hmm, how much danger does Oily Orpivs actually mean? Is it far beyond armors/weapons?

I mean because of the 3 endurance boosts.

Hahahah, oh god this is great. I start out with 13 arm + leg str 11 dex and agi. I then find, in the starting room, Saal'thul. After that a wand of polymorph, and then a kobold with a ring of teleport control and an amulet of esp.
Still haven't explored more than a third of UT 1.

Edit: still in UT 1: scroll of change material... and carrot.
Edit 2: UT 2, wand of cloning, rapier named Lynslag.
Edit 3: Ommel Urine. Yay!

were can i buy that, i wanna play ivan on psp

...if you want IVAN on PSP, make it yourself. Or, you know, find a bunch of coders and pay them to make a port. Whinging about it not existing will not make it happen.

Edit: I feel like being helpful so here is a link to the PSP-compatible DOSBox and also one to a place where the DOS port of IVAN can be found just under the Windows port binary. JimmyJ mentioned this in your poll but maybe you forgot or missed it so here is a workaround just for you.

Heh, BDR I actually wrote amulet of psp, then i edited it. So there was grounds for commenting ^^

The bit where he sort of played like the mistype was real wasn't where my objection lay; it was the bit where it was less of a joke about it and more of a whiny "why is there no IVAN on PSP gawd I want it so bad" style post that I objected to, as he's already made one topic about it and was given a means to have it available to him that way (plus, I'm also annoyed because he dashed my dreams of having someone around who might do *something* new with IVAN, even if it was more or less useless to me).

Well, not exacly found, but I've got my hands on two-handed valpurium sword before reaching UT3. As well as Angel Hair armor +1 and some lame mithril arms from angels. But that was thanks to finding 2 HHG.

Eh, in the first floor of the Tunnels, I had gotten my hands on one of those Thieving Girdle deals, +2, then ran into a ommel cerumen golem, which was barely any ommel at all. But hey, the 1 Intelligence and Wisdom was nice. Ended up with mostly leather gear and mithril daggers by the time I got to Genetrix, but.. got unlucky, got bit in the head by a greater plant, and.. you guys know the rest.

Hmm, I'd have to say Saal'thul +3 and a Helmet of Piercing Perception +2. It was my first time on GC2 on that run, but I died after a veteran kamikaze dwarf got me.

some exploding weapon that destroyed me 5 minutes later...

Welcome to the magical world of IVAN, Waspys!

If I heard the sentence your said in the street, at the mall or over the phone, IVAN is the only possible thought that springs.

Turox is not the nicest weapon to use at the start of the game

Also, I've been finding a curious amount of holy hand grenades in UT in a few of my recent games.

Just had one who found Turox, Vermis, and a cloak of invisibility (torn and then repaired) all in UT 1-2

Yesterday I had a game where I got a scroll of wishing and a wand of mirroring (amongst other things) before getting to UT3. Unfortunately UT2 was also infested with MMs, and a werewolf got him.