Flesh weapon run

So yes, felt like playing IVAN a bit again, this time with a "slight" self-imposed challenge. Initially I intended to limit the allowed equipment to fruit-based materials for weapons, but that quickly expanded to all flesh materials.

Rules:
1) Fighting in melee may only be done with fruit or flesh material weapons. Fighting unarmed is restricted to cases when neither is available, and should be avoided as much as possible by stockpiling corpses/limbs/kiwis.
2) Using offensive wands is prohibited for everything except the enner beast and named monsters.
3) Throwing non-fleshy weapons is prohibited.
4) No pets.
5) No artificial limbs.

My own run:

Just to throw a heads-up, there'll be spoilers here should someone wish to avoid those.

I started the run as normal, stealing some bananas and training agility to 16 before heading underground armed with two banana peels. Armed zombies caused some headache to take down, otherwise UT1 was a breeze with some retreats to heal.

Come UT2, the peels rotted away at some point and got replaced by a pineapple and a kobold's leg from a spawned bear trap. Neither seemed to be nearly as effective as the banana peels were (you'd think they would do more damage than a rotten mushy banana peel), so I was forced to find alternatives. These eventually ended up being a dead hedgehog and a rat's corpse. In addition to being much better weapons than limbs, loaves of bread or similar, they seem to train ASTR even faster than halberds or two-handed scimitars.

UT3 was pure hell. Killing greater plants takes ages, plus they deal a lot of damage should you not have enough armor. I ended up having to burn a scroll of harden on leather armor just to survive a 1v1 fight with one. Luckily there was a second wand of polymorph and a pickaxe lying around on the level, which in turn I managed to get a mithril chain mail with. Taking down Genetrix was easy after that. (Normally I'd have left her alive to spawn some training material, but with perishable weaponry spending time on training isn't really ideal.)

No pics for UT, sorry!

I tamed a veteran guard for his armor and ripped off the librarian in Attnam before heading to GC1.

Due to the very heavy ASTR training (natural 28, not gifted in STR), I encountered my first apprentince necromancer on already on GC1. Despite spending around an in-game day on beating it with severed limbs, the damage simply was not enough with all the blocks and misses. I ended up skipping him for now and headed down, only to find a scroll of wishing from an Atavus room and a SoCM later on. Having gotten two scrolls of charging from the library earlier, I wished for a wand of cloning (3 charges, lucky me) and cloned the SoCMs along with some ommel urine and scrolls from another few wands of polymorph.


Rest of GC didn't differ all that much from any usual run after getting a real weapon aside from taking ages to kill humanoids with the player preferring to sever all the limbs before a killing blow. Enner beast got blasted with a wand; didn't wish to take the chance of taking him down in melee. Found Danny on GC9, who got killed in melee after around 8 hits (severed both arms and a leg).


Elpuri died very soon afterwards. I was a bit worried he'd negate the wand of slow zap with haste from the blue clouds while backing up to avoid being hit, but seemed my agility was high enough for it to not matter. The spider silk golem went down almost accidentally while exploring the level. Used the wand of cloning (2 charges) from him to clone a bunch of ommel sweat.


Another stroke of luck on GC10, found a third bones file that had gotten killed by Sherry. 7 SoCMs, a spent 3-charge wand of cloning, a few scrolls, 2 AoLS and a helmet of brilliance +10(!). Spent some scrolls to bump my INT up by two points and suddenly valpurium gear. Things are looking rather swell. Sherry herself is still alive.


Sherry is dead, only took 4 hits. Even with her slowed and me with haste, she still moved faster than I did. Luckily my DEX was high enough to land a hit by waiting for her to move with 's'earch, then teleport away with a wand. With telecontrol, I kept hopping a few squares ahead to not get hit. (Notice how I forgot to put an AoLS on. :x)


Oree is dead. I didn't dare to take on the mage room with all these limb hits, there's just no way I could've killed them fast enough without wands of striking. Still haven't met Urky or Izzy, so up to Petrus we go.


And Petrus is dead. My staff kept breaking each time he managed to block, which made the fight rather difficult. Eventually got a severing blow on his sword-hand, quickly snagged Justifier to keep anyone from using it and finished him off. High priest run with flesh material weapons only complete!



Final score: 893510

I've got to say, while I did get pretty lucky with finding bones and enough wands of polymorph early on, I certainly didn't think a high priest victory would be possible with flesh weapons only. The hardest part of my run was a tie between UT3 and GC12.

Prayed to everything from Mellis to Seges currently (that school food -> purify from praying to the two in succession is wonderful). I've been avoiding losing the staff to rotting by alternating its material between Elpuri's flesh and enner beast flesh whenever it's got 3 flies around it. Takes a large amount of SoCMs, but it's the only way to keep using a single weapon. Currently standing at 7-8 left IIRC. Found three bones files: the first was that lightning-in-a-doorway-guy I posted a screenshot about with hardly anything useful, second one with a 1-charge wand of cloning and 7 SoEWs with other assorted scrolls, third in GC10 with some rather neat stuff.

The fact that you can reach/kill Elpuri pretty much on command (and with flesh weapons no less!) baffles me. You ought to write up some strategy guides (or hell, just take some videos of yourself playing) for those of us who are still lucky to get past Enner.

I would watch that video

You know, I did think about throwing my own walkthrough to an Elpuri win together after seeing the abandoned WIP guides on the wiki. Might do that at some point. A video walkthrough wouldn't be out of question either, for that matter.

In other news, Elpuri is down. Going to head on downwards for a knight/high priest attempt.

Very impressive.

So far I've only been able to get screamed apart by the Enner beast.......kill it from a far...wands......scroll of detect Material: Enner beast flesh.
How'd you get so many of the SOCM?

Wishing/buying and finding is the only way i seem to get ONE per life. ^^

Taming a guard....[never thought of that!]

Most of my SoCMs were cloned, so one is really all you need to get going with a wand of cloning.

OP updated, high priest victory complete!

Damn. Nice job. I see you changed material every time it got 3 flies.. did you ever forget to do it at any point? Did the weapon ever get weaker as a result of rotting?

Man JoKe this is huge. How many in-game days did you spend stat training?
I see Enner beast flesh is magenta, that's cool.

No, forgetting to change the material would've meant the staff would just rot away completely. Not something you'd want to happen with a +15 enchanted weapon, is it?

Around 3 days for agility in the start, a few days to get LSTR up around GC1 before getting the wand of cloning for urine. Training dexterity or ASTR wasn't needed seeing how well banana peels and corpses train the two (lots of hits needed to kill anything + wieldable in one hand despite heavy weight). Sci-talked with banana growers, the NA village elder, Decos, normal and greater light frogs, the librarian, mystic dark frogs and both necromancers - i.e. not as much as I could've.

Wow amazing win JoKe, I can never keep up a natural limb game. Always get scared and change at least one or two by the time I get to Elpuri or so. And flesh weapons is a great challenge idea. Did you use any gas immunity? I always find the "wondrous smells" to be more frustrating than helpful, though its a fun weapon to use. Is it more powerful than a normal staff?

No gas immunity, so I had to try and keep any contact with the red clouds as short as possible. The only real harmful effect from them ended being polymorphitis, which is why I kept a ring of polycontrol on. Sure, lost my near-perma haste from blue clouds on contact with them for a short while, but that never proved to be a true problem.

I really can't say whether or not it's actually more powerful than a normal staff damage-wise, I only chose it over a normal staff for the effect, plus the fact that it was the only (semi-)artifact weapon available by GC2.

A staff of wondrous smells does indeed have better damage. I think I'm going to sticky that thread.

The other day i came across a wand of cloning with 3 charges but was unable to clone a scroll of charging or scroll of change material.

How is it done?
tried cloning myself... [wand of mirroring does that.]
dropped the scroll on the ground and zapped it. [nothing but a wasted charge.]

How is it done?



I did a duel sheild run yesterday....
The second i lost one leg...i was basically done for. OVERLOAD!

You can't clone a wand of charging, for obvious reasons. Otherwise you'd end up with infinity of anything you wanted.
You should be able to clone change material

kicking and wands? I wonder if it is possible.

IIRC a while ago someone looked into a "kicking only" run and it turns out kicks are too weak for the later game, not to mention really slow.
You'd be relying on your wands a lot.

I am not entirely sure highly enchanted boots of kicking would help either.

maybe with spider silk legs and boots of kicking +15?

Highly enchanted boots of kicking with a very heavy material might help with the damage. You'd also need to rely a lot on kicking things against walls for the extra damage.

I may need to try this next.

I did a quick little test in wiz-mode, and with +15 valpurium boots of kicking and GEF legs I was able to kick my way through the Dark Level without much difficulty. Oree's lair was quite a bit rougher, but it should certainly be possible.

My original thought behind duel shields was that the player would shield bash enemies,
That and the fact a shield is used as defence... I wondered how good defence would be with two shields.
Then I found out he kicked them because of unusable arms.

I stuck with it between I expected this:

If I kick an enemy away
He'd spend his turn walking back to me
I'd kick him again.
and He'd spend his turn walking back to me

Until he ether dies or panics and runs off.

Then I learned how agility or dexterity allows a character multiple moves per turn.

I soon died after finding out I caught Leprosy off a zombie and my legs fell off.

Yeah, unfortunately you can't shield bash (if you could I'd expect it to act like a stronger kick) but since weapons become better at blocking attacks than shields in the long run when you've levelled your affinity for them, you basically have an offensive shield in the form of whatever weapons you're using toward the endgame.
Of course, earlier on shields are definitely better at blocking, but at the same time you're giving up a chance to fit in two attacks for free.

Also quoi leprosy, it's another good reason to wear whatever armor you can to cover all bodyparts. Leprosy transmits better through an attack on an uncovered limb - hence why you're more likely to notice it on the way through UT and not GC. If you are struck with leprosy, options are to run (or roll) to the nearest healer (priestess/priest), drink an antidote potion, or pray to mellis with empty bottles and hope you get an antidote.

On that note and that of this thread, I wonder if hitting an enemy with zombie parts can transmit leprosy? Or if that's only transmitted naturally by bite, like poison.
Tomorrow I am going to look into seeing if I can jury-rig in some "daggers of parasites/leprosy"

I would think the kicking run is possible, but it would take a lot of luck. you would have to find boots of kicking and light shields early, and a bones or two to enchant them. Then I think you would have a chance to kick enemies away from you and "s"earch until they move back next to you.

This would be totally luck dependent - you would have to get the equipment early and some way of either boosting your lstr or changing material on the legs to buff them.

Interesting! O.O

I have learned though gameplay and some notes in the game that only one limb might have Leprosy,
So when it falls off you might be cured of Leprosy.
But if you reattach it you'll have Leprosy again and it might spread though your body.
I believe Silva cures Leprosy if you pray to her.

It's been ages since I've died because of Leprosy ruining my body and then some kobold pinking me to death with a balsa stick,
Mostly because I know how to deal with it.
When i first started Ivan i always thought antidote was only for poison and nothing more.

I don't think the leprosy is ever confined to one limb. If you lose a limb, you can be sure that another one will detach soon if you don't get cured

That was when you lost a limb, went and got cured, then got the limb reattached, you'd get leprosy back.