0.50.09 New Stuff

I picked up a Chilling Axe, is the slowing effect on enemies permanent? Is there a way to increase the likelyhood of the magical effect happening?

No, only temporary.


The chance is hardcoded, so not without changing the code. Do you find it triggers enough, or too rarely?

I would love to hear any feedback you can give. I tried for as much balance as I could, but as always, there will probably crop up things that will need revision after more playtime.

I have only played with it a little but it seems to happen to little.

it is quite easy to move all the "special effect mechanics" to scripts. see k8ivan commits from this upto this. then people will be able to balance chilling axe and terror scythe without recompiling the code (and create other "magic effect weapons" too as a consequence).

The ring of detection seems overpowered.

Hello! I just wanted to ask a couple questions about the new update.
I found an empty room with a forge, a chair and a anvil. What can I do in that room?
And why is there an iron cloak of protection?

I dont think the forge/anvil do anything (yet). IDK about the cloak, I think it is a new item.

The forge is (currently) decoration. The cloak of protection is, well, exactly what it says on the tin: a cloak which provides more AC than usual, with less of a movement penalty than (normal) iron cloaks.

I think most of the new items are awesome, but the spawn rate of magical items needs to be toned down significantly across the board. as it stand i cant get to the end of UT 1 without having some new magical item in my inventory. I think that is part of the problem with humanoids and humanoid undead becoming so dangerous early on is that more items and more powerful items are being generated too often and too early.

I love the new items too but yes I think I'm getting lots of nice equipment a lot more frequently than before

also much earlier, which is cool because it gives me a chance to see all the new items, but in the long run i think is kind of breaking the game. Also it makes early generated humanoids insanely dangerous, as it seem in half the games i play i am encountering a skeleton with a +1 bastard sword or something equivalent. Most of the time before i can even find leather armor.

Item generation might need to be revamped. IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong), each time the game generates an item anywhere, it rolls a random number and picks from the full list of spawn-able items. We can control how often a given item spawns by weighting it, sure, but you are no more or less likely to walk into a room containing a +5 flaming adamant sword in UT1 than you are in GC6. (Not accounting for monster influence, i.e. a kobold walking off with said sword or Rondol spawning with his diamond spear.)

I don't know about bastard swords, because nothing was changed there, so they should not be any more common than before, but I will look into rarity of magical items. I tried to make them all more rare to account for their higher numbers, but they could definitely be made more rare still.

BTW, a radical idea - what if we prevented most magical weapons and armor from spawning in UT? This way we could have a nice change of pace from lowly crawl through tunnels to mroe exciting adventure in caves/tomb.


IIRC the game picks from whole list of items based on their rarity, with some items being allowed to generate in only certain dungeons (eg. food cannot be generated in TX). You are no more or less likely to find a flaming sword in TU1 or GC6, but the +5 is much, much more likely in GC6, because enchantment chances are also weighted in favour of deeper dungeon levels. Those +5 swords on UT3 mentioned in other thread are very unlikely (but possible), while +5 swords in Oree's Lair are quite normal.

But yes, there is always a chance of random great item being generated. And given how random the generation is, there can be funny situation like the one game I found four Saal'thul, the first one in UT and the rest in GC (including one in Merka's shop).

I like this idea, actually. Perhaps prohibit everything non-mundane from spawning in UT1 and only allowing more basic magic items - flaming swords, thunder hammers, daggers of venom, rings, wands, scrolls etc - in UT2/UT3, maybe unlocking some of the stronger items, like named weapons, only after G:3 (or equivalent)...

I don't think actively preventing the good stuff from appearing in UT at all is such a good approach. Make it less likely sure. It's nice to surprise the player with a neat item early on.
Perhaps what should happen is that the loot scale climbs alongside the danger level?

More dangerous = more loot = increasing the danger level = more loot

Pretty sure there are controls on the max and min item price for each level. Maybe the new loot is too inexpensive?

How hard could it be to make an ingame settings option for a loot drop modifier? As a noob, personally I have a hard enough time with the game as is, (I haven't won yet), and removing earlygame magic would be just a kick in the groin for me.

To be fair, Magalor: Not a lot people have win ANY version of IVAN. I've been playing on-and-off since 2005, and have only won once. The current version is, IMO, rather difficult, owing to early enemies with 2h swords.

I personally hate difficulty options. It makes different player experiences more or less incomparable and in many cases breaks all game balance. We can discuss what needs to be tweaked to make the game more or less difficult, but I don't like the idea of having "easy mode" Ivan and "hard mode" Ivan.

BTW, it took me years to beat the game for the first time and I have yet to become a new High Priest in vanilla (I did it in CLIVAN, but that variant is a whole lot easier than vanilla).


It's actually, IMHO, a tiny bit less difficult than the prievous version, because of the number of new options you have with new magic items and loot. True, you have to run from some enemies rather than taking them head-on in early game, but you also have so much more different and useful stuff to work with I tend to have solutions for many more dangerous situations than before.

what does liquid darkness do? I drank some in wizmode and it said something to the effect that I made a mistake, but i saw no immediate stat or health impact.

It drains mental stats. Given that many AI options are based on mental stats of monsters, liquid darkness should make them act more dumb. I think eg. spellcasting requires that the dark mage had some amount of Int.

As far as I remember, the biggest impact of reducing their INT would be the fact that they can't spot you from as huge a distance away with ESP and blast you.

Not sure if this has been mentioned but, but the distribution of some random items needs to be tweaked (IMO) I was walking torhoug the tunnels of UT1 and i came across a grandfather clock and a potted plant. A treacherous dungeon tunnel doesnt seem like the place to randomly encounter high end household furnishings

I agree with that. Maybe like beds they could randomly appear if there's an eddy around