That '#t' engraving is intentional, it marks the item for autopick. You can turn it off in options. Autopicking thrown items shouldn't take a turn, AFAIK, so it's safe to use.

Yeah, water is useful.

Especially in later stages of the game, players can find themselves with
large amounts of money that can no longer be spend on anything useful
(barring priest services and fixing equipment in Attnam), as shops not
always offer good items, or everything of value was already bought.

I made a pull request that adds a new dungeon, the Black Market, which is
randomly placed on the worldmap and may be found by players who go
explore the wilderness. (This also gives some incentive to go explore, as
otherwise the player will only go for the shortest route between UT, Attnam
and GC/TX) It has two levels: The first one is full of guards, the second has
a huge shop of overpriced items.

The purpose of this is to have a place where players can spend all their
hard-earned money, with enough items generated to ensure there will be
at least something for every player. However, to prevent unbalancing the
game with new shopping options, the Black Market has intentionally
overpriced items that will only be affordable to players who have
accumulated some excess funds, therefore allowing an end-game
shopping spree.

The shopkeeper and her shop guards were balanced about being next
to impossible to beat even for an end-game player, as the shop holds
too much wealth to give to the player.

Thoughts and polemic are more then welcome.

Shields were already buffed and can be pretty good now. In early game, especially if you have no armour, shields can provide the much needed AV, plus will block some blows. Later, you can get huge AV from metal shields, and shields of light metals are extremely good at protecting you, at the cost of some offense. I'd say they are at least competitive now, unlike before.

That's not to say I disagree with IVAN being a game where good offense is very, very important. But that's not a flaw, that's design decision. I always liked how IVAN feels action-packed even though it's a turn-based game. You can kill many things easily - and they can kill you quickly. IVAN would feel weird if you could turtle most attacks with good enough armour.

It gives you a very high resistance to poison and acid.

New strategy for the tactical level in TX: Bring a stack of landmines, as many as you can. Drop them right as you enter the level and zap them with a wand of teleportation. Make sure that none of them ended near you, then pray to Silva or read a scroll of earthquake. Watch the level burn.

This gets rid of quite a few enemies (hopefully the spellcasters, too) and opens new tunnels in the walls that would otherwise force you to go around the long way. Unfortunately I still died in the last game as the Xinroch's grave keeper kept destroying my torso.

Yeah, it would be a cool boss.

There was a discussion in the ideas thread a while back about a cockatrice that would stone your limbs on attack.

The trick with a floating eye and darkness made dealing with them actually tolerable once I learned about it.

Crafting is very new subsystem, so I don't think anyone has really explored what everything can be done with it (and what is broken). Maybe start with smaller items? I think they should be easier to craft.

I released the one behind the palm island today by exploding his buddy on the island. It seems that if you use a wand of fireballs and the island dwarf is standing all the way on the right, the right wall will not survive the two explosions. Fortunately, I set off the other too before he had a chance to get closer.

BTW, that level with the priestess of Infuscor that constantly summons new creatures is brutal. Even if I go and kill her, she often manages to get several necromancers and they keep zombifying anything I kill. Do you have some clever strategy for this?