The whips don;t autofail. I know I've been polymorphed by a kobold weilding a chameleon whip in UT. Don;t forget that each time you use the whip it curries favor with the associated god.

I don;t know if i could tolerate having to press the extra key in order to make a instead of a : )

It was probably IVAN and you just forgot that you get dying over and over again and restarting

Well I haven;t played in months now but I always played 0.50 the last official release. I think some of the mods are unbalanced.

spilling acid on you shouldn;t kill you unless you a very weak. One ring of acid resistance is more than enough.

yeah but the meteoric steel chests rarely have bottles in them. All I really care about is gettin wands of cloning/mirroring and those don;t usually break. I can;t say I've noticed that kicking has less chance of breaking items. is this in the code?

if your Astr is better than you LStr then throwing works better than kicking. This is usually the case for me and I usually open the meteoric steel chests in the secret rooms in GC by throwing them at the wall.

I hate to be a jerk and bust your bubble but that is a well known tactic. Congrats for figuring it out on your own though. Other minefield survival tactics
- belt of levitation or fountain levitation
- pray to silva - eartquake detonates all mines
- SoDM gunpowder
- hit "s" multiple time prior to each step
- get good fire protection
- get lots of pets and turn them loose in the minefield
- move diagonally and kick square in front of you mine does the least damage to you that way (I've never used it in minefield but have used this diagonal to survive VKDs)
- use lots of wands to detonate mines in your path (theoretical - I've never tried it, but it could be useful once youve detected mines with s or SODM, e.g. if there was a vermis on top of a cluster of mines.)
- pray to legifer to get his explosion to detonate detected mines from a safer distance

@Z

and they keep the taxmen away

I was hoping someone would be able to get the answer by code-diving. However, if you want to derive the equation empirically that would be great too.