Part 2

When we left off, we were about to enter the first level of the dungeon.

Unsurprisingly, not much is threatening to our mechanical deathmachine so far. For example, here's our first unique:



Chicken Little, one of several (!) chicken uniques in the game. She spawns surrounded by chickens, and she's a bit tougher than your usual chicken, but -



Oh.

One important thing to note is weapon damage type.



All weapons are either blunt, slashing, or piercing. This might be in vanilla Angband (I forget), but it's front & center in Steamband: many enemies are either vulnerable to or almost totally resist certain weapon damage types, even from the first level of the dungeon. Even with our enormous strength, our broadsword bounces right off this 'animated clay', but when we de-equip the broadsword...



We trash it in a single round of unarmed combat, even without any points in Martial Arts.

It's worth keeping a couple of different weapons around, just to make sure you can get around enemy resists. (Until you start encountering enemies resistant to all physical damage... )



Here's Cocky Locky! We killed him in one round.



Identifying mechanisms (scrolls) by rigging (reading) them is pretty dangerous early on, mostly because they could be Summon Monster and spawn nasty out-of-depth monsters at you.

Not a threat for us.



In our first trip through the dungeon, we picked up a couple new things. First is books. I mentioned there were two reasons libraries are important; this is the second. Returning books to libraries gets you extra skill points. That's pretty huge, and it means it's basically always worth picking up books whenever you see them.



We also picked up a brand new head.


I'm going to also drop our second trip into the dungeon into this post, because it wasn't any more eventful.



We kill the Invisible Man in one round...



And steal a new pair of arms from his body.



Another unique, White Fang! He actually gives us some trouble; he corners us in a corridor while we're fighting Morlocks, who happen to grab & Fear us when we're in the middle of a fight. Being no longer able to attack is kind of a problem for a melee monster, and of course we can't quaff potions to dispel the Fear!

Luckily, we have vulcan cannons.



Steam-Mecha is the dumbest race.

We slowly & tediously kill Alien Psuedpods (our quest target - out of depth, but not enough to pose a challenge), and, after one and a half passes through Level 48, we've killed the required 14.



Our glorious reward.

Next time: actual danger!