Part 17: Ground Control to Major Mitch

Last time, we won the game! So what's left to do? Well, you can always just keep playing until you've killed all the uniques, found all the non-random artifacts, and otherwise just done everything there is to do. But there is also one last quest. Let's head on over to our good buddy Galadriel in Lothlorien.





A hopeless quest? Sign us up!



And with that, Galadriel conjures up a purple staircase in the middle of Lothlorien:



Sure you don't want to put that somewhere where random wandering townspeople won't stumble into it? Ehh, I'm sure it'll be fine.

The game describes the staircase as "a jumpgate to the Void", and that's an important descriptor. See, there's one small problem with where we'll be going: there's no air. Like when we visited sunken Numenor, we'll be taking suffocation damage every few turns if we don't find a way to breathe without air. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like that. I thought we'd held onto the Phial of Undeath, which would have been a really awful way to get voidbreathing, but at least a way, but it doesn't appear to be in any of our homes. And none of our other items have it either; the closest we come is Ar-Pharazon's amulet, which gives water breathing. Not good enough.

In fact, the only ways to get voidbreathing are the Phial of Undeath, a specific artifact that I believe can only be found in the Void, and one other item: a Cloak of Air. These cloaks are ridiculously rare, though; only one ego type is rarer (a moderately powerful heavy crossbow; that seems an odd choice). Rather than spend hours in the Lonely Mountain killing great wyrms and then tediously sifting through their drops for cloaks, I'm just going to cheat us up a cloak.

Input command: ^a

The debug commands are for debugging and experimenting. The game will not be scored if you use debug commands.

Yeah, yeah, I know what I'm doing.

Input command ^ac





We force the game to generate a Cloak for us.

Input command: ^ao



From here, we can reroll the cloak indefinitely, forcing it to be of "excellent" (ego-item) quality every time.



And in short order, we have ourselves our new toy:



We have some other equipment rearranging to do. Morgoth's Crown is ridiculous and has no downsides, aside from that it welds itself to our skull, so we can never remove it. But why would we ever want to remove it? On it goes. This also allows us to swap out our ancient Boomerang of *Slay Dragon* that was providing poison resistance, as well as our beloved Amulet of DOOM as its stat boosts are wholly outclassed by the Crown's +125 to everything. We equip Cubragol, for its +10 speed, and Ar-Pharazon's amulet for the +40% mana. This leaves us with Free Action uncovered, though, which is an awful idea, so we swap in one of the Elven Rings of Power, Narya, in place of the Ring of Flare. This loses us the swap-positions power, as well as flight, but I don't think either will be needed much in the Void.



Yeah, that looks pretty good. We make a quick tour of the towns, grabbing consumables, and our inventory looks like this:



And I think that's everything! Let's go for a little spacewalk.

There is a jumpgate to the Void.
You enter a maze of down staircases. You go into a jumpgate to the Void.



Welcome to the Void! It's basically the worst. See, we've already cast Vision in this screenshot, followed by Sense Monsters. Notice how we don't see, say, any walls? The entire level is just open space (except for the occasional vault), rendered as pure blackness instead of marking the tiles with "."s as usual (except for those purple and red tiles, which are "nether mist" and will damage you if you walk in them).

And it has the Labyrinth's gimmick of the game refusing to remember the map for you. And we start at level 128, and all of the monsters are leveled up.



Vision is still helpful as it lights the dungeon for us, so we can see monsters coming, and if we manage to find any stairs they'll be readily visible. This isn't as helpful as you might think, though. Check the monster list:



What're those Spirits? They're at the end of the list, which means they're the most high-level monsters around. Up in that room to the north are two G monsters. One's red and detected by ESP; the other is purple and...not.




Yes, for this particular dungeon the game has a set of identically-named ubermonsters with various different power sets. You can tell them apart by their color and descriptions, but they're all pretty unpleasant, excepting maybe the "orcish" Spirit that just hits you and has less than a tenth the HP of the others. It, like the other spirits, has lethally powerful melee though. Looking at the monster list, we have the following basic types:

* Orcish; just a basic, flimsy melee monster
* "Etherealism" -- breathes light, darkness, and confusion, like Ethereal Drakes do
* Doom: can cast the Hand of Doom spell, which eats away a large percentage of your HP (70%, if I recall correctly).
* Thiefish: steals gold, can cast heal-self and amnesia...which is spectacularly pointless as you can't remember the map anyway.
* Time: breathes time, casts Slow, Haste Self, and Paralyze. Also counts as an "animal" for some reason.
* Assholes: has a lot of unpleasant, unresistable attacks: Mana Storm, Plasma Breath, Time Breath, Fire Rocket, Hand of Doom, Amnesia, and Whirlpool.
* "of vampire or something" (I'm quoting the monster info file here, folks): drains experience, has nether/darkness spells
* Shadowy: basically like thiefish except drains experience instead of gold and can cast Darkness Storm
* Elemental: one each for fire/cold/acid/electricity, with appropriately-themed melee and spells
* Nether: casts Nether Storm
* Annoyance: breeds rapidly, comes in groups, and has the "AI_ANNOY" flag which causes them to hover just outside of melee range
* Movement: casts Slow, Haste, Paralyze, and Phase Door.
* Confusion: breathes nexus/confusion/chaos, melee causes confusion and hallucination.
* Strength: has ridiculously powerful melee (4x 18d18 attacks that cause earthquakes!)
* Dragons: A souped-up Great Wyrm of Power
* Snakes: can summon generic monsters; its bite poisons and drains all stats
* "of Seeing": lots of unpleasantness, but chiefly it can shriek for help, awakening every monster in a wide radius.
* Ickyness: a massively souped-up Icky Thing. Can summon more Spirits
* Friendliness: shows up with lots of similar monsters and can summon more Spirits
* Abomination: melee can temporarily turn you into an Abomination -- a nasty polymorph that imposes major stat penalties and that is ordinarily only a consequence of a Mimic class failing to use their class power.
* Of various stats: STR/DEX/CON/INT/WIS/CHA. Their melee drains the relevant stat and they have various "appropriate" spells.

That is far, far too many different kinds of Spirit. We're just going to do our best to avoid the lot of them.

Now, given that we're a somewhat-squishy mage out in the middle of an open space, you might think we should cast Time Out. We can do that! We absolutely can. It just causes this to happen:



I hope you remembered where things were! We can at least use Probability Travel to skip to the edge of the "prison", though as in Angband we can't use it to levelport. Indeed, casting Time Out and then using Probability Travel to jump to the edge of the block of stone we threw down is a fairly quick and somewhat safe way to travel -- comparable to using Minor Displacement, but with fewer keystrokes. In fairly short order we find our first staircase:



While this staircase generated on the edge of the map, the Void is not a "flat" dungeon -- stairs can show up anywhere. Which makes searching for them harder as we can't just explore the perimeter of each level.

You enter a maze of down staircases. Generation restarted (too many objects) Looks like any other level.

And that's the first level of the void down, without, as far as I can tell, any monsters waking up. We want to do these levels as quickly as possible -- literally every single monster has been stuffed to the gills with extra speed, HP, and melee attack power, there's plenty of nasty monsters that can walk right through walls, and we want to conserve our resources as much as possible. So our goal on each level will be to find the stairs down, then rest up to max SP or as close as possible before monsters cotton onto our presence before fleeing to the next level.





We're seeing monsters upwards of level 130 right now. Our speed of +55 (with Essence of Speed cast) is frankly absurd for any game, but the monsters here still outspeed us and can easily put out hundreds of damage in one round of melee if we let them. Fortunately, the speed scale has diminishing returns, so even a monster at, say, +70 speed only has a minor advantage over us and is unlikely to get double turns.



Shown here: a level-86 Drolem (mechanical gas dragon with nasty poison breath), level-97 Great Bile Wyrm (top-tier acid dragon), and a level-129 Colbran (lightning golem). Of these, the Colbran is probably the most lethal, simply due to all the levels it's piled on. Its lightning bolts don't scale up much if at all, but its melee would hurt.



This is more dangerous, though. The vast majority of these guys are Spirits of various types; one of the types that shows up with friends must be in there. And some of them are already awake! We throw up a Time Out and reverse course, hoping to stay well away from the group. Fortunately, Probability Travel lets us cover vast distances in a single turn so long as we've been diligent about leaving great masses of rock behind us. Even more fortunately, there's a down staircase nearby.



Imagine about 1000' of solid granite extending behind us. Because there's about 1000' of solid granite extending behind us.



This level's been nuked already -- someone cast Word of Destruction here, which fills a circular area with random debris. We're carrying around a few Scrolls of *Destruction* with us for super emergencies -- in addition to the terrain removal, they also delete all monsters in the area of effect. We can also cast Area - Destruction, which has a similar effect, but in a smaller area. Annoyingly, the stairs down are hidden in one of these Destructed areas, where they can't be seen from a distance. Fortunately there aren't any Spirits on the level, though, and we manage to escape before anything wakes up.



The Void is not wholly bereft of rooms. They are very rare however. There can also be vaults, which are only really recognizable because you can't teleport into them -- otherwise, the map constraints of the Void make them hard to recognize from a distance, because the items and traps in them are "invisible" unless directly in line-of-sight.

One thing to watch out for here (and in the rest of the game, but it's more evident here) is the presence of friendly monsters. There's an entire different category of "spirits" -- the Child Spirit, Young Spirit, Mature Spirit, Experienced Spirit, and Wise Spirit. They're coaligned, and utterly worthless in a fight (even the Wise Spirit has a pathetic melee and no spells whatsoever), but they will happily wake up sleeping monsters for you. Fortunately you can dismiss all coaligned monsters using the "P" command (for pets). It doesn't take any time to do so, so dismissing all pets on a new level should probably be your first action unless you're playing a class that relies on summons.



Fun fact: uniques can level up too. Khamul the Black Easterling, one of the Ringwraiths, is in this vault, and he's level 128. He's normally supposed to be only level 72! We are not going to fight him.

The Spirit gestures in shadow. Darkness surrounds you. The Spirit makes a high pitched shriek. You feel a sudden stirring nearby! The Spirit blinks away.



And of course some of the Spirits would be specifically designed to blend in with the pure-black background. Literally impossible to see unless you keep a close eye on the visible monster list. Frankly we got lucky here; the only other monsters in the vicinity are 13 other Spirits of this type, which have no direct attack spells; and a level-81 Colbran. None of these guys can pass through walls, so we throw up a Time Out and forget about them.



We have a different problem, though. Where the hell are the stairs? There must be some somewhere around here, but hell if I know where they are. We can cast Reveal Ways and be notified if there are any stairs within a 43-tile radius of our position, but that's not very helpful as it doesn't tell is where in that radius they are. I can't even remember where the stairs we entered the level from are; in the middle of a pile of granite somewhere.

Well, hell. Maybe there's some stairs in the vault.



We get into a brawl with a Nightcrawler and a Great Wyrm of Chaos and his buddies. Meanwhile, Khamul is tromping down the corridor to our southeast. Fortunately, Black Hole is more than earning its keep; even these high-level foes are put into stasis by it.



Unfortunately, I forget the implications that Khamul's levels have on his speed.

Khamul, the Black Easterling hits you. <2x> Your foe calls upon your soul! You feel the Black Breath slowly draining you of life... Khamul, the Black Easterling touches you. You keep hold of your life force! Khamul, the Black Easterling touches you. You keep hold of your life force!

Damn, stupid Black Breath. It shouldn't cause us much trouble, since our stats and experience are sustained, and we do have some Sprigs of Athelas, but I'd still rather not have the plague. We nail Khamul with Black Hole, hitting him 29 times...and slowing him only 3 times. This still makes him a lot more manageable, but it's a bad sign for the viability of our attack spells. Still,

Khamul, the Black Easterling says: 'Adios.' Khamul, the Black Easterling is destroyed.

Khamul's ring is somewhat confused. Check out that name!



Also found in the wreckage of the fight is the last Ring of Power, Vilya:



We can use it, for slightly more speed at the cost of losing protection from fear. I wish I could remember if fear affected spell failure rates. We'll keep using Narya for now.



And there's our staircase, over next to a pack of Dreads (the orange "G"s). Dreads are very annoying -- they can move through walls, they're just alert enough to slowly wake up and bother you in dribs and drabs, and in a normal game their nether bolt spell and STR-draining melee are a potent threat. Here they mostly just suck up all of our mana because we have to spend a Black Hole on each one as it wakes up and comes to bother us. Fortunately, we're able to make it to the stairs without having to spend one of our limited Potions of Restore Mana. Psychic Drain is ill-advised around here -- all of the high-level undead and demons are likely to hit us with backlash if we try to use it, and there's a paucity of weak-minded foes to safely suck mana from. Our 21 Potions of Restore Mana should be enough...but there's plenty of dungeon left to go.

New level!



And the stairs are readily in evidence! So is an awake Spirit, the confusing/chaotic kind. We throw up a Time Out, and then just Probability Travel our way over to the stairs, taking us to level 136.



The Void covers levels 128-150, but there's also a side branch we have to go down. I can't remember which level of the Void branches into the side dungeon. I hope it's one of the even numbers, like 140, because it'd be nice to skip levels when possible. At least ToME doesn't do the NetHack thing where branchpoints are at randomly-chosen depths.

Level 136 passes smoothly; there's another staircase in a vault near the entrance. You may have noticed that the nether mists (red and purple "."s) tend to form rectangular areas and the occasional line. My guess is that they're being used as the "room walls", while the void tiles are used for "fill", and this is basically just normal dungeon generation otherwise. I don't know that that means a whole lot, other than that there's an awful lot of tiles that aren't supposed to have anything in them, because nothing normally gets generated in the "fill" areas.



A lucky bit of probability traveling takes us to a down staircase just south of that mob of zombies (mostly ghouls, as it happens). Level 138 is also smooth sailing; nothing even wakes up before we find some stairs:



Level 139 is tiny; this is it:



And here we are on 140.



It's also a small level; the vault to the east is the only noticeable feature, and there are no staircases outside of it except the one we came in on. The vault itself has several stairs, but none of them purple -- no route to the side dungeon here. I sure hope we haven't missed it.

It does, however, give us a Strangely Phosphorescent Potion, the Blood of Life:



The Blood of Life is a unique potion, and effectively gives you an extra life -- if you have drunk it, the next time you would die you don't. I can't remember if it revives you in town or just refills your HP on the spot, but in any case there's no reason not to drink it as soon as you find it. Dying is generally not advised.

Nothing for it but to keep going, I guess. Level 141...



It hides all of its stairs in the corner, along with Azriel, the Angel of Death.



Azriel's been pumping iron; he's at level 124 and is able to eat a Black Hole full in the face while losing only 70% of his hitpoints. Too bad for him we can cast that spell more than once.

Level 142 has an uncomfortably huge vault:



I'm really worried that the stairs are in there. Vaults can get messy in the Void, due to the high monster density and tendency for the floor to be clogged with items, preventing Time Out from working properly.

We wander around the outside of the vault, smack down a pack of level-130 Dreads that was getting uppity, and loot some legendary gloves from their, uh, remains.



Our old gloves were worn solely for +4 CON, which is kind of pointless when we have Morgoth's crown on our heads. That crown doesn't boost luck though, so sure, we'll wear Fingolfin's gloves instead. The other abilities are basically pointless.

Fortunately, down under the southern end of the vault is a staircase.



Let's just keep going.

Level 143 has way too many zombies, but is otherwise not really noteworthy for a dungeon that can kill you in a second if you blink:



Level 144 starts us out facing a posse of greater demons.



These "posses" are groups of monsters of the same letter, and they always start out awake. Very annoying when we're trying to do a stealth run here. We just throw up a Time Out and then explore in the opposite direction. Once we get far enough away, they'll stop chasing us.

Of course, that doesn't help that much when the opposite direction has a pit of high-level Hellblades and Death Swords:



Hellblades are animate blades of chaos with experience-draining melee; Death Swords are stationary high-speed monsters with a painful melee attack, plus they look just like swords so young characters tend to walk right up to them without looking at them carefully first. In a mob like this they stick out like a sore thumb, of course.

Multiple Time Outs lock the blades down and we slip past them to a staircase on the other side. Being able to entomb vast swathes of the dungeon in solid rock is a really great ability, guys.

Level 145 has something seriously scary: a vault with no walls!



What the hell, dungeon generation algorithm. We turn right 'round and fortunately find a staircase elsewhere. Vaults are bad enough when their contents are more or less contained.

Level 146...



Let's try this again. Take the stairs up, take the stairs down...



That's a bit better. Not a lot, but a bit.

On the subject of stealth from before, I've set our exploration mode to "slug-like". This gives us +4 stealth at the cost of -10 speed, which would normally be ridiculously awful. But our normal speed with Essence of Speed active is +51; dropping that down to +41 only makes us 7% slower, and the +4 stealth makes us a lot more stealthy. Stealth works on an exponential scale for some reason, so every plus is worth more than the previous plus. Plus everything around here outspeeds us, until we hit them with Black Hole anyway.

Level 147 spawns down stairs right next to the entrance, and level 148...



There's our special staircase! All right.

You see a magical portal to the Nether Realm.

Could it be worse than the Void?



Oh, probably.

And that's more than enough for today. Next time: we keep diving!