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Let's Play Caves of Qud
Part 2: Primordial Ecstasy
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A despised race; the long-jawed, hyena-like desert bogeyman is a brutal scavenger, preying on the weak of all the desert peoples.
Snapjaws are the gnolls of qud, and the most numerous enemy of the early game. These are scavengers, the least dangerous of their ranks. We won't be having trouble with them, our laser can kill them in one or two hits. They get bonuses if they swarm you, but it's not enough to trouble any but the freshest, weakest characters.
We and our goat make short work of them, but I notice he continues on, dashing into the darkness: he can see something we don't. I'm not about to blindly follow him, he wouldn't shy from charging into slumberlings, sleeping monstrosities that can usually be avoided, if something doesn't wake them up. So I use clairvoyance.
And it's just a snapjaw hunter, made more dangerous than their scavenger cousins by their possession of a bow. But still pretty weak.
On the wall is a jilted lover.
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This thorny vine has the nasty habit of ensnaring passing travellers, drawing them into its often-final embrace.
Not really dangerous under these circumstances, but they often spawn in corridors. We dispatch it, along with a run-of-the-mill giant spider, and our goat level ups!
I'm not sure what that does, my guess is an hp increase. We then eat the snawpjaw corpses. Sadly, they're not very filling.
We continue on, looting the caverns. You may have noticed a couple of %s (one of a few missing tiles), they're vinewafers, a staple of our current diet.
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A wafer of saltvine, the vinewafer provides both nutrients, and a burst of fresh water locked in the specialized flesh of the dried watervine.
We step into a new room and spot a chest, along with a snapjaw, that gets a swing at us.
We step back, letting our goat handle him and preserving our laser charges, and then loot the chest, finding a freeze grenade, and some more wafers. Freeze grenades are one of the better grenades, and it may well save us later on.
We'll be killing a lot of snapjaws, and other varieties of chaff enemies, so I'll stop mentioning them unless they're interesting, or they suddenly present a threat.
And so after another room of those, we level up again!
Our goat was out of my sight for a moment there, and I saw a little splash of blood (the game has animations for a few things), so I was worried there was something nasty inside, and that our goat was no more, but it turned out he just killed a snapjaw with such brutality, that he's now all bloody.
As is the corpse and loot the snapjaw left behind.
So let's have a look at what we got from that level up.
An attribute point! Which we spent increasing our intelligence. Another mutation point, which we still can't use, and more skill points, enough to buy us a skill!
We'll be getting Snake Oiler, which will make us even better at getting good deals out of Tam.
Moving on, we find a nice piece of clothing.
Most enemies in Qud move at our base move speed, which is 100, so even an improvement of 5% enables us to outrun them, which can be nice, but we care more about our armor (AV, the blue lozenge), which this gives 0, while our steel boots give us 2. Still, we can sell it.
We run into another wall plant creature, and I let our goat handle it, but he starts having a hard time, so I power up and face it. I'm not sure why he had any trouble. I fear he won't be around for long.
We clear a couple more rooms, eat a couple of bats, and find a pretty good body armor!
This will last us a while. Usual 3 AV armor are a good deal heavier, and the 4 AV armor is twice as heavy as those, so we'll probably skip it for the eventual 5 AV armor. And we'll smell slightly better I guess.
We then run into a snapjaw brute.
They're not too bad if you don't have to engage them in melee. One extra blast from our laser. And upon clearing that room, our goat levels up again!
There's some fanfare to it, you might notice the asterisk and musical note flying about.
We explore another uneventful room, and can no longer move, so full of former snapjaw belongings we are. So we'll just drop something, and run back to town to sell it all. This isn't as troublesome as it might sound, we can autotravel to the stairs.
Our goat comes along!
I had my eye on that nylon bodypack, it'll let us carry even more stuff. And now that we have Snake Oiler, it's even cheaper! We also buy some unidentified artifacts.
Which turn out to be an EMP grenade, and a hulk honey injector. We're still being burdened by some scrap.
The sole purpose of scrap, is being disassembled into bits. Bits are used for tinkering, and they occupy no space in our inventory. However, we can't tinker yet, nor can we disassemble scrap, so we'll be stashing it for now, along with a couple other things.
This is our stash. You don't have to store them in a house, you can just leave them anywhere in the village, no one will touch it. But we'll be civilized. I find this shack cozy, and it's close to Tam too. Back to Redrock!
Autoexplore finishes exploring the first floor for us, so we'll go deeper.
To be immediately confronted by three ranged enemies, a snapjaw and two seed-spitting vines.
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A viscious spitting plant.
They have a pretty long range, so they're much scarier in large, open areas, when you have to take several steps under their barrage before even spotting them. I raise my Toughness to be careful, and end up taking no damage. We walk into the next room, and meet our first beetlebum.
They're pretty hardy, but they're neutral to us, so he'll be ignoring us. He will, however, be gobbling up loot in the ground, so we'll have to watch out for that.
We take another step, and...
We're overwhelmed by terror! So terrified, in fact, that we lose control and move a couple of steps to the left. Under that splat is a dreadroot.
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A small, branching plant with black fern-like fronds which emits an ominous, nearly subliminal, hum.
Dreadroots can scare us with their humming. Perhaps with different positioning, or had we been scared a little longer, we might have ran into that corridor, getting grabbed by those jilted lovers, and had to contend with them, along with that snapjaw, and whatever else lies in that direction. And that's not even the end of the plant-based horrors this cave has to offer us: we've yet to meet the most dangerous of all.
We move on, and level up again!
As we go to the corner to finish clearing the room with our pistol, something happens to our goat. He's hit by the plant I was just foreshadowing, the young ivory.
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A bloodthirsty plant of Qud, the Young Ivory lurks beneath the surface until it senses a creature pass overhead, then it unleashes a sharp tusk to impale its prey.
And he's now bleeding. This might be his end.
Except it's not! He's just wounded. Not even badly wounded. He'll perk up. So let's have a look at that level up.
One more mutation point and we can get a new mutation! They're all level 3 now, improved in one way or another. We'll save those skill points for now. Onwards.
We do a little weeding, for the insult of a single experience point. And get our first serious scare.
Ouch. Young ivories are no joke, especially if you skimped on toughness. We're bleeding profusely. If we didn't have ego projection and bandages, this might've been it. Thankfully we have both. I somehow got the bleeding debuff twice, so just the bandages might not have been enough.
We survive to genocide snapjaws another day. I decide to be careful and wait for the ego projection cooldown to end, and it was just as well, since we immediately got stabbed by another young ivory.
Don't leave town without bandages.
Deeper!
Jesus. Seven enemies, two new ones. The centipedes aren't too bad, being slightly stronger than a snapjaw, but that red pig is a slugsnout, one of the worst things you can find in these caves.
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A massive, muscular boar, with an un-naturally long snout. The torpid slugsnout can spit massive, solid slugsnout slugs, made out of the compacted undigestible sinew of their prey, out of its slugsnout snout.
His nose shotgun is pretty scary. I power up, but they still halve my hp, so I go back up.
A lone centipede follows us up, and our goat dispatches it with no trouble. I bar the stairs with a force field, and rest up.
We have better luck the second time.
Yet again our goat dives into the darkness, this time taken by his rage against this young ivory, that he somehow spotted.
And we level up again! That slugsnout sped things up. You know what this means.
A new mutation! Flaming Hands and Freezing Hands are both very powerful physical mutations. They cost 5 points at character creationg. I'm partial to Freezing Hands, as freezing your enemies is pretty handy. Burgeoning would've costed us 3, but is a mental mutation. Flaming/Freezing hands would need a further investment of mutation points to remain relevant, while also taking our hand slot, meaning less armor. So we take burgeoning!
We can summon plants with it. We'll be testing it shortly. We also got a little more popular with Qud's flora: the Consortium of Phyta is a faction of sentient plant-beings.
We also got enough skill points to get Disassemble! Not enough to allow us to actually tinker, but we can start collecting bits.
I disassembled our EMP grenade, and got a scrap power system out of it. We could also have gotten another kind of bit from it, but regular disassemble doesn't always give us everything. That takes Expert Disassembling, and we'll never be learning that with this character.
Plants! A couple of those can't even harm our enemies, they're regular Qud trees. We could harvest stuff from them, if we took the harvesting skill.
We move on, killing a horned chameleon in the next room. I remember those being very filling, so I try to have a bite, but it seems we're satisfied.
We wash our goat in this pool of brackish water.
In the next room is a chest, with a beetlebum close by. He could swallow it whole, along with its contents, but he just buggers off.
We get an EMP grenade and a salve injector out of it.
Aggressive use of burgeoning proves successful. Our friendly young ivory stabbed a centipede, while a seed-spitting vine dispatched a snapjaw hunter. Our goat has some trouble crossing a pair of beetlebums.
Score! More AV, and that carbide long sword will be pretty valuable.
We finish exploring the floor without our goat, who, embarrassingly, is still with the beeblebums. Back to town!
Tam is out of water. We visit Argyve, who still wants that copper wire.
We're interested in something else, though. His inventory.
Previously these would all have been shown to be just differently priced "Data Disks". This is the reason for Snake Oiler. This is why we want to be rich. These are tinkering recipes.
We won't be using pistols for long, since they're only comparable to rifles if you can use them akimbo, and we don't have the agility for that, so we have no use for the chain pistol. I hear the phase cannon is pretty sweet, but I remember it taking Tinkering III, and we'll never have the intelligence for that. The price is also a strong indicative. And the grit gate recoiler would teleport us outside an underground vault, which we would be unable to enter right now, and then have to fight our way up to get out, instead of eventually fighting our way down to get in there. Would be a pretty amusing way to hear someone starting out died though.
The eigenrifle is one of the better rifles in the game. We buy the data disk for it, along with the one for stasis grenades mk III.
Alas, it takes Tinkering II. The stasis grenade takes Tinkering I, and we don't even have that yet. We will pretty soon, though. We disassemble the scrap in our stash, and head back.
Level 4, this is as deep as Redrock goes. It differ from the previous floor by a few things. One of them is this underground river. Another are gnawed watervines
We're getting close.
There's our quarry.
Sheesh.
He's not too though tough. We have to take this to Mehmet.
So we do!
He directs us to Elder Irudad. We haven't met him yet.
He gives us some lore on the Girshlings, which we promptly forget.
And level up again! This time we got a bonus in every attribute. It'll keep alternating every 3 levels between this, and giving us an attribute point.
He also rewards us with some artifacts.
I'm really not sure what it does. I think it fixes broken items, but I never had the opportunity to try it.
We'll save this for an emergency. Hopefully we'll realize we're having an emergency, before the emergency kills us.
He didn't take the girshling corpse from us though, and why would he. We might as well eat it.
That hits the spot!
Finally!
We get our pick of one out of three data disks, as a nice bonus. We'll obviously take the one for ulnar stimulators, whatever that is.
This is the main reason to get at least Tinkering I. Being able to recharge cells is incredibly handy, since many artifacts are powered by them, such as the eigenrifle. There are solar cells, but they hold a shit charge.
Sadly, we can't craft ulnar stimulators yet. We're missing a bit!
And with that, we're done for today.
We had a pretty successful first quest. We're slightly stronger, more popular and better equipped than when we first started, and we still have our goat! Maybe next time we'll get around to finding Argyve his wire, and who knows, even find out what the hell are urnal stimulators.