/vg/ Roguelike General - Caves of Qud guide 0.0.3

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Character Creation
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You can decide between being a mutated human or a True Man. Mutated humans have paltry starting equipment and have lower starting stats than True Men, but are able to acquire mutations that affect gameplay. True Men gain extra skill points, start with slightly better equipment on average, get some free resistances based on class, and have access to cybernetics, which I have yet to encounter in any run.
It's generally better to be a mutated human unless you want to rely mostly on ranged combat or tinkering, in which True Men have better benefits.

If you intend to engage in melee combat, you will need a significant amount of Strength. Strength lets you penetrate armor more easily, which acts as a multiplier for your damage. 29 Strength is a requirement for some weapon skills, and the best weapons can utilize up to 34 Strength for penetration.
Agility is most important for ranged characters, but used for some defensive skills too. Similarly, you can get the best ranged skills at 29 Agility.
Every 2 points of toughness gives you an extra HP per level.
You don't need much more than 16 Intelligence unless you use Tinkering or want to try out Master Butchery.
Willpower is mostly a dump stat unless you utilize several mental mutations.
Ego can be a dump stat unless you utilize mental mutations, but it also affects store prices dramatically.

Ignore morphotypes unless you want to mainly use mental mutations, in which case you want to pick up Esper.
Good physical mutations, roughly in order of usefulness: Freezing Hands, Flaming Hands, Multiple Legs, Carapace, Regeneration, +2 stat mutations, Horns
Nearly all of the mental mutations are good, but some useful starting mutations are Cryokinesis, Sunder Mind, Pyrokinesis, Force Bubble, and Temporal Fugue.
Night Vision lets you dual wield before you find a hands-free light source.
Get Telepathy if you keep getting Glotrot.

Good backgrounds for physical mutants: Marauder/Warden, Nomad (invest in a weapons skill ASAP), Arconaut.
Backgrounds for mental mutants: Apostle.

Good backgrounds for physical True Men: Praetorian, Child of the Hearth, Syzygyrior, Child of the Wheel.
Good backgrounds for ranged True Men: Praetorian, Eunuch, Artifex.


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Starting the Game
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1) Get the quest from Mehmet to go to Red Rock.
2) Find the three houses with chests in them. Go in each one, closing the door behind you. Loot the chest with the door closed.
3) Optional: Kill the zealot of the six day stilt. Nobody will care, and his book is worth a lot of dosh.
4) Go to the southwest corner and get the quest from Argyve. If you got two artifacts in step (2), then you can turn them in now for a quick level two.
5) Sell any junk you collected to Argyve and Mehmet for their vinewafers.
6) Once you're done, you can explore the areas surrounding Joppa for XP. Glowpads and Crocs aren't too scary, and you can get a few levels in safety by beating them up. You can eat glowfish corpses, too.
7) Press < when you're ready to explore the world map. Move to Red Rock, which is 2 tiles north of Joppa. Press > to enter.
8) The fourth floor should be your first real threat. Remember to collect the corpse of one of the girshlings to bring back to town.
9) After the fourth floor is cleared, you can follow the underground river south to its source; you have a chance to get up to folded carbine and maybe a floating glowsphere. Check the piles of bones, too; you may come across a dead miner's skeleton, complete with a miner's hat and anti gravity sphere. From the source, go up until you're back in Joppa, or just leave the way you came.
10) Go do the quest for 200' of wire in the Rust Wells. There's three dungeons here, so you can grind quite a bit. If you're a pussy, 50' strands of wire are guaranteed at the entrance to each rustwell, as well as every floor.
11) Explore the Rusted Archway on your way to Grit Gate, there's a chance for good loot.


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Weapons
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There are no penalties for dual-wielding. Instead, you only have a chance of attacking with your off-hand weapon. This increases with the Dual Wield skills.
Offhand strikes can activate learned skills, so you're not forced to use short blades.

Cudgels: Best base penetration, but initially, has the worst dice. With Bonecrusher and Flurry, Cudgels are the strongest weapon type for a melee-focused character.
Axes: Better dice than cudgels until they get Bonecrusher. Cleave stacks and lowers the armor of opponents, and you can hack off limbs. Good damage and utility makes them well-rounded, and a great weapon type for characters who don't have as much strength.
Long Blades: Worst penetration, best dice early on. Only weapon type that gains accuracy as you get skills. Has area swipes and reactionary attacks.
Shortblades: Best used as an offhand weapon, has synergies with dual-wielding and evasive skills. Offhand attacks with a short blade can use your Agility modifier for damage (but not main hand strikes).

Bows and Rifles: High penetration and single-shot damage. Skills let you sacrifice a turn for extra effects on hit, including more damage. You can mark targets for extra accuracy and free reaction shots.
Pistols: With Akimbo, puts out a lot of damage over time with minimal skill investment. Skills let you fire more quickly, as well as let you fire while moving.
Heavy weapons: They're pretty rare, I haven't found any yet.


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Misc. Tips
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As of right now, NPCs won't pick up your stuff, so feel free to leave a stash in one of the houses in Joppa.

Corpses never rot, and most are perfectly edible. A single point in butchery will give you a lot of food for travelling, but it's possible to survive on just corpses for a lot of the early game.

You can go to the Rustwells and get the wire before you get the quest. Since you don't have to go deep into any of the dungeons, it might be easier.

With 21 INT, you can get Master Butchery, which lets you get some special equipment from corpses. You can take the shells from eyeless crabs and use them as a (surprisingly good) shield, or pry the claws from a Salthopper, for example.

Snapjaw barracks always have chests. It's worth seeking them out because you can get quality equipment, as well as a good unique buckler.

Every 3 levels, you get an attribute point. Every 6 levels, you instead get +1 to all stats.

Cold damage can freeze enemies, which is potentially exploitable with Freezing Hands or several freeze grenades.

Fire damage can set things aflame for lingering extra damage. Fire damage over water creates steam, which will probably stupidly kill you.

Solar Cells have less charge than Chem Cells, but recover energy quickly while outside during the day. To charge, a solar cell must remain in your inventory, not in any items.

If you use mental mutations, they get free levels based on your Ego modifier. With max Ego, you won't need to spend mutation points on leveling spells for a long time, instead using them to learn new ones.

Shops restock on a timer. There will be a message upon reentering a town if any shop owners refreshed their stocks.

Equimaxes will normally wreck your shit, but if you can kill them, they give 350 XP each. It's entirely possible to hit level 10+ before you finish your first quest this way.


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A guide to Tinkering
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Paraphrased from the "Caves of Qud Tinkerer Guide":

You want to play a Tinkerer?  Terrible idea!  Tinkerers have shit survivability when the game starts, and most will die before reaching Red Rock unless you've spent entirely too much time grinding in swamps or the RNG has blessed you considerably.  BUT! For those of you who know the best part of playing in a post apocalyptic wasteland is TECHNOLOGY then maybe if you put in the effort and follow my lead, you might make it more than a week before you fast travel yourself to death because you forgot to get food.

Tinkering lets you create items out of stuff you find. They have a rough start. They also have a lot of stat dependencies and are very item dependent, so it's highly recommended to start as a True Man Artifex.
Get at least 21 Intelligence, and high Ego; you're going to buy a lot of data disks and scrap. Extra points can go towards Agility, and maybe a bit of Strength or Toughness. I prefer 16/18/18/22/12/20, putting future attribute points into agility or intelligence.

Artifexes start with a stun rod and a large, but mostly random, set of scrap and trinkets. You might get a pair of nightvision goggles and helping hands, or you might have a box of crayons and a metal folding chair.

After you raid the three chests in Joppa, check the shopkeeper for cheap trinkets. Don't disassemble anything. Give Argyle your cheapest trinkets, preferably some of the more useless things like plastic trees and crayons.  You probably also want a weapon; a rifle and some lead slugs if you can, but an axe wouldn't hurt.

Save your skill points until you find a good ranged weapon you can stick with. An energy weapon will serve you for a long time, especially with a solar cell. Picking up the cheap utility axe skills like whack and trip are good, too. After that, you can also learn Expert Disassemble and finally start disassembling scrap.

Head north and fight snapjaws. They drop basic equipment, so you can pick up weapons and armor you couldn't buy at Joppa. You want an axe and buckler. Pick up bows.

If you see a salt hopper, immediately sprint away. Freezing grenades are good for emergencies, but not at low levels; you probably can't throw them far enough.

Gradually fight your way up to Red Rock, selling your stuff as soon as you can't carry anymore. Be sparing with using your musket.  Nomad Traders can be hard to find, and Tam doesn't restock nearly fast enough for you to pretend you're fighting redcoats out in the rust. Try not to sell waterskins.  Better to fill them and keep them for large purchases.  Same goes for trade goods.  If you can keep them about until you get ego boosting equipment like a knollworm skull they'll be worth more. Save money for when a laser weapon or solar cell blueprint shows up.

Eventually you'll clear Red Rock (don't go deeper than you have to. Fire ants are the bugs from Starship Troopers... the book, not the movie, complete with goddamn lasers.  If they hit you while you're standing in water, you're most likely fucked) and be ready to go on your next step towards the rust wells.  The Rustwells are not particularly alarming.  Your skills should look something like: Whack, Trip, Shield->Deft Blocking, some ranged skills, expert disassemble, butchery, master butchery, (skip skillful butchery) and maybe Offhand Strikes or Cleave.  On your way to Grit Gate, pick up Scavenge. It doesn't yield too many bits, and certainly not enough of the good bits, but when you get to Grit Gate, there is tons of garbage.

That's pretty much it.  From there your character options should open up significantly and you'll have the basic skills and equipment to get through whatever comes next.  Don't be afraid to run.  Qud has more hp than you do, so if the going gets tough, get going.

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A WORD ON TURRETS
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Don't sell bows unless you have over half a dozen.  Bow turrets are bad ass.  Deploying a turret exhausts you, so don't use them mid combat, but if you're in a situation where you have prep time, bow turrets can turn slumberling fights into games of cat and mouse... only the cat is taking 1d4 every turn.  Good places for bow turrets are:
-The tops of stairs.  Angle them so they shoot at your back... or rather, anything chasing you back to the entrance.
-At Snapjaw arrow slits.  Set them up at opposite sides, wait a few turns, collect equipment.
-Around tough monsters. Do not set up turrets directly in line of sight of sleeping monsters. They will fire while you are exhausted, ruining your plan... and probably your character.

Note: Eventually, something always seems to fuck up and turn your turrets hostile.  They won't shoot at you (intentionally), but they will shoot your other turrets.  Best to stagger them so they don't have line of sight on each other.  Also, bow turrets aren't particularly accurate.  Try to keep something between you and the turret directly (like a snap jaw) so they don't hit you on accident.  This takes a little practice.

This concludes the tutorial. Enjoy being Batman.