FROZEN DEPTHS OVERVIEW Note 1: This is written with the Warrior class in mind, though most of what follows will apply to all races/classes. In the future I plan on making more serious attempts with Ranger/Archer, but I simply had far too many shitty runs consecutively as those classes and so ultimately decided to focus on Warrior. My defeat of the final boss was with a Dwarven Warrior. Note 2: It should go without saying, but if you want to dive into the game totally blind, then stop reading now since I plan on laying out as explicitly as possible every mechanic I witnessed. Note 3: Some of this will be slightly disjointed and I plan on editing it later for clarity. But for now you'll just have to endure a bit of chaos. Note 4: I have added tips directly from the creator himself in the "ESCAPING" section. I will assume you are familiar with the very basics of the game/genre. FOOD/TEMPERATURE In Frozen Depths, you lose body heat per turn. The primary method of restoring lost body heat is via food/drink, and each different type of food/drink has different properties. Seeds can radiate warmth or cold (it is random), firemead restores two levels of warmth (so importantly, takes you from Freezing to Normal) but causes Confusion for a few turns, everburning leaves, volcanic honey, warm goo, pyre peppers and onions seem to have no drawback unless you eat them while too warm. You can also find campfires to warm yourself, and you can be warmed all the way to Hot as a side effect of praying to the Goddess for a full heal (more on prayer later). There are seven levels of temperature: Freezing, Cold, Cool, Normal, Warm, Hot, Boiling. Freezing causes frostbite, which lowers your max health and causes damage every turn until it is cured, while Boiling causes ~4-5 points of damage per turn until it is dissipated. The other temp levels impose no penalty as far as I could tell, and so it seems to be most logical to wait until you are Freezing before consuming a food/drink item. I experimented with this in many trial runs and did not seem to lose heat any faster while almost always staying in the Cold-Normal range vs. Normal-Hot, though it's possible there is some negligible benefit that I missed. As you descend into the depths, the rate of cooling increases. As you will be consuming much food on your journey at any rate, the ideal approach is to lessen your rate of cooling as much as possible, to save your precious food. This is where clothing comes in. CLOTHING Your clothing affects heat loss; your armor does not. This is particularly important when wearing new pieces of armor, since the only way to id weapons and armor is to wear them, and you cannot equip clothing underneath a cursed armor slot (i.e. if your gauntlets are cursed and your cloth gloves underneath them break, you cannot equip a new pair of gloves until the cursed gloves have been removed in some way, which will lead to suboptimal warmth). Your goal should be to maintain a rate of "Decreasing" warmth or better at all times. "Decreasing slowly" is the ultimate goal, but by the later depths this is simply not possible most of the time. A rate of "decreasing quickly" will eat through all of your food in short order, so you should try to avoid this at all costs. Clothing can also become wet in various ways (random environment effects, water-based monsters, diving into icy pools, etc.), which exacerbates cooling until they dry. There are items (amulet of drying) that increase the drying speed of your clothes. SAGES/BLACKSMITHS Sages can identify items, buy your unwanted items, cast a spell of pre-resurrection on you (cost increases depending on either depth tier or how many sages you have encountered up to that point; not sure which), can heal you, sell you firemead, or sell you arrows. Playing as a Warrior, I ultimately found it most useful to spend most of my money on food items, so that I could fully explore every floor while resting properly to maximize survival. All potions can be safely quaff-id'd at max health and in a safe area, and since having a sage identify them is rather expensive, I opted for this cheap method. Identifying jewelry is up to you and is a trickier question to answer, since you can get mega-fucked by a cursed ring (ring of forced melee on an Archer is pretty much instant death without a way to uncurse). Blacksmiths can repair items, destroy cursed items, exchange materials, craft using supplied components, and buy your unwanted items. Much of these services I considered as luxury since food was usually a more pressing concern, though destroying low durability cursed items covering an empty clothing slot was useful since it was cheap. ALTARS/PRAYING At altars, you can sacrifice any item in your inventory to increase your Piety. When your Piety is at least 100%, you can pray to the Goddess, which has one of two effects you can choose from: Uncurse all of your equipment, or fully heal your HP/SP and raise your temp level to Hot. This second option is extremely useful, and I would not have been able to clear the lower depths at all without praying in this way multiple times. Upon praying, you lose 100 Piety. Your Piety has no cap, meaning that you can sacrifice as much as you want to increase it, limited only by how much of your inventory you can afford to sacrifice. I was routinely at 200+% Piety in the later levels for maximum caution. At a few points in the dungeon dependent on depth level, your link to the Goddess will weaken, meaning that your effective Piety pool will decrease. You will be told when this happens upon entering the floor; returning to the floor above returns the lost Piety until you delve deeper again. SKILLS When leveling up, you can press 's' to view the list of potential skills you can learn, and on this list you can press 'A' to sort the skills by attainability, to see the skills you are closest to being able to learn. Use this to plan your skill progression carefully. For Warrior, Brutal Strike and Critical Strike are useful early, culminating in Desperate Strike for a remaining health%-scaling attack that is great. By DL35, you will want Multistrike just in case you do not have the proper wands to do guaranteed aoe damage. If you lack strength boosting potions, the Warrior's Strength skill can substitute, though it is costly if used at full SP. BOSSES FD has 5 demon bosses, located on depth levels 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35. All of these must be defeated in order to progress further, and slaying the fifth and final boss lifts the frozen curse, "winning" the game (More on that later). The first, second, and fourth bosses are relatively straightforward fights so long as you play safely, though do not be shy to use a temp buff potion or a few wand charges as needed. The third boss has "iron skin" and most annoyingly, will teleport away from you after every 1-2 hits you manage to land cleanly. For a melee-focused character, it was a brutal fight that saw me expending many resources, though I imagine a ranged character would have an easier time with that particular fight. The final boss is on another level of nastiness entirely. The final boss has 800 HP, does 68-72 damage per hit, has high armor values, 75% chance to hit, and 25% chance to dodge; he also has a ranged attack. That's not even the bad news: when his health reaches certain thresholds, he summons ~8 mirror images of himself (completely visually indistinguishable from the original, as far as I could tell). The burst damage resulting from this is completely ridiculous, requiring two mid-battle prayers just to barely survive on a character with ~270HP. If you do not have a way of dealing enough aoe damage to quickly dispatch the illusions, you have no hope of beating this boss. ESCAPING/POST-GAME Here is where we need to put our collective heads together to figure out how to go for the flawless victory. After defeating the final boss, you have saved the kingdom of Glacia from the curse. But with the cold dispelled, you now gain heat exceptionally quickly, leading you to boil to death without relief. You must escape to the surface to survive the ordeal. If, like me, you were forced to use a prayer during the final boss fight (an extremely likely scenario), then (if you've been following along) you'll note that your body temp is at Hot. This is not an enviable position to be in with our heat situation now reversed. The good news is that after the final boss is slain, prayers to the Goddess now fully heal and provide COOL instead of warmth, so if you pass an altar on the way out, it's probably a great idea to unload absolutely everything in order to maximize Piety, since prayers are the only reliable method I found for dissipating heat. Unused icy pools will provide a small amount of cooling, as well as any monster attacks that inflict frostbite, but neither of those are reliable. The removal or wearing of clothing seems to have no effect on heat gain at this point. Apart from doing so well that you have so much banked Piety that you can afford several prayers on the way up, I don't see an obvious way to survive this part. I've messaged the game creator asking specific questions about this aspect of the game, and hopefully he can shed some light or provide some hints as to how we are meant to deal with this situation. UPDATE: He has since responded to my email and included some great tips, which I will paste verbatim below: "Some tips for the overheating problem: -Destroy walls on all the floors so that the path to the next staircase is always as short as possible -Kill the boss when you're freezing -Save all wands and potions that you can use to cool yourself -Pray to the Goddess if you still have enough piety -Save all the pools, as you noticed -Take all the clothes off. The effect is small, but it's there -Take a risk if there's no other choice: eat a spotted seed. They randomly cool or warm you There's also a trick to shorten the distance to the surface, but using it doesn't give you the best ending :). Also, the overheating effect is a lot stronger deeper in the dungeon, it gets easier on the way up." He also confirmed that it is essentially impossible to beat the last boss without praying, so you can expect to always begin your ascent in maximum overheated mode. GENERAL TIPS - Most monsters can follow you up stairs, though a few cannot. Also, only monsters that are directly adjacent to you can follow. Use this to your advantage when reasonably close to stairs to separate nasty packs of monsters and deal with them one at a time on the previous floor. (Note however that monsters can spawn on a "cleared" floor, so sometimes even being meticulous with clearing a prior floor isn't enough to guarantee a 1 on 1 fight in this way) - Regardless of class, you always have one ranged option: throwing. Make as much use of this as you can, since it will level up your throwing skill, and can do some decent damage depending on your setup. The ammo is recoverable and almost inexhaustible, so there's no excuse not to use it. - Unlike many other roguelikes, in FD only one of the cursed potions can be thrown (potion of exploding acid, once you identify it), so any other cursed potion is entirely useless to you and so should be sold or sacrificed. - Wands are probably the most important items in the game after food. They can be relatively safely zap-id'd since there are very few negative wand effects, and the worst I've encountered summons an elite monster of the current depth level. Some examples of wand use include: wand of inferno and wand of acid rain are great at dealing guaranteed aoe damage within 1 square of you, wand of ice block creation is invaluable for sealing off narrow passages leading to piles of monsters so that you can safely rest up to full HP/SP, wand of teleportation can be used on an enemy or yourself (press 'num5' for zapping direction) to teleport the enemy/yourself to a random location on the current floor, wands of identification are a much better source of id'ing items than sages, etc. It is likely that the success of any given run will come down to efficient wand usage. -After the early levels, start examining every monster the first time you come across it. Pay attention to its speed relative to your speed, whether it has a ranged attack, and whether it has any special abilities. On early floors, chupacabras can be really dangerous if you don't pay attention since they can drain your blood, which heals them. Later on, vampires are dangerous for the same reason. Enemies that have a chance to reanimate on death can cause you real headaches if you haven't planned for it. -There are many random environmental things you can come across that I haven't yet discussed. Some of these include frozen bodies with unopened loot bags, veils with shadows behind them, icy pools, etc. Whether you use these or not is up to you, since it's a dice roll whether or not it's a positive or negative experience, though a fully-rested character is mostly safe to attempt any of them. It should be noted that there also exist universally positive environmental things, such as training chambers which give you a free ability training point. Also berserker masks, while having the drawback of disallowing retreat, do always provide some combat benefit as well. -Adjust your fighting style as needed to suit your current situation. Do you really, really need the next hit? Then switch to Accurate style. Do you need to deal more damage in one hit to keep chupacabra/vampire sustain down? Switch to Aggressive style.