User:Fyr/Extinction

Notes about methodical extinction

Basic idea: stay at the top of the dungeon while patiently and systematically wiping out all the species, then stroll through the uninhabited Mazes of Menace with your massive amount of gear.

The easiest way to do this is to be a Wizard, especially if you start with a ring of slow digestion. If you don't get that ring, you can usually still survive by eating as many corpses as you can (best to abandon your pet immediately, so it won't eat any of your kills) and praying for sustenance when necessary. Eventually you'll start to stockpile enough food.

It's also best to have an altar. Sacrifice religiously, and pray every time you get a feeling of reconciliation - this turns the altar into a highly productive spellbook factory, and occasionally lowers your AC or increases your max HP. Altars are also the best way to clear up troll corpses when you get to the point that trolls appear. If you are chaotic, sacrifice all the corpses of your own race. Let the peaceful foocubi wander around on your level and use them to recharge your Power pretty easily whenever it runs out.

It can be helpful to use level drain (if you have the "drain life" spell or if you get Stormbringer from an altar) to maintain control over which monsters appear at a time. Note that if you're also using an altar, altar prayers also sometimes restore a level, so be ready to re-drain yourself. If you don't have the ability to drain your level, you should still have no problem - by the time you reach experience level 13 or so and monsters start getting a little tricky, you will have accumulated a lot of nice defensive items.

Another useful spell is of course "create monster", which helps speed up the rate at which you can plow through the species. Again, not a big problem if you don't have it - just keep spamming the "wait a thousand turns" command. If you're standing in a room, the game should automatically make you stop waiting when an enemy enters, so you can deal with it appropriately.

One thing about using spells is that you will probably have to re-learn them several times, as this whole process takes a huge number of turns to complete.

You will know that you've wiped out all the monsters in your current difficulty level when "create monster" (spell, wand, or scroll) fails to make anything appear. Note that this does not give any message; just that nothing happens. Check to make sure it didn't summon a monster that you just can't see - an invisible one (if you don't have see invisible), a mimic (sometimes they appear on top of an adjacent object, pretending to be that object), a centipede or similar hiding under something, etc. Once you are confident that everything is actually extinct, it's time to increase the difficulty by either descending lower into the dungeon or raising own your experience level (if you had previously drained it) with a blessed potions of Restore Ability, uncursed or blessed Gain Level, or Wraith corpses.

While you're going through the slog, it's a good idea to pop down to a different dungeon level for a moment every now and then - if the game crashes and needs to be restored, it will restore from the moment you arrived on the current level.

I like to leave most of the sessile monsters alone. It makes the killing level feel like a magical garden, filled peaceful coaligned unicorns roaming among exotic fungi and jellies. If I have a ring of slow digestion, I'll also generally save all the lichen corpses and lizard corpses as way of measuring my progress, since I'm generally too lazy to count kills. Unicorn horns are also good to save, both for counting and for polypiling to get magic markers.

An icebox is a really good item. If you get an early wish and already have more essential stuff, it can be worth wishing for. Use it to save all the footrice corpses and wraith corpses. Footrice corpses are especially helpful when you get to the level of monsters that cast Summon Nasties, as it can be tricky to get rid of them faster than they multiply.