Chests are back!

[Variaz]

Chests are back.

Well, they were never gone, but they were rare, and useless, as their drops didn't contain anything good.

Now they will be more common, there should be a few on every dungeon levels. They will come in many types, each containing a different number of items, of different quality. Each chests have a "level", which is the overall quality of items.

Most types save the Wooden chest are locked. A combination of dexterity and intelligence contributes to picking the lock(dexterity for the manual work, and intelligence to actually understand the lock). The difficulty is based on the chest's level and type. The difficulty rises rather quickly, especially higher quality chests, and the Lockpicking Rogue ability, which will be introduced, will play a huge part in whether you can open locked chests or not. And you only have one attempt to open a chest, so if you fail, you can't unlock the chest ever! (and your game is saved after each attempts, so no reloads allowed!)

The Rogue will have Lockpicking ability that will provide a huge bonus to lockpicking rolls, and even guarantee some of them. It will actually be required to open the higher quality chests.

Here's a preview of what the chests types will be, and what they will drop:

Wooden chests: the most common, and lowest quality type of chest. Contains between 1 and 3 items, which can also be gold, and their level tend to be rather low. Not that great, but these chests are not locked, so anyone can open them.

Iron chests: contains between 3 and 6 items of higher level than wooden chests, and it doesn't contain gold, so it's only potentially good stuff. This chest is locked, but it's the easiest to open amongst locked chests.

Large Steel chest: contains between 4 and 10 items of high level, higher than iron. Very good chest, but more difficult to unlock. Unless your stats are very high, it's going to be very hard without Lockpicking.

Magic chest: contains between 3 and 5 magic items of high quality. Very nice chest, but even harder to unlock. This one also REQUIRES Lockpicking. Non-rogues will have to pass on this one. The items in this chest are restricted to the ones that can be magic, so you will never get junk.

Cursed chest: contains between 3 and 5 cursed items. Even harder to unlock than the magic chest. Expect a lot of gold if you sell this chest's content. Or if you enjoy cursed items, you'll get many good ones! Again, no junks in these chests.

Ancient chest: contains 1 artifact. Very hard to unlock. This one is very rare early on, but gets more common as you do deeper in the dungeons.

Strange chest: contains 1 special item. Hardest chest to unlock, and also rarest, does NOT appear until very late in the game. Only for master lockpickers!


So as you can see, finding a chest is now a good thing. So instead of saying: "lol! Another old relic from pernangband!", you will say: "I hope I will succeed at lockpicking, and get the cool stuff from the chest!"

[kipar]

Doesn't they weight much? I can almost see all my house filled with chests which I can't open until my level of lockpick will be high enough.
And what about "Knock" spell (in alteration?) which will be very costly and very rare, but with enough mana will allow at least try to open them. Or maybe scrolls of lockpick (high cost and not 100% success), just to don't force most of characters get rogue class for this ability.

[Variaz]

That could be the doable for iron and steel chests. However, I'd say that magic chests and higher should remain Rogue-exclusive. Otherwise, the ability will become pointless.

[junyortrakr]

I was just wondering: will some particularly good chests found with the mining 'Archeological Dig' ability? It would seem like a perfect place to find good chests.

I think the idea of a lock pick or knock scroll could be useful if there were limits. For example, on lower levels you might find one of 1 lock pick ability. It would give you one not very good chance to open a magic chest. Higher level ones could be found further down, and they would become increasingly rare. For example, if one of ability 30(able to attempt strange chests) was a level 120 item with a very high rarity(say 10), I don't think it would be abusive. With this system, a player could either use the ability or the item, and they wouldn't be additive.

[Variaz]

The Archeological Dig idea is pretty good.

Since it needs to be rewritten anyway, it's something to consider.

I don't know about a scroll. Maybe for the wooden, iron and steel chests, but for Magic and higher, I'm afraid that if we have scrolls, players will just use that rather than the Lockpicking ability. Since it's an ability that doesn't provide any damages or defensive bonus, it has to have some exclusive use, otherwise, it might not be worth it.

[kipar]

I've reincarnated to test ancient chests and opened three of them (levels 40, 41, 40):
no artifacts
Pretty powerful violet items but still just violet, not yellow.

Maybe problem is that artifacts preservation don't work - you will never find any artifacts listed in '~','1' list if you haven't already found them.

[Gando]

Actually I have found quite a few in the ~ 1 artifacts list but managed to miss them in the dungeon they were in. Either I failed to kill the monster they were held by or passed over them on the floor without noticing.

Violet? You found violet items? Those are the ones that go through the flow right? I've found pinkishpurple ones in the Ancient Chests but nothing worth talking about. Largely just a big waste of ability points that.

[Variaz]

Jan 8, 2010 17:11:59 GMT -5 kipar said:

I've reincarnated to test ancient chests and opened three of them (levels 40, 41, 40):
no artifacts
Pretty powerful violet items but still just violet, not yellow.

Maybe problem is that artifacts preservation don't work - you will never find any artifacts listed in '~','1' list if you haven't already found them.

The problem isn't artifact preservation. The problem is that if it cannot find an appropriate artifact, it will instead give you a purple(although that purple has a +20 to it's rank, so it's better than a normal purple).

The problem is that there is currently not that many artifacts. So that will happen fairly often.

[Gando]

So far the items Ive found in chests have been uniformly bad considering my level and the depth I can go. Also I REALLY hate having to reincarnate just to open chests to find that nothing of interest was in them. I have decided the plan with the higher level chests (better than magical) is to ignore them entirely. I can deal with spending 1 point to get access to magic chests on the off-hand (meaning extremely unlikely) chance that I could find something of use. (I'm sure its mainly the same reason it takes hundreds of changes to find a good item in the Black Market that this is so: Namely the number of items and possible combinations. But also getting an item with 9 useless abilities is not equivalent to finding an item with one or two very good abilities. It's more equivalent to finding 9 useless items.

[junyortrakr]

I personally like chests. My favorites by far to this point (I can only open to ancient ones, and I don't know if I'll ever get to strange ones) are the cursed ones. Even if you never wear any of the items down into a dungeon, you can get some amazing bonuses for things you do on the surface. If you need basic items to make magical, the iron and steel chests can give some good, unmagiced items, which is often very helpful. As far as I can tell, wooden chests are nearly completely worthless after you're past Udor. Of course, they're free to open, too, so they don't hurt anything.

One thing can help with item quality in general is if you use the red lic. from the nightmare scouts to improve item quality. Of course, that means you can't use some of the other, powerful abilities from other horrors.

One of the advantages of chests is that you can haul several items per backpack slot out in one. This allows you to bring back much more per trip.

I definitely think the ancient chests are much too expensive for what you get from them. Even if you do get an artifact(which is rare), the artifact is probably too weak to use, anyway. If there aren't going to be more artifacts, a significant boost in the random item quality would be nice.