I've gotten tired of seeing newsgroup claims along the lines of
"since devteam is aware of this and has chosen not to eliminate it, they
must endorse it", so weaken the tactic of "pudding farming". It is still
possible to gain unlimited experience (past level 15 or so there's not
much point), but will be less effective for gaining items and for providing
sacrifice fodder. Keep track of which monsters have been created via
cloning (mostly puddings; gremlins and blue jellies are affected too but
nobody's likely to care much about them) so that they can receive special
handling. Make cloned monsters progressively less likely to leave corpses
as the number killed for a particular type goes up, and also much less
likely to drop random items at death. This is sure to need some tuning
once hard core farmers point out how they can still abuse it. For the
absurdly extreme case, see
http://scavenger.homeip.net/farmbot/HomePage
FYI, farmbot/PuddingFarmingHOWTO includes an impressive screen shot of a
dungeon level where rampant farming is taking place.
Cutting a shopkeeper poly'd as a long worm would generate strange messages
and could result in a crash. cutworm didn't deal with all the intricacies
of duplicating a monster. Fixed by changing cutworm() to use clone_mon()
to do most of its dirty work. It seems to me that without this change,
cutting a tame long worm could also have similar bad effects.
Other side effects of this change:
- clone_mon now takes x,y coordinates, 0,0 results in previous behavior
- clone_mon no longer always makes cloned monsters tame/peaceful if player
caused the clone, using the same formula previously in cutworm. Someone
else may wish to tweak this for gremlins.
- clone_mon will christen the new mon with the old shopkeeper's name, even
though clones are never shopkeepers (game can't handle 2 for a shop)
- cutworm can now be called during conflict or pet combat, although I
added no such calls (yet)
<Someone> wrote:
- You currently appear to be able to specify '~' and have it try
to detect monsters (though it won't detect any long worms)
Show the entire worm when specifying either '~' or 'w' now.
Pat Rankin wrote:
> collect them all into some new struct and
> save that separately rather than jamming more non-option stuff
> into struct flags.
This patch:
- collects all context/tracking related fields from flags
into a new structure called "context."
It also adds the following to the new structure:
- stethoscope turn support
- victual support
- tin support
>More worrying is the fact that applying a figurine over water lets
>the monster wait until its next move before it drowns (giving
>you time to teleport it to safety, or whatever) [...]
>Should there be a minliquid() check as part of make_familiar()?
Applying at the water location next to you was easy. But
applying it at your own location (triggering BY_YOU) could
end up placing the figurine at the far side of the level if
there was lots of water.
Correcting that required the ability to pass a flag from
make_familiar to makemon() telling it to not rule out
water locations as good positions. The flag had to
be passed on down to goodpos() and enexto().
The bulk of this patch is just adding an additional
argument to goodpos() in all of the callers.
