ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The Maggot, the optional horror starting dungeon, is one of the hardest in the game, largely thanks to the low sight range and the deadly boss. Here's what I've found makes it more survivable (setting aside whatever talents your specific class may give you).

- Get some inscriptions from the shops. The boss has plenty of HP, and between Bone Grab and the range on Dark Whispers, hit-and-run is unlikely to be an option, meaning this will be a battle of attrition. Make sure you have at least two, preferably three, of Healing, Regeneration and Shield, in any combination. A lantern of health would also be helpful, but the inscriptions are higher priority.

- Wands of conjuration and similar are dirt cheap, but will greatly increase your damage output at this stage.

- Expect to be blinded a lot. Unless you have a physical Wild ready, always retreat left until it wears off. Only one enemy can do meaningful ranged damage, and none of the others are fast enough to move and attack you on the same turn. If you have a Shield rune set to "use whenever enemies are visible", don't forget to turn it on manually.

- Speaking of which, plasmic disruptors (the round green blobs) are your priority target. Their slime spit can do massive damage relative to your starting hit points.

- Check the little rooms off to the top and bottom as you go. Auto-explore sometimes misses them, and you'll want to kill their inhabitants to make sure you get to level 3 before you reach the boss. (It can be killed at level 2, but you want every advantage.)

- Ignore the bloated oozes. They do trivial damage, they give no XP, and they disappear a few turns after their master dies.

- DO NOT OPEN THE DIGESTIVE SACK. I cannot overstate this. The sack will usually contain a unique+ monster which will obliterate you. The reward is not worth it. If you must open the sack anyway, do it after beating the boss and fully exploring the area, and make sure you have your Rod of Recall counted down to a very low number so if you find the Maggot's bitten off more than you can chew, you just have to survive for a few rounds and then you'll be out of there. Note: do not use Teleport: Kroshkkur for this, as it won't trigger if there are enemies in LoS.

I would also add that you can do to Trollmire or somewhere to get XP and you have 1000 turns before Krokkshur is destroyed. You may not be able to completely clear the zone, but this is easily enough time to go kill Prox/Shax, which means you can be lvl 4-5 for the Maggot.

It used to be easier when you had some starting money to buy an inscription. Nowadays I go do the first level of Trollmire first. In theory you can do a couple levels of Trollmire if you don't autoexplore, but then you have to worry about escorts and item decay.

Also regarding the digestive sac, it seems like the enemy it spawns was nerfed at some point. They seem to have a damage penalty now, so you should be able to kill it after killing the Maggot boss.

Some classes can do it right away. Partly RNG dependant if you get some gear upgrades on the way or not. The boss doesn't really heal much so guerilla warfare style combat can work too(attack a few turns, then run away, make sure you can remove bone grab though and you'd want a better tool than the crappy 3 range blink you start with as Drem for that). Once in a while though it rolls with strong items and that's kinda bad(I had him roll with a T4 greatsword on my demo run for example, so he was slapping me for 90-100 whenever he wasn't casting spells, which made it impossible to kill right away).

As mentionned the safest easiest way is to just go do trollmire first, don't use auto explore but instead manual explore(wastes a lot less turns) and you can clear the entirety of trollmire. If you REALLY want to have an easy time, do that after entering the maggot(you can use teleport: kroshkur to get out) so the level there is set, but it's a bit wasteful on xp.

Note that if you run out of time in trollmire or something, you can go inside the Maggot(remember it takes some turns for the teleport to work, and some turns to walk to the entrance too, about 60-70turns iirc so don't tp too late), then rest to reset the teleport, and teleport out again. It resets the counter to 999 everytime you enter the Maggot, so in theory you could do every single T1 before the maggot for example. In an even crazier theory you could potentially finish the game without failling or completing the maggot quest(High Peaks would be very challenging however since it takes a while and you'd only have 1000turns to do it entirely but 2 movement runes and a very strong build would probably let you do it).