ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

One of the perennial complaints about the Sandworm lair is trying to find that one last cavern to finish the level [and that's if you even know that there's supposed to be a fixed number of caverns on each level; in my own early play, I spent way too long trying to follow sandworm tunnelers into what looked like empty parts of the level because I was sure there must be another cavern in there… ]

Various ideas have been suggested to improve this; what I'm trying, by way of my new Sandworm Cavern SONAR addon, is a slight variant of my frequent wish that I could have Burning Star in Sandworm lair; in its place, we give the player access to an item that can detect and "remember" the walls of nearby sand caverns. It keys off receiving the "Into the Darkness" quest; the plot hooks should be easy to follow from there.

[And some people will no doubt consider this cheating, so it's definitely not going into ZOmnibus. ]

[Implementation notes:]

Had an idea for a small improvement in v1a: our oddly dressed plot item provider probably isn't just going to stand there while their odd attire is criticized by a player who is themself oddly attired — say, in a bikini or mankini. And because (as I may have mentioned elsewhere) I am a notorious overengineer, I've included a hook by which other addons that provide unusual attire (such as, for instance, a black bikini ) can get in on the fun; documentation is, as usual, bundled in the .teaa.

So, I think this is a bug: Vorloth characters from Tradewind_Rider's Quantum Slider addon end up never receiving the "Into the darkness" quest — which, remember, is our "hook" by which we arrange to give the player our item. For now I'm papering over that in v1a.1 by arranging for the sequence of quests to eventually lead to the right quest. And since Vorloths will be in Point Zero when they receive that quest, I tweaked the chats a bit for flavor.

Sorry to bump again so soon, but a worrying thought occurred to me overnight: some server-push events (like the Halloween event or the May the 4th event) will put hostile NPCs into levels that you enter, even towns like Last Hope, and we don't want those hostiles killing our quest item giver before they can give us the quest item. So in v1a.2, we make the quest item giver invulnerable and immovable, just in case.

(And while I was working in that area, I noticed that I hadn't given the quest item giver any ASCII-mode display information… For our ASCII tiles players, We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™)

I keep running into places where my stuff isn't available when I need it… In particular, in nsrr's QUICK campaign, the player doesn't receive the "Into the darkness" quest until after completing the Sandworm Lair (if you end up getting sent there at all). In v1b, then, we hook into Zemekkys' chat at the point where he (potentially) sends you off to the Sandworm Lair and provide our quest item directly. [We also, of course, head off the usual quest giver handling, since the player can't get to Last Hope at all in this campaign… ]

Hmm, I think I should word that slightly differently… v1b.1 has a few tweals to chat dialog text for the new Vorloth handling, mainly to clarify why Zemekkys is giving us the next quest. No change in functionality; We Apologize for the Interruption.™

Oh, come on, seriously? Yeeks apparently don't even get the "Into the darkness" quest in the normal quest sequence. (Okay, they'll get it if they finish one of the T2 zones, but (a) the whole point of that quest is to tell the player to do the T2 zones, and (b) if that first finished T2 zone is the Sandworm Lair, then it's too late for us to give the quest device anyway.)

Well, this just won't do at all. The obvious place for Yeeks to get the "Into the darkness" quest is when we complete the "Light at the end of the tunnel" quest by going through the Rel tunnel to Halfling Ruins; in v1b.2, we arrange for that to happen. We Apologize for the Omission.™

Been a while since I ran an Embers character. The Ritch Hive isn't quite as bad as the Sandworm Lair since we have the shredder, but I think our quest item would still be useful on level 3. So in v1c, we hook into the Ritch Hive's .on_enter() method (where the game tells you about the sand shredder), and have Metash give you the SONAR.