The More You Know: Little-known quirks and game mechanics

[Effigy]

I got this idea while reading another thread about a game quirk that was basically unknowable without looking at the source code. While ToME is quite good about presenting relevant information to the player overall, there are a fair number of things in the game that aren't immediately clear. I'm hoping people will respond to this thread with specific examples of things that you had to learn through trial and error, or by source-diving, so I can make a wiki page as an easy reference. I'll update this post as people post more examples. Once I have enough items in the list, I'll reorganize them by category.

1. Staff's accuracy bonus doesn't apply to projectile procs, such as triggering Earthen Missiles through Arcane Combat.
2. Time Shield and Shielding rune cannot crit, whereas most skills that deal damage, heal, or create a damage shield can crit.
3. Some skills, such as Brandish and Rend, are considered spells but deal melee attacks. These attacks use physical crit rather than spell crit.
4. The gold value from selling to vendors versus transmuting is virtually identical, but minor differences appear due to the different rounding methods used. The one notable exception is alchemist stones, which transmute for almost nothing but sell to vendors for a good value. Transmute value is capped at 25 gold; most vendors will pay 25 gold or less per item, but the Derth jeweler will pay up to 30 gold and the Last Hope randart merchant will pay up to 35 gold.
5. Attribute requirements are only checked at the time of allocating talent points or equipping items. If you use items or buffs to temporarily meet the requirements of a talent or item, you can continue to use it without penalty after you no longer meet the requirements. This can also be done to meet the requirements for prodigies.
6. Any character (except undead races) can enter the town of Zigur as long as they have no resource bar for mana, vim, paradox, or positive/negative energy the first time they enter the world map. Once your character has discovered Zigur, they can continue to go there even after gaining one of these resource bars. Ziguranth patrols, on the other hand, will be hostile if you have any spells (including runes) regardless of your resource bars. Archmages can enter Zigur, but can never buy anything and the NPCs will be hostile.
7. The level of enemies in a zone is determined based on your character level the first time you enter a zone, within a certain level range specific to that zone. You can enter and immediately leave a difficult zone at low level and come back later when you're higher level to make the fight easier, although items that spawned on the ground in that zone may decay before you come back.
8. Effects with the same icon don't stack, or they overwrite each other. For instance, damage shields from two different sources don't stack if they show same icon in your effects list. Effects with different icons do stack, such the damage shields from Shielding rune and Time Shield. Damage-over-time effects will sum the damage values (damage per tick * duration) and average the duration values when the effect is reapplied.

[twas Brillig]

I'd clarify the DoT stacking a little, to specifically call out that they sum the lifetime damage. I'd also make sure to include a tag for the last version a behavior is confirmed to occur in, and optionally another for the version something can be confirmed to no longer occur. Some of these are bugs (like the earthen missile, however hard it would be to fix), some may (temporarily or not) die to bugs, and others may change due to deliberate design changes. Finally, there's a lot of information like this scattered on various wiki pages. It might be good to collate some of those in the list, and likewise to copy certain facts to the various pages. (maybe in a Quirks section that can just copy the format from the main page)

• Maybe just fundamental advice, but you can right-click->Examine any NPC/enemy to see it's stats, current effects, and talents. This can give you a better idea of what it's capable of, or why it's suddenly teleporting and invulnerable.
• Likewise, you can reveal new hotbars for talents by using page-up/page-down, or scrolling with the mouse over the hotbar. This can make it seem like your hotbar has mysteriously cleared itself.
• You can swap places with any friendly/neutral NPC (townsfolk, escorts, NPCs from certain random events) by trying to move into its space (like you're trying to talk to it, or bump attack it). This lets you move friendlies into more desirable locations (e.g. underwater or out of the way).
• Items dropped in vaults do not decay, even if items dropped on that level normally would.
• If you suddenly can't move, make sure you aren't over-encumbered (weight limit appears in the inventory screen, glowing weights may appear over your EXP bar). This can happen if you pull items out of your transmutation chest, or change gear, when changing levels.
• The logfile is your friend when trying to report bugs with error messages. It will clear every time you start the game, so try and copy the relevant parts immediately after you close a session when you encountered a weird bug.
• For effects which trigger per attack, multiple damage types can count as multiple attacks. This includes Bone Shield (meaning wearing Elemental Fury can tear them apart) and retaliation damage (meaning wearing Elemental Fury can tear YOU apart).
• You can (normally) block one damaging effect per round (melee, ranged, spell, damaging effect, etc.), of any damage type your shield(s) give you resistance to. I don't remember off the top of my head how this interacts with the last point.
• At max Block talent level, the additional one turn of blocking from Eternal Guard means you can refresh your block as soon as it ends. Combined with Eternal Guard not ending your block when you take damage, this lets you block (and counterstrike!) anyone who attacks you, block damage from DoTs (if you can block their damage type), and feel generally badass.
• Dual-wielded shields pool block values and resistance sets, and use the higher (?) of the granted block talents.

[Ivels]

1. You can check your escort locations upon generating a character in the log file.
2. If you die and pick the "restart with the same character" option, your new character will encounter escorts in the same locations (escorts themselves are still random though).

[starsapphire]

I just thought [1] and [4] may be "bug" not "feature"?

[0player]

Transmute/vendor discrepancy is not a bug.
Projectiles not benefitting from an accuracy bonus is... a lack of a feature, not a bug.

[Sirrocco]

pretty sure that dual-wielded shields add their block talent levels together - or at least did at one point.

[daed4]

If the game starts to froze; you're probably dead.
Release classes will, 8 out of 10 times broken.

[Effigy]

I'd also make sure to include a tag for the last version a behavior is confirmed to occur in, and optionally another for the version something can be confirmed to no longer occur. Some of these are bugs (like the earthen missile, however hard it would be to fix), some may (temporarily or not) die to bugs, and others may change due to deliberate design changes.

I agree with this. Once v1.3 goes live, we should definitely start listing version numbers with entries on this thread. Until then, we can assume v1.2.5 for all the things listed here.

[posetcay]

This should be a sticky! It contains so much helpful information thats pretty hard to acquire yourself.

[Andy00]

Possessors can do Zigur quests if they Possess someone with Anti-Magic, regardless of Magic skills. You don't even need to do the Antimagic training. Granted, Fungus tree is pretty much useless since you can't heal possessed bodies, but it's still interesting.

This can also be done to betray Escort quests, which gives better rewards for certain classes.

[Majestix]

Not something you need to look into the code for, but still useful tricks:

• Everybody (who got this far) knows that Limmir, the jeweler of the Valley of the Moon quest, will add a random third gem to the two that you give him. If you have the "See the Threads" skill, e.g. from the Threads of Fate cloak, then start the skill just before you give Limmir your precious Goedelath Rock, have three rolls of those random gem dice, and choose the best one.
• Some sustained skills scale with the stats that you have at the point of triggering the sustain. An example of this is the amount of damage that Retribution on a Sun Paladin can absorb. So pop up a Heroism infusion before switching Retribution back on after it has exploded, and make it absorb a few dozens of damage points more. Feel free to contribute other examples of this mechanic.

[Phoenix1]

v1.5.5

Medical injectors count as objects; among other things, this means the Charm Mastery talent will lower their cooldown. Further, the Charm Mastery gained directly from yeti tissue (and presumably escorts) appears to be a mechanically different talent than the updated one in the survival tree, and they stack (although I think it's multiplicatively rather than additively, so there's a degree of diminishing returns, but still). I expect (but haven't tested) that activatable Tinkers would also qualify.

[minmay]

• Some sustained skills scale with the stats that you have at the point of triggering the sustain. An example of this is the amount of damage that Retribution on a Sun Paladin can absorb. So pop up a Heroism infusion before switching Retribution back on after it has exploded, and make it absorb a few dozens of damage points more. Feel free to contribute other examples of this mechanic.

I have a list here.

[anp]

Everybody (who got this far) knows that Limmir, the jeweler of the Valley of the Moon quest, will add a random third gem to the two that you give him. If you have the "See the Threads" skill, e.g. from the Threads of Fate cloak, then start the skill just before you give Limmir your precious Goedelath Rock, have three rolls of those random gem dice, and choose the best one.

I can think of using the same technique with Wyrm Bile but it needs testing

[Aesthete]

This may not be obvious, but temporal wardens have a lot of ways to proc "on spell hit" effects with their attacks. The chronomancy attack skills are classified as spells on the talent page and work for "on spell hit", and the weapon manifold effects are spells that can proc "on spell hit" themselves too.

Maybe think twice before transmoging that Exiler ring I guess.