Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (
More info?)
In article <fe7bzxzn543$.15v1yni63unvd.dlg@40tude.net>,
Paul C. Bischof <slfjkdwrdlsori.20.pcb@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>Am 2 Apr 2005 20:15:52 -0800 schrieb NeoUltima:
>
>> I often hear about "pudding farming", which seems to involve camping
>> out at an altar and slaughtering loads of puddings for sacrificing.
>> What exactly is this, and how would I go about doing it?
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>0. Prerequisites: Be quite tough (black puddings are serious enemies) and
>have all your worn/wielded stuff rust/corrodeproofed. It is also adviseable
>to have a means of quick escape like level teleport or a quest artifact
>that can help you with that.
Indeed. By the time you can do this safely, you're probably at a point
where you need to decide whether you want to get quickly to the planes,
or else drag out the middle game for as long as possible.
Doing puddings can really help on the way to extinctionist, for example,
and it is on the short list of ways for a polypile-less wishless
character to get items.
Brown puddings are a little easier to manage, earlier.
>1. Get a weak edged weapon (like a knife or a dagger) and
>rust/corrode/blunt it or enchant it negatively
Better to use a non-weapon, like a key. An iron helm works well also.
>2. Get one black pudding (by continuously polymorphing some creature until
>you get lucky, kicking a sink, wishing for a figurine of black pudding,
>stone-to-fleshing a statue of a black pudding, or polymorphing into one and
>splitting yourself, though I'm not sure if the two latter work; or one of
>the dozens of other possibilities I forgot)
Brown puddings work too, but they don't have as many hitpoints, so it's
a bit more of a patience game to grow them.
If you think you're really going to do this for a while, it's a pretty
good idea to prepare the level by digging out rock, lighting it up, and
making a nice fortress with boulders on Elbereth squares near your
altar. You're going to be standing here for a LOT of turns; you'll be
coming back here from time to time as the game progresses, and you'll
have things like arch-liches, cockatrices, etc, sneaking in on the
perimeter. You want to see them coming and be able to take care of
them. Another kind of rotten thing is when some of the puddings get
slimed. You'll come across puddings that you've named, that are now
slimes. Kind of funny, kind of scary.
DON'T use Stormbringer against puddings -- it drops their level, and
then the siblings will be lower level too.
>3. Attack this black pudding with your weak edged weapon. If it had more
>than 1 hp, it will (at least VERY probably) split up into two black
>puddings, each with (roughly) half the hitpoints of the first one (not sure
>about details here...). A stethoscope can help you with finding the
>toughest pudding around to ensure many splits.
Yep, also handy to be able to cast healing/extra healing on columns of
them.
Pets and pudding farms don't mix, at least, not good pets. They will
kill them faster than you can spawn them. Several times I've been down
to the last pudding, or had to undead-turn a corpse because a pet dragon
or titan was a little too agressive. Pretty surprising, considering the
level can go from 1300+ puddings to zero.
>5. Take your normal weapon and start killing the puddings and sacrifice
>them.
I suggest using a unicorn horn to cull, or keep using the key (or the
rusty weilded helm) to kill them, sacrifice the ones that die on the
altar, #name them to keep them from stacking with stale ones, and
occassionaly maybe let a gelatinous cube loose and/or keep a cursed bag
of holding, to get rid of the huge, possibly game-crashing, amount of
garbage that they drop. For every magic marker or helm of brilliance,
you're going to have a few hundred pages of useless armor to get rid of,
get it?
Every now and then I reverse-genocide gelatinous cubes or tame a Xorn or
two. Be careful with a cursed BoH, of course.
>6.When there's only one pudding left, switch back to the weak edged weapon
>(if you can still find it between all those artifacts that clutter your
>inventory now) and start over...
After you have a few hundred puddings, you don't have to worry about the
population. Just kill, move, sac, pickup, move back, rinse, repeat.
>During this process, be VERY careful about randomly generated different
>monsters, especially nymphs, foocubi or strong monsters that can seriously
>dent your hitpoints.
Master mind flayers with their ranged psychic attack is annoying.
Spellcasters/summoners are really annoying, especially if you can't get
to them without swimming through your sea of P's.
>Have fun, and keep in mind that pudding farming grants great rewards
Surplus food for an indefinite middle game turns out to be the most
important aspect of this technique. You can actually get just as much
loot, if not more, by camping and casting create monster, eating,
recharging, etc. The problem with that, of course, is you run out of
food as creatures start to extinct, whereas with Puddings, you can
go indefinitely.
Nesta, killed by a black pudding named turn#138447
% - a piece of food (elf corpse named Nesta)
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