Here we are again! When we left off, Zeus had just confiscated all my loot and life points. Or I dropped them on the floor when I died. Either way, weak! The consequence of this is that I can't afford to magicate my armor and blade.
But hey, I don't need magic equipment to deal with bats. This, by the way, is all of level four that can be accessed without being able to open secret doors. Luckily:
I'm a wizard. Actually, even without being able to open doors, this probably wouldn't be a bad place to go if you just wanted to level up quickly. You could buy enough armor that bats couldn't touch you and just grind life points from the wandering bats in this room. Grinding is pretty boring though, even running the game way faster than it's supposed to go. There's plenty of experience to be had in the early levels.
I have my usual struggle with the door while bats attack me ineffectually, and step through into a long hallway. I deal with the leech that appears and scan for hidden doors, finding only the one I just came through. Not shown: wandering bats all over the place again.
The lower path gives me a scare: I started my map near the bottom of the page, and the north-south corridor makes it look like I'm going to run off the edge. It turns out it takes a sharp corner, and I'm spared. Each of these small rooms has some weak enemies in it and a diamond. The first two rooms have small diamonds, the others have large.
The upper corridor looks to be a mirror of the lower. At this point I checked my inventory because I missed seeing what the treasure I'd just picked up was (turns out, a large diamond. So much for my mirror idea - there was a small diamond in the lower second room), and when I came out the onscreen map had wiped:
Very disorienting. Also of note in that .gif: giant leeches are able to injure me again, now that my armor isn't magic. If I meet anything tougher, I'm likely to get ruined. I've also noticed that it takes me two hits to kill a giant bug with my unenchanted sword.
I revisit all the rooms I've been to so that my subsequent screenshots will match the earlier ones.
I carry on and have another near-deadly encounter with a giant leech.
I kill a couple more leeches and pick up another couple diamonds, and this leg of the cave is fully explored! None of these rooms had any more secret doors. If I remember my Caevquest lore correctly, level four was the dwelling and sleeping area. I guess this little area was a dormitory, and I've been raiding people's jewellery boxes for those diamonds.
I return to the exit, save my game, and quit. I could've carried on through the hidden door in room 1, but given how that ended last time I don't want to take it on while I'm weaker than I was then. I need to get my gear magicked up. I don't think I'll be spending any of the rest of my life points/treasure money though. I've got quite a bit of stuff, and anything else I buy is just more weight to carry.
The game seems to have kind of an issue in the balance between treasure and experience. I've gathered up about 1500 silver worth of stuff in this expedition, which is enough to re-enchant my gear with a little left over, but I've also gained 8540 life points, all of which will be converted to silver after I don't spend them levelling up my intelligence. A lot of that is from killing large numbers of wandering monsters, of course. If I weren't pausing to draw my map in each room I wouldn't be killing anywhere near so much stuff. Still, I think it would make sense to have the amounts of life points you get be smaller, and have the level up costs be lowered to match, so that when your leftover life points convert to silver they don't blow out the economy so dramatically.
On the other hand, after level 3 I had enough life points to max out all my stats, so maybe the levelling costs wouldn't need to go down either. And even now that I'm as tough as I'll ever be, I still got wiped by that lizardman pretty much instantly. Maybe the true adventure begins once you reach the level cap, and getting tonnes of extra money doesn't matter.
Anyway:
Here's my expanded level 4 map. I'm a little worried about how it'll cope once I go through the right-side hidden door in room 2. I'm not keeping to scale very well.
Next time:
Probably the right-side hidden door in room 2, I guess.
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