The Item Guide

Everything here is read straight out of the game, so the numbers on this page are the numbers the game actually uses.

Food is your health bar. Hitpoints come back at about one a minute, which is far too slow to matter, so how far out you can go is decided before you leave by what you packed. You cannot eat while something is attacking you — food is what you do between fights.

There is no ladder here. The eight materials fall into three families that trade against each other, and no single material is best at everything — the hardest hitter, the toughest armour and the best tools are three different metals. Forge is the Forge room level you need to smith it.

Four, and you wear one at a time. They are ordinary items — you carry them, you can drop them, and you lose them on death like anything else.

Ore is mined, smelted into bars, and bars become gear. Prices are what a shop pays before its own rate is applied.

Every shop only buys what it sells, and pays 60% of an item's value for it. The general store is the exception: it takes anything, but pays only 35%. That is the price of not walking across town.

Shops hold a limited number of each thing, and the dear items are often simply not in. Cheap staples — vials, seedlings, arrows — are always on the shelf. Something at a few hundred gold is there about half the time, and the jeweller's best pieces about one visit in five. The shelves refill every seven minutes or so, and anything you sell a shop goes straight back into its stock.

Plots mostly come up vegetables, but about one planting in six grows a herb instead — taller and paler in the soil, so you can tell from across the room. The apothecary pays properly for them; nobody else does.

Which herbs your soil can produce depends on your Kitchen. At level 1 only the two commonest will grow; a maxed Kitchen can turn up all seven, though the best is still roughly one planting in ninety.

The Wise Old Man sends you after a particular creature. What he pays depends on how deep that creature lives — a task for something out past wilderness 40 is worth about two and a half times one for something near the ditch, and asks for fewer kills into the bargain.

So the task you are given is worth reading before you accept it.

Caught at fishing spots, cooked on a range or a fire. Raw fish is worth little; cooking it is most of the value. The fishmonger buys any of it.

What is left after a fight. Bones build your Shrine; hides are the armourer's trade. Neither is worth much on its own, but they arrive constantly and the rooms want them by the dozen.

Uncut gems come out of the deeper rocks. Cut, they are the densest gold in the game for the space they take — a diamond is worth more than six lobsters and weighs the same as a pebble. The jeweller pays properly.

Brewed from herbs at a cauldron. Attack, strength and defence potions buff a fight; the super versions do it harder. A prayer potion restores most of your points, which matters more than it sounds when Protect Item is the only thing between you and a bad walk home.

Runes are spent casting; your Rune Altar makes each cast take fewer. Logs are cut from trees and feed almost every room in your dungeon.

A boss occasionally drops something from a small table of oddities. They do nothing at all — no stats, no effect. They are worth carrying because they are rare and because somebody will want one.

Buckets, jugs, pots, tools and oddments. Most of it is picked up in passing and none of it is worth much, but a few are quietly load-bearing — the knife cuts cobwebs, the tinderbox and axe do what you would expect, and vials are what potions are brewed into.

The general store buys all of it, at its usual poor rate. That is what the general store is for.

Monster drops, crafting parts and a few curiosities. Fangs, silk and eyes of newt come off the things that carry them; bow strings and shafts are what a bow is made from; the rest turns up as you go.

A knife cuts the cobwebs sealing doorways out in the wilderness. They grow back after three minutes, so a shelter you opened on the way out may be shut again on the way back.

A loot note is sealed. Your storage chest will hold one but cannot open it — only the banker, deep in the wilderness, will break the seal.

Your Rune Altar discounts every spell's rune cost by 5% a level, to a maximum of half. It never makes a cast free — a spell always costs at least one of each rune.

Seedlings go in the farm plots in your dungeon. They cost a flat price no matter how many you buy, because they are a running supply rather than a one-off.