How to become extremely unkillable in Qud
Caves of Qud now has a "roleplaying" mode, which allows you to checkpoint at settlements in the world. This makes it a lot easier to slowly work your way through the game content.
It also means that my crusty old strategies for hoarding XP and making myself unkillable are a lot less useful. I'm going to share them anyway, though, because I am proud of them!!
Needless to say, there are a lot of mechanical spoilers for early-game Qud things in this blog post. Do not read it if you'd like to discover everything for yourself. If you've played enough Qud to have visited the Six-Day Stilt, though, this is probably safe for you to read.
Roll a True Kin
The downside to my strategy is that it requires me to play as a True Kin rather than a mutant. If you are new to the game and want to see what's special about Qud, you really should play as a mutant human. The mutation system leads to really really strange and fun and kind of out-of-control, unwieldy character builds. This is where the game expresses a ton of its uniquely chaotic personality.
"True Kin" are Qud's non-mutant humans. Instead of mutations, they use body-mod technology, like robot arms, dermal implants, chips in their brains, and so on - which is still fun, but simply less bizarre and chaotic. True Kin start with one of these tech upgrades and must scavenge for more as they explore.
They also generate with resources that mutants lack - their starting inventory contains more tonics, books, and other valuable items. Even when you don't spawn with things you might actually use in your build, the gear you start with as a True Kin can be sold for other things that might be useful to you.
This makes you substantially harder to kill - which allows you to accelerate IMO much more quickly through the early game. It also makes your build much more reliable across the length of the game. Qud is definitely one of those games where even an experienced player might roll a new character, wander out of the starting village, explore a bit, and die within 20 minutes to some unexpectedly dangerous critter. If you're playing permadeath, or trying to get to the endgame more quickly, being a rich and unkillable jerk is a good way to avoid the slog associated with this very very vulnerable early-game time. When I'm going somewhere new in Qud, I usually go there as a True Kin.
Roll a chef
I usually roll a character who starts with the ability to harvest plants, or the ability to butcher corpses. You can explore the True Kin starting templates to see which build with those abilities you prefer - or you can skip it entirely and gain the ability to harvest or butcher through your starting village.
Each starting village has a leader which can teach you a different skill. One teaches butchery. I usually roll a Horticulturalist, which starts with the ability to harvest. Then I choose the Butchery village as my starting point.
You can learn your village's skill after earning enough reputation points with their faction. I immediately grab the first two quests in the village, complete them, then trade rep for the Butchery skill. This allows me to immediately begin cooking meals with pretty great buffs.
I usually choose the build with the harvesting ability (Horticulturalist) to access plants as my first, base food type specifically because harvesting plants is a low-risk activity for a new character. There are also many, many more opportunities to harvest plants in a new Qud save than to butcher animals. The first screen you spawn on will likely contain many harvestable plants. The screens surrounding the village screen are also "peaceful" screens containing agricultural fields and few, if any, monsters - you can spend a few minutes scooting around and picking up plants here.
If you spawn with butchering or harvesting, it will be "toggled on" and will happen automatically every time you are not in combat and pass over a corpse or a fruit-bearing plant. Learning to see which plants are harvestable can be a bit tricky - some of them are visually pretty subtle - but you will pick it up quickly.
You then need to preserve all food before cooking it. This is possible at any lit campfire or oven. An inventory full of fresh apples does nothing - you can only cook once you've turned them all into jam.
Finally, the next key thing to do is to travel to the Six-Day Stilt and harvest the spinefruit there. Spinefruit grows on the thorny plants all over the Stiltgrounds - it is represented by small pink pixels. The pants will cut you for 1 damage every time you pass over them, but this shouldn't be a serious issue. Collect the spinefruit, then learn the local recipe from the Stiltgrounds settlement. This recipe is the same in every single game. It requires Spinefruit and Dawnglider Tail (harvestable in the desert around the Stilt), and always gives you heat resist and damage reflect. It's probably the single most-useful recipe in the early game experience.
Damage reflect is massively helpful against many of the overwhelming enemy hordes you'll have fewer tools to deal with in the early game, like Snapjaw armies and Naphtaali tribes. Heat resistance is also excellent - it helps you deal with firesnouts and makes it a bit easier to explore the dungeon immediately northeast of the Stilt. It's not a main-quest dungeon, but if you go deep enough inside, you'll find a shit ton of incredible weapons and armor.
Really work your first village's vendor over
I sell all of these every time I start a True Kin:
- All my non-salve tonics. You will find more.
- All grenades which kill fungus or plants. These are less useful in the early game because plants and fungus are unlikely to really hurt you in early game regions.
- If I am feeling very spicy, I also sell all EMP grenades. The very early game of Qud does not involve as many fights vs robots as fights vs. flesh beings.
- The clothes I am currently wearing on my back. If I have 0/0 shoes, I sell those as well.
- I often play with night vision implants as a TK. If I am doing that, I sell all my torches as well, since I will not need them.
- Always check your off-hand in your equipment. I sometimes find that I am holding some deranged, moderately-valuable item there when I spawn in. If I have no immediate plan to use it in combat, I sell it.
I then buy these things:
- One musket
- All the lead slugs in the shop
- Leather armor
I then put on the armor and wield the musket. I keep any bows and arrows as backup.
Wearing armor the first time you walk out of the village will make you MUCH more resilient. I understand why, fun-wise, the game usually spawns True Kin characters with more than enough resources to buy armor, but no actual armor - it gives you the OPPORTUNITY to do something weird with your character if you really want to. But every single time I play as a True Kin, I sell all this stuff and buy the armor instead, since I'm playing as a TK specifically in order to access survivability.
Muskets are also incredible utility - they do a shitton of damage in the early game and make it a lot easier to kill Snapjaw forts. Remember that unlike bows, however, you must reload your musket between every shot.
Collect books for the librarian
I also deliberately juice my XP in a couple ways. The easiest way to gain a ton of XP on top of the XP you gain in combat is by collecting books and donating them to the Librarian at the Six-Day Stilt.
The Stilt is a settlement in the upper left hand corner of the map. It's the thing you can see there! When you arrive at the Stilt, you can travel one screen north to enter the main structure - then immediately enter the first room on your left. Some creature - randomly-generated - will appear in that room as the Stilt's librarian. They will give you an XP bounty for every book you deliver to them.
You can get bounties of many thousands of XP points by turning in big piles of books! So keep them around, never sell them, and visit the Stilt periodically to drop them off. A True Kin can even spawn with books.
Next, go hunting for more. You are likely to find books in ruins - in particular, I hunt for them in circular ruins. Circular ruins are fairly common and are particularly easy to find as you travel north toward the Stilt from your first village in Qud. Circular ruins are less geographically complex than the ones with rectangular forms - which means that they are easier to survive in the early game. You may find higher-level enemies hiding in them, but the better lines of sight allow you to shoot down enemies from afar, or run away from them before they can mess you up.
I must admit that this belief is possibly anecdotal, but the circular ruins also seem to contain more bookcases than other ruins. It may be that I just find it easier to locate the bookcases in the circular ruin maps, since there are fewer walls to conceal them... but most of the time, I get a good pile of books from each circular ruin. There are some circular ruin templates which contain weapon racks rather than bookcases, but they seem to be the minority.
I always agree to enter every ruin that the game warns me about on the overworld map. If it's not a circular ruin, and I'm hunting for books, I sometimes bail without exploring it (particularly if I am low on resources).
Collect stories about Resheph
The final Sultan of Qud was a sultan named Resheph. Resheph's story is hand-authored rather than randomized and relates to the most crucial history of Qud.
There is an NPC named Tszappur in the first screen of the Stiltgrounds who will give you tremendous amounts of XP for sharing your knowledge of Resheph. You can find this guy standing outside the tent in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.
The trick with this system is that you must continue to share Resheph stories with this guy. The more Resheph stories you find, the more each one is worth. This is a detail I missed out on for a long time - to get the most out of this system, you really do need to repeatedly return to the Stiltgrounds, share the stories, and keep a positive reputation with the Cult of the Coiled Lamb so that you can continue to do this.
Resheph's life is extremely long, and there are a ton of stories to find... every time I'm at the stilt, I check with this passionate Resheph-worshipper and donate any new stories I have. The amount of XP you end up getting is really nutso.
That's it
This is not the most creative way to play Qud, but it is a very reliable way to increase your level and armor your body! This is the build and the playstyle I choose whenever I am seeing a new dungeon for the first time. I am currently playing through the new story content with one of these True Kin Horticulturalists (dual-wielding axes, tinkering like a maniac, dumping every stat point possible into Strength and Intelligence, and cheering every time I decapitate someone).
I cannot recommend Qud enough. It is a monumental achievement, and it's one of those roguelikes which makes you feel like you have acquired a real skill by learning to play it. I've barely scratched the surface here- for every one of my crusty personal preferences I've listed in this post, there are a thousand I haven't mentioned... and probably a thousand more for you to discover that I don't even know about.