Editing v0.34:Adventurer mode

Unlike [[Fortress mode]], Adventurer Mode is a sort of advanced [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game open world] version of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_%28computer_game%29 rogue] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nethack  nethack] taking place in the same procedurally generated worlds used for Fortress Mode, but you control a single character in a turn-based manner rather than manage a group of creatures acting in real time.

*'''Dwarves''' have the advantage of being able to go into a [[Martial trance|martial trance]] when fighting multiple foes at once. This gives them many combat bonuses, which aids their survival greatly. They are the only race which can start with steel weapons, but they wear "small" sized clothing (like goblins and elves) which means that they're unable to wear human clothing and armour found in shops. Goblin amour will fit them so its usually easy enough to find some armour since you'll run into a lot of hostile goblins during quests. They can start with almost all of the same weapon skills as civilized humans. Most human-sized weapons (such as long swords) must be wielded two-handed by dwarves, due to their size.

*'''Willpower''': Affects Fighter, Crutch Walker and Swimmer. Willpower is really important as it governs how easily you'll pass out from extreme pain. Low willpower is a death sentence if you are seriously wounded, as you'll pass out and have your head caved in. Broken bones currently cause enough pain that even very high willpower usually won't keep you conscious. For non bone injuries however willpower can keep you going long enough to kill enemies, or at least get away from them.

*'''Intuition''': Only helps with Observer, which aids in spotting concealed enemies and ambushes. A useless skill since you rarely see these in adventure mode.

=== Attribute advancement cap ===

Adventure mode attributes are capped at double the starting value or the starting value plus the racial average, whichever is greater. Humans, for example, have a racial average strength of 1,000. If a human adventurer starts with an ''above average'' strength of 1,100, then their strength will ultimately be capped at 2,200. Had this human started with a ''below average'' strength of 900, then their strength would be capped at 1,900 instead. For the purpose of maximizing final attributes, this makes it important to start with as many attributes in the ''superior'' range as possible (more attributes per point allocated), while avoiding taking any penalties to even remotely important attributes (big attribute deductions per point recovered). As a consequence of the attribute cap, demigod adventurers will always have a much higher potential for advancement than mere peasants and heroes.

Crossbowman is an exception. Dwarves call this skill Marksdwarf, although bow skill is referred to as Bow Dwarf as you'd expect. Elite Axe and Hammer dwarves are referred to as Lords.

*'''Shield User''' - Ability to block attacks with shields. Starting with even novice skill in this means that the adventurer will start with a shield. This is a no-brainer unless you're creating a two handed weapon user.

| Interact with an object in an advanced way. (unstick a weapon, refill waterskin etc.)

The {{k|I}} key allows "complex interaction" with objects in your inventory.

 

This is used for removing arrows and weapons stuck in wounds which will appear in your inventory when they become stuck in you. Removing stuck arrows can cause bleeding so it is not always a good idea mid combat, but stuck objects will slow you down as you are encumbered by their weight. It s best to remove them as soon as possible when it is safe and you are not in danger of bleeding to death.

 

Advanced interaction can also be used to steal enemy  equipment. Use [[wrestling]] to grab hold of a piece of enemy equipment, such as their weapon, or a helmet protecting their squishy brain and it will appear in the advanced interaction menu. Simply select it and choose "gain possession". if successful you'll take it from them. This can be very useful in battle.

Advanced interactions can be used next to a campfire to heat things, such as any frozen liquids you have in your inventory(or snow lying on the ground) and need to drink. You can refill waterskins from a nearby liquid source as well, though you cannot drink stagnant water (water not from wells or rivers) unless you are highly dehydrated (Thirsty is shown in purple).

The game has a day/night cycle with time passing as various actions take place.  

 

When using quick travel mode, the top line of the screen will indicate the position of the sun in the sky with a yellow "☼"; further to the right of the screen is earlier in the day and further to the left is later in the day.  

In local travel mode you'll have to use the {{k|W}} command.

The game also has weather and temperature. The most common weather you'll experience is rain. Rain is shown as blue moving dots on the local travel screen and will unsurprisingly cause everything outside to become wet. Wet vegetation cannot be set on fire and you cannot light campfires in rain. Temperature is important because if it happens to drop below freezing while you're swimming through water, you'll instantly die from being encased in the ice.

 

Therefore you might want to keep an eye on the temperature while swimming, especially if it's getting cold.

 

Also, unlike fortress mode, rivers/other bodies of water can be liquid during the day, and freeze at night. The cycles of freezing can also be erratic from day to day.

Freezing weather can also freeze liquids in your inventory solid, making them undrinkable. If your water freezes and you are thirsty, try hunting down nearby enemies and slicing them up so you can drink their warm, unfrozen blood instead.

Sleep does not necessarily have to coincide with night, but if you're traveling alone when night comes you'll be in danger of being attacked by [[Bogeymen]].  To avoid this while traveling solo you need to make it to shelter before nightfall and sleep the night away inside a building or abandoned lair.  Enter a building, use {{K|k}} to talk to a human, and ask for permission to stay the night. Next press {{K|Z}} to sleep, {{K|d}} to sleep until dawn, then {{K|Enter}} to confirm. ('''NOTE''': If you stay the night in a castle, you have to sleep in the keep which houses the lord/lady of the castle.  Sleeping inside the castle but outside the keep still leaves you vulnerable to attack.) Sleeping on an ocean beach also prevents bogeymen from attacking. ('''NOTE''': You can disable bogeymen by generating a world using [[advanced world generation]] and setting "Number of Night creatures" to 0)

Though sleeping inside can be safe, it's also limiting: any quest site you want to go to has to be within a daytime's round-trip time of a safe habitation, and you have to make your way to there by hopping from one habitation to the next, sleeping at each along the way.  A way to avoid this is to travel with companions.  If you have any companions with you then Bogeymen won't attack you.  You'll still have to sleep at night, though, both to avoid sleep deprivation and because there's no visibility at night.  You can still be ambushed at night by wildlife, but that's much less likely than being ambushed by Bogeymen when traveling alone. If you find yourself alone at night with nowhere safe to sleep, the safest bet is to keep traveling until dawn, even if that means running around in circles. You will eventually feel unwell from sleep deprivation, but this can take a considerable amount of time. You can make up for lost sleep once you've found your way to safety.

Note that sleeping in lairs, shrines, and labyrinths makes you safe from ambush, assuming that you or someone else has killed whatever was living there. If you have sufficient shrines/lairs/etc between you and your goal and they are either uninhabited or inhabited by things you are capable of killing then you can travel from lair to lair using each lair as a safe lodging. This is much safer than sleeping out in the open, day or night, even with companions.

The easiest way to stay hydrated and full when starting out is by finding and fighting something weak (say, a vulture, or a raccoon, or a fox).  You will almost certainly end up covered in blood.  You can drink any liquid covering you using 'e' and then simply selecting the fluid - perhaps a little salty in real life, but in Dwarf Fortress it works.  The corpse can then be butchered {{k|x}} for edible parts, to cure your hunger - the first two problems are solved.

 

Note that drinking vampire blood will turn you into a vampire instantly.

Make sure to eat or drink regularly even if you're not hungry or thirsty, as you can only eat or drink three times in a row: after that you'll need to rest, or wait until you can consume another meal. If you find yourself in need of both food and hydration, make sure to take care of the most urgent problem first, as if you are moderately hungry but severely dehydrated and eat three times, you may die before you have another chance to drink.

To attack with a ranged weapon press the {{k|f}} key with a ranged weapon (bow, crossbow, etc.) equipped on one hand and select the square where you want to attack. Note that you need to have some sort of ammo, corresponding to the type of ranged weapon you are using (for example, bows use arrows, crossbows use bolts). Otherwise, a message stating "You have nothing left to fire." is displayed in brown. Similarly use the {{k|t}} key to throw any random object in the same manner. Random objects appear to make a random attack if they happen to have more than one possible type.{{Verify}} For example, if you throw a sword it may hit with a blunt impact, a stabbing impact, or a slicing impact. Throwing crossbow bolts with sufficient throwing skill and strength seems to have an effect similar to firing them, although less powerful. On the plus side, you will never lose ammo if you throw it.

For a detailed list of moves such as takedowns, throws, choke holds, etc., see [[Wrestling]].

*'''Capital''' - Ask where the capital of the current civilization is. As with the "Surroundings" topic, a random bit of the capital's history will also be given.

In recent versions, you may find towns that are entirely deserted. In this case, you can steal from their shops with no consequences. You can also steal items from a fortress without any consequences, but it is unknown if you can do this if there is someone else in the room to see you. {{verify}}

'''Note that if you steal anything, then nobody in that civilization will talk to you anymore, making it impossible for you to get new quests, use the shops, or get new companions.''' <!-- Unless you hack it. -->

You will find that coins from one civilization are nearly worthless in other civilizations. This will typically result in adventurers carrying around lots of now useless coins. Coins can and will encumber your adventurer, eventually reducing your speed. To reduce that effect you can try to exchange your copper and silver coins for gold ones as well as sell all of your loot directly for gold coins. Remember, merchants will always try to pay you in higher denomination currency first but will resort to lower value coins if they run out of anything higher. First, check the merchant's chest to see how much of each type of coins they have.  

 

 

To receive the maximum amount of gold coins from that merchant, make sure the amount "they owe you" during the trade is equal to (total amount of gold coins the shop has)*15☼ . If you are selling loot, simply make sure you only trade this worth of goods, and move on to other merchants for the rest. If you wish to exchange copper and silver coins for gold, buy random goods from the merchant until their price is around this value and then sell back all of the goods for their original value but in gold.  

The next best way to get items to sell is to kill non-talking monsters, butcher their corpses (see below for how), and pick up the edible bits. Butchered bits from the corpses of people (dwarves, elves, humans, etc.) can sometimes be found in monster lairs and these seem to be just as desired by shopkeepers as the products you gain from your own butchering.

* Remember that ''it's better to let your enemy come to you, than to go to your enemy''. You have to either move or attack. If you move, you can't attack, so if you move within range to attack your enemy, you allow them to have the first strike (unless you're much faster than them). On the other hand, if you let them move within range of you, then you get to have the first strike. If your enemy is one space away from you, use that as an opportunity to throw a knife or a rock at them; worst case, they will get a bruise or a cut; best case, they will start the melee severely crippled. If you're fast enough, then you can simply step back after getting in that first hit, and they'll have to spend their turn approaching you again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

** It's relatively easy to obtain some armor by killing a sleeping soldier in a fort and taking his stuff.  Alternatively, you can recruit the soldier, and get them killed by natural means, such as drowning.

** Most villagers are pretty easy to kill and while their stuff isn't usually too valuable it is worth something. Instead of killing animals you can go around killing villagers and taking their stuff, then travel to another civilization that doesn't know (or maybe care) how evil you are, in order to trade.

** Don't try this in the beginning if the next civilization over is more than a day or so away. You need to be able to flee to another country in order to escape justice and continue to quest/trade.

* Loot friendly fortress keeps and the dungeons of towns. All equipment and items held within containers in fortresses and keeps are free for the taking, and will not result in being branded as a thief. Be wary of the dungeons, however; you're not the only one attracted to shiny things.

* Pick companions with good equipment so you can "inherit" it when they get killed. Letting them do all of the fighting for a while might help speed up this process. While this might be kind of evil, it's not as evil as the first option (murder) and will cause you much less trouble. Even better: if you have Novice or better in Swimmer, you can take a dip in a lake or river (or any other body of water) and they will follow suit; drowning in the process, if they have Dabbling or lower in Swimmer.

Here are some techniques for raising your skills; very rapidly in some cases.

Most of these skill-raising techniques involve repeatedly entering the same keystrokes. To assist with this you can use a [[Main:Macro|Macro]] to make entering the same sequence of keystrokes over and over again much easier.

*'''Fighting and Wrestling''' - A good way to raise your Fighting and Wrestling skills and related attributes is to go find a small, relatively harmless animal and wrestle with it repeatedly. You can wrestle using {{k|A}} followed by {{k|Enter}}. Continually grabbing and releasing a creature is sufficient to raise your skill, and you can do it indefinitely with the same animal as it won't be injured (unless you auto-wrestle it).  Wrestling will increase Kinesthetic Sense, Spatial Sense, and to a lesser extent, Endurance.  You may also somewhat increase Dodging and Shield User this way as the creature takes swipes at you.<p>It's possible to change your {{k|C}}ombat preferences for attacking and dodging to ''Close Combat'' and ''Stand Ground'', respectively, allowing you to simply walk into the helpless critter to wrestle it.  (Standing your ground prevents you from moving to dodge attacks, so your wrestling can continue almost uninterrupted.)  You will, however, perform occasional throws and take-downs as long as the creature remains standing, which may result in their eventual bleeding to death.  Strangulation is also a repeated concern, as it will render the victim unconscious, thus making you have to wait until it regains consciousness before you can continue auto-wrestling it (though you may still raise your Wrestler and Fighter skills by 10 points for every time you ''release'' a limb - though this must be done manually and must be repeatedly confirmed, once the creature is rendered unconscious).  Another concern with auto-wrestling some animals is that you will perform joint locks, and break hips, knees, and ankles in the process, which can cause the creature to bleed to death.  If you can wrangle a creature incapable of blood-loss and strangulation in a high-FPS area (such as a crab on a frozen beach), you can easily raise all associated skills and attributes to Legendary and Superhuman in the course of a few minutes.</p>

*'''Throwing and Archery''' - Throwing rocks with {{k|t}} will raise your Throwing and Archery skills. Throwing objects at creatures, while not as completely devastating as it once was, can still come in handy.  (In early 31.xx, somebody killed a bronze colossus by throwing a fluffy wambler at its head.  We can only hope the wambler survived.)  Although throwing is a way to raise Archery without wasting ammunition, there is a non-wasteful method that additionally increases bow/crossbow skills.<p>The most efficient way to level via throwing is to forgo using a macro and separate training into two phases: {{k|g}}etting and {{k|t}}hrowing.  First, find a tile with an indefinite amount of throwable objects (e.g., snow, rocks, mud, etc.).  Then, sequentially mash {{k|g}} and whatever key the rocks are assigned to until both your forearms explode.  Rest.  Then, sequentially mash {{k|t}}, followed by some consistent key assigned to your rocks, then {{k|enter}}, until you've emptied your inventory.  Rest.  Rinse and repeat.  (You may wish to empty your inventory beforehand such that the rocks are assigned to a key close to {{k|t}}, allowing you to keep one hand on {{k|enter}} and another on {{k|t}}.)</p>

*'''Ambushing and Swimming''' - An efficient way to raise Ambushing is to sneak over large stretches of land, possibly in preference to fast {{k|T}}raveling.  Ideally, this would be done in a biome containing sparse vegetation and few threatening creatures to blunder into and reduce FPS (e.g., a frozen beach).<p>Although less efficient for raising only Ambushing, it's also possible to sneak and swim at the same time, thus combining their training.  ''Just make sure you start with at least Novice in swimming'', or you'll find swimming practically impossible to train.  Swimming can very quickly improve your Strength, Agility, and Endurance.  Additionally, if you can safely drown and then recover (e.g., by moving under a bridge and then back before suffocating), this will raise both Toughness and Endurance at a ''ridiculous'' pace-- a single step spent drowning will raise both attributes by a fifth of a point apiece.</p>

In unmodified games, only human companions are typically available and humans currently seem to have the philosophy that all wildlife MUST DIE AN IMMEDIATE BRUTAL DEATH ASAP. While there's currently no way to order them to ignore wildlife and other neutral creatures, you can modify the ''raw\objects\entity_default.txt'' file and add the {{token|AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE|c}} to the entity definition for humans. This will cause humans to have an elf-like attitude toward wildlife, and vice versa. Humans will then avoid killing animals and animals will not run away from humans, also giving you somewhat of an advantage when hunting as a human.  However, this does mean you'll have to confirm attacks against animals with {{k|alt}}-{{k|y}}, among other things.  (It's still preferable to each of your companions getting one-shotted by hooved, precision kicks to the face... damn horses.)

* Your strength, agility and toughness are doubled. They're still fixed forever, so, again, be prepared.

* Despite not needing to drink water, you have a hunger for warm blood. To satisfy it, beat someone or something unconscious and {{K|e}}at their blood. However, if you become a necromancer after {{verify}} becoming a vampire, you will not need to drink blood.

* Depending on the flavor of zombie virus, your speed may or may not drop to 20% or 60% of its normal value.

*[[Main:Adventure Mode quick reference|Adventure Mode Quick Reference]]

*[[Main:Adventure mode quick start|Adventure Mode Quickstart Guide]]