(WARNING! This is a wall of text, as I was powerless to restrain my inexplicable resurgence of tendency to exhibit verbal diarrhea in all written texts. You must excuse the diluvial verbosity of the following lines.)
In the wake of recent necro archmaging and all that, I have decided to go for the unthinkable: the mindcrafter archmage. Kudos to Heikki for the idea some years back, though he will have to excuse my refusal to pick a troll for that, I'm mad but not insane.
Before I get into the details, I have to say one thing: I cheated.
The cheat was based on a well-known character renaming bug that was the equivalent of save scumming.
The only place where I had to do this was the library, in order to generate a spellbook of wish.
So, in my defense, I cheated not to survive or avoid something unpleasant and instead to obtain a particular item that makes this whole effort possible in the first place.
Sure enough, it took about 30 reloads, each of which generated 18 random spellbooks upon entering the library.
The character is a raven-born gray elf.
Some early fortuitous finds included 7lb in DD, double pre-crowning on the PC5's cavernous level, where a lucky altar and a steady stream of chopping block enthusiasts allowed me to obtain executor and crown of leadership.
That guaranteed two things: offense and PV.
Everything else from here went smoothly.
Saved Khelly, speared the ACW with RCT, cleaned the maze before lvl 25 class power kicked in so I could eat the mino emp corpse, regain lost willpower and then level up and get 5 more points of will.
Never used aotme since executor with rolf's shield (I got it, of course, when I needed the other items more) worked perfectly well, axes are now at lvl 14 with less than 10k marks left till grandmastery.
Three random shops have been generated - rings shop in R6, potions in UD8 and scrolls in UD6.
I restocked the potions and ring shops about 10 times each, which netted me a rods as well as plenty of stackable rings and poexes to get another one via polymorphy. Some more poga too, either directly or through alchemy (boost speed + pocc, I've seen worse recipes).
FGJC bloomed with artifacts and glittering things, I left that joint wearing bracers of war and brandishing farslayer with thunderstroke, not to mention wyrmlance, the only random artifact that is actually guaranteed.
Long story short, I breezed through the reminder of the unexplored areas, splattering things, teleporting around, GTBing karmics and stat drainers in an unrestrained spree of mental carnage.
I'm L+ but not crowned so I have the option to go for ultra and probably will.
On a side note, non-crowned, invisible char, wearing regen items and many artifacts on top of that, really gets his satiation drained; like a glass of cold beer on a steamy summer evening.
I'm on exclusive blessed stoma diet and it feels like I'm eating cooked lizards instead.
Now the MC is lvl 50, with great book caster talent, TotRR and mana orb obtained, and wish spell knowledge at the whopping 23 points.
Here is where I got stalled.
With all the attributes, stat boosters, armor of life, items with +mana, I'm at 1050 HP and 1700 PP.
I have a skin tingle room and mana battery.
I can't read the spellbook to get more than 23 knowledge - tried three times in the "walls look like shelves of books" room - one read created a trap, second teleported me and the third blinded.
Fun fact: Length of blinding due to failed reading of the book is proportional to the turns required to read it. I had to pray to see things again.
I figured, no point forcing my way in and having the book explode.
Even if I did manage to read it and increase spell knowledge, I'd most likely still be below 100, if the other spellbooks successfully read are any indication.
Having 23 points in wish castings elevates the cast cost from 3000 to ~5300 and bookcasting accordingly.
I tried bookcasting wish with aols equipped and ended up at around -650 HP.
That is pretty hardcore all things considered, though less perhaps, than the math would suggest.
It's possible that bookcasting cost doesn't scale the same way for spell knowledge <100.
So now where do I go from here?
I generated DD since I needed gardening so I can't milk the healer for pouh.
I have alchemy but the recipes' ingredients do not cooperate.
A doppleganger king killed the potion shopkeeper and in retrospect I should have prevented that.
Nevertheless I turned ~250 useless potions into porc and proceeded to dabble in chaos alchemy, increasing attributes even further and generating copious amounts of water.
I still have the choice to kill greater white unicorn for more poga though I'm wondering if killing the black one wouldn't be more useful after abusing mana orb and getting a crap ton of corruptions in the process.
I'm already at 93 mana with all boosting items so I can't really count on some vast increase after rubbing mana orb but still. PP gets increased even after mana reaches 99.
Casino is intact although I have gathered all the items in a single heap so by now it must have restocked. I have 1,5 mil gold stashed in the pyramid so I could give it a shot.
What else do I have left? Should I farm BDC for more potions/wishes?
I'm 600 HP short but just to be sure, I need to get 1k HP to offset possible toughness/mana drains for the first wish.
I need ways to directly increase PP or HP or both, though I have already exhausted a lot of the options.
If I could get the first few castings somehow, I would raise the PP with power wishes and Mana with the orb but the problem is actually casting in the first place.
Oh, it's day ~98 and I'm 200k turns into the game.
EDIT: Oh, I just remembered I have about ~80 wands stashed in the pyramid as well, waiting to be drained. Also enough holy water to bless them.
With some luck that should be almost 200 extra PP. It's a start I guess.