Well, the VDDL does provide a guaranteed wand of teleportation. But I could certainly see alternatives made more available in the early CoC - like, maybe a guaranteed wand of cold somewhere in the early CoC.

Also, I just had a cool idea regarding praying to your god in order to cross the river. It could be a costly prayer, but praying while standing next to a river with a land space within sight on the other side could cause a path to form in the river to the nearest such land point, with a message hinting at the idea of moses parting the sea. Perhaps requiring that a hostile foe be in sight on the same side of the river as you, to give the PC reason to need to cross it. I think it would work really well.

ADOM is meant to be hard. Carrot juice is easy to get, as well as wand. You can just cross river, and then heal.

I like the idea of buffing bridge building as it is presently not very useful. Even PCs who have the skill rarely use it. Other solutions are too extreme IMHO.

There's already a guaranteed wand of cold and book of frost bolt available from druid.

Sounds cool, but many PCs at the point in the game quik mentions probably wouldn't have enough piety.

Reducing (or partially eliminating) the failure rate on Bridge Building so that you don't have to chop quite as many logs to do it would be enough, if you ask me. Most rivers are perfectly crossable just by drowning your way across them, though. The Healing skill alone should be enough to recover afterwards.

Yeah, you can cross a 5-square river with one healing prayer (iirc), without any healing skill. I've never really had any trouble in this regard.

Well, swimming and praying for healing partially solves the issue. You still suffer heavy item destruction and rusting, which is a fun-killer to me.

I think the topic can be reduced to this: buffing bridge building in order to see some use out of it, independently of the problematic of crossing rivers.

If you don't want your items to rust or be drenched, try throwing them across if the river is narrow enough. It's very rare that you have to cross five squares to cross a river, too; four are usually no problem at full HP. With a pickaxe especially you can usually guarantee at least a three square wide crossing, and often two.

ADOM isn't supposed to be all about crushing monsters. Sometimes you get non-monster obstacles and puzzles that require some preparation and inventive thinking to get across. Rivers are perfectly fine the way they are. (Bridge Building isn't!)

If you're unlucky you can find levels where you have to cross a 5-square rivers two times (maybe even three) to get to the opposite stairs.

I think Bridge Building clearly needs a buff. It's a skill that is conceptually very useful, but almost no one uses it. That means it's asking for a good buff.

I agree that bridge building should be boosted in some way. Currently using it requires literate PC, who chooses carpenter quest over druid quest, which already is quite steep requirement compared to usefulness. Even when PC manages to aquire the skill, increasing it requires keeping manual from getting destroyed by random traps/monsters/whatever. Finally actually using the skill in meaningful way requires PC with hatchet and decent carrying capasity so he can actually carry the logs to the river.

I'd suggest that in addition of boosting success rate of bridge building, the manual requirement for skill increases would be dropped as well. That way it would be easier to actually increase the skill on the meaningfull level. In addition Yrrigs could offer to teach the skill, if PC doesn't already have it. That way illiterate characters could have access to the skill (As I see it, current literacy requirement means, that PCs most likely to get bridge building are those who already have good chance of learning frost bolt and thus are those less likely to need the skill).

These changes would make the manual less important, but Yrrigs could charge price for teaching the skill and maybe teach the skill to lower level than reading the manual would, so the manual would still be preferable way to learn the skill.

Even after the changes, crossing river with bridge would in many cases require at least few round trips to the surface, so I don't think the skill would even then be too powerfull.

And lastly: while crossing the rivers by swimming is certainly doable even on early game, as quik pointed out it isn't quite realistic option in many cases due the item destruction (And yes, I know about the quaranteed blanket).

If you don't want your items drenched or rusted, then you can get the guaranteed waterproof blanket from the SMC.

Definitely boost Bridge Building.

I may be remembering wrong, but I thought you could already use wooden sticks, with 5 required for one tile, or something like that.

I've seen more rivers in recent builds, some with extreme crossings (one required 14 squares of swimming!).

I like the current balance of availability of wands of cold and so forth. And it is cool when rivers appear in the UD, PC or DD.

A possible solution would be to edit the map generator on CoC-generated river boards so that both entrances appear on the same side of the river, creating a harder-to-explore space (or impassable save a wand of digging)

A suggestion I made once was that river width would depend on dungeon depth, wider in deeper levels and vice versa (the in-universe justification being that the water would've gone to the lower rivers during millennia). Narrow rivers would be obviously much easier to cross and so suitable for early levels.

The only problem with that is that if you don't fetch the blanket immediately, it might not be realistically possible to fetch it later (when PC is around level 10). Making blanket fetching mandatory part of starting the game just to be able to cope with rivers later is not very good solution in my opinion.

I just had PC, who had river in each of UD, PC and DD and two rivers on CoC above dwarf town. Some times RNG just decides to play nasty.

Laukku's suggestion is great. A two-square wide river level would be great until CoC: 15 or so.

To be perfectly honest, I find that bridge building is fairly usable once trained to at least 50. Reading the manual and training with Yrrigs allows one to train the skill to 100, provided that he keeps the manual. Simply sacrificing one point or two on the skill every level should allow one to cross a river early on with some patience.

It's a randomly generated item, you could find it anywhere - it's not "mandatory". The game's already throwing you a bone by even including a guaranteed location for it and nudging you towards it with the ominous scrolls in one of the closest available early game dungeons.

As an aside, getting the Swimming skill if you can't swim - already enough to cross any kind of river but the worst - requires nothing more than two uncursed or one blessed potion of carrot juice, though it's a bit unfortunate that you almost certainly won't figure out this particular secret as an unspoiled player. Some character in the game should reference Blup's love for carrot juice during conversation. Munxip, possibly?