Why would a plain blanket be better at blocking acid/shock inventory damage than, say, a set of clothes you have sitting somewhere in your backpack? Or a robe? Or a cloak? Or rather - why would any of those items block the damage? You're being showered in acid, either from a bolt/breath attack or from a trap, how would one item not specifically designed to counter that type of elemental attack block it? It's acid, it's supposed to be pretty darn good at destroying things. And why the plain blanket and not that black robe you picked up in VD:1?

I shouldn't be doing what I'm about to do, since it's very counterproductive in this section of the forum, but I don't think you're doing any better.

You asked me in another part of your posting spree why am I being hostile, so let me answer. What you are doing is posting mostly useless (apart from one or two partial exceptions) suggestions that were clearly born not from extensive play and experience, but a mild inconvenience you run into in the game, which for some reason you chose to tackle by not giving it more thought but by coming up with how much easier it would be if there was a shortcut bypassing this particular feature. So there's no acid or shockproof blankets. Might it be a design choice? How would adding them influence the general game balance? Wouldn't it make certain locations a walk in the park and free source of massive xp and loot? Maybe someone already suggested this? Maybe there are reasons to not have in the game that's over 20 years old and is AFAIK as a rather kitchen sink-like within the genre? No, instead of thinking about it, you made a quick run through your backpack, chose an item that you don't have any particular use of and decided it would be a good countermeasure against a problem you've run into.

I'm not going to discuss how lazy and harmful your way of solving problem is in relation to ADOM's game mechanics any further. What I do have to point out is that you're giving into your ADHD or whatever you're suffering from and litter the front page of the bug section with your mostly useless suggestions, hiding actually important problems, when we're on most likely the last release before the first official Steam version. Actual problems like game crashes or huge display bugs are out on the second or third page of the issues list partially because you didn't bother to read the manual or didn't bother to try things out and see the results etc.

Please stop posting until you actually have worthwhile ideas to share or find a real bug.

To the other forum users: I'm sorry for the outburst, I'll try my hardest to contain myself from now on.

You are right. I'm wasting my time here. I purposefully tried to make the features simple and easy to implement, so that it wouldn't be too complex or time consuming for the developer to implement them. Clearly, that kind of thinking isn't wanted here. Clearly, people want features that will take the developer months and months to implement over something simple that could get the job done; maybe not the best, but its sufficient; it doesn't divert the developer away from more important features for that much time. Fine, I can live with that. Its true that many of them were complete shit; I'll own up to that. Sometimes however the best features come about from trying to make something more convenient because some small issue irritated someone enough to suggest it and then people loved that it got implemented. But oh well. Who cares.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to tell me to go fuck off. I really, really, appreciate the gesture. I will personally do as you suggest and leave this forum, permanently.

I won't bother this forum anymore. It is clear it is run by hostile fanboys and I see no reason to suffer your animosity anymore. I tried to offer a few features that might make the game better, but it is clear to me that I'm wasting my time.

Take your stuck up pride, and go fuck yourself. Asshole.

And for any admins reading this, delete this profile. I won't be needed it anymore.

Oh wow, so that's where the drama took place. I was wondering why his profile was deleted.

To be fair, plain blankets are kinda useless (unless they have some secret function).

They are less of a waste than fire/waterproof ones, when you want to cover a pit and create a trap.

I think the point of them is to be misleadingly useless. Why *would* a blanket be that useful in in a dungeon crawl? It also makes it harder to determine what kind of equipment you have. If the only types of blankets you have are fire and waterproof, then if you have blankets and get wet and your stuff gets wet, the you know for sure you have a fireproof blanket. I kind of like that adom makes it difficult to tell apart useless equipment from useful equipment. It's part of the challenge. If everything was always useful, looting and equipment collection would kind of be braindead.

If palandus ever reads this forum again

Annnd some things in adom are "irritating" on purpose. It's a roguelike that's meant to be hard. You are nowhere near knowledgeable enough the game to determine whether a mechanic legitimately adds some depth to the game and you simply don't understand it yet through lack of experience, or it really is a pointless nuisance. Adom does have its fair share of those, in my opinion, but until you know better I don't know what makes you think that your 100s of suggestions are worth anybody's time.

Good idea, I don't like pointless items. One or two joke items are fine but ADOM has several more.

Well, that's interesting. I consider braindead the current necessities of picking up everything which can be remotely useful, then reading a blessed scroll of identify (the most common type of scroll + the most common type of potion + guaranteed altars), then discarding a huge pile of junk. ADOM doesn't make it difficult to tell apart equipment, it makes you care for nothing except scrolls of identify.

I mean, I can sort of understand of rationale behind blankets - fireproof nature might be induced magically and indistinguishable for a non-magic character. But when I see a pair of blue gauntlets and I have to equip them to check for a minor to-hit penalty in order to distinguish leather from dragon scales, this is stupid.

FWIW, I'm an experienced player and the last time I've used a blanket to cover a hole in a course of a normal game or specifically dipped myself into water to semi-identify my blankets was never. It's pretty easy to balance good items and bad items using rarity instead of swelling the ranks of items with annoying garbage.

Well, there's the problem that burdened status means almost nothing when you get SoA or a blessed girdle of carrying. Otherwise, you get penalized for carrying around tons of junk. I don't know if I think designing the game around the assumption that you are circumventing a basic mechanic of the game is something I like. When I play an archer or some other low Str class w/o SoA, it does actually force me to be considerate about what I'm looting (do i really need these spare weapons? or these extra torches? or these heavy rations?) I don't think it's fair to say that this never becomes an issue.

Well, in this specific example any experienced player knows very easily where to get guaranteed fireproof/waterproof blankets, and fireproof blankets being fairly common in general you will have found a scroll of identify by then. I think if anything it just showcases how absurdly powerful blessed scrolls of identify are - but I at least like the idea that the player has to be intelligent about loot and such. (honestly though, do scrolls of id need to be that strong? altars already give you full access to B/U/C status detection which effectively is identification for all equippables... but this is a separate issue).

Palandus, if you still read this: sorry you felt that way. Discussions about new features tend to get heated, especially with veterans that all have strong opinions about how the game should be.. so long

I think it's important not to let a community get too insular and end up catering only to its audience of stick-in-the-mud die-hards who like things exactly as they are, particularly if it has aspirations to expand its audience.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the proposed feature--it doesn't make a whole lot of real-world sense but then a lot of things in ADOM don't. It could certainly pass 'ADOM logic'. Nor do I think people would have a huge problem with plain blankets having this functionality if it had been in the game from the start--in fact I'd be willing to bet if that had happened and there was an RFE saying "make plain blankets useless" that just as many people would be downvoting it.

I feel like I have to point out the same thing I always point out again here. There is no good reason to believe that absence of acid/electricity resistant blankets is
a "design choice" in the sense that phrase is being used. Maybe TB just never thought of putting them in. Maybe he thought of it and didn't have the time. Maybe he thought of it, had time to add that feature, and then read these posts in the forum that assume it was some sort of carefully calculated balance tweak to have no acid/elec protection. Maybe he even thought that was funny.

Development is an organic process. Everything isn't planned out from the beginning. Sometimes things just come into being almost spontaneously. ADOM doesn't even remotely attempt to be balanced in so many different ways. You think *blankets* were given this much thought?

We're in a state where we can't even accept that bridge building should be rolled into woodcraft, and now we are hitting a roadblock because we think there was some sort of deliberate blanket balancing? Seriously?

If you really want to look at the issue of inventory destruction, the problem is that it doesn't currently encourage any sort of strategic play in almost all cases. If you don't want your stuff destroyed, you can leave it on the stairs of the floor above/below, the get it later. That's it. You are punished for not wanting to go through that inconvenience when you carry your stuff around and it gets damaged.

What's worse is that this is another aspect of the game that rewards carrying large amounts of useless junk around, because it acts as RNG fodder. So, the game is basically telling the player that the ideal gameplay style is this:

1. Dump your stuff on the stairs every floor, then come back when said floor is cleared.

2. On levels where you have to bring your stuff with you for some reason, carry around as much extra junk as possible.

Is inventory destruction seriously enough a problem that people would ever consider doing this? I mean, if you're clearing a black dragon vault or the Air Temple, maybe you'd do this, but you can do the entire BDC losing no more than a handful of items, even without Alertness or particularly high speed. On an average level, your average item loss is much less than 1 item per floor, and your gain is much more than 1 item per floor. Even if your character is running around doomed for some reason, inventory destruction is not severe enough for you to need to do this sort of thing.

I know people are possessive about their loot, but seriously, on most characters, if you lost half your inventory, it would not make any difference whatsoever.

The last time I went to Blue Dragon Caves, 8 out of 9 of my scrolls of chaos resistance got burned in one lightning attack (they are hard to avoid on the last level) with Alertness maxed out. If I didn't go there for the completion sake after closing the gate, it'd be a considerable loss, and a huge one if I was attempting an ultra ending. In one other, earlier case, I lost my only pair of 7LB in the same location. It really depends on what gets destroyed. So yes, I really do drop almost all of my stuff outside of the Air Temple and try to lure enemies out of the item destruction zone and I really do avoid BDC most of the time (and if I don't, I leave the most valuable items in a safe place). Despite that, I think the OP's suggestion is a bad solution to the problem and a solution isn't even needed in the first place, it's just "by design" - I think we can assume it's intentional after 20+ years. I'm repeating myself though.

Scooter, that's just the problem with this whole discussion. We *cannot* assume it is by design except in the most literal sense. Look at the backlog of RFE's. Do you think blanket mechanics have ever been anywhere near the top?

This is a really systematic problem with the way most of the community looks at game mechanics. There is a (real) problem pointed out, it doesn't get fixed for whatever reason, and as a result it is assumed that the choice not to fix it is some sort of carefully thought out gameplay balance decision.

Look, if you were the developer, where would this be on your list of priorities. How many years did it take to make cursed blankets not work better than blessed in the TOEF? That is a perfect example of what I am saying. You can't just ignore that.

Which is exactly why I think we should reduce the amount of junk/clutter. I totally agree. And if you could choose what half of your inventory was destroyed, that would be a legitimate gameplay mechanic, because it involves planning/strategy/etc. But you can't. Item destruction is random.

And yes, no one really drops their items every floor, because that would be boring and silly. But the point is, that is the best decision based on the current situation. The current best optimization of gameplay, in that particular area, is boring and silly. So boring and silly that even though that optimization is completely obvious, pretty much no one consistently uses it.

The game is telling the player: This is the best way to handle this situation.

And the player is saying: This solution is so monotonous that even though it is obvious, I will ignore it.

That's not good.

Come on, item destruction is part of the game. Since we don't have acid-proof and lightning-proof blankets (and we can't grind for 100+ plain ones to protect equipment from any damage) item desctruction still affects later game... which is mostly cakewalk by the way and would be even easier and more predictable if such suggestions were implemented.

I'd rather suggest giving a failure chance to blankets/rings that halt fire and water destruction now.

What will come next? We'll ask for an item that prevents damage completely since HP can be restored by simply waiting in safe place?
If you don't want your items to be destroyed - yeah, you have to make a wise choice on what to take with you to stay alive and what to leave in safe place. That sounds a lot closer to reality then covering inventory with blankets.

I mean if the game took away half of all your items, you probably wouldn't notice. I don't mean junk/clutter. I mean if you lost half your holy water and half your PoEX and half your arrows and half your SoCR and whatnot, you probably wouldn't notice in an average playthrough. If you could choose, probably you could get rid of 90% of your inventory and not notice. Item destruction doesn't need to be strategic because it's a weak effect (except in a few specific areas, like the ToEF or crossing a river, where some strategy is obviously needed) and because ADOM showers you with so many extra good items, never mind the useless ones.

No, the solution is not to worry about item destruction, because it has such a minor effect on gameplay. Leaving most of your items behind is a riskier strategy than just carrying them and living with item destruction, because, aside from the boredom, it means you're taking the risk that you won't need those items at some point in the areas you're passing through. You're also taking the risk that your items left on the floor on the other level won't somehow be destroyed by some errant monster or forgetting to put on your thick gauntlets before you pick up your potions or whatever. If you are dropping the majority of your inventory at the start of every level, what it means is exactly what I said above: You don't need those items at all. You're just wasting your time by carrying them, and having them destroyed would not have any effect on how you play--because if it did, then you'd be carrying them.

@gr3ybird
I don't see it as a problem, so it wouldn't be on my priority list. If I were to implement it though, steps would be as follows:

1. Add acidproof and shockproof blankets to the game.
2. Nerf all blankets to protect only from environmental damage and not from concentrated spells/abilities. So, protection in Air Temple, ToEF, rain, swimming and from fire statue in D:48, no protection from breaths, bolts, ball spells etc. Traps would count as concentrated stream and blankets wouldn't help against them.
3. Increase difficulty of the Air Temple to make up for effectual lack of item destruction. Don't know how exactly, it's just a theory.
4. Rebalance detecting, avoiding and disarming traps to make up for the lack of protection from traps. This would be a huge work obviously.
5. Add a location with acidic environmental damage. Recently someone suggested a Black Dragon Island, that could work.
6. Wonder why fans are angry at Steam release being moved another year into the future. :D

That's how I would do this if I were ADOM's creator and someone forced me to do it. Since I'm not and I don't want to change blankets in the first place, I will just stop at providing the crazy scenario above.

Hah. Nice try.

Look, that's the reason there are food/corruption clocks (and there are monsters that spawn and will get you if you just sit around). *There is a real cost for restoring HP*. There is not a cost for item dumping. Early game, without healing, if you just sit around and try to regen, there is a real chance of starving. And you have to deal with the monsters that spawn. late game, if you just sit around in blue dragon caves trying to heal, you will get corrupted and fried by dragons.

This issue has already been addressed.