I beat it unspoiled and no save scumming. It took a few years of playing on and off. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember how I solved everything. I do remember doing some stupid stuff.
I remember going off into a dungeon without buying food, running around starving and finding a kobold to kill and eat. Then dying of sickness.
I rarely ever did the carpenter quest, as I didn't realize he could be healed and I could get the healing skill. So I always did the druid quest.
It took me a long time to understand cursed and doomed. I always wore the black torc and for awhile I thought the crown of science was the best item in the game.
After I figured out how important potions of insight were, I started to understand the effects of cursed and doom, and I started to narrow down what caused it.
I was actually in the habit of eating any corpse that I had not eaten before just so I could see what they did or didn't do.
I did figure out that spider corpse gave poison resist. When I encountered bees I figured they would do the same, but they don't and I lost a few characters that way before realizing it.
I did a ton of experimenting with eating corpses.
It actually took me awhile to figure out what the ring of weakness was doing, since I was playing an wizard running atlas' strength non-stop. I played for about an hour before noticing my str was at 2.
I never knew you could pre-crown or post-crown until after I beat the game.
I didn't even realize there was an ultra ending.
I didn't grow herbs, I just picked every patch I saw.
I couldn't figure out what rooms of very rich flavor did.
Death rays were really not much of an issue, since I was in the habit of wearing the ancient mummy wrap and the ankh.
The first thing I did after talking to the oracle for the first time was kill her to see if she had anything cool. I don't remember if I killed her first try, but when she dropped a corpse I ate.
The first time I found bees wax I stuck it in my ears trying to figure out what it did and ran around deaf for awhile, before realizing all I had to do was clean my ears out.
With the mud in the face rooms, I was trying to figure out how to cure my blindness, without even realizing what caused it. Then I went back to message log and saw I had mud in my face.
I died over and over and over to the corruption poison hands. I never realized thick gauntlets would stop it, so I would save any corruption removal just in case I got it.
I used traps of corruption and the lives of many characters to figure out all the different corruptions.
All in all I think the biggest mile stone was overcoming curse and doomed. When you don't understand how these two things work they do a lot of damage. It is not really until I started to understand what caused doom and how to remove it that I started to get ahead in the game.
It was just a lot of trial and error and stopping to take time to read things over. I got in the habit of just stopping and taking a survey of my inventory and saying is there anything here I can use to help me out of this situation. When I got really pressed I started looking over the manual for clues and talking to NPCs. Playing that way, you don't really see each character as a potential win, all you really want to do is learn something new and get a bit further.
I loved playing the game unspoiled, but after I beat it for the fist time, I allowed myself to get online and read up on it.
AKA: Jbc
1st win no spoiler & no cheating version 1.1.1
Favorite Race Class Combo: Darkling Farmer