Shameful question

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I'm playing ADOM again after a period of inactivity... and I have been struggling for quite some time to do something that used to be very simple: picking part of a stack (e.g. one out of a stack of 2 large rations in Munxip's shop).

In previous versions, pressing "," resulted in a prompt asking how many items to take, but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I have gone through the keybindings but there don't seem to be other alternative commands that will help.

I've probably drunk some potion of confusion because it can't be that hard. I've finished the damn game a bunch of times and now I can't pick up an item, it can't get much more ludicrous than that! But... how do I do it?h

[mitres]

If you've tried a ring of the clear mind, and still no go, you can use shift+ letter to pick part of the stack.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Thanks! That does work when there is more stuff in the ground apart from the stack, and it will be very useful. But I still don't see a way to do it if the stack is the only thing there is. In that situation, pressing ",", "p" or even "Ctrl+p" (which seem to be the only pick up commands covered in the keybindings) seems to pick up the whole stack directly.

[Grond]

To pick up part of a single stack:

1. Press d to enter the drop menu.
2. Use the arrow keys or >/< to move to the pick up screen.
3. Select the single stack with A.

[Soirana]

To pick up part of a single stack:

1. Press d to enter the drop menu.
2. Use the arrow keys or >/< to move to the pick up screen.
3. Select the single stack with A.

And if backpack is empty?..

[Grond]

And if backpack is empty?..

AFAIK you are out of luck in this case.

Silly solutions:

Unequip a worn item so that you can access the drop menu. Of course, this does not cover the case in which you also do not have any equipped items. In that case, you will have to decrease carrying capacity to the point at which picking up the entire stack would make you extremely overburdened (thus giving you a prompt when you try to pick it up). Hopefully the strength penalty from starvation will be enough!

[Al-Khwarizmi]

OK, at least I see it wasn't my fault, this is quite unintuitive now... and the problem with empty backpack is not nice. What do I do the next time I have a character with St drained to 1, who is only wearing an equipped cursed girdle of carrying, unarmed and with an empty backpack, but grand master of polearms, standing on a stack of two ultra-heavy eternium halberds of devastation, stuck between two tough monsters? He may die to this!

[ghostjghost]

LOL, and this happens how often.

I do think it should simply always ask you how many you want to pick up, same as how it always asks you how many you want to drop. Perhaps an RFE is needed? Though I don't think it is quite that serious an issue.

[Jeremiah]

OK, at least I see it wasn't my fault, this is quite unintuitive now... and the problem with empty backpack is not nice. What do I do the next time I have a character with St drained to 1, who is only wearing an equipped cursed girdle of carrying, unarmed and with an empty backpack, but grand master of polearms, standing on a stack of two ultra-heavy eternium halberds of devastation, stuck between two tough monsters? He may die to this!

shift-t 7 _

[Al-Khwarizmi]

LOL, and this happens how often.

All the time, there are many such situations! What when you are on top of an ice bridge in the piranha lake, which became an ice island because a fire vortex exploded? You can cast frost bolt, but you are mute from eating a harpy corpse. You need to wait out the muteness, but you are starving, a few turns away from death. Your pack is empty, you only wear cursed gear (from trying to pray for food) and on the ground, two large rations of which you can only take one without breaking the bridge.

Now seriously, indeed such situations should be very marginal (I doubt I've ever encountered one) but it's a pity that in such a flexible and deep game as ADOM there is an action that makes sense in the game world and just cannot be done. But in practical terms, I'm more worried about the difficulty of the case with backpack: even if there is a way to pick a part of a stack by using the drop menu as Grond said, using a drop command for taking stuff is quite counterintuitive and I doubt newbies will find it out... maybe an "advanced get" command could be implemented so that the command is still streamlined for the average user, but people who really want to get part of a stack can find help in the manual.