My thoughts concerning tracking in ADOM were suddenly reawakened by an RFE to upgrade GCBs to crash doors. This is a painful topic for me since the debuff for invisibility which crippled its usefulness in an incredible fashion.

Basically, I have always thought that the degree of tracking for monsters in ADOM is insane. Aside from rats, orcs and goblins, there is practically no way to run from a hostile monster "permanently". Even if you exit its visual range, it will track your steps with a good level of precision and will eventually find you. My question is - does it have to be this precise for 90% of monsters?

I will list several situations which may or may not be relevant for the topic.

1) You see a hostile tough monster, quaff a potion of invis and run away only to find it matching you exactly step by step. I am sure many of you have noticed this effect.

2) You will lock a monster in a distant room, go to the other half of the level to continue herb farming, reading books and so. Eventually some other monster opens the room and your opponent will find you again (locking at you cats).

3) You enter a room, close the doors and start smithing/reading a complex book. Unless you have also locked a door, there is a 90% chance of someone barging in. This starts to get absurd when you lock the door, commence a long session of smithing and open the door to see a corridor absolutely packed with all monsters who have no reason to go into your room because they don't even know you are on the level (for example, spawned during smithing). For some reason, everyone gravitates towards you. If you quickly kill all of them and run around the level, you will find it devoid of any life. Which can only mean that no hostile monster stays in its place if the PC is somewhere.

However, simple observation will show you:

4) Neutral and friendly monsters can easily stay in one big room for long periods of time without any compulsion to find the PC. Of course they don't care about, so this is reasonable.

Basically, my main qualm is the following:
Why hostile monsters that have no knowledge of the PC existence try to find him/her nevertheless?

The related questions are:
How fair are tracking abilities of most monsters? Why are non-visual senses (hearing, smell, magical powers) so strong that everyone gravitates towards the PC even before any visual contact?
How would you feel about an RFE about cutting all these non-visual senses outright for the majority of monsters? A change to implement such functionality is to make all monsters "don't care about the PC" till the very moment they are able to identify them visually.
How non-visual senses are able to provide a legitimate target for a monster? A dungeon is populated by a whole bunch of critters. However, (assuming a monster can hear a target from far away), how do most monsters know that this is actually a PC who they are hostile to as opposed to something else?
How would you feel about an RFE to decrease these powers of tracking for most monsters?