40d:Adventurer mode

In adventurer mode, you pick a race (elf, dwarf or human) and start out in either a town of your race or in a previous fortress you played on. You can receive quests, venture into the wilderness to find caves, abandoned towers and other villages. You can even visit your old fortresses and find whatever riches were left to be guarded by the creatures that fated your fortress.

Your first adventure

Picking a race

When it comes to picking a race, there is difference in skills. Dwarves cannot wear human sized armor, and are somewhat limited in the weapons they can wield due to their size. Elves have a slightly different set of skills. Humans are generally fairly well-balanced, and are the easiest to acquire quests from. Each race fares differently in combat; you may wish to look at the races' pages for the finer details.

Choosing skills

Basically, if you want to start with a weapon, you need to avoid having the most points spent in unarmored/wrestling. If you, for example, choose to start out with most points in swordsman, you will start out with a sword. When you have chosen your preferred set of skills, you can press Enter to embark.

Setting out

If you chose human, you will start out inside the Mayor's house. You will see the Mayor (purple) and probably several drunks. Press k and talk to the Mayor. Press 'services' for a quest. You can talk to the drunks and recruit them to your party for some additional combat aid. Be sure to read the Adventure Mode quick reference or use the help files for more information on the commands in Adventure mode.

Trading

In towns you can find merchants inside some buildings. Talk to them to trade with them. After buying an item, you must pick it up manually from somewhere in the shop.

Equipping your adventurer

After acquiring armor from one source or another, you'll most likely want to equip it. To do this, first make sure it is in your possession--not on the ground. You can then put it on, granted you don't already have too much on that equipment slot already. You can remove or drop inferior equipment as necessary.

Travelling the world

How-to

You can walk around the whole world tile by tile if you wish, but given the size of the world, you might want to consider using another method. Pressing T will let see a very zoomed out map of the surrounding area. Moving about on this map is much faster, as well as it heals your adventurer, keeps him from starving, dehydrating, or getting tired. To exit this screen and explore the area you've reached, press >.

Finding quest locations

After receiving a quest, you will be able to track its location using the Quest log. Initially it will just give you the location on the Travel map, though a lesser-known feature is its use in finding the cave entry (or other such target) once you're already in the local map. Bring up the quest log again, highlight the quest objective you're after, and zoom to it. It should then provide you with a local map of your current area, complete with a 3x3 box of flashing squares. This box indicates the general location of the cave's mouth. You'll still have to do some searching, but at least it's narrowed down for you. You can bring up this map at any time that you're in the local area of a quest objective.

Visiting abandoned fortresses

If you start an adventure in a world with one or more abandoned fortresses, you can take your adventurer to see the sites of your previous endeavours. When you find one of your old fortresses, you will find that everything is a mess. Items are scattered about, things are smashed up and there are probably new hostile inhabitants that you will need to fend off. Visiting your old fortresses might prove to be rewarding, since you can find armor and weapons you made (if you made any). The best thing to be found in your fortress would probably be any left behind artifact weapon or armor. This is also probably the best (and only?) way to get artifact-quality weapons and armor.

Also remember to check out any engravings you made while in fortress mode. When checking out engravings in adventure mode, they reveal alot more specific information about the event that is engraved.

Combat

Fighting is extremely detailed in adventure mode! This adds alot of fun in the battle, since there are so many ways to injure your opponents/victims.

Ranged

If you have a bow or crossbow, you can shoot arrows or bolts at enemies. You can also throw anything you can carry at enemies. Ranged attacks are highly efficient when you hit. To fire your bow or crossbow, press f, and move the marker to the enemy you wish to fire upon, and press Enter. Same with throwing stuff, only press t and choose wich item to throw, then choose the victim. Note: Throwing is slightly bugged, but in a good and fun way. You can throw captured flies, socks and even vomit if you want, with lethal effects. (Water piercing lungs, flies piercing hearts etc..)

Close combat

To fight a creature by hitting it, you just need to walk towards the creature. Alternatively, you can press A and choose your target. After you've pressed A and are given the list of targets to attack, you can use Enter to choose between a normal attack and wrestling before selecting which opponent you wish to target. A normal attack will make the adventurer hit the target with whatever weapon he holds. If he is holding no weapon, he will bash with his shield. If he has neither a weapon nor a shield, he will either punch his target or grab a random appendage. In wrestling, you must spend a few rounds locking the target's limbs to be able to break and splinter them (good times). Alternately, you could try gouging, pinching, or strangling them instead.

Wounds

Your adventurer will get wounded by enemies or falling (jumping) off cliffs. The best (and only?) way to heal, is to press T, and travel atleast 1 tile in any direction. Your adventurer will be fully healed then. Read more about wounds HERE.

Tips for survival

Dying is easy in adventurer mode, especially if you've just started out. Following these simple tips will increase your chance to survive, and reach those nice stats and legendary skills! These tips are for the faint of heart only. If you like the challenges of the game, feel free to do the opposite of what these tips say.

Living Shields

If you recruit some members to your party, you will not only gain extra damage-output. You will also have someone else to take the damage dealt towards YOU!
When you first start out, the easiest human shields to recruit are the drunks! They are found in human towns (and other places?) inside the same building as the mayor. They will gladly come with you and block some blows for you. Drunks will mostly attempt to do low-skill wrestling and (mostly) damage-less punches. Don't expect them to last long when you meet that Giant you are supposed to kill.
When you have finished some quests, you will have a better reputation(?), and can then recruit other adventurers with some actual skills. These could be axemen, swordmen and others.
The better your reputation(?) is, the bigger a party can you assemble. Whenever you meet a nasty creep/"boss", just get behind the other team-members, and they will take on the first blows.

Avoid the impossible

Some things are harder than others. Descide for yourself is this is due to unbalancing of the game, realism or simply to add to the variety of challenges.

Giant Cave Spiders

Unless you are a legendary or better (ok its not possible to go beyond legendary..) bow-/crossbowman, you should at all costs AVOID giant cave spiders!! They shoot a web at you, making you immobilized while they rip your limbs off one by one. Then when you finally break free from the web, and can attack again, you've probably lost your arms while lying on the floor and the spider is about to throw by your head up in the roof. Leave these for the living shields to deal with while you slip out the other way.

Arrows

Don't take on quests where you need to kill elite bow-/crossbowmen! Generally, avoid flying arrows! Why? Because bow/crossbowmen have the tendency to see farther than you can. They are therefore able to fire at you from beyond your sight, making it hard to see where the arrow(s) are coming from. You may therefor end up chasing the shooter in the wrong direction, giving the shooter even MORE time to turn you into a pin-coushin. Of course, this is only the case if you manage to survive the first 3-4 arrows, because arrows are BAD for anyone but the shooters health.

Training yourself

Gaining stats (strength, agility, toughness) helps alot when fighting. How to best train yourself?

Throwing

While walking around on a creature-less place, you should occasionally press g to check for rocks. Rocks are practically free ammo. When you find a tile with rocks, pick up alot of them (there are infinte rocks), and start throwing them. You can simply throw them at the tile you are standing at. Every throw will gain you 30 points toward the skill "Throwing", and will after a while increase your stats (Strength, agility, toughness). You will need to throw 600 rocks to reach legendary Thrower (starting with no skill).
Throwing rocks are also a cheap way to injure enemies before they reach you if you are a melee-fighter.
You can also throw other stuff you can find, like flies, beetles, worms, and even vomit. If you have a tendency to chop off enemy-limbs, you can even throw these limbs. Iron men are fun, because they leave behind a nice statue for your taking. This statue can also be thrown. Arrows seem to be deadlier than other thrown items.

Bow/Crossbow-skill

This skill-training works the same way as throwing. You gain skill per shot, not per hit. This is a more expensive skill to train because you need to buy (or find) arrows/bolts, but is also a much more deadly skill. Shooting arrows at enemies is fun, because it is very efficient. Sadly, that also goes for enemy bow/crossbowmen.

Wrestling

Since melee-weaponskills are hard train because not every hit gives points towards the skill, why not train your wrestling? When you are alone with a unconcious creep, why not break some limbs before finishing it off? Creeps are always going to try to break your arms and legs, so having a bit of skill in wrestling will help break those locks alot. Also training wrestling is a quicker way to better stats (strength, agility, toughness) because wrestling is skill where you gain points per move instead per "hit".

Swimming

needs rewrite by someone who has tested this
Swimming around in ponds and whatnots should gain you a nice statboost. Be sure to avoid drowning.

Ambushing

Sneaking around, training your ability to not be seen will also boost your stats. Could be helpful for dealing with creatures as well.

Summary

-Recruit some living spearcatchers
-Avoid flying arrows
-Throw rocks/statues/socks/bugs at enemies that still haven't reached you
-Train your stats before taking on your first quest-monster