jruderman
commented
3 years ago Perhaps the ghost timer should reset every time you reduce your 'best distance' back toward the yendor orb (while holding its key).
Open pengvado opened 3 years ago
jruderman
commented
3 years ago Perhaps the ghost timer should reset every time you reduce your 'best distance' back toward the yendor orb (while holding its key).
There is one game-mechanic (the Yendor Quest) which incentivizes exactly retracing your steps for 100 steps, otherwise you'll never find the same Orb again.
There is another game-mechanic (the timer ghosts) which says that if you haven't explored any new territory for 80 turns, the game assumes you're stuck and sends lots of ghosts to force a proper game-over rather than waiting for stuck players to just quit.
Combining these two, if you're too good at exactly-retracing your steps, then you count as not-exploring during the second phase of the Yendor Quest, so the ghosts kill you even though you were making great progress on the quest.
I triggered this by accident when my Yendor Quest took me through the Overgrown Woods. In that land, an exact-retrace is just the natural thing to do, and straying even 1 tile away from the return path would have required cutting down more trees.