CoQ’s main quest inevitably forces you to delve into Golgotha (ancient sewers or something like that) to retrieve a broken robot. Black slimes dwell there and they will likely afflict you with “stiff legs”. And then after some time your movement speed will start decreasing while your armor will increase.
That kinda sucks. Ironshank maxes out at -80 movement speed penalty - 5 times lower than the default movement speed! Armor bonus is nice but not being able to run away from overwhelming threats is WAY too big of a penalty.
So, after my character contracted the disease, I tried talking to all sorts of NPCs in hope that some will provide a clue. None did. No one at all even mention it. It got on my nerves so I checked the wiki. Aaand there’s a book named “Corpus Choliys” that one NPC sells that contains instructions for curing diseases.
….How on Earth should a first-time player know this?.. How do you figure this shit out without looking up a solution? Whatever! I know what to do now! I bought the book and read the page dedicated to Ironshank.
Once the disease is fully blown and the patient begins to lose mobility, gel (made from desalinated amoeba slime) is the only effective treatment I’ve discovered. The patient should be administered a draught composed of one dram of gel and one dram of wine[1] every day until the leg joints regain their full range of motion.
[1] The game randomly chooses what liquid you need to use. I got the rarest and most expensive one :)
“Gel made from desalinated amoeba slime.” Wh- what? I know about amoeba slimes of course, I fought dozens of them at this point, but what does “desalinated” mean in this game? I’ve never seen a single mention of this in any dialogue or items’ description. Not knowing what to do again I looked it up online.
When a desalination pellet is applied to a container of liquid, or thrown into a pool of liquid on the ground, it removes up to 200 drams of salt, leaving behind the remaining liquid.
Interesting. So the game has this item. And one of the NPCs I’ve met already have these at sale! So, it is my fault in the end? It was me who wasn’t paying attention?
No. The mentioned NPC did NOT have desalination pellets on sale. Bottles, liquids and some unidentified artifacts - but nothing with ‘pellet’ in their name.
I went to Six Days Stilt to see another trader who should sell it. No luck again. Frustrated, I checked the subreddit. And, well…
Bottles, liquids and some unidentified artifacts - but nothing with ‘pellet’ in their name.
There were indeed these pellets on sale. It’s just that the game hid them from me. To make sure I have no hint whatsoever on how to apply the instruction the game so fiendishly hidden away.
Maybe I should read on the ascension kit next while I’m at it hm?
tal@lemmy.today 20 hours ago
If you’re playing a non-Esper mutant and get the physical mutation Regeneration to level 5 prior to Golgotha, you can more-or-less ignore disease.
wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/Regeneration
I normally go for Regeneration just because (a) it’s so much of a pain in the butt to deal with fungal infections, and just at level 1, the mutation makes it mathematically extremely unlikely for incubation to complete and (b) gamma moths can inflict mutating and at level 5 or above, Regeneration has a reasonable chance of curing it before it completes incubation. Level 9 and it becomes very unlikely, though that’s a lot of points to spend.
Level 5 Regeneration has a 2% chance of curing a major debuff per turn. Mutating has a short incubation period, 100 turns. So your chance of incubation succeeding at level 5 is 0.98¹⁰⁰, or about 13.3%.
At Level 9, it has a 4% chance per turn. So the chance of completion of incubation of mutating goes down to ~1.7%. And there’s a small chance that mutating will have a beneficial effect even if it completes.
There are a few other ways of dealing with mutating, like becoming friendly with the insects faction to keep gamma moths onside or building a character that can stay out-of-phase, and I imagine a character with a high DV might also work.
Wine isn’t the rarest and most expensive liquid. It is more expensive than water, four times by volume. You can easily get it at the Six Day Stilt.
Cloning draught is the most expensive liquid, 1250 times by volume. Once you have one dram of it and a gyrocopter backpack (which can contain 128 drams of it), a late game strategy — tedious though effective — is to farm metamorphic polygel. Various merchants, especially Tillifergaewicz at Yd Freehold, have a (small) chance to stock polygel. Polygel can be used to duplicate any item in the game. Cloning draught can duplicate any character in the game, including Tillifergaewicz, effectively increasing the chance of polygel being available when you visit Yd Freehold after a restock. Once you have a metamorphic polygel, you can duplicate a container and all of the liquid it contains, such as a gyrocopter backpack and all of the liquid in it. If you have two containers partially full of liquid, you can pour all of one container into another (well, except for neutron flux, which requires special handling).
catfeeder@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
It is the most expensive liquid that might be included in the recipe for curing Ironshank. I don’t know if it’s the rarest among them but it isn’t (easily) found on the ground the way asphalt and some others are.