ADOM Guidebook


The Big Room

The Big Room is found on level six or seven of the CoC. It is indeed one big room with no walls. This means it is not possible to use corridors to restrict monster movement. If there are many monsters present they can always swarm the PC. Breeders and summoners are thus very dangerous on this level. If the PC does not have poison resistance this level is exceptionally dangerous since dark elven wizards and dark elven priestesses who summon poisonous spiders are guaranteed to appear sooner or later. Breeders can get completely out of control on this level. Even if they can't really hurt the PC, once a high enough number breed and *continue* to breed the PC can't kill them as fast as they are being generated. Being trapped like this will lead to starvation eventually. Remember that breeders can be sterilized by a scroll of vermin control or divine intervention.

Herbs are guaranteed in the Big Room which leads to the dilemma of whether to stay and harvest herbs or flee from the constant onslaught of monsters.

Petri Sihvola has recently (March 8th, 2002) discovered a way around this dilemma. His post from RGRA:

With a bit of planning and minimal amount of equipment, it's possible
to fight monster generation, to the point that no new monsters appear
on the level for the rest of the game, letting you harvest your herbs
in peace.

In order to achieve the desired effect, using this particular
solution, in this particular level, one needs...

* a breeder.

* 14 doors, forming an enclosed area of 8*5 or 7*6 squares, or 1-13
doors and a method of digging, enclosing an area of at least 40
squares total.

The first thing to do is to find a breeder and leave it somewhere,
until you have the necessary equipment. For those who like to do
things the alternative way, and are in a position to do so before
finding a naturally generated breeder from a nearby CoC level (or the
Big Room itself), find/create a corruption trap and lure a regular rat
over it... to generate a chaos rat... which is a breeder.

I'll provide two examples on how to proceed from here, depending on
the amount of doors you're planning to invest in this.

Example 1 (14 doors, no digging):

Choose a corner that would disturb your herb patterns the least, and
create the doors, like this:

#..........
#+++++++...
#......+...
#......+...
#......+...
#......+...
#......+...
#......+...
#......+...
###########

Now, get the breeder from wherever you left it, and lure it inside the
box. Close the doors, so that the breeder won't escape and wait
outside. Protect the doors from random passers-by and observe the
occasional popping/burping sounds.

Once the amount of breeders reaches 40, all monster generation in the
level stops. Start to wander further from the box and kill the
remaining monsters from the level.

Example 2 (1 door, some digging):

At first, it would seem that the big room has no walls to dig, but
upon further investigation this appears to not be the case. You can
dig one square left, one square up, three squares right and two
squares down, into the wall. This leaves the lower right corner as the
obvious choice to start digging, and the two-square wide corridor in
the right side allows for getting around the initial breeder without
needing a second exit. Enclose a 40-square area...

   ####
####..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
...#..#
..+#..#
###...#
#.....#
#######

...get the breeder inside and apply the same method as in the first
example.

If everything went well, you're now looking at a completely peaceful,
guaranteed herb level, which is guaranteed to be in a non-corrupting
zone.

Updated March 8th, 2002
© Copyright Andrew Williams 2000-2002