Caves of Qud

Important Information

• Before you do anything else, go into the Help section and read the following entries:
  • Ten Things You Should Do When You Start To Play
  • Skills and Powers
  • Weapons and Armor

• It's recommended to ignore the other entries, their subjects are mostly fairly self-evident. Combat is a good help entry to read after playing the game for a while, but won't be very easy to understand before playing the game.

Character Generation

• Try to get at least 18 strength/agility/toughness on basically every character you make.

• Mutants have the easier early game, if you take the right mutations.

• Not all mutations benefit as much from investing in them. Some reward high investment, some are more or less buy-and-forget.

• If you take a bunch of mental mutations and jack up your ego stat to make them all ridiculously supercharged, extradimensional psychic assassins will come to take your soul. They get pretty scary.

• True Kin can eventually get multiple wizardnetic enhancements but they have a generally rougher early game, so keep that in mind.

• Don't try randomized character builds as a beginner. You will suffer.

Joppa

• The most recommended first quests available in Joppa are those Argyve the inventor gives you. You can and probably should complete all the Joppa quests before moving on, though.

• You can steal from some of the chests in Joppa, if you make sure nobody can see what you're doing.

• There's something weird about the northwest pool in Joppa. Take a closer look.

• Visit the sultan shrine.

Skills

• Swift Reflexes, Spry, and Hurdle are defensive skills that every character benefits from.

• Wayfaring is also more or less in this category, as it helps you to avoid getting lost right into a lethal ambush.

Miscellaneous

• If you do something to piss off people you have good rep with e.g. you took something that belonged to them and now they're all hitting you, just... run away. Be somewhere else for a few days. They'll return to being friendly in a while.

• "You see a croc and stop moving." Unfortunately the croc is green and so is its background and so technically speaking you cannot in fact see the croc. How do you find it? Hold down the alt key. This also works for finding containers (except baskets for some reason), items, and sultan shrines. And it keeps track of immobile creature locations. Very useful.

• Daggers and trade goods tend to be the most encumbrance-efficient way to carry water around early on, armour the least. Make inventory management choices accordingly.

• The water ritual can let you buy skills, items, secrets, and even allies with your faction rep. Don't sleep on it.

• On that note, don't sleep on sources of secrets in general either, theyre very useful.

• If you get a disease, the mayor of Kyakuya has a book for sale that contains recipes for cures.

• Sources of limb regeneration are not exactly easy to find in Qud. Try to lose as few limbs as possible if you don't take the overpriced regeneration mutation or are True Kin. Theres a main quest location with guaranteed regeneration access but it's pretty dangerous.

• If you go one screen north of Joppa, the town graveyard will always spawn with a statue that reveals the location of a nearby historic site, randomly generated dungeons that give good exp and loot. This will often be a good place to go after finishing the quests from your starting town.

• If you start in a random village, the ruins of Joppa will still spawn on the tile where Joppa would normally exist, at the intersection of red rock and the northmost rustwell. The ruins will have an item that lets you start the main quest, as a backup if anything happens to the questgivers in your starting town. The graveyard one screen north will also still spawn with the statue revealing the early historic site.

• Historic sites always contain a chest at the bottom with some credit wedges, with harder sites containing more credits. If you're playing as a truekin, clearing historic sites will be a major source of new credit wedges. The rusted archway near Joppa also has some guaranteed credits and becoming nooks, making it a good place to explore early on.

• The mayor of Kyakukya (the mushroom town by the river) can teach you cooking if you water ritual with him

Secret Techniques

• You can turn off permadeath in the debug options if you have trouble getting out of the early game and want to see the rest of the world.

• You can set debug commands to keys in the Key Mapping menu for cheating yourself out of holes and growing back limbs and such.