Xanadu: Sea of squares

What a miserable experience level 7 is. You've got endless repetitive terrain. You've got invisible, silent teleporters that give you little clue you've been teleported because they just warp you into more corridors that look exactly like the ones you just left. You've got inescapable monster pits that you can only get out of by using flying boots or teleportation items. You've got cursed enemies that inflict karma when you kill them. You've got invisible teleporters that drop you right into the inescapable monster pits. You've got a nasty, Amidar-style maze occupying a big slice of the map, which has dead-ends you can't escape from without using a teleporting item.

And when you find the dungeon, it's curiously abandoned!

 

Instead of monsters, you've got a maze of one-way passages and non-euclidean wrapping. Starvation is a legitimate threat here as you wander around in circles! Thankfully, I've got the non-euclidean wrapping figured out already, and I'm able to make a quasi-sensible map.

Wrapping left shifts you up one row, wrapping right shifts you down one row.

A few fire drakes guard a handful of rooms with minor treasures toward the end of the maze, but the real prize here is the third crown guarded by a Hindu god.

Kartikeya gave up and died so as not to insult Murasame. I think.

 

Crown #3 plus some assorted goodies

 

Few enemies means not much gold for healing, but I'm not too worried for now - I've got enough red potions for 16 full heals, plus the three elixirs.

If you've been following how I approach Xanadu, then you may be wondering - do I stand a chance against the Silver Dragon in level 9, who I assume guards the final crown? Could I possibly grab it, and with it learn the whereabouts of the Dragon Slayer while there are still monsters weaker than the Red Dragon himself to practice on?

Nope!

Xanadu: Anxious powergaming

I have a potential problem. Maybe. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I'd rather think about potential problems now and become overprepared for a non-issue than ignore potential problems and get screwed later.

Whenever you get a new spell, weapon, or armor, it is basically useless at first. Every usable item in the game has its own experience level, and when you get that new thing, you have zero experience with it and it's only going to provide a fraction of its potential damage or protection until you use it some.

As far as spells go, this doesn't concern me too much. The ultimate spell, Death, is nearly in my reach already, and if it sucks, I can just spam it on something tanky until it doesn't suck.

For weapons, this concerns me a little bit. The halberd I bought for level 5 was fine, but there are seven more incrementally powerful weapons to find. Future weapons might be more scaled to the level where I find them, and enemies in melee range hit back. What happens if, by the time I find that Dragon Slayer, there's nothing left to kill but the Red Dragon, and no weapon-enhancing pickups left to find? I've already cleared five stages and I don't know how many are left.

For armor, this concerns me a lot. The only way to train armor, apart from finding pickups in the dungeons, is by letting yourself get beat up. Which means finding enemies strong enough to do damage, but not strong enough to OHKO you. There's still six armor upgrades to find, and my experience with plate armor in level 5 involved multiple expensive trips to the healer before it started offering any real protection.

 

My solution - I'm going to use my level-warping items to scout ahead to the towers where the good stuff is, and use my invulnerability items to find them. Items don't expire as long as you're in battle mode, and as long as you don't kill all of the enemies in any given screen, battle mode doesn't end!

A test run - there's a Large Shield +3 in level 6

Better stuff lies in later towers, and the Black Onyxes reveal two things - that level 10 is as deep as Xanadu goes, and its tower is inaccessible. The one in level 9, though, will let me make out like a bandit.

But it also has boss rooms best avoided for now.

 

I map out the dungeon with the aid of my item, mainly Demon's Rings and Mantles (and I have only three of the later), then reload and clean house with strategic use of one of each.

This gets me:

• 1 luck-blade (fifth-best weapon)
• 2 Murasame blades (fourth-best weapon)
• 1 reflex armor (fifth-best armor)
• 1 ring mail+2 (fourth-best armor)
• Small shield +5 (sixth-best shield)
• 2 large shields +5 (fifth-best shield) 

I'm not sure how there can be so much more stuff left in the upgrade path when this is the penultimate tower, but I take what I've got back to level 6, and it's not too long before nothing there can hurt me head-on, and I'm doing enough damage with each hit to kill the toughest enemy three times over.

I need a few mattocks to get everywhere but I find some on the monsters here too.

After clearing level 6 and selling my extra loot, I have over $500,000 saved up, and more than half of it easily came from the gear in level 9 (I kept the best stuff for myself, obviously). That's enough to buy Death and all of the AOE spells in the scroll shop, another 154 keys (at which point I have 200 and the guild kicks me out), and still have $13,329 left over.

I can just stop worrying about money now, right? Right?

I make a backup save just in case.