Last Level Itemization Selection might be broken.

I am not sure where to start other than suggesting you peruse The screenshot:



This is just 2 floors worth, NTTG, After selling multiple of each to the vendor before I realized there was nothing left in the vendors that I wanted. If I wanted to fully comb over levels 11 and 12 there would have been many more.

1-2 of each are artifact/quest type rewards, but the rest is just plain old one scattered through the dungeon.
Since I was staff speciality I didn't mind, but it made me wonder if more staves were dropping because I had staff speciality. I rarely saw a sword, mace, or axe... nothing compared to this.

 

This has been addressed in the beta.

 

You sure about that? In RC2, anyway, there were a heck of a lot of level 10 items, but only one item of level 11 and nothing new beyond that except caltrops and caltrop eruptors. Which means that on levels 12 and deeper, you're gonna see the same half dozen items again and again.

Mind you 1.0.10 (and/or the DLC) is probably still better than it was in 1.0.9, since you're actually seeing items of levels 11-15, but it's not a huge improvement.

We should probably ask Nicholas or David to tweak some of the many new level 10 items in the DLC so that they have quality ratings of 11 to 15.

 

Not to be an ass, but would it not make more sense to add a digit to the item levels so there can be a full byte of levels? 0-255 as item levels then divided by 8 or 10 to have the final result without rounding. This is the way such things are handled by many *Band games so they can manage so many items properly. I just find that 1-20 is too limited a range for the sheer number of items we have in a fully decked out and modded well past sanity game.

When you roll a one byte number on level one for an item it should have a range of accepted numbers native to that level. Rolls outside that should roll several times more to determine if that roll is discarded or not. If not, by all means let the out of depth item spawn.

All this may be my lack of understanding plus my obvious need to piss in the wind for no reason though. Your call.

 

I had the same experience in my RC10 run. I didn't even see several high lvl items, but tons of others. For example I didn't see a single Clockwork Rail Launcher, but tons and tons of Bolt Eruptors, just a few Eldritch Crossbows, and a single Bow of the Red Archer(from an evil chest). Also no Clockwork Ravagers, no Clockwork Drill Lances, no Clockwork Chainswords, no Clockwork Thunderclaps, no Crownstar Addendums, etc. I only saw Clockwork Chainaxe in a shop. Tons and tons and tons of Flashy Staff of Godewijn, Mask of the Golden God, and Deathly Skull of Death.

 

Not all items are equally common--many lategame items, including all of the clockwork weapons and most other level 10+ weapons as well, are flagged as artifact-quality items. This means 1) if they're artifact-enchanted (from Krong, uber/evilchests, etc.) they get an extra bonus or two compared to run of the mill items, and 2) on the whole they're noticeably rarer. Staves of Godewijn and Bolt Eruptors are found everywhere because they're the highest level non-artifact weapons in the game, so for floors 11-15 the level generator looks for common level-appropriate weapons and those are the closest it can find.

The Deathly Skull and Mask of the Golden God are artifacts but also get spammed pretty liberally. I'm not entirely sure why the level generator seems more willing to put down artifact-quality helmets, though. It might have something to do with the fact that these two items are just higher level period than most weapons and so the game has to sort of default to them when it's trying to place really high level items, but Savvarius is the same level as them and while it's relatively common compared to other artifact weapons it doesn't really get spammed the same way the artifact helmets do.

 

You can install 20 or so mods that add high level items. Then you will have much less of the same, but less chance of getting a specific item too. I think it is a fair trade-off.

 

The RNG is pretty streaky, and I think that accounts for a large portion of what you're reporting, at least in regards to the helmets. Exactly which items the game decides to spam varies from computer to computer, and sometimes from run to run. Not that I'm saying that artifact="1" isn't a factor, as clearly it and special="1" and probably craftoutput="1" all reduce the spawn rates of things. It's just that which specific items end up spawning has streaks, and varies from user to user.

For example: I've been down in the deep floors several times in 1.0.10 and the Beta of 1.0.11, yet I very rarely find a Deathly Skull. You've apparently seen enough to consider them "spam".

Back in the 1.0.9 days when only level 10 items would spawn on floors 10-15, I was getting nothing but Lirpas. When I complained about it here, some people had the same experience, but not everyone. There was a guy who got nothing but Doul's Possible Swords, which, IIRC, is an artifact. I'd only ever had like 2 of them at that point, but several dozen Lirpas (quite possibly hundreds of them).

Now look at this craziness:

That's three Sesame Staffs spawned adjacent to each other, plus one in my inventory which was the only loot in the room before it. They're just random weapon-spawn loot triggers, from a main-game room. The staff is a level 12 item (in the version of ID I was testing at the time), but this is a Mysterious Portal level, so it should (unless I'm really mistaken) be drawing items from the entire database not just one specific quality/level rating. The odds against that same item spawning four times in a row are pretty huge... but this sort of thing happens. All the time.

All hail Krong! All hail the RNG!

 

I'm kind of lumping Deathly Masks/Golden Masks together. In vanilla games I do seem to see about twice as many gold masks, but I've always chalked that part up to streakiness. I have a harder time explaining away the general prevalance of whatever the highest level non-artifact weapon is, as well as the tendency for uniquely high level artifact helmets to spawn quite frequently. It's a pattern that persists across multiple playthroughs (and plenty of playtests where I just debug my way down to floor 13 or so), with different mods.

(I don't know if armor other than helmets would exhibit the same spawning patterns; I've never been in a position where the highest level artifact armors were non-helmets.)

Mysterious Portals seem 1) biased towards lategame loot and 2) ridiculously streaky even compared to the standard dungeon generator. In vanilla I've had a single portal drop 4 Staves of Godewijn. In playtesting More Dred I found a portal with 4 Van Allen Belts (this was at a point when the Van Allen Belt was the single highest level non-artifact item in the mod.) They don't always do this, but it's a distinct possibility.

 

I think anyone who has beaten the game a dozen times or more has encountered at least six or eight times where the RNG went nuts for a while and things looked horribly broken. But it really means little or nothing. I have thought of ways to help randomize the loot drops, but lacking a knowledge of how the RNG for this game works, I cannot really help. If it simply rolls a number in a range, perhaps it should roll once for a big number, then hash it to a longer number and roll again for a small number of bytes to skip in the hash to start from and take a string of the right size as the final roll. But for all I know, something like this already happens.

Remember there is no such thing as a random number generator in reality. They are all psuedo-random. They usually are close enough for everything we do.

As many times as I have played the game, I actually think the RNG is reasonable most of the time. The oddities that persist may still be nothing more than my observation of the RNG. Things like a 45% disarm chance being failed ten times in a row are staggeringly common though, so at times I really do think the RNG is flawed.

 

If you take the base game and mod in a single level 12 common weapon, by the time you reach the bottom floors you will find shops selling literally nothing but that weapon. Similarly, in vanilla games level 15 shops often are 90% Crownstar Addendums because there is no other level-appropriate equipment at all. It is not the RNG. The loot generation algorithm starves itself to death on lower levels because there simply aren't enough items to choose from, and most of them are artifact-flagged so it avoids placing them.

 

Gabriel, while I 99% agree with you, I will point out that the Crownstar Addendum is also tagged as an artifact. So it's not _just_ the artifact rating that makes a particular item more or less common. As you acknowledged, _some_ artifacts get placed just as often as the non-artifacts. Likewise, special="1" _usually_ prevents an item from spawning on the dungeon floor, but not always. Maybe we need to bribe Nicholas into explaining to us exactly how the system spawns items.

 

The most obvious pattern is that the generator is a lot more willing to "skip over" level-appropriate artifact weapons and place lower-level nonartifact weapons instead. By comparison, it will avoid placing too many artifact armors, but if there are no other alternatives it will default to artifact armor instead of going back and placing a lower level nonartifact armor.

It just occurred to me that the default itemDB adheres to different syntax for designated weapon and armor equipment levels, with weapons having their equipment level defined in the <item> tag and armors having it defined in the <armour> tag. Perhaps this is the crux of why the level generator seems to treat them differently? It might be worth testing sometime; I can confirm that you can use <weapon level="x"> and it will show up with the correct level and be placed at the proper depth, although I haven't had time to test it out in detail to see if it changes the generator's behavior at all.