Please for the love of our carpal tunnels add a way to separate more than one item per click!

Seriously. 500 clicks to separate 500 lockpicks from a humongous pile, so you can fisk them for maximal effect at a lutefisk altar is physically painful.

Make shift+alt or ctrl+alt separate 100 at a time, better yet, make one of them separate 10, and the other 100.

 

I've done it with darts too... not just lockpicks.

 

Not sure if its possible, but if your feeling particularly evil caping a stack of lockpicks at 50.
That means your either going to sacrifice that extra inventory space if you want to appease the lutefisk god or keep your total to 50 or less.

 

Any plentiful, cheap, stackable and mostly useless item makes an excellent item for fisking. Use mostly useless plastic ingots, make scads of plastic bolts at 6 and fisk 'em. Not sure how that would be abuse, really - just a clever eyebrowed hero getting the most out of his lutefisk cube. Even the lockpicks - the cooldown is 44 turns between pick generation. Takes quite a while to accumulate the amount of picks needed for optimum fisking. Abuse? Maybe in the same way that pudding farming is abuse.

Also, I can't imagine any real use for softballs other than fisking fodder. I mean, when you're a tender morsel of an adventurer staring down ravenous Blobbies and Potatoes they have their purpose, but they become obsolete fast.

 

It's not like the artefacts are worth much in most cases, though. The only reason people abuse lockpicks like that is because of some weird OCD-like thingy that tells them to do it.

And without lockpick abuse, having to get 500 of lutefisk for a tithe will make most such players want to kill you (though they can always take Big Game Hunter instead and just skol the ground meat).

 

For throwing based builds softballs are good rank and file killers. Also they can be crafted into bolas, which are quite useful with their 5 turn lockdown debuff.

 

That. And if you have some melee power bonuses, they can be used to get rid of those annoying debuffing casters you encounter in monster zoos.
There's no need to use your rarer weapons if your melee power gives you +30 damage or so, especially with softballs only having one type of damage (which means it's difficult for caster monsters to resist even half of it).

 

A fixed number other than one would not be good. Picking up one has to be allowed or else it becomes impossible. If an additional modifier key did 10, then that'd be OK, but ideally, it would prompt you for a number that you just type in.

 

Aegho, you have blown my mind. I'm trying to figure out how you end up in a situation where you "need" to click 500 times to separate out 500 lockpicks for fisking. Even assuming the fisk rewards are worth it, the only way you'd need to click 500 times is if you had over 1,000 lockpicks in your inventory. (If you disagree, see bullet point #1, below)

To get to 1,000 picks you'd need to activate the skill 250 times (much more than that actually, since you'd be using picks along the way as you open doors). With a 44-turn cooldown, that's 11,000 turns to create those picks. It seems unlikely that you've gone 5,000+ turns without seeing a lutefisk statue. At worst, they show up at least every couple of floors, so that's maybe as rarely as once every 3,000 turns if you backtrack a lot.

So one of five things is happening:

1. Over-clicking very inefficiently. Clicking 500 times instead of 27 times on a pile of 527 picks. D'oh! You'd be better off clicking 27 times and setting that small pile down on the floor, then picking up and fisking the large pile you removed them from.
2. Being very inattentive about your lockpick inventory totals as you pass by each individual fisk statue. Which seems unlikely since the other half of the problem would be a very attentive clicking of the lockpick skill every 45th turn. Once you hit 500 fiskables, you might as well dump them in the next statue you find.
3. Choosing not to fisk until the last floor of the dungeon, hoping for something like a Crownstar Addendum to come up as the item.
4. Using modded files that alter the number of picks generated to some much higher than normal number. If you're doing this, why not just mod it further so that each use creates exactly 500 lockpicks. Then whenever you find a lutefisk shrine, you set down the picks you're holding, activate the skill, and dump the whole pile in the statue at once.
5. Exaggerating the situation to make a point, and failing to notice that the exaggerated situation is unlikely to ever occur.

If there's some other possibility I'm not considering, please point it out to me. These were all that I could think of.

Of those 5 possibilities, only #3 seems like something that could or should be fixed by alterations to the game code/functionality. #1 and #2 are user-error, essentially. #4 is a form of cheating, more or less, and certainly not something the game should be altered to make easier. (And like I said, if you're using a modded lockpick skill this is something you could fix yourself). #5 is at best a hypothetical exploration of design-philosophy, a theoretical issue that shouldn't come up in normal play (see above and below).

As to #3, I have only anecdotal evidence, but I suspect it's not worth the hording or the clicking. It takes a pretty exceptional item to be worth replacing what you've already got by the deep levels, since by then you'll have had the cream of the crop to choose from and been able to discard anything that's not amazing. I can't say that I've ever dumped 500 fisk into a statue on floor 14 or 15, but I know that it was already seeming to not be worth the effort by floor 7 the last time I did so there.

I guess I could see the point of holding on to 500 picks (or ground meat, or whatever) for the express use of trying to get Crownstar when you get down there, but I don't think the odds are good in the beta (and crownstars too numerous to care about in 1.0.10), and again it seems like some degree of user-error a la 1 or 2 must be going on as well.

Changing lockpicks won't fix the issue, but then I don't particularly think the issue needs fixing. Various builds can stock up huge numbers of picks, grated meat and cheese, bolts, throwing implements, etc. With the right crafting tools, or the patience to raid all the vending machines in the late game, anyone who wants to "abuse" the lutefisk statues will have all the fuel they need to do so - and isn't that the point of the lutefisk god anyway? It's not like a character who abuses lutefisk is significantly more powerful than one who doesn't.

In the end, the lutefisk god is a flavorful, amusing thing that isn't really a major component of winning strategy. It's there to make you giggle or gawk the first couple times you encounter it, and every once in a blue moon barf up something mildly interesting. And that's just fine. Most of us complain that he generates sub-standard rewards, but as I think about it, if he gave out the really good stuff that would have unpleasant ripple effects on optimal play. I don't ever want to feel like I 'must' put the maximum amount of fisk in every single statue to keep up with the power curve. No need to shake it up. Best let sleeping 'fisk lye.

 

That was exceptionally clever.

 

What I don't understand is why people don't just keep the cube open all the time, and leave their fisk in it until it hits 500, then pull the stack out of the cube and start another stack.

 

If he's specifically using lockpicks for fisking, it could be a desire to retain maximum flexibility. Makes sense not to automatically throw all the lockpicks in the cube as soon as they're made, at least not when you've only got a few dozen of them. If you get disracted and forget to activate the skill for a while, you can run through picks pretty fast.

But yeah, I usually keep the cube open in the corner of the screen and just throw things in it as I need space.

That he's talking about separating out the picks and not the fisk is what makes me suspect he's modded the lucky pick skill to produce at least several hundred at a time. I seem to recall there was someone around here somewhere who posted that they changed it to do something like 1,000 picks with around a 10,000-turn countdown, but I'm afraid I couldn't point you to the specific thread.

Thank you. I will admit I was pleased with myself for that one.

 

The biggest stack of lockpicks I've ever had was over 2,600 of them. I've had situations where I've had over 1500 lockpicks, and two lutefisk statues on the same floor, after completing the 500(I do fisk other stuff) for the first one, I had to do 500 clicks for the second one. This by dungeon level 5 or so.

I'm kinda OCD about getting everything on every floor... even if it means droppiles, backtracking, etc. Though when faxpax's tiki room was broken and I could amass unlimited wealth from one, I didn't bother as much. It means I spend much more turns per floor than the average, hence the nutty pile of picks.

 

Wow. Don't know what to say. Not that that ever stops me...

I feel like I'm way too OCD about getting all the loot, grating before I fisk, turning plastic into bolts for the cube, and what not... but I know I've only ever once made more than 500 fisk in a single floor, and it was memorable in a "I don't think I'll ever go to that trouble again" way when the 'fisk god gave me an enchanted crude iron weapon for my efforts. You, sir, must have the constitution of a muscle-diggle.

As Fax suggested, whenever you note your cube has 490+ fisk in it, you might consider pulling them out and making a separate pile for them. It'll be less clicking in the long-run, and I fear you'll miss those wrists when they are gone.

 

And it'll give you pretty much nothing - there are many other ways to get helluva items to skol, and by concentrating on lockpicks instead of either an alternate solution to the whole "infinite lutefisk if you have patience" thing or making it easier to divide large stacks, you will just waste time.

But for as long as your solution gives me one free slot to use for my crafting OCDness, I'm not complaining.

 

I agree with Kazeto. That doesn't solve the issue. There are other click-spam item creation skills in mods, and there are other even more tedious ways to generate lutefisk, like grinding every cheese you find. Let the click-spammers do their thing, and if they get carpel tunnel syndrome in the process that's their own problem. As Bergstrom pointed out, there is no reason why someone should have to click a stack 500 times, and clicking Lucky Pick every once in a while isn't any worse than clicking for any other reason on a turn.

I'm more in favor of lowering the Lutefisk God Statue requirements by a factor of 5. 500 is a really high number. The work involved in generating that much lutefisk is not worth the items you get in most cases. Personally, I never use the things any more. 100 would be a much more attractive number for a maximum quality artifact.

 

Really I only bother if I have archeology.