Caves of Qud – Useful Tips for Golgotha

Golgotha Tips and Tricks

There’s a guaranteed Force Bracelet in Beth Lah; it’s the artifact Hindriarch Keh has available for trade. Remember you can use a recoiler even when enemies are around from within a Force Bracelet bubble, so with careful play you can get out before a situation becomes unsalvageable (like when you’ve “picked the wrong chute crab tunnel”).

You can cheese the Golgotha trip quite effectively with flight – break through the walls of the security door with a pickaxe, start flying, and descend down the shaft without moving, just pressing the “descend” key repeatedly. And remember there’s a guaranteed set of Mechanical Wings in the salt marsh!

Slog hurts and can stunlock you! Picking up the first skill in the Endurance tree, the Padded helmet mod, and/or Reactive Cranial Plating if you’re a True Kin helps if you’re planning on fighting him in melee. However, the better plan is to shoot him or avoid him entirely (or… befriend him! Use a love injector, snail-encrusted gear, or electric snail shell hats for mollusk reputation).

Really, the biggest tips for Qud survivability and limit-testing are “flight and Force Bracelets are your best friends and get you out of situations that would otherwise be completely lethal.”

Other than being one-shot or stunlocked (Galgalim Run Over spam, surprise Swarm Rack turret), I think the only situation that flight + Force Bracelet isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for is Engulfing – you need teleportation or phasing for that. (Shade Oil tonic and yondercane are amazing emergency consumables!)

General Tips (Early Game)

• Getting your hands on a gun – any gun – will greatly increase your chance of survival. It lets you soften up enemies from a distance or kill them outright. Even a musket, one of the worst guns, is more powerful than a lot of early melee weapons.
• Learn some basic traditional roguelike tactics. If you can avoid it, don’t get threatened by enemies you don’t need to engage with. Always have a plan of retreat, and preserve it at all costs. Caution is paramount. Never get surrounded; it’s very often a death sentence. Use your hallways and draw enemies into them.
• Know what you’ve got in your kit that can get you out of a hairy situation: healing items like witchwood bark and salve injectors, defensive mutations, and every character has sprint.
• Regarding healing items, remember that if you’re playing permadeath, it’s infinitely better to use a healing item you didn’t end up needing than to risk death.
• Caves of Qud is a very open-world game, and you don’t need to beeline the main quests right away. Unless you have a very strong build and are experienced, you might not be quite ready for the next leg of the quest when you get it. Wandering around the desert canyons can be a good way to get some armor scraps to boost your AV/DV, which can help you survive.
• Toughness is a very, very important stat. For new players, I’d recommend never rolling a character with less than 18 if you’re having trouble dying.

One other very important concept in roguelike tactics I apply often is safe zones. Once you clear an area, you can retreat to it easily. Don’t go deep into unknown areas you don’t have to; instead, prefer drawing hostiles into your safe zones to prevent getting more aggro than you can handle.