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Scumming techniques are certain repeatable actions or tactics providing players with unusual in-game benefits, usually exploiting a bug or simply quirks of the game design that might not have been intended to be used this way, or to this extent.

Many scumming tactics present in ADOM v. 1.1.1 were fixed in v. 1.2.0, either due to RFEs focusing on balancing the game or because they stem from bugs that would be fixed during development anyway.

Piety overflow[]

Abusing integer overflow to turn a large negative piety into a huge positive and milk your god for goodies. While piety can no longer overflow, it's still possible to get an excessive amount of piety by praying many times. After over 1000 unheard prayers, the cost increases so high that it overflows and actually increases piety. Also, around 200 unheard prayers are enough to anger the current god enough to max out piety with the other two gods. Summoning wrath is avoided either through locked doors, waiting companions, swarms of weak monsters, or terrain that does not permit summoning.

Room effect stair-hopping[]

Using stairs no longer takes a turn, but room effects still trigger immediately on ascent/descent. A PC with 19 Appearance can hop between ID 1 and 2, periodically wiping their face, until they obtain 1 Strength, 99 Appearance, 99 Charisma, and 99 Learning. The high scores can then be moved to more useful attributes via potion of exchange. The damage from shattering mirrors rooms is generally counteracted by the healing effect of the ancient bones room.

Stat lowering[]

Intentional lowering of stats by controlled sickness, starvation, or use of stat lowering items such as ring of weakness to train stats beyond the common limit of certain methods. Most ways to increase stats were changed to use base stats instead of current stats, but this is still effective for increasing the likelihood of stat gains from mushrooms.

Throw robbing[]

It's possible to reload with unpaid items. If PC's only unpaid items are in the missile slot, leaving the shop will not anger the shopkeeper. Alternatively, the items can be thrown out of the shop. Easily abused by throwing a high value item (so it is eligible for automatic reloading), and then selling it on the door of the shop.

Ultra Healing Engine[]

Characters who choose the Save Yrrigs quest can scum blessed potion of ultra healing rewards from Jharod. This requires either a healing spell or being a high enough level Healer. Various methods can be used to produce injured monsters to heal, including trap creation and Summon Monsters. The most efficient way would probably be luring Jharod to the Water Dragon Cave cave, and then healing the infinite supply of drowning gremlins that a fluff ball will produce.

Gold Scumming with Survival Skill[]

Characters with the Survival skill can use it to generate wealth by using it repeatedly in the overworld. This works better with characters who have longer lifespans (such as any kind of elf) and especially so with Merchants who uniquely never suffer from increased prices after Shopkeepers restock their wares. It also works better if the Character has no other skills that can be used in the overworld, so that they can just hold down the skill button to spam it repeatedly. If you have an skill that can be used in the overworld other than survival, you can remap the keybindings using a text editor on the adom.kbd file (be careful, pay attention to the warnings). Repeatedly holding down the skill key causes the screen to flash, which may be an issue for those with Epilepsy. In addition to being able to sell the seeds for Gold at a reasonable speed (which can be used to purchase items early game from the Black Market & Border Town Potion Shop, or to train skills at the Thieves Guild prior to going through the small cave) this method can also train Strength at lower levels, and the seeds generated can also be given to Farmers or Beggars in order to modify alignment. Merchants that specialize in Potions can also use the Alchemy skill to potentially stock up on potions of booze to trade with Yggaz to accelerate their acquisition of Attribute increasing potions for a potentially safe source of unlimited stats that's available at level 1.

Obsolete methods[]

These scumming techniques do not work in the current version of the game.

Banshee in the Animated Forest[]

One way to scum for items is to bring the banshee into the Animated Forest. High rates of tree spawning combined with area instakill effect leaves many items rather quickly, although there is the danger of the banshee gaining levels and becoming rather dangerous in melee too.

Plants are now immune to the banshee's wail.[1]

Dragon gold doubling[]

Dragons which pick up gold dropped twice that amount in addition to their own gold upon death. This could easily be used to create truly game-breaking amounts of gold, which were commonly spent on getting piety for precrownings or to pay for Garth's training. There is a bit of risk involved, since many types of dragons can destroy entire heaps of gold with their breath attacks, and dragons are relatively rare in the early game and cannot double more than once.

Dragons no longer replicate gold.[2]

Free actions from "Act reasonably"[]

The "Act reasonably" command (Enter key by default), allows choosing one of many contextual actions. Most actions that are supposed to take a turn would not take a turn when they are chosen in this manner. This meant that kicking, missile attacks, wands, and spells could be used without monsters having a chance to retaliate. Shops could be freely robbed with swapping or teleportation in a manner similar to teleportitis robbing.

This bug was fixed.[3]

Gremlin bomb[]

Involves creating lots gremlins and using them to get easy loot, be it by killing them, or by pickpocketing them, or having a pet kill them for you.

Gremlins no longer drop loot nor can be pickpocketed[4][5], making gremlin bombing a useless tactic.

Ice Queen item duplication[]

When transitioning to a new area in the Ice Queen Domain for the first time, auto-pickup triggered at the (x, y) location the PC just entered, but on the previous screen. This added items to your inventory, but didn't actually remove the items from the ground, resulting in item duplication.

This bug was fixed.[6]

ID stairhop[]

Continuously going up and down stairs between two certain Infinite Dungeon levels. Loot created inside the room is picked up, and accumulates over time. Requires some patience, but is very safe in general, much safer than trying to find the respective loot in-game. Refraining from this technique - or, indeed, from entering the ID at all - will make the early game considerably more challenging.

Items are no longer generated on the floor on stair rooms in the ID.[7]

Kick robbing[]

Opening a hole in a store corner wall that allows the PC to kick items out of a shop from outside, without enraging the shopkeeper. Kicking shop items is no longer possible.[8]

Picking up infinite stacks[]

At least as of 1.0.0, it was possible to pick up more objects from the ground that were lying there, thus generating potentially infinite numbers of the same object, perhaps for selling or sacrificing. This could be done simply by trying to pick up a stack of objects that weighed so much that the game would ask how many you wanted to pick up, and then entering a number greater than the actual number of objects in the stack. Some relatively good objects to do this with included large rations (easy to obtain in heavy enough stacks), plant seeds (easy to obtain in general with Survival) and gold (valuable before the Casino).

Teleportitis robbing[]

If teleportitis caused the PC to be teleported out of a shop with unpaid items in their inventory, you had one turn to drop these items and avoid the wrath of the shopkeeper. Once dropped, they lost their price tags and could be freely picked up. As abusable as kick-robbing, but with different setup requirements.

This bug was fixed.[9]

Waldenbrook sacrificing[]

Waldenbrook could be raised to an incredibly high level by selling him Sis, and then sacrificed to reach level 50.

Shopkeepers no longer gain levels from being sold Sis, and it's not possible to gain more than 5 levels from a single kill.[10]

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