The Game of Dungeons v8: My Secret Stash

Once again, I'm progressing in The Game of Dungeons v8.  Losing Strider, the character that I had advanced to beyond level 100, was a harsh blow, but I've picked myself up and started again.  My current character, the poorly-named Joe Average, is currently on Level 38.  I'm advancing quickly, perhaps even more quickly than I have been in this game so far.

(About that name.  Yes, I realise that Joe Average is a terrible name.  He had decent stats when I created him, but only 3 hit points, so I never expected him to survive.  Now that he's higher level I should rename him to something like Joe Noteworthy.)

There's a reason that I'm advancing a bit faster than before: I've discovered a feature of the game that stops me from wasting excess gold.  Every character in this game has a carrying capacity based on strength, race, and a couple of magic items.  Once this capacity is exceeded, excess gold will be discarded every time you move.  This was really annoying, because whenever I found a sizable haul of loot, most of it would be gone by the time I reached the surface.  Occasionally a chest will contain some astronomical sum from 100,000 to 500,000 gold pieces, which is often enough to advance a level or two.  I was being forced to drop a lot of gold.

What I figured out, after a careful reread of the manual, is that you can keep a stash of gold in the dungeon protected by magic, by pressing CTRL-ALT-H.  That stash remains so long as you don't start another one elsewhere, and you can keep going back to it and taking more gold.  So now whenever I stumble across a hoard of over 100,000gp I can claim every last bit of it over the course of multiple trips.  It's really helpful.

If you keep a stash on Level 1, you can use it to purchase items from the shops.  I'd often wondered at the astronomical prices of the magic items, but it makes a lot more sense now that I know I can establish a bank of sorts.

I give it another week or two before I'm going to start mapping again.  As I've mentioned before, I'm going to have to map the whole damn game, all 90 levels.  It's the only way to guarantee a safe exit to the surface, and it's going to take a while.  I'll get there one day.