User:Chamou/Softcore IotM Analysis

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(Explanation about IotM slots, this is copy/pasted from Hardcore IOTM Analysis)

• Tomes: Three summons per day across all tomes. Makes for diminishing returns on additional tomes.
• Librams: Summons share an ever-increasing MP cost, and some libram summons synergize with summons from the same libram. See libram-specific notes.
• Garden: Only one seed can be planted at a time, and cannot be changed during a run. Unless changing this across paths, you only need one.
• "Yellow rays": Also known as "disintegration", all sources of this bonus give you the "Everything Looks Yellow" effect, and thus do not stack.
• Spleen familiars: Familiars that drop turn-generating spleen items. Each has its own daily drop timer, so additional familiars make filling spleen easier, but you only need so many spleen items per day. Greatly diminished returns if you already have several spleen familiars.
• Runaway familiars: Familiars that let you flee combat without consuming a turn, which is used to advance many in-game counters. These familiars share the same counter (how much abuse your butt can take), and thus do not stack.
• Free combat familiars: Familiars that let you fight special wandering monsters without consuming a turn, which grants lots of free stats. These familiars share the same counter, and thus do not stack.
• Monster-copying familiars: Familiars that let you target a monster while fighting it; the targeted monster will appear as a wandering monster 2-3 times following that encounter, letting you fight multiple copies of it.

(Explanation of categories; basically will explain that date sold means older items will cost more, and value means how good it is compared to other things within its slot. Emphasis on how value is geared towards speed ascension, and not necessarily other goals)

Tomes

Tomes are limited to three summons across ALL you own per day.
Item Name	Date Sold	Abilities	Description
The Smith's Tome	December 2013	Equipment (items, meat, mus/mys/mox, adventures, fites, ML, fam weight (if TT)), buffs (mus/mys/mox), turn generation, banishing, yellow rays, free runaways, item drops, meat drops	Summon Smithsness summons three items; a Flaskfull of Hollow, a lump of Brituminous coal, and a handful of Smithereens. The Flaskfull of Hollow grants 150 turns of Merry Smithsness, which gives a boost to all of your stats, along with powering up the equipment made with the lumps of Brituminous coal. The handfuls of smithereens can be put to a variety of uses, including a yellow ray, a banisher, or food and booze up to EPIC quality. This tome excels above all the rest in terms of both strength and flexibility; the equipment you make can be better than Ultra Rares. The primary benefit to actually owning the tome instead of pulling Smith's gear is access to enough Flasksfull of Hollow to keep you empowered though your entire run, along with saving you pulls on gear and utility functions, of course. This is the only tome that can let you generate EPIC food and booze, allowing you to save on turngen pulls as well. Having Pulverize additionally allows you to turn excess Brituminous coal into more smithereens for more utility items or food/booze. The gear is strong enough to be worth a pull on day 1 if you wish you equip more than three smithness pieces of gear then, and can later be pulverized when it outlives its usefulness. It really cannot be emphasized enough how much stronger this tome is than every other tome at once.
Tome of Clip Art	September 2011	Equipment (items, weight, adventures, stats), buffs (ML, items, max MP), turn generation, banishing, yellow rays	Summon Clip Art allows you to select a single item to create from a large list by choosing three pictures that correspond to the item you want. The old standby for the power of tomes, since Summon Smithsness its comparative utility has diminished greatly, the primary reason being that you can simply get more from your Smithness summon if you planned to make a utility summon with Clip Art; for example, if you needed a yellow ray, there's no reason to summon the Unbearable light with Clip Art when you could Summon Smithsness and get a Handful of Smithereens for Golden Light, plus another Lump of Brituminous coal and Flaskfull of Hollow to use. Therefore, Clip Art's functionality has been downgraded to only be useful toward things that can't be replicated with Smithsness, such as Borrowed time or a Bucket of wine. You can pull these things if they're necessary for turngen, diminishing the value of Clip Art further, though owning it will allow you to save those pulls in extremely fast runs if they would be more valuable to you than anything Smithsness can give you.
Tome of Sugar Shummoning	September 2009	Equipment (weight) -I need some help filling the rest of this one out-	Summon Sugar Sheets allows you to, well, summon Sugar sheets. In its time, all of the options were decent choices, but now, pretty much the only thing that hasn't been completely obsoleted by tomes released later is the Sugar shield, which grants +10 to Familiar Weight. The gear is temporary as well, unlike Smithsness gear, making sugar shields/sheets poor choices for pulls. Sugar shields must be used very strategically in order to be worth the tome summon in very fast runs, but they can be! Remember, it's the same strength as an Astral pet sweater.
Tome of Rad Libs	KoL Con IX	Equipment (weight), buffs (items, meat) -need help here too-	Summon Rad Libs gives you two Rad Libs per summon, which, when used, allow you to fill out a short story mad-lib style and gain a small amount of substats. That's not the only use of the tome, though; you can cook the Rad Libs with soda water to obtain a Papier-mâché glob, which can be used together in order to create equipment and potions. It's a fun item, but very hard to use due to the multiple tome summons you will have to use in order to get what you need in-run; it's simply not practical. For example, to obtain a papier-mitre, which grants +5 familiar weight in the hat slot, you would have to use five tome summons, because it uses nine globs! Not to mention, the gear you could create all have much stronger and flexible alternatives in the form of other IotMs you can pull, such as a Crown of Thrones. You can get a very powerful item and meat drops potion by using two tome summons to get it, but it doesn't last very long in comparison to your tome summon investment and that generally can't be recommended either.
Scratch 'n' Sniff Sticker Tome	November 2008	Equipment (items, stats, meat, mus/mys/mox)	Summon Stickers gives you the ability to summon stickers that can be applied to a Scratch 'n' sniff sword or crossbow that is generated when you first use a sticker. The stickers temporarily imbue the weapon with an enchantment, and the stickers you summon depend on how many times you've used Summon stickers today. You always get a unicorn sticker or an apple sticker with your first summon randomly, which are the stickers you generally want, especially the unicorn sticker, which puts a +25% items enchantment on your scratch 'n' sniff weapon and can be stacked up to +75% if you summon stickers three times and also randomly get unicorn stickers each time. This is where the tome falls flat, though; the stickers you get are random, so you have to rely on luck to get the best item drops, and even if you did, it takes the same amount of tome summons over multiple days you summon stickers to get what you need. UPC stickers can be useful for the nuns, but it dips into your tome summons even more and suffers from the same problem of unreliability. Technically, it's the best +items and +meat you can get in the weapon slot in-run, but it's extremely unreliable and not a recommended strategy in softcore, compared to, again, summoning Smithsness and creating A Light that Never Goes Out or Half a Purse for those purposes and getting more. Pulling the stickers is also impractical for the same reason pulling sugar sheets is, because they wear out over time.
Tome of Snowcone Summoning	January 2006	Buffs (Items, weight+exp, meat, HP/MP regen, stats)	The classic Summon Snowcones skill has, unfortunately, aged rather poorly, being comparable in power to a libram summon now. It allows you to get a single snowcone that gives a moderately strong, but short-lived buff from a random selection, along with a chance to summon a black snowcone that gives you all the buffs at once. You cannot stack multiple different types of snowcone buffs, even if you summon and consume multiple snowcones. The familiar weight (+5 weight and +2 fam exp) and item find (+30%) can be nice, but again, they're random, and even if you do get what you want, they last for a very short time. It was revolutionary in its day, but now it's pretty much retired.

Librams

You can summon as many librams as you can sustain with your MP pool.
Item Name	Date Sold	Abilities	Description
Libram of Pulled Taffy	April 2013	Buffs (stats, mus/mys/mox, weight+exp, items, meat, HP/MP regeneration)	Summon Taffy is a unique libram because it offers utility functions, but only in the aftercore area of The Sea. You can't use them as banishers/yellow rays/copiers/etc. in a standard ascension environment. In run, you consume the taffy as potions, and they grant you very strong buffs which have strength depending on how many turns of the taffy's effect you have, capped at 50 turns. This nature of the buffs is both this taffy's strength and weakness; you won't get enough taffy to get the most out of its effects unless the only thing you ever summon IS taffy. The buffs that grant more stats also grant more points in that stat, making you stronger while you earn more stats. The accumulative nature of these buffs makes using the "uncommon" taffy (indigo, green, and yellow) too difficult to stockpile en-masse to maximize the effects, especially yellow (granting items and meat), which may only be one of your four uncommon taffy summons per day. The star feature of this libram for ascension may be the blue taffy, which not only grants you +5 familiar weight at maximum effect but also +10 familiar exp per combat, allowing you to level a familiar at extraordinary speed. Even dud summons (like off-stat taffy) can be useful for raising your HP/MP pool or getting to a safe adventuring moxie level.
Libram of Resolutions	January 2012	Buffs (items, meat, stats, weight), turn generation	Summon Resolutions gives you potions that always last 20 turns and give a medium strength buff; the common summons offer items, meat, and stats, while the uncommon summons can get you familiar weight or the very unique ability to gain more turns at rollover. This libram has a good mix of flexibility and power; because the buffs last so long, you can enjoy their effects over quite a bit of your run if you're sufficiently liberal with your use. The worst aspect of this libram is the high propensity for getting "dud" summons, like off-stat stat resolutions, which don't help you much, or the "be feistier" resolution which only increases weapon and spell damage. Still, this is the only libram you can use to get more turns, and it provides a lot of utility for speeding up quests with its frequent "be happier" resolutions that increase item drops.
Gygaxian Libram	KoL Con VIII	Buffs (Initiative), HP/MP regeneration	Summon Dice is a very cool libram that has a lot of uses, but unfortunately, none of them are really for ascending. To get the really cool effects, like summoning a Family of kobolds, you need a quantity of dice you're simply not going to get in-run. Single-using dice allows you to get items that restore HP/MP instantly, but they aren't combat-useable, and hence can't even be used as an emergency button. The initiative buff from d20s are quite large, but you have just as much chance of getting a massive initiative debuff too, which can't be removed by using another d20. Basically, leave this on the shelf when you're ascending, and use it to print meat while you're in aftercore.
Libram of BRICKOs	February 2010	Equipment, free fights	Summon BRICKOs gives you three BRICKO bricks or two and a BRICKO eye brick per summon. The eye bricks count as the uncommon summon, so you only get three of them a day. You can create things by using a certain number of BRICKOs together once you have sufficient quantities, either (mediocre) equipment or enemies. The enemies are the primary attraction of this libram, as using and fighting them gives you stats, but doesn't cost an adventure. You can raise your ML to get more stats from them just like any other enemy, as well. You can have up to 10 fights per day in this way. That's pretty much all you do with this libram! There are some advanced strategies that use this libram, such as copying BRICKO bats with a wandering monster copier as from a Reanimated Reanimator or Obtuse Angel in order to burn delay in a zone, but this is an advanced trick that's not necessarily the main feature of this libram or even a recommended strategy to use with it.
Libram of Love Songs	February 2009	Combat items, stats, familiar exp, HP/MP regeneration, buffs (items, meat, familiar weight, mus/mys/mox, initiative)	Summon Love Song gives you combat items that are also useable as potions. They tend to give similar effects when thrown in battle as when used as potions, but applied differently. For example, love songs of icy revenge will give you instant familiar experience when used as a combat item, but when used as a potion, will give you familiar weight instead. The buffs that love songs provide can be very strong, but their utility is hampered by their extremely short durations; like taffy, the buffs get stronger the more turns you have, but each love song only gives 5 turns, meaning that they lose strength very quickly and are difficult to sustain. Compared to later librams, like resolutions, even the high-powered versions of the buffs don't prove to be feasible to maintain, since it would take four love songs of disturbing obsession to get a buff that lasts as long as a single Resolution: be happier, and would only be better than it for 5 turns, degrading to worse after that. Granted, you do also get mus/mys/mox from love songs, but at the quantity you'd need to be summoning them to get enough to maintain them, you might as well be mass-summoning taffy and getting more helpful stat exp buffs on top of that.
Libram of Divine Favors	January 2008	Combat items, stats, banisher, free runaways, MP regeneration, unique pickpocketing mechanic	Summon Party Favor commonly gives you attack items that deal damage based on the stat associated with that particular party favor (there are three of them) and gives you a decent chunk of stat points to go with using it. However, the uncommon summons offer some very unique, powerful functions; divine champagne poppers allow you to free runaway and banish what you use it on for 5 turns, and divine crackers give you a sharply enhanced chance to pickpocket an item from an enemy. These functions can't be replicated with any other libram summon, making it a very valuable suite of items to have access to. However, it offers very little utility outside of its special functions, meaning excessive summoning of party favors might lead to a lot of items you have no use for except to gain a handful of useless off-stats while dealing mediocre damage. Best when combined with another libram.
Libram of Candy Heart Summoning	February 2007	Buffs (items, meat, stats, weight+exp, HP/MP regeneration, initiative, mus/mys/mox)	Summon Candy Heart. Poor poor candy hearts, pretty much serving the same purpose as resolutions but weaker in every way. The only arguable advantage candy hearts have over resolutions is that they give a small amount of stat buff, which resolutions don't, and offering an initiative buff, which resolutions don't. The problem: the primary buffs last half as long (ten turns) and are weaker. Even the stat candy heart only gives one stat per fight as opposed to two that are focused on a particular stat, but at least it gives familiar exp too. This really isn't a useful libram for ascension anymore, it's just been obsoleted. If you want a libram that gives functionality like candy hearts, look to get a libram of resolutions instead.

See Also

(more relevant stuff later)

• Hardcore Skill Analysis
• Hardcore Familiar Analysis
• Campground patch strategy
• HCO forum thread

{{Ascension Strategy}} [[Category:Ascension Strategy]] [[Category:Items]]