YMMV / Caves of Qud

• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Recruiting NPCs is a good way to make your journey easier, but having companions with powerful ranged weapons or Area of Effect attack powers can lead to your demise because the game doesn't have Friendly Fireproof.
  • The summoned plant creatures from your Burgeon ability can become annoyance if you don't know what they will do. For example, Feral lah generates tons of explosive Tumbling pods that follow you and they can cause destructive chain reactions when they are destroyed, and fiery explosions of Aloe pyra can burn you alongside the enemy who stepped on it.
• Demonic Spiders: While this game is filled with deadly enemies, there are notable ones.
  • Slugsnouts are infamous because they often show up in caves in early-game yet they have a painful ranged attack. As they can show up as early as Red Rock, Slugsnouts are among the top killers of low-level characters.
  • Goatfolk enemies in the Jungle often spawn in groups, and they are quite deadly. Goatfolk sowers often throw grenades that deal decent damage, and as explosives they ignore your armor and Dodge Value. Worse yet, the sowers don't care if they hit their own people while blasting you, so the Goatfolk groups can easily kill you by just surrounding or distracting you while the sowers do their work. Meanwhile, Goatfolk shamans always have a random physical or mental mutation, so their attacks are quite unpredictable. Other enemy types of Goatfolks are respectable mid-game enemies, too.
  • Most dangerous enemies can become this trope at historical sites, due to the enemy pool pulling from factions those sultans were associated with; normally-rare enemies like twinning lampreys appearing en masse is not unheard of.
• Difficulty Spike: Like many roguelikes before it, Qud isn't at all shy about suddenly introducing some new monster or hazard that can totally annihilate you right when you thought you were safe, or sending you to a new location that will bury you even though you plowed right through the last area without breaking a sweat. The Golgotha sequence particularly stands out here, but it's also very possible to have monsters spawn out-of-depth (examples include finding Saad Amus clones or Giant Lava Crabs) in the Waterlogged Tunnel under Joppa.
• Goddamned Bats: Any group of enemies with the "swarmer" trait, but above all the chute crabs of Golgotha, which not only spawn in huge numbers, but (due to a possible bug) can be shunted en masse by the conveyor belts onto one tile, allowing them to execute a One-Hit KO on pretty much any character at this particular point in the game. Golgotha overall is already That One Level material, and the chute crabs are widely considered one of (if not THE) most dangerous of its hazards.
• Popular with Furries: You can make your own furry mutant quite easily thanks to various mutation options, so naturally this game has quite a few furry fans.
• That One Achievement: Two qualify: one for difficulty, another for sheer RNG value.
  • "Ten-Sludge Monte:" Kill a decasludge. Sludges are formed from liquids interacting with primordial soup, primarily in the Rainbow Wood: 'mono'sludges are already incredibly dangerous (with their ability to disarm you), and to make a decasludge you have to provide nine other unique liquids to the sludge in question to make it become a decasludge. Each "level up" provides a new pseudopod with an effect based on the chemical given. For example, applying slime will add a pseudopod with a 100% disarm chance. This achievement only has 0.2% completion rate on Steam: by comparison, the achievement to kill a chrome pyramid (considered by many to be a Superboss in mook clothing) has a completion rate of 1.5%.
  • "Leap, frog:" Have a frog teach you how to jump. The theoretical execution of this is simple: find a legendary (or otherwise sentient) member of the Frogs faction, perform the water ritual with it, and then have it teach you the Jump skill. However, there's the matter of finding the lair for such a frog (no other types of faction like to share it, meaning you have to get lucky on the world map or with Trash Divining), being able to improve your relations with the faction to a sufficient degree (it starts at -475, meaning you won't be able to use any frogs you find immediately to improve your relations, forcing you to rely on other legendary creatures or Schrodinger pages), and lastly, the fact that there are only two types of creatures total in the Frogs faction, meaning that they aren't very widespread. This is even rarer than Ten-Sludge Monte, having only a 0.1% completion rate.
• That One Level:
  • The aforementioned Golgotha, in the eyes of most players. Between the conveyer belts of death, the hordes of enemies that obstruct easy escape with a recoiler, and the threat of contracting Ironshank or (particularly) Glotrot, even experienced players don't approach this dungeon lightly.
  • The Rainbow Wood, a quest location which is filled with weeps of various fluids. It also has rivers of primordial soup... which create hostile sludges when mixed with any other liquid. It is therefore common to end up being chased by a horde of sludges (of various flavors) as you try to navigate through the mushrooms. Worse, sludges get more powerful (gaining quickness, HP, and pseudopods to attack with) as they continue to mix with other liquids. Worse still, each new liquid gives a sludge a new debuff it can inflict on you (rusting, poison, disease, vomiting, disarming, confusion, etc). Worst of all, their pseudopods count as cudgel weapons, meaning it's easy for the massed sludges to stunlock you and beat you to death. For most characters, attempting to fight the sludge hordes is suicide, and the only option is to Run or Die.