So finally got around to trying this, mainly as did not know there was another area within hidden cave. Derp

Bit hard may be an understatement doing it at General and still lost a fair few children (god knows how attempt without decent stun).

Some minor points first:
Is there a means of stopping multiple of the same child spawning? - Mainly ask as ran several times, and as some unsuccessful recalled to restart, then met up with the 'previous' children later! this nicely leads on to....

Could the children be set to nofight? Given the above had some circumstances of 4 children surrounding a dwarf meaning I could not attack it. The children are too puny to hurt it, so had to get at least one to die (and sod's law, not one I had a handy clone of!). Given they do next to no melee damage anyway (think they can just about hurt the spiders? but nothing else) seems a fairly silly thing for them to do.

Probably old gripes from previous forum but worth reiterating:
Would be nice if could heal the children (other spells would be nice, but can see that making life far too easy)
Would also be nice if SH2 didn't hit them (presuming sensible counter would be, but you should be doing if before getting arch skills. My counter counter would be what about RB chars? )

Amulet chance - Not sure what the actual odds are as I keep getting stat scrolls. Whilst obviously nice for me at Gen/FDM, can't see this as being ideal if doing at ranks intended?
Would it be possible to program a formula that essentially detects if you have a cave amulet equipped, and if so then teleports you to different chest room with 100% chance of amulet?
If system detects you do have amulet, it drops you to existing room with current loot chances (whatever they are).

I have zero knowledge of coding to know if that's possible here, let alone if would be support for the change.

Figure it would at least make tempting for everyone to do once per alt at least.

My tuppence

Oh sweet summer child. Soon you will learn the builders of this server love RNG so much they would be lost without it in their lives.

...seriously, near everything relies on RNG for artificially lengthening content relevance. Even the darned Wand skill is locked behind RNG hell.

Zool,

I am sorry to hear that your parenting skills have been challenged and that you lost a few children. Aranock parenting classes are available on the 6th Tuesday of each month, about lunch UK time.

Auto extermination of your existing child when recreated is a good idea. It was a while since this area was done but I am assuming this is not too hard. Harsh on your poor child but possible.

Turning off fight back. This is a player command but I have never tried it for an NPC. It is worth a look and maybe a simple fix.

Allowing you to spell your children is not a consideration (unless I make them much weaker).

Area spells not hitting them may be able to be solved via grouping. This is worthy of investigation.

Kev and a number of others like absolute certainty as opposed to items with random chances.
The only way to implement this (without making the game very easy and all over in 2 hours) is to super charge the bad guys. Alas this means newbies and weaker players will pay the price.
We have adjusted the random effects over time and will continue to do so but we do need some repeatable areas other then the pents to encourage players to go to.

Happy to review and consider changes to the chances of the amulet drop but the random effect is not in the plans to change at this stage.

On the testserver, if you respawn a child and you already have this child active in the game, then the original child will be removed.
This will be come active on the main server when next I copy across my changes.

The auto fightback is a bigger change as it was implemented differently between players and NPCs.
Players use a data field and not a flag for some strange reason and that data field has a different use for NPCs.
I would need to convert it to a flag for this to work which means searching the code for anywhere it is used.

Spellignore is a flag so I can turn this on.

I have not looked at the grouping yet.

Changed Curse 2, Blast 2 and SH2 to not hit your minions (Malte, Warden, Children etc) unless you are in imp mode.
This is also active on the testserver.

Cool