So I've picked up ADOM again after a break for Dungeon Keeper, Master of Magic, Nethack, etc. and decided to try a couple of new classes that I've never played or haven't for a while. I've got a twentysomething merchant who got some very decent artifacts precrowning and is having a pretty easy time of it, but I had a bad day with a thief who died around lvl 4 or 5 and for his next incarnation life is much better but I'm starting to doubt everything I ever knew about piety. According to https://ancardia.fandom.com/wiki/Piety, you need to be level 8 or higher for the first precrown and three levels higher for every artifact that exists in the game after that. So 8 (3 * artifact count) gets you 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, etc. if you don't hit any of the levels where one is guaranteed to show up and you don't get "lucky" with a surge of power in a regular dungeon level. I think there used to be kind of a bug some versions ago where the "very close" message wouldn't change and I could still get precrowned, but that seems like it's been resolved with one of the more recent patches so that's good.

Currently, I'm "very close" and have been for 100 live sacrifices with a couple of magic armors and tools and some corpse saccing here and there. I got very lucky this game and found a properly-aligned altar on the first level of the puppy cave, so I've read a scroll of danger to improve the quality of the monsters for XP and sac value. I decided to skip the pyramid this time around to avoid adding to my artifact count and to milk the precrownings for all they're worth, but I'm starting to think I'm stuck on "very close" until I give up and get to extreme alignment so I can crown. Has anybody run into this before? How did you break through the apparent glass ceiling of piety?

Also, I've won several times with a variety of characters and was yesterday years old when I read someone's post about trading booze to Yggaz for useful potions. I've just been hoarding them and dipping wands in them or dipping stacks of booze into potions of exchange for...a while. Oops.