: in looking back, but my best guess is that it's a probability of a monster
: spawning at each tick. There are 60 monster slots available, and I assume
: that the extra spawned monsters get written into a saved game, but
: dissecting saved games is a topic for another time.
Right. A 'tick' is you moving from one cell to another, or resting for a bit.
In the map file, starting at offset 0x01B6 from the beginning of each level, is a table of three pairs of 16-bit integers. Think of them as three "eggs" that occasionally hatch. The first integer in each pair says what species comes out of the egg (-1 means the egg is infertile), the second tells how often. The scale is 0..255, with 0 meaning never and 255 meaning every tick.
After you kill the Sleeping God, the first frequency on each level except Labyrinth is set to 15. (I think that's a bug. It looks like they were trying to set the frequency to 15 for every egg that's not a Sentinel and not on Labyrinth.) So if you want to increase your final score by maximizing your kill count, it's probably more effective to do your killing on the way back out rather than on the way in.
When a new monster hatches, it's spawned somewhere on the edge of a square centered on you with a "radius" matching your light source (7 for IR, 5 for flashlight, 3 for neither), except that if you're resting on OWEWS or on Labyrinth the radius is 2.
Once spawned, the new monster is an object, just like any other, and saved to the SaveGame file.
-Ron Hunsinger
