Boulders are completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

[Llamamoe]

Sometimes you have a lot of warning time and they spawn far, sometimes you just die too fast to have a chance to even begin to react.

It's really annoying :-/

[!Supreme Grand Wizard Yoodiv]

You can turn traps off to avoid (a lot of the) unfair deaths.

[Llamamoe]

Yeah but without traps the game really stops being challenging once you get a decent ranged weapon and some skill :<

[Schrödinger's Dinger]

Yeah sometimes when you walk in a line from a Boulder Trap it would trigger and fall, Sometimes you would have to be under it to have it trigger?

[FiendishFox]

Boulders are the one mechanic I feel cheated with, wish I could turn just them off.

[Omnipotent]

In the new addition if you have enough health/armor points the boulder will do a lot of damage but won't kill you. Also I think your stealth level affects the time in which the boulder falls.

[MeSako]

Did my first good run, where I felt truly confident that I would make progress, and then I found a long corridor (just like many other long corridors I already found). I started to move down throw it, then I heard a lond crash behind me.. .. .. Half a second later I was run over by a boulder..

[Llamamoe]

Yeah, you either get 10s of warning or like 0.5s. Eurgh.

[!Supreme Grand Wizard Yoodiv]

By the time you're having a really good run, I'd expect you can outrun or survive a boulder. They do ~50 damage if you have good armor.

[Llamamoe]

@!Yoodiv: The whole problem is that sometimes it's dark or you otherwise don't spot the boulder and it spawns right on top of you, making it impossible to outrun even with maximum possible speed. And I'm pretty sure it instagibs no matter what.

[!Supreme Grand Wizard Yoodiv]

Nope, been hit by plenty of boulders, lol

[mistersneak]

We try and make it a policy not to give a lot of hints and spoilers here, but I want you to be able to enjoy the game more.
The biggest thing I want to point out is torches. Wandering around in the dark can make it impossible for you to detect them at the end of those long hallways for sure, which is why you light up the place by bringing your own light source!
The second thing is that a lot of players early on carry way too much and end up moving super slow. This can result in situations where you definitely don't have time to avoid boulders.
Third, boulders are triggered by invisible 'pressure plates' that activate from the direction it's going to roll.

With these 3 things combined, you can fool and avoid 95% of all boulders. There are still a couple situations where boulders can spawn that really undermine these precautions: 1, when a boulder comes from a 2-high ceiling, just after a 1-high ceiling, making it impossible to see without being under it. And 2, when a boulder trap is behind a closed door, so you can't see it. These are fairly rare, but even so, you will probably run into those circumstances - try and think through how you can deal with these, and calculate the risk of going into a situation like that.

Lastly, remember there are other tools you can look out for to help you out of bad situations. Teleportation, digging, potions of speed - if you're hot on the trigger, you can survive where lesser adventurers get squashed.

Good luck!

[Llamamoe]

3 of my 6 playthroughs ended that way(2x high ceiling, 1x squashed after opening door at end of corridor), so idk if that's that rare.

I just in general don't really think that instagib traps are a good idea, even if they're usually avoidable.

I still think that boulder traps where you get almost no time to react are a very bad idea. The game should give you at the very least a moment to react no matter what. You shouldn't leave instant death to random mapgen chance.

[!Supreme Grand Wizard Yoodiv]

I say again, it's not instagib, it's just high damage. Get your AC and health up, and you can definitely survive a boulder.

[Llamamoe]

Yeah but that only applies to the tankier classes, and you'll only reach that level well beyond half of the game.

[mistersneak]

Llama, the point is that it's not just a matter of mapgen chance randomly killing you; there are plenty of ways that players have learned to expect and prepare for the worst case scenarios with boulders. Whether or not you have the patience or desire to get to that point is up to you. We don't have any plans to change how boulders work at this time.