The wilderness encompasses the game world of ADOM. The PC starts the game here, and can enter various dungeons and settlements by walking to their entrances on the wilderness map. While moving through the wilderness, the PC may be drawn into random encounters.
All areas in the wilderness have a danger level of 1, and will remain so throughout the game unless modified by scrolls of danger. Any such modifications are applied to the entire wilderness at once.
Food consumption[]
The PC's food consumption is greatly increased while traversing the wilderness: +30 points of satiation per turn for trolls, and +15 for other races.
Body armor with the 'of travelling' suffix can reduce food consumption in the wilderness by half.
Travel time[]
Moving through the wilderness can consume a lot of in-game time. Time spent moving depends on the square type the PC moved into (there is some randomization, which is up to 10 min extra):
- Plains, road and special places (the ones the PC can enter) - 1 hour
- Forest - 2 hours (doesn't seem to be affected by the woodcraft skill)
- Hills - 1.5 hours
- Water - either 1 or 2 hours (the chance to take 2 hours is reduced with the swimming skill, and eliminated with Amulet of free action) - time spent is not related to drowning
- Mountains 5 hours
- Swamp 3 hours
- Pressing '5' to rest is 1 hour regardless of the terrain
These travel times are modified by seven league boots (around x1/6, x1/3, x2, for B, U, C, respectively). Occasionally, no time at all will pass when travelling, and the frequency of this increases as speed increases. At low speeds, travel times can be multiple times longer.
Time taken by actions[]
Changing body armor and eating only take one turn in the wilderness. However, actions like changing equipment, eating, and drinking take significantly more in-game time in the wilderness.
In many cases one turn in the wilderness counts as 30 turns elsewhere (while actual turn count is increased by one). This 30x effect includes:
- Lit torches
- Sources of HP regeneration as well as natural HP and PP regeneration
- Self-buffs like Strength of Atlas and Farsight; however, status giving spells like Bless and Slow Monster (and gaining Blessed, Slowed) will go at 1:1 speed.