Taking a break on level 21 to log my starters tips. This is all assuming the base version of the game.

First play on easy:
– The game is hard, but somethings get easier when you play it. Recipes transfer between plays, and messages can be incrementally decrypted over time. Playing on easy lets you get a feel for the game, identify recipes, learn what items do, and teaches you what enemies do what without you having to find out the hard way 2 hours in.

Use, learn it:
– This is true of all things, though it's really mostly useful knowledge with weapons. If you need to work on your blade skill don't just level it up, kill every weak enemy you find with that skill until you get it to a useful point. And do it early. The deeper you go the harder it is to cultivate a new skill.

Invest in melee, or blade:
– Rationing your ammo means you have to get close for the easy kills. Being good at it means you won't be left defenseless if you run out. For this to work you need to go Wolverine ASAP, and learn what enemies you absolutely can't let near you like Proteans which must be shot on sight regardless of your ammo level.

Leveling your leveling:
– Leveling up will give you full life(mentioned by others.) If you are in good health let the bad guys beat you down before using it. On the flip side, if you are close to leveling up, don't waste your medical supplies. Do what you have to do, but don't use it if you don't have to.

Pick every locked door:
– Picking door locks will not only help the skill, but more importantly it gives you easy exp. You get two safe tries, and if you have more than a 30% chance of success, then your odds are quite good. Be aggressive about it early, because it gets harder with the new security doors later on. This also means you should pass up those level keys when you see them. There is always another way through.

Don't use lockpicks on doors:
– Don't do it. Save them for pods and other locked things where you only get one try and get goodies. You need every good thing you can find. BTW don't make third attempts on doors and bring in the bots either. Just find another door or destroy it.

A Sword can attack multiple spaces:
– A good sword does decent damage and can kill more than one guy at a time in the right circumstance. It can also destroy things you might want, so be careful where you swing one.

Check your map on a new level:
– Find out where you are starting, and try to make a plan to work around the level in a way that keeps you from doing much back tracking. You won't be able to see the level, but you can see if you are near the top, the middle, or what have you. The less backtracking you do the farther your food will go. Sometimes you cant avoid backtracking, just make a point not to be careless about it.

Do NOT use unidentified mods:
– Mods, like door traps, change color each game. You have to identify them each game to know what they are, and there are at least as many bad ones as good ones. There is an item, and a craft to help sort it out, but you may be hanging on to a few for a while before you get the chance.
Know Thy Traps:
– To reiterate others, identify the traps(the earlier the better) The goal isn't just to find the bad ones. What you really want is to find which ones heal you, and which one recharges your gear. Walk through to find out. Drop your gear first though, and don't forget to reequip you armor after. To make this easier drop something you don't care about, move then drop everything else. If you drop everything at once the game will pick up the good stuff first which is annoying when you are trying to sacrifice something safe.

Different Meds, different times:
– There are medical supplies that take turns, and ones that don't. Save your insta-meds (bandages, nano-meds, etc) for when you get cornered. It's tough to use turn taking meds in battle.

Some enemies, don't like to leave their room:
– Plague bears for example seem to stay put. You can run in and out of the door frame for a shot, and they won't be able to get to you, but don't try it with a diseased bear. With bots it's more difficult because of the shooting back, but you may be able to lock them up, and go back after you have cleared the floor of any complications, and found any goodies. Bottom line is you have options for being prepared.

Soften enemies up:
– You my be tempted to think you have two choices, kill a baddie with guns, or not. There is a third option for enemies that you cant kill before they strike. Shoot them to soften them up, then move in for the final killing blow. This helps ration ammo a bit more, and keeps you from getting melee damage. It's not the best option for rationing ammo, but it's better than nothing and helps keep you safer than strait melee/blade attacks. Bottom line is don't overkill. Use a high damage weapon to weaken a strong enemy, but don't waste high tier ammo on a wounded baddie when something lower tier will do nicely. You will be switching weapons constantly, so get used to it. It would have been nice to have mouse wheel support on that one.

New floor? Get ready:
– Reload before you go down a level. It's very common for there to be a waiting party looking to kill you, and reloading won't be an option. At least not a good one.

Food. Craft or not to Craft?:
– This one may be somewhat controversial, but crafting food isn't automatically a good idea. You are often gambling with editable items for fewer gains than you might think. If you fail you loose everything, and an 80% success rate is a 1 in 5 chance of badness. It's hard to say when it's worth the risk, and when it's not. It depends a lot on what you are making, like pungent meat doubles your investment and is near impossible to screw up (I’ve done it though). There is a meal I think is 2xmeat and 3xbindings. Bindings are easy to find, and aren't edible so the gamble is only the two meats. Then if you desperate the risk might just be your safest bet. Bottom line is be mindful of your crafting food. Target foods that are safest to make, and give you a good bonus over the base ingredients.

Just finished the game on Normal (Scout). Not gonna repeat every tip everyone else said, but here's what I think:

HAVE PHEROMONE BAIT. It probably saved my life on floor 30, when there was still tons of mobs around and my weapons were mostly demolished. Just toss it in the middle of the room, close the door and enjoy the pitfight.

PICK YOUR BATTLES. Especially on the harder difficulties, it's not always wise to clear every room. If the room in question only has one medical locker or something similar, but it's completely guarded by guards (or Proteans), ask yourself: do I really need to see what's in that locker? The outcome usually isn't worth the ammo loss (or even the XP gain).

ALWAYS CARRY EVERYTHING EXTRA. If you have the room, keep every weapon you find with you unless it's 100% something you won't ever use, like a blade when you've been a gunslinger this far and have an according blade skill. Have a spare armor before you enter room 30! There's a ridiculous amount of mobs: you really have to see it to believe it. No matter if your armor is at 100 durability by the time you get there: they still probably will destroy it.

ALWAYS PONDER ALL YOUR OPTIONS. For example, in my first playthrough I completely neglected the rest option. You don't always have to use medical supplies in order to heal. Take a break and rest instead.

NEVER USE THE AUGMENTATION BAYS. In my first run, I didn't know what it did, so I used one. I was lucky, and it gave me a speed boost. Later another one gave me tunnel vision. In both times, the chance to succeed was 99%. On my latest run, I used one and it decreased all my stats. What I'm saying: no matter what the percentage to succeed is, it doesn't matter. The machine could still fuck you up very bad. It's a roulette, and in my opinion it's safest to ignore them completely.

USE THE 4D COPIER TO YOUR FULL ADVANTAGE. So, you spotted a working 4D copier. Time to use it right away, to make an extra sandwich or extra ammo? WRONG! First of all, I think it only copies one bullet, not a whole stack. What you should do, is postpone it until you find a beneficial mutation serum or a weapon/armor mod. Copy that instead!

And final tip, probably repetition but still, it's important: DON'T GO INTO THE GAME THINKING YOU'RE GOING TO BEAT IT ON YOUR FIRST TRY. You probably won't. Start with the engineer, decipher messages to get recipes and in order to make the game just a little bit easier on your following runs.

The game just takes too long. I finally played it enough to see what it really has to offer, and there's more than you get from first impression. Actually, starting on Easy is a bad idea: you just kill everything and you think it's smooth sailing, only around Floor 15 or 20 you starve or run out of ammo because you were didn't even know what you were doing wrong. And if you play better, it's kind of easy until 20 or so, and then it's kind of dangerous at times but still winnable, and then you hit 30 and suddenly every room is full of rooms with 3x as many enemies as you've ever seen in one place before.

It's actually probably better to start on an unreasonably high difficulty just to see what it's like to hit a wall hard and learn how to give enemies proper respect before you've bored yourself with the tempo. *then* you might want to go back to Easy and farm up the first 50 coded messages.

It takes a few runs to train your intuition enough to even see the point. The first time you play, you don't really know what it's like to run out of ammo or make gut-wrenching decisions about whether 1/4 of your health bar matters more than two pistol rounds 5-10 floors before you think you'll run out.

What happens if you destroy an item? Is it possible to get upgrades back? (I kind of know the answer is no, but what the hell right?)

On Food: Did you know that on the surface there are - I just discovered this after at least 20 runs :)
Trees that can be tried to forage food from?
And there is a chance of monster encounter - I once got an instant level-up from one...

And once I got insta-death on level 0. lol
Do not try this if you have low foraging skill :)

Haha, yeah might suit Engineers best :)

I wouldn't be as harsh with the game, but after 3-4 hours of playing, I'll agree that it fell below my expectations given other roguelikes I've played, but maybe I've just be spoiled.

The depth so far, while not completely shallow, has definitely been less than I hoped for.

I'll still give it another ~24 hours of playing and read the manual (already played the tutorial) before I set my opinion in stone about the game.

I've only made to lvl 17 so far and that's not even halfway, but just seems so funny to me...
How exactly the thing that I love about the game, the repetition and discovering recipes, is something that others would see as the minus and look for something else :)
I admit the game can be a bit rude and lacks (of what I know) in storytelling, and even the mechanics are not that "deep".
But even if it is like that, I think it's just that maybe some other game that I hate, may be the game for you? :)
Tastebuds and all that.

Oh hey, thanks for all the feedback, everyone who posted here before. Mostly good stuff.

I like The Pit, but I don't agree with some of the balance decisions. Crafting in particular means packratting tons of stuff and often never getting to use it. And every expansion adds races and racial gear, lowering the chances that you can even use half the stuff you find. And 30 floors was a slog, while 40 is just way too much. Also, the locker room kind of makes you second-guess whether you should be playing "for keeps" at all times. :(

But I still like it. I think the Psi abilities added just enough depth to make it interesting. I just think some things, like the door traps, are too random and more annoying than anything else. Well, that's how it is sometimes, I guess.

I can probably win on Easy if I try a few times, so I should just do that so I can finally win and feel good. X-D

Not sure how anyone could say this game isn't deep. It's the most tactically deep roguelike I've ever seen, by far. There's a world of difference between how an experienced player and a beginner play this game.

The depth isn't immediately apparent, especially when playing without any DLC. A noob playing on Easy just thinks that it's a really easy game for the first 15 floors, and then suddenly they run out of everything and everything breaks and they don't know why. Some of the tricks, like the stop-and-drop to avoid trap damage, are really tedious and can easily be missed without tips. Actually, a ton of the things you have to do to win are sort of tedious, but I'm going to try to be more diligent about them next run and see if it makes the difference.

That's true... On my first try I've done a lot of stupid things. By now, my playstyle changed completely! I don't reload anymore if I have 4/10 shots left with my Autopistol. I always use one of the two moves you have per turn before I shoot, reload or do other stuff. When I open a door, I make one step in and one to the side. This way you can see almost every corner of the room. If there's only a Med-Bay and three enemies, I do one step out of the room, turn around and close the door. That's two turns to check and leave, instead of 10+ turns to kill everything, reload, activate the Med-Bay and so on. A few exp aren't worth the wasted food and damaged equipment. And I don't waste turns anymore to pick up stuff I don't need. I've learned which ingredients, ammo, grenades, etc. are usefull for my playstyle. I choose my fights carefully. A Moon Bear is worth my time (chance of Raw Meat x2), those flashing or two headed Proteans don't give me anything... except of huge damage to my whole inventory, my armor and my health. Or even worse, one of those floating balls who spit the L5 poison cloud... ouch.

I think I still have to learn a lot of things (I just started to use teleport door traps to my advantage). But up until now, the game seems to be all about food management. I'm drowning in ammo and have/find enough stuff to repair my gear. The only problem is food, but it's getting better when you learn to be efficient with your movement.

That's pretty much what happened on my first try (Engineer, Normal, 16th floor). My gear was still fine (I even dropped some repair kits and I had tons of Nanobots, or whatever they're called), but I ran out of ammo and food, because I killed every single enemy on every single floor. Another problem was that I didn't have any recipes, so I had to eat the ingredients.