Healing is hard. I havent found aspirin in my past few playthroughs. The price for the heal chant has increased(?) to 600 credits and it takes a long time to collect that if I am also buying other things. I will try to play better. I agree that healing by resting is too easy, unless perhaps one added random monster encounters to make resting much more dangerous.
I usually start out with 1 package of Aspirin, go to the dungeon (levels 1 and 2), collect items and sell everything I find. Then buy more Aspirin, maybe some armour or better weapon, and go deeper (levels 3 to 5). In level 5, you have more traders, which sell Penicillin (which is better than Aspirin). Usually, it is not that hard to survive, if you don't spend too much money on stuff which is useless in the early stages of the game.
It seems difficult to collect enough food in the catacombs. And I keep dropping my equipped weapon due to weakness. It seems to be necessary to consume several food items to regain strength. I like needing to eat in roguelikes, but I want to add a "hungry" warning Hstatus text) so that I can return to the temple if food is low.
I usually have at least 2 meat or fish, and 2 bread, and often some cake, in my inventory. Bread and meat can be combined to burger, bread and fish to breadroll (combine items by dropping them onto each other).
If you are able to perform fire magic, you can also cast a fire spell onto a corpse of a dead enemy, thereby creating meat. (to do this, cast the spell in the direction of the tile where the corpse is lying).
When arriving at the outskirts of Enoa, usually by accident, new players need to discover that the stairway back to the catacombs is marked by a green dot on the "radar screen". This took me a long time to figure-out.
The minimap symbols are explained in the manual:
http://lambdarogue.net/guide.html#interface
Also in the outskirts, it would be nice if some of the houses contained inhabitants. Maybe they could give the player tips on how to get back to the catacombs or where to look for quest items. Or perhaps the houses could contain a couple of random traders?
Which NPCs and quests are available in a game depends on your chosen profession or religion. The NPCs in the outskirts SHOULD be in the houses, but sometimes this does not work (and I did not find out why).
A general remark:
As I explained
here and
here, LR development has basically stopped, so besides a final 1.7 release in 2013 with a new 40x80 tileset and a final questline, I won't do anything else for this game. Instead, work on part 2 has already begun.
However, you are free to create a fork of the game and include any changes you like. (Just be so nice and tell your players that it is a fork of a game made by me.)