I'm wondering what the best strategy for getting and using artificial limbs is. Are any Gods beside Silva worth praying to for limbs? How do I get rid of unwanted limbs, especially if they're really sturdy? Is it worth it to pray for limbs, or should I just stick to SoCM?

Unrelated question, but when you zap something with a wand of mirroring, the pile on top is the mirrored stack, right?

Re artificial limbs: Check this page, it details who is associated with what as far as limb materials go (notable exceptions are Valpurus and Mortifer - do not pray to them expecting something as trifling as granting you a new limb for they shall smite your head off if you do). The best way to handle a subpar limb is to either spend a scroll of harden material to make it better, a scroll of change material to bring it up to par from weaksauce (in the event hardening won't work for your intended purposes), or to skip hoping the "right" material is gained from praying and try to keep your limbs whenever possible until such time as you can get what you want through pure braininess. SoCM is probably the best to go from human to awesome artificial because it is a) reliable and b) a drastic enough use of resources that you'll hopefully have thought it through before making use of it, with SoHM coming in second as a substitute (nice because it requires 5 int less than trying to use an SoCM directly and also is slightly more plentiful) and praying coming in dead last because as the link should make clear gods are associated with multiple materials and so quality is not guaranteed.

As for your other question? It's really the bottom stack which is the mirror. The top stack is the real one.

Thanks, this information helps me a lot. What about an extreme case, though, like if I had, say, 4 amethyst limbs?

Having all your limbs amethyst really causes more problems than it's worth. For one, because of the extreme lack of flexibility your DEX and AGI will be horribly low, whilst your LStr and AStr will be very high, as well as limb health.
The problem is this: you will have a very low chance of dodging let alone landing a blow (although should you do so it will be devastating!), and although your limbs will be able to survive many hits it is important to remember that your other body parts cannot be changed. That means that all your vital body parts remain with very little HP, and if you remember that your torso takes the most damage on average, that means that not being able to dodge an attack will lead to a quick death.

My strategy for artificial limbs is this:
Should you encounter a SoCM and want to use it for changing a limb, generally the best materials to choose from are from the cloth/leather branch.
This would be, in order of scroll of harden material ranks: Leather, [Nymph Hair], Hardened Leather, Troll Hide, Ommel Hair, Phoenix Feather, Dragon Hide.
The best over all is Golden Eagle Feather, but that cannot be obtained through harden material scrolls. Note that as you go up the ranks each requires a higher INT to harden.
My advice to you is that if you should encounter a SoCM very early in the game (e.g. in the underwater tunnel) the first material you should transform your limb into is troll hide, and then later harden it to ommel hair which is only difficult if you didn't start with 10 INT or more. From there you need to read, pray and science talk to boost your INT to 20 in order to harder your limb(s) to Phoenix Feather. Phoenix Feather is very strong in both strength and speed, for example in one run through the game I had a character with two Phoenix Feather arms and he plowed through everything that came at him (including the shop guards and shop keeper in the gloomy cave AND most of the dwarven city populous in LIVAN) but was finally taken down by a couple of veteran kamikaze dwarves.
And that is the final danger of artificial limbs: They raise the danger level to the point that very strong monsters will come at you earlier than they would normally, and you are likely not to have good enough equipment to withstand them. So it is important to monitor your equipment and adjust your limbs accordingly. In short, if you are still wearing iron boots and an ommel hair armor piece, don't go power hungry and turn your limbs to dragon hide.

4zb4, his question was what to do if he wound up with 4 amethyst limbs and not whether amethyst limbs were good or not.

Answer: Don't end up with 4 amethyst limbs, seriously. Heal yourself before your human limbs get lopped off, go to the healer in NA to replace your lost limbs, or at least pray to gods who will get you on the right material track. Prevention is the best medicine here. If you are stuck with them on a decent game, though? You're pretty screwed because a) no, there is no better safe option for changing your limbs than SoCM (or HM if you want to try emulating the UT4 golems) and b) there is no safe way to get your limbs destroyed, even if they are crazy weak (amethyst definitely doesn't fit this category), since there is no way to ensure your head is not harmed (mines, enemies, and I think even bear traps can lop it), nor that you won't simply take too much of a beating while waiting for your limbs to be targeted to keep going. If you have an amulet of lifesaving, you could try blowing yourself up with a mine or something but there are no guarantees that you won't fuck that up too (since if your head is lopped before you die, the amulet will fall off and fail to save your life).

That said, if you get any of your artificial limbs hacked off and drink some healing fluid or troll blood, you can get your human limbs back (max of one or two back per bottle, but loads better than none).

I think should you need to remove said limbs, traps are actually effective with the right preparations.
I think most importantly in the case of amethyst limbs, you would need to reduce their health down to red through fighting with monsters to make sure they come off easily. This is easily achieved if you have quite a few healing potions on you because they don't heal artificial limbs and will still heal your torso, head and groin.

Next you should probably find a very strong belt, helmet and body armor set. Having a wand of teleport or scroll will be very useful if you screw something up really bad with a bear trap. So, to remove the legs find a bear trap made of a very strong material (adamant maybe?) and remove your boots. Step into the bear trap and just mash directional buttons until the trap either breaks or the limb comes off. Now there are a few problems with bear traps, the biggest probably being getting your head caught as BDR said. That is where the scroll or wand of teleport comes in. Assuming you haven't got both your arms stuck of course, (not sure if this affects reading a scroll though). Also something big might just come along and start eating you while you're helpless so try to do this in a room where you have a key to lock the door(s).
Arms are a lot harder to remove, but with some luck you could try removing them by getting them stuck in a bear trap while trying to escape. An easier way would be mines. Have high END and/or some really powerful armor (but not fire resistance!), remove your gauntlets and just walk around the dwarven mine field for a while.
Also this should go without saying, but make sure you have the means to restore your limbs beforehand!
But as BDR said all this is really quite risky, so be careful when trying it!

I think you can use a scroll of golem creation to get rid of unwanted limbs, no?

That's true, but scrolls of golem creation tend to be rare. Another excellent method is wands of lightning. Those you'll find plenty of, and they tend to target limbs.

Hmm, good to know. The main problem is that although Silva tends to give me good limbs, sometimes I get crappy ones, or even get a good limb changed into a crappy one on really rare occasions. Also, some gods seem to never give me limbs made of certain materials that they're affiliated with.

One thing I'm wondering, how do you check what kind of limbs you currently have? Sometimes I forget, like if I save the game and come back to it.

A scroll of harden material or change material or golem creation should work.

Can you guys explain the golem creation thing more? So, you can create a golem out of one of your limbs if you don't like the limb material? Then what, you are limbless?

Yeah, you can use one of your limbs as the material for a golem. Doing so will remove the said limb.

Losing normal limbs can also be done by leprosy. A very unsafe way is to anger some gods that can teleport limbs away or mages that do the same. The best limb material IMHO is Phoenix Feather, because it grants insane value of 120 DEX and AGI. It gives a good chance of surviving melle with Sherarax and even beating her (I tried this 'bout dozen of times in real game and more than half of my attempts to kill Sherry in melle were succesful).

Leprosy is not recommended. Not only is limb-loss completely random, it'll also hit your stats. Angering Sophos is an interesting approach, and very do-able, points to Zulox for originality. It's really hard to find spell-casters that'll target limbs, and letting them take your limbs is dangerous, they'll probably kill you.

So does someone have a list of what your stats would be if you have all four limbs of various materials?

Valpurium seems like it would be great to have. In a test game when I was playing with Wizard Mode, I made all my limbs out of it. And I had 400 arm and leg strength, but 16 agility and dex.
With some decent gloves and boots, I could boost those stats up to around 30. Wouldn't that be good?

Or do you need the insane dex and agi from phoenix feather?

The stats per limb are the same as the stats of the material, which are listed on the wiki.

Besides, insane DEX+AGI > insane ASTR+LSTR.

Listed on the wiki?

For Valpurium, the stats shown are:

400 Strength and 4 Flexibility

So is that 400 L/ASTR and 4 Dex/Agi per limb then?

Because as I said, a starting character ends up with 400 L/ASTR and 16 Dex/Agi.
So the strength doesn't seem to stack... though I suppose it is just showing the 400 for each limb, instead of a combined total.

Meanwhile the Dex/Agi DOES stack?

I'm just a little confused about that.

Oh... also, being all shiny golden coloured is pretty badass.

Right, so to translate the limb DEX/AGI from the flexibility value you just multiply it by 4. The stats shown on the character sheet are the average of the stats of your limbs.

Okay, so then strength is average, Agi/Dex is total.

That will make it easier to see what I want to play with.

I guess you can't have limbs made out of liquid.

The AGI/DEX values are average as well, but since the value for both of the limbs is the same if the material is the same, it only shows the value they both are at.

In wizard mode, the limbs can be made out of anything. In a real game, nothing can be transformed into either gases or liquids.

Ah, I see. Well, I was just using Wizard Mode to test out stuff for the normal game. Seeing what things did, and what stats some stuff has. (Want to get home and play around with it some more).

The AGI/DEX values are average as well, but since the value for both of the limbs is the same if the material is the same, it only shows the value they both are at.

Er... but then, if all 4 limbs are valpurium, shouldn't my Dex/Agi just be 4 then?

The value is multiplied by 4 for each limb, not just the total.

Yeah, so then it's not an average for Agi/Dex, it's the total value of the limbs combined. 4 limbs with 4 flexibility gives me my 16 Agi/Dex.

If I had 2 limbs with 4, and 2 with 2, then I'd have 12, right?