Do You Want Your Possessions Identified? Let's Play NetHack

Make sure to tell us when the yaks eat you.

ASCII is the only option when playing the game the way it was meant to be played: on a VT102 in your dorm room.

That's why I'm not actually caving into my desire. Nethack is all about the complex interactions of stuff the DevTeam added to the game over the years; Linley's makes up for it lack of aforementioned complex interactions by being balls-to-the-wall hard. I'm terrible at both of them for completely different reasons.

Can I vote for the Geoduck tileset twice?

Let our descent into hell begin! (I mean this quite literally).



A bit of background information first. Look at the bottom row of the screen, showing our name, our dungeon level, alignment, and statistics. The stats are traditional D&D – strength (of which I have very little) helps you push, carry, and kill things. Dexterity helps you dodge, hit, and use things. Constitution helps you survive things, and will affect how many HP Daz (the 1st of her line) gains per level (it also affects how many HP is regenerated per turn). Intelligence is, as you might expect, the all important stat for a Wizard, and affects reading spellbooks, spell failure rates, energy regeneration. Wisdom, as Intelligence’s long-lost twin, affects spell point gain per level and energy regeneration. Charisma is integral to sexual satisfaction.

Note that stats don’t play a critcal role in Nethack, and there is no min-maxing – our character will be a maxed out �bermensch. There are two common ways to increase stats – the most straightforward way will be “drinking potions of gain ability”.

Due to the fact it’s fairly easy to change stats, your starting attributes aren’t important in relation to overall gameplay success. In short, our friend Daz can’t carry much and is very intelligent (Nethack hearkens back to the glory days of real fantasy, where men were men and elves lorded it over you pathetic humans with their superior IQs). Her constitution does seem unusually high for an Elven Wizard, which is a bright spot. To the right of her stats is her alignment (Nethack puts some effort into pretending that the “Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic” isn’t “Good/Neutral/Evil”, but not much.)

HP is the HP you know and love, and power is essentially spell points (no Vancian casting here, despite Nethack’s roots in early D&D). We see can also look at the turn count, gold, and dungeon level.

The game also shows the AC, or armor class. An executive summary of AC is that the lower the AC, the harder you are to hit and the less damage you sustain. This is really all you need to know, but here are some more details for the mechanically inclined among us. Nethack AC starts at ten, to a minimum of -127, and ACs above seldom encountered in normal gameplay. Each piece of armor (or other source of protection) reduces your armor class by a certain amount. In this case, my cloak decreases it by one. Until you reach zero, the lower your armor class, the harder you are to hit. Once you’ve reached an armor class of zero, lowering it further doesn’t affect how hard it is to hit you, but instead decreases the amount of damage you take.

Now, for my inventory – the quarterstaff will suffice for a little while, but I intend to replace it as soon as I can. The cloak of magic resistance is a very powerful item – it essentially renders me immune to a huge number of effects that would bring other classes to their knees. People often wish they had cloaks of magic resistance. My scrolls and potions aren’t good for much at all – their greatest value will be the fact that I’ll be able to rule them out in the future, and won’t find out which scroll is “destroy armor” when my cloak gets shredded. Don’t expect to see much out of the harp either.

All Wizards start with the rather ineffective spell of force bolt (the wand of striking can be used four times for exactly the same effect), and one other spell. Dez’s other spell, “Detect Unseen” will be useful significantly later on, but the high cost and failure rate will render it somewhat ineffectual for much of the game. The one bright spot in this starting inventory is the ring of warning - monsters that pose a threat, but are outside our visible range, will be denoted with a number based on how powerful the monster is. This helps avoid the situation of turning a corner in a hallway and coming face to face with an FOE.

My avatar is the “@” (blame the people that voted ASCII for this), and my pet cat “Autobahn” is the highlighted “F”. The red block is an open door, and the red “+” is a closed door. I’m standing on top of the staircase out of the dungeon, which is represented by a “<” (downstairs are “>”). Finally, the yellow “%” is food.

Note the game uses specific characters to denote entire classes of items. Potions will always be a flavor of an exclamation mark, while the percent sign is something you might eat.



Fortune cookies can be eaten for a pithy remark, but I find them most useful in taming animals. Their nutritional value is sadly limited.



The teal “(“ is a whistle. When I use it I get “You produce a high whistling sound.” This means that the whistle is a common whistle made out of tin, and of no use to me.



The yellow “:” is our first monster, a newt (the game categorizes them as lizards, and this I cannot forgive). They are as threatening as they sound. The “|” is a tombstone. Later on, we’ll get a chance to desecrate it, but not yet.



I kill and eat the newt, and move on. Monsters in Nethack will sometimes leave corpses when they die (bigger monsters tend to be more likely to leave corpses than smaller ones), providing you with not only nutrition, but other effects as well.

And of course, they also provide you with a thousand classic ways to kill yourself.

The “`” is a boulder. And yes, Nethack has block puzzles. Oh, does it have block puzzles.



But not today. I blast the boulder into smithereens with my force bolt.



For our effort, we’re treated to yet another boulder. This one is dealt with similar grace.

The pink “x” is a grid bug (from the Tron arcade game apparently, which is before my time). They move like a rook, and are dispatched with ease.



Our feline friend dropped a lichen corpse from an earlier encounter (usually cats will just steal your food). Lichen corpses are notable because they don’t rot and decay like other corpses. A Nethack rite of passage that all players go through is eating corpses that are too old – this is a ticket to a sick, sick death.



We go down the stairs to level two. Note the fashionable newt on the side.

Before I went downstairs, I dropped off my two spellbooks by the stairs to the second floor. Spellbooks are used for learning (and much later on, re-learning) spells, but they aren’t necessary to cast the spells. Nethack dungeons are persistent, so I’ll be able to go back for the books later. Right now though, they’re a lot of weight I don’t need (although I suppose you could throw them at something).



The door is locked. This means we need to search every square in the dungeon to find the right key to this door.



Or we could use the violent method. The teal “=” is a steel ring. I pocket it and move on – we won’t be wearing it for awhile, if at all.

Rings in Nethack provide (mostly, but not universally) useful effects. You do want to be conservative with them though – each ring increases your food consumption. As Wizards are dumped into the dungeon with no food at all, this is a major consideration.

One of the defining features of Roguelikes is how item identification works. When I find an item, such as a ring, a potion, or a weapon, the game will tell me the outward appearance (“a steel ring”), but not what it does. In order to determine the effects of the item, you need to either try it (which can be dangerous), or use a source of the spell “identify” (which are few and far between). In the case of rings, you can sometimes determine their effects by wearing them for a little while (if you are suddenly lifted up in the air for instance, you’ve found a ring of levitation), but there’s a catch – if equipment has a negative effect (such as lowering your statistics), it will often be cursed. If an item that you wear is cursed, you won’t be able to take it off again until you uncurse it or otherwise deal with the effect (for instance, the scroll of destroy armor I started with does provide a rather extreme way of dealing with cursed items you’re stuck to).

Any item in the game can be cursed. In many cases, the curse will not only prevent you from taking off the item, it will also change the item’s effect in a way you generally won’t like. For instance, a cursed scroll of light creates darkness. Conversely, blessed items often have an effect that’s enhanced in some manner.

Determining whether or not an item is cursed is a very important part of the game. If you’re playing a character of the “Priest” character class, you automatically detect this, but for those of us not so endowed, the method immediately available is to drop the item and watch what your pet does. If they are reluctant to move on top of a tile with an item in it, that means either the pet is playing mind games with you (never something to be ruled out), or that the item is cursed.

I also see the staircase down to another level in the dungeon. However, it’s generally good practice in Nethack to explore each level before going to the next one, so I leave it for now.



When I get hungry, my lichen corpse provides scant sustenance, but lets me keep going. This room contains a fountain – you can dip things in the fountain, or sip the water. There often benefits to this, but in true Nethack tradition, it will also kill you. My character is far too fragile for such nonsense right now, so I admire it and move on. (Luckily, Nethack has no thirst mechanic).



I do pick up the potion, shown by a “!”. The “Z” is a kobold zombie, and doesn’t pose a great threat to even my resources. When time comes for an Angband (another Roguelike) LP, Zs will be far, far scarier.

Eating undead seldom leads to positive results.



We find another staircase, a wand, and a potion. Periodically, you will hear dungeon noise in the message window, which is a good indication of the features or monsters on the level. Hearing someone cursing shopkeepers is especially useful, as it tells you to look around for a shop

I find it in the end, though it wasn’t easy. Unfortunately, not all doors are immediately visible in this game, and (right now), you have to use the search command next to the fake wall to find them (searching each wall for the one door masquerading as a wall is exactly as fun as it sounds). When we get more powerful, my “Detect Unseen” spell will accelerate this by instantly revealing hidden doors and passages, but right now it’s a slog. This is one of the features most likely to turn a new player off of the game.

The green “F” is a lichen, which I kill.

This shop only sells potions unfortunately, and I don’t have much money. Later on, when we’ve collected more, we’ll return here, but now is not the time.

I kill the jackal (“d”), and eat his body. Jackals have some of the most meat on them of all the early monsters, so things went well.

I also gain a level. Although this one doubled my HP and power, levels don’t play much of a role in Nethack beyond the very early game. Trying to grind for experience is a sure way to die, of boredom if nothing else. Just go through each dungeon level, and your experience will take care of itself. Mechanics like hunger also prod you to keep moving.

Just in case that wasn’t a clear enough message about how the game was meant to be played, the power of the monsters created is directly affected by your own level as well as the dungeon level. Thus, grinding means that you’ll encounter powerful monsters without the equipment to deal with them.





The first staircase I choose takes me to a special dungeon branch called the “Gnomish Mines”. At this point, I can either continue down through the Gnomish Mines for some nice rewards, or go back up and continue down the main dungeon. The Gnomish Mines are almost always worth clearing out, but I’m not ready for them yet. We’ll take the other path, and return here later on.



There we go.



The room in the north gives me another potion and some gold, and then we continue eastward. Autobahn devours a red mold, which won’t attack me on its own, but damages you if m�léed. I prefer to avoid this, but Autobahn has no such inhibitions. My lichen corpses are a sad bastion against the insidious hunger creeping over me.



This room contains a cram ration (“%”, which provides enough nutrition to tide me over) and a scale mail “[“. As many of you have likely guessed by now, metallic armor inhibits spellcasting (and weighs a great deal), so I pass on it.



Note the comments in the message window about feeling tough, meaning my constitution has been increased by a point. This is another way to increase statistics. Performing certain actions will exercise a stat and increments a counter. Periodically, the game will reset the counters, and then randomly change your stat (the higher the counter has gotten, the more likely they stat will increase). For instance, pushing boulders around exercises the strength statistic, and will make it more likely that your strength will increase later on.

Of course, this process also works in reverse. If you eat too much and become Satiated, this will abuse your dexterity statistic. This can cause the game to revise the stat downward, so you have to be prepared.

The next room yield dollars and drinks.



We are blessed here with an armor shop, which is of course the shop least useful to Dez. However, it may have a few trinkets.

There are two objects of interest to me. One is the pair of boots in the southwest corner, and the other is the apron on the east side. The boots are determined to be either jumping, water walking, or speed. The other armor interferes with my spellcasting, so I cast those aside.

The reason I know this is “price identification.” A shopkeeper will charge the same amount for items (with a few exceptions) whether or not they’re identified. So by looking at the price they charge for a generic set of boots, you can then check a guide (or http://nethack.roy.org/clippy/clippy.pl ) to see which boots would go for that price. This is especially helpful when narrowing down armor and weapons, and can also tell you the cursed status of an item.

I realize it’s asking a lot to keep a price guide on hand for playing the game, and it’s generally not all that necessary (though it does give you an edge). The sole exception to this is scrolls of identification – they’re always the lowest priced scroll. Remembering that does make a big difference in gameplay.



Unfortunately, I only have enough money for one item, and there is something even more important. The apron is mediocre armor, and won’t supplant my cloak of magic resistance. However, it has three very useful situational abilities. The first is that it helps with alchemy (more on this much later). The second is that it is one of the very few ways to get resistance to acid, which makes fighting certain enemies much less dangerous. Finally, it confers poison resistance, and poison is the bane of the early game of Nethack. Poison has a multitude of unsavory properties. At worst, it can be an insta-kill – one of the most unsporting deaths in Nethack is deadly poison (I’ve lost strong characters to a single hit by a poisoned arrow, or falling into a trap with poisoned spikes. It’s one of the very few deaths I feel is genuinely unfair in this game). Failing that extreme, poison can also lower your strength stat, sometimes significantly. This will throttle your damage output and carrying capacity, and is often going to be the prelude to death by some other hazard. The apron will allow me to negate this threat fairly easily, as will soon be seen. Later, when I have the money (they both cost 66 gold), I’ll come back for the boots.



Unfortunately, we pick a fight with the mimic pretending to be armor. Luckily, we are victorious. Uncharacteristically, Nethack does not engage in the favored CRPG tactic of making mimics far more powerful than anything else you’ve seen so far. Otherwise, Iskenderun would have a few more pieces for his used armor dealership.



Foods supplies low. This message is apparently very witty to people that have played Gauntlet.



We eat our last food, but the critical food shortage means our hearts are heavy, and each step is painful. I’m not sure how much further we can go on.

Next time – we see how much further we can go on.

Thanks, fixed this.

Any feedback is welcomed -- one thing I'm particularly working on is standardizing my screenshot format and image cropping, as I was unhappy with some of these results.

I think if there's one thing I learned about Roguelikes it's that I enjoy reading about other people playing them more than playing them myself.

Zorkmids!?

Holy crap, I knew wizards were EZ-mode but god damn that's a lot of kickass powerful stuff you're starting out with there.

I agree that poisoned traps are probably the only truly unfair death in the game, but they're almost exclusively dangerous in the very early game. Not much you can do about them but laugh it off and reroll.

Even worse than dying to a poison trap (or whatever) is to watch your pet fall and die in one. Or get crushed by a boulder. Or anything else, really, leaving you stranded with no line of defense.

Speaking of which, take that whistle. Sure it's not magical, but every little bit helps to keep your pet in line.

Well, they are certainly EZ mode once you get to at least mid-game. Pretty high death rate at the start though, at least when I play them.

As the other poster mentioned, the equipment is wonderful, but doesn't always quite compensate for the incredible wizardly infant mortality. I've found it much harder to get a Wizard to the mid-game than a Valkyrie, Samurai, or even an Archeologist.

Amusingly enough, the particular kit for my Wizard is actually pretty low quality in comparison. I got one decent ring, and the rest was essentially chaff. I've had some truly sick starts, such as a ring of conflict, a ring of slow digestion, and a wand of polymorph. Oh, and a magic marker.

These starts aren't the ones I win with though.

I'm okay with the standard strength ravaging poisonous traps and enemies -- that's just part of the game. It's the deadly poison that I dislike.

Yeah, losing your pet is a big problem for a Wizard. It's especially fun if it's in the starting room.

I've tried, and I've seldom found it worthwhile. I can always wake them up with my harp.

This is Brickroad, reminding you to have your pet spayed or neutered.

Part 2 --



Cave spiders, while not a huge threat, can be annoying. They hide under items, so they’ll surprise you (or in this case, my cat.) They can be tricky to hit, but I’m able to survive. I think that my constitution (usually high for this race/class combo) has been giving me an edge here.



We score! I stumble upon a (Autobahn-tested) pointy hat! This essential piece of a Wizzardly Wardrobe has two effects when worn by a member of the chosen order. It increases my charisma by two (by announcing to everyone just who and how important I am), and it grants clairvoyance (more on this soon!)



The red k is a Kobold, the filthy little creatures that those of us familiar with D&D (i.e., all of us) know. Speaking of D&D, because I am playing an Elf, I have infravision, which allows me to see enemies with body heat in darker areas, at a longer range than normal. This will be useful a bit later.

There isn’t much else to say about Kobolds, other than they aren’t good to eat. Not even Autobahn is interested, and she never misses an opportunity to steal my food.



This won’t stop me from trying.



By wearing the apron I purchased earlier, I’m able to safely eat kobold corpses. In Nethack, you character can gain certain abilities by eating corpses of monsters with those abilities. For instance, eating a yeti (an icy monster) can provide for me cold resistance. In the case of kobolds, and many other poisonous creatures, I can get intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic, which is provided by equipment) poison resistance, allowing me to bypass all negative effects of poison anything. (One Nethack oddity is that the other ability of my apron, acid resistance, cannot be acquired this way).

Now, of course, the problem with eating poisonous corpses to get poison resistance is twofold –

1. It’s a percent chance, and thus not guaranteed. Doing this is likely to ravish your stats.
2. Even if you do manage to get poison resistance, it still gets added after the poison has taken its toll.

However, by wearing the apron, which provides me with extrinsic poison resistance, I can safely eat poisonous corpses. Once the random number goddess decides to gift me with intrinsic poison resistance, I’ll be able to laugh at orcs and their puny poisoned arrows, and eat feasts of kobold thigh.



I’ve found an altar. Anhur is hungry

Altars are powerful locations in Nethack, and finding an altar of my own alignment this early is a huge stroke of luck. Expect us to come back here several times.

The first thing I do with my new toy is dump all my stuff on top of it. Altars react to items based on their blessed/cursed status, thus revealing the status of the item. This provides us with more convenient method to determine which items are safe then letting our cat stomp on them.

Speaking of identifying items, there was that wand we found earlier…



One of the features of Nethack that some people love and some people see as yet another reason you need spoilers to play this bloody game is finding out information about wands by using them to write things (if you’re playing on a public server (more on this later), they can even be obscene).

In this case, my wand blasts the ground with unholy fire, thus telling me I have a wand of fire. This is a really good find – while I can use it to attack enemies, wands of fire and lightning have an even better property we’ll be exploiting soon.

Note that before testing the wand through engraving, you always want to write something on the ground first. Some wands only react if there’s a pre-existing message. For instance, a wand of polymorph (oh so much more on them later) will change the original message to something different.

Speaking of spoilers, the official reference site of this LP is http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/ .



It isn’t obvious in a screenshot LP, but parts of the dungeon level that I haven’t been to yet have already been mapped. At random intervals, my clairvoyant hat will reveal portions of the dungeon in a limited radius around me. This is exceptionally helpful for pointing out secret doors and passages, and will make the game far less tedious (my least favorite part of the game is methodically searching each wall in a dungeon level, trying to find the secret door that leads to the room with the down staircase.)



The blue “e” is a floating eye. I could whack it with my staff, but I don’t feel like it right now. Zap!



A taste of force bolt leaves me with that rarest of finds – a floating eye corpse that’s too far away from Autobahn for her to steal!



Eating the floating eye corpse gives me the ability telepathy – it’s turned off normally, but when my character is blinded, it will allow her to sense the location of all mindful monsters on the map.



I’m selling these fine leather jackets, would you like to buy one? (They were added to Nethack for the benefit of the archeologist class. That and the fedora.)

The “#” is a sink (seriously). We’ll be having fun with those later.



The “^” is an energy trap. Had I not been wearing my cloak of magic resistance, my spell points would have been reduced to zero. Things like this is why I can’t wear the apron in normal gameplay.

Um, am I interrupting something?



Luckily, neither dogs, bats, or giant levitating disembodied eyes can manipulate doorknobs.

(Of course, the characters in Jurassic Park also thought this).



Here, in a completely premeditated maneuver for educational purposes, I valiantly strike a member of a battalion of floating eyes with my own stick.

I am immediately paralyzed for several turns, and Autobahn follows suit. Luckily, floating eyes do not attack directly, and no other monsters wandered in to take full advantage of my helpless state. Accidentally hitting floating eyes is a wonderful way to get yourself killed, all the more bitter because after the first time, you know full well it was your own bloody fault.

Note that many Roguelikes have floating eyes that behave in very similar manners. However, you have to be careful! For instance, in Angband, the eyes can attack to paralyze, without requiring you to strike first. In a Roguelike similar to Nethack, ADOM, the eyes not only paralyze, but I believe they can attack on their own. ‘Ware the marching eyes!

(I’m hoping that if I pretend this was for educational purposes, people will believe I made this incredibly stupid move on purpose).



While wait for my cat to recover (I swear she stood there paralyzed twice as long as actually necessary, simply to annoy me), I deal with a shrieker, whose attack pattern consists of yelling at me while I attack it. (In Nethack, shriekers are most notable by having corpses that are not poisonous, but can convey poison resistance. Unfortunately, I am not blessed with a corpse).



I forgot to grab a screenshot of this, but earlier on I picked up a leash. You can attach leashes to your pets (I, as the LPer, reserve the privilege to make the inevitable S&M jokes later on) in order to keep them within a close range. In general, this makes them less effective at attacking enemies, but is helpful for ordering your pet around (for instance, when you need to get them somewhere quickly).

Sharp eyes will also notice that I’m hungry. Sharp memories will know that I’ve eaten all my lichen corpses and cram rations. This won’t end well.



Nethack’s hunger mechanic fulfills its purpose by forcing me to descend deeper, rather than playing with the altar.



Nethack then fulfills its reputation as the very original “game that hates you” by strategically placing a pit trap where my cat will fall into it. For now, I am a very lonely wizard in a very dark dungeon. I’m frankly surprised that I didn’t get pulled into the pit by the leash myself.

We’ll find Autobahn on a lower dungeon level, but depending on how long she’s roamed free, she might go feral and attack me. If this happens, I can bribe her with cookies back to my side. At the moment though, I have more pressing concerns. Note that losing one’s pet is a big problem for a Wizard – it forces me to engage all the monsters myself, which is a very fast way to get killed.



Such as my stomach. In my despair with no one to turn to, I kneel down and pray for guidance. I am blessed with manna from heaven and encouraged to go on my way.

Those of you who have played Earthbound will know of a similar mechanic.



There are good reasons not to take out your unresolved issues on doors in this game. We’ve just demonstrated one of them, as the door promptly self-destructs. In the future, I’ll use Force Bolt to blast the doors open. Well, actually I’ll probably just forget and kick them again, but I should use Force Bolt.

Playing ADOM for so long (where door traps are nastier than Nethack ever dreamed) means that even in Nethack, I stand diagonal to the door to kick them down when possible. There is no reason for me to do this other than inertia. ADOM makes Nethack look like sweetness and desire.



Or so I thought, until I too fell into a pit trap, and ended up two dungeon levels lower. Note that this is inevitably not going to be the level my cat ended up on because the game likes to see me cry.



I continue on my way, like a little lost lamb looking for her little lost cat. I see some gnomes, friendly sentient creatures whom I promptly kill and eat.



Two things –

First off, Nethack has random existing engravings scattered throughout the dungeon. Most of them are pithy quotes, but some are meaningful. This is one of the meaningful ones, and we’ll see why later on.

Second, this level has two staircases going up. What to do?



It’s that time. There are holes (“^”s). Next time, it will be our woman’s job to put things in them.

wow. this game is super confusing to follow.

Is there something you'd suggest to make it easier? Would you like more screenshots of each individual action? I'm genuinely curious.

After playing through the game, I'm beginning to rethink using ASCII characters. Tomorrow has already been written up, but on Wednesday, I'm going to play through the next session using tiles rather than ASCII. I think that will help people unfamiliar with the game follow what I'm doing. After a day or two of tiles, I'll ask for opinions on the contrast.

i just don't get what i'm looking at. I'd love for you to make a legend for the map or something, just so i can have a handy reference without having to scroll way up. or like paint in lines pointing at what i should be looking at in the screen or something.

Maybe something like this?

Here is a partial legend:

@ - Humanoid, when highlighted or underlined depending on system = you
. - dungeon floor in a room
▒ - Hallway
+ - Closed Door
� (larger and red in above images) - Open door
│┌ ┐└ ┘─ - Walls
< - Stairway up
> - Stairway down
⌠ - Fountain
# - Sink
^ - Trap
! - Potion
? - Scroll
+ - Spellbook (yes, same character as closed door but different colors)
/ - Wand
) - Weapon
[ - Armor
" - Amulet
= - Ring
A through Z and a through z plus : ; ' & ] ~ - Things to kill (there are exceptions like your pet, don't kill that).

Just popping in to say that the ASCII text isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Hooray!(?)

I can take the static images, but something about how it moves when I play just makes my head ache.

EDIT: Oh, if only someone had made a graphics pack for this game! Oh, wait.

Oh yeah...trapped doors, or more appropriately, what hides behind them are a pain in the ass in IVAN.

A not untypical encounter will be a locked door, which when kicked to "unlock" it will explode in your face, probably blowing off an arm or leg and destroying most of your equipment. Then the kamikaze gunpowder dwarf will run at you shrieking glory to their particular (random) god and then blow up in your face. I tend to use fireball wands as door openers a lot in IVAN if I have them...

And so we return to the world of Sokoban, a block pushing wonderland fraught with deadly peril and copious amounts of food. Alone and friendless, we wonder what’s next.

Quick Note – When cropping screenshots, I’ll generally remove the parts of the textbox that don’t apply to that particular moment. Thus, any lines you see at the top are going to be left there for a reason, and should probably be read.





I’m going to try and get tile versions of each Sokoban level. While I’m generally fine with ASCII characters, I think higher contrast in the tile version works better when showing off the Sokoban puzzles.

Because I love you so much, in addition to narrating my adventures, I’m going to give a blow by blow account of my block pushing. You can find it here -- http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/soko-331.html. I didn’t feel compelled to repeat in the LP a Sokoban solution I followed religiously. The goal is to push a boulder into each of the pit traps blocking the way to the stairs up (there are more boulders than pits). Each level contains a fair amount of guaranteed treasure without disproportionately strong monsters, making this excellent for early Wizards.

A few notes – Sokoban works by different rules than the rest of the game. Neither the player nor monsters are able to teleport (which generally works to our advantage). You also aren’t able to push boulders diagonally. Secondly, the entire map is revealed upon entering Sokoban, rather than in bits and pieces as you explore. Later on, I’ll detail more of the quirks of Sokoban.



First off, I collect both a wand and rations of food. Sokoban is guaranteed to contain quite a bit of food, as well as several wands. This will essentially end our nutritional problems in the foreseeable future.



A monkey tries to steal my stave and run away. He fails.



He does manage to steal a potion. When I blast him with my mighty magic, it also manages to shatter the potion bottle. With my luck, that was probably a potion of gain ability or something similarly awesome.



There are two scrolls in this alcove. Prior knowledge of the game means that I know these are scrolls of earth. Scrolls of Earth will drop boulders all around the character, which can be both an escape mechanism, and a source of spare boulders (for instance, if you destroy too many boulders, or push too many into corners). Using it in Sokoban comes at a price however.



I pick up a tin on my boulder pushing crusade.



One of the enduring mysteries of this LP is what kind of corpse this unfortunate creature was. It was created when a monster spawned in one of the pits, and then when trying to escape, fell into the next one. The flavor of pit trap used in this level simply damages you when you walk over it, and leaves you vulnerable for a few turns while you try and climb out.



Oh, it’s a beautiful nymph! I’ll go hit on her. This cannot possibly end badly.



Taking off my clothes is a promising start.



Unfortunately, she doesn’t stop with that, and continues to loot my still living body. This I cannot accept, and I raise my hand in defiance.

Note that nymphs are infamously annoying in Nethack, because once they steal your items, they’ll immediately teleport clear across the level. You have to decide whether or not to just give up, or try and chase them. Chasing them often makes the problem worse, as they pick you dry. In Sokoban, things are much easier going because teleportation isn’t allowed, so it’s easier to corner them.

Nymphs do have some positive value though, because they can steal cursed equipment that’s stuck on your character. As they don’t attack directly, it’s safe to approach them without anything in your inventory (including weapons). When they steal your items, their only choice will be the equipped cursed items, thus freeing you from the burden.

Of course, not attacking directly doesn’t mean they won’t throw your own potions at you, or zap your own wands. One of my most frustrating deaths was a nymph stealing my wand of death (bonus points for figuring out what it does), and then zapping me with it. That went exactly as well as it sounded.



I eventually manage to kill the nymph, and recover my equipment. Note that I take a risk when I use Force Bolt on nymphs – as we saw before, this spell will break glass things, such as the mirrors nymphs often carry. And we all know that breaking a mirror means bad luck, so that can lead to trouble down the road.

Another Nymph draws near!



This time, she stole my weapon. However, I managed to take her down without magic. I have done well in defeating the nymph.

Note that while this character will eat bloody near anything, I won’t eat nymph corpses. They provide a certain attribute called teleportitis – which causes the player to teleport to a random location on the current level ever 50 to a 100 turns. While some people swear by the ability of teleportitis extricate the player from deadly situations, I find it to be far more trouble than it’s worth. However, later on we’ll gain the ability to control our teleportation, in which case teleportitis is very attractive indeed.



As we finish up our dalliances with the nymphs, we then encounter a far less attractive enemy, a group of hill orcs. Orcs are generally not generally dangerous enemies (especially when compared to the original Rogue), but they do appear in groups of three or four, which can make things more difficult (especially if they manage to surround you). Moreover, they will often use poisoned weapons, which can drain your strength or kill you instantly.

The orcs also helpfully demonstrated for me that enemies take no account of anyone between them and the player when throwing things. They’ll fill their ally with arrows and daggers all day long if you let them (this is another reason to try to herd them into hallways, rather than letting them ambush you in a room).



Gollum lied. Orcses taste very good indeed.



For those following along at home, I though it might be helpful to include a show of my current inventory to keep track of what’s going on (see Brickroad, I did keep the whistle).



Before going up to the next level, I drop some of it in the corner to pick up on my way back (if I survive that long). This includes the potions of confusion, the mirrors, and the whistle. I also identified the pine wand as a wand of digging and the hexagonal wand as a wand of light. More on these later.





The next level of Sokoban amps the difficulty even further. The pit traps have evolved into actual holes in the level (like the holes that Autobahn and myself got dumped into in the first place). Falling into one of them will take you back a level or two, and do a bit of damage.



The ring of warning indicates a rather large welcoming party in the room containing the stairs up. In a normal game, I’d just lead my pet into the room and then shut him in to deal with the monsters. Unfortunately, this has been nixed.



We have a close encounter with a leprechaun. They work like nymphs except that they go after gold rather than items. This makes them far, far less irritating. However, that doesn’t say much.





Oh, and they hit back. This leprechaun helpfully downed a potion of invisibility, and took me down to half HP. Eating the corpses pose the same problem as nymph corpses (note that this is one of unusual cases where your pet will eat something that you shouldn't. In most circumstances, if your cat will eat it, it's fine for you too).

Tins are an interesting feature of Nethack, and we’ll see more on them as the game goes on. They’re scattered throughout the dungeon, and each contain meat of a given monster, and once you find a tool called a tinning kit, you can make your owned tinned meat from monster corpses. Eating a tin of given monster meat will grant any of the intristics or attributes of the monster, but with negligible nutrition. However, tinned monster meat is comparatively safe to consume. Even if the meat is poisonous, rotten, or both, eating a tinned version will at most only make you sick for a few turns, rather than draining your stats or killing you. (There are a few specific monsters that kill you if you eat them, even tinned, but this fact is telegraphed well in advance. Note also that tins will always warn you about what kind of monster meat you’re eating before you actually consume it).

This means, for instance, you can tin the meat of a kobold zombie, and then eat it for a chance at poison resistance. Even though the corpse would have killed you seven ways to Sunday, the tin will only make you vomit. Moreover, later in the game as the monsters get bigger, you might be too full to actually eat the corpse. By tinning it, you can save it for later and still get the benefits. Some people even like to make a show of tinning important monster corpses as a kind of collection (“See my tin of meat of the chromatic dragon?”)

This tin contained spinach, which is a special case – you can only find spinach in tins you find laying around, rather than the homemade variety. Eating spinach, in addition to the unusually high nutritional content will increase your strength by a point. This makes them very valuable in the early game, especially for our fragile little Dez.



I really don’t like the look of all those monsters. I break the door down and brace myself.



The first few monsters were garter snakes, which aren’t a problem. Then I have to start dealing with orcs. I’d like to amend what I said earlier – orcs aren’t dangerous except in large numbers. In this case, to conserve mana, I switch to blasting them with wands of striking, rather than force bolt.



More loot, and some human corpses. Since I’m an elf, eating the human corpses wouldn’t be cannibalism, but this one has aged too much to be appetizing.



In the spirit of a Fire Emblem LP, here’s a screenshot of my increase to Wisdom. This image serves no other purpose then to make me feel better for not taking pictures of every level up.



I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place here. Hill orcs to the west of me, a dwarf (the “h”, for humanoid) and a Mordor orc to the right of me, and only two shots of force bolt left. This really doesn’t look fun.



I dispatch the hill orcs first, so I at least have somewhere to run. The dwarf has been doing a number on me though – note the low HP and spell points. This is getting really, really ugly.



Fortunately, I am able to prevail through exhausting my wands of striking.

You may notice the hunger status of Satiated in the bottom of the screen, indicating that I’ve eaten more than enough recently. Different Roguelikes deal with people overeating in different ways. In Angband, you’ll end up being gorged, and given a significant speed penalty for a short time. In ADOM, you simply can’t eat another bite while satiated. In many console Roguelikes, you can eat as much as you want, but it simply doesn’t do anything after a simple point.

Nethack has its own elegant solution to the problem. If you eat to much, you die instantly.



The horde of orcish troops has not yet been exhausted, though I certainly am. He keeps coming.



At this point, I give up and take a breather in the lower level, waiting for my HP and power to restore. This is a fairly slow process, so I kill time by walking from the upstairs to the downstairs and back.



Recharged, I give things another go. While all the ASCII characters look intimidating (though after playing Nethack long enough, e-mail addresses look intimidating), this isn’t too bad. The yellow F is a yellow mold and the green b an acid blob (both passive and harmless). The blue o is the last hill orc standing. The three Ss are garter snakes, also harmless. We have a blue floating e, and three human zombies. Finally, we have the red M the mummy. Especially one at a time, this is doable.

(Note – unfortunately, doing the monsters legends like this is very tedious and time consuming. In giant swarms of monsters I’ll bite the bullet and make them, but only in special cases).



The snakes are taken care of, and then the acid blob. Since acid blobs don’t attack, I simply stand there for awhile, recovering further before continuing.



And then the Orc reads a scroll of create monster. Or, might I say, “create lots and lots of monsters.” Remember what I said about doable? I’m going to amend that.

We’ll return to this vale of tears tomorrow.

EEK! ROTHE!

I hateses rothes. =(

You might as well put that on a keyboard macro, because it's a phrase that's useful (and probably will be used) again and again.