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

how the HELL do you do ascii block puzzles? my hat is off, sir!

Just wait until we get to cockatrices.

And I actually used tiles for most of the block puzzle bit, and only turned on ASCII for screenshots.

I seem to recall that eating too much in ADOM will give you an "are you sure you want to do that?" prompt, and then if you do it, you have a chance to choke and die.

Then again, I've never gotten very far in any roguelike other than DoomRL's easy mode, and ChessRogue.

Under the nethack options menu you can set what character the boulder is. I find the block puzzles much easier if you set it to something other than the default `, I use the numeral zero.

I played ADOM a lot, and it just doesn't let you eat too much. Nethack does give you a warning if you approach the limit though, and gives you a chance to stop most of the time (unless you're really dancing on the line).

Oh, and for what it's worth, I generally like rothes, because they're a fairly substantial early corpse.

Edit --

I actually feel that Nethack is actually fairer than ADOM or Crawl (though not as fair as Angband). ADOM has much nastier and unpredictable traps in comparison to Nethack, and even more brutal a clock. The late game is also far more dangerous than Nethack's comparatively tame endgame. My experience with ADOM has been that I ended up in cases where progressing was either very difficult or impossible. When I die in ADOM, it tends to feel much like my own fault than Nethack or Angband.


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For instance, imagine the above situation where my character is facing an orc, and tries to blast them with a magic missile. My finger slips, and instead of hitting right, I hit up. This means that the magic missile is going to bounce between the two falls, going through me each time.

In Nethack, the worst case scenario is that you get hit by your own magic missile twice, which will generally not kill you (note that, especially later on, you're likely to have equipment to render this completely harmless). In ADOM, this will destroy you. I've lost a half dozen of my best characters to this simple mistake, and even in the cruel world of Roguelikes, it's more frustrating than challenging. (Now, this doesn't mean I don't like ADOM. If I didn't like it, I'd never have gotten far enough for this to be such a problem. But it does make it frustrating).

Starting from the top left –

We have “p” which is a rock pincer (fairly weak, but they like to hide), a “d” which is a little dog (this can be nasty, and one of your starting pets), and a “:” for iguana (harmless). The next row has a monkey (we’ve seen them before) and a gas spore (more on this soon).

The next row we have a golden naga hatchling (they can be tricky, but their corpses can convey helpful intrinsics, and they aren’t too hard), a housecat (kittens evolve into these), and the bloody Mordor orc whose fault this is in the first place.

Then we have something hidden, an acid blob (another passive monster), and a rothe (they can be pretty mean in the early game, especially since they often have friends). Next line we have an imp, and finally three rats in a column.

The saving grace is that we can feed cookies to the housecat and the dog to shanghai them into killing some of the monsters for us.

I take the opportunity to fight the monsters, and fire off a force bolt at the orc while he was in the same file with me. Unfortunately, it turns out the imp wasn’t actually hostile until I blasted him with pure magical energy. Even for chaotics, you don’t want to attack peaceful monsters.



My next step is to tame the cat to deal with some of the weaker monsters in the room, and block off the doorway.



While our cat deals with the monsters, I eat one of the naga corpses. The fact that it said “You feel sick” indicates that it was old enough to become deadly in the near future.



I figure I should name the housecat eating all those monsters for me, so I choose the second entry in the thread, Guido.



The rock pincer promptly jumps to the ground and lays its teeth into Guido, killing it. Well, that’s that.

The red “@”, another humanoid, is a werejackal. These monsters are not fun to deal with – they do high melee damage, and can summon friends. As Guido found out to my despair, they can also use weapons while in humanoid form.



I manage to avenge my adopted cat, but exhaust my mana reserves again. The reason that this problem has been cropping up again and again is that I lost my pet, the normal Wizardly way to deal with enemies. At this point in the game, I’m just not well-built enough to machine gun monsters down with impunity, and keep running into this problem.

I help myself to a mummy wrapping, and move on to round three.





Let us continue this fantastic journey in the world of rocks!



Unfortunately, I mistyped, and accidentially moved one of my rocks into the corner of the room. Worse yet, that blocks the access route for getting behind other boulders in order to push them around. I blast my force bolt at it.

Now, there is a consequence to this. When you do things in Sokoban like destroy boulders, read scrolls of Earth, etc (we’re going to have an outtakes session where Goofus shows us all the things not to do in Sokoban), you take a penalty to your luck as a punishment. Luck effects a great deal of things (accuracy, your ability to dodge, how much damage you take, etc), and one of the most notable is dealings with your god. IF your luck is negative (like mine now is), religious relations become much trickier, and they aren’t as likely to help you out.

This is well and good, but I feel Nethack drops the ball by not actually indicating to the player that they’re getting punished for something. The luck stat is notoriously subtle, and there’s no good reason to make the connection. The game should really put a message like “you feel like you are behaving inappropriately” when you do something wrong to at least leave a clue.

Anyhow, we take the hit and move on.



The Y diagonally from me is an ape, from whom I devolved. These suckers will murder me if I get too close. Fortunately, while they can’t fit through the walls to move at me diagonally, my spells don’t share their difficulties. (Apes hunt in packs apparently, and the “1”s are also apes outside my visible range.)

My strategy is essentially to stay seated, and zap them whenever they move my field of fire. This actually worked sickeningly well, well enough to almost feel unfair.

Then, I did what I do whenever I think something I’m doing might be unfair. I thought of soldier ants.



Eliwood, eat your heart at. Half of my stats increased in one go.

One of the benefits of Sokoban, especially for Wizards, is that each time you push boulders around, it exercises your strength, thus making ensuring that you’ll probably see several stat increases as you finish the area. Characters with lower starting strength tend to benefit most, due to the increased likelihood of increasing lower stats, diminishing returns for each additional point of strength, and just plain hitting the maximum.

The increase to my already quizzically high constitution also helped a lot, and the increase to Wisdom will provide a minuscule increase to power regeneration.

Nethack giveth, and Nethack taketh away. You know how Etrian Odyssey meant that you could never look at woodland creatures the same way again? How deer and antelope became rather frightening, and god forbid you even touch a squirrel?

Well, Nethack does this with insects. They’re fast, hard to hit, come in packs, and hurt like the hell beasts they are. I’m quickly surrounded by very dangerous fire ants (“a”s), whom hit hard and set your scrolls and equipment on fire. To improve matters, I’m flat out of magic.

I could pray, but breaking that boulder hurt my luck, which makes asking the divine for help a dicey proposition.

So I do what anyone would do, and write a message to future generations on the floor. Namely, “Elbereth.” For those not up to date on your Elvish, Elbereth is part of a hymn to the divine being Varda in the Lord of the Rings canon, and Frodo invokes the word as defense against the Nazgul.

In any event, if you write “Elbereth” on the ground, most monsters in Nethack will flee from your location, and will not melee you. This serves as an excellent second-to-last resort. However, if you write in the dust with your finger, or even engrave with something sturdier (such as a diamond), the word will be munged after spending a few turns on the square, removing the protection. Thus, it should mainly be used to give yourself a bit of space to run away. Note also that monsters with spells or ranged attacks can still attack you indirectly, so you have to watch out for that.

However, if you have a wand of fire (or of lightning), you can (for all intents and purposes) permanently engrave it and behave more aggressively. In this case, I can stand on my single square, and attack the ants as they come by, leaving myself reasonably safe.



Since I won’t be attacked while on this tile, I switch from my staff to a dagger I found on the previous level (I was confident it was uncursed by observing another monster wielding it). While I’m very inaccurate with daggers and they do less damage than staves, there are very good reasons for me to want to practice using them.

Note that regardless of my weapon, this is a very tedious process. I only get one attack when a fire ant comes adjacent to me, as they immediately flee when they come close. Moreover, fire ants are very hard to hit. There are reasons I don’t like to resort to doing this.



Finally, success! After you use particular weapons a certain number of times, you can choose to increase your skill in that weapon, improving your accuracy. Thus by poking the ants with my toothpick, I was able to up my dagger ability to become slightly less nightmarishly inaccurate. There are four skill levels (at least as far as I’m concerned, Monks are an oddity and), “Unskilled”, “Basic”, “Skilled”, and “Expert”. Which categories you can increase your skill level in, and how much you can increase your skill level in that category, is determined by your character class. For instance, as a Wizard, I can enhance short swords, but not long swords.

There is a limit to how many skills you can improve at a given character level, which is why I didn’t improve my quarterstaff skill (due to the limited long term potential of the weapon).

You might ask “why did you use bare handed combat enough to have the chance to increase it?” The answer is – remember this?



It turns out that after that happened, I never remembered to re-equip my quarterstaff, and had been brawling this entire time. (This is far from the first game where I’ve forgotten to re-equip weapons, and I pray I’m not the only one). This explains a lot of the earlier game, particularly how the leprechaun was able to beat me up.

That rather humiliating fact aside, you can also enhance different categories of spells. Enhancing spell categories will decrease the failure rate of spells, and for some spells, going from basic to skilled will change the effects. In order to preserve skill slots, I won’t enhance attack spells until I find one that benefits from this, and I haven’t used Detect Unseen enough to improve my skill level in that category (and thus reduce my failure rate).



In any case, enough with the boring mechanical things. I finish off the fire ants, and one ape that was still hanging out.





In the staircase room of doom, I tame two animals. I felt bad about the last pet lasting such a short time, so re-using the name “Guido” was only natural. (Also note my strength improved in the interim as well. (Quick visual notes – all friendly animals (i.e., pets) are highlighted to make them stand out).



Dwarf lords can wield weapons, and I’ve found that high level dwarves to be unusually deadly toward pets. I take the unprecedented step of actually stepping in to defend my pets at a non-trivial personal risk. My reward is a wand of teleportation, which (outside of Sokoban) is very useful in emergencies, teleporting either monsters or myself as the situation warrants.

I leave Guido the 2nd and 2.5th on this level for the time being. I’ll go get them after finishing the Sokoban puzzle in the next room (but before taking on the last roomful of monsters). Having pets wandering around while you do the Sokoban puzzles can be a pain, as they end up behind the boulders and prevent you from filling the holes.





After I complete the last puzzle, there’s a room full of monsters to take out. In one of the three small rooms to left, there will be a prize.



One of the pieces of starting equipment I’ve been neglecting is my ring of protection from shapechangers. These rings prevent monsters from changing their form, and lycanthropic monsters can’t summon help or infect me. In this case, I’m going to start wearing it due to my much improved food situation, I’ll start wearing it.



The specific reason behind this is because you often see giant mimics in Sokoban, and as they try to fit in with their surroundings, they mimic boulders up here. I don’t want to get caught off guard and embraced to death by a large amorphous blob, so I’m taking precautions. In the case of this mimic, I can now bolt him to his painful death before actually touching anyone.

The obligatory power up shot.



Fog clouds are yet another rogue weather phenomena the intrepid adventurer must deal with.



After finishing Sokoban, I bring my pets up for the final battle.

Unfortunately, this will not be televised, as Infranview stopped taking screenshots without informing me. Essentially, I lead the Guidos into the room to dispatch as many monsters as possible, while I stood outside the (open) door with Elbereth burned under my feet. Both of my pets died to poison arrows, to be replaced by the new Guido the 3rd. I managed to somehow continue surviving, and found myself an amulet and some gold. I’m really sorry for not being able to record this.

But most importantly –



Let’s look closer.



I found a spellbook of magic missile. This spell is a game changer for oh so many reasons.

Magic Missile is a step up from force bolt. It does significantly more damage, scaling with my level. Unlike force bolt, it doesn’t destroy fragile inventory items, and it doesn’t miss. It can even bounce off walls, allowing you to hit some monsters multiple times. The coming darkness will stand no chance against Dez, as she cuts down all who stand in her way.

At which point, she’ll probably get killed by deadly poison.

Next time – we begin our search for the missing Autobahn, our beloved cat. And hope she hasn't gone feral.

Please tell me I'm not the only person who read H as "a scroll labeled BOOBIE FETCH".

Don't worry, there will be plenty of that.

Well, we’re back! We just finished Sokoban, recruiting Guido the 3rd and finding a powerful spell and a powerful amulet. Now, we will continue our quest, going ever shallower in the dungeon to the bitter end.

I’m going to experiment with the next one or two sections. First off, I’m going to play using tiles for a bit, just to see what people think of it. Secondly, I’m going to stop cropping the screenshots for the time being. Doing that has been rather time consuming so far, distracting for me to look at, and doesn’t seem to necessarily add much value. I appreciate any feedback on the format changes people can give me.



This wasn’t necessary in Sokoban, due to the small dungeon size, but I leash Guido the 3rd to me. Right now, I mainly want him to follow me, not actually fight much.



We ascend up to the previous dungeon level, which we haven’t actually explored yet. We see a wood nymph in her natural habitat (which is far more dangerous than Sokoban since they can teleport now), and a jackal.



What’s this? We found Autobahnn, but he’s gone feral! We only abandoned her six thousand turns ago, and adopted a new cat to replace her! What could she possibly be unhappy about?

We also see a scary looking yeti lurking around.



As always, when I need affection from my cat, I bribe her with food. Autobahn quickly returns to my side. I also show off my new magic missile spell to dispatch the nymph (magic missile won’t break mirrors, making my luck (which is damaged goods already) safe in this case) and the yeti.



I let the cats have the nymph corpse (and a quasit that happened to be actually hostile and wandering around) while I feast on the Yeti. I’ve been trying to avoid being overly satiated thus far, but yeti corpses are attractive, because they can confer resistance to cold. Unfortunately, it isn’t happening this time.



A kobold also had the bad fortune to be wandering around without a chaperone, so I kill him instantly and wear an apron to prepare to eat my fill. The gushes of water that have been tormenting my poor cats is a rust trap – if you step into it while wearing metallic equipment, it will damage them and give them less of a chance to hit. It’s a fun way to annoy cats though.



Sadly, I still don’t manage to gain poison resistance from the kobold corpse, but he does drop some food and a scroll of create monster. Fortunately, this time I was smart enough to kill the enemy before he managed to summon half the dungeon to make my life a living hell.

Autobahn also managed to evolve into “housecat”, making telling my two cats apart much easier.



This level contains the Oracle (which is based as much on the Usenet oracle as the one at Delphi), surrounded by fountains and statues of centaurs. (Sokoban is always the level directly below the Oracle, which makes it easier to know where to look if you don’t skip the level entirely like I ended up doing.

You can purchase either a minor or major consultation from the oracle. A minor consultation will give you something from the true rumor file, which provides opaquely worded bits of trivia that will occasionally help you. Major consultations provide important information on gameplay and what you need to do in order to win. To be honest, I see major consultations as mainly a way for people to maintain the polite fiction that spoilers aren’t necessary to win the game.



After our visit with the oracle, we take on a naga hatchling, mainly in the hopes that her corpse will give us poison resistance (spoiler – it doesn’t).





I’m providing both flavors of screenshot here, just to make sure you remember that blue a, and remember it well. These are soldier ants, the nastiest monster in the game relative to when you encounter them.

According to a public Nethack server, despite being a mid-game hazard, soldier ants are, by a large number, the most common way to die in Nethack (cite -- http://alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html ). They are sickeningly fast, hit multiple times for high damage, are difficult to actually kill, and can poison you. The development team understands just how hellish and frustrating these creatures are, so they helpfully made sure they come in groups of three or four most of the time. In short, soldier ants are bad news.

On the plus side, a helpfully positioned spotted jelly means that soldier ant can’t actually reach me (you cannot move diagonally through doorways with intact doors). Running like a child is the better part of valor, and I avoid this like the plague.



Note that my clairvoyance has shown me that there’s something beyond the room. Someday, I might actually take advantage of this. Maybe when I don’t value my own skin quite so much.



At last return to dungeon level five, from where I had been lost forever. We’re finally going to continue our aborted attempt to explore this level.

With my luck, this time the pit trap I fall into will have spikes on the bottom, ending our misery.



It hasn’t come out enough in the LP just how much I’ve appreciate having clairvoyance (and thus avoiding having to manually search for passages). It isn’t common to get the ability this early, and it has been wonderful.

I find a weapon shop, which interests me very little at this stage in the game. The most amusing aspect of this detour is playing with my new amulet from Sokoban. It’s an amulet of reflection – whenever beam attacks (such as magic missile) hit me, they will simply harmlessly bounce right back. This means, for instance, that I can blast a magic missile at a mimic, bounce it off a wall (to hit the mimic again), and then bounce it off of myself (possibly hitting the mimic again). It makes spell battles at close quarters much easier, and can prevent many of the generous methods Nethack provides you to die.



That’s interesting – a small disconnected room. Right now, I don’t have a way to mine though. File this one away for later.



Sleeping traps don’t affect me because apparently elves (at level four or above) don’t sleep.



We ascend the spiral staircase once again, and I discover that herding cats is exactly as much fun as it sounds.



In a sudden burst of holy fervor, I return to my altar to check for curses in my inventory.





One of the odd features of Nethack is dropping rings down sinks. Doing this will cause you to lose the ring forever (in most cases), but gives you a message that, with effective use of spoilers, allows you to identify that type of ring in the future. Obviously it’s most useful if you have more than one of that type of ring already. In this case, I use it to identify my two cursed (and thus unlikely to be worth lugging around, as the rings generated as cursed are nearly always unhelpful) rings, finding what a ring of polymorph (which causes you to randomly polymorph into different monster types) and a ring of aggravate monster (which is apparently so noxious that the sink spat it back out).

We’ll have more fun with these wondrous devices later.



Ding! More power.



We go up again, both cats in hand. Note that I didn’t spend much time with the altar yet – I’ll go into some of the features of these wondrous devices later on.



During my travels, I get ambushed by a ferocious cat. I don’t really need another pet right now, but cats are a pain to kill. Instead, I throw my meal at the cat. Note that if you throw food at cats, dogs, or horses that they will not eat (in Nethack, in real life some cats will eat anything, including books), they become peaceful and won’t attack you.

Unfortunately for this kitten, your pets have no compunctions about attacking peaceful monsters as long as they aren’t a significantly higher level than your pet. Thus, the kitten is safe from me, but not my jealous companions.

(One of the coldest things I ever did in Nethack was, when a kitten manage to take down my pet little dog, was to take the corpse of my old friend and feed it to the kitten, thus taming the kitten and gaining a new, more powerful follower.)



Remember this? I team up with my cats to take down the mimic. Unfortunately, you have to be really, really careful when using spells in shops – you don’t want to accidentally hit the shopkeeper.



My coffers full, I buy the boots that I had to leave behind so long ago. To my delight, they turn out to be boots of speed. They do exactly what they sound like, and speed your character up, making it easier for me to attack, and more importantly, to run away.

In some cases, you can even hit a monster, and take a step back before they can hit you. They’ll close back in, right in time for another hit. (On the other hand, some monsters can and will do that to me, so it’s hard to think of this as unfair).



We ascend another dungeon level, leaving Guido the 3rd behind at the moment. For some reason, training to cats to do anything remotely resembling what you want them to do is hard.



I visit the potion store. I’m not buying quite yet, but I take the time to get a price list from our fine shopkeeper friend. I transcribed this to a word document for later. The 400 zorkmid options are the most interesting at the moment.

I do the same with the selling prices for all my potions for later.

Next time – Dez explores the gnomish mines, looking for gnomes and mines to eat.

Why didn't you bring both cats and shoplift a bunch of potions? you have the rations to wait it out a while. Too heavy to carry?

I find tiles nearly incomprehensible (tiny bitmaps on gray backgrounds are difficult for my rather poor eyesight to differentiate), so I suspect some sort of own-medicine snark is called for here. As someone who works at a text terminal 95% of the day, though, I suspect that my tastes in visuals are rather nonstandard.

Not cropping the images is just fine, especially if it frees up time for your insightful commentary.

It is fucking impossible to see where your character is on the tileset. That's my main complaint, the character graphics are just too mushy and samey against that background (everything else about them is fine). Cropping might help and gives us a good place to focus our attention.

I was wondering when we'd get to putting things down the sink.

Yeah, I don't like the tileset at all.

Another benefit to the ASCII is that when pointing out monsters and things you could say like "That big red D is a dragon," rather than "That kinda lumpy reddish-brown blob thing is a dragon." Everyone knows what a D is, but I can't tell what most of those pixel creatures are supposed to be.

I wouldn't mind you showcasing some of the more popular tiles though, just to show people what's out there. Have you seen that funky isometric one? Fun place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Hey got a question here. Do the resistances come in varying levels, or is there just one? What I mean, is that if you had eaten more grey oozes, would you have gotten more acid resistance?

Having only played Nethack with tiles before, so am I.

And the thread also convinced me to play Nethack again, for the first time in many a moon.

Damn do I hate Boulders.

There's just one in Nethack. Once you eat a corpse and gain, say, cold resistance, that's it, you're essentially immune to cold attacks.

The next set will be tiles since it's already done, and then I'll decide again how to continue.

And about shoplifting -- I don't actually shoplift much unless I either have a magic whistle, or the store has something I specifically want. After finishing up the mines, I might go ahead and do it (but by then I hope to simply have polymorphed my pet into something that will eat shopkeepers, thus saving me the trouble). In retrospect, I should have done this, but I didn't think of it.

here's a dumb question-- what is sokuban, and what does it have to do with nethack? are there just random rooms you encounter that have block puzzles in them, or do you have to seek them out?

Sokoban is rather well-described here on Wikipedia. I used to play a version of it called Boxxle on my original Gameboy. (I got stuck after the first few puzzles. I was a kid. I still suck at Sokoban.)

Sokoban, as part of Nethack, first appeared in SLASH'em (as NetHack is open source, people make custom versions; SLASH'em is one of the longest-lasting, with lots of added stuff--Super Lotsa-Added-Stuff Hack, if I remember correctly, and I refuse to cheat and look it up) and got pulled into the official release by the DevTeam a while back. As to why it's in Nethack ... uh ... because it is. There's a reason that Nethack has sinks. Kitchen sinks, if you get my drift.

I haven't played enough modern Nethack (and am not good enough at it, to be honest) to tell you whether Sokoban is a 'side-dungeon' where you can choose to quest or not or part of the 'main dungeon' that you're "forced" to go through. I put "forced" in quotes not for emphasis; a well-equipped player can skip many (but not all) things you're ostensibly required to do in the game.

EDIT: I did some research after the fact; I forgot that Slash'EM is actually a fork of a fork; SLASH stands for what I described above, and Slash'EM adds Enhanced Magic. SLASH is no longer actively maintained, but Slash'EM is. If you think this sort of thing is complicated, for the love of $DEITY don't investigate Angband, its predecessors or its spawn. Your head asplode.

We then take the path to the dungeon branch we skipped over last time, the Gnomish Mines. Usually I do this earlier in the game, but the limited visible range can make this section very tricky. Moreover, I was short on power – a situation that could get me cornered very quickly.

Note that the layout of these dungeon levels is different than the main branch. Instead, these are large cavernous levels, injecting some variety into the game, and as an added bonus, making it much easier to get yourself surrounded, and for monsters to blast you at a range.

One of the problems with my leashes is that due to my boots of speed, I now move faster than my cat will walk. Thus I constantly have to wait for her to catch up, even when she’s actually trying.



Remember the wand of light I found in Sokoban? I can use it here to permanently light up small areas. It can help in high-activity places, but isn’t really a substitute for something more permanent.

Then I get stuck in a bear trap. Luckily, Autobahn has my back while I struggle to escape. You can actually disarm bear traps and set them yourself later on, but they’re very heavy and frankly not worth the effort.



I gain another level. Nethack is designed in such a way that around level 10 – 14, it starts becoming nearly impossible to level up through gaining experience, forcing you to use alternative methods.

As an aside, one thing I’ve noticed in this game is that I’m actually playing much better than I generally do. I wonder if the fact that I have to keep pausing to take screenshots, think up commentary, or demonstrate concepts means that I play more cautiously than normal, rather than being more aggressive.



I’m always wary of housepets dealing with monsters wielding weapons – this can seriously amp their damage output. Thus, while Autobahn is happily stealing my kills, I dispatch a gnome with great justice.



I then go back upstairs to stash some of my equipment. A blessed 400 blessed gold potion is going to be paralysis, gain ability, or gain level. This is safe to drink right now.

Fortunately, it turns out to be gain ability, increasing each of my non-maximized stats. I stow the other potion for now – potions of gain level are more helpful later on.



A gnome dropped of large stack of daggers. Iiiinteresting.



Magic missile abuse is the most wonderful thing of all time.



I manage to find a pick axe, which is even more of a plus. Pick axes allow you to cut through almost any dungeon wall at will. If you’re frustrating at finding secret passages, you can simply start hacking through the rock until you find something. Need a boulder destroyed? The pick axe and blast it to bits without the messiness associated with a spell. Can’t find the staircase down? You can cut a hole in the floor to the next level.

Unfortunately, pick axes are also heavy. I find them useful enough to be worth making space for though – I like being able the remodel the dungeon how I see fit.

(My absentmindedness killed me again here. I maximized the window again, so I had to crop things down a bit.)



For example, I found an arrow trap that I saw fit to disarm. In previous versions of Nethack, people would simply put on plate mail and move in and out of arrow traps for hours on end, collecting as many arrows as their sanity would allow. The development team came to their senses, and the traps will now run out.

Oh, and also a single poisoned arrow (yes, this has happened before) could kill me.



We descend deeper into the mines. Contrary to my normal custom, I’m not exploring each level entirely at the moment. Instead, I’m going to descend as fast as reasonably possible until I find some sort of light source. I’ll then go back and smoke out anything I missed.



Disaster strikes. In a heartrending typo, I blast a magic missile, hitting Autobahn, and weakening her enough that the savage hill orcs (that’s the “you hear some noises” part) finish her off.

I feel genuinely guilty about this.

(Unrelated note – when enemies arrange themselves in a neat little line like that, it makes my job much easier.)



I kill the orcs, and find a strange gray stone. I take my despair at my poor cat out on the gray rock, which refuses to move. This is an indication that I don’t want to touch it – some gray rocks are loadstones, which can’t be dropped easily, and weigh you down a great deal.

Of course, if you don’t ever pick it up, you can’t mark it or name it for the future.



I take an unsuccessful trip back into the main dungeon in order to find Guido the 3rd (who is wisely remaining hidden). I do get a chance to verify that my daggers aren’t cursed. This will be fun.

Oh, and my pick axe leads to some interesting possibilities for that room on the lower left.



Well, I am chaotic after all. I help myself to the gold as spoils of war.



I battle a winter wolf cub on the way out, carrying my nice pile of money. My amulet of reflection makes this battle rather silly – their attacks simply bounce off.

And now, finally I get to make use of my daggers, which are frankly overpowered. You use the same skill for wielding daggers as for throwing daggers, so you don’t have to expend extra skill slots. Unlike darts, arrows, throwing stars, etc, daggers don’t have a chance to break, and unlike spears it’s quite easy to find them in large quantities. As your skill level increases (and Wizards can get to expert, compounding the problems further), you can throw multiple daggers at a time. This allows me to make the winter wolf into a pincushion.

It was to be ready for dagger throwing that I ditched the quarterstaff – and later on, we’ll find something to make the weapon type even more powerful. Things will get very interesting very fast now.



I blast my way back upstairs, finally becoming an expert in daggers. This means I can now throw three at a time in certain cases. Just in case my damage output wasn’t already sick. And I’m not even using my spells much yet.

Of course, daggers are no defense against stepping into a poisoned pit trap. I’m getting really concerned about this.



Dez checked the chest! Wow! This is a nice chest (but depressingly empty)!



This is a brown pudding – an enemy much more dangerous to my equipment than my person. When you hit them in melee combat, they have a chance of dividing.

Some players exploit this to absurd extremes. They’ll engage in pudding farming by purposely hitting them with the lowest damage output weapon imaginable. They’ll then methodically cull some of the puddings for their death drops (in Nethack, monsters have a chance of creating an item out of the ether when they die), and their corpses.

The punishment for engaging in pudding farming is, of course, the fact that you have to partake in something so mind meltingly tedious simply to make yourself so powerful that the endgame isn’t fun anymore. Whee.

I, not being so inclined, simply fire some magic missiles at it.



Unfortunately, I make a big mistake. You see, cave spider corpses are not poisonous. Giant spider corpses are. I forgot this distinction, and ate a giant spider corpse. My strength promptly dropped four points, and my inventory suddenly became distressfully heavy. It isn’t necessarily a game ender, but is very inconvenient. I have got to redouble my efforts to obtain poison resistance.



I take a trip back up to lighten my load for the time being. Hopefully my circumstances will improve enough to recover the stashed non-essentially items later on.



Things do look up – welcome to Minetown.

Ravens are scarier than they look. They don’t do much damage, but they can peck your eyes out to blind you. While my telepathy will show me thinking monsters, stuff like undead or blobs won’t show up on my radar, so I still take a risk. Thus, I feel justified in blasting a magic missile at the poor bird.



My clairvoyance helpful automaps the area for me, and I’m very thankful that the level is lit this time around. The humanoid figures (without the copious fur) are watchmen – peaceful NPCs that wander around and don’t do much in particular. They’ll get mad at you if you wreck the fountains, pick locks too conspicuously, or attack shopkeepers or other watchmen. Of course, they couldn’t care less if you get attacked.

Watchmen are mostly a nuisance, and I often go out of the way to feed them to my cats at this stage in the game. They also mean I have to be careful aiming so as not to hit any of them. There’s also a watch captain that’s more powerful than his underlings.



I enter a temple with a priest of Thoth. The forbidding feeling mentioned in the message queue indicates that this isn’t of the same alignment as myself, which means I can’t sacrifice upon their altar without annoying the priest. However, I can still use it to check the curse status of my inventory, and I can donate money to the priest later on, in order to buy bonuses to my armor class.



Yet another creature has gotten their hands on a wand of create monster, a situation which can quickly get out of hand. I blast his heart out with my missile, being careful not to hit the priest, and get the wand for myself.



Another winter wolf makes a pathetic attempt to blast through my fortress of reflection. What makes this notable is that I was able to get cold resistance from the corpse of the wolf. This is another feather in my cap (in this case, because the situation wasn’t so critical, I used daggers rather than magic missiles to kill the wolf.)



My strength stat is slowly starting to recover, which will ease the pressure on my carrying capacity. I have no idea what I did to be come wiser though (the giant spider incident comes to mind as a counterexample.)



Shopkeepers don’t like it when you bring pick axes too obviously in their shop. It isn’t trivial, but you can hack through store walls to escape with the merchandise. Honestly though, this is almost never worth the effort, because shopkeepers are tough opponents and there are far more effective ways to loot them.

The most inconvenient thing about this is that you need to find somewhere to leave the pick axe to prevent a monster from grabbing it. The last thing I want to do is give some gnome an even better weapon.



Picking locks can still be done despite the watchmen, but you generally want to avoid having one supervise you while doing this. Even chaotic characters get penalties for killing them, so I don’t want more trouble.



A hardware store – how intriguing.



You’d think that talking to the watchmen would lead to some cool Discworld in-jokes. Sadly, this doesn’t happen. I was shocked to find out this wasn’t the case.



I stash the pick-axe at the temple, not having any better ideas and being too lazy to go put it upstairs where monsters won’t get it. I might buy one of those boxes from the hardware store later on for this purpose – monsters won’t open boxes (though gelatinous cubes, a D&D import, will eat them.)



I purchase a key to replace the lock pick I found in Sokoban. Their effects are exactly the same, but keys work faster.



Of course, Nethack still has it in for me. Opening these boxes with my new key to look for more merchandise causes to box to breath fire at me in revenge. I only have cold resistance right now sadly, not fire resistance. The box contained a tin, which I bought in hopes it contained spinach (at the very least, it’ll be an easy way to make pet monsters peaceful).



I also kill off the mimic, if only to make navigating around this place a bit simpler.

There’s one other interesting thing about that hardware store – lamps usually cost about ten gold pieces. Here, I they’re much more expensive. I wonder what that might mean.

We’ll see next time.

Man I wish I could get anywhere close to where you are in Nethack... don't know what it is about it but I just get completely lost in all the commands... But awesome LP so far.

If anyone is interested I stumbled across another Roguelike based off the Dungeon Crawl Roguelike that actually has a really nice tile/windows interface with mouse control for some things found at http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/

I actually managed to get a character to level 8 which is amazing considering I die before I'm level 3 in nethack.

In our last episode, Dez hit minetown with its corrupt police force, overpriced shopkeepers, and homicidal gnomes. Today, we continue our quest, and we find out the gnomes dug too greedily and too deep.

After the first few shots, this will be done in ASCII (while my personal preference remains tiles, ASCII does feel more authentically Nethack, and the second round of voting resulted in a tie. This is still something I’m accepting opinions on though.



One of the items I bought at the hardware store was an overly expensive bag. By taking all of a dead dwarf’s material possessions, I find out that things get lighter when they are put into the bag. This is a great development.



A bag of holding is a powerful item in Nethack, as it greatly expands your inventory space, and will make our strength issues far less pressing. It does take a turn to shuffle your inventory in and out of the bag though, so you’ll want keep essential items (like escape wands, powerful potions, food, etc) on your person. Unfortunately, we don’t have portable holes in Nethack (my sources tell me Slash’em does though), so we’ll have to sit out the wellspring of D&D comedy springing from putting portable holes in bags of holding and vice versa.

Along these lines, a tip for new players – don’t put unidentified wands in bags of holding. The results will be tragic.



I get unhappy with my pick axe (and the possessions of the dead dwarf for that matter) sitting out in the open, so I purchase a large box from the hardware store. This also keeps things tidier (moreover, if I get pets again, it prevents them from rearranging my storage units just to annoy me).



Well well well… I seem to have some expensive lamps in my inventory, one of which is blessed.

Moreover, Nethack has a rub command (useful in this situation and absolutely nowhere else).



Thanks Nethack. There’s an 80% chance that rubbing a blessed magic lamp will give you a wish, a 10% chance the djinni will become your pet, and a 10% chance the djinni will try to kill you.

Coming as a no surprise, I get the one that tries to kill me.



Luckily, the enemy isn’t incredibly hard at this point, and bouncing a magic missile through him is once or twice is enough to do him in.

Now, if that’s the blessed lamp, I think I’ll wait on playing with the cursed one.

We then take the downstairs at the left side of the level, going further into the mines. But this time, things are different.



I start out with a heroic charge toward the gnomes, wielding my now-unmagic lamp and hitting him upside the head with it. Uncharacteristically, I realize that I haven’t equipped my dagger after the jinni fiasco, and remember to do so before playing for an hour this time.



The black W showcased above was a wraith. They’re a fairly tame monsters by Nethack’s standards, though they can hit to drain levels (not generally a big deal in this game, but an annoyance.) The most notable things about wraiths are their corpses – eating the corpse will cause your character to gain a level. Later on in the game, their one of the easiest ways to improve, and we’ll hope to make use of them. The corpses rot after a few turns though, and you can’t tin them, so you have to act fast.

The corpses have very little nutritional value, but that doesn’t mean you die from overeating if you go for one after a big meal. In fact, choking on a wraith corpse is one of the classic Nethack deaths.

Luckily, this wraith doesn’t leave a corpse, sparing me the ignominy.



The blue “)”s are my daggers that I’ve been embedding in the resident dungeon population. While I can throw three at a time, it’s not consistent – the game has uses an odd routine for deciding how many missile weapons you throw each round you try.

I still have my cursed lamp, so let’s activate it.



Like an old lawnmower, you have to try several times to get the bloody thing on, but we preserve and there is now light. This will improve my visibility enormously, and make exploring these dark caverns much quicker.

Note that magical lamps will work as a light source in perpetuity, which is quite valuable (especially later on). However, rubbing them and freeing the inhabitant for a wish (or to commit suicide) turns them into a standard oil lamp, which does burn itself out after some time. One of the more interesting decisions to be made here is whether to rub the lamp and get the chance at a large benefit right away, or to delay this in favor of using it as a light source. In my case, the decision was made for me – I don’t have an immediate way of uncursing the lamp, so rubbing it would be too dangerous.



The clairvoyance is also helping me as well. Note that I’ve been hitting the magic missiles heavier than I like to – I’m only about 50% charged.



I need to take care of some exciting inventory management, so I go back upstairs. My route is blocked by a large ape, which is too dangerous to try and stab to death.



This is the ASCII version of the watch captain. Note that while your pets can generally eat watchmen with impunity, the watch captain generally comes out ahead in fights with a normal pet. Generally this means it isn’t worth the risk.

I add some more daggers to my stack, giving me yet another magazine of gnome killing ammo. Daggers really are unbalanced in this game, and I probably shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this.



Back downstairs, we encounter another soldier ant, but he doesn’t seem to have friends (my ring of warning would have picked them up otherwise). That doesn’t mean he’s not scary (the poison sting can still insta-kill me).



I manage to magic missile it again, but I still have to be really careful, particularly around ants. They’re just too fast and unpredictable.



Remembering to wear my apron this time, I eat the corpse. Nothing wonderful happens, and I still don’t have poison resistance (this is actually pretty uncommon for me at this stage in the game.) This is ominous.



Chameleons are interesting creatures (the red “:” – they shift between random monsters in the Nethack bestiary. This can lead to odd situations, such as encountering an arch lich on the fifth level of the dungeon – at which point, you then learn to your horror that chameleons also gain the strengths of the mimicked monsters. You then either die, or run around long enough for them to turn into something manageable.

In this case, the ring “protection from shapeshifters” I’ve been wearing forces chameleons to stay in their base form, rendering them trivial to defeat. This ring has been helping me out more than I expected when I first started out with it. I cover her with daggers and move on.

(Incidentally, chameleons can make certain kinds of pets a pain to manipulate. Eating a chameleon corpse will cause a pet to randomly change into some other monster, and the transformation is generally not going to be in your favor. I hope you enjoy your new pet lichen.)



After getting stuck in yet another bear trap (ironically, there are not, in fact, any bears in this game at all), I finish exploring this level to my satisfaction, and move on to the next one.



This level is lit, thankfully. I start by cutting a swathe through the indigenous gnomish population.



I continue to explore the level, leveraging my awesome dagger artillery to the fullest.



That menacing apostrophe right next to me is a wood golem. This particular genus of golem is more dangerous than his friend the gnome, but that doesn’t say much. The most notable thing about them is that they leave a pile of quarterstaffs behind when you kill them. Frankly, I prefer the gold golems (I have fond memories of grinding gold golems in Dragon Warrior when I was young (i.e., about 16. I had something of a retrogaming mid-life crisis when I discovered emulation, and then bought an NES)).

I go down yet another level.



One quick note – you have to be careful about how inventory stacking works in this game. Once you check something for whether or not it’s cursed, it won’t stack with identical items that haven’t been checked yet. Moreover, you can only throw multiple items at a time if you have enough entries in the stack left to doo that. So if I have two daggers in one inventory slot known to be uncursed, and two identical daggers in another slot that are also not cursed (by my character doesn’t “know” that), I’ll be at a disadvantage since I’ll never throw three daggers at a time.

For this reason, you generally don’t want to check the status of your large stack of ranged material. That way, when you hoover up other items throughout the dungeon, you’ll be able to immediately combine it without having to go visit an altar later on. As is so often the case with good Nethack practice, here you can see me observing this mainly in the breach.



Rock moles are intriguing little monsters. First off, they will happily chomp through the dungeon walls, redecorating the place and making it more open. Second, they’ll eat metallic items, including weapons, rings, and gold. They’re not hard to kill, but you never know – any time you play, at that very moment, a rock mole might be munching on that precious ring of slow digestion you wanted so badly.



I then fall in yet another pit. It’s instructive to note that while Angband is generally ranked lower in the “Roguelike Games that Hate You” (redundant, I know) ladder than Nethack, pit traps are much worse in Angband. This is due to the fact that the levels in Angband aren’t persistent – once you leave, the level vanishes. In many cases, this is helpful because you can always play at a given dungeon level until you’re ready, or use stairs as an escape route (and never see your opponent again). However, this means that you will inevitably see a stack of artifacts and powerful weapons, take one step toward them, and fall into a pit to the next level, seeing the treasure fade away forever.

When the Angband LP is done, I’ll be very disappointed if we don’t see this. Almost as disappointed as I’ll be if they don’t identify potions by drinking them and seeing what happens (yay potion of death!)



Long worms are apparently a Dune reference, which I haven’t read. The “w” is the head of the worm, and the tilde is its tail (which can stretch out quite far). Their glacial movement means that despite their relative sturdiness, it isn’t difficult for me to execute them. They leave teeth which you can turn into knives if you are so inclined.

Leocrottas are a mythical donkey-like creature from India that I didn’t know about because nobody bothered to put them into a Megaten game yet (this is also how I found out about God).

More pressingly, they’re very vast and very dangerous – they do more damage than you expect, and I’ve had many powerful characters die because they underestimated these beasts. In fact, I think they can outrun me even now, and I don’t want to gamble on fighting. So…



I aim my wand of digging downward, and create yet another pit to fall through. I land on top of an indigent gnome in a level with several more monsters, but none as scary.



Things start out badly, as I’m mobbed so badly that they’re will to sacrifice their comrades in order to fill me with poison arrows (god this game really wants me to feel that gaping hole in my list of resistances.) Oh Nethack, you never cease to amaze me

Not only have I lost a shitload of artifacts to a pit trap that was in a greater vault, my most humiliating death was running a Wizard who had reached level 30 and use-IDing a potion of death because I was out of mana and didn't feel like resting for a handful of turns.

Hubris. Come to think of it, have you explained use-ID and how it works yet? I know it's not as important in Nethack but it's still a classic roguelike tradition.

I haven't explained it yet, but will try later on. (I can't describe how wonderful it is that I do not seem to have found a single scroll of identify yet.) I generally rely on it mostly for wands and certain kinds of rings though. The problem is of course is that while use-identifying is a Roguelike tradition, so is extraordinarily sadistic game design.

Your situation is the corollary to the low level character selling unidentified potions, and finding out only too late what a potion of augmentation looks like. The only time I seem to get these potions early is if I sell them -- I never find them when I identify everything.