NetHack 3.0: Final Rating

Hey, that's how I roll.

NetHack (3.0 series)

United States

The NetHack development team 

The series includes 11 public releases between July 1989 and February 1991

Date Started: 24 June 2012
Date Ended: 12 June 2013

Total Hours: 262
Difficulty: Hard-Very Hard (4.5/5)
Final Rating: 44
Ranking at Time of Posting: 76/96 (79%)

In the 1990s, I had a six-year enlistment in the U.S. Army Reserves. When I first joined at the age of 17, I was weak and pudgy. I had never done any serious exercising or bodybuilding in my life. Shortly after signing the enlistment paperwork, I read in the literature that on the first day of basic training--three months to come--I would need to perform 20 pushups; otherwise, they'd send me to a remedial physical training course for some extra weeks. I didn't like the sound of that.

I dropped to the floor and did pushups until my arms were exhausted and I physically couldn't lift them anymore. Specifically, I did four pushups. After that, I got up and began scanning my paperwork for any loophole that would get me out of my enlistment.

It's not that I didn't realize there was such a thing as training; it's just that the distance between 4 and 20 seemed so vast--my body so exhausted after those four--that I couldn't conceive of a time in which, no matter how much training I did, my body would be capable of 20 pushups, let alone the 52 I would have to do to pass the physical fitness test at the end of the 13 weeks.

But, having no way out of it, I worked at it, and in the next three months, I built myself up to the point that I could easily do 20 on the first day, and after that to the point that I was able to do not 52 but 80 in the final test. After that, pushups didn't seem so hard. I haven't done any in over a year, but  I just dropped and managed to coerce my old, out-of-shape body into 28 of them.

That should have been a lifelong lesson, and yet it still surprises me how often in life we mentally deem things as "unachievable" until we actually achieve them. Upon achieving them, it's like our brains instantly re-wire, showing us maps and paths and patterns where we couldn't see them before. It's like those "magic eye" pictures where until you cross your eyes the right way, you can't believe there's a 3D image in there, but once you find it the first time, you almost can't stop doing it.

While I was doing pushups, every time I hit a new record--10, say--my mind interpreted it as "the most I'm able to do right now, and perhaps the most I'll ever be able to do." But when I hit that goal of 20, 10 just became "the halfway point." Essentially the same thing happened in NetHack. My brain rendered every new achievement as, "Okay, I've reached the highest level I've ever achieved. Now when am I going to die?" But now that I've won, and I can "see" the game in its totality, it doesn't seem that hard.

Last year, blithely getting to character level 10 and dungeon level 13 would have seemed unthinkable. Today, I accomplished it while screwing around just to take screen shots for this posting.

It seems absurd to say this only a few weeks after comparing myself to a monkey who would never ascend given infinite time, but now that I've won, now that I know how the entire dungeon maps out, now that I realize what's possible and how to do it, I think I could ascend (in this version, at least) at least once every 20 characters. (Maybe if I kept at it, I'd get so good that I'd have to play with "conducts" like never eating meat or never killing another creature directly. These strike me as insane the same way that ever ascending at all struck me as insane a month ago.)

Many commenters had been explaining these realities about the game for the entire year, but there's a difference between "knowing" something and "getting" it. Reading over my old NetHack postings makes me cringe a bit. I wish I could send comments back in time to myself. I've been thinking about what I'd say to ensure that 2012 Chet really gets the game, and this is what I've come up with:

1. A character with greater than 17 strength or dexterity, more than 70 hit points, less than -10 armor class, telepathy, poison resistance, a blindfold, a decent stock of throwing weapons, and a unicorn horn is essentially invincible for the first 25 levels. Immediately work towards these at the outset. Of these, poison resistance is probably the most important, so you don't have to worry about what you eat, and thus don't have to worry about starving.

The intelligence delivered by telepathy and a blindfold was vital to my ascension. Here, I see a squad of "Mordor orcs" coming through the doorway.

2. Once you get these things, or at least most of them, The first half of the dungeon is your playground. Go up and down liberally, kill whatever you can, and start to tick off items (both equipment and intrinsics) on your "ascension list." Once you're down to only a few items, you can head to the Castle and use the Wand of Wishing to get the rest.

3. Carefully note locations of altars (especially co-aligned altars), fountains, sinks, and shops. You will return to them throughout the game to test the blessed/uncursed/cursed status of items, figure out what different items likely are, and create holy water. (Incidentally, to me most potions are worth more diluted and turned into holy water than fulfilling their original functions.)

Sacrificing a Potion of Object Detection to make a Potion of Water.

4. The most important intrinsic/extrinsic combination to acquire is teleportation/teleportation control. It will get you out of a ton of jams and make navigation much easier (and this was before I knew about CTRL-T!).

5. Don't obsess about not being able to identify things. With the exception of weapon bonuses, almost everything in the game can be identified through some combination of careful testing and noting the results. As far as weapons go, your level and strength matter much more than the type of weapon you have. (I ascended without even knowing what I was carrying.) Don't start thinking about suicide every time an acid blob corrodes your sword.

6. Items don't generally disappear. Make caches for yourself, using boxes when you can. Backup weapons, missile weapons, food, armor, pick-axes, and unicorn horns will all become extremely valuable once the Wizard of Yendor starts cursing your stuff.

7. Once you exhaust the possibilities of the shops, stop hauling around gold. It just takes up weight you need for other stuff. Cache it if you really want it, but it's hardly necessary to win the game.

The nature of randomness in NetHack can't be overstated. I think everybody understands that the levels are random, so they never look the same from game to game, and the distribution of equipment is random, but simply stating that doesn't convey how this randomness fundamentally changes the game from character to character. I've had games where I found blindfolds on Level 1 and games where I never found one and had to wish for it; games in which I've quaffed six "Potions of Gain Level" before reaching the castle, and games (including the last one) in which they never appeared; games with shops on every level between 3 and 7, and games with no shops at all; games in which I never found a co-aligned altar; games in which I've found enough wands to crack the world in half, and games where wands were a rarity. Whether you encounter the Wizard on Level 50 or Level 41 (as I did) makes a huge difference as to the difficulty returning to the surface.

Chester gets lucky with a blindfold on Level 2.

Despite its randomness, we have to observe, with something approaching marvel, that NetHack is an extremely "tight" game. There are tons of items in the game, and thousands of different ways in which they can interact with each other, but the developers seem to have anticipated every potential interaction. Consider the way that you can bash or pry chests with weapons, dilute potions and "blank" scrolls in fountains, make pets out of enemies by throwing food at them, and throw potions at enemies (with a chance that they'll splash back at you!). The developers not only bothered to program different effects for scrolls based on their blessed, uncursed, or cursed statuses, but also have a different effect for reading each scroll while "confused." The self-polymorphing system allows you to turn into just about any monster and gain their special attack and defense skills while doing so. You can turn enemies to stone while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice as a weapon, something only possible while wearing gloves.

This logic unfortunately also applies to death. When I first started this blog and announced it on Reddit, I knew nothing about NetHack. Some of the commenters started talking about it, and one of them remarked:

I made it to the plane of fire before drowning in lava because I took off my ring of levitation to eat a corpse...To be fair, that was an extremely stupid mistake on my part. I had plenty of food in my pack, but I wanted to eat a fire giant to gain some more intrinsic strength that I didn't even really need.

Can you imagine what this sounds like to someone who hasn't played the game? I remarked that it sounded "terrifying." Imagine trying to keep up with all of the possibilities hinted by those couple of sentences. And all in a game where everything is represented by ASCII characters.

These combinations--and hundreds more--make each game of NetHack essentially unique, with the exception of a few fixed levels and of course the endgame. They make hearing about each character's experience, even deaths, relatively interesting.

Given all of this, I can see how people become addicted to NetHack. Every time you step into the dungeon and start exploring the first level, you wonder, "What am I going to find? What unique challenges will the game throw at me this time?"

But ask me if I really "enjoyed" the 262 hours I spent over the past year ascending, and I don't know how to answer. Part of me says that it's a crime, really, that a game this clever, this innovative, this engaging turns off so many players with the specter of permadeath. I realize permadeath is a staple of roguelikes, and most roguelike players wouldn't trade it, and that it introduces a tactical depth to the game that wouldn't exist otherwise, and that it makes the final ascension all the more exhilarating...but let's be frank: someone shouldn't have to invest more than 250 hours in a game to win it. That's just crazy. Imagine what else I could have accomplished in that time. I certainly could have finished any of the numerous books I have half-started. I might have been able to make a good dent in my dissertation. At worst, I could have watched every film on IMDB's "Top 100" list, and still had 62 hours to spare.

All right. This has been a very long intro. Let's see how the game rates on the GIMLET. I should mention that I already rated the "early NetHack" series in January 2011, having experienced much less of the game, but I'm not going to look at that while compiling the scores here.

1. Game World. I've never experienced a roguelike in which the story, lore, and history was well-defined. It's not generally the priority of the genre. In NetHack, you're not really told anything about the game world, and although there are some vague hints in things like the names of gods, they never come together in any kind of "story." (At least, not in this version.) Score: 1.

2. Character Creation and Development. The creation process isn't much--name and class--but the development process is pretty satisfying. Rewards for leveling up, which happens very swiftly in the early game, are welcome and tangible, at least through about Level 10 (after that, the experience requirements get so large that you essentially need to find Potions of Gain Level or to eat wraith corpses). Perhaps more important are the aspects of development that come from eating corpses to gain intrinsics (fire resistance, poison resistance, teleportitis) and those that improve statistics. Unfortunately, there aren't many ways (in this version) to improve anything other than strength, which is admittedly a pretty important one. The whole point of the game is to make yourself more powerful, and it offers you plenty of opportunities to do so.

Chester gains the "resist cold" intrinsic.

The game could stand to do a little more with class-specific role-playing. The character choice determines starting attributes and equipment, and I suppose this choice still matters late in the game to the extent that it's hard to get a high intelligence score unless you start with it. There are a few alignment-based conducts that affect luck (e.g., lawful characters shouldn't use poison arrows). But overall, it doesn't feel like class "matters" much in this version. I understand that changes later with class-specific quests. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. There really aren't that many in the game. The "chat" command is woefully under-utilized. There's the occasional shopkeeper, the Oracle, and some priests that can matter, but your interactions with them aren't very deep. I suppose it deserves a few points for the bonuses you get from the priest and the things you learn about the game from the Oracle. Score: 2.

Chester "chats" with a friendly orc.

4. Encounters and Foes. The game throws a dazzling array of obstacles in your path to ascension, including curses, various debilitating conditions, and dozens of monster types organized into a handful of classes. These monsters have enough strengths, weaknesses, and special attacks to make the game reasonably tactical, and it even has nice one-paragraph descriptions of certain special monsters. I love the variety of the encounters: floating eyes freeze you, leprechauns make off with your gold, nymphs seduce you and steal your equipment, were-creatures can give you lycanthropy, fire elementals can cause your scrolls and potions to catch fire or boil. Every new letter occasions a rush to your notes or the NetHack wiki to figure out how to best deal with it. There are deeper encounters with vault guards, Keystone Kops, the Wizard of Yendor, and other situations that are rare but fun. There just aren't many role-playing options in all of this. Score: 6.

I had my gold ring stolen Monday, Wednesday, and twice on Friday...

5. Magic and Combat. The magic system is underpowered in this version, even for spellcasting classes. You rarely find spellbooks, and you need multiple readings to get very proficient with the spells. Even then, they fade after you cast them a few times. Combat, on the other hand, is enormously tactical despite only a single "attack" option. Knowing when to attack, when to use a spell or item, and when to flee is both an art and science, and it takes dozens of hours of study to figure it all out. There's even some limited use of the "terrain" in combat, such as finding choke points where only one enemy can attack at a time, luring enemies into traps, shoving boulders into their paths, and locking doors to keep them from getting to you. Pets add an entirely new dimension that I never explored. Score: 7.

6. Equipment. Easily the best and most well-written part of the game. There are so many things to find, use, wield, and wear that it's hard to keep track of them all, and the game features a highly original system by which you either have to identify the items (via spell or scroll) or intuit what they are through practice or experimentation. I love games that give you lots of armor options, and this one has armor, helmets, shields, boots, gloves, and cloaks to keep me happy. The testing process can sometimes be laborious; some of my least-fond memories involving killing an entire barracks full of soldiers, lieutenants, and captains, then hauling loads of their gear to the nearest altar to ensure it's not cursed before systematically testing it for its effects on my armor class.

Chester won't be wearing that cap.

The whole blessed/uncursed/cursed process adds even greater depth to the equipment system. Scrolls of Genocide wipe out monsters; blessed Scrolls of Genocide wipe out entire monster classes; cursed Scrolls of Genocide create the specified monster. The latter isn't always a bad thing. Also notable is how armor and weapons can increase in level or degrade through various scrolls and monster attacks.

Equally important, as I noted above, is the way in which the different items you can find work together. You can dilute potions into potions of water, then turn them into holy water by placing them on an altar, then use them to bless or un-curse your items. A Ring of Teleport Control with a Cursed Scroll of Teleportation can take you anywhere in the dungeon. Magic markers can create scrolls if used with blank paper. I'm sure I didn't find even half of the possibilities. Only a lack of in-game item descriptions keeps NetHack from a perfect score here, but otherwise it's the best equipment system of any CRPG so far. Score: 9.

7. Economy. Not so good. Gold can be useful in the early stages at shops--if the game bothers to generate any--and in donations to a co-aligned priest--if he appears. It's useful when you encounter the Oracle (again, if you find one in your game). Otherwise, all it affects is your final score. The game has piles and piles of gold everywhere, and I wish there was more to do with it. Score: 4.

Teleporting out of a shop without paying floods the dungeon with "Keystone Kops" while the shopkeeper obsessively follows you around, demanding his two dollars.

8. Quests. The game has a single main quest which isn't even very consistent, since you never hear of the "Adventurer's Guild" again after embarking. I think there's only one outcome to the main quest, and this version doesn't feature any side-quests. No real role-playing and not the strongest part of the game. The Amulet is basically a MacGuffin, and the plot is all about personal gain. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. I've said this before, but I don't see anything particularly appealing or noble about the "raw purity" of a soundless ASCII game, and everything I liked about the game, I would have liked better with a proper tile set and sounds. In fact, I'd vastly prefer actual sounds to the messages describing what you hear--messages that flash too fast while you're moving around. I know some developers have created proper graphics applications to sit on top of the game, and I may try one in the next version.

The interface is good enough. I don't like having capital and lower-case versions of the same letter do different things, but there's really no way around it in this game, and for the most part, the commands were intuitive and easy to remember. I had constant annoyances with having to hit SPACE to continue messages, and I know I could have solved this by frigging around with the configuration options, and I just never bothered. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. NetHack seems linear at the outset, until you realize you're not really constrained to rushing inexorably forward. The dungeon levels aren't large enough to create a truly "open" gameworld, but it's relatively open within its confined space. It goes without saying that the randomization of the dungeon, distribution of equipment, and distribution of special encounters (including the location of the Wizard of Yendor) makes the game extremely "replayable" except in the sense that it's so hard to win that you never fully play it during each excursion.

With respect to legions of fans who feel otherwise, permadeath just sucks. I wouldn't mind limited save points--even extremely limited save points, like once every 4 hours or something. I wouldn't mind deaths that cost you dearly and take a long time to recover from. But you have to be extremely masochistic to burn through 262 hours and a few dozen characters in your effort to win the game without "save-scumming," and I'm not sure it's worth it. This will always be a complaint of mine with roguelikes, and I'll likely never rate them particularly high in this category for this reason. Score: 5.

I note that the final rating of 44 is 2 points higher than I gave the previous version. My understanding is that future versions will develop more in the quest, character development, and encounter categories.

Despite ascending, I still don't feel like I "mastered" the game. There are a host of things I didn't experience or didn't think about until after I won. Here are some:

• I never made use of a pet. They were always too annoying to me. I realize the watchword in this game is "patience," and juggling a pet is the ultimate test of patience, but I'm not that patient.

• I finally read up on how to use scrolls of blank paper and magic markers to create scrolls, and I was looking forward to it, but I never found a single magic marker among my last eight or nine characters.

• Never did much with luck. I realize that sacrificing corpses on altars and throwing gems at co-aligned unicorns increase your luck, but as I never found a luck stone (I'm not even sure they exist in this version) to preserve it, it seemed like a waste of time.

• Never did much with artifact weapons. I think maybe a couple of my characters found a special axe once or twice, but I'm not even sure special weapons like "Excalibur" exist in this version.

• I realized very belatedly that it would make a lot more sense to delay getting the Amulet of Yendor until I'd explored all of the maze levels and found the paths between the stairs--in fact, I should have used my pick-axe to hack shorter paths between the stairs before getting the amulet.

• Spells strike me as incredibly useless in this game, and I never did much with them. You exhaust them after a few castings, you rarely find spellbooks, and you have to read the same spellbook multiple times to get the spell to a high enough "level" to be useful. But it's possible I missed something and should have concentrated more on spells.

• I stayed away from self-polymorphing, even though I understand there are some cool effects you can achieve with it, including the ability to eat rings as a rust monster and turn them into intrinsics.

• I used ELBERETH on occasion to save my life, but there are other ways you can use it to confine and route monsters, and I never really explored that.

I look forward to exploring these options more, and seeing the game progress, in the 3.1 series. My understanding is that it's the first edition to feature dungeon "branches," a series of elemental planes, and special levels of Hell (renamed Gehennom). Mind flayers and some other monsters appear for the first time. There are more options to improve (and degrade) attributes. Getting the Amulet is tougher, requiring multiple sub-quests; most notably, the Wizard of Yendor no longer has the amulet himself.

I'll reach this version in 1993, which might not occur for another three or four years in my current rate of play. I don't know how I'll feel by then, but right now, it's almost impossible to imagine investing another 262 hours in the game. (Though in accordance with my boast above, I suspect I won't need to.) We'll see then whether I insist on playing honestly or play on "explore" mode long enough to experience the changes and then move on.

I accomplished my NetHack goal of ascending within a year, but there's no way I'm going to make my second goal of finishing all 1989 games within a year. Perhaps without my side-trips to NetHack, though, things will go a little more quickly. Let's move on to The Land and see what happens.

That is, I'll move on to The Land after Chester the Barbarian dies. I created him just so I'd have someone to create screenshots with for this posting, but he's doing pretty well.