 |
| Random increases in attributes for no discernible reason were characteristic of this oddly "blessed" session--at least for a while. |
Aamanz the Caveman didn't get very far. I overestimated the strength of the caveman's stomach, and he died of poison after eating a rotting kobold corpse. But I did pretty well with the next character, Aanzim the Archaeologist (god: Quetzalcoatl). The archaeologist is modeled on Indiana Jones, starting each life with a bullwhip, leather jacket and fedora. But he also has some useful tools, including a pick-axe, which chops through walls and obstacles, and a tinning kit, which lets you turn corpses into stored food for (usually safe) consumption later.
On Level 1, I noticed two features that I don't remember from previous NetHack versions:
- The game occasionally gives you messages that "you feel strong!" or "you feel wise!" and raises your attributes accordingly. I'm not sure what actions prompt these messages, but I think I got stronger from kicking down a door.
- You occasionally run into hints scribbled on the floor, sometimes with missing letters. The first time, I got: "They say a floatin? eye can defeat M?dusa." I think it refers to the ability to see monsters but not to become petrified while blindfolded with the "Telepathy" intrinsic, which you get from eating a floating eye. Later, I got (without the missing letters): "They say that a xorn knows of no obstacles when pursuing you," referring to the ability of the creature to tunnel through stone.
 |
| I assume they get harder to interpret as you move downward. |
On Level 2, I found a fountain and drank from it. It spawned a demon, who offered me a wish. That was quite a bit of fortune. I spent a long time thinking about the wish. I nearly wished for a Wand of Wishing, but I figured the game wouldn't allow the loophole. I looked at some of my entries from my previous wins and decided to try a "blessed +2 Silver Dragon Scale Mail." The game said it didn't know what I was talking about. I tried again with gray dragon scale mail and it worked. So I have a high-AC item that resists magic. That should help a lot in the early levels. I'm sure many of you will have opinions about better items to wish for this early in the game, and I look forward to hearing them.
 |
| I don't know if this would have worked, but I deleted it before it was too late. |
Level 2 also had a "delicatessen" offering piles and piles of food. I didn't buy any yet, as I was "satiated" and still had a few rations and tinned items, but it's nice to know it's there. I probably won't starve to death in the first 10 levels.
On Level 3, I managed to eat a floating eye and gain telepathy. I also got a random point of strength and constitution. More importantly, I found my first level in this version with two staircases going down. I took the first, and it led me to the first level of the Gnomish Mines. I confess I didn't expect the gnomes to be hostile, but they were. Although they're pretty easy, a rope golem nearly killed me (I couldn't get away because there was an
NPC on the other side of me), and I had to pray to Quetzalcoatl to get my
health back after it got too low.
 |
| Arriving in the Gnomish Mines for the first time. |
On Level 6, I found a bunch of stores: Luds' Lightning Store, Sarangan's Delicatessen, Budereyri's General Store, and Nosnehpets' Hardware Store. The level was patrolled by non-hostile guards. I don't know if they're gnomes. They got upset when I drank from the fountains or tried to get into locked doors, so I didn't agitate them.
A couple of awesome things happened on the level. First, enemies--including well-equipped gnome wizards and uruk-hai--kept spawning, so I kept killing them, taking their equipment to the general store, and getting paid. Eventually, I had enough to buy almost everything in the general store. I took a chance on a wand, and it turned out to be--I kid you not--a Wand of Wishing. At this point, I made the rookie mistake of not immediately wishing for a Scroll of Recharging and instead went with my second option from earlier, +2 Speed Boots. But I still have the wand, so I'll hold onto it until I get a Scroll of Recharging.
Second, a room on the level had an altar. When I entered the room, the game said that I felt at peace, so I guess it was probably lawful. I then sacrificed a gnome wizard on it, and my "pleased" god gave me a samurai sword named Snickersee, which I assume is better than my whip.
 |
| Nothing about what happens next is, alas, "wise." |
Miscellaneous notes:
- I've met a few friendly creatures. You can talk to them, but they just give one line canned responses. Hobbits always "ask about the One Ring." Dwarves always "talk about mining."
 |
| If you don't know, it's already too late. |
- I'm on the road this week and I forgot to bring my external numberpad. I had to play all my sessions with the on-screen keyboard to move diagonally. (There's a way to change the settings to allow diagonal movement with regular keys, but it's a weird cluster and I didn't want to screw up my muscle memory that way.)
 |
| Sigh. Go ahead. I'm ready. Explain why that cluster makes perfect sense somehow. |
- Enemies do indeed pick things up and use them against you in this version. They can also suffer effects from using cursed items.
 |
| Should've identified it first! |
- At one point, I killed an orc inside a store, and when I went to claim his stuff, the store owner told me I'd have to buy it. I guess that makes a certain amount of sense.
I was feeling pretty good about Aanzim's prospects, but it was time to head down for another conference session. I left the game running on my laptop in my hotel room. I had failed to note that the power cord had come loose from the transformer. I returned three hours later to find my computer had died, taking my DOSBox session and my character with it.
I'm going to need to take a few days.
Time so far: 5 hours
"On Level 2, I found a fountain and drank from it. It spawned a demon, who offered me a wish. That was quite a bit of fortune."
ReplyDeleteThat was quite a bit of luck. The demons aren't always peaceful and there are other nasty things that can happen. Drinking from fountains is an r-type rather than a K-type strategy; recommended only if you don't mind having a lot of characters die quickly so you can get something good for one character.
"I'm sure many of you will have opinions about better items to wish for this early in the game, and I look forward to hearing them."
Nah, that's pretty much the right choice.
In fact this made me realize why the first few panels of this NetHack comic I made are the way they are--the player has to get some gray dragon scales in the first few panels in order to explain why he's wishing for something else. (Spoilery!)
Deletehttps://web.archive.org/web/20180628091806/http://sadowl.com/dudley/index.php?f=20090907
"What to wish for" is something people have argued about for a long time in this game, and blessed +2 GDSM is definitely on the list. Bgure tbbq pubvprf ner fpebyyf bs punetvat (gb erpunetr jnaqf bs jvfuvat gung lbh trg yngre) naq zntvp znexref (gb jevgr fpebyyf bs punetvat).
ReplyDeleteAs for the key bindings, rogue/etc date back to the era of minicomputers using serial terminals, many of which did not have arrow keys on them. The use of hjkl for direction was a common unix standard at that point (came from editors like vi). Those editors didn't have diagonal directions, so yubn (while definitely not ideal and intuitive) was about the best they could do.
This is correct. It came from vi.
Deletemore precisely, from the ADM-3A terminal
DeleteWow! That's before my time. Had to look that one up. Thanks for sharing that bit of terminal lore.
DeleteIt's also nice to be able to navigate in four directions without your hand leaving the home row. Of the popular methods of representing the cardinal directions on a keyboard, hjkl is the one that makes my hand the least tired if I'm doing the kind of movement that is common in roguelikes (a lot of discrete movements in all directions). But it's really just historical, yeah.
DeleteI also wouldn't even want to try playing with hjkl + yubn, and I don't have a numpad. This problem could be solved by letting the player change the key bindings, but unfortunately even modern roguelike games often don't have this feature, such as Brogue. This orthodoxy and lack of usability is a tad bit irritating.
DeleteAnother workaround is to simply play without diagonal commands. I think this might result in merely slight disadvantages, nothing too severe?
Being a turn-based game, learning unusual keybindings in nethack is not the huge deal it would be in real-time game like a shooter. Nethack rewards patience and careful thought before moving anyway.
DeleteI feel like there's an argument to be made that if you aren't willing to put in the effort to learn some of the stranger bindings, you shouldn't even bother playing because you'll never get far with that kind of mindset. Now, whether or not that's actually the case or just an obnoxious "git gud" type of thing is the real question
DeleteTotally disagree. Directions are spatial, keys are organized spatially, it's reasonable to expect those things to correspond. It's no different than how (for an English speaker) commands mostly correspond to words that begin with the same letter; if apply were e, wield were v, and remove were z, you wouldn't say "well you have to learn the keybindings!" And even in a turn-based game, having to stop and think "is j up or down?" throws a little sand in the gears of your thought process.
DeleteWhen I played, even though I didn't have a numpad, I used the option that mapped directions onto the 1-9 keys because at least I could systematically work out what corresponded to what.
Oddly enough, Addict's playing of this game had me fire up the game for the first time in many years to play along a little and see how 3.6 has changed from when I played. I have a laptop and no number pad so I quickly switched to vi keys. They feel instinctive to me because I've used vi so much - but I recognize that I've just been trained to do something non-intuitive for most people.
DeleteYeah, there's no way I'm learning a new key mapping to play a single game. It's taking me forever to adjust to the switch controller.
Deletehjkl are only slightly less spatially relevant to each other than wasd -- you have to learn that j is down and k is up, but h is the leftmost key and it goes left, l the rightmost and goes right.
DeleteComplaining that a 35 year old game doesn't use the preferred keybindings from the last 20 years seems a bit like expecting Wizardry or Bard's Tale to have mouselook.
Funnily, moving with the WASD keys is also an old standard (used e.g. in Moria and in the first Wizardry); and unlike HJKL it is still commonly used today.
DeleteIt sounds entirely reasonable to me to want for a 1993 game to have either spatially-relevant or remappable keybindings, instead of adhering to a standard from 1976.
For me the problem isn't so much hjkl as the fact that hjkl has no sensible relation to yubn. Diagonal movement always messes me up with these keys, and that's all they're really needed for on modern keyboards, since even without numpads the arrows work for orthogonal movement. WASD doesn't solve that unfortunately.
DeleteAs for the complaints, it's reasonable for Chet to report his experiences as a contemporary player playing this.
Nethack from 1993 has the excuse that far more keyboards had numpads back then. But modern Nethack still offers no method to rebind the movement keys.
DeleteBesides, it has been always possible to enable diagonal movement support with just the 4 arrow keys, had the programmers implemented this:
Deletehttps://old.reddit.com/r/roguelikedev/comments/klvqzh/diagonal_movement_without_numpad/ghbjw72/
"I made a roguelike that had 8 directional movement with WASD. Instead of submitting a single keypress immediately on keydown, I wait until all keys are in a keyup state, and submit the set of keys that were depressed concurrently.
(...)
W and D were down concurrently, so this is a combination press. WD combination press maps to NE directional command."
When programmers take usability problems seriously, good solutions will appear.
There have been a lot of good perspectives here. I just want to add, though, that I'm not sore at the developers ofNetHack for not providing an alternate key arrangement for movement since they DID provide one in the form of the numberpad. The situation is my fault for buying a laptop--a GAMING laptop, I should add--that lacks a damned numberpad.
Delete@Bitmap: Unix ttys don't provide keyup/keydown events, so this would not be possible on many systems that NetHack supports. I also think you'll find that movement on keyup feels incredibly slow and awkward (and it prevents holding the key to move continuously, although that's a bad idea in many roguelikes). There are a lot of features in NetHack that make it clear that DevTeam takes usability seriously.
DeleteI also think people are overestimating how many 1993 games had remappable controls.
We all know that the proper movement scheme for NetHack is YASD.
DeleteGood one!
DeleteBitmap, those old terminals were plugged into 9600 baud (if you were lucky) serial lines. There were no key events outside of the terminal, pressing a key sends the ASCII bits for that character over the serial port. Broadly speaking the same thing is true today when you connect to a unix system over the network with ssh -- the only place you get key events is when using a windowing system.
DeleteAs for "modern nethack", I don't really think such a thing exists. Sure, there have been a couple of releases since the late 90s, but those are pretty minor tweaks, the vast majority of the game is the same as it was in 1996.
The point about terminal connections is interesting and valid, but this merely means that the "diagonal-movement-via-keyup-events" approach doesn't work over a connection, while it could still be available as a configurable option when playing locally.
DeleteSeveral roguelikes reportedly use the keyup approach: ADOM, Desktop Dungeons, the Mystery Dungeon series; and a couple hobby roguelike devs mentioned that they use this method.
It does introduce a small delay of several dozen milliseconds, but I don't see people complaining about sluggish movement controls in those games. Rather the opposite, I see several statements from people who tried it that it works well.
In any case, this is meant only as an option for the cursor keys. Numpad keys and hjkl+yubn would still use the keydown approach. Remember that the alternative is to use the cursor keys without being able to do diagonal movements. I think the keyup method is the preferable choice in that situation.
Holding down keys for continuous movement is still possible by adding the rule that holding down keys will trigger movement commands for each ~150ms the keys are held down. This means that you can both move via individual tap-tap-tap keyup events, and by holding down the keys to move longer distances. I wrote a little test for this approach and for me at least, this works well.
Maybe there's not much development on Nethack nowadays, but they had 30 years to implement remappable movement keys to allow people to set up a 9-direction-cluster like "YUI HJK NM," (which requires rebinding of the letter commands on these keys, e.g. I for inventory; either by moving them elsewhere, or by holding CTRL or some other modifier key to use them where they are).
Of course I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, but still... And as mentioned, other modern roguelikes such as Brogue also offer no way to change the controls. Sigh!
This reminds me of how discussions about feature proposals often go. Programmers often list multiple reasons why the proposal can't work or is a bad idea, even if other games already use that feature successfully.
First: matt w: That made me laugh.
DeleteSecond: Chet, it is ok to hate hjkl movement, like all things descended from vi. ;)
Third: I actually bought a really cheap USB numberpad so I could play nethack on my laptop in university back when I was using my laptop keyboard for everything (and, to be fair, Thinkpad keyboards were a lot better back then). Didn't wind up using it much as I stopped playing the game much in university. I still have and use the numberpad though.
Wait! Important! Does the package/distro/whatever you have for NetHack come with the "recover" utility? You might be able to get your character back (maybe from a point before you entered the current level).
ReplyDelete[That is the useful portion of the post. Rant follows.]
I hate, hate, hate, HATE the way NetHack treats the save file for permadeath--deleting it when you start up instead of when your character dies. This means that if the program crashes, probably through some fault of the program or computer rather than the player's, the game is lost forever. The windowed mac port I used to use had a fair amount of fatal bugs and the "recover" utility didn't work. I think I stopped playing seriously when I lost an overpowered wizard who had just completed what he needed for a descent into Hell.
The explanation that was given to me once is that, if they didn't do this, an unscrupulous player could control-C out of the program when they were about to die and restart from their last save. Which meant that the philosophy was to ruin the experience for honest players in order to inconvenience cheaters. The effect was to turn me into a cheater; I started backing up my save files in case of a crash (I did delete them if I lost). Some kind of general lesson on how to design security measures here--don't make them so onerous that legitimate users will need to bypass them.
You gotta love anti-cheat measures. Always making things harder for legit players while cheaters are killing vampire lords 10 floors down by the dozen with cursed copper coins.
DeleteYeah that's why i have always have prefered to play nethack online (on NAO) over local.
DeleteYour save is ironically much safer that way, without needing to cheat, and it saves all your stats for posterity which is quite nice.
Ofc NAO only offers the 3.6 version now, so not an option for Chet.
NH was developed on and for multi-user systems; there’s always discovery mode, which makes you invincible (but barring you from the highscores).
DeleteDiscovery mode doesn't help you if the program crashes. And since the saving system surely has to be changed for ports to single-user systems, one of the possible changes would be to make the save file more robust to crashes. Or even to include a "save file is deleted on death but marked as such on high score tables" run-time option if people like.
DeleteIf it's a DOSBox issue, then that's not really on the Dev Team though.
If the game notices that a save, bones or temporary swap file has been edited or modified, you will get the rare " killed by a trickery" message.
DeleteAsk me how I know!
Wishing for a wand of wishing does work - it gives you a wand of wishing. A cancelled wand, that is, so utterly useless.
ReplyDeleteI don't quite get the mechanics behind this: if there's only one wish per wand, wishing for another holds no benefit and does only delay the proper wish, isn't it? Colour me confused...
DeleteNot sure how it is in 3.1.0, but in the current version wands of wishing have a maximum of 3 charges, and can be recharged once with a scroll or [mumble mumble mumble].
Delete(Oh, and also: according to the current spoiler, wishing for a wand of wishing gets you a wand that was recharged and then cancelled. This is important because even a cancelled wand can be recharged, but wands of wishing can only be recharged once.)
Take this with a grain of salt, but it might be worth using one wish for an empty wand of wishing if it means you can use a blessed scroll of recharging to give that wand two or three wishes. Of course, it's gonna be YASD if you die before you find/write such a scroll.
DeleteI honestly don't know why this strategy got patched out - it's a high-risk, high-reward type of thing that punishes people who didn't plan ahead well enough to survive while waiting to find/write the scroll. I think that's already enough of a "karmic consequence" for trying it.
P-Tux7: I don't think that the empty wand of wishing strategy works, because the wand you get is not rechargeable! In the very best case, and only 1% of the time, you get your wish back through a strategy I won't mention here. (Unless things are different in 3.1.0.)
DeleteThe problem is that granting an empty chargeable wand would really give you infinite wishes once you had the blessed scroll of charging in hand. Wish -> empty wand -> blessed charge to 3 charges -> wish for new wand + blessed scroll of charging + something else -> charge new wand to 3 charges -> repeat ad infinitum.
Blessed +whatever GDSM is the default "correct" wish choice. I think +2 has the best odds of working or something? Nethack always felt like a weird float between being a "solved game" and a random number generator. Once you know what you need to do to ascend and win, it's just throwing dice at a wall until it actually happens.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the same can be said of all video games really.
"Perhaps the same can be said of all video games really."
DeleteYour words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a saviour such as you!
What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk... have at you!
DeleteAh, good old vi-keys. They kind made sense in their original context, as command keys for a text editor. In 1979 you didn't often have a number pad, and you certainly didn't have a mouse, so you wanted your hands to plant in one place on the keyboard and never ever move. So the text editor vi said 'ok, just hold a command key with the left hand, and use the home row with your right hand to move left, down, up, and right.' When games like rogue came around, vi users were the target audience, and they were already used to those keys. All that was left was to squeeze in some diagonal directions, and those could just be the keys in reach of your index finger, job done.
ReplyDeleteOld terminals sometimes even had the arrows drawn on hjkl. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg
Obviously none of this still matters for the modern general audience of game players, but you know how resistant nerds are to change.
I swear to god, some day in 2035, I'm going to be playing a game from 2015 and I'll wonder why the water effects for ponds looks slightly worse than the water effects for oceans, and the answer is somehow going to have something to do with "vi keys."
DeleteI wonder how much emacs users hated having to use vi keys?
DeleteFor those that don't know; There was a bitter divide between vi and emacs users. vi used more home-row based keys like hjkl and model editing, whereas emacs used several modifier keys and some...non-ergonomic shortcuts (Since I also started on a different keyboard layout). vim was very minimalist, whereas emacs had nethack as an extension.
That is right, this text editor let you play nethack inside it (and do many, many other things. It is a very old joke wondering if it was a text editor or an operating system).
Anyway, I wonder how it would feel to be an emacs user back in the day who had to learn the hated vim keys just to play nethack...inside emacs.
As an emacs user and a southpaw, yes, we hated it.
Delete(Moment here to be angry, as a southpaw, also at games that don't offer an alternative to WASD, a combination that basically can't be combined with a mouse by left-handed users. Full-sized keyboards have a cluster of keys with arrows on them in a very convenient place for the right hand, please, for the love of god, let us use that if we want to.)
it's one of those comments that will appear in an eternal recurrence as long as this blog exists
Deletetime is a flat torus
Glad you are enjoying your return to the Dungeon of Doom! Bummer about your lost game; it was a good start! Some thoughts:
ReplyDeleteThe Restore utility that usually ships with the game might recover your game. Nethack only keeps your current dungeon level in memory, and saves previously visited levels to temporary files. Restore will recover your state from these scratch files. In normal circumstances, you’d be able to restore everything up to the current dungeon level. Unfortunately, since you were playing in DOSBox, the state of your virtual DOS machine needed to be saved as well, and I’m going to guess that DOSBox didn’t do this.
Kobolds are just inedible. Lizards and acid blobs never rot. Lizard corpses are a surprisingly good cure for, um, arthritis.
Graffiti sometimes gets randomly generated when you enter a new level, and the messages degrade over time. You can write your own messages by #E)ngraving. It’s worth exploring the mechanics of engraving. It just might save your life.
Drinking from fountains early game is suicidal. You got very, very lucky to get a wish. Just as dangerously you can dip things in fountains as well.
The choice of Grey Dragon Scale Mail vs Silver Dragon Scale Mail is a decades long argument that’s some ridiculous percentage of all text on the early internet. Either one is a top wish, especially early game. One gives you magic resistance the other gives you reflection. You are going to need both. Getting one early is huge.
Speed boots are also a great choice. As is a wand of charging. Make sure they are blessed. And you can ask for the boots to be (rot13)svercebbs.
Asking for up to a +3 enchantment has a good chance to be successful, especially if you know your luck is positive. Pros never go above +2 however. N oyrffrq fpebyy bs rapunag jrncba pna vapernfr lbhe jrncba rapunagzrag ol hc gb guerr, ohg tbvat bire svir qrfgeblf lbhe jrncba.
Doing specific things exercises your stats. For example, kicking in a door exercises strength, reading exercises intelligence, etc. Exercise a stat enough and it will increase up to a max of 18.
Welcome to Gnometown! It’s guaranteed to be generated roughly half-way through the Gnomish Mines. Getting a co-aligned altar was a nice bonus. Sacrifice as many corpses as you can afford! Each time you don’t get a gift, you decrease your prayer timeout, and increase your chance for a gift next time. Eventually, you will max out your god’s favor, and they will let you know.
Surprisingly, the guards and shop keepers in Gnometown are human and human sacrifice is a Chaotic act (unless you aren’t human.) Sacrificing gnomes however is fair game. The guards are tough, but the captain has a nice weapon.
Snickersnee is a medium power artifact weapon, but a huge improvement on the bullwhip. The bullwhip won’t hurt monsters with tough hides, but you can A)pply it to disarm opponents with weapons or wands, or swing over pits.
Good luck! There’s a full moon this weekend (2/24/2024), good time to be playing Nethack!
Gray Dragon vs. Silver Dragon scale mail won't be a hard choice for Chet, because silver dragons don't exist until 3.3.0! And that's (blessed) scrolls of charging, I don't think there's a wand of charging?
DeleteThere is one thing that it is a very good idea for many characters to dip in a fountain, once they're high-level enough to deal with the possible enemies. The archeologist didn't have it, but a previous character did...
I believe for the dipping thing I was talking about to be effective, the character has to be level 5 or above anyway.
DeleteYeah, full moons are a great time to play, it's one of the few situations where what's happening in the real world influences your performance. The game recognizes the full moons for a few days before vanishing, so don't take too long to mourn Aanzim.
DeleteYou are right, of course, about the scroll vs wand of charging. I got confused in my enthusiasm and nostalgia for Nethack.
DeleteDOSbox usually stores files on the host filesystem, so it shouldn't matter that the state was lost.
DeleteHere's my original spoiler on "Exercising Stats" from decades ago, that was them updated and posted by David Corbett. Somehow the link still works.
ReplyDeletehttps://alt.org/nethack/mirror/www.geocities.com/dcorbett42/nethack/exercise.htm
Moving boulders is a good way to exercise strength early on, but only the first push of the boulder in a particular direction increments the counter.
DeleteIf you push it one way, then run around and push it the other way, then back around again and push it... that will continue to increment the counter. If you do that 38 times before turn 800 then you will have a good chance of gaining a strength point. Beyond that I only do a couple things to intentionally exercise stats:
1) kick open doors because it exercises both strength and dexterity
2) search a few times for secret doors in likely locations because it exercises wisdom and also gives you more doors to kick open
Beyond that I mostly just avoid the things that abuse your stats and play normally.
Be careful with kicking down doors, that can sometimes get you in trouble. :)
DeleteIs this the first version that had these "exercises" and "abuses"? I don't remember such things happening at all in 3.0.10.
DeleteYes, according to the Nethack wiki.
DeleteThanks for that FAQ, Dauntless. The game told me that I had LOST dexterity a couple of times, and I guess it was from "abusing" it by satiation.
DeleteStats lost by "abuse" can be regained via the same methods as stats lost to monster attacks. I won't spoil those methods here, but suffice to say that by around mid-game they are usually easily recoverable.
DeleteHere's another Nethack spoiler resource that still works.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.steelypips.org/nethack/
Some brief history:
The very first Nethack guidance I ever received online was from David "Kirsty" Damerell. He is a Nethack OG from back when we were connecting to BBS using NCSA Telnet.
Kate Nepveu (hostess of steelypips.org linked above) has been organizing this disorganized crap that college boys spammed on BBS sites since at least 1996.
Kevin Hugo (original Dev Team member) gets broad recognition (deservedly) and he is another great source for Nethack anthropology and archaeology.
Oh wow, I'm so glad to see steelypips.org is still around. When I was at a science academy in 2005 we had 4 computers and three of them were modern and got internet; the last one was running Windows 95 and didn't have internet. I remember copying over nethack on floppy disks and a download of the steelypips.org spoilers since I could play on that computer as long as long as I wanted, since no one else wanted to use it. Reading them in Notepad was kinda a pain though.
DeleteLikewise I downloaded the HTML version and copied it onto the aforementioned Windows 95 IR computer in grad school.
Wow, that is an incredibly lucky start to get two wishes early. I eventually realized that quaffing from fountains greatly increases the variance of the game and they're far more likely to kill you than help you. If I'm playing for ascension streaks, I ignore fountains (mostly except for the thing alluded to by a poster above) until I have a lot more luck or ability to handle the toughest things that fountains can throw at you.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, always wish for 2 blessed scrolls of charging as the first wish from a wand of wishing.
> You occasionally run into hints scribbled on the floor, sometimes with missing letters. The first time, I got: "They say a floatin? eye can defeat M?dusa." I think it refers to the ability to see monsters but not to become petrified while blindfolded with the "Telepathy" intrinsic, which you get from eating a floating eye. Later, I got (without the missing letters)
ReplyDeleteWell, not only that - Floating eyes also reflect attacks, which works quite nicely against Medusa too!
How do you get a floating eye TO medusa?
DeletePolymorph into one?
DeleteThere's a real answer to this question:
DeleteTrg n svthevar bs n sybngvat rlr, oevat vg gb gur zrqhfn yriry, naq nccyl vg gb trg n sybngvat rlr. Vs gur svthevar vf oyrffrq, gura rvtugl creprag bs gur gvzr gur sybngvat rlr jvyy or gnzr (yvxr lbhe crg). V qba'g xabj vs guvf jbexf nf n fgengrtl ntnvafg Zrqhfn.
You don't need to bring a floating Eye to Medusa, you only need to
DeleteTrg ersyrpgva lbhefrys
Or alternatively you can just nccyl n zveebe ba ure, that works too
And are you sure flaoting eyes have reflection? Their passive attack (retaliating against melee attacks) is something different. So I think Chet's comment about blindfolding is the correct one.
DeleteIn fact I don't think intrinsic reflection is a thing in this version. IIRC there's a comment in the source code sbe jura lbh cbylzbecu vagb n zrgny-rngvat zbafgre naq rng na nzhyrg bs ersyrpgvba that says "Nice try." When silver dragons come along in a later version they are the only monsters reflection, so bringing a silver dragon to Medusa might work.
(rot13 because the following mechanic is relevant in the current version, even if silver dragons aren't). Juvpu orfvqrf gur hfhny svthevar naq bgure jnlf bs gnzvat pbhyq jbex ol pneelvat nebhaq n qentba rtt hagvy vg ungpurf, ohg bayl nf n znyr punenpgre, naq bayl unys gur gvzr. Srznyr punenpgref jub jnag crgf sebz rttf unir gb cbylzbecu vagb gur zbafgre sbez naq ynl gur rtt gurzfryirf.
Could you have wished for a Scroll of Genocide? If so, why is it not a good choice?
ReplyDeleteHe could have, but Scrolls of Genocide aren't usually a great pick for low-level characters--you aren't likely to encounter any monsters worth zapping until much later, so in terms of maximizing survivability gray dragon scale mail, conferring an enormous armor class improvement along with magic resistance, is going to be much more consistently useful (and will continue to be so through the endgame).
DeleteVery well said.
DeleteI am not clear on how these stores are supposed to work. What sort of businessman opens a store in a mine full of monsters? The answer, I'm sure, is "the video game kind", and if I were playing the game myself rather than just reading about it, I probably wouldn't care. As it is, however, I can't help but wonder who the regular clientele of these stores is supposed to be.
ReplyDeleteI would also wonder why these storekeepers are so willing to sell things to Aanzim when the apparent legal authority in the area is hostile to him, but I figure that's because they're desperate. He's the first customer they've seen, what with all the monsters.
Shopkeepers in Nethack are incredibly buff and not patient with typical adventurer shenanigans. They also confiscate the goods of the now dead adventurer who he broke the rules.
DeleteOn a popular multiuser system, say at a university in 1993, with adventurers getting generated many times a day, the shopkeeper is making a killing.
And have you seen his profit margins? Walmart and Amazon can only dream of marking merchandise up that far! Plus Rodney doesn't seem to have any sales tax.
DeleteMost games suffer from this kind of unrealism. Huge, multi-leveled dungeons are never realistic in the first place. I think the bare minimum graphics of a roguelike make it easier to swallow the situation than in, say, Dungeon Master. You can imagine that all kinds of things are happening in the invisible periphery.
DeleteI have my laptop set to hibernate automatically on very low power. It's rare that a program doesn't survive this.
ReplyDeleteI have had trouble with DOSBox crashing/closing when my system sleeps or hibernates. Its possible Chet hit the same snag.
DeleteAlso, depending upon how old the laptop's battery is, the Hibernate may not trigger early enough to ensure all data is saved before total power loss. The solution on Windows is to enter the advanced power management settings, and change the "Battery \ Critical Battery Level" setting for the current profile to a higher percentage (i.e. 15% instead of 5%).
Yes, that's the issue. Anything that causes my screen to refresh or redraw causes DOSBox to crash. This includes going to sleep, switching monitors, switching resolutions, and some other program taking over the full screen. Given that, it's all the more baffling that I just didn't save and quit.
DeleteDoxbox has an active development community; I wonder if this is worth bringing up on their forums?
DeleteDoes the crash only happen on refresh while playing Nethack or is it for all DOSbox games on your machine? If it's the former, then there may be a relevant setting in the Nethack config file.
DeleteHappens no matter what I'm running. It's been an issue for years.
DeleteAs a Yet Another Stupid Death, losing a 2 wish beginning character because of power shortage must be up there.
ReplyDeleteChet: It feels weird to be posting in real time (I feel behind in what, 2014?), but I'll try to keep up with your nethack posts at least.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of talk here about keybindings and why doesn't nethack have them: It does, at least in version 3.6.X: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Binding_keys I would check the config file and text manual that comes with your version of the game to see if there is supported there.
Most key bindings can be changed, but not the movement keys.
Delete(Except for choosing between numpad or hjkl+yubn.)
Huh, odd! I wonder what arcane C programming decision lead to that.
DeleteFrom reading the source, it seems like groundwork has been done to allow remapping directional keys, but it's not hooked up yet. I suspect it's because directional keys are used in so many different contexts -- the commands it's currently possible to remap are all in very specific contexts.
Delete