Cold, Cold Dark Heart of Uukrul

The first party didn't do so well.

As I said in my first posting, The Dark Heart of Uukrul is "almost roguelike" in its approach to saves. You get one, and the game automatically appropriates it frequently, including after every combat, every character death, and every time something significant happens. Unless you want to cheat with frequent backups of the save folder, you've got to role-play with the punches. Death isn't exactly "permanent," though, in that upon full party death some mysterious Samaritan pays to have your lead character resurrected. If you don't want to pay for the rest, you can dump them and get a new NPC from the Adventurer's Guild--conveniently located right next door to the Mausoleum.

Left unexplained is why Uukrul tolerates, in his own dungeon, a guild full of adventurers who hate him.

It turns out--and I missed this on the first pass of the manual--that you can "backup" your party every time you visit a sanctuary. If something unpleasant happens after that, you can restore the backup. Some discussion on the board last week suggested that DHoU "purists" regard this as cheating, but screw that: if the game provides it, I'm going to use it. This ends up making the game a little less like Rogue and a little more like Might & Magic, where once you reached a town, you knew your progress was safe.

An important overlooked function.

I hadn't backed up my first party, but we were early enough in the game that I started over, recast my party, and made Plenamujer a little more pious this time. More on that in a bit.

Over the last couple of days, I have made my way through, and mapped, what feels like a decent part of the dungeon. The game comes with a decent automapper, which not only shows the overall contour of the dungeon but also the specific squares your characters have stepped on. You can annotate squares with letters if you want to remember key locations later. But I still find it too limiting, and it fails in certain areas of the dungeon, so I've been making my own maps. In doing so, I'm testing out a java-based Dungeon Mapper created on a whim by reader Pierce Roth. It works pretty well, with keyboard shortcuts to add walls and doors, the ability to paint dungeon squares in various colors and thus track where you've been and where you haven't, and annotation options for individual squares, entire levels, and the map file at large. Pierce has been very responsive to bugs and suggestions that I've sent. This might eventually replace Excel as my default (just in time for tiled first-person CRPGs to disappear, probably).

The same area mapped with the auto mapper and Pierce Roth's Dungeon Mapper.

 

So far the game has been fairly linear. Numerous up and down staircases defy attempts to organize the dungeon into "levels," but there are definite "areas." Each area might have three or four staircases up or down, but generally all but one lead to a dead-end. Some of them are odd. You'll find a secret door leading to a staircase that leads up to a long corridor ending in...nothing. No treasure, no major encounter. I suppose that's realistic, in a way. I once found a secret room in my attic, but there was  nothing in it.

45 minutes of dungeon crawling to find a crummy commercial?

I continue to enjoy the atmosphere the game imparts as you explore new areas. Almost every major room has some brief description attached to it, and many of the fixed encounters are preceded with some textual introduction. Again, it very much reminds me of Pool of Radiance, minus the adventurer's journal.

Not much has unfolded in the plot, so for now I'll just cover the game mechanics in more detail.

I encountered one more Mara apparition, but I don't know who this old man is yet.

In my first posting, I suggested that I found the combat a little tedious, and I still do, but I have to thank Caron for cluing me in as to the existence of "autocombat," which I had missed in the manual. It's a welcome feature, and I'm using it even in these early stages against rats and other low-level enemies. The AI is reasonably good, and characters will cast both offensive and defensive spells, lay on hands, and otherwise make full use of their abilities. Against uniform enemies, it makes essentially the same decisions I would, but I'm careful to plot my own combats against creatures who can poison, drain experience, or cast spells.

The good thing about combat is that it's not so frequent it's annoying. Each battle feels deliberately and sensibly placed, with rats in caves and orcs patrolling corridors, and undead in dank crypts. You don't encounter them every step; I'd say every 25 or so steps. I haven't quite figured out whether there are "random" combats, exactly; the places that I've re-played, I've encountered combats in essentially the same places (although the foes might be slightly different each time), but sometimes only after walking over the square several times. It appears that there are squares that have a certain probability of combat on each map, but not a lot of completely random encounters. In general, areas I've already traversed remain clear.

The magic system is interesting, but it doesn't give you a lot of choices early on. I'll cover it in more detail in a later posting when I have more of it. Briefly, magician's magic is organized into five classes called "Arkanas": Fire, Frost, Healing, Protection, and Knowledge. Each class has multiple spell levels represented by "rings": iron, copper, silver, gold, platinum, and crystal. Each ring confers one or two spells. At first, I thought you obtained more rings literally by finding or buying them, but it appears you just get them on leveling up. My mage started with iron rings in fire, healing, and knowledge, which gave me five spells: a fire bolt (AMRAS), a fire spell that burns all adjacent enemies (ORLOS), a healing spell (SHUM), a translate spell (NGOS), and light (LUM). Each spell consumes a number of "psychic points."

Killing an orc with my only viable offensive spell.

Priest spells are called "prayers" and are organized among four gods, each with different aspects: Ufthu, the God of War; Drutho, the God of the Underworld; Golthur, God of the Physical Self; and Fshofth, God of the Spirtual Self. As with mages, prayers come in six rings, and there's one prayer per ring. My priest started with the ability to pray to Ufthu for a "divine arrow" (RALKOR) or to Golthur to heal everyone (SIRDHE). Each prayer consumes "virtue points." Prayers are notably different from mage spells in that they're more powerful but often--usually, actually--unsuccessful. There's a decent chance that the god will either ignore the prayer or get annoyed and "smite" the priest for bothering him. Given her lack of piety, this happens to Plenamujer a lot.

Retribution for what? Trying to kill undead?

There is an additional complexity to prayers in that the actual meaning of some of them isn't certain. Plenamujer got iron-level prayers for Fshofth when we found his altar, but the first prayer, called "The Quiet Room," is a mystery. It goes like this:

Fshofth, On the shore of the lost lake,
There is a house. Though the spell makers talk,
It is quiet still. For though chanting sounds,
It will little disturb the air where they dwell.

Does it silence spellcasters? Only experimentation will tell.

Plenamujer finds another god to disappoint.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• I don't know what most of the stuff in my inventory is. The game suggests I will find a sage who can identify it for me. This appears to be the only way to identify equipment in the game. I keep finding things that seem worthless, like bones, skulls, and shreds of cloth, but I'm taking them anyway, just in case. I also have a bunch of gems that either have some plot-related purpose or I'm supposed to sell them.

Some items that may or may not be important.

 

• There isn't a whit of sound in the game. The developers didn't even try. I created a iTunes playlist with every song that has "Heart" or "Dark" in the title. Norah Jones was playing when I started this entry; hence, the title. Yeah, that's right: occasionally I like Norah Jones. I'm sure your libraries are full of nothing but masterpieces of hipsterdom. Jerks.

• I gave up randomly searching for secret doors because it wastes food, and I was hardly ever finding any. The game often gives hints about their locations, such as this map I found on a wall near the secret door's entrance. Still, I hope I'm not missing a lot for which the game doesn't provide hints.

• You have to keep a supply of food going in the game. It's expensive enough that it's cut down on my ability to buy better weapons and armor for my people. So far, the only way I've found to get it is to buy it at the one store in the game.

• Being able to listen at doors is a good idea which is generally useless in practice. I routinely hear things at doors only to find empty rooms beyond, and many encounters are preceded by silence on the other side of the door.

This is the one time that it's helped.

 

• There appear to be no missile weapons in the game.

• I haven't fully gotten a handle on it yet, but I think the game scales experience rewards for combat. Creatures that were giving me 30-40 points at the beginning are giving me single digits now. (My characters are all Level 4.) But even during the same level, the amount of experience I get for combats seems to vary wildly.

• Humor: I walked into a room, and a message said, "A sign at the end of the room reads 'DANGER!'" I walked up to the sign, and it fell on my head.

• "Rancid molds" have become my archnemeses. I hate them. They attack in big groups, poison everyone, and are very difficult to kill.

Poison slowly depletes health until it wears off.

• I hate certain undead, too. They can drain hundreds of experience points, which take hours to build up.

I'm enjoying the game, though I hope I get to a point I can identify equipment soon. In the meantime, I wonder if some of you more tech-savvy people might help with a conundrum. I've successfully increased the size and scaling of my DOSBox window so it's got a proper size and resoultion (800 x 600), but the program insists on taking all of the Dark Heart of Uukrul screenshots at 320 x 200, and they're enlarged to make a decent size here in the blog. But for NetHack, DOSBox takes the shots at 800 x 600, and the blog ends up having to shrink them--which, of course, is better for viewing purposes. Why is DOSBox varying the size of the shots, and how can I get it to consistently use the window resolution?

NetHack: Dos and Don'ts

Does the "chat" option ever produce anything useful?

The Dark Heart of Uukrul is a good game, and I'll probably end up spending most of the next couple weeks on it, but I wanted to get in a little more NetHack play while I still had the bug plus all the new information I got from you in my last posting. I allowed myself to explore with "explore mode" for a while, which is identical to regular play, except when you die, a box comes up asking "Die? (Y/N)." If you say "N," you get all your hit points back. You can also see your intrinsic abilities at any time with CTRL-X (I discovered this by experimenting with CTRL-anything). This helps a lot with figuring out what eating various creatures does. I prefer to "explore" with a healer, whose stethescope can tell me a lot about various monsters.

Through this mechanism--which does feel a bit like cheating--I've uncovered things I never would have gotten from just playing to win, including the intrinsic abilities conferred by eating various monster corpses (and the associated dangers), monster hit point levels, uses of various objects within the game, and (finally) a list of scroll effects resolved to scroll names.

"Explore" mode makes me a lot bolder as to what I eat.

 
Since my "explore" hiatus, I've played two regular characters. One, a priest named Joktan, died at the jaws of a soldier ant on Level 5. The second, a cave-man named Almodad, is on Level 9 and presently still alive. I wasn't going to tell you this, because every time I tell you one of my characters is doing well, he dies soon after. Then I remembered that, to date, 100% of my NetHack characters have died, so it's not like I can correlate it to my blog postings specifically.

The second Lord of the Rings reference for Almodad. This might be the first "named" weapon I've found, and it does indeed glow blue when orcs are close. And it's at times like that that I have to be extra careful.

Through my research and analysis, I've compiled the following list of major "dos" and "dont's" in the game. I make it a point to review these before each session to keep them fresh in my mind. I welcome any comments, corrections, or alternate viewpoints on any of them.

DO

• Drop all unidentified stuff on altars to at least see if its cursed. This is especially useful for armor, because you can tell by the AC whether it's better than what you already have, even if you don't identify it. You can also often figure out what rings and amulets do by putting them on. As long as you know these items aren't cursed, they're at least safe to experiment with.

This means the scroll was cursed. I had a cursed scroll of "remove curse." Does that mean they just cancel each other out? (Yes, I did get a lot of mileage out of this dungeon level.)

• Use holy water for blessing things. Blessings augment whatever the item already does. I particularly like blessed scrolls of identify, which will identify multiple unknown items instead of just one. I'm curious to see how a blessed scroll of genocide acts, but scrolls of genocide are rare and I haven't found one in forever.
• Try to engage as many foes as possible in ranged combat, keeping daggers, bows, arrows, lances, spears, rocks, and other throwing items for this purpose. Too many enemies have attacks that really suck at close range, including blue jellies (cold!), gelatinous cubes (freeze), floating eyes (freeze), leprechauns (steal gold), nymphs (steal other items), acid blobs (corrode weapons and armor), were-creatures (inflict lycanthropy), and innumerable enemies that poison you. Many of these foes either don't move at all or don't necessarily make a beeline for you, so you have a decent chance of destroying them at range if you can avoid blundering upon them.

This character's inventory includes plenty of stuff to throw.

• Carry a junk weapon to use against things like rust monsters and acid blobs, so you don't ruin your good weapon.
• Use the diagonal key to cut corners. Every step you save in corridors is a step that monsters don't get closer to you.
• Eat whenever there's fresh food available unless already satiated. You never know when you'll get another chance, and I haven't found any good reasons to ration.
• Test scrolls and potions in controlled environments. I find shops are good places after I've picked up an item or two, since the shopkeeper blocks the door. No enemies can suddenly appear while I'm temporarily blinded or stunned.
• Use the buying and selling price of items in shops to help figure out what they are. I think this varies based on charisma, so I haven't been able to map prices to items perfectly yet, but I keep meaning to analyze the effects of charisma and come up with a solid table.
• Use the "repeat" option instead of holding down the SPACE bar (to wait) or the S key (to search). "Repeat" interrupts you when something happens. I'm embarrassed how long it took me to master this.
• Go downstairs the moment you find stairs. Pop right back up again if you want to, but since the creatures encountered on each level are at a level equal to the average of your level and the dungeon level, and since they generate when you first appear, you'll get easier monsters if you go down right away. Combined with the following, I think it maximizes your chances.
• Try to reach a level equal to the next dungeon level before heading down permanently. At least, this seems to work best for me early-game and mid-game (or am I naive for even thinking I've reached "mid-game" yet?).
• Wait for hit points to recharge unless you desperately need to move forward (e.g., to find food).

DON'T

• Hold onto items in shops if inflicted with teleportitis. If you suddenly teleport out of the shop with unpaid merchandise, it counts as thefts, and a battalion of police officers swarms you.
• Eat anything that confers teleportitis unless you have a way to control it.
• Eat things that sound like they would be trouble, like dead spiders or acid blobs.
• Go charging down hallways. Pause between each step. Monsters come out of nowhere.
• Let yourself get impatient and frustrated until after you die. If you have to save and take a break, do it.
• Drink from fountains. Hardly anything good happens.
• Wear armor or weapons that you want to keep while reading unknown scrolls. They can diminish or destroy anything you have on. (On the other hand, if it's a scroll of enhance weapon or armor, you'll lose the benefit if you don't have anything on.)
• Eat when already satiated. You can choke and die.
• Waste potions of Extra Healing on hit point regeneration if you have any other options. They also cure sickness, poison, and blindness, and you're more likely to need them for those conditions.
• Ditch your dog or cat. They help, even if they make navigation annoying.
• Waste time and energy (read: hunger) searching for secret doors unless you really need what's on the other side (i.e., the stairs).
• Trust anything while under the effects of hallucination.

This is embarrassing. It looked like a yeti while it was killing me.

 

• Feel like you have to engage every enemy. If they're not bothering you, you may want to leave them alone.
• Throw harmful potions at creatures right next to you. You get splash-back.
• Try to wander around when confused, stunned, or blind. You step into traps, rouse monsters, and accidentally kill your allies.
• Forget about "ELBERETH!" It can buy you a couple of moves when you need them most.

It was probably still too early in my NetHack career to narrate a video of the game, but I did the one below (also here) a couple of days ago. I thought it might be an epic adventure, but I ended up dying after about 20 minutes. In the post-game analysis, I realized several things I could have done to save myself, including escaping sooner and a more intelligent use of ELBERETH. I'm curious what other gameplay mistakes that you find, but watching the video is probably going to be more useful to those who haven't played NetHack than to those who have.

There are a few things I'm confused about for which I wouldn't mind some hints if you have them:

1. I'll just be sitting around, minding my own business, and suddenly I'm "blinded by a blast of light!" What the hell is that? How can I get it to stop?

What yellow light?!

2. I don't really understand the different colors the corridors turn as I play. I can't really tell color anyway, but as I explore, the corridor seems to turn white, but then it degrades to gray later on. Then, suddenly, individual squares will turn to brown (or red) or yellow (or orange) somewhat randomly. Is there something I can do with this information?

3. Every few characters, when I start the game, it tells me that there's a "new moon tonight" or a "full moon tonight." Does this actually mean anything when it comes to gameplay?

How should I be careful?

Okay, back to Uukrul for now. But my average character and dungeon level attained is slowly increasing, and I have until June 2013 to "ascend" and still meet my goal.

Game 76: The Dark Heart of Uukrul (1989)

I'm not sure we're fighting this dragon in the most efficient manner possible

       

The Dark Heart of Uukrul
United Kingdom

Digital Studios (developer); Brøderbund Software (publisher)
Released 1989 for DOS and Apple II
Date Started: 17 October 2012

      

At this point in my career as a semi-professional CRPG player (hey, the $250 I get each year from Google isn't much, but it's something), I like it when games show me something new, even if the game itself otherwise isn't perfect. The Dark Heart of Uukrul opens with a delightful character-creation process reminiscent of Ultima IV, but even better because it applies to all four characters.

You play the game with a fighter, a paladin, a priest, and a mage--no sweating over class choices in this game. For each party member, the game asks you to envision the character and answer a series of conceptual questions based on your profile. The answers determine your starting statistics. I decided to play the exercise straight rather than game the system for the attributes I wanted. I envisioned:

• Gliglois the Fighter: A charismatic, dextrous, enthusiastic fighter of medium to thin frame--much more like Westley in The Princess Bride or Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood than, say, Conan the Barbarian. He likes fighting, but not particularly killing. He sees swordplay as an art and became an adventurer for the fun of it.

• Invictia the Paladin: The classic lawful good drill sergeant. Think Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5. She marches into battle with a straight back and a grim expression, focused always on doing her duty as efficiently and effectively as possible. She adheres to a strict set of virtues and habits and never deviates. She's tall and strong with a dark shock of hair topping a head that is often bloodied, but ever unbowed.

• Plenamujer the Cleric: A voluptuous and licentious woman, Plenamujer would be an atheist if she could. Every fiber of her being tells her to be a thief--and she's clever and skilled enough to do it--except, for reasons she's never been able to figure out, the gods speak to her, and give her holy powers that she never asked for and doesn't want. With every healing spell she casts, she curses the ability and the god that gave it to her--a rage that she channels into her wild, unpredictable combat.

• Prufrock the Magician: A portly fellow of middle-age, with a bald spot in the middle of his hair, Prufrock used to entertain children with sparkles and disappearing tricks. He would have been happy doing that forever. But he was good--too good--and someone important took notice. Now roped into this suicidal dungeon crawl, he's terrified of the dark, terrified of monsters, terrified of...well, everything.

It worked: with these descriptions in mind, I was able to answer the questions quite well. Here's  one for each character; see if you can guess how I answered.

 

Answers: 3, 1, 1, 1

Going against type led to some consequences: I ended up with a fighter who's not particularly strong, and a priest whose lowest score is in "piety." Things worked out better for Invictia and Prufrock. I'll play with this group and see how I do. Perhaps Plenamujer will discover some faith during her journey and Prufrock will discover some courage.

Plenamujer is the worst priestess ever.

The setup offers a familiar dungeon-crawling backdrop. The underground city of Eriosthe, constructed by the fabled Ancients in the Kalurn mountains, was once a shining beacon of peace and prosperity. But one of the Ancients, Uukrul, grew corrupt and powerful, and he drove away his colleagues, leaving the city to fall into darkness. Now, hundreds of years later, Uukrul's evil threatens to spill out of the underground and into the "Western Lands." The Lands' council raised a party of councilors, led by Mara (presumably before her ascension as a Divine), and sent them into the dungeon. They never returned.

The Council concluded--and try to follow this logic--that their mistake was sending a party that was actually powerful. Somehow, this "played into Uukrul's hands." They decided what they really needed to do was get a party of rank amateurs. Noting that my four characters are "the most promising of all the Aspirants," they intend to smuggle us into Eriosthe through a secret entrance and let us develop our skills once we're already there. Our only advantage is four "soul amulets," which will facilitate resurrection and allow access to secret refuges in the city.

Resurrection takes place, apparently, at the "Mausoleum." This feels like a trick.

The game begins with the party tossed into the starting dungeon with a few initial resources. Nothing to do from there but to explore. The exploration is fun. As a dungeon crawl, the game is a lot more like Pool of Radiance than Wizardry or Dungeon Master. You have frequent special encounters with numerous options, and when combat begins, the game switches to a top-down iconographic display. There are proper shops, too:

Gliglois is going to want that enchanted mail. Invictia will likely let him have it.

As you can see, the graphics are quite good. The dungeon corridors are mostly empty--it will be a while (Ultima Underworld?) before our dungeons seem like real places with unique sub-zones--but the graphics for monsters, shops, and special encounters are some of the best in the era.

Weapons occasionally break, but can be repaired here.

The encounters, which offer some opportunities for role-playing and logic, differentiate this game from a lot of dungeon-crawlers. Even something as banal as finding a secret door might present numerous options: listen at the door, trace its outline with a staff, search for a mechanism to open it, or shove it. Here are a few random screenshots of these special encounters so far:

I asked about Uukrul and he attacked me.

In most games, a door is just a door.

Prufrock begged Gliglois not to press it, but he did anyway, and we found a little bungalow with some treasure.

On the wall, a little map indicating a secret area. I found it off to the east.

And even when you're not in an encounter, the game provides fun and descriptive visual cues about the various areas you enter. Touches like this make for a good CRPG experience.

You don't often find this level of detail outside of text adventures.

Most games would just have the door open. This game feels more like there's a dungeon master behind it.

At first, I thought the town was a bit nonsensical. After all, who would expect to find robust commerce and trade in the middle of a pit of evil? But then again, it's most CRPGs that are unrealistic, not Uukrul. In the average high-fantasy game, the moment you leave a city or town, you're in amidst tribes and animals. But orcs and trolls have to get their weapons and armor from somewhere, meaning they must have trades and jobs and a functioning economy--just a tightly controlled one.

At several points during the game, you encounter sanctuaries that you're allowed to enter because of your magic amulets, although the game throws a copy protection at you. I found images of the amulets online that allow me to crack the code:

Entering a sanctuary with a soul amulet.

Sanctuaries give you the opportunity to rest and heal, store items, and teleport to other sanctuaries in the dungeon, which makes travel less of a nightmare than in, say, Bloodwych, when returning to the potion shop meant a good half hour of maze-crawling. I think you also need to visit a sanctuary to level up.

So far, I can't say I'm in love with the combat system. It's turn-based and tactical, which I do like, but a little too cumbersome. Each combat turn proceeds in two phases: a movement phase, in which you can move characters exactly one square, and an attack phase. in which you can swing  your weapons and cast spells and such. The whole thing is slower than it needs to be. I prefer the "Gold Box" style in which movement and combat take place simultaneously, and both characters and enemies can make multiple moves. You also can't strike diagonally in this game, making it a pain in the neck to position the characters just right.

The party fights rats--yes, rats--and some kind of slime.

On the positive side, there hasn't been an overwhelming number of combats so far, and enemies have the decency to flee when they're outnumbered, rather than making you shuffle across the map, one turn at a time, to kill every last bat. I just came from a game that was a little tedious for that reason. I also like the way the combat map models the corridor or room in which it's taking place.

As with many CRPGs, combat provides experience at the end. Each character gets a differing amount of experience, and I don't yet have a lock on the variables that influence this. Generally, the character who makes the most kills gets the most experience, but no one ever gets 0. I think it's possible that the game tracks all the individual actions you make in combat: moving, taking damage, dealing damage, casting spells, and awards an amount to each type of action. This is consistent with something else that I've discovered: combat isn't the only way to get experience. Characters also get it for finding treasure, finding secret doors, and I think even talking to people. (I don't always notice when it increases.) This is the most complex experience-based system that I've encountered so far.

Plenamujer killed the most bats in this combat, but Invictia still got some points without doing anything at all.

I'm not sure if the plot is going to unfold in stages, or if I'm just going to explore and get more powerful before I inevitably meet Uukrul. Evidence suggests perhaps the former. A key part of the back story involves the previous party led by Councilor Mara, and I've already encountered several inscriptions and diaries left by her group, as well as some kind of apparition instructing me to "find the frozen hearts."

I'm not sure if she's a ghost or a "sending" of her imprisoned form, but this diary I found doesn't bode well:

Here's one final twist: the game is practically roguelike in its saving. You get one save slot, and the game continually overwrites it on its own. If a character dies in combat and you don't like it, tough: it just got written to the save file. I suspect I'll be using the mausoleum quite a bit, and I'm curious to find out what happens in full-party deaths.

Despite the length of this posting, I'm still feeling my way around, so I'll cover navigation, inventory, magic and combat more in the next couple of postings. This is a rare game that I've entered with absolutely no preconceived ideas, or even knowledge of the interface, and I'm liking it a lot so far. Many of you predicted that I would.

Note: The last word in the game's title is pronounced "OOK-rull." I realize that in the matter of pronouncing the name of the game, it's difficult not to call to mind a certain 1990s TV character. When this happens, you will suppress it immediately and try to forget about it. You will not--WILL NOT!--make any jokes, references, or otherwise discuss said character in the comments; I will delete such comments immediately and ban the commenter from ever posting on my blog again. Got it? OOK-rull.

NetHack 3.0: A Guy What Takes His Time

In a room with a fountain and an imp, and on a level with an altar, Uz the Barbarian contemplates his next moves.

I've discovered a key secret to NetHack through long trial and error: slow the hell down! It's those moments that I go charging through corridors half-cocked, or hold down the SPACE bar to regenerate hit points, that I inevitably meet my demise. After a slew of unsuccessful characters (I'm almost up to 70), I forced myself to pause for a second or two between every movement, and while it's a bit torturous on my impatient brain, I've done a lot better in the game. Going slower allows me to take more time to pelt enemies with missile weapons instead of charging right up on them before I see them, to consult my notes, and to otherwise consider all of my options. My rule of thumb is that if I have to keep hitting CTRL-P to repeat the messages that flash on the screen, I'm going too fast; I should be able to read them as they appear.

Using this method, I started to see a great improvement in my statistics. But I got discouraged after two characters died after reaching dungeon levels 13 and 10, got careless, and lost a lot of new characters on low levels. I took a break for a few days, returned with my "take it slow" strategy in mind, and am now playing a barbarian, Uz, on dungeon level 16 and character level 11. He's my most successful character since Magog, the Valkyrie, died on level 15.

In the course of my playing since last time, I have discovered the following things:

• When "applied," figurines turn into allies. Although I still find allies (including the dog) annoying when trying to navigate, they are undoubtedly useful in combat.
• This is something I "re-discovered": identify scrolls are extremely cheap. If you try to sell one to a merchant, he'll only offer a little; if you try to buy one from a merchant, he only charges a little. This amuses me, because as far as I'm concerned, identify scrolls are the most valuable objects in the game.

Clearly, the shopkeeper knows what it is. Would it have been so bad if you could pay shopkeepers to identify items for you?

 

• When you visit a shop, you want to stand at the end of a row of goods and huck weapons down the row to flush out any mimics that might be hiding there. I find that they do serious damage but also give a lot of experience, and if I get the jump on them I can usually defeat them. Sometimes shops have 3 or 4 mimics.
• Also in stores, if I encounter one on an early level, I find that it pays to buy as many potions and scrolls as I can afford and use them right away. If they do bad things, well, I'm on an early level, so no big deal. Either way, they give me intelligence as to what the items do, which helps enormously later on.
• I found an amulet of ESP but it didn't do anything for me until I was accidentally blinded, at which point I could see everything on the level. I suddenly realized the use of the blindfold that you occasionally find. I also discovered that unicorn horns cure blindness: I was desperately trying everything.
• Lumps of royal jelly found in beehives heal as well as satisfying hunger.
• Wraiths can drain levels, but eating their corpses restore them. Man, I wish this was true of Dungeons & Dragons.
• Eating stone giants increases strength.
• There's no problem with backtracking, especially if food isn't much of an issue. Sometimes it makes sense to squat on a level to get your experience up or find better items. Sometimes it's worth revisiting a store, even if it's six levels ago. I've learned to keep notes on major features on levels. Until recently, I was stuck in Rogue mode, mentally thinking that I always need to keep pushing forward.

I've also developed a more general appreciation for the need to hoard as many useful items as possible. This is not a game that rewards streamlining your inventory. You want to keep every potentially-useful ring and amulet (regardless of which you wear by default) for that one creature it protects against, or that one situation it solves.

Uz has had some interesting adventures and close calls. On one level, I nearly died at the jaws of a wolf. In desperation, I tried an unidentified potion. It lifted me up through the ceiling and deposited me on the previous level. Nice.

On Level 12, I ran into a succubus who seduced my dull barbarian. The game told me that it "raised me to my full potential." I'm not sure what it did for me statistically, but she took almost all my money for the service. Later, I encountered her again and she wanted to fight. I killed her and took my money back.

On Level 15, I entered a room called "Dave's Treasure Zoo," where I was set upon by a host of odd humanoid characters, including a vampire, a nurse, a sergeant, and a couple of gray elves. True to its name, though, there were piles of treasure everywhere. More important, the "sergeant" had a +5 protection ring on him.

Trying to play NetHack without spoilers creates a significant problem: on higher levels, I can't experiment. On level 1 or 2, it's easy to say "let me mess around with this and see what happens" because the consequences are less severe--if you die, you've only wasted a few minutes. Only a lunatic, on the other hand, starts "experimenting" on level 15. I'd love to know what eating a unicorn corpse or a gelatinous cube does, but no way am I going to risk it. I guess this is what "explore mode" is for. For those of you NetHack-philes, how is "explore mode" regarded among serious players? A legitimate way to learn about the game, or an inexcusable exercise in spoilers?

A couple other notes, for which I wouldn't mind some ROT13 hints if you have any.

• There's nothing more frustrating than hearing the sounds of a store on a level ("clinking of change," "someone cursing shoplifters") and not being able to find the secret door to get there.
• I still have no idea how to use fountains and sinks except to occasionally drink from them. Hardly ever does anything good happen when I do this. 
• I find gems everywhere, but shopkeepers hardly ever seem to want them. I'm not sure if they serve any purpose.
• There is literally nothing I hate more than being infected with lycanthropy. Every time you change, you drop all your stuff. I have successfully cured it with prayer, but this doesn't always work. Yes, I understand that there are supposedly benefits, like being able to summon allies, but I find that this doesn't make up for being unarmed and unarmored.
• Since multiple monsters use the same letter or symbol, you have to differentiate them by color. That's a bit of a problem for me, though I'm trying harder to note at least the general color ("reddish" or "blueish") so I can make an educated guess. The difference between Red Mold and a Rust Monster is not trivial.

Rust monsters are bastards.

I keep reading that for NetHack experts, almost every game is "winnable," which means they must know every trick and resource. I certainly don't need to get to the point where I can win every game, but I would like to win one. Maybe Uz will go the distance.

Later edit: Uz ultimately made it to dungeon Level 18. There, he encountered a white dragon and killed it! Even though I was full, I figured no way am I not eating this corpse. I choked while trying to eat it and died. Time to play something else for a while.

Getting killed by the dragon itself would have been a good death.