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Welcome to Nethack, one of the most complex role-playing games ever devised. Your goal is simple. Delve into the dungeon's depths, retrieve.
Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.That's right, nethack, the grand-daddy of all of today's roguelikes. Descended from the 1980 game Rogue, Nethack is the longest running game that is still developed and updated, itself having been a descendant of Hack, which is a clone of the original, rogue. Notoriously difficult, some players have spent upwards of 20 years without a win, known as an Ascension. Apr 18, 2020 11:34.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.Round 1: Arthur, male touristThe end of my shift! Anydin is now up to bat.Round 2: Big Bertha, valkyrieEnd of Anydin's shift. Princey is up next!End of Princey's shift. DiggleWrath is up next!End of DiggleWrath's shift, Arcvasti is taking the wheel!The Graveyard:Arthur dent Male tourist.
Died from a series of unfortunate events following a level teleport trap.Aishlinn fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Aug 12, 2019Jul 3, 2019 20:24.Junpei Oct 4, 2015Pictured: Me being confused by SA.And also just by things in general.If we're getting an amulet for a god, a Female Paladin Human makes some degree of sense.Jul 3, 2019 20:33.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit. Critic of the Dawn used Whine at the GM.You gain a level!Random is the best character, obviously!And yes, Crawl is also a pretty great Roguelike - it's got a lot less of the silliness and random 'gotcha' deaths that are kind of omnipresent in Nethack, plus a lot of quality of life improvements and more interesting and robust map generation. On the other hand, a lot of Nethack's charm is exactly because of the silliness and 'gotcha' deaths, plus I like Bones levels in Nethack a lot more than player ghosts in Crawl.Jul 4, 2019 02:45.Ayndin Mar 13, 2010I'd been thinking about playing some nethack again lately, cool.Assuming things have not changed too much since I last played seriously (five or so years ago), I'll suggest a nice slow pitch right over the plate: a lawful Valkyrie.
No preference on race but if I'm remembering right they only can choose from two so that's not really a big choice anyway.While the Valk starting kit is pretty rear end overall (they basically get a long sword, a pretty OK shield, a dagger, some very basic supplies, and nothing else), if you're lawful there's a thing that you can do fairly early game that will either kill you or get you an incredibly good weapon that can last you into the endgame. You can fix your AC problems in the mines fairly easily, and with good AC and excellent offensive capabilities - especially once you get your hands on a crysknife or silver saber - it's really not too much trouble to survive into the midgame, where you can Get Swole by eating the roughly one million giants in your Quest. Quest reward has some useful properties even if it's really heavy.Jul 4, 2019 02:47.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit. Random is the best character, obviously!I'd expect nothing less! And i know, crawl has the QoL stuff that nethack has been lacking, but hey, I just like the good old meat grinder that is NetHackAnd as for the valkyrie quest artifact, despite it being heavy as heck, its one of the strongest ones, if not THE strongest one. Half physical, half spell damage, luck and invoked levelport? Yeah, Alright.
Especially if you wish for it as a neutral monk, you'll be a beast.Aishlinn fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jul 4, 2019Jul 4, 2019 02:48.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.Going to push back the start to Friday, july 5th, in the evening, as its 1: a ridiculous thunderstorm outside my house right now, and having me lose power during the play session would be a bad start, and 2: the 4th of july, which means dinner with the fam. Hopefully we can get a few more votes in, right now we're basically tied up with1 knight1 tourist1 valkyrie1 randomIn an event of a tie, random will always be the tie-winner.Hint of the day: You can use your pet to test items being cursed. If they refuse to walk over them, or only 'Do so reluctantly', an item on that tile is cursed. Testing pieces of armor 1 at a time is a great way to get better AC in the early game!Jul 4, 2019 21:01.Princey Mar 22, 2013Go Wizard or go home. Not the easiest start but you get a bunch of cool stuff to play with and you get to go hard into magic later.Jul 4, 2019 21:15.Leylite Nov 4, 2011I'll vote for Knight because 1) it means goons can then vote on what to call a horse and 2) we can then start working on Obviously The Best Ability, making L-shaped moves.Jul 4, 2019 23:39.Old Grey Guy Feb 12, 2014One more for a tourist. You know you want to. Alternatively, start a knight or a valkyrie to get going.Jul 4, 2019 23:42.Arcvasti Jun 12, 2019Never trust a bird.Let's be a Female Human Knight.Horse name should be Rainbow Dash.Jul 5, 2019 01:06.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.
It's only the Final Battle once all the players are ready.Go for tourist, mostly because a part of me still can't believe that's an actual role.Jul 5, 2019 05:06.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.looks like Tourist is pulling ahead, i don't know about you guys, but maybe it is time for a vacation. Voting will end in around 4 hours, and then we'll set off!Jul 5, 2019 16:27.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.Journey #1: TouristEpisode 1: If i ever make it home, i'm going to kill my travel agent!Our journey begins, as they often do, looking down into the mouth of a cave. Why, oh why, do we feel the need to go in here?So here, we have our main interface in nethack. Starting from the top, we have our name (we need a real name, SAHACK is the username we'll all be using to play), our alignment, gender, race, and class.For the most part, i'll be letting the game pick our alignment/race/gender randomly, unless i have a good reason not to.Down on the bottom, we have our name, with a handy hit-point bar, which will change colors based on how damaged we are, going from grey (full) to green (mostly full), to orange (mostly hurt) to red (nearly dead!) our stats are the traditional dungeons and dragons Strength/dexterity/constitution/intelligence/wisdom/charisma. For the most part, they do what you'd think they do, with a few particular quirks that we'll talk about when it's important.Finally we have Dlvl (dungeon level), our wallet, full of zorkmids, of course, our hp, magical power, armor class, experience and the turn counter.now, let's take stock of our surroundings. Our brave(?) hero (????), is represented by the @ sign. The lowercase d is our faithful Dog who definitely needs a better name than 'little dog'.
Symbol is a scroll, and the x is a statue, in this case, of a grid bug. Critic of the Dawn used Whine at the GM.You gain a level!The puns, Duke, the puns!NetHack has this weird thing where eating sentient creatures totally doesn't count as cannibalism unless it is a member of your exact specific race.
So, as a human, you can feel free to nosh on all the goblins, elves, centaurs, mindflayers, giants, etc., to your heart's content!I guess this isn't exactly unique among Roguelikes, but it's still weird if you think about it, and chances are that weird trope is NetHack's fault.Also, literally everything you kill and eat tastes terrible!Two stars, would not recommend.Critic of the Dawn fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Jul 7, 2019Jul 7, 2019 12:53.Kodos666 Dec 17, 2013I propose that our dog shall be named Luggage.Jul 7, 2019 13:02.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit. Also, literally everything you kill and eat tastes terrible!not anymore, actually. Sometimes things 'Taste alright'Hint of the day: you can use the #annotate command to leave a note for yourself for later. Whenever you go up or down into an annotated level, it will display whatever message you left. Helpful things like 'Stash here!' Or 'Altar' or 'Ran away from a lich on this level!'
You can also use #overview to see what points of interest the games marked out for you.Aishlinn fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jul 7, 2019Jul 7, 2019 16:29.Old Grey Guy Feb 12, 2014Since we're all out of towels while our dog saves the day, perhaps 'Ford Prefect' would be an appropriate name for him.Jul 7, 2019 20:09.cant cook creole bream Aug 15, 2011 I think Fahrenheit is better for weatherI haven't played this since 3.43. I'm glad to see that there has been a huge nerf for Elbereth, since it was a bit ridiculously overpowered.
And it always felt like a cheat code, since the only way you could figure that out without some outside knowledge, was the engraving in the zoo. So you wouldn't be able to notice anything particular about it, unless you ran for the treasure without clearing the enemies. As far as I recall there is no other hint around that that's even a thing.Jul 7, 2019 21:50.Arcvasti Jun 12, 2019Never trust a bird. I haven't played this since 3.43. I'm glad to see that there has been a huge nerf for Elbereth, since it was a bit ridiculously overpowered.
And it always felt like a cheat code, since the only way you could figure that out without some outside knowledge, was the engraving in the zoo. So you wouldn't be able to notice anything particular about it, unless you ran for the treasure without clearing the enemies.
As far as I recall there is no other hint around that that's even a thing.There are a few rumors regarding Elbereth, like you get from the Oracle or fortune cookies. It's also burned on the wand of wishing square in the Castle, so at the very least you might guess from those that it's useful for protecting your stash. It's still dumb and opaque like so much of nethack though.Jul 7, 2019 22:22.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.Episode 3: Kiss the cookwe're back. Ducking down to the next floor, we find a fox waiting for us, standing next to it's stash of.tinned food?
Ah well, no matter. Foxes are one of the more dangerous super-early game enemies. They don't hit very hard, but they tend to be pretty fast, so they can land a few hits in quick succession if we aren't careful.the fox did manage to get a few nibbles in before we took it out, and we're already hungry again. Our tourist, who is most certainly named Arthur, seems to be a hungry boy. (the dog is totally named Ford Prefect now.) Time to crack open a tin for another snack, hopefully this one is a little less greasy.Delicious.moving on, we find another wandiridium is shiny stuff.
Let's do our normal test to see if writing with the wand yields any information.Doesn't get much clearer than that. Thankfully the monster spawned was just a gecko, nothing too worrisome.down at the end of this hallway, was a floating gas spore. We bumped into it once, and thankfully didn't kill it, stepping back a dart was enough to take it out. If we had killed it in melee range.we most certainly would have been blasted to bits.This level has been one tourist trap after another green molds are highly acidic, causing acid splashback if we were to strike it.
It can ruin our weapon, and more importantly ruin our pretty face by melting it off. This calls for.you guessed it, darts to the face. Thankfully molds have a base speed of zero.they can't move at all, so they will happily stand there and take as many darts to the.whatever passes for a face that they have.a few darts later, and we have gone up to level two.giving us a whopping.3 hp. Our constitution isn't abysmally low, but tourists have among the worst hp growth of any class. There are many to fix our hp situation, but most of them aren't really feasible until much later.
The green mold left a corpse, but eating it would lead to rather quickly.and possibly death.we had an apple as we were wandering through the halls nethack is full of funny messages like this.holy moly, that is a heck of a find! A random newt we bumped into in one of the hallways dropped this little beauty. The apron is an alchemy smock, which grants poison AND acid resistance, and MC1, as well as a point of armor.and this one was highly enchanted to boot!
This is an ENORMOUS help to our little tourist's defenses. And as a little bonus.you can now read the apron, for a funny message. (this is new as of 3.6.0)just to prove that in fact, some corpses taste alright. I think it has to do with your character's preferences. (meat for non monks, etc)and with that, we reach level four of the dungeon, and just in time to hit level 3, for another 4 hp!
We managed to train in bonking things with our quarterstaff enough to enhance our ability with it, so we are now able to hit things a lot more reliably than before.Jul 7, 2019 22:49.Scaramouche Mar 26, 2001SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!I was seriously into Nethack with 3.0j which I believe is shortly after skilling was introduced. Beat every class+race combination though. That was a while ago, so it's interesting to see what's changed! Including that ANSI life bar thinger.You mentioned training stats, there's a down side to training called abusing. Bizarrely eating a fortune cookie can do either to Wisdom, depending entirely on if the fortune is true or false (neutral/nonsense ones don't count I think), unless that's changed of course.Jul 8, 2019 03:13.Arcvasti Jun 12, 2019Never trust a bird. I was seriously into Nethack with 3.0j which I believe is shortly after skilling was introduced.
Beat every class+race combination though. That was a while ago, so it's interesting to see what's changed! Including that ANSI life bar thinger.You mentioned training stats, there's a down side to training called abusing. Bizarrely eating a fortune cookie can do either to Wisdom, depending entirely on if the fortune is true or false (neutral/nonsense ones don't count I think), unless that's changed of course.The life bar thing is a life saver, really cuts down on stupid deaths to not noticing how low your health is.Abusing stats basically does nothing once you get a unicorn horn, along with half a dozen other mechanics. Seriously those things make so much stuff obsolete it's amazing. They're even decent weapons for Tourists/Healers!Jul 8, 2019 04:05.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.no update today, a little too zonked out to risk playing and killing off our little tourist just yet.Instead, here'sHint of the day be careful when interacting with things in shops if you don't have a lot of money on you.
Certain items, such as scrolls of scare monster, can be destroyed with rough handling, and the shopkeeper WILL charge you for them if you ruin them. Same goes for testing a bag if it's a bag of holding or bag of tricks, or reading a spellbook. They will charge you a usage fee, and if you don't have the cash to cover it, they will get angry and attack you! Shopkeepers are tough, and many a young adventurer has gotten their rear end handed to them by one.Jul 8, 2019 23:21.Aishlinn Mar 31, 2011This might hurt a bit.Episode 4: Tank up!we're back. The first bit of level 4 was rather unexciting, until we came across this room. Splint mail is a rather heavy suit of armor, in both weight and protectiveness, so we'll have to let ford dance around near it to see if it's safe to put on.
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Remember, cursed armor welds itself to you, and you can't remove it until you remove the curse, so its usually best to be sure before putting on any piece you happen to pick up. Thankfully uncursed, the splint mail dropped us down to an incredibly respectable -1 armor class, which for this early on is quite good! The downside.with our pathetic strength score, we are burdened just by picking it up. We can do a few things to lighten our load.reading one of our uncursed scrolls of magic mapping, the entire layout of this level is revealed to us! We will still want to fully explore it, to see what goodies may be waiting, but that's one less thing we're carrying, and we have so many of them that we aren't likely to need them all for a good long time.
We can nosh down on a few snacks to fill our belly, we still have an abundance, and hopefully we'll be able to wander around without our armor slowing us down. Being burdened, or worse is rather dangerous, enemies will be faster than us, which means they'll be able to swing more often than we will. With our new armor, we'll be able to avoid a lot of hits, but we're anything but invincible.
We've got way too much stuff to want to leave behind right now, so at the moment we'll have to trudge along in our heavy armor.Ah! How excellent, a well-stocked hardware store! We'll certainly have to browse and see if anything catches our eye.
Remember, as a tourist, the shopkeeper sees us as.well.an easy mark, and will charge us more for everything that he's selling. But we have a pocket full of cash, and we could likely walk away with some nice things! The shop was rather unimpressive, though our dog did manage to filch a few items out of it for us! We came away with a free bag, and.a TOWEL Towels are wonderful little tools, with a myriad of uses. Any touristhitchhiker should always know where his towel is.
The bag, plain as it is, is still quite useful. We can store our damage-able items, such as scrolls and potions inside, to protect them from things that might harm them.This. This floating bastard is the cause of death in so many new players. While left on it's own, they are harmless, with no actual offensive attacks, striking a floating eye in melee will paralyze the player for a random amount of time, which tends to be.almost instantly lethal, due to being slowly nibbled to death by a newt. We're.not going to do that, and this eye is going to get.well, an eye-ful of darts!Nooo! Ford, you jerk! Eating the corpse of a floating eye gives a 100% chance of gaining intrinsic telepathy, which will show monsters on the map (provided they have a brain), whenever the player is blind.
We can purposefully blind ourself by wrapping our towel around our head. Ah well, there will be plenty more floating eyes to eat in the future.the more astute of you will have noticed that there were TWO sets of down-stairs in this level. One led further into the main dungeon.and the other led to the gnomish mines! The mines are a branch of the dungeon that is guaranteed to spawn, which has some nice rewards if cleared out fully.
Theres a guaranteed town with an altar, which may end up being the first altar an adventurer sees in his travels, as well as a guaranteed lighting shop, which may contain.well.we'll see. The mines can be rather dangerous, unless you go in with some decent armor, and we're not exactly the most powerful of adventurers, but our armor is VERY solid for this point in the game. With luck, we'll be able to pick up some more in here to round out our equipment loadout to delve deeper into the dungeon.Ouch. Even with our new armor, that gnome lord nearly did us in. We dipped down to 5 hp in that scuffle, and we had to drink our other potion to stay in the fight, and it was a good thing too, the next hit he landed knocked off 7 hp.
On the bright side, Ford is now the best doggy, a large dog, and he'll be ready to help protect us and rip these gnomes to shreds.if they don't get us first.we narrowly escaped with our life there. Thankfully, monsters are all but frozen in place while we aren't on that level, so leaving ford behind won't be an issue, unless it takes us an exceptionally long time to come back. Unfortunately, it means that the gnome lord that we left there is still waiting to try to kick our teeth in when we return.we went back down after a little bit of hiding in a corner to lick our wounds, and managed to finish off the gnome lord.
The nearby treasure chest had another potion of extra-healing in it, as well as another scroll of magic mapping, which we used right away. The gnomish mines tend to be rather large, fairly dangerous levels, so knowing where we are is a godsend, and we are already carting around a lot of junk.
Now.this dwarf doesn't seem to friendly, hopefully ford can take care of it while we pelt it with darts. If we can finish it off, we might be able to find some goodies.we hit the motherlode boys. We'll be carting all this stuff upstairs to let ford poke and prod, and we might be in GOOD shape!Oh yes. Oh YES That was WELL worth the danger we just faced. We went back down and snagged the dwarf's sword, a sturdy weapon to be sure, and even better, a one-handed one, allowing us to wear his shield. None of the gear turned out to be cursed, and the dwarvish mithril-coat weighs a paltry 150 compared to the 400 that the splint mail weighed. We are now a lean, mean.ish, fighting (ha), machine!
-7 armor class before truly exploring the mines is an incredible place to be, and with that, my first round of updates is officially over! I'll be passing the reins to Anydin, for the next 2500-5000 turns! I think i left them in pretty great shape to explore the mines!Jul 9, 2019 23:15.Ayndin Mar 13, 2010That is some very solid armor for any class at this point, let alone for a tourist.
Bodes well, though we'll see if my natural carelessness can overcome this!I'll probably have an update out sometime late in the evening.Jul 10, 2019 06:02.Old Grey Guy Feb 12, 2014What a great find!I wonder - since we'll need to grease the bag - could we achieve it by wiping greasy hands on it? Has that ever been implemented?Hint of the day: M-O-O-N, that spells Moon!Jul 10, 2019 20:17.Ayndin Mar 13, 2010Episode 5: drat Straight It Can.An AC of -7 is fantastic at this point in the game! However, if we are a tank, it is some sort of APC - we're tough but have pretty limited offensive capabilities. To this end, I came up with a plan: continue heading down the main dungeon, whacking the still-fairly easy monsters until we got proficiency with our new sword.
Maybe we'd run into the second dungeon branch, and if so, I'd probably go there - outside of the last floor, it's pretty safe, and tends to have a ton of food and other useful things (and, of course, the last floor has some Fabulous Prizes).But first,!The neat thing about whistles is that there's only two types of them, and it's very easy to tell them apart because they make different noises. The 'high whistling sound' indicates this is a plain ol' tin whistle.
Not as useful as its counterpart, but it'll still tell our pet to head towards us if they happen to have strayed. Unfortunately, it can also get us some less friendly attention.Specifically, this monkey. Monkeys are a giant pain in the rear end, as they're fast, and as seen above, can steal your stuff. If it was something minor I might have let it slide (ha ha no, thieves must die) but we need that apron! We spend a good while chasing it through the level, tagging it with our sword a few times, but eventually our good boy puts it down.With that done, I started heading for the non-Mines stairs down, running into another floating eye (killed via darts) and a gecko on the way. As it happens, the room with the stairs up had both a gnome lord and a leprechaun - a very annoying enemy, if not much of a threat - in it, so I gave it the old and headed off.Welcome to Dlvl:5!
That 'p' is a rock piercer, an extremely slow enemy that usually only gets spotted when it tries to fall on your head. They're pretty tough, and we don't really manage to hit it with our lack of proficiency, but Ford remains a good dog and kills it.We head left some, stabbing up some orc zombies for practice and picking up some violet stones - probably glass this early, but maybe amethyst, which is worth a pretty penny, so worth grabbing - and finding a brass ring in a room with a grave and a statue of red mold. Graves can be robbed, but you need something to dig with and it's not exactly looked kindly upon, so best to not do until thoroughly prepared. En route, we get a message:Hey, our Strength went up! As Aishlinn mentioned, doing certain actions will exercise your stats; pushing boulders around will do so for strength, and every once in a while the game will (very loosely) check to see how you've been doing in training and roll to see if you get stat points. That's what happened here - with our Strength as low as it was, it's not surprising at all that pushing some boulders around did it.We continue exploring the floor, and then.Level teleport traps do exactly what they sound like - send you to a different level of the dungeon, anywhere from floor 1 to three levels above the highest (lowest, really) floor you've been to. That gives us a better than 50% chance of going up and to a relatively safe floor, so where do we end up?Welcome to Dlvl:8.
This is the worst possible result for us - we're way out of our depth, Ford is not here to protect us, and there are going to be things here that can and will hurt us. Things like that big 'C' there, a plains centaur. These jerks are really beefy, get multiple attacks, and usually have some kind of ranged weapon. This guy's no exception, he has a crossbow, and is very happy to start using it on us. The lowercase 'n' is a nymph - a mountain nymph in this case. They're sort of like monkeys, in that they steal stuff from you, but unlike monkeys as soon as they grab something they teleport to somewhere else on the floor.
The centaur is a big enough problem - if the nymph steals something important, like our apron, it'll be that much easier for it to kill us. I figure - probably unwisely - that we'll need to take out at least the centaur to be safe, and start hucking darts at him. He mostly laughs it off, but is having a lot of trouble hitting us; the nymph takes a little friendly fire from him, but ultimately comes over, steals a tripe ration - dog food - and poofs. Considering how well we seem to be doing - not at all, with our dinky offense - we camera the centaur and start heading towards the exit of the room, but around this point a gnome king, also with a crossbow, shows up. I camera him as well and he stumbles out of the room.which is where we need to go:Nice, hit us while disoriented anyway. He is still stumbling around, so we do manage to advance down the hallway a little, but our HP is dwindling:The only other place to go is the room with the annoyed centaur in it. It's time to see if luck will in fact be a lady tonight, and ask Lady Luck for some help:She was!
We've done enough stuff - kill monsters, mostly - that during our prayer we got a shield that prevented monsters from attacking us, and at the end we were fully healed (and actually gained a little max HP out of the deal). This is great, but praying has a decently long cooldown and the gods will eventually tire of us asking for favors, so it isn't very reliable for emergencies.
Still, better than nothing. Also, in the course of the prayer, the gnome king wandered off!The problem is, he wasn't that far away, and there was also a garter snake - not normally a massive threat, but we can't hit things for beans with anything but the darts, and they do very little damage, so it would leave plenty of opportunities for the gnome king to pound on us.
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