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The Many Ways To Die in Nethack
The GameSetWatch column '@Play' deals with the storied history of Rogue-like text adventures. This week, author John Harris discusses the many ways to die in Nethack. From the article: "The lowly cockatrice is perhaps the most dangerous monster in the game. There are plenty of monsters with more hit points, who do more damage, who have special attacks, and are just bigger, but cockatrices instantly kill anyone who touches them with their bare skin, and are thus very likely to kill players unwise in their dealings with them. Even Death up on Astral Plane has to succeed in an attack against a player to deliver an instakill, but a cockatrice can kill by being attacked. If the player attempts to fight a cockatrice without a weapon or wearing gloves and hits, he turns to stone. If he attempts to pick up a dead one with his bare hands, that will also turn him to stone. (It can also be wielded, however. Applications for a wielded cockatrice corpse are left for you to imagine, but I will say that it can be, hm, useful.)"
I searched the text but found no mention of the obvious option:
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
liqbase
Uh... what?
Nethack is a great game and is still very playable today. It makes a great time-waster in case any of you need one. You can either download and run it locally, or play via telnet at a site such as nethack.alt.org. My favorite way to die would be...crushed to death by a falling drawbridge. I hate those drawbridges.
As many may know, one can play Nethack on a publicly-viewable server at nethack.alt.org. There is also a group project to play through and obtain as many unique deaths in Nethack as possible on a shared account called DeathRobin. For the curious, one can check on his progress here. The character was started as one of several shared accounts on the IRC channel #nethack on the Freenode network.
Any word on when this new "nethack" game will be released?
Spoilerish... (outdated version, though) http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/nethack/ways_to _die.html
Also, thinking about my own stuff, I especially liked 'killed by elementary chemistry'. Never add water to acid, people, always the other way around...
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
Wearing gloves while wielding a cockatrice corpse (safe and useful!), but falling down the stairs because you are carrying too much stuff or your legs have been pricked by a xan, and landing on top of the corpse. *Poof*, you're stone.
Damn.
Dot-Bar-Hum-Fem-Neu, Killed by kicking a hallucinogen-distorted mumak.
Is how you die by touching the universe.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Nethack was good fun, but I don't play it so often now for fear of losing months of my life. DoomRL (Wiki) is fun to play for a short while - a "coffee break" game, as they call it.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
For plenty of Nethack fatalities, check out rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and search for either YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death) or YAAD (Yet Another Annoying Death).
Also, check out the Top Deaths List at alt.org.
So I was at a friend's house, and we were on seperate computers playing different games. My game was Nethack. I had been playing for maybe a month or two at a decent rate but had never gotten very far.
But this time was different; I was lucky. My Valkyrie found Excalibur, Mjollnir, Grey Dragon Scale Mail, was easily destroying everything in her path, and I finally got to go on my quest for the first time.
I entered the quest level, and ran straight into the lava.
This is going to sound a bit weird at first, especially if you're new to the game, but really... NetHack isn't that hard. After a few years of playing, NetHack is "normal" difficulty, and most other games come under "easy". Redefining terms to suit myself? Yes, but once you get going, losing a game due to bad luck or lack of knowledge becomes less and less believable.
I haven't ascended yet. I've come close twice: I once made it to the VS without the candles [:(] and once had a very promising character blow up Lord Surtur's drawbridge while trying to clear a boulder out the way. Neither of these were my own bad luck, well, not much; the problem was my own stupidity and not paying attention.
Is there a lot to learn? Not really, no. It might take you a few plays of random characters to get to know all the items or monsters, and (if you're not spoiled) some time to get acquainted with them, but from that you can deduce most deaths. Once you've learned that touching or handling a cockatrice (or its corpse) in any way stones you, you know not to take its corpse, feel it while blind, kick one, help one out of a pit, or all those other things. The game still needs to know all these, which is why the list of footrice-related deaths is so long.
The best way to die is to not pay attention. Playing late at night or while tired, playing when you have better things to worry about, or playing too fast are all ways to get you killed quickly. Thought that purple h was a dwarf king? Too bad, you should have checked. Wielding a c corpse while burdened? Should have looked at the status line. I've often died, surrounded by monsters, with (identified!) wands and scrolls of teleportation in my inventory. Woe is me.
On the nethack.alt.org server, the record for ascension streak is IIRC 23 straight ascensions, some with conducts. So although luck plays a part in all games, it's not as big as you think, and ascending with 95% certainty can be done, just as long as you keep paying attention.
Attention demands 27096 gold pieces. Pay? (yn)
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Keep kicking the edge of a plane (in the end game) until you die. I think it's 1 hp per kick or something like that.
The now-venerable annual International Nethack Tournament starts on 10/31 as always at http://nethack.devnull.net. These guys are the original online NH tourney, accept no imitations :-)
If you click over there you can volunteer to run a game server, which is kind of fun. Nethack probably has the highest ratio of player brain resources to server CPU resources of any current computer game -- I ran a game server a few years in a row and was always bemused to find that 20 people were playing nethack on my [random ancient piece of hardware] without noticeably impacting its load average or even clogging up my DSL line.
Cause of death:
3940 1 0.000 choked on a cup of STFU
*sob*
People need to learn the dangers of kitten huffing!!
I am running SuSE 10.0 with nothing tricked-out or fancy. I checked the box to include nethack in the install. It seemed to go fine.
When I tried to play it though, it gave me an error. I can't remember the error message and I am at work now (I know, slashdot at work is evil).
Just curious...anyone else have this happen? Figured out a way to fix it?
--AC
Actually, NetHack isn't as cruel as pointed out in the article. Instadeaths are extremely rare and almost all can be prevented by following the advice from this spoiler. Cockatrices are pretty harmless once you know how to handle them. For example, soldier ants are much worse because they a) tend to come in groups and b) appear at dungeon depths where a character is usually not fully equipped.
--
Ascensions: ABKPSVW
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Cockatrices are the coolest! I was once in the Valley of the Dead, when Juiblex was summoned. He summoned Orcus, and together they summoned Demogorgon. I was wielding my trusty cockatrice corpse.
Juiblex: *pwned*
Orcus: *pwned*
Demogorgon: *pwned*
Ate the corpse of Famine. Just wanted to see what happened. Well, I died. hehehe. Also on some games, I'd call my character GOD. When I died, any players finding my bones file would be attacked by GOD's ghost. Well it was philosophically interesting :-)
http://www.bitworksmusic.com/
BitWorksMusic.com -- odd tunes for odd times
Nethack has been one of my favorite games throughout the years, though I've come to realize that I've had more fun getting it to work on obscure hardware than playing the actual game (in the 18 years I've played it, I've only ascended once).
.h file appropriately.
Nethack is one interesting in that they don't provide a config file that presumably would make compiling simple (and less of a challenge), so when building it on anything, you have to figure out what features your flavor of Unix has and set the #defines in the
In the 18 years, I've compiled it on an original NeXT cube, a Playstation2 running Linux, a Vax running Ultrix (didn't like the BSD flavor, nor the SYS V..was weird blend), a Cray2 and a Convex something-or-other.
The only problem was that the Convex used an accounting system to track usage, and between compiling and playing, I ended up being "charged" around $1000 in cpu time.
Good times.
Hey, that's the combination on my luggage!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
becareful how you eat pussy :-P
Could anyone tell me if there is a interface for nethack that shows sprites or whatever on Linux? I used to play the windows one but I'm unsure if Ubuntu has it's own version..
Online servers.. anyone know a newbie friendly one with a nice IRC channel?
Finally! Is there any way to use said interface with an online nethack server?
I like muppets.
It took about two years after I first downloaded it from the BBS' in the mid-80's before I ascended. And I did it without spoilers or even internet access :) When I did finally get on the 'net at Johns Hopkins APL, I snarfed the source and compiled it so I had the most up to date version and got involved in the usenet group. Ultimately I participated in a small way in the coding for which my name is in the credits. Now my daughter plays it.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I haven't found all the ways to die yet, not for want of trying ..... the developers have thought of enough of them ..... in fact I'm off to try to find a few more (or maybe not).
.nethackrc? My dog's name is Piggy (named after a wonderful old lady of a bull terrier, who passed away earlier this year -- imagine the dog in Snatch, but all white and with one ear up and one ear down, /\__/>) and my cat's name is Chico (after my ginger tabby kitten, who has been helping me type this. If pressing keys to give me things to backspace out counts as helping).
Meanwhile, has anybody else set default pet names in their
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Me and my girlfriend have got into playing nethack quite a bit lately; I'm sure she'll ascend before I do at this rate. We always play (partly because of my insistence) in the ASCII with standard black and white, I think that colour is a little... "showy".
One of my main problems with it is that I can't be bothered to play a really long game, so I often play for about 20mins running right through down to about level 7 or 8, usually past the gnomish mines, and then get killed because I hold down "h" and run into something and die really quickly, or I get blinded and then get killed by "it". Still, I enjoy it and I'm not that bothered if I never ascend
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The power running out on my laptop! And recovery not being compiled in!
Luckily, I decided to do the taboo thing and savescum some time before, just this once, just in case something catastrophically bad happened outside of the game, like this.
I wasn't going to use it if I died legit. Honest. Maybe I'd keep it for posterity. I mean, it was the first time I made it past the Big Room (cone of cold FTW)! I wanted a keepsake, damnit!
And then I was able to get the save off my laptop's hard drive before it died in turn.
Worst "cause of death" on your tombstone is "Killed by a kitten". It's embaressing, and happens far t often (those kittens are surprisingly tough!).
A far more respectible cause of death is "Choked on a dragon".
I blew tons of time playing Nethack back in the 80's in college, and every few years since I've rediscovered it. Besides the old Bolo game for the Macintosh, Nethack has been the most replayable game of all time for me.
I just telnetted into that nethack.alt.org server... you can WATCH OTHER PLAYERS! I spent ten minutes watching someone, and it's actually kind of fun. I'll be sucked back in tonight, looks like.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
You Die. Die? (yn)
y
As I ascended the dungeon on my way out, I picked up all the jewels I could find, leaving heavy things like weapons and armor behind. I'd heard that you could turn lowly gems into diamonds with a wand of transformation (or polymorph, or whatever they are called). On level three, I dropped all my gems into a pile and zapped them with the wand.
But I mis-typed.
The wand of death ricocheted around the room, striking all four walls before finding me again.
I never played it seriously again.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Is there a tarball for it yet?
I could not find any.
killed by a falling rock , killed by a bolt of cold , killed by a newt , killed by a white unicorn , killed by a quasit , killed by a giant spider , killed by a coyote , killed by a rabid rat , killed by a soldier ant , killed by Mr. Rewuorb the shopkeeper , killed by a rabid rat , killed by a leocrotta , killed by a homunculus , killed by a giant ant , killed by a fox , killed by a giant mimic , killed by a sewer rat , killed by a mumak , killed by a fire ant , killed by a wand , killed by the invisible Wizard of Yendor , killed by a gnome , killed by a soldier ant while helpless , killed by a giant spider , killed by a Woodland-elf , killed by a jaguar , killed by a goblin , killed by a clay golem , killed by a giant mummy while helpless , killed by a dwarf while helpless , killed by a hallucinogen-distorted blue jelly , petrified by a cockatrice corpse , killed by a soldier ant , killed by a killer bee while helpless , killed by a leocrotta , petrified by a cockatrice corpse , petrified by a cockatrice corpse , petrified by a cockatrice corpse , killed by a snake , killed by an iron piercer , killed by a soldier ant , killed by a boulder , killed by a killer bee , killed by a little dog , killed by a giant rat , killed by a mumak , killed by an ettin mummy , killed by an owlbear , killed by a rabid rat , choked on a gnome corpse , killed by a killer bee , killed by an arrow , killed by a magic missile , killed by a panther while helpless , killed by a hill orc , killed by a soldier ant while helpless , killed by a newt while helpless , killed by a winter wolf , killed by a plains centaur , killed by a bolt of fire , killed by a hill orc while helpless , killed by a killer bee while helpless , killed by a giant spider , killed by a hobbit , killed by a soldier ant , killed by a giant spider , killed by a giant spider , killed by a large kobold while helpless , killed by a fox , killed by a bolt of fire , killed by an orc mummy while helpless , killed by a leocrotta , killed by an ape , killed by a wand , killed by a wand , killed by an owlbear , killed by a mumak , killed by a gnome lord , killed by a kitten , killed by a dwarf king , killed by a bat , killed by a werejackal , killed by a fox , killed by a fox , killed by a gnome , killed by a leather golem while helpless , killed by a rope golem , killed by a rothe , killed by a fox , killed by a boulder , killed by a gnome lord , killed by an exploding wand , killed by a cave spider , killed by a coyote , killed by a plains centaur , killed by a fox , killed by an invisible stalker , killed by a scorpion , killed by a killer bee while helpless , killed by a killer bee , killed by a mumak , killed by a gnome mummy , drowned in a pool of water by an electric eel , killed by a pyrolisk , killed by a plains centaur , killed by a blast of frost , killed by a rothe , killed by a killer bee , killed by a spotted jelly...
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.