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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.)"
Any word on when this new "nethack" game will be released?
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.
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
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.
The one I always remember from my Nethack playing days at uni was also pet related. I had 3 pet dragons (Huey, Duey and Luey (sp?)) I also had a ring of teleport control (had eaten several leprechauns) and a magic whiste (to teleport my private fire breathing army).
:D
:D
My usual room clearance mode was teleport in, teleport the dragons in with the whistle, teleport out. I didn't do the last bit, the dragons attacked some nearby demons with fire, I got caught in the crossfire and the several tonnes of potions and scrolls I was carrying also went up, causing death by.... "thermonuclear explosion".
Another one that sticks in the mind even though it wasn't technically part of the game and was from the earlier plain "Hack" version, was my mate Dave, who edited his save file and was very pleased with himself for giving himself 32768 hit points. Until that is, he killed a bugbear, went up a level, gained 4 hp and died with -32764 hp. Killed by a signed integer
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?