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My NetHack page. Brad Despain, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[ Roles | Ten rules | The graveyard | Ascensions ]
I'm the systems administrator for the mathematics department at a university here in Salt Lake. I keep about forty Suns, a few dozen PCs and one very old VAX running, and I keep the faculty from finding out how close any of them is to not running.
I started playing Hack in the spring of 1987, on a VAX, in a terminal room that smelled like burnt coffee. Keith Beck, a grad student two desks down, showed me how to start it and then went to get lunch. When he came back I had been killed by a jackal. That summer NetHack showed up on the net and I switched over and have never really stopped. I'm 35 now. That's twelve years. I've been killed by a jackal more than once since.
These days I play NetHack 3.2.2, compiled from source on the department's Sun in the machine room and on the Linux box at home, usually in an xterm at about eleven at night when I should be asleep. I read rec.games.roguelike.nethack most days. The title of this page is from there: when you post the story of how you died, and you will, it's a YASD. Yet Another Stupid Death. Every death in NetHack is a stupid death. You only find out which kind afterward.
You go down into a dungeon, level by level, to get the Amulet of Yendor from the bottom and bring it back up. The dungeon is different every game. Everything is drawn in letters and symbols on a plain terminal. You are the @. Your pet is the d or the f. Everything else is something that wants to kill you, and almost everything does. Here is the start of a game, a Samurai and his little dog, in the first room:
------------- |...........| |.....d.....+ |....@......| |...........| |..)........| ------------- Dlvl:1 $:0 HP:15(15) Pw:2(2) AC:4
That's a room, the walls of a room, a door on the right (the +), something lying on the floor (the ) is a weapon), me, and the dog. That's all the graphics you get. Once you've played for a while you stop seeing the letters and start seeing the room. That's either the best or worst thing about it, depending on who you ask. My wife says worst.
There's one more thing to know. When you die, you're dead. The game deletes your save file. No reloading, no going back. You start over at level 1 with a new character. That's the whole point, and it's why I'm still playing it twelve years later.
When you start a game you pick a role. In 3.2 there are twelve:
Because she's the easiest, and the game is hard enough. A Valkyrie starts with a +1 long sword, a dagger, and a small shield good enough that her armor class is respectable from turn one. She's strong and she's tough, with more hit points than almost anyone. She starts with cold resistance and stealth, so things that are asleep stay asleep while you walk past. She gets speed later on. Most of the early dungeon simply cannot hurt her very much, which gives a new player time to learn the things that will. Every ascension posted to the newsgroup seems to be a Valkyrie. There's a reason.
Play a Valkyrie until you win, or until you're sick of dying with a Valkyrie. Then try something else.
None of these are mine. Everybody who's played this game for any length of time learned all of them the same way: by dying. See the graveyard for which of them I learned when.
Elbereth. Engrave the word Elbereth in the dust (E, then - to write with your fingers) and most monsters will not attack you in melee while you're standing on it. They'll back off. It's saved more of my characters than every potion of healing combined. It doesn't work on everything. Humans (the other @s) and minotaurs ignore it, and so do shopkeepers. And dust smudges, so check that it still says what you wrote.
Never melee a floating eye. It's a blue e, it just floats there, and it looks harmless. It is harmless, unless you hit it with your sword. Then you're paralyzed, sometimes for a very long time, and everything else on the level comes over and eats you while you stand there. Throw things at it, zap it, or walk around it. Once it's dead, eat the corpse. You'll get telepathy, which you want.
Never touch a cockatrice. Don't eat one, don't pick up the corpse without gloves on, and don't fight one barehanded. Touching one turns you to stone, and that's the end. If one hisses at you and you start slowing down, you need to eat a lizard corpse right away, or pray if your god is speaking to you. Carry a lizard corpse. They never rot.
Pray when you're Weak, but not too often. When you're in real trouble, like fainting from hunger or about to die, you can #pray, and if your god's in a good mood, you're saved. But your god keeps track of when you last asked. Pray too soon after the last time and you get nothing, or worse. Folk wisdom on the newsgroup is to wait about a thousand turns between prayers and not to pray at all in the first few hundred.
Carry a unicorn horn. Apply it and it fixes confusion, stunning, blindness, hallucination and sickness. You get one by killing a unicorn. Not one of your own alignment. That's very bad luck, and in this game luck is a number, and it's counting.
Get reflection before Medusa. Medusa's gaze turns you to stone. If you have reflection (silver dragon scale mail, a shield of reflection, an amulet of reflection) it bounces back at her, and she's the one who turns to stone. If you can't get reflection, put on a blindfold before you go near her. Do not "just take a quick look."
Eat fresh. Corpses go bad. Eat what you just killed, not what you found lying there. Old corpses can make you deathly sick, and the game is not interested in your excuses.
Don't drink from fountains. Water moccasins. Water demons. Nymphs who steal your stuff. Every once in a long while something good happens. It isn't worth it.
Let your pet check for curses. A pet won't willingly step on a cursed item. If your dog walks right over that ring you found, it's probably not cursed. If he walks around it, leave it alone.
Don't make a shopkeeper angry. Pay for what you break or use up, don't try to leave without paying, and never, ever hit one, even by accident. Shopkeepers are much, much tougher than you are, and they hold a grudge. Ask me how I know. Actually, don't ask me, read it.
If you like your games in text but would rather have other people in them, there's Emberfall MUD Help Files, kept by one of the immortals of Emberfall, a text MUD that's been running since 1995. I don't have time for a MUD. I barely have time for this. But I read her help files, and they're better than most man pages I've read.
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