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Welcome to NetHack. http://www.nethack.org Previous thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2818537 Your task is simple: Retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from the Dungeons of Doom, deliver it to your chosen god on the Astral plane and ascend to demigod-hood. Unfortunately thousands of deadly monsters stand between you and your goal. NetHack is a rogue-like, which means that it features randomly generated dungeons and permanent death. It's difficult, really difficult, new players usually send dozens of characters to spectacular deaths before they get the hang of things, but with patience and a healthy dose of spoilers anyone can ascend. One of the fun things about NetHack is how almost everything can be used to help your survive. That seemingly useless potion of paralysis? Bash someone over the head with it and kill them while they can't move. A looking glass? Point it at a monster to scare them with their own reflection. A scroll of destroy armor? Read it to rid yourself of cursed equipment. A large dog is about to rip to to shreds? Feed it some food to tame him and now you've got an ally to fight along side you. A polymorph trap? Push your pet into it and you may end up with a tame black dragon. There are ways out of almost any situation in NetHack, it's up to you to think of them. Since NetHack dates back to the 80's it doesn't have much in the way of graphics. The old school way is to play in a text terminal...  Here we see our hero (the @) in the mazes of Gehennom just after he's crushed Demogorgon with Mjollnir. The graphics aren't quite up to next-gen standards but it tells you everything you need to know at a glance and it works very well. If ASCII isn't your cup of tea, you can always try tiles.  A bit prettier than the ASCII version and you also get mosuse support which is nice for those of you who have computers made after 1987. Goon The Kins also made his own tileset so you can play NetHack with that SA touch. And finally, if you have some sort of brain disease you can get THREE DEE NETHACK on Steam for a low low price. How to play There's two ways to play NetHack. One way is to head to http://www.nethack.org (or to Vulture's Eye if that's your thing), download the binaries for your OS and go for it. The second, and in my opinion the most fun way, is to play online on a public server. Telnet to nethack.alt.org (you might want to use PuTTY instead of the default windows telnet client), set up an account and start playing. NAO lets you watch other people play in real time and even send them scrolls of mail. Also you may run into bones files from other players, levels that other players have died on complete with all their loot and the things that killed them. They even record all your games so the memory of that time you dissolved in molten lava will be preserved for all time. The only downside is that you can't use tiles or Vulture's Eye on NAO, only the ASCII version is supported. NetHack forks Since NetHack is open source, a number of fine people have taken it upon themselves to modify it extensively and morph it into a whole new game. Slash'EM (Public server) - Based of NetHack 3.3.1, Slash'Em adds a whole bunch of crazy stuff to the game. Hundreds of new monsters, hundreds of new items, dozens of new weapons ranging from lightsabers to rocket launchers and even a few new character classes and races for you to play with. It also has a redesigned dungeon layout featuring a longer main dungeon, shorter Gehennom and lots more special levels. In the past elements of Slash-em have ended up being incorporated into the main NetHack branch, for example, Slash'em created the Monk class that you now see in NetHack. SporkHack (Official public server) (Also on nethack.alt.org)- A beefed up version of NetHack 3.4.3 designed for people who find the endgame of NetHack too easy. A redesigned Gehennom and some modified gameplay elements that remove easy options in the endgame are the biggest changes. Well designed but certainly not for the faint of heart, a winning NetHack character would likely be chewed up and spat out by Spork. Let's Play Threads For those of you prefer to watch things rather than do things, there's a bunch of NetHack LP's out there. Watch them to see what the game's all about and see some of the tricks that people use to stay alive in the dungeons of doom. * Salvor_Hardin's video LP (archived) * Lobster Maneuver's screenshot LP (archived) * Salvor_Hardin's screenshot LP * Sartak's NetHack on IRC #nethack on irc.freenode.net is the official channel. It also features a friendly robot named Rodney who'll answer all your queries and then shame you by announcing all your deaths on NAO to the 200+ other people in the room. Feel free to ask for advice and share your stories in here, there's a lot of good players around and we're always happy to help. The best parts of these threads are always the YAFAP's (Yet Another First Ascension Posts) and the YASD's (Yet Another Stupid Deaths) so start playing and entertain us with your epic adventures! Contra Duck fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Feb 27, 2009 08:14
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Argon_Sloth posted:A link in the OP is mislabeled. Sartak's LP ended quite some time ago. Fixed 
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Feb 27, 2009 13:28
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Bushibytes posted:I started a game again on the university server the other day and I am at the farthest I've ever been, but I can't help but feel like I'm a little screwed: It's not nice but you should be able to get out alive. If you've got wands of teleport you can zap some of those monsters away, and it should be easy to kill the wizards since they'll be more concerned with killing the high priest and taking the amulet. Just don't get in melee range with the high priest because with only 84HP he could easily kill you in a single round of combat. Also get unburdened argh!
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Feb 28, 2009 01:51
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Yeah, but where'd all the wishes come from? One every 300 turns seems like a lot.
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Mar 3, 2009 07:14
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SubG posted:So what's the best way to get a game restored on NAO? I got unceremoniously dumped to the options menu while playing yesterday, and now I get the `there is already a game in progress' error when trying to play. I tried emailling paxed (at alt.org) but haven't heard anything back. Anyone know if there's a `more correct' way to do this? You'll get a faster response if you message him on irc. Join #nethack (details are in the op if you haven't been there before) and type '/msg paxed Hi, I'm SubG on NAO, can you please recover my game'.
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Mar 10, 2009 04:52
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stubblyhead posted:I didn't think that monsters were affected by hallucination. Liches aren't all that great as pets anyway, their big dangers are cursing and monster summoning, which they don't do when they're tame. Yeah hallucinating pets are a bad thing. I've had a pacifist bought down to 1hp by his own archon after a black light exploded. Luckily intelligent monsters will pick up and use unicorn horns, so once they find one of those it's no longer an issue.
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Mar 17, 2009 05:49
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BurgerQuest posted:Am I a bad person for scumming wizards until I get a ring of slow digestion? Starving to death either means you're not eating enough corpses or you're not descending fast enough. There's LOTS of food rations and monster corpses out there for you to eat, way more than you could ever need, but you need to go down the dungeon to find them.
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Mar 18, 2009 09:20
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Wands have a small chance of exploding if zapped when cursed. If you feel like exploiting a bug you can engrave with your wand of wishing rather than zapping it because it won't explode if you do it that way. Also I've killed more woodchucks than Demogorgons 
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Mar 24, 2009 07:45
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Shady Amish Terror posted:You survived that much inadvertant dunking? And killed Demogorgon? This is ridiculously awesome, you know that, right? Scrawling elbereth in the dust is useful on occasion but it's basically your last resort. If you're regularly relying on it to survive you're eventually going to die when it fails. There's a million better options for escaping, you need to identify them early and use them as soon as it becomes apparent there's a significant threat.
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Mar 24, 2009 10:06
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thebrassthief posted:How do more find more food? If I die, it's because I have nothing to eat and faint and something bites me to death. I was just at this part with these watchmen walking around (I don't know what it's called but I've been there) and was ONE loving square from a fountain to get Excalibur. Faint, get bit to death by a bat. gently caress. Save your rations for when you need them and eat corpses whenever possible. Most corpses are edible but there's a few basic rules you should follow: 1. Don't eat kobolds. 2. Don't eat stuff unless you JUST killed it because it goes bad very quickly. 2a. This also means don't eat the undead because they died a long time ago. 3. Be careful of eating corpses of monsters with poison attacks like soldier ants, killer bees and giant spiders. They're fine if you have poison resistance but they can drain your strength if you don't. 4. Don't commit cannibalism and don't eat cats/dogs. Anything else you'll see in the early game is good eating. In the mines you'll find a lot of gnomes which make a great meal if you're not a gnome. And by the way, the place you reached was minestown. It's guaranteed to be there a few levels down in the mines every game. Be careful going for excalibur there though, the watch don't take kindly to people messing with their fountains
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Mar 25, 2009 07:34
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angryblackguy posted:How do you avoid water nymphs? One literally stole my entire set of armor off my loving back. Nymphs are generated sleeping. If you don't go around kicking doors and chests they'll probably remain asleep.
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Mar 27, 2009 05:34
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If you're wearing an amulet of life saving, which you almost certainly will be once you're past vlad, the ring f free action is pretty unnecessary. Getting belted with a potion of paralysis and getting instakilled is very rare, having it happen twice is even more unlikely.
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Mar 28, 2009 03:23
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Greybone posted:It would have been a stupid thing to do on any other level as well, since I'd probably would have landed on something nasty. Nah, digging down is usually a great escape option. Yes, there could potentially be something worse than what you're currently facing on the next level (although it doesn't get much worse than a winged gargoyle at the levels you're talking about) but the odds that you'll end up adjacent to it are pretty slim. The biggest thing you have to watch out for when digging down is that some monsters are able to follow you. I know I've seen a few bones in the mines from people who have tried to escape an angry watch captain/shopkeeper by digging down only to have him follow them through the hole.
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Apr 2, 2009 00:31
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ThreeHams posted:Out of pure curiosity, I wondered if you could (endgame) get to your altar on the Astral Plane, polymorph into an intelligent monster, genocide @, and still offer the Amulet and win. I've done that except I polyed into a vampire lord just after the castle and used an amulet of unchanging to prevent what would have been a rather nasty change back to human. Playing out the endgame as a V was pretty cool actually, you get free regeneration, 10 free points of AC and you can fly which means you don't have to worry about primitive technologies like rings of levitation.
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Apr 3, 2009 14:01
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elcyberGoth posted:I considered trying that actually, are there any downsides beside silver damage and possible nymph instakills? Silver damage is a complete non issue, only one monster regularly uses silver weapons and they're very easy to spot, and nymphs have a hard time stealing from you when you have -50 AC. Low max HP is the main drawback. When you first change your max HP will be about 60. You can boost that with various healing potions like normal though so it's not a big issue if you're willing to do some alchemy. Also not being able to #twoweapon is a minor drawback.
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Apr 3, 2009 15:17
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Bushibytes posted:I was just gonna post that one. It's a classic vampire polymorph mistake. Yeah if you're going to try it genocide c to avoid looking stupid.
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Apr 4, 2009 02:10
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Tyshalob posted:New moon? During a new moon their petrification attack is instant unless you have a lizard corpse in your backpack. Also they insta-stone you when you walk on their corpse without shoes, hit them without gloves, touch their corpse without gloves, or other ways that involve them coming into contact with bare skin. During a new moon the hissing attack has a 100% chance of starting the slow-stoning process if you don't have a lizad corpse in main inventory rather than the usual 10% chance. It's not an instant stoning though.
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Apr 4, 2009 07:35
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ThreeHams posted:I've got to stop playing as a dwarf. I've avoided genociding my own race so far, but I decided to sacrifice some peaceful monsters since the level was crawling with them - after all, my alignment was maximized, and it's really not a big penalty to anger them. It's really not worth the scroll, green slimes are very rare and having them successfully start to slime you is even rarer. Having an MC3 cloak will protect you from 98% of sliming attacks and if it does happen you've got 10 turns to zap yourself with a wand of fire, not exactly difficult. I think in all my time playing I've been slimed exactly once and getting rid of it was no problem at all.
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Apr 9, 2009 05:49
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factorialite posted:How do YOU mark the vibrating square? I take a screenshot. I am a terrible nerd 
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Apr 18, 2009 08:41
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Greybone posted:I didn't find a corpse I could revive either, the whole thing was just weird Nope, in fact they'll never leave a corpse. You've got to look after them well because once they're dead they're dead forever.
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Apr 20, 2009 09:29
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bobwhoops posted:No they can't. Master and Arch-liches can cast Summon Nasties, but Demiliches cannot. Yes they can. Demiliches range from XL14 to XL16, spellcasters at XL16 or greater can cast summon nasties. I've had a game ruined by a demilich casting summon nasties in the castle myself.
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Apr 21, 2009 23:43
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Evil Dr. Reef posted:I can't believe what I just did. Nice one. How long did you have to go without resistances? Running around without poison resistance until you can get crowned always worries me with foodless games.
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May 4, 2009 03:02
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'A feeling of inadequacy' means you've pissed off your god somehow and you need some good quality sacrifices to molify him. Neutrals and lawfuls can usually get by but chaotics can have a really hard time with that since their god requires stronger sacrifices before they'll calm down.
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May 18, 2009 12:19
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Sargeant Biffalot posted:How common are bugs in this game? I ask because last night I saved a game just after picking up a bag of holding in the bottom floor of sokoban and filling it with all my junk. Now I don't see it anywhere when I load the game up, and I'm trying to work out if it's missing somewhere or some sort of glitch has got rid of it. Hahahahaha. No that's not a bug. There are certain items that don't mix well with a bag of holding. Putting a wand of cancellation, a bag of tricks or another bag of holding inside it will make the bag explode and its contents disappear. Exploding a bag of holding is one of the great 'oh gently caress' moments in nethack.
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May 19, 2009 10:49
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Ogmius815 posted:This went fine and everyone who INSISTS on level porting down to the bottom and to/from the sanctum is lame. I do it every game because TC is easy to find, cursed scrolls of teleport are plentiful and once I'm in gehennom I don't care about fighting or finding loot. At that stage I'm all about getting out as soon as possible and magic mapping everything and levelporting past crap like the wizard's zoo make that possible.
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May 20, 2009 00:13
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bobwhoops posted:Lots of people consider quaffing from fountains at a low level a form of start scumming. The chances of you dying are pretty high and the chance of a wish is low. You can play however you want, but if you start relying on getting a wish at the start you won't get good at the game. I wouldn't say that it's startscumming, but it is kinda a dumb thing to do.
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May 20, 2009 04:02
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Speakeasy posted:I don't watch other people play so I wanted to ask here: I'll use it if I can see a situation that's potentially nasty like I'm about to fight a major demon or arch-lich, or as a precaution while I do something like nurse dancing or armour enchanting, but doing it in every battle seems like a waste of time to me.
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May 22, 2009 02:07
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TotallyGreen posted:Is Magicbane/Silver Saber twoweaponing good enough damage or do I need to try to get a Brand or Greyswandir? Twoweaponing any +6 or +7 items is going to be plenty of damage, having frostbrand or grayswandir is nice but far from necessary. Magicbane's magic resistance and curse catching is quite helpful so I'd run with it if I were in your position.
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May 27, 2009 00:05
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TotallyGreen posted:Oh my god. Jesus. No it's just kinda pathetic I hope he used a bot or something, 400,000 turns of manually casting create monster and killing them sounds incredibly tedious.
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May 27, 2009 10:05
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axolotl farmer posted:Does NAO ban certain ISPs? I get connection refused when I try to telnet in, both with the regular OSX telnet client and the java telnet applet on the NAO front page. Not that I know of. Check that it's not your own system blocking outbound connections on port 23, if it seems to be working then you might be best to ask paxed in #nethack on freenode.
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May 29, 2009 00:44
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Lazerface posted:Ok! after months of playing NetHack it finally looks like I might be able to ascend. So far I've never even got past the quest but this time I've made it down to lvl 22 without too much grief and I am getting antsy. Lvl 15 Valk, I've got GDSM(dropped from the only dragon I've seen this game), "oR(worn) & 2 "oLS, Speed boots, -23AC, #twoweaponing +2 Excalibur & +5 silver saber (mjollnir stashed as I've only got 18/99 str), 2 magic markers and some blank scrolls, blessed luckstone + extremely lucky, blessed unicorn horn, blessed BoH, blessed tinning kit, Orb of Fate, Poison cold fire resistances, telepathy, various wands including sleep & poly, plenty of holy water and a ring of invisibility. First things, ditch mjollnir so you're not tempted to throw it. Excalibur is plenty of weapon, Mjollnir will occasionally hit you when you throw it and it will destroy your wands and rings. As for the questions: 1. Your AC is low enough. The orb of fate makes you stupidly tough. Most classes you should get to AC -30 but with the orb of fate -20 is more than enough. You'll probably get to -30 anyway since there's lots more scrolls of enchant armour in the next 30 levels. 2. Your weapon is fine. Better than fine actually. You're not going to die from lack of damage output at this stage so a wish for something different would be a complete waste. A wish on a ring of levitation is OK but check for levitation boots in Perseus' statue at Medusa and try polypiling your junk rings before blowing a wish on it. 3. The only reason to go to ludios is if you're short of cash and want to buy more protection. You'll be finding lots more cash in Gehennom if you want it though so it's not really something you have to worry about. 4. You're only at Dlvl 22, you don't need to worry about the planes just yet. Minotaurs will drop a million wands of digging in Gehennom anyway so you won't have a problem. 5. Not important at all. Spending resources rust/fireproofing your gear is a massive waste. If your gear is blessed and you luck is high it will resist being damaged 95% of the time, and even if things do get damaged one point of AC is not going to matter. 6. Wishing for scrolls of genocide is perfectly fine although if you're swimming in markers you could try blindwriting it. Get some blessed genocide scrolls and get rid of L's and h's (note: dwarf is a h, don't geno h if you are a dwarf). Something else you might want to look at is getting a ring of teleport control and teleportitis. Being able to hit Ctrl-T or #invoking the orb for a controlled escape is supremely powerful. Also be wary of eels and of the castle drawbridge. Eels are easy to avoid and easy to escape from if they somehow do grab you but if you panic around them you will die, and the drawbridge makes a very powerful weapon but if you make a mistake it could easily kill you.
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May 29, 2009 14:30
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Insurrectum posted:I'm going to go and clear out the entire perimeter of every Gehennom maze. I'm would advise against that. There's nothing you'll find in those mazes that could improve your situation, you're more than ready to ascend right now and the more time you spend in the game the more likely the game will throw something horrible at you. Spend a wish on a magic marker, use it to write some magic mapping scrolls and go get the candelabum, book and amulet.
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May 31, 2009 05:53
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Insurrectum posted:Got my bag cursed early on in the game and had my candles disappear (part of the reason I wanted to go through Gehennom thoroughly). Decided just to pudding farm for them instead of wasting a wish. I guess there was a hole in the level. Here's the Castle level which was one below. This should be fun to clear out. I've already cleared out the left maze and right past the moat. pudding farming If you wan to clear them quick genocide is a good option.
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Jun 1, 2009 05:44
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bavid posted:I was surprised at how rough the planes were, just in terms of monster density. The plane of fire was pretty much packed with enemies after a while, and I ended up using up two amulets of life saving just trying to wade through the crowd. After making it out of there and finding the plane of water also full of enemies, I was convined I'd either end up being overpowered or starving to death trying to find the portal. I'm guessing you ran into a few archons? They're always top priority for me, a few turns worth of summoning and all of a sudden you'll find yourself surrounded 8 deep with monsters and with no real way out.
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Jun 2, 2009 01:27
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Cholfo posted:luck Like others have said, once you know what you're doing the only kind of luck that matters is not running into a goblin with a wand of somethingtoopowerful before you have the HP to survive it. Nethack gives you a lot of ways out of almost every situation, if you know what they are it's very hard to die.
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Jun 5, 2009 14:27
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Insurrectum posted:If you're wearing a ring of polymorph and have polymorph control, is there any way to just cancel the polymorph? You can answer with your own race, eg. 'human'. It's not a complete cancelling of the polymorph because you'll still become a new man and get your stats shuffled a bit but you won't break polyselfless conduct and you won't break your armour.
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Jun 7, 2009 02:20
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Broken Loose posted:Carry an extra holy water or zap a wand of cancellation at it before you pick it up. Luckstones are always generated uncursed. Unless it was from bones it's perfectly safe to pick up.
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Jun 8, 2009 01:45
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I seem to say this a lot but illiterate is a favourite conduct of mine. The lack of charging and enchanting sounds a lot worse than it really is, without enchanting you'll still have AC -20 and some good quality (if unenchanted) weapons, and not being able to charge your wand of wishing sounds like it'd hurt but when you remember that you're no longer going to be spending 3 wishes on magic markers it seems a lot less important. It also gives you an opportunity to try out lots of little tricks you otherwise wouldn't bother with, like identifying rings of free action by punching gelatanous cubes and standing on dropped scrolls of scare monster to protect yourself. And failing that there's always speed games
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Jun 9, 2009 07:39
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bobwhoops posted:Being a priest would make atheist a lot more manageable, wouldn't it? Yeah but being an atheist priest is so close to playing any other priest that it barely counts as a conduct.
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Jun 9, 2009 12:18
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Fury1671 posted:Except you don't get a good weapon unless you wish for it. Lemme tell you, a +7 Silver Spear is no replacement for any artiweapon. +7 silver spear? Please, a +7 mace should be enough for anyone.
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Jun 10, 2009 00:04
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