Old School - Nethack

I don't know the spoilers, so maybe this is something I've never known, but I don't get what a tinning kit does for you vs just eating all the corpses you find. I mean I guess if you're already satiated it can save a corpse you want to eat for later, but that's not that common a situation really.

intrinsics if you're satiated after killing like 3 dragons, tinning nurses for healing, to get rid of trolls... idk?

you eat nurses? boy i don't think i've ever even killed a nurse, i just let them bump my HP until they vanish.

Have you genocided all liches or just the normal ones?

Anyway, I think you're pretty much set.

i genocided all the liches, i think

Nethack's tinning kit is not considered a magical tool for purposes of polymorphing, but it is hard to say what kind of non-magical object(s) in the real world it is meant to correspond to. Home canning of meats is a fairly laborious process that involves cutting the meat into appropriate pieces, usually salting and partially cooking it, packing it into containers and then boiling the containers in a pressure cooker for over an hour. The pressure cooker is needed to raise the cooking temperature above 100 degrees C (212 degrees F), in order to eliminate dangerous microbes. This corresponds to the concept in NetHack of tinned food not rotting away. Home canning uses screw-top glass jars, but the NetHack tinning kit obviously uses tin cans, which further adds to the complexity, as the cans must be sealed. This is probably done by soldering the top onto the base, as was originally done with tin cans in our world. Canning guidelines from the United States Department of Agriculture are here. So, we can assume that the NetHack tinning kit includes the following:

A large number of tin cans.
Soldering supplies (presumably).
A knife or knives for preparing the meat.
A pressure canner.
Water.
A good heat source, such as a propane burner, and fuel.
Tongs, silicone gloves, or some other implements for handling the hot containers.
(Maybe) salt.
(Maybe) a frying pan, or some other implement for pre-cooking the meat.

The length of turn in NetHack is fairly abstract and flexible, and attempts to work this out will yield different results based on what kinds of activities (movement, combat, etc.) are used to calculate it. But, in light of the above, tinning a corpse is clearly one of the most action-packed turns a player will ever experience.

Although there are no special in-game penalties for doing so, some players consider it extremely poor form to kill this particular shopkeeper. The NetHack community itself is somewhat divided on this issue - in #nethack, hardly anybody cares; in RGRN, at least several vocal regulars will usually reprimand any transgressions; and the wiki itself sees a broad mix of editors' opinions. For extinctionist games, it is considered acceptable to leave Izchak alive.

I think this is really sweet.

Oh, I forgot - teleport control can be very useful with the Valkyrie artifact.

so i haven't played a ton since clearing the castle, but i did do a few things to get ready for gehennim. i have grabbed my quest orb (and the bell for the ceremony) and dumped my luckstone. i made a bunch of blessed enchant weapon scrolls, donated to priest, and brought my AC up to -36 (also enchanted my weapon to +5). i used my last wish on a greased, blessed, fireproof cloak of displacement +2. i found some jumping boots, i made a bunch of holy waters, found a tinning machine + blessed it (tinned a nurse!), dropped all the dead weight i had (any wands/scrolls/food/etc i don't plan to need - so goodbye boots of levitation that just replicate ring functionality), bought my 7 candles from Izchak for final ceremony, grabbed fire resistance intrinsic (i think i have them all now except disintegration - haven't seen any black dragons - and i'm not 100% sure about sleep/shock). um... that's all. i guess i'm ready to go.

mordy, i played this game for a few days and sucked and the farthest i've gotten is level 6 and about 6 levels down, and i still don't even know how to use a lamp. but i will tell you this.

you are doomed. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED

You die from your illness.

FML. Didn't even know I was sick or I would've used my blessed unicorn horn.

Ok. Now I'm taking a long break. That was heartbreaking.

Apparently a Juiblex made me sick, but I missed the message. Sigh.

not sure if these updates are interesting for anyone else but after a number of early deaths i'm on a fairly promising run. it was going pretty good (knock on wood) for awhile - i found gray dragon scale mail and an amulet of reflection (after sokoban produced a redundant bag of holding) on a bones file and dipped them both in fountains to uncurse them. then, i found a wand around level 15 that turned out to be an almost fully charged wand of wishing (!!). first two wishes were for gloves of power (25 str great for valkyrie) and a scroll of recharging. i still have 3 wishes from it (4 if you count wresting the final one), and i haven't even hit the castle and the wand there. gonna take a quick break while i think on what i want to use the last 3/4 wishes on (i have a ring of levitation, but no rings of conflict, free action, or slow digestion - some combo of those might be useful - also could use boots of speed, um, a cloak of displacement, a magic marker!, etc). i'm feeling pretty good tho! maybe this'll be the run.

lol at "a Juiblex", btw. He's one of the toughest demons! And 6 wishes? That is crazy, you should maybe save a few for emergencies

Ring of free action is the most necessary imo but not worth a wish (?)

i killed Juiblex and if i hadn't combat-scrolled past the illness message (or been prepared for the fact that he makes u ill) i would've just healed it. once i get down into gehennim this run i'm taking everything uber slow + carefully. i'm ready to ascend + be done w/ nethack for awhile tbh.

lol fuck this game forever

now you got it

Dipping things in fountains uncurses them?

it can

i killed Juiblex and if i hadn't combat-scrolled past the illness message (or been prepared for the fact that he makes u ill) i would've just healed it. once i get down into gehennim this run i'm taking everything uber slow + carefully. i'm ready to ascend + be done w/ nethack for awhile tbh.

― Mordy, Thursday, 26 July 2012 05:49 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol fuck this game forever

― Mordy, Thursday, 26 July 2012 13:50 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

does this mean you ascended, or

I honestly find these updates fascinating and live vicariously through then since my history with nethack is just a series of brief and terribly obsessive failures, keep em coming mordy.

personally i think the thing to do would be to write a script automatically posting your deaths to this thread

some of them are really embarrassing

Mordy, do a monk run

Switching to a monk after a period of "blarrgh weapons" or "ararrgh spellbooks" was amazing. By XL 17 you've got all intrinsic resistances (except disintegration) and teleport control... there's something about staying vegetarian than confers disintegration resistance, too, iirc

i've never had to mess w/ weapons or spellbooks bc valkyrie gets artifact by L5 and can barely cast spells

just sacrificed a werejackal to my lawful god, he was pretty pissed off, sent the Angel of Death to sort me out. ah well, live and learn.

I remember valkyrie as being a good class for newbies but hard to ascend? You should diversify, seriously.
The breakthrough moment for me was a class switch. I was playing priests and then wizards pretty exclusively. Switching to a monk brought my first ascension almost immediately

bah, a soldier petrified me with a cockatrice corpse. i didn't realize i wouldn't have time to pull a lizard out of my bag. next time i'll just keep one in my inventory always. BLEH.

i did have a cool move earlier when i got into a mess - was clearing a zoo when a wand woke up all the trolls. i wasn't at a point where i could beat them, and my 2 scrolls of teleportation just bounced me around the zoo. i was going to die when i remembered i had a cursed potion of leveling... drank it, escaping up to the higher floor, recouped, then went back down and cleared it out.

i don't get upset when i die anymore. this is really good (or really lousy) at working out your patience.

update: just marked the vibrating square w/ a towel

Whoa

that was a failure - but a close one. got the amulet stolen by the wizard and then accidentally killed him over a water tile and by the time i realized what i should do (wait on that floor until he comes - automatically grabs it - then go upstairs and kill him there) i had wiped all my scrolls + potions diving for the amulet and then got eaten up by loads of monsters (tho i was so annoyed at that point that i really let them kill me - by the time you're at that point in the game the regular monsters have a really really tough time bringing you down).

i feel like all gamers should be intimately familiar w/ this game. goat imho

Yeah, exactly. I don't have the time (or the rhetoric) to properly word this statement with all considerations. The whole "videogames are art!" "videogames are not art!" debate tends to measure gaming as a medium with the wrong yardsticks. i.e. games as literature, games as cinema. Basically an Ebert or a Kojima just need sit down with Nethack (or ADOM or Tetris for Christ's sake). The parsing of an artificial reality as being entirely statistics-based, teaching your mind and hands to navigate that reality, that is the unique experience, you know? I guess it's the same as chess, really

Mordy and Owen totally otm. I hear the wailing of the banshee again... Usually happens every autumn when it starts to get cold and I feel pretty much only ok when it's dark and I'm alone inside. And in a way this game still reaches out to me when I'm in a pretty dark or severely placid place in my life?

I first played this game 28 (!) years ago, on an old xenix system at my dad's office. Then I was just learning English and was always a wizard because of the cool ascii graphics when zapping someone. It's been a questionable red thread throughout my life since then. I'll go four or five years without and then suddenly dive in deep again for a couple of weeks. I ascended twice, once as a wizard and once as a valkyrie.

The most beautiful thing about it is the ascii. As Owen said:

I can't stand a tileset. You're fighting letters and punctuation, not actual creatures. A little bitmap of a red dragon is missing the point: you are actually fighting a red D.

Owen said some ridiculously poetic and true things in this thread, but this is really otm:

First: working that hard on a single game will take over your life and change you permanently. I wouldn't recommend getting into rogue-likes unless you're bedridden sick, turn back, give up now, etc.

As you guessed, I'm about to play this again. I think... (taking heed the many warnings signs itt and from my own experience). Shame it doesn't 'work' for me on iPhone or iPad but eh, will get the old laptop out.

Mordy, and Owen, has any one of you played this after your previous posts here?

(I am investigating ADOM, but could only find a tiled, graphical version, which is unplayable for me)

(I was seven years old 28 years ago btw)

I am so terrible at this game but Mordy's liveblogging itt is one of my favorite things on ilx.

i may have continued to play a bit after my final post, but i haven't played since. still think it's one of the most amazing experiences ever.

Hi Amory, this is Owen. You can switch ADOM to graphical in the menu.

I... actually played a lot of ADOM this past year. (I was suffering from depression and it was a terrific outlet! Recommended to all saddos.) The author ran a Kickstarter to get the game finished, with new features and classes and artifacts and quests and things. The re-balancing actually made the game terrific, it is deep and balanced and just altogether wonderful. I've won two ultra endings this year, once with a beastfighter and once with a duelist.

But also I got really good at Brogue. I started cheating with it. The game is not exactly randomly generated... it responds to a seed number and generates the dungeon with that number as its mitigating variable. As a result, if you enter in the same seed twice to generate the dungeon, you can replay that same dungeon over and over again. I found a seed that had a great collection of artifacts and some super powerful pets, and ran a character over and over again until I was able to get crazy weapons and mail and could bop a dragon in a second and I descended all the way to Lv 40 with pile of Lumenstones. Cheaty but worth it, that is one cruel mid-game. And late-game.

But it's true I don't have time for any other type of game. I played Pirates! for a bit a couple years ago, and half-heartedly zapped through The Last Of Us, but that's really it.

Also Amory we are the same age and the first game I remember playing obsessively was Moria on my dad's PC at age 6 or 7

fgti have you ever tried playing the demons/dark souls games? i know that kind of thing is an entirely different experience but there is a common thread

Yeah, I never played it but I had a neighbour who was really into it and I sat and watched it for hours. Looks like a killer timesuck

for sure, they are 60-80 hour games where you can get sucked into replaying through compulsively, designed so you can't do and see everything in one play. certainly i played the first couple over and over. the most fun is at the extremes too, the first time when you don't have a clue what's around the next corner and then when you have every inch to memory and you're trying to go thru perfectly or break it early. there is definitely an overlap in mentality with those games and the hardcore rogues. altho ADOM did make me want to jump out of a window eventually, so thanks for that.

Owen, thanks so much for your reply! Please do not hold it against me that my heart skipped a beat out of glee learning you are still playing this, after having read your previous experiences. Was afraid you'd became wise and left this behind you ;-)

I'm in "that place" rn, but because of what you said, will try either Brogue or ADOM this time around. Will dive in head first at Brogue though, no seed number business first, just to get acquainted.

Oh and I played Moria! On al old unix system in the same office, after the systems had switched from xenix to unix. Think that's why it later became Umoria actually, the U added because of unix!

I honestly find these updates fascinating and live vicariously through then since my history with nethack is just a series of brief and terribly obsessive failures, keep em coming

qft

I am apparently a year younger than you, Amory and fgti, and the earliest childhood games I recall seeming to be infinitely vast worlds to explore forever were 8-bit platformer Jet Set Willy and roguelike Caverns of Larn

(actually a p. short game to blast through as these things go, at least on the easier settings - the bosses are a gamble but there's not much buffing up to do in preparation: get the one good weapon and hope to find one of about 3 decent spells, but really just go and meet them and either you die or you don't, as far as I've yet worked out - but the way I played as a kid I somehow made each char last for days; the one time as a kid I reached the potion to save my daughter I had long outlived her. I really don't know how I spun it out so long, there are only 13 levels and once you mop up nothing particularly interesting respawns)

I used to be totally anti-tilesets, but I got into DCSS with tilesets this year for the first time after several previous phases of playing the ASCII version. It was kind of like a whole new game and yet also familiar. ascii is the only way for trv kvlt rogvelikeheads of course. also a little part of me dies inside every time I see a game described as roguelike which is, like, not ASCII, and not top-down, and not permadeathy, and not solo-dungeon-crawly, and etc

I KNOW

I played Spelunky and was like "not a rl" and FTL and was like "NOT A RL". Love both of them tho

this is such a good thread

i only ever played the game intensively for one term as an undergraduate, and i played with the tileset, so obv i should be tarred and feathered, but anyway, i was listening to the first marnie stern album a bunch at the time and would be entering keypresses a lot of the time in sync with her sixteenth-note power-tapping stuff and now whenever i listen to that record i can't associate it with anything but nethack, it was a good and worthwhile thing to do, i was not that good, i only ever got to the hell levels was the best i managed