everyone loves to laugh at how comically granular/detailed Dwarf Fortress is (and rightfully so!), but i feel like NetHack doesn’t get enough attention because it is just as funny. for example, one of your most essential tools for surviving the early floors is to check the readme/wiki and notice that one of your, no joke, literally 134 keybinds is “engrave”. pressing that button prompts you to write a word or phrase on a nearby surface, either by etching it with a dagger, blasting it with a wand, or just writing in the dust with your finger. if you write specifically the word “Elbereth” on a tile, you can stand there without most monsters being able to touch you.
the word “Elbereth” is not referenced or explained anywhere in-game. you are expected to know it from having read Lord of the Rings. you can really tell this game originally released in 1987 sometimes
“Vegetarians can reverse genocide gelatinous cubes for the intrinsics once they can defeat them and take the acidic corpse damage” is such a good sentence
Tags:
#playing Nethack is fun but reading Nethack guides is even more fun #Nethack #games #my childhood #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Starting on my final issue for work. Stay tuned for amusing fury.
I was originally planning on not rewriting *any* of the build infrastructure, but it was *so* bad that it was genuinely more efficient to rewrite it instead of hacking what I needed together.
I have no idea how my co-workers tolerated this for literally years.
Remember kids: once you’ve run it twice it’s time to automate running it.
Good advice that I’ve been trying to keep in mind more often.
(I’ve made more habit-cultivation progress for the somewhat-related guideline of “once you’ve accessed a piece of cloud-based information twice, it’s time to make a local copy of it.”)
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^ Today in “old posts that I keep thinking about”, though this one is rather less old than the previous.
This time, the post is brought to you by learning how to convert online MediaWiki-based wikis into sets of linked HTML files. Now I can play Nethack without Internet access and still look things up on the Nethack wiki!
Next I’m going to research cron tasks some more and see if I can figure out how to meta-automate the automated wiki archiver: make it take a fresh copy once a month, zip it, and leave the zip in the appropriate folder. I’m guessing that’s probably a thing I can do with only slightly more Linux know-how than I currently have. Time to go acquire the slightly-more.
(I probably sound like a total noob, but I’m a total noob with a local copy of the Nethack wiki.)
Tags:
#(also the Crawl wiki while I was at it) #I probably need some kind of prepping tag #it keeps coming up in ways that don’t *quite* fit into the memory or phone or finance tags #reply via reblog #(more or less) #Nethack #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
I forgot to describe what happened with the Scrupulously Ethical Rogue, didn’t I.
I skipped the Castle. Just because the soldiers would try to kill me on sight doesn’t justify killing them, and that goes double if I can just not let them see me. The Wand of Wishing would give four to seven wishes, and I could easily take it without having to kill any enemies, but that wand belongs to someone. Got to leave it.
And wishes are fairly plentiful anyway, in Slash’EM. I of course spent one on a spellbook of create monster, because those monsters would rather exist than not exist.
In Gehennom, I was constantly surrounded by various demons trying to kill me. By the time you get that far, no single monster is much of a threat, so self-defense doesn’t come into it. I was constantly Googling for information on demon types in NethHack (or DnD, since they imported those species), checking for which ones are barbaric but people and which ones come under the BtVS Vampire Exception.
Important tools: Elbereth, a tooled horn, and a wand of teleportation. Without that kind of thing, it’s really hard to get enemies or monsters that you don’t want to kill to move out of your way on a maze level. What I ended up doing was turning into a xorn so I could walk through walls and the mazes wouldn’t apply to me. (The fact that I stayed as a xorn had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I forgot turning into large monsters would wreck my armor. It was on purpose, definitely.)
Killing the Wizard of Yendor is completely justifiable. He wants the player character dead and is capable of doing it, and besides, he’ll get better. Death ray.
I ended up losing. The problem with being a xorn is that you don’t have very many hit points, so between the High Priest of Moloch and two Wizards of Yendor it goes down very fast.
That means the game was probably net-negative utility. I killed a lot of monsters, many of whom were sentient. I lost track of how many hostile gnomes and hobbits and goblins I killed by accident, even, just from pushing the wrong button. And since I lost, I didn’t get to deliver the MacGuffin to the Utility Monster. Except…
At one point, I sat on a throne. I was offered the chance to exterminate any one type of monster. I took it. Slash’EM contains tsetse flies, so those are an available choice. With those dead African sleeping sickness has no remaining vector, saving over nine thousand lives per year. (Too bad “mosquito” wasn’t an option.)
As usual, the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation. I promise I did not go in to the game with that in mind.
Tags:
#Nethack #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(‘as usual the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation’)
I just saw a capital “C” and thought “what is a centaur doing in the title of my document” and I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN PLAYING NETHACK LATELY.
Tags:
#Nethack #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #I’m not sure any of my followers who haven’t already seen this will get it #(slepaulica would but they haven’t been on Tumblr in ages) #but I promised I would reblog things that made me laugh and I am damn well going to
The Very Hungry Rust Monster is a mini-comic I made a few years back. I’ve seen it floating around Tumblr without attribution recently, so I’ve uploaded a higher-resolution version, properly credited.
Tags:
#…aww? #(I didn’t know where this was going) #(I’ve only encountered rust monsters in Nethack) #(and Nethack rust monsters look more like walruses than anything chitinous)
i almost never play video games, but when i do it is a roguelike of some sort
right now i am playing Super Lots Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic aka slashem
it is pretty fun, i am trying to be a monk doppelganger neutral lady
Doppelganger Wizard for the Win. Not literally for the win; I’ve only ever ascended in vanilla Nethack rather than SLASH’EM, but you know what I mean.
Oh hey, more people play NetHack! It’s on my list of ways to kill a…week…if I ever happen to have no obligations.
I’M PLAYING SLASH’EM AGAIN BECAUSE OF THIS POST THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.
Decided that I’d start off by winning, since I haven’t played in a while, so I rolled up a doppelganger Wizard, and what should I start with but a ring of polymorph control. This is a very promising turn zero.
Sounds good. Doppelgangers are fun, from what I recall of Slash’em. I mostly stuck to vanilla Nethack, though, and I haven’t even played that in quite a while. I go to Crawl for my roguelike fix these days.
I’ve never technically ascended in Nethack (I have ascended once in Crawl, as a Spriggan Enchanter), but I do have a Wizard that is basically omnipotent and could pretty much win any time I wanted. I wanted to do it extinctionist, because small-child me loved reading Nethack guides (probably even more than she loved playing it) and that challenge sounded like one to try. I’m mostly there, but I got bored, drifted away, and…dear gods, I think that was two computers ago. That’s at least three and a half years. (I copied the savefile from the old computer, and copied it again when I moved to this one on the off chance I ever decide to pick it up again. I figure it’s not savescumming if you’re only messing with the savefile to cheat out-of-universe virtual death.)
I’m rusty enough that I’d probably have to play some other Nethack games before going back to that one, to reduce the chances of forgetting some detail or other and making a fatal mistake. I still love reading game guides, but I haven’t read any Nethack ones lately.
Quick reminder that Flight Rising’s one-day registration window opens in about fifteen minutes! (Half past 1pm GMT.)
I’d write a longer post about why it’s a really cool site and you should join ^_^ but I’m currently super focused on pokemon-battling a group of my dragons up to max level so that I can help out my not!Hogwarts House in a friendly-but-intense competition tussle thing we’ve got going on with another House this week. (They’re called Flights. Because dragons.)
So I’ll just drop this fact here: when my Flight did an informal Gdocs survey of people’s demographics after the November reg window when I joined, like 18% of us were nonbinary. Also there was an option for nonbinary gender. :D *shrugs* I can’t speak for other Flights, but Lightning is some damn cool people if you’re into spreadsheets. :D
Ooh. *wanders over to website*
…wow. I have not seen that much impenetrable game-jargon in one place in quite some time. Not that I’m saying Flight Rising is unusually bad, mind you. I’m sure the Runescape home page I looked at this morning would seem just as impenetrable to the untrained eye, but I have eleven years’ experience speaking Gielinorian and it comes as naturally to me now as standard English. It’s been a while since the last time I had to learn a new game language.
Well, you’ve only been playing for what, a month? And you seem to be reasonably fluent already. I’m sure I can cope.
I’m confident that potential near-future me who already has a decent grasp on Flight Rising would like to hear your explanation of why it’s awesome almost as much as I do. Maybe when you’re less busy.
I was about to say I’m not into spreadsheets, but then I remembered the time I charted my menstrual cycles for six months out of sheer curiosity. And the time, eleven years ago, that I read the entire guide section of the Runescape website before even making an account. (The guide section is much, much bigger now. A modern-day newbie could never hope to do the same.) And how, though I enjoyed playing Nethack, I enjoyed reading about it even more. (The so-called “bachelor’s degree” aspect of Nethack, in which you must study all the obscure intricacies of the game in order to do well, puts a lot of people off. I really liked it, that there were entire long guides devoted just to, say, Altars and You.) I suspect I probably am what you’re calling “into spreadsheets”, and just don’t think of it in the same terms. Feel free to correct me if I’ve misinterpreted you.
Brinens and Things 