Is anybody else here addicted to Nethck? All my friend’s find it amusing that with all my computer stuff my favorite game is is text based.
If you play, how long was it before you first ascension?
I love nethack! Nethack is the greatest! I nethack all day at the office when I should be working!
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What the hell is nethack?
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist)
Okay smartass.
That link should have been to here.
What is nethack? Simply the greatest computer role playing game of all time. It is easily the most complex, internally consistent game I have ever played. I have been playing off an on since 1992 and I have still never ascended (won).
It is also one of the few good examples of how freeware/open source software methods can produce truly superior software.
I just love playing a game that has me turning to my SO and saying, in all seriousness: “I need to eat a floating eye so that I can wear a towel on my head, allowing me to telepathically see the invisible nymph which just stole my blessed +3 Mjollnir!”
Ok, my sister is really really into nethack, religiously, and has tried to convert me. I downloaded it, looked at the list of ‘codes’ for objects and manouvres, tried it out, got promptly killed. I have been told it’s swell, when one works out how to play. I trust your additional testimonial though. I’ll give it another shot and report back in a few weeks. I’ve been looking for a thinkin’ person’s game for a while (Myst almost did it, Final Fantasy doesn’t).
These days, it has become fashionable for people to label themselves `computer nerds,’ some even claiming to have been into computers from waaaay back. When I meet one of these poseurs, I say, “Oh yeah? How many Nethack characters have you ascended with?”
Most of the Computer Science types around here don’t even know what I’m talking about. And just forget about Code of Hamurabi or Towers of Hanoi.
Ok, Ob, now I’m hooked and it’s finals week and I’m holding you responsible.
How can you escape from monsters if HP are low? Should you just pray and see what works
(it got me fed once)?
Why, when I prayed at my God’s altar, was he displeased (archaeologist character)?
Oh, help me.
I played NetHack all the time, back before that bastard Version 3.0 came out and ruined the whole damn thing.
In fact, I was around back in the Golden Age [TM], when it was just called “Hack.” Somewhere, I still have my 5-1/4" floppy diskette of Hack 1.03e.
Oh, and M.K.: try inscribing “Elbereth” on the ground if you get in dire straits.
M.K. wrote:
In most cases, you’ll want to write `elbereth’ on the ground, with a wand of digging, if you’ve got one. Be sure to stay in one place. Beware, it will wear off.
Or, you could pray. I hope you’ve been sacrificing corpses to your god at altars.
Or, you could read an unidentified scroll. If you fail to read it, you might teleport.
Or, you could zap the monster with an unidentified wand, or smash it with an unidentified potion.
But what I would do would be to don my gloves, pull my cockatrice corpse out of my backpack, and poke my enemies with it.
Well, I guess the best advice is to know when you should run away. There is no rule saying you have to kill every creature as soon as you see them.
Also, archaeologists have their benefits but I would recommend beginner’s play focus on Valkyries, Barbarians, or Samurai for a bit to learn some of the ropes. They can usually take on anything you might find in the early levels.
But if you are just about dead by all means pray. Your god can heal you, but just be warned that praying too often is not good either.
As to why your god was displeased, I can only say that there are many reasons that can happen. But in the early levels the most likely cause would be failing to look out for your pet (or even worse, accidentally killing it yourself).
But keep playing. Every time you finally figure out how to get past a certain point, something will be waiting for you beyond it!
I used to play the earlier version, “hack” & ???, good fun.
I’ve been playing nethack for, geez, Decades 
I still have not ascended. I’m so tempted to hack the code to just give a character what I want him to have, just for fun.
I played Nethack on the Amiga. How bad is that? Of course, dear husband has it on our computer at home. I play when I have time. Never ascended. Probably never will. But golly, it’s fun!
In earlier versions of Nethack (and of course Hack), you could ascend out of the dungeon any time you were on the “up” staircase on the first level.
Of course, if you did so without the Amulet of Yendor, you wouldn’t get a very big score…
sigh
The first time I check the boards in two weeks and I find a Nethack thread. I’ll never escape this place. Oh well, despite the injury (and having to retype things three times) here goes:
I love Nethack. I’ve been addicted to the game for three years now, and still haven’t ascended even a Valkyrie. Of course, I play mostly priests and monks (the monks kick ass, BTW) which aren’t as easy to ascend. I did get up to the plain of air once with a Samurai.
Oh, and I’ve been able to throw Mojo and have it return. Valkyries rock!
If you want tips, here’s the spoiler page. Check out the competitive game going on. I’d play but they don’t have my character classes yet.
Off to play with my pet orange dragon who won’t attack mind flayers…
A cheat you can do with Nethack that you won’t see in ANY of the spoiler pages:
When you save a game and then restore it, Nethack compares the operating system’s timestamp on the saved file with a timestamp encoded into the file itself. On a non-Unix operating system (e.g. an MS-DOS descandant), when you make a copy of a file, the new copy has the same OS timestamp as the original.
Thus, it is possible to save a game, copy the .SAV file (to another directory, perhaps), then restore that game – and if you die, you can copy your copy of the .SAV file back where the old .SAV file was, and play that saved game again! Eventually, if you save whenever something good happens and copy the saved copy back whenever you die or have something bad happen, you will get lucky enough to Ascend.
Oh I think pretty much everybody knows about that cheat.
In fact, this is the basis of some of the Nethack competitions you can find. Essentially someone starts a game and teleports to every level for one turn so that the map is drawn, goes back up to the first level and saves the game. Distribute the save file. Everyone starts with the same dungeon.
But why would you want to cheat to ascend? Wouldn’t be much more fun than cheating at solitaire. The only valid reason would be so that you can learn about certain situations and test various hypotheses; but that is what explore and wizard modes are for (the use of which disallows ascension).
Well, if you don’t know… 
Seriously, though, there’s a kind of personal thrill you can get from saying “my character has more hit points/spells/armor/immunities than yours does”. One other cheat I like to do is, while a game is running, dump all my gold and gems on level 2, go back up to level 1, copy the level 2 .LVL file, go back down to level 2, get my stuff, go back up to level 1, copy my copy of the level 2 .LVL file over the existing one, go back down to level 2, pick up this second copy of my stuff, go back up to level 1, and repeat until I am wealthy enough to buy out every Shopkeeper in the game.
Great, I just DL’d it…I’m only going to play for 5 more minutes…I swear. 
I back up my saved games. While I understand that there are some purists who think that the game is much better if you get no second chances (or 30th chances, as it happens sometimes), but the game would be abysmally frustrating if I couldn’t go back and re-run the scenario that got me killed and find a way to get out of it.
Another one of my cheats is simply to use a binary file editor, open up my save file, find where my max hit points are stored, (searching for the little-endian binary representation of my hit points and max hit points usually works, especially if it’s an unusual number), and upping it to 30000.
Once, I upped my hit points to 32767 in this fashion. When I lost a few hit points and healed them back, the don’t-let-the-player-heal-back-more-hit-points-than-his-max algorithm “wrapped” my current hit points around to -32768 and killed me!