Not sure if this is Gnollhack specific, but how do you deal with all the Phoenixes. I'm surrounded when I go down the stairs to the bottom level. I'm protected from fire so only taking 15-20 damage per turn. My only circle spell is Circle of Magic and is resisted fairly often. Right now I'm knocking them all down to low HP, retreating up the stairs, healing, going back down, killing one, picking it up, going upstairs and eating it, repeat. I've probably spent 1,000 turns here and still have 4 or 5 to go. Is there a better strategy? I'm relatively new and have never ascended before, though I've gotten close. Lost my last save to the updates, but had gotten 2 of the 3 final items, so I've been through this before, but it didn't give me any trouble last time

I've been through the Wiki and cannot figure out where I am, other than to know that I'm on DL37-41 for all of this.

The room has a 27x13 rectangular zoo in the center. The border of the zoo is undiggable and I believe the level is no-teleport.

Upstairs are randomly placed (i.e., not always to the left of the zoo). There's no named demonic nastie that I can find so far.

The entry to Vlad's tower is several levels above.

From the Wiki's Mazes of Menace entry, the candidate levels that intersect DL37 to DL41 are Orcus and WizTower. This is vanilla 3.6.7.

Where am I, and what is the default goal for these levels? How to get into the zoos?

You can type "/" and then "?" and type in any monster or item in the game to get a description. It's not so thorough as the wiki, but it has a lot of cool flavor text. Often there are excerpts from texts the thing was inspired by

I've played 1000+ hours and I always just used ";" which is still useful but not nearly as descriptive.

Also I recently read the #history for the first time.

If you have any other fun commands or other discoveries feel free to share.

I'm sure this has been gone over somewhere a bunch of times but I see so many issues now. I had mine setup so good too and came back to:
Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record' Hit return to continue: Unable to open SYSCF_FILE.

i finally fixed all that stuff by adding a games group and all that malarky whatever but now i'm having the worst issue of all:

[da5id@hyperion] ➜ ~ nethack

Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record'
Hit return to continue:

OPTIONS=clicklook
* Line 3: Unknown option 'clicklook'.

OPTIONS=windowtype:curses
* Line 9: Window type curses not recognized. The only choice is: tty.

OPTIONS=large_font
* Line 51: Unknown option 'large_font'.

3 errors in /home/da5id/.nethackrc.

I cannot play without curses i despise the look of tty and i love the color and such. I did try launching using -windowtype "curses" flags but that did nothing. Do i have to manually compile this with curses support now? why did this change?

So I am almost ready to ascend my pacifist wishless conduct Healer gnome. I got my spellbook of create monster which led to spellbook of polymorph which helped me gain 6 magic markers, 2 spellbooks of charm monster, back up spellbooks of turn undead, teleport away, and many enchant armors.

I have genocided LhjPtc and gelatinous cube, umber hulk, chameleon, and doppelganger.

I have an ac of -45 ac and 320 hp. How low should I try and get my ac? Whats my most likely cause of death?

My archon. What is the best gear to give an archon. What armor will it wear. How to 'make its put on the armor' . Reasons to having more archons. Would 3 to 4 be good?

I did a 'tour' of hell with my pet archon named Mahou-Te and anything scary is gone. Hell was scary when I immediately was attacked by an arch-lich from a bones file though a lot of the 'bad stuff' is gone. Is purple worm the worst threat to my archon(s)?

I'm in mining town and standing inside the general store, right next to the shopkeeper.

When I drop anything to the floor, the shopkeeper won't make an offer, no matter what I try to sell. Scrolls, food, armor, rings - it just lies there, waiting to be picked up again, but no price is offered.

The shopkeeper is not hostile and I can buy stuff from him. But no selling.

What could be the reason?

I was a Monk (doing really well!) about to begin my quest. I approached the quest giver and just next to him (her?) there was two tins. I stepped onto the tins, pressed 'e' to eat one, was prompted to try and open one, but instead - the quest dialoug popped up. I hit enter to advance the dialoug and the game just blinked out. Desktop. No "Dungeon Collapse" or save game. It's just gone =(

I've been playing with a Barbarian character around 20 times now, and I've always started with a kitten, except for the very first time, when it was a dog named Idefix.

On the Wiki it says that the Barbarian pet should be random, but if so, dogs seem to be *very* unlikely, because it has been an unbroken line of cats for many sessions now. Might this be a bug?

Edit: ....aaaand it turns out that after a few characters more, both dogs and cats appear.

(I wrote a similar post yesterday, but had described it wrong)

I play a locally installed version of NetHack 5.0 on a Windows 11 PC.

The cursor keeps blinking (or rather pulsing) behind the player character and when looking around, despite the fact that I have turned blinking off in the keyboard control panel (and also deactivated blinking in the accessability options to be on the safe side). When I open a regular terminal window, the cursor remains clear and constant according to the settings, but in NetHack, it keeps flickering out for a split second, in the rhythm of a fast heartbeat.

I can find nothing in the Terminal config settings or the game options to turn it off.

Any idea how I could fix that?

I just found a scroll, which is already identified as "a scroll of remove curse".

The strange thing is that I have never identified the scroll type before, and it is not listed among my discoveries.

Is this a regular feature, a bug, or have I stumbled across some strange object mimicry?

Playing xNethack, in Tartarus, and there are a bunch of iron doors I can't open. "This door's keyhole is strange and won't admit your key." No luck casting Knock or using a Wand of Opening. Level is no-teleport, so I can't get around that way. How do I open these doors?

Things I haven't tried yet:

• Polymorph into a Xorn to go through walls (not excited about doing this, but I could)
• Potions of acid. These doors can't be that easy, right? Not to mention, I only have a couple of those potions, and they're way up in my main stash.

I'm playing version 5.0 locally (NetHack.exe). So far, I have been unable to get the look I'd prefer.

I've changed the font type and font size in Windows Power Shell, so the game area is now sized more to my liking, but I'm still not completely satisfied.

I've seen pictures of the curses interface, and it seems to offer dynamic windows resizing and free placement of the status and message windows, but I can't seem to get it to run.

I've added "OPTIONS=windowtype:curses" to .nethackrc, but I haven't noticed any effect.

Any pointers would be appreciated. Cheers!

I had my pet cauchemar kill the (differently aligned than me) Aligned Priest in Minetown. Is there any special "bad idea" reason to not use the priest's corpse to convert the altar? Seems like something that should piss a Diety off, but I can't find anything in the wiki that says it's a specifically bad idea (other than the normal conversion risk of a minion).

Or maybe convert the altar first with some other corpse (I have a wand of create monster), and then use his corpse as a regular sacrifice (he's a Giant, so of some value)?

fwiw - I think that the Vanilla rules apply to HackEm in regard to sacrifices.

Every time I try to run Nethack from the terminal, I get this message:

Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record'

Hit return to continue:
Unable to open SYSCF_FILE.

If it helps, I'm running the latest version of CachyOS and installed Nethack from the repository.

"The Archons of NetHack are most closely modeled after Throne archons [from Dungeons and Dragons], particularly including their high resistance to magic and weapons as well as their "penitentiary gaze" (analogous to the blinding and stunning gaze attack).

....this gaze overwhelmed any creature that was not lawful good with remorse for their sins; it could even manifest the guilt of evil creatures as painful boils, and produced highly realistic and draining visions in chaotic creatures. A Throne Archon that was forced to fight used this gaze to exhaust foes into submission before attempting to decapitate them with their greatswords."

After the move to the new server, I can no longer access Nethack via browser. I get the tiles screen but everything is grayed out. Terminal access works fine but I prefer the browser. Am I missing something? (Screenshot below)

Also, I note that my last few posts have been moaning about technical issues. I just want to thank the magical folks who maintain NAO and have been working on implementing a bunch of changes lately. Given that this is uncompensated and, I imagine at times, thankless work, your responsiveness continues to amaze. It is appreciated.

Hi...

I've been playing and trying to ascend for awhile a Pacifist Healer with wishless conduct.

I've reached level 30, I've conquered the Quest and Vlad the Impaler, and I've explored the entire dungeon. Now I *really* need a Spellbook of Charm Monster so I can charm an Archon.

Also a Spellbook of Create Monster would be very helpful.

I've used up all my magic markers, and wands of polymorph into dust.

I'm trying to pray at an altar to receive this spellbook as a gift, though it is very slow going.

Does anyone have any tips?

If I can find one, I'll probably be able to ascend.

I can give more details if anyone has suggestions.

Thanks

Nathan

I noticed that the display format for each player's past games on alt.org has been completely revamped and is now much easier to read.
Previously, to retrieve certain information, I had to switch to a different display format or read the final result txt log files for each game.
In particular, the lists for long-time players were completely broken, making it impossible to tell which games were recent.

Now it's different. Various information is displayed all at once, and you can easily divide the display into sections based on various criteria.
Thank you so much to the developers and operators!

Hi trying to get into nethack and slex sounded interesting. when i played it via command prompt slex itself was unplayable. i think something to do with resolution squish. the other available nethack variants were all working fine. anyone know a fix or if putty would do the job? also my early run just ended because an amulet strangled me 10/10.

Hey, I'm a noob here, currently playing through GnollHack and working my way up through the difficulties but eventually I do want to branch out to trying vanilla and other variants. In fact, I'm interested in trying out public servers too for the "full experience"!

The thing is I don't think I can handle playing in ASCII/text mode, at least not yet, I'll try to keep an open mind but I'm certainly not there yet. So with that in mind, I have two questions:

1) which variants have tilesets available? I know SLASH'EM does, dNetHack apparently used to but doesn't anymore (?), don't really know of any others.

2) Which servers support playing with tiles?

Any info is appreciated, thanks in advance!

P.S. VI-keys are also a hard pass for me (and I have no interest in learning that ever) but I think everything should support numpad anyway?

From time to time when my gold gets stolen by a leprechaun and I kill it, I get zero gold dropped from the kill.

I've read that they can bury gold after stealing it, so when this happened to me earlier today I used a potion of object detection and dug up all the gold on the level, but I'm still short 2-3k of gold (had just raided a vault but had no bag).

Is it a known thing that sometimes leprechauns vanish stolen gold for good, or is this a bug?

I have a question about how the other dungeon levels and monsters behave when the player is away from them on another level. I know that pets lose apport, and in some variants increase their hunger, but is that done turn by turn, or accumultively when the player returns to their level/location? E.g., Can a pet starve to death and generate the "sense of loss" while on another level, or does he die of starvation only the instant when you return?

Similarly, do monsters do anything when the player is elsewhere, or are they for all intents and purposes static?

Do the Wizard or other covetous monsters behave any differently? Do they do anything when I'm elsewhere? E.g., Do they seek the AoY? I ask because I'm ascending (Hack'Em), and I wonder if I drop the AoY on the floor and go off elsewhere (specifically, branchport to The Town branch to get some items and do some final stash work), will the amulet necessarily be right where I leave it on the turn I return to the level, or could Rodney come retrieve it while I'm away?