NetHack Ideas Archive

Welcome! This is a site which archives feature requests and suggestions (aka YANIs) for the roguelike game NetHack - The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play. The ultimate goal of this site is to preserve good ideas so they don't get forgotten about, and to present them in an organized way so that developers and interested players can use them.

Places To Go Here

Browse the list of tags, or look up contributions by author.

Look at all ideas sorted by newest first or the most recently added batch.

Where the Ideas Come From

Most of the ideas on this site are drawn from logs of several channels on the libera.chat IRC chat network (formerly Freenode), principally #nethack, #hardfought, ##nethack-discord, and ##nethack-variants. The logs are searched for certain strings such as "YANI" and "feature request", then the chat is refined into a more readable form to be shown here.

There are several categories of idea that don't get put onto this site:

Silly, impractical, pointless, and non-serious ideas (YASIs).
Vague ideas that lack enough details to do anything with (for instance, an idea that something unpopular should be changed... and that's it, no further details).
Evil Patch Ideas.
Bugs, or ideas of the format "This is a bug; it should be fixed." These should be reported to the devteam instead.
Ideas which already fully exist in some variant, in vanilla NetHack, or in the past of vanilla NetHack, and add nothing new. Though this is a bit flexible; in particular, an idea won't be removed from here because it was discovered later on that it already got implemented somewhere.
Ideas created by a variant developer about their own variant and which could only be done in that variant. Sometimes an idea like this can be reformulated to be "variant-agnostic" or "vanilla-compatible"; if so, it's eligible to be posted here.

Additionally, ideas which never had any clearly identifiable discussion on IRC, such as suggestions made via GitHub, posts on RGRN, or someone writing their own ideas on a NetHackWiki page, likely won't make it on here. Not that that's a bad way to make suggestions; it's just tedious to sort through other forums to catch anything, and they tend to be more persistent than IRC. However, that's more a consequence of my time limitations for going out and searching for ideas; there is no reason why they can't be listed here. Feel free to make a pull request that adds them.

Note to Aspiring Variant Developers

If you are thinking of making a NetHack variant, the ideas here are a great start - but make sure to talk about your plans with the NetHack community. Variants that are worked on in secret and then announced out of nowhere tend to have design or code issues that could have been fixed earlier if the community had known about it.

Contact

Questions, comments, other feedback? Find me as aosdict on Freenode, as copperwater on GitHub, as Phol ende wodan on the NetHack Wiki, or email aosdict@gmail.com.