Archeologists should get a combat bonus for discovering artifacts. Flavored as studying and learning from the artifact to determine how it does what it does, either identifying or merely touching an artifact grants them a permanent bonus in line with whatever the artifact does. For instance, studying Demonbane could grant an additional d6 of damage to demons throughout the rest of the game. The less useful an artifact is, the better its bonus could be, in order to make it so that at least one role is happy about finding them.

(Not all artifacts may have a special permanent effect for Archeologists; in particular, other roles’ quest artifacts and any sort of non-weapon artifacts probably shouldn’t.)

Remove the blessed scroll of genocide’s whole-class genocide ability. Make it instead do what the uncursed scroll currently does, where you name a species and it gets genocided. The uncursed scroll of genocide is now the one that prompts for a monster class, but instead of genociding the entire class, it genocides one random, genocidable species from that class.

New monster, enchanted snowman, based on Frosty the Snowman.

It is never randomly generated, but is instead supposed to be assembled by the player as an ally. Assembling it requires the following:

• A top hat, which is implemented as a helm which conveys no AC like the fedora. If being true to the source material, this would be a magical piece of armor, but it’s unclear what magical effect it would have.
• A corncob pipe and button nose, which are new tool-class objects that are unusually heavy for their size (with a message like “This feels unnaturally heavy for such a small object” when you lift them). Arguably, the button nose should be gem-class instead of a tool. The heaviness is intended to discourage carrying around lots of these.
• Alternatively, instead of the button nose, an ordinary carrot.
• Presumably, some source of snow or ice, likely implemented by simply requiring ice terrain (which means a source of cold magic is required for most heroes).

The exact mechanism or commands required to assemble it are not specified.

Once assembled, it has the following properties:

• Has extremely high attack and defense, and is moderately fast.
• Will melt in 100 turns, or 250 turns if standing on ice.
• It will usually be tame, influenced by your Luck, with a hard upper bound of 95%. It will otherwise be hostile.
• If it loses the top hat for any reason, it instantly dies.
• It should drop some of the material components used in its creation when it dies, although probably not all of them (otherwise you could make new ones using all the same items).

The spell of create familiar should summon more powerful monsters when cast at higher skill; since it’s a clerical spell, the monsters could be drawn from the list of minions your god is capable of summoning.

Rogues should have exclusive access to an “assassin” combat skill: putting points in this skill makes poisoned weapons deal more damage and poison their targets more frequently.

Rogues should get bonus AC, using some formula that scales with increasing Dexterity and XL.

A new object either inspired by, or literally, a Pokeball. It allows you to “pick up” pets by putting them into the ball (probably not along with any items), carry them around, and re-release them at a later point.

On Easter, eggs appear in various bright colors instead of plain white.

Artifact chaotic helm Helm of the Underworld, modeled after Hades’ helm. Grants drain resistance, invisibility, magic resistance, and passive detection of buried objects (or phasing, if this is too difficult to implement) when worn. When invoked, it does a stronger version of the chaotic turn undead effect (rebuke or tame undead).

A formula to provide diminishing returns on the HP growth you get from potions, which is currently unbounded.

In the formula, X represents the total amount of extra HP points you would have in vanilla (1 per blessed healing, 5 per blessed extra healing, etc), R represents the actual amount of extra HP points you will have under this formula, e is Euler’s number (a constant), and A represents the desired asymptotic upper bound of extra HP points you will approach:

R = (2A / (1 + e^(-2x/A))) - A

The value of A is up to the designer. If it’s selected as 100, for instance, total HP gains from potions will get closer and closer to 100 as more and more potions are consumed, but the hero will never quite reach it.

Chaos dragon: a dragon with polymorphing breath, and whose scales grant unchanging. The dragon also has unchanging naturally (which raises the question of what happens if you polymorph into it, then die).

Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:

• It only works if you’re not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.) Alternatively, its chance of successfully charming is reduced the more armor you’re wearing.
• Make it more reliable than it is now, but it always fails if you have other pets. (You can then only have one pet at a time without using scrolls of taming.)
• It only tames one monster at a time. (Make it a directional beam with a maximum range of 1.)
• It only pacifies monsters, and can’t be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
• Make it do what the temporary pet code in the Bard patch does: the monster remains tame for a fairly short amount of time and then reverts to whatever it was originally.
• Split into three spells: pacify monster (peaceful for charisma*2 turns), charm monster (tame for Charisma*2 turns), and dominate monster (tame permanently or for a long time).
• It only works on monsters, and doesn’t work on intelligent beings.
• It can’t directly tame a hostile monster; it can only pacify it. Peaceful monsters can then be tamed by subsequent casts, but attempting to tame a peaceful intelligent monster may anger it instead. The pacification step is dependent only on monster MR, but the taming depends on the player’s level relative to the target. The scroll of taming should remain comparatively powerful.
• Scale with skill: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic to pacify all adjacent, skilled to tame one adjacent, and expert to tame all adjacent. All of these are subject to normal monster MR checks.
• Whatever nerfs do get applied, they should ensure that the scroll of taming is more powerful and reliable than the spell.

Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:

• Dies and turns to normal floor if hit by fire or have a death ray zapped over it.
• Turns into fire terrain if hit by fire and can spread to nearby grass.
• You can plant trees on them, whereas you cannot do this on normal floor.
• Small monsters that are capable of hiding under objects can hide in grass.

Gold is a metal associated with the sun, so weapons made of it should deal extra damage against undead. Additionally, blunt gold weapons get a d2 damage bonus versus everything due to being heavier.

An Alchemist role, revolving around potions and alchemy, and likely requiring overhauls of several systems.

• The main form of combat is to create phials of potion (where 1 potion splits into many phials), which can be tossed at enemies to cause potion effects on them. The main potions used are things like acid, paralysis, (lit) oil, and confusion.
  • Phials come in all the same types as normal potions but have somewhat weaker effects.
  • You can dip a stack of empty phials into a potion to fill them with that potion (up to some maximum).
  • Thrown phials have the same exact splash damage effect on things as throwing the potion would produce, but drinking it is a small enough dose to only cause the splash damage effects to the drinker. Requires some balance so that splash damage is useful against monsters but not useful for the player to drink for beneficial phials.
  • Phials can be dipped into potions, but nothing can be dipped into phials.
• The quest artifact is the Philosopher’s Stone.
  • The quest leader is Nicolas Flamel and the nemesis is an Avatar of Death (like Death, but weaker).
  • Fun possibilities for transmuting materials here if the object materials patch is in effect.
  • Its base item type could be a ruby (but perhaps not because dnethack makes the Heart of Ahriman a ruby) or a garnet, based on its color in Harry Potter, or an opal.
• Can also create alchemic gizmos: smoke bombs from potions of blindness, firebombs from potions of oil, all lighter and more numerous and useful than the base potions.
• Start with all potions identified.
• Could start with an alchemy kit, which is a rare tool find for other roles. NeroOneTrueKing proposed a set of mechanics for an alchemy kit:
  • Has 3 compartments. The first accepts only potions/phials of polymorph (or perhaps it just has charges and you can recharge it by using potions of polymorph).
  • The other compartments must each only contain items of the same material.
  • A success chance is displayed based on the amount of polymorph potion available, the weight ratio of the two compartments, and the materials themselves (metal can transform into metal relatively easily).
  • A successful use swaps all of the materials of the two compartments.
• Needs mechanics such that in an Alchemist’s hands, no potion is useless.

The invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.

• It creates potions of the Elixir of Life. This potion cures disease and restores lost attributes, but most importantly it grants temporary intrinsic lifesaving. If you die with intrinsic lifesaving, you lose the remaining time for the intrinsic.
• Creating potions is way too powerful since the player will be able to bank them, so nerf this: perhaps you can only get Elixir of Life by dipping the Stone into a potion of full healing, or something. Or Elixir goes bad after a while and reverts to water, making it usable for before a fight but not for stashing.
• The Elixir should not be more powerful than a potion of full healing, or the invoke effect of the Staff of Aesculapius - healers should be the best at actual healing. Probably, getting lifesaved from intrinsic lifesaving will only restore enough HP to stay alive a little longer.
• The Elixir gives a large temporary boost to HP regeneration.
• No Elixir of Life; it instead turns potions of sickness into (extra? full?) healing.
• The Stone can turn metal objects into gold or can turn rocks into gold pieces when rubbed on them.
• When dipped into gain level or gain energy, transforms the potion into polymorph.

A really great Alchemist implementation would probably involve a full alchemy overhaul which adds herbs and fungi, harvesting ingredients from corpses, cooking, and interesting ways to combine everything. The challenge with making this is how to make it useful for other roles and not just the alchemist, and at the same time not overcomplicating the game with the new additions.

Monsters that exist in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:

• If a single monster in a group is next to the player, try to pull back until allies can get next to the player.
• Avoid doorways and narrow corridors; if you are in an open space, stay there unless you decide to move to another open space, and hang back from the doorway where the hero is, forcing them to enter the room in order to pass.
• Groups of intelligent monsters also try to stay out of the way of ranged fire if possible.
• If the current strategy is to defend a certain area, form ranks to block the player from reaching it.
• Pincer maneuvers; some monsters of a group will split up and try to get behind the hero or attack from another side. If the pincering group hasn’t gotten in position yet, the other group will fall back until they catch up.
• Wolf pack: the monster of the class with the highest level, or failing that the highest max HP, “leads” the pack, and all other members key in on this leader and follow it. This means if you get the leader to flee, the rest of the pack will flee as well.
• The Yendorian Army can form a phalanx, which is an ordered rectangle of soldiers. Will stick to wide open areas, try to stay out of the range of ranged attacks until they can swarm around you. Enemies forming a phalanx could receive to-hit and AC boosts.

“Leaders” of a group of monsters (loosely defined as a M2_LORD or M2_PRINCE monster, when several monsters of the same monster class are nearby) will try to put the group between them and the player. The presence of a leader could also buff the strategy or intelligence of the group it is in.

Several new objects for aiding in alchemy:

• Flask, holds multiple quaffs of a single potion type (so that holy water can’t be mass-created but other potions can).
• Mortar and pestle, can grind gems / other things into dust which can be used to make potions.
• Alembic, can distill potions from things in the dungeon such as corpses.
• Recipe books/scrolls, which tell the reader how to create a certain potion through alchemy, and identifies the result potion or even all potions involved.

Non-weapon skill that has various effects on alchemy: make alchemical blasts less common (or zero at high skill), and increase the probability that mixing certain potions yields the right result.

Cursed arrows fired from a blessed bow or vice versa do not misfire.

Martial artists should be able to use martial arts weapons to use extra abilities, such as:

• Throwing shuriken is a bonus action that costs no time (at least in some circumstances).
• While wielding a quarterstaff, you can jump.
• While wielding nunchaku, you can disarm opponents.

Scale spellbook generation rates by level and dungeon depth, making lower-level books much more frequent higher in the dungeon, and higher-level books more frequent lower in it.

When an item-using monster rises from the dead, it automatically picks up any useful items on its square.

Place gear suitable for a wide variety of pets in the Healer quest (mostly in the home level), and an amulet of life saving in Hippocrates’ chest.

To be more true to its source material, Grayswandir should deal double damage only to crossaligned targets rather than all targets (though this would not likely have a huge effect since most wielders of it are lawful and few monsters are lawful).

Cancelled monsters have lower monster magic resistance.

Reaching Skilled in polearms allows you to use them in melee with no penalty.

Giants can catch moving boulders (whether rolling along the ground or thrown), putting it directly into their inventory.

Gnomes, being much smaller than other races, hunger significantly less quickly.

Real-life creatures tend to eat an amount of food proportional to their weight, so the hunger rate in NetHack should depend on your race’s (or your polyform’s) base weight. This mainly helps gnomes by cutting their nutrition rate significantly.

Monks can control whether their strikes cause a staggering blow. This would lend itself to variants that implement technique and combat style systems.

Eating corpses gives you a temporary “queasy” intrinsic, which is a debuff on par with being burdened. This is aimed at fixing the irrelevance of the game’s hunger clock.

Implement a player fear system that unlike many other proposals, does not take away agency from the player by paralyzing them or forcing them to flee using a predefined algorithm. Instead, it incentivizes the player to flee by making continued combat unattractive.

Create a new intrinsic called “Panic”/”Panicking”. Sources of fear (including existing sources of paralysis-fear, e.g. ghosts) give you temporary amounts of this intrinsic. While you are panicking:

• You have a large to-hit penalty, possibly making it so that you can only land a hit when rolling a natural 20. (Directly subtracting a large number from to-hit could still be overcome by wearing rings of increase accuracy and would be hard to balance the exact number.)
• You deal half damage for any attack you can make land.
• Ranged attacks have a high chance of misfiring in the wrong direction.
• Spells not in the escape school or designated as emergency spells (or healing spells, for variants that remove emergency spells) have a higher failure rate or are uncastable.
• Your skills may be treated as if they are the levels you started the game with.
• Your speed is slightly boosted (if possible, only your movement speed, not your general attack/item use speed).
• If you die, your death reason will have a “while panicking” appended to it.

Priest characters can sacrifice gold at a coaligned altar for identical benefits as they would get from donating to a priest. The altar does not have to be attended.

You can only use cursed potions of gain level once or twice while carrying the Amulet. After a few uses, the Amulet will start to pull you back down as you rise up, wasting the potion.

While you are on the ascension run, mimics prefer to disguise themselves as upstairs. It also edits your memories to make you think you remember the stair being where the mimic was (in order to fool the travel command routing to the correct upstairs anyway).

Define a new set of ability score maximums which represents the highest the score can reach via exercise. These caps are always equal to or higher than the existing maximums, which represent the highest a stat can be increased to through potions of gain ability or other stat-boosting effects. In some cases, the exercise maximum should stay the same and the non-exercise maximum may need to be decreased.

It’s an open question on whether restore ability should be able to restore points to their exercise-only maximums, or just up to the gain-ability maximums.

Lightning spells:

• The most common suggestion is for a level 5 attack spell that creates a lightning bolt, implemented as a simple ray. Possibly, it causes an electrical explosion on the first target it hits if cast at Skilled and Expert.
• Alternatively, a spell of lightning bolt could be a melee range spell that deals heavy shock damage.
• Chain lightning is a spell that forks off and hits adjacent targets in a breadth-first search (see here for how it might work). Possibly, the lightning bolts can only chain off at 135 or 180 degree angles (maybe 90, too). Chain lightning can still be reflected, but becomes a straight ray.
• Lightning storm, which causes an electrical explosion centered on every monster in your line of sight (possibly with a decreasing chance of doing so as it gets further from you). Or if this is too overpowered, just strike these monsters with an individual lightning bolt that does not cause an explosion.

Regenerating HP naturally doubles your hunger rate while you are regenerating.

Sand terrain, which slows you down a bit when you walk on it. Shows up in certain special levels. Might be a . glyph.

Stepping on a squeaky board near a sink may spawn one or more sewer rats on the sink. Alternatively, sinks may occasionally just spawn a sewer rat on their own.

Using wizard lock on a monster locks their pack, preventing them from using items against you.

Reduce the level of create familiar significantly, and make it only able to create replacement pets and possibly similar low-difficulty monsters, and not work if you already have any pets. Add a 7th-level clerical spell, “create minion”, that summons tame/allied minions of your god.

Confuse monster scrolls grant more charges than castings of the spell do. This means that the uncursed scroll should grant several charges, and the blessed one even more.

If the player has glowy confuse-monster hands, ranged projectile attacks also work to confuse monsters, not just melee attacks.

Give a YAFM if you would “sink like a rock” while currently turning to stone, or polymorphed into a stone monster (gargoyles, earth elemental, stone golem).

• if petrifying: “You sink like a rock, because you are becoming one.”
• if a stone monster: “You sink like a rock, because you are one.”

The Amulet of Yendor blocks teleporting within a dungeon level, but only after a certain radius. Short-range teleports work fine.

Desks as dungeon furniture: they can store items like a container, and acts like a table if you are on top of it (if levitating you can interact with it and things on it). Sometimes generates a magic marker inside. Writing scrolls or spellbooks at a desk has some bonus: maybe a higher chance of writing unidentified, or a slightly reduced or capped ink cost. Possibly put one or more in the College of Archaeology, and Warden Arianna’s office for Convicts.

King Arthur gets the same resistance suite that the player gets for crowning, and the Grand Master and Master Kaen get the suite of intrinsics that high-level monks get.

Thrown potions of sickness create a stinking cloud centered on the spot they break. If the potion were diluted, the cloud is either smaller or disperses faster.

When an egg gets very, very old, it cracks and releases a small stinking cloud. If it happens to be carried by the player, the cloud centers on the player. When it is close to rotten, the player can throw it and it will release the stinking cloud wherever it shatters. (The chance of it releasing a stinking cloud increases with age, asymptotically towards 100% the older the egg is).

Attempting to eat an old rotten egg will create the stinking cloud on the player’s square.

Alchemic golem, which is basically made out of potions. Its melee attacks expose you to random potion or potion vapor effects. Killing it drops a few random potions and causes more random vapor effects. It can spontaneously explode when it hits something, with a greater chance when you hit it in melee. The explosion obviously also causes multiple random vapor effects to the area, and scatters potions around (by throwing them, so they tend to smash if they hit anything).

Armor of lifesaving. Works as expected, saves your life but disintegrates in the process; more interesting than an amulet because it leaves you more vulnerable after disintegrating. This could possibly be an (extremely rare) object property.

AC you have from your polyform should not stack with AC you have from armor. The game should compute both, take the max, and then add on AC from other factors like protection.

Monks, and possibly other roles, can learn martial arts techniques out of spellbooks similar to dnethack wards and SLASH’EM bard spells.

Luggage pet for Tourists. Has very high carry capacity and doesn’t drop items of its own accord. Fights like a normal pet. Either it is immune to damage but has a low maximum level to compensate, or if overwhelmed, it doesn’t die but instead turns into a normal “luggage” object that will eventually reanimate.

The common suggestion along these lines has been to give tourists the Luggage as their starting pet, but the common criticism of that idea is that it makes Tourists far too powerful from the outset. Instead, a possibility is that you can trade the Platinum Yendorian Express Card to Twoflower in exchange for the Luggage. (The Card then vanishes, so you can’t arrange Twoflower’s death and get both).

Customizable, player-named “hat” armor that uses a similar system to slime molds, except it is 0 AC helm-slot armor. Archeologist fedoras are set to this by default, and the fedora item is removed and replaced with the more generic “hat”, which is hard-set to fedora for Arc’s starting hat.

When a monster wears a helm of opposite alignment, it becomes tame if it were hostile, hostile if it were tame, and either hostile or tame depending on the helm if it were peaceful. When it removes the helm, it undergoes a fresh peacefulness check as if it newly generated.

You can’t produce more holy or unholy water by dipping. Instead, each water can be dipped into a largeish but finite number of times.

Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.

• Damage is a little less than a quarterstaff. Should probably not weigh as much as a quarterstaff; it would be hard to justify 40 weight any way you slice it.
• Can be applied to give a menu offering to do one of three things (and unlike grappling hooks it never does the wrong thing):
  1. Hit a monster at polearm range (skill-dependent).
  2. Attempt to hook a monster at polearm range. Tame monsters are always hooked. Peacefuls are always hooked, but may be angered. Hostiles might be hit instead of hooked. If the monster is hooked, it will be pulled towards you, or you will be pulled towards it if it’s much larger than you.
  3. Grab the top item from a square, even if the square is a trap or water square.
• Wielding one passively gives a boost to the radius in which pets will follow when you change levels.
• Wielding one also makes pets follow you as if you had a treat.
• Can be applied to a monster two squares away to yank it towards you, which may stun the monster.
• Binders in dNetHack could start with one. Peasants in dNetHack could generate with them.
• Two-weaponing a crook and a flail should do ‘‘something’’ (from Egyptian pharaoh iconography).

In order for a random item to drop as a death drop, it must be able to have been carried by the monster. This means that newts and such won’t get many death drops and the ones they do will be small.

Specifically, this approach doesn’t involve trying extra hard to pick an appropriately sized item, because then lightweight items such as scrolls and magic markers would become too common. It merely rolls up a random item, checks whether it would be the right weight for this monster, then decides not to drop it if it’s unrealistically heavy.

Convert the spell of polymorph to a form that polymorphs only monsters and never items.

Wand definitions specify the amount of charges each wand should generate with. Polymorph wands should get fewer charges than other beam wands, for instance.

Polymorph beams stop at the first square on which there’s an object or a monster they affect. In addition, golem formation is made much more aggressive and item-destructive to discourage one-large-stack polypiling.

Homemade tins give the minimum of the corpse’s nutrition and 50 nutrition. This is to prevent silliness like a killer bee corpse giving 5 nutrition when eaten but magically giving 50 after being tinned.

Most corpses have sharply decreased amounts of nutrition (from the current values). They may also be too mangled to be good for a sacrifice, randomly based on their object ID. Their intrinsic-conveying chances are unchanged, though.

Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:

• Don’t generate bones if the player died on the upstairs.
• Going downstairs doesn’t use a turn, but going up does.
• When saving the bones, set all monsters’ movement points to 0.
• If the player died on the upstairs, swap the upstairs and downstairs locations.
• A way to “peek” up or down the stairs without going there.

Mind flayers have to grapple your head before they can successfully suck your brain (like in D&D), forcing them to spend a turn doing this. If you have a greased helm, this gives you at least one extra turn to act since they will not be able to grapple your head until the grease dissolves.

This would probably best be implemented by giving them a sticky grab or bear hug attack and ignoring the existence of their tentacle attack if they aren’t already grappling you (or you are being held by another enemy and thus can’t avoid them). Either way, checking u.ustuck is the key.

Possibly, they need to spend another attack getting your helm off, which will unequip it, though this will get weird if your helm is cursed. A cursed helm shouldn’t offer total protection against them. Possibly, they should be able to remove a cursed helm (like nymphs and foocubi do) despite its curse; this could be handwaved as them using their psionic powers to do it.

In variants that implement zombies eating your brain, it should work on basically this same system, where the zombie needs to hold onto you before it can eat your brain (and which also works that way in D&D).

“Painting” dungeon feature / furniture. Players can look at them to see what it’s a painting of, possibly identifying item types they didn’t already know about. Could be free-standing (\) or could be part of the struct rm flags of a wall (|, interactable by farlooking them while adjacent). Might be able to be haunted - can produce a ghost?

Very rarely, when eaten, candy bars have a Golden Ticket inside, which does something good like grant a wish. (Requires some method of not being farmable; possibly, polypiled candy bars have obroken set, and obroken candy bars never have a ticket in them.)

Figurine monsters generate with an inflated monster generation difficulty (because a figurine of most at-difficulty monsters is likely to be underwhelming as a potential pet).

Blessed figurines always make the monster turn out tame. Uncursed ones make a tame monster 80% of the time and peaceful 20% of the time. Cursed ones make a tame monster 20% of the time and a hostile monster 80% of the time.

Move angelic and demonic maledictions out of quest.txt/quest.lua; they have nothing to do with the quest. They should probably still live somewhere in the dat folder.

More angelic maledictions:

• “Weep, for [your god] has abandoned you!”
• “Your unholy soul shall be [cleansed/purged]!” (cleansed if coaligned, purged otherwise)
• “[Tremble/Cower], mortal!”
• “Kneel, or thou shalt be knelt.”
• “Bow before me!”
• “You viper!”
• “Repent, sinner!”

Add two fields to struct trap: an object, which represents the “ammo” of the trap (darts, arrows, potions of oil), and a number to represent the “level” of the trap (which can affect a lot of things, such as a to-hit bonus the trap gets, how hard it is to untrap, or what the skill was of the player when they set the trap).

Add restrictions on levelporting for various roles to help differentiate them.

Debilitating wound system that expands on wounded legs. Includes wounded arms and various types of disease and poison, all of which provide various debuffs. Quaffing any healing potion cures all of these at once on top of its usual HP healing.

Intrinsic see invisible now works only at a range of 2-3 squares. Extrinsic see invisible works at the current see invisible range (unlimited as long as you can see the space normally).

Spiked pits and a lower percentage of pits generate with an item or two buried. When you fall into one, any buried items are automatically exposed. The most commonly generated items here are a few gold or an eroded weapon.

Chests generated in barracks should contain gold, which is the soldiers’ payroll.

Gold objects deal extra blessed damage and extra cursed damage (i.e. extra damage from wielding a blessed weapon versus undead will be enhanced if the weapon is gold).

Make blessed identify give no more type-identification than uncursed identify, but it will identify the beatitude and spe of all its items. Uncursed identify will identify the beatitude and spe of some, but not all, items; the rest will only be type-identified.

Iron chains are given either whip or flail skill. Probably flail, since they’re heavy.

TDTTOE: Skeletons use gendered pronouns if and only if the player is an Archeologist (and therefore used to analyzing bones).

Torches, which can be created by dipping a club into a potion of oil. Torches are their own item, not just a “lit club” (though possibly the lamplit flag could be used for this), and have a light radius of 3. Deals additional fire damage to monsters it hits, but may go out. May light the hero on fire if they fall down the stairs with a lit torch in inventory.

There is some sort of way to store a soul (ghost, or monster’s or pet’s soul from its corpse before it rots) in an item, and later release it into a freshly killed corpse to make the soul inhabit that body. Possibly this could be a ritual spell.

Hands holding a quarterstaff or wands don’t count as being occupied for the purposes of calculating spellcasting penalty. (Perhaps generalize wands to any other non-weapon.)

Long worms should be much faster than they currently are, and they get a damage bonus for each tail segment that is lined up behind their head.

Gnomes spawned with a sufficiently high starting level, or else just a fixed percentage of gnome lords and a different fixed percentage of gnome kings, generate with a touchstone.

Merge the damage versus small and damage versus large stats of weapons, since they don’t really matter that much and add mostly pointless complexity. Damage should be more dependent on skill than on the size of the target monster. The only problem is how to stop the highest-damage weapons from becoming used by everyone because they’re so optimal; perhaps skill should do something drastic like add an extra die with every skill level, allowing you to have weapons that are decent at low skill (by having multiple small base dice) but poorer at high skill (because adding more small dice doesn’t work as well).

Scale monsters’ hit dice bonuses based on their size. In order to reduce the high amount of variance monster HP currently has, monster HP is now computed by this formula: (HD)d4 + HD\*2\*(size), where size is 0 for MZ_TINY, 1 for MZ_SMALL, and so on.

When a monster decides whether you are peaceful and makes race or alignment checks to do so, they do it based on polyform, current alignment, and when they first spot you as opposed to when they are first created. If the player polymorphs into an orc and some other orcs are hanging out in an unexplored room across the level, they should be peaceful to the character as long as the character is polymorphed into an orc (but will turn hostile when she changes back).

New slot for belts:

• Belts themselves could be armor or tools, but probably armor. They mainly serve to hold items for quick access. It’s not defined whether they are intended to hold an indefinite number of items like any container, or a limited amount. The only problem with making them armor is that they would by default be enchantable for more AC, but belts should probably not be enchantable. If it makes more sense that several magical belts would hold charges, tools would be the appropriate class.
• Items carried in a belt weigh nothing and are mostly or totally protected from destruction, and using them doesn’t take the action it usually takes to get an item out of a bag.
• Types of belts could be scroll-holding, potion-holding, wand-holding, ammo-holding (with a possible “endless quiver” item or artifact), gem-holding (to get partial resistances from certain gems), chastity (providing immunity to foocubi seduction) or no special powers but some moderate AC.
• One randomized belt description could also provide protection against leprechaun theft.
• Randomized descriptions could include: cloth, leather, worn, studded, buckled, braided
• Tourists and Convicts also start off with garish swim trunks/striped slacks, which do the same things as Hawaiian shirts/striped shirts. The swim trunks also allow swimming. Both of these protect from instadeath when you sit on a cockatrice corpse.
• Belts of giant strength, elven grace, and troll toughness. These increase your Str/Dex/Con either to 25 or by +enchantment (if belts can even be enchanted, which isn’t currently defined.)
• Swordbelts/sheathes. These allow you to ready an additional weapon or give you an additional weapon slot.

More belt ideas here.

Minor special feature of a level “jackal kill”: a corpse of a playable race surrounded by a few jackals. If fake bones piles are added, make this a fake bones pile with “killed by a jackal” on the headstone.

New special room “rat nest”: generates very high in the dungeon, and contains some r, some eroded/negatively enchanted armor, and some comestibles.

In the uppermost levels of the dungeon, add (non-guaranteed) fake bones piles which contain starting equipment from some role. Gear is eroded or biased towards negative enchantment, most magical items are removed, and perhaps one or two non-starting items are added. Then the whole pile is mostly cursed as usual.

Note: This has been implemented in 3.6.1 but differently; it places random cursed items instead of selecting starting gear.

Several things relating to making the upper dungeon feel more “eroded” or exposed to the elements/other adventurers, in keeping with NetHack flavor that other people have been seeking the Amulet:

• Falling rock traps on shallow levels come “pre-disarmed”, which is to say that they have already been used up and so should consist of a pile of rocks on the ground underneath a falling rock trap with no rocks left in it.
• Rolling boulder traps on shallow levels generate without boulders or with out-of-line boulders.
• Traps with ammunition can have a few pieces of that ammunition lying on the appropriate space.
• Dilapidated armories.
• Monsters on these levels are likely to generate with zero-charge or low-charge wands or other items.
• Fewer items lying around.
• Randomly destroyed walls.
• Fake bones piles (see below).

Note that this has been partially implemented in 3.6.1 with the addition of fake bones piles that come with a pre-disarmed trap if applicable, although that was aimed less at adding ambiance and more at helping players avoid early traps.

Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:

• The general idea is to unbreak the hunger system by making regular corpses unsafe to eat, so the shortage in resources isn’t in food itself but is in safe methods of cooking it.
• Cooking sets a corpse’s rot timer to 0, lets them go longer without spoiling, or unspoils them.
• May also remove poison from some kinds of poisonous corpses.
• Cooked corpses are unsuitable for sacrifice and less likely to give intrinsics, or don’t at all (because the vitamins are destroyed).
• You can apply wands of fire to cook corpses.
• Or maybe eating raw non-vegetarian corpses is just plain dangerous, causing vomiting or sickness or other bad effects.
• Corpses can be cooked by killing monsters with fire or hitting monsters with fire attacks while they are carrying corpses.
• The problem is that nobody has yet proposed a mechanism for cooking corpses that would work well. Having firewood or some similar thing would massively affect the early game between characters that can and cannot manage to find it, and roles that start with or without it. Wands of fire have been proposed as a resource but those are valuable. Introducing a new item like firewood means that a whole lot of mechanics have to be reviewed for whether they should interact with or create that item.

Maximum HP should have some ceiling that depends on your race/role combination, proportional to what you would get by leveling up to 30 as that race/role.

Add a bull rush command that lets you shove a target monster back one or more squares. The relative size of the monster and hero and the strength of the hero are important factors. The hero might move into the space of the displaced target.

Allow the player to disable things that display on the status bar, like ability scores, gold, dungeon level, and experience level, none of which have to be monitored constantly like HP or Pw do.

The game should display your base to-hit bonus (excluding circumstantial modifiers) at all times, perhaps for both ranged and melee to-hit.

Roles which are good with melee weapons (Bar, Val, Kni?, Cav?) should be able to see the enchantment of their weapon after using it for a while, or perhaps right when wielding it. Alternatively, seeing the enchantment of a weapon should be based on skill: basic will reveal enchantment on 1% of hits, skilled on 10%, expert as soon as you wield the weapon.

Monsters should get bonus AC against attacks coming from allies (hostile versus hostile, or pet versus pet).

Any gaze attack which is prevented by blindness (one which is visual in nature) should be prevented by hallucination, or at least the effects are reduced or mitigated. Possibly archons’ blinding gaze should be exempted from this, with the hallucinatory message being “The power of the Aurora overwhelms you!”