#4562
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.
Chris_ANG is the author of dNetHack
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:
Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:
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 invoke effect of the Philosopher’s Stone is heavily debated.
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:
“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:
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:
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:
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:
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).
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Bull rush command that lets a player shove a target monster back one or more squares. The relative size of the monster and player and the strength of the player are important factors. The character 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.
Have the game display your base to-hit bonus (presumably 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 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) is 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!”