K2 is the author of EvilHack and runs the Hardfought NetHack server.
Make it so that firearms are loaded with bullets (they become stored as part of the object) so that you don’t quiver them, which is a weird and unflavorful way to treat them.
A special container that can hold the invocation items, and only the invocation items. Has bag-of-holding-like properties (or else is an artifact bag of holding). It appears in some hard to reach place in the dungeon.
The Oracle becomes angry at you if you dry up all of her fountains.
Iron doors should be able to take water damage and become rusty. Once rusty, it should be possible to break an iron door like a normal wooden one.
Alternatively, iron doors should be corrodable by throwing or smashing acid on them, with it taking 2-3 potions to weaken a door to the point of destroyability.
Gas spore explosions should knock back any creature caught in them.
Priests tending an altar should repair the walls and doors of their temples if they are damaged, like shopkeepers do. (In NetHack 3.7, peaceful monsters avoid digging temple walls, but the temple can still be damaged by other monsters or the player.)
The line-editing functionality currently provided by compiling in EDIT_GETLIN should be moved to a boolean option on all platforms it is supported, because about half of all players will not like it whether it is forced on or forced off.
There are adverse effects if you swim within a certain amount of time after your last meal, because of the traditional advice that it’s dangerous to swim less than an hour after eating.
Greasing an item slightly increases its weight. If the grease wears off, it reverts to normal weight.
Mind flayers (or possibly only master ones) can use telekinesis to drag you a space or two closer to them so they can eat your brain.
Monks with Expert or Master level martial arts can force-fight walls to break them. (Possibly not uncarved rock though.)
Pets should not attack coaligned priests.
Add a #pour command, which allows you to pour a potion on your own or an adjacent space. This allows you to do things like pour healing potions on your pet rather than smashing them with it, possibly pouring acid and other harmful potions on adjacent monsters, pouring water on fire elementals and other fiery monsters, etc.
Artifact towel that acts as a magic carpet: invoke it to start flying on it. Doesn’t work if you’re currently wearing the towel, and trying to wear the towel either doesn’t work or ends any flight.
The livelog for making a wish also includes the source of the wish, whether a wand, a djinni (from a lamp or a bottle), a throne, etc.
Zapping a cursed wand of make invisible turns invisible things it hits visible. (Or possibly transfer this effect to the cursed potion, since wand effects generally do not vary with beatitude).
Non-coaligned priests require more money in donations than coaligned priests do to get the same benefits.
The number of turns you can remember a spell is directly dependent on your Intelligence, and possibly Wisdom (at the time of reading the book). The default 20000 turns is a baseline for maybe 12 Int and 12 Wis; more of those means you get more turns when you learn the spell or refresh your memory, and less of those means you get fewer turns.
Add a Druid role: intended to be a more balanced form of SLASH’EM’s doppelganger race, druids are highly attuned to nature and possess innate shapeshifting abilities.
Cantrips are level 0 spells that cost d2 or d3 power to cast. In order not to let them be unbalancing, they don’t train skill and are mostly useless, except in certain circumstances or for low-Pw spellcasters who can’t do much of the bigger stuff yet. ais523 suggests that good candidates for cantrips might be things that have little combat use, and whose effects could be duplicated by backtracking or other tedious things, but would be useful to avoid boredom. Given their cheapness, they should probably not train skills, and may not even need spell schools.
Most ideas for cantrips seem to be a little too powerful and would do better off as normal spells (and may be listed as independent YANIs for normal spells); however, those that seem like they would fit are listed here.
Add a #notes command, which opens up a blank text editor window where you can type anything you want. The notes are saved along with the game and can be referenced anytime from within it.
To prevent this being a hugely complicated undertaking (basically implementing a text editor in the game, which won’t mesh particularly well with players used to other text editors), one suggestion is to use the shell’s default editor, but then this becomes akin to just using out-of-game notes anyway.
Another suggestion is to implement it using a system similar to autopickup exceptions: the player can add, edit, list, and delete one-line notes, which doesn’t require implementing any text editing capability the game doesn’t already have.
Rather than having dragonhide items be generically “dragonhide”, let them each be a certain dragon color, which cannot be specified by wishing. This item does not confer the same extrinsic it would if it were body armor. Instead, when you are wearing dragon scales or mail and a dragonhide item of the same color in another slot, you gain a very powerful extrinsic which cannot be gained otherwise. E.g. cancellation immunity for gray dragon armor.
The idea is to discourage everyone continuing to wear gray or silver dragon scale mail: if you find or wish for dragonhide gear and get some other color, it may be attractive to wear dragon scale mail of that color instead in order to get the powerful extrinsic.
Certain drawbridges are made of steel rather than wood, which means they cannot be destroyed by force bolts and will not explode.
Certain deaths (i.e. most HP deaths, but not things like disintegration or sliming) should let you scrawl a bit of player-chosen text in the dirt with your finger which persists in the bones file. This engraving is of blood if your current form has blood, and dust otherwise.
This is slightly technically complicated because the bones file gravestone also stores an engraving and there cannot be two engravings on one space; one solution is to engrave the message on an adjacent square.
Eating any kind of fish may increase your Intelligence, because of the popular wisdom that fish is “brain food”.
Eating cursed rings or amulets gives the opposite of the normal effect (likely stripping an intrinsic instead of gaining it).
Barbarians who go into berserk mode start attacking multiple targets in an arc as if wielding Cleaver.
An artifact magic marker that can be used normally, but also allows you to engrave the name of a monster species on the ground and make a monster of that species appear as a pet. This is subject to an invoke-style cooldown so it can’t be used rapidly in quick succession.
A variant monk role, or a “specialization” picked at some early level such as 3 or 5, which is a weapons-using monk. Has the same or a slightly reduced capacity for spellcasting and gains weapon skill caps at the expense of reducing martial arts’s cap to Skilled or Expert. Still has a body armor penalty.
The blessed effect of the scroll of amnesia allows you to choose the skills (and spells?) you want to forget, which allows you to reskill more efficiently.
Possibly only do this if your Intelligence is sufficiently high.
You can apply an equipped small shield (or possibly other types of shields) to attack a monster with a shield bash. This could be treated either like a blunt weapon attack, or more likely as a special effect which has a chance of stunning the target. Stunning odds could be higher for either more martial-based roles, or could use a shield skill and scale with that.
Gremlins generated not via cloning an existing one may spawn with a cursed scroll of light, and read it to create darkness when in the presence of brilliant light (Sunsword or gold dragon armor) or just randomly in lit areas when they sense an approaching player.
Armor and weapons are heavier when they are cursed than their normal weight.
A new spell that is primarily a healing spell, but is in the clerical school instead of healing and works by divine influence, which would make priests and knights good at casting it, but not healers and wizards.
Scroll of training, which allows you to readjust your skill slots. Blessed it allows more readjustments than uncursed, whereas a cursed scroll could do something bad like make you choose 2 categories to lose skill in and choose only 1 to regain skill in.
A horseshoe item that can be equipped on any equine creature (including player centaurs), in the boots slot. Horseshoes could deal a small amount of additional damage in kick attacks, and also deal damage based on their material, e.g. silver damage to silver-haters if the shoes are silver.
Hellfire from monster casting, being inspired by Ghost Rider, should in addition to ignoring fire resistance slow the player down, since it does spiritual damage that reduces the victim’s will to act.
Intelligent monsters will deliberately flash a camera at you to blind you if they come across one.
When you begin the game as a monk, you are prompted (if you have not already configured in .nethackrc) whether you want to be a weaponless monk or a weapons monk. Using weapons when you have chosen to be weaponless, or vice versa, you take alignment penalties.
In variants that print messages such as “Foo’s [armor piece] deflects your attack”, extend this system to monsters that have relevant defensive body parts even if they’re not wearing armor. Do this by crediting them with an appropriate amount of fake AC when determining what string to use for “[armor piece]”. Then players that miss monsters instead get messages about the monster’s natural armor preventing them from doing any damage.
The inspiration for this is EvilHack’s giant turtle, whose AC of -8 prompted many inexplicable “miss” messages for such a large and slow creature.
A statue that falls into a pit or hole fills it up like a boulder would.
When the game detects a crash or some other event that an administrator should know about, it calls a hook for some possibly customizable alerting behavior like sending mail via the unix mail system. This would be a compile time option that defaults to being off.
Saddle bags, a container that can be equipped on a saddled pet. Looting the pet from an adjacent square will ask if you want to open the saddlebag, and if you confirm it will give you the normal container prompts to put in and take out items.
Split Gehennom into two different branches - Hell, which contains devils and the lawful “demon” lords like Asmodeus, and the Abyss, which contains demons and the chaotic demon lords. Either only one of these generates in a given game, or the player gets a choice of which one to go to in the Valley of the Dead. Alternatively, they’re sequential parts of Gehennom, with the Abyss being deeper.
A tree hit by a fire ray or explosion should instantly incinerate, provided it’s not marked non-diggable (petrified). Likewise, a tree hit by a disintegration blast should disintegrate.
The quest leader either sometimes or always asks for the quest artifact back when you return with it, to replace the weird flavor in most quests that the leader is desperate to get the artifact back but is then completely fine with you adventuring off with it after retrieving it.
If you refuse to give them the artifact back, they turn hostile. If it’s a chance-based system, the chance might be dependent on your alignment record, so a character that has misbehaved is less likely to be found worthy of keeping the artifact. However, since you must have +20 alignment to enter the quest and get a massive amount of alignment from killing the nemesis, it’s questionable whether anyone’s alignment will ever be in a bad enough state to increase the chances. Luck has also been suggested as a variable that influences the chance, but most players will already have maxed their luck by the end of the quest.
In order to keep the player from just dodging the quest leader on their way out of the quest so that they can keep the artifact, various enforcement mechanisms have been proposed:
Prevent giants from accidentally moving on top of a boulder in Sokoban, which incurs a luck penalty. This is probably most easily done by only allowing them to move on top of an unpushable boulder by prefixing the move with m.
Another possibility is just to prevent giants from stepping onto boulders in Sokoban at all, giving a message “The ceiling is too low for you to step over this boulder.”
Applying a cursed horn of plenty will cause it to vacuum up food items in your inventory or the surrounding area.
When a corpse (possibly only a fleshy, blood-bearing corpse?) falls into water, any nearby sharks and/or piranhas become “frenzied”, gaining bonuses, for some time. Possibly they could also try to converge on the space containing the corpse and maybe eat it.
Assuming the monster and player spell lists are unified so that monsters cast player spells: When a mind flayer sucks your brain and causes you to forget a spell, it may gain the ability to cast that spell.
An option that disables special level flipping.
Force bolt will dig one space if cast at skilled or expert and it hits a diggable wall.
A Wand of Orcus artifact, no longer an actual wand of death but now a quarterstaff or mace. It can be invoked to shoot death rays (perhaps with some limitations to avoid overpowering it). Orcus can use it to shoot a death ray at will, without any sort of invoke cooldown.
Casting stone to flesh upwards while standing on a falling rock trap makes the trap drop its remaining ammo as meatballs instead of rocks (which still fall on your head when you trigger the trap, but do no damage).
Lava gremlins: a different gremlin species that reproduces in lava instead of water. It has at least one physical damage attack and at least one fire attack, and the regular gremlin intrinsic-stealing attack, except they steal intrinsics during any time that is not night.
New artifact The Never-Ending Doughnut, an unspecified-comestible base type artifact that can only be eaten when Hungry or worse, but will never get fully consumed unless the eater is a purple worm. After eating it the first time, it is perpetually “partly eaten”. You cannot become satiated by eating it.
Put an attended temple to Moloch in the Orc Temple Mines’ End, and guarantee generation of the Orc Temple if Minetown has already been generated and is Orcish Town, so that an aligned priest always exists (unless the player’s unlucky enough to generate a non-Orc Temple Mines’ End prior to generating Minetown, and then visits Minetown and gets Orcish Town).
Instead of a human priest of Moloch, it might be possible to have one of the orc shamans generate with an epri struct attached, so it tends the altar like a normal priest.
Snow golem, which is a ’ monster found in icy locales. Does not generate in Gehennom. It uses a spitting attack to launch snowballs (flavored as throwing them), which are an object which behaves like spat venom in that they disappear one way or another at the end of their flight. These deal damage and possibly knockback. The encyclopedia entry for snow golems uses “Frosty the Snowman” as reference material.
If you try to sell a zombie corpse to a shopkeeper, they get angry. Or maybe they merely won’t let you into the shop if you’re carrying a zombie corpse, the same way it works with digging tools.
You occasionally receive a dragon egg as a sacrifice gift.
Juiblex has a passive acid attack, and a passive acid explosion attack (AT_BOOM AD_ACID, which triggers on death).
A “never wore dragonhide” conduct, which includes “natural” dragon armor items like scales and scale mail.
Flying creatures have a chance to auto-evade engulfing by flying out of range of the engulfer’s attack. Maybe only if the engulfer isn’t also flying.
Oviparous monsters periodically lay eggs.
Iron bars can rust by being hit with water or having a water elemental pass through them. Rusty bars are more vulnerable to damage; they can be kicked down and a monk can punch them down. Presumably, non-diggable iron bars cannot be rusted.
Shopkeepers should charge a very high usage fee for using a charge from a store-owned wand of wishing, though not more than the wand costs by itself.
Iron safe additions:
Fountains can be frozen, creating a silver or cyan “frozen fountain”. These can’t be dipped into or quaffed. They appear in ice-themed levels.
It’s harder to force the lock on chests or large boxes made of metal, and increases the chance your weapon breaks. Additionally, the material of the weapon used to force the lock affects the result, if it’s used to pry rather than bash:
Squirt gun: a weapon which can be loaded with a potion (using up the potion), giving it ammo for 5-10 shots. When you fire it, a liquid projectile flies through the air, and causes potion effects (identical to those of throwing a whole potion) to whatever monster it hits.
It would be silly to define a separate liquid projectile object for each type of potion; probably the best implementation would be to have a single “splash of potion” object and use some field on the object, like corpsenm, to track what sort of potion it is.
Loading water into the squirt gun can be used to discipline pets.
Mummies have a constitution-draining touch attack, which possibly also inflicts a ‘withering’ intrinsic that deals damage over time and abuses Constitution every turn.
Mummies could also “cast” a curse on you, not to curse your items, but to make you sink through the floor, sending you down 1-3 levels.
Add gargoyles (or statues of gargoyles) to the Castle.
New object, a metal collar you wear on your neck. Makes you immune to being decapitated by Vorpal Blade. It would probably be worn in the amulet slot.
When you switch from a one-handed to a two-handed weapon and you are wearing a shield, you are asked if you want to remove the shield, and if you say yes it is automatically unequipped before wielding the new weapon.
An orc shaman behaves as the temple priest in Orcish Town (possibly even having an epri struct attached so that it tends the altar). If you pacify it, you can donate to it as you would a normal temple priest.
Option to configure your character to be nearsighted, which prevents you from seeing things more than a few spaces away from you unless you’re wearing lenses. You can also be farsighted, which means you can’t read scrolls or spellbook unless you’re wearing lenses.
Player monsters on the Astral Plane can be named after people on the top ten list (note that they don’t all have to be; some can use the same names they have now). Possibly, pick a different name if a player monster would be generated with the player’s own name, in order to avoid problems on single-user installs where everyone on the top ten list could have the same name as the player. Then again, that could be cool.
Freezing a fountain does something. All the following have been suggested:
Glowstick: a tool that can be applied to make it emit light in a radius of 2. It lasts a few thousand turns before dying (reducing to radius 1 light when near the end of its life), but cannot be turned off like a candle or lamp can.
A potion or spell of searching: it doesn’t give you the regular searching intrinsic, but rather it detects any traps you move adjacent to with a 100% chance (regular searching isn’t guaranteed to find these, and this effect won’t find other things that searching is able to find).
Alternatively, just make it give you temporary intrinsic searching as currently implemented, but make it so that timing-out intrinsic searching (available only from this) is guaranteed to find everything.
A spellbook’s level determines how long the spell stays remembered after you read it, rather than having every spell be remembered for 20000 turns exactly. Lower level spells are remembered for longer than higher level spells.
A tinning kit’s weight is dependent on how many charges it has left, getting lighter as it is used to tin things. This could also be extended to other tools which have charges and are not magical, such as cans of grease.
If you get a djinni by quaffing a smoky potion, one of the possible outcomes is that it uses its wish for itself, then is hostile.
Bows should be two-handed, as they require both hands to use properly. You’re already not allowed to twoweapon with them, but it shouldn’t really be possible to wear a shield and fire a bow at the same time either, except maybe a small shield. Possibly classify them as hand-and-a-half weapons, in variants that have those, or just disallow firing with a bow while wearing a shield.
Grab bag: a magical bag that contains up to four small random items. You may take out any one item, and are allowed to view the contents first; after taking out one item the bag and its other contents vanish. Items cannot be put into a grab bag. If you tip it, one random item comes out and then it vanishes.
Merge the potions of booze and confusion together, because booze is basically just a weaker form of confusion that also has a minimal amount of nutrition. It’s not certain which way they should be merged: deleting booze and favoring confusion has the advantage that monsters can still flavorfully throw it at you in order to cause confusion (you don’t get instantly drunk from being splashed with booze), but deleting confusion and favoring booze is attractive because it’s a more flavorful item in general, what with having a dual confusion/nutrition effect, being nonmagical, contributing to levels like the Wine Cellar, etc.
Spell staves are made into poor melee weapons (comparable or worse than the club, being basically a stick that’s just sturdy enough not to break), but are made lighter than the quarterstaff, weighing only 10. Its bonus to a single spellcasting school is countered by it applying a slight spellcasting penalty to spells of some or all other schools.
Using digging to escape from an engulfer no longer leaves it teetering on the brink of death at 1 HP. Instead it cuts the engulfer’s HP in half. For unsolid or amorphous engulfers (e.g. Juiblex), it does even less damage than that. It still lets you escape in all cases though.
Potion of honey; nonmagical but provides a lot more nutrition than juice. Can be obtained from bees somehow, possibly by dipping royal jelly into a potion of fruit juice or potion of water.
Mindless undead are immune to every form of fear effect, including scare monster.
Note: EvilHack takes this a step further and makes every mindless monster immune to fear, not just undead. This may be more apt, depending on your point of view.
You can apply a cursed bag of holding (or possibly empty bag of tricks) at a ghost to capture a ghost, which can then be used to recharge a wand of undead turning.
Crystal plate mail is so transparent to magic that it provides no magic cancellation and can’t be enchanted, disenchanted, canceled, destroyed with destroy armor, or cursed with curse items. Possibly extend this to any armor made out of crystal (GEMSTONE). Also possibly it always generates as +0, because anything otherwise would imply that it had been enchanted previously.
A level 5 or 6 divination spell that creates a tame speed 0 monster. This new sort of monster gives you permanent vision in a radius around it if it is tame.
In certain cases, you can see what telepathic monsters can see in a radius of 2 or 3 centered on the monster, assuming it fails a saving throw versus you reading its mind.
Pool of acid terrain that deals severe damage and corrosion if you fall in.
A levelable haggling skill that gets you better prices in shops.
Procedurally generate the game-equivalent of Elbereth each game (the literal string “Elbereth” does nothing special anymore), and make it fairly likely to appear somewhere in the Dungeons of Doom.
A bag of tricks may occasionally engulf and digest you.
Psuedodragons that are tiny D-class monsters. They may be the starting pet of Wizards, but don’t grow up. Instead, they have some kind of telepathic/psychic/magic-enhancing passive ability that scales with their level.
Fountains can be contaminated by letting corpses rot on top of them. This makes them more dangerous to use.
You can dual wield Sting and Orcrist; this gives an even bigger damage bonus against orcish monsters.
A greased object thrown across the floor will slide an extra 2d4 spaces.
Hallucinatory trap names for when you look at traps while hallucinating: “slime pit”, “jack-in-a-box”, “buzzsaw trap”, “spiked floor”, “axeblade trap”, “queasy board”, “revolving wall”, “uneven floor”, “anti-anti-magic field”, “ice trap”, “finger trap”.
You can dip an item in a ochre, spotted jelly, or acid blob corpse to make it take acid damage (if applicable).
Various alternate endings for the game:
Also see the Astral Escape Patch.
Poisonous tree frogs, which only generate in trees. Applying darts or arrows to them can coat the darts or arrows with poison, but the poison can also get on your hands.
Artifact weapon Rodneybane: has a giant bonus against the Wizard (only) and negates the Amulet’s extra Pw drainage. Located in some heavily guarded location.
Add nets, on the basis that NetHack needs to have nets in it. You can throw them in pools to fish with, and throw them at small monsters to trap them in place. There could also be a trap that catches you in a net. You can also mess up throwing them and tangle yourself instead. Possibly, nets would be their own skill too.
For simplicity of implementation, they should create a temporary web on the player’s space (with a flag set so that it uses “net” in its messages instead of “web” and is probably harder/impossible to tear through at high Strength). Either nets would generate in stacks of 11-20 and get destroyed when the monster escaped the net, or they would drop themselves (most of the time) when the monster escaped the net and destroyed the trap. Either way, they should be fairly light.
You can consolidate wands of the same type by rubbing them on each other. This transfers one less than the number of charges in the wand (or just 1 charge if the wand has only one charge), and increments the recharge counter of the new wand. Overcharging a wand like this beyond its normal generation limits is likely to make it explode.
Inside the Wizard’s Tower, the player encounters some of the Wizard’s hostile apprentice wizards.
You can write a scroll onto a piece of paper armor (with a magic marker, incurring the regular ink cost), then instantly read it.
Change the Ranger quest artifact to an infinite quiver that can produce an endless supply of arrows, rocks, or crossbow bolts, preferring to match to whatever the hero’s wielded weapon is. This benefits gnomes who want to use crossbows.
Healers can use an uncursed unicorn horn as if it’s blessed. They could also get the unicorn applied passively every turn as long as it’s wielded (with or without gloves on).
Special level or branch that is populated by dinosaurs and an intelligent reptilian humanoid called sleestaks. There is an artifact somewhere in here that is guarded by the dinosaurs and sleestaks.
Grand Master martial arts skill allows you to (attempt to) force-fight boulders and statues to shatter them with your bare hands.
Swap the spell levels of sleep and cause fear: sleep is now level 3, cause fear level 1 (to maintain there being a level 1 enchantment spell).
Additional temporary effects accompany drinking a potion of booze. The effects wear off when the confusion does (so if you extend it by, say, drinking a potion of confusion, the effects are prolonged). There is consensus that there should be both positive and negative effects; all of the following have been proposed:
Casting a forgotten spell consumes some Pw, perhaps one point per spell level, or just a random amount, in addition to its confusion and stunning effects.
Rogues can build and set traps, more types of traps than just plain pits and land mines and bear traps. Traps may consume some types of items to be set, like a sleeping gas trap will consume potions of sleeping. This should probably not be totally reversible through untrapping. Intended so the player can pick their battles and set up traps in an advantageous position.
Leprechauns (or anything with AD_SGLD) should steal items made of gold out of the hero’s inventory.
Bump the spell of sleep up to level 3 or 4.
Carrying gold items openly causes leprechauns, dragons, and Croesus to be automatically aggravated.
Don’t allow giants to carry an infinite amount of boulders.
Higher pickaxe skill increases digging speed.
Elbereth should not work until the hero discovers it in-game. (Similar to dNetHack’s wards.)
Getting lifesaved has permanent detrimental effects. Perhaps it reduces the stat maximum for an attribute as well as the attribute’s current value, like Wis or Con (Con is preferred, because it hits both carrying capacity and regeneration), and if the attribute it would reduce is 3 or below, life saving does not work at all. It could also possibly drain 1d3+1 levels.
Add spell of summon pets, a level 2 or 3 matter spell that duplicates the effects of a magic whistle. The name needs work.
Grandmaster skill in martial arts allows you to shatter enemy weapons like two-handed weapons do.
Some version of key breaking, perhaps when trying to use a cursed key. However, this should not go the SLASH’EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys’ probability).
Lock picks and credit cards should possibly be able to break too.
You can invoke a ring of hunger to make yourself more hungry immediately so you can eat dragon or giant corpses. (You have to be wearing it and have it identified.)
Maybe rather than having all rings of hunger capable of doing this, have it be a single artifact ring of hunger. Suggested names for this artifact include Overeater, Bottomless Pit, Cookie Monster, Glutton, and The Hungering.
In Orcish Town, have a powered-up hostile orc shaman who has taken over from the dead Minetown priest.
Add some effect to Snickersnee so that it’s not just a slightly better katana. Ideas include confusion resistance, stunning resistance, displacement.
Make the Ranger quest artifact a crossbow if you are a gnome.
