Big rooms should use the ‘shortsighted’ level flag, which prevents monsters from homing in on the player from far away and would make it a bit more interesting than having all the monsters converge on the player once they arrive there.

In order to prevent nymphs stealing your entire inventory while you disrobe, make their charm-steal attack not steal anything if you are immobilized due to taking off armor. Or make their armor-removal immediate like a foocubus, or give you a chance per turn to resist the charm, based on a Wisdom save.

An option that changes all the game’s messages to their hallucinatory counterparts, without requiring the player to be hallucinating, and without affecting the symbols displayed on the map. Messages that mention monsters turn them into fake hallucinatory monsters, but farlook will represent them accurately.

Some way to close off the double-slow-digestion loophole by which you can survive indefinitely without food, by abusing the fact that ring hunger is counted on certain different turns for the left and right hand. Suggestions include:

• Ring (and amulet) hunger is always counted on every 20th turn. This prevents the slow digestion trick, but makes it somewhat easier to avoid ring hunger from most other rings (though not significantly harder).
• As above, but the hunger is offset by some random phase, determined by a hidden value that is constant in your game, such as ubirthday.
• As above, but the random phase is different every 20 turns (e.g. by deterministic hashing of turns/20). Effectively, one turn in every 20-turn chunk will cause ring hunger, but it’s not possible to figure out which.
• Have a random 1/20 chance of each ring causing hunger on every turn.

Add a new option that controls whether autopickup functions in shops. If it is on AND regular autopickup is on, items will be autopickedup in shops; if either of the two are off, they won’t.

Monsters will try to loot bags of tricks along with other types of containers (receiving a bite for their trouble). On the other hand, this goes against the implicit rule that monsters know all item identities.

Add a new type of eye with a hallucination-inducing active gaze attack. It could be called either “third eye” or “pseyechedelic”.

Less useful potions (useful enough to throw at monsters, but not usually to drink) sometimes generate in small stacks, so they can be thrown without worrying about stashing them as much. It would help if potions were made somewhat lighter.

Add a potion of resistance, which provides a cocktail of basic resistances (things like fire, cold, shock, sleep, and poison) for a limited time. In order to make this more useful and not just yet another candidate for stashing away, possibly all roles start with it identified.

Fix the effective level difficulty of all Sokoban levels to either the level past the one with the stairs, or the level with the stairs, or a constant 9.

It’s a common refrain that Sokoban was too easy in 3.4.3 with its easier difficulty as you progress through it, and that it was too hard in 3.6 with its harder difficulty. Fixing it at a constant difficulty is a popular middle ground.

Anything the player touches or has seen the description of is added to the discoveries list with a blank type name (it hasn’t been named yet, but will be accessible on the list so the player knows they’ve seen it and can call it from the list at a later point).

Specifically, this should trigger whenever an object internally sets dknown to true.

Polymorph traps have some percentage chance of disappearing whenever they polymorph anything (some people have suggested it always disappears). This is better for symmetry and means players might be able to deliberately polymorph themselves multiple times, but can’t abuse it on behalf of their pet.

Allow configuration of a list of monsters that the player should be prompted to confirm fighting before automatically attacking by moving into them. Fighting with F bypasses this check.

Also, possibly add an option to make this behavior happen for any monster.

A set of options (similar in structure to the paranoid options) that manages triggers that you want to interrupt you. Examples of triggers: a monster attacks, you teleport due to teleportitis, a monster comes within sight, a monster comes adjacent to you.

In an effort to make unicorn horns not infinitely usable but also preserve their other good qualities: Split the unicorn horn into two items, the horn, a simple tool which now has a number of charges, and a “unicorn spear” / “hardened unicorn horn” which is a weapon.

Both items have the same base damage, are two-handed, and use the unicorn horn skill, but reading a scroll of enchant weapon while wielding a unicorn horn will transform it into the weapon version like how crysknives work. The weapon cannot be used to cure ailments.

New mode for #terrain that hilights spaces you or a pet have stepped on. (There is also popular demand for a NetHack4-like display of this on the regular map.)

Color priests differently to distinguish them from player monsters.

Make all unidentified objects of the same object class cost the same (rather high) amount until you know what it is, at which point it can be bought and sold for its correct price.

All spheres should explode in a 3x3 explosion like gas spores do. They should do this regardless of whether they died by attacking or some other method, so they should have an appropriate AT_BOOM attack.

You can dip a potion into a sink to pour water into it from the tap, diluting it and causing runoff which subjects you to vapor effects (hopefully identifying it). For simplicity, the 1/30 chance of a random potion coming out of the sink should probably be ignored here.

Artifact blank spellbook that guarantees success when writing in it and can be read infinitely without blanking. However, it can never be blanked or cancelled. Or possibly it generates as a random type of spellbook, and can only be blanked if not yet read.

You can eat cloaks of protection and invisibility to get those intrinsically. Eating a cloak of protection is equivalent to eating a +3 ring of protection.

Unchanging prevents you from starting to turn to stone (it already prevents starting to turn to slime), and if you are in the process of turning to either, it halts the process but does not cure it.

Random closets that have secret doors (but not no door at all) can sometimes generate a random item inside, or possibly a dungeon feature like a sink. (Generating a sink would be a bad idea unless the sink glyph is changed, since it’s otherwise identical to the corridor glyph normally used for closets).

Inflicting poison damage on a monster, or killing it by poison, makes the corpse poisonous to eat.

Weight the probability of Orcish Town down lower than 1/7. Possibly as a starting point, reintroduce Frontier Town as minetn-8 so that the probability will become 1/8.

If polymorphed into a giant, you can pick up a door off its hinges (breaking it).

Pits (and other traps?) on early dungeon levels sometimes generate revealed.

Assuming that shallow water is implemented: all giants should use the shallow water behavior of only wetting their feet even when walking through deep water. Also, fire giants can wade through lava, which acts mostly the same.

If you’re polyselfed to a lithivore, worthless glass tastes terrible but valuable gems taste delicious. Each gray stone gives a different YAFM: “Yabba-dabba delicious” for flint, “That was a heavy meal” for loadstone, “The stone’s texture is delightful/distasteful” for touchstone, ??? for luckstone.

Vortices confuse you after you spend a few turns engulfed in them, because you’re dizzy from spinning around so much. (Limit this to actual vortices: fog clouds, for instance, are in the v class but don’t spin you around.)

Make most if not all rings chargeable:

• Hunger / slow digestion: merge, and the positive and negative enchantment work different ways.
• Stealth works in a radius / makes monsters have to roll higher to detect you.
• Warning increases or decreases its regular radius.
• Aggravate monster works in a radius, or affects monsters’ rolls for being aggravated.
• Invisibility / see invisible: work in a radius, possibly.
• Searching: radius or have it affect your chance of finding something
• Polymorph / teleportation: affect the frequency at which it triggers
• Conflict: radius or affect monster rolls
• Most other rings that confer binary trinsics like teleport control or free action or sustain ability are difficult to make chargeable.

Condensing all of NetHack’s poison mechanics into one unified mechanic:

• Dexterity and Constitution poisons are removed. Quasits (the only AD_DRDX attack) might still directly harm Dex, but it’s no longer flavored as poison. Rabid rats (the only AD_DRCO attack) don’t cause poison, they cause disease, which hits Constitution. Poison will now only affect Strength.
• Poison is now implemented as a timing-out trinsic. The amount of Str loss is a direct function of how much timeout is left, so Str will gradually recover as the poison goes away.
• Passing Con saving throws could give small bonuses to decreasing the timeout faster than normal.
• While poisoned, HP regeneration is either impeded or stopped entirely, or else the player’s HP is damaged every turn, or every several turns.
• It could also heavily abuse Str while it lasted instead of being directly tied to Str.

Change rne() so that it doesn’t depend on the player’s experience level: instead it depends on the current level depth. Specifically, change its theoretical maximum from max(XL/3, 5) to max(depth/5, 5).

Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.

Change the definition of polyselfless conduct to “You have never intentionally changed form.” If you step on a hitherto unknown polymorph trap and have an uncontrolled polymorph, the conduct is not broken.

Luck ideas:

• Luckstones don’t remove luck timeout, they merely extend it.
• Luck is much less controllable, impossible to get any clues about except through enlightenment, and various random events (like what?) can give or remove luck. A skilled player would know how to bias the odds towards luck-increasing events. Controllable sources of gaining luck like sacrifice and throwing gems at unicorns are removed. It no longer times out.
• The luck timeout rate is less predictable, and a luckstone will help but it might still time out quickly if the RNG hates you.
• The base number that luck times out to is equal to the total number of luckstones in your inventory (so carrying 2 noncursed luckstones means luck times out to +2). Luckstones’ weight is increased.
• Remove luckstones in favor of an amulet of luck. Luck timeout can no longer be slotless.
• Luck times out at a rate of 1 point per (600*(number of luckitems + 1)) turns.
• Do away with luck timeout entirely in order to make it impossible to micromanage luck. Luck is now conferred entirely by luckitems. The problem with this approach is that NetHack has about two ways to gain timing-out luck and many, many ways to lose it.
• Luck can be gained by enchanting luckstones.
• Different types of luckitems which stack with other luckitems but not with each other, like a four-leaf clover you can get from leprechauns.

Ring and amulet hunger should be counted all on turns that are a multiple of 20, to close the two-slow-digestion-rings loophole.

Give monsters their own XP counters, because the system of “all kills by a monster count as equal experience” is weird.

See invisible operates on a scale that determines what level of invisible monsters the player is allowed to see. (A low-level monster that drinks a potion of invisibility should be visible even with weak see invisible, an arch-lich casting disappear should require very strong see invisible.) Invisibility should do this too and have a scale as well (one notable place on the scale being that invisibility is kept only until the invisible thing takes an offensive action). If rings of invisibility and see invisible are made chargeable, this is an obvious avenue for them.