aosdict is the author of xNetHack
Add a “save selection” directive in the Lua parser that takes a previously defined selection and saves it into the level structure along with a name, allowing subsequently executed Lua scripts or other pieces of code to use that same selection after level creation is over.
Add special “reduced” effects for the diluted potion of polymorph.
Objects dipped in it will change their material, but not their type. The material is constrained to non-exotic ones the object could naturally generate with.
Monsters who have it smashed on them or who quaff it will try to polymorph into a different monster of the same class. If none are available, they follow the ordinary monster-polymorph logic.
Convert the sleeping gas trap to just “gas trap”, and make it scale based on the difficulty. Each individual trap releases a single type of gas; which type is partially dependent on the level difficulty. At low levels, they all emit sleeping gas like normal. At higher levels, they emit stunning hallucination gas like container traps, clouds of poison gas, and maybe even nastier gases that reduce speed or miasmas that cause illness.
Barbed devils have a passive physical attack that involves you getting pierced by their barbs. Possibly if you are wearing body armor and/or gloves, or wielding a two-handed weapon with longer reach, the passive attack may not always hit you. (Polearms should never incur this attack, but the way passive attacks work by default should already ensure this.)
If you bribe a demon lord for safe passage using Demonbane, they melt it down in front of you while laughing maniacally.
A ring of monster attraction: Each individual ring is associated with a randomly selected specific, common monster species (or possibly monster class), and causes monsters of that species/class to generate disproportionately often while it’s worn. When the type is known, the ring appears as “ring of monster attraction”, but when an individual one is fully identified, it ring appears as e.g. a “ring of newt attraction”.
Depending on the potential for abuse, it should probably not be allowed to wish for specific monsters. E.g. it’s probably bad to allow the player to wish for a ring of wraith attraction.
Pale jelly, a j or j that has an engulf attack that causes illness and a difficulty rating appropriate to that. Some may be found on Juiblex’s level.
Cancelled, non-unique warpers (and possibly some unique warpers, like non-magical quest nemeses) shuts down their warping. This means that cages in Gehennom can contain liches that are cancelled and thus incapable of warping out.
If you underpay a foocubus (which includes not having any money in the first place), their chance of getting a headache is increased. This could even be implemented as a sliding scale where they are more likely to get a headache the more you underpay them by.
Add a “randomizer mode”, a non-scoring mode enabled by some option you put in the config file that randomly mutates the stats of each monster – for instance, in one particular game, gnomes could have fewer hit dice and thus lower HP, while soldier ants gain an ice attack.
In the spirit of traditional randomizers, this could also randomize loot, for things like artifacts and invocation items being mixed up and findable in regular chests, monsters generating with and dropping gear they shouldn’t have, etc.
Artifact suit of armor (type is unspecified, perhaps a ring mail or chain mail) that is unaligned and operates like magic armor in the Legend of Zelda. When worn, it drains your gold at a constant rate, and when you take damage, you lose a somewhat randomized amount of gold, in exchange for partially or completely negating the damage. Gold is consumed at some rate higher than 1 per turn, and it is lost for damage at some rate higher than 1 per hit point.
If you have no gold while wearing it, you become either very slow or very encumbered.
Croesus may occasionally generate wearing this armor, along with some gold to supply it. Otherwise it generates like any unaligned artifact.
Silver items never generate in Gehennom, except for non-weapon-and-armor items which are base silver such as the silver wand.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, a chaotic artifact silver war hammer which references the Beatles song. Its powers and details have not been specified.
Rather than the replacement for techniques being certain roles learning new spells from nowhere once you achieve a certain experience level, have the spells be known from the beginning, but uncastable unless you are above that level.
This also helps disincentivize drain-for-gain tactics, since keeping yourself at a lower level will cut off your access to certain spells.
An artifact, likely named “The Fast [something]”, which grants speed, but also prevents you from eating because fast also means to refrain from eating.
Priests get a +1 bonus to Charisma when they wear whichever cloak has the “ornamental cope” appearance.
Sitting on a saddle (on the floor) gives a YAFM if you have sufficient skill in riding rather than the standard “It’s not very comfortable…”
If you are an elf, you can read any object with “runed” in the description (e.g. elven spears, daggers, bows, and the runed wand). Though, elves will know the identities of most of these items by default, so they won’t appear “runed”, which might defeat the purpose.
In any case, the message should be something relatively inane, like “Made in [elvish sounding place]”.
Applying a pick-axe to iron bars allows you to try to pry them apart, but this has an equal chance of destroying the pick or the bars.
A shopkeeper who hates you (e.g. for having stolen from them) will be reluctant to serve you and will insist you wear a shirt and shoes before you enter.
In variants with racial shopkeepers, the shopkeeper can also hate you on principle without you doing anything wrong. In variants with Convicts, their striped shirt could be unacceptable for purposes of having a shirt.
A cursed amulet of reflection will behave as an “amulet of absorption”: instead of reflecting rays, nearby ones that weren’t going to hit you get redirected towards you instead. Also, rays that hit an amulet of absorption wearer don’t continue past them.
Alternatively, add the amulet of absorption as its own item, and make it usually generate cursed like other “bad” amulets.
Rangers break wands on their knee rather than raising it high over their head, because that’s what they’re used to doing with firewood.
The Amulet of Yendor (and fakes) should have some bright, noticeable color that is not the same as the metal color used by every other amulet type.
Vampires shifted into some other form should appear on warning as their true difficulty, rather than the difficulty of their current form. Attentive players are then rewarded for noticing that a wolf or fog cloud is an unusual difficulty 4.
Rather than bugles being tuneless, they should be able to play sequences of notes containing only C, E, and G.
Shopkeepers value empty wands at 0 and will not buy them.
For every mimic you personally kill inside a shop, the shopkeeper gives you a token fee of 5 gold (or store credit) if you talk to him afterwards.
If you clear the shop of all mimics (with some minimum amount of mimics required), the shopkeeper could give you a free item of your choice.
Reimagine the Rogue quest plot where the quest artifact is owned by a rich guy and you’re sent on a mission to steal it, sneaking into his estate, bypassing all his security guards and systems, and covertly entering his mansion.
Ideally, it would require cunning and inventiveness like the current quest does, not simply being a quest you can slaughter your way through. It could still use the idea of having the entry point and destination on a level be in disconnected areas of the map separated by non-phaseable walls.
The nemesis can be made weak and trivial to kill if you actually get to him (because he is just a fat old rich guy), with the possible exception of if you get noticed by or kill him, he will call in all his backup to stop you.
For this to work, the quest artifact would probably have to be changed from the Master Key of Thievery to something else that a collector would have. Alternatively, the goal of the quest could just be a macguffin, with the quest leader having the Master Key of Thievery and they exchange it for the macguffin when you return with it.
Shock resistance (possibly only extrinsic shock resistance) prevents you from being paralyzed by a ghost’s sudden appearance even if you lack free action, because you are resistant to being (emotionally) shocked by things.
The extrainfo patch for servers should store a piece of metadata that indicates whether the player has mail turned on, so that a person spectating a game in dgamelaunch who tries to mail a player with mail turned off will get a message explaining that.
Artifact unaligned pair of lenses The Lens of Truth, from Zelda, which grants see invisible when worn.
Occasionally, maybe 1% of the time a monster spawns during normal gameplay (not during level creation), select a random stair on the map as its spawning location, even if the player can see those stairs. This makes it appear like the monster is arriving from off-level.
However, first scan the stairs and the 8 spaces surrounding it to see if any monsters or the player are there. If so, do not do this and instead spawn the monster randomly like normal.
To help differentiate bone devils from being boring popcorn monsters with no special attacks or abilities, give them the ability to summon skeletons.
This should come with reasonable limits, such as setting their mspec_used field so that they can only do it every so often, and preventing them from doing it at all if there are a certain number of skeletons around them or on the whole level. Possibly limit it so that if they are not within the “misc item use” distance from the player, they will limit themselves to creating 0 or 1 skeletons.
Vampires will not enter a temple that has a priest in residence.
Cloudy and white potions, in addition to milky potions, sometimes contain a ghost.
Allow the player to cut down the trees in the Ranger quest home level to traverse the level more easily, but give an alignment penalty for doing so.
Dipping a corpse into a potion of polymorph “keys” the potion to that specific monster type: if it is used to polymorph the player or a monster, they will be turned into the same monster type as the corpse used. The corpse and potion are not consumed by being dipped.
If the monster is no-polymorph, nothing happens.
If the potion is used to polymorph an object, it does not do anything unusual, unless the object is a type for which species matters, in which case the potion changes its species to the keyed type, which can be useful for changing a figurine to something specific.
If in a variant that has potions of specific monsters’ blood, this can also be created by dipping polymorph into monster blood or vice versa.
When a leprechaun teleports after taking gold so they can bury it, if there is a leprechaun hall on the level, they will always pick a random unoccupied space in that room to teleport to. (If no space is unoccupied, they will teleport randomly as normal.)
Make enchantments on launchers relevant without making them overpowered by adding their enchantment to damage (because projectiles already add their enchantment to damage): the enchantment determines the likelihood of getting +1 to multishot, unaffected by role or skill. This chance is given as either enchantment/(enchantment + 1), or enchantment/8.
If the enchantment is negative, the same formula is used on the absolute value of the enchantment to determine if multishot should be decreased by 1. If it is decreased to 0, you fail to shoot anything and waste your action.
The scroll of gold detection, if read when confused (and cursed, possibly), detects silver items instead of gold pieces.
It’s probably desirable to keep the existing effect of trap detection in some form, so it’s a bit tricky to decide exactly which combinations of cursed and confused should keep that and which should detect silver.
Even if they have a headache, foocubi should interact with rings of adornment (the typical way; succubi take it and incubi put it on your finger). When they have a headache, they will do this “petulantly”.
Knights who have never consorted with a foocubus have a permanent +1 intrinsic increase damage bonus, which they lose when they do consort with one, with the goal of it being something that is not a huge difference to lose, but does add up over the long run, and which will not stop pacifist knights from using foocubi to achieve the Quest level. This is based on Lancelot and Galahad in Arthurian legend.
Add “royal blue” as one of the randomized potion descriptions, for two reasons: 1) so that the monarch of a throne room can be given a royal blue potion as a pun, 2) so that there can be a potion that uses the “blue” color, which currently none do.
New room-joining algorithm for regular Dungeons levels and levels which use des.random_corridors:
Allow for gas clouds of different types (confusion gas, hallucination gas, etc) by passing an additional argument to create_gas_cloud.
On the Plane of Fire, run a rudimentary cellular automaton to make the lava slosh around, with a couple rules like “won’t encroach on radius 1 or 2 from the portal” and “there should be no net gain or loss of lava across the whole level”. It being static and the same every time except for the portal location is rather boring.
Human (and possibly humanoid) monsters killed by a vampire’s drain attack (not its weapon or physical bite damage) should have a long timeout set on their corpses to revive them as a vampire. If the player or a pet was the one that killed them, they should revive tame.
Add a throne effect which either copies the confused noncursed effect of a scroll of taming, or mass-tames monsters in the current room. Either of these gives the player an incentive to sit on the throne without killing everything in the room first.
Make hunting the wumpus into an actual step in the progression of the Ranger quest, rather than just having a level inspired by it. For instance, the wumpus that appears in the quest is much more powerful and can kill the player in one hit, and must be slain in order to progress beyond its level (even if the justification is as flimsy as “It isn’t safe to proceed while the threat of the Wumpus remains”).
Water elementals’ HP (and Pw, if applicable) regeneration is boosted when they are on a water-containing space such as a moat or a fountain. Possibly, they can also suck up the water to regain a large quantity of hit points at once, which removes the water terrain if it is expendable (a fountain or pool or puddle of shallow water will dry up).
In order to make them more interesting in combat, their AI may favor hanging around sources of water and trying to find a path to the nearest water when they are injured.
Magic bookshelf dungeon feature, which is heavily inspired by and is functionally similar to the TNNT swap chest, but only involves spellbooks instead of all items (and is not itself an object).
Looting while standing on it gives you a feeling you should put a book on the empty shelf, and if you do, you magically find other books on the shelf. You can see the identities of these books but do not permanently learn them if you didn’t previously know them. Once you take a book from the shelf, it vanishes.
Left up to the implementor whether the books would actually come from other players like the TNNT swap chest does (in which case it might end up filled with low-value or common books; if so, there are various ways this could be mitigated such as the shelf not accepting a book type it already has, or adding in randomly generated books) or whether the books would just be a pool of random ones selected at the start of the game.
An additional possible detail is that you can only see books on the shelf of equal or lower level than the total level of books you yourself have put in. So if you put in a level 1 book, you will only see other level 1 books, but if you then add a level 3 book, you will see books of up to level 4. Or, you always see all books, but only books below this threshold show you the spell and others appear as “a spellbook”. identities
A “repulsion” intrinsic. This prevents monsters that fail a resistance check from moving next to you (specifically, where they believe is next to you) on their turn by making their AI consider it an invalid position. However, if you are in melee range, it does not make them step away from you or refuse to fight you, nor does it prevent them from making ranged attacks.
This intrinsic could come from some new artifact or spell, but two possible sources for it that already exist are reading the scroll of scare monster and casting the spell of cause fear.
Sometimes, if there is space and there is no intersection with another corridor, a closet will extend 2 more spaces back (for a total length of 3). The middle space will be a secret corridor (or sometimes plain stone), and the second space will be a regular corridor with a chest with random contents.
Occasionally when fighting in melee with a weapon you are Expert in, not twoweaponing, and there is no special artifact effect already in play, you get some special benefit of that weapon type. ( Ideas:
Track all alignment violations according to their source, which means when you anger a peaceful you tick up an “angered a peaceful” counter, when you rob a grave you increment “grave robbed”, etc. Enough incrementing in any counter (which may vary based on your role and alignment) starts to make your god angry and priests unfriendly. The idea is that if you have a large number of alignment violations but they’re spread out across multiple causes, you might skate by, but repeatedly and happily doing a bad thing will get you punished (and will allow your god to actually vocalize what you’ve been doing wrong). It would also be nice to show in the dumplog what your worst sins were.
Have Zeus’s lightning bolts as an item or artifact you can throw. If an artifact weapon, it should automatically return like Mjollnir; otherwise, it could be an item that vanishes after striking a target but deals immense shock damage to that target.
Alternative Necromancer role, because its implementation in SLASH’EM winds up being a rather halfhearted version of Wizard with some elements of Priest and Archeologist. Note: This was written for a hypothetical variant that does not have a Necromancer role, rather than as an update to SLASH’EM’s.
The system may want some simplification since it may be clunky to have the player navigate through menus to choose souls from all the different ones they have accumulated. Possibly, souls from a given species just combine, so you would be shown something like “souls of gnome kings (12 total monster levels)”. An extreme simplification would cut out the entire soul-storage system and just replenish Pw when you collect one.
Dynamite in SLASH’EM should be changed so that it uses a digging explosion, and carves out tiles in its blast radius, rather than just a really powerful fiery explosion that doesn’t affect terrain. It should probably also create pits randomly in the blast radius.
Also, Archeologists should start with some dynamite (though perhaps they, or at least Lawful ones, ought to get alignment.penalties for using it, since blowing up your dig site is poor archeological practice).
Stun grenades, which work similarly to regular grenades except they explode for zero or a token amount of damage, and inflict stunning and other types of status effects on things in the blast radius. For instance, there could be a flashbang grenade which stuns and blinds its targets.
Occasionally when you try to attack a python in melee, you instead swap places with it and get the message: “It slithers around you; S, @ = @, S.” (replacing the @ with the hero’s glyph if they are different). This is a reference to multiple variable assignment in the Python language.
If the hero can be represented by S themselves, the displacement never happens, because S, S = S, S is not syntactically correct in some versions of Python (though it is in current versions).
Red light, a y that has an explosion attack that causes paralysis. This is a reference to red lights in real life making you stop.
(There could also be green lights whose explosion gives a temporary speed boost, but since this isn’t harmful to the target it’s a sillier idea.)
The rate at which HP regenerates when resting on a bench isn’t constant. It starts out slow (less than 1 HP per turn), then speeds up gradually the longer you sit on it, eventually capping at 2-4 HP per turn.
Wielded wood and plastic weapons (and possibly glass) block passive shock attacks, since they are non-conductive. Plastic could block 100% of the time and other materials less so, mainly to give a fringe benefit to a material that’s normally pretty underpowered.
The passive attack only gets blocked if you actually used the weapon to make your attack: if you’re polymorphed into something with a weapon attack and a bite attack, for instance, the bite will still subject you to the passive shock.
Everlasting gobstopper, a food item that you start sucking on when you eat it, providing a constant d2 nutrition per turn. It never gets used up, but once you spit it out (by choosing to eat something else or by using “-“ with the eat command) it is no good anymore and gets used up. If you get oversatiated by not spitting it out, you can indeed choke and die on it.
Keep a counter on each shopkeeper representing the number of times a pet has picked up a shop-owned item in their shop (or a shop-owned item inside containers they are carrying). Every time this increments, use it as an increasing chance that the shopkeeper will become aggressive towards pets picking up their wares, with messages like “Kabalebo shouts “Hey! Drop that!” at Fluffy. Fluffy drops [item].” Once they are past that point, you can’t use pets to take their items anymore.
The point on the counter at which the shopkeeper stops playing nice should be roughly some fraction of the area of the shop, to strike a balance between large shopkeepers being more lenient and not allowing you to clean out all the tiny shops in Minetown. A rumor could be added for this: “They say that mom-and-pop stores have lower tolerance for thieves.”
Unspecified whether the counter should increment when a non-pet picks up an item in the shop. Probably not, since this is a fairly rare case.
Create a new stat to track the maximum level a player has ever reached, named “u.ulevelpeak”, and use it when computing the difficulty monsters should generate at, so that the player has no incentive to drain levels from themself to get easier monsters.
ulevelpeak is used rather than the existing ulevelmax because ulevelmax represents the highest level it is possible for the player to return to via restore ability, and shrinks when doing things such as quaffing blessed full healing to restore lost levels and losing levels when polymorphing into one’s own race, so it’s unsuitable for the monster generation purpose.
Assign every scroll and spellbook a random “writing difficulty” value at the start of the game. Say it’s stored as a percentage chance (in reality, this is an implementation detail and could differ). Every time you attempt to write a scroll or book, it computes your own percentage chance to correctly write something unknown, which is deterministic and only depends on stats like Luck and Intelligence and your role. Whether you write the scroll successfully or not depends on whether your computed percentage beats the randomized percentage of that scroll.
For each scroll and spellbook you try to write in the game, resolve the random writing chance exactly once, the first time you try to write it when unknown. If that initial attempt fails, mark the scroll or spellbook as not knowing how to write it, so that subsequent attempts will fail with a message like “You don’t know how to write that, so you don’t even try to.” which means they won’t eat up ink either. If you subsequently learn the identity of the scroll or book, you become able to always write it successfully as normal.
Make container traps deterministic (either as a hash of their object ID, or stored as a field on the object) rather than computing the trap when it’s triggered based on Luck. Untrapping them successfully can then yield an item related to the trap, which then gets deposited inside the container. The items for each type of trap are:
Cave-in trap, which appears deep in the dungeon and/or in Gehennom. It causes the ceiling to collapse all around the target, turning the spaces into stone terrain, burying the target (potentially starting suffocating timers) and dumping a few boulders and rocks in the vicinity. It works somewhat like GruntHack cave-ins on the Plane of Earth, but in trap form.
If you use #force when standing next to a closed door that you don’t know to be unlocked, the game will ask if you want to force the lock. If you say yes, you try to; if the door is actually unlocked, you’ll get a message indicating that and “You decide not to force the issue.” If it’s locked, you try to force the door with your weapon, which could involve prying with a bladed weapon (opens the door quietly and faster than kicking, but higher chance of breaking the weapon than forcing a container would) or bashing with a blunt weapon (much the same as kicking).
A monster, probably in the y or e class, with an attack that steals an item (or a few items, excluding equipped gear) from your inventory and randomly teleports it somewhere on the same level. This makes object detection and detect treasure nice to use even after a level is fully explored.
Make the ring of conflict chargeable, with the enchantment serving as a timer: when worn, the enchantment slowly ticks back towards +0, and the ring ceases to provide conflict when it’s +0. Negatively enchanted rings tick up in enchantment towards +0. Being cursed doesn’t affect this, it only prevents you from removing the ring as is standard.
Boots of fleeing: they give bonus movement points based on how many turns ago your last offensive action was (offensive actions are things that would fade an Elbereth underneath you). For the first several turns after combat they grant no speed bonus, then gradually scale up to full speed. This means that remaining in combat grants you no speed advantage but lets you travel very fast if you avoid it.
Hookshot, a tool that shoots a retractable point on a chain and then pulls things together when the chain retracts. In practice, this should probably be implemented as an invisible beam that gets shot in the player-chosen direction, with a short range of only 3 or 4 squares. It has various effects depending on what it hits:
Make the spell of reflection a directional beam rather than always being directed at the caster. You can still hit yourself with it, but you also have the option of giving a monster temporary reflection. The beam stops at the first monster it hits so it can’t multiply the effects.
Each Rider has the ability to use their attack to destroy items you’re carrying that are antithetical to their purpose, which replaces their normal attack.
If you attempt to move into a ghost’s space (either if it’s invisible and unseen by you, or by m-moving, not by moving normally towards it when you know something’s there which would still be an attack), you successfully move there, displace the ghost to an adjacent space, and take some damage from creepily passing through a ghost. If this is implemented in an extra evil way, this could be cold damage that destroys potions.
Make alchemy recipes randomized per-game and consistent with a game, by doing the following:
This system gets rid of random alchemy results entirely, but does not necessarily get rid of the chance of an alchemic blast or failing and turning into water or evaporating. Possibly these could be removed, so that the player is incentivized to try and mix together as many potion types as they can to discover what they produce and find interesting combinations.
A list of known alchemy recipes could be added to the discoveries list so the player can use it as a reference.
On deeper levels, land mines cause a fiery explosion in addition to their existing effects. Player-placed land mines get a bit trickier; a simple implementation will just consider the depth of the level the trap is on, but a more correct one would track via a field on the land mine object (in case it is picked up and carried around to another level) whether or not it will produce an explosion when triggered.
When someone gets out of a bear trap (or is killed while in it), it removes the trap and drops a beartrap item on the ground.
Add a minetown variant called “Wine Town”. It would largely follow the regular Minetown precedents of having the Watch, a temple, a (high probability of a) general store, but would also have at least 2 potion stores, a couple random potions of booze lying around, and a large “drinking hall” room.
The message for getting engulfed should distinguish between monsters that swallow you whole / have solid bodies versus ones that aren’t. For these monsters it should print “The purple worm swallows you whole!” instead of “engulfs you!”
Hitting an earth elemental with a stone to flesh spell currently has no interaction, which is odd. The following possibilities have been proposed:
Shop-owned items with positive enchantment (but not negative) have the enchantment identified, since the shopkeeper is, after all, trying to get you to buy them.
In variants with object properties, items with beneficial properties should also come identified in shops for the same reason.
Add a bit to the monst struct that tracks whether the monster is hiding on the ceiling or not. (Only valid for things like wumpuses, piercers, and perhaps bats but not actually since bats don’t roost on the ceiling when inactive.)
Then, when polymorphed into a wumpus or piercer, you can use < when not on stairs to climb onto the ceiling and > to climb back onto the floor, but only when adjacent to a wall.
Based on some new code in 3.7 that tracks how an artifact was generated, allow the player to ask the Oracle about the existence of an artifact. The code isn’t in place for her to tell you where it actually is, but she will be able to tell you whether it generated randomly, in bones, from a gift, etc. Possible messages for some of these:
Only for Tourists, general stores occasionally stock unidentified fake Amulets of Yendor.
Tourists start the game with a fake Amulet of Yendor, or else have it pre-identified.
Grease trap, which showers you with grease when triggered, greasing your wielded weapon and giving you slippery fingers and several turns of fumbling. Occasionally, your armor may get randomly greased.
May drop a can of grease with 0-2 charges when untrapped.
If #3671 (greasy floor) is implemented, the grease trap may automatically replace itself with the greasy floor trap or terrain as part of its effect.
Cornuthaums give a lesser reduced-hunger casting benefit to non-Wizards who wear them. They also improve reduced-hunger casting for Wizards.
Bags of holding should cost 500 zorkmids; this makes them trivially price-identifiable, but it’s not hard to identify one in a shop anyways.
Artifact lock pick Doorbane, which mostly works like a regular one but prevents doors from resisting when it’s carried.
This functionality should also probability extend to the Master Key of Thievery.
Add a way to show nearby unseen pets and possibly also peacefuls. Using a warning-like system, they render as green 1-5 (pets) and blue 1-5 (peacefuls) using the same scale as warning does.
Initial idea was to tie this to intrinsic warning or when wearing a blessed ring of warning, but this has flavor problems since warning exists to alert you to threats, which pets and peacefuls aren’t. Plus, a lot of roles get intrinsic warning anyway, and rings don’t generally change behavior based on beatitude. It might be better off coming from some other source.
Resolve the quirkiness of statue traps - they are a silent trap on which a real statue potentially containing spellbooks can generate, which you can teleport off the trap to smash for its spellbooks (indicating it’s a true statue) and do not show up with telepathy or monster detection (indicating it’s a true statue), but reveal themselves as “You find a foo posing as a statue” (indicating it’s been a living monster all along). There are two basic options:
Make more artifacts creatable by naming, with reasonable restrictions based on your role, experience level, alignment, and preexisting enchantment of the weapon, if it is a weapon.
Example: A lawful Priest who is XL 20 can create Demonbane by naming it, provided the mace being named is +5. The enchantment turns to +0 as the magic flows into its new anti-demon powers.
If you talk to King Arthur after receiving the Quest from him, he will tell you to seek the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. (Or just have him tell you this as part of giving you the quest.) After this, your next fountain dip is guaranteed to produce Excalibur, if it does not already exist.
If you pray while there are hostile monsters near you, your god may decide to answer the prayer by frying all the monsters around you with lightning (sparing pets and peacefuls). This would work best when there are a bunch of hostiles right near you but none a medium distance away. Possibly it should be suppressed when your HP is low, but then again restoring your health while leaving you surrounded by monsters often doesn’t give you high odds of surviving.
The hero is not credited with killing the monsters, and gains no experience or penalties.
Change the Master Key of Thievery’s invoke power, since it already gives you guaranteed untrapping passively. The new invoke power is to magic map a moderate radius around you (maybe 10) and then teleport you (which will be controlled because the Key gives you teleport control), but you must pick a space within the mapped radius to teleport to.
Artifact ring that provides a cocktail of basic resistances all at once (fire, cold, shock, poison, maybe sleep, maybe acid). This is interesting primarily because it is very useful early in the game and then becomes progressively less useful later on as the hero gets intrinsic resistances.
Could be named “The Ring of Everything Resistance” or “The Chromatic Ring”.
Your god may give you useful non-artifact items as sacrifice gifts, such as a stethoscope or bag of holding, so long as you aren’t carrying one of them already.
A slightly more advanced system that wouldn’t require carrying a bunch of items to avoid getting duplicates would be to track the last time you picked up or put down each type of object, and if you have never touched one or it’s been a sufficiently long time, you are eligible to get that item as a gift.
Tortles can wear hard helmets and gloves and a cloak, but as long as they wear any of these they are unable to hide in their shell.
Make the Longbow of Diana able to change shape between the different types of launchers (bow, crossbow, sling), either by invoking it or simply by applying it. This allows Rangers to play with whatever type of ranged combat style they prefer, and allows gnomish Rangers to use a crossbow without being coerced into switching to bow later.
Occasionally, if a Mines filler level generates where there is a sufficiently large space of empty stone, a little separate walled-off area may generate disconnected from the main map, containing a few gnomes and dwarves, and some more gems and gold, possibly in a chest. This area won’t get the stairs generated in it, and should probably contain a hole so that a randomly teleporting player won’t get stuck there (other types of escape items could get picked up by the gnomes and dwarves).
Getting lifesaved (for the first time, probably not subsequent times) gives you some experience points, because now you have experienced what death is like.
Seperately track every different source of exercising an attribute, with diminishing returns for repeated use of the same exercise source until that attribute changes value, which resets it. This prevents you from spamming an easy-to-do exercise source such as pushing boulders around or writing Elbereth, and makes you diversify your sources of exercise.
Possibly weight the different exercise sources (e.g. successfully finishing studying a spellbook should be worth more for Wisdom exercise than successfully casting that spell is).
A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:
See also: Bard implementations.
Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:
Add a system for casting ritual spells: more powerful and more expensive spells which have some esoteric effects you can’t get otherwise. The main differences between ritual and normal spellcasting are that they consume valuable, hopefully non-renewable components, take a number of turns to cast instead of taking effect instantly, and may require you to be in or set up certain circumstances.
Various ritual spells that have been proposed:
Ritual spells come in spellbooks like usual, but aren’t stored in your spell list. Instead, reading the spellbook prompts you if you want to begin its ritual and tells you the necessary ingredients and circumstances you need to satisfy as preconditions. If you meet all the conditions and answer yes, you initiate the ritual. (For simplicity, this should probably burn up / expend all the components instantly.) You cannot begin a ritual while in the process of casting another ritual; this should probably be implemented as a precondition.
Apart from the component cost, rituals act as a constant drain on your Pw until the ritual is complete. If something distracts you in the middle of the ritual, you can go take care of it and then resume the ritual as long as you have the Pw left to finish it. (You could also drink gain energy during the ritual.) The only way for a ritual to fail, possibly backfiring with bad effects, is for you to run out of Pw while it is incomplete.
In addition to its preconditions, each ritual also has some postconditions: common to all rituals is that you have been casting the ritual for at least some length of time, but there may be others, such as standing on the square where you began the ritual, or have another item, or kill a monster, or something. There may also be other conditions such as “moving off the space where the ritual started breaks and halts the ritual”.
Every time you stop casting a ritual (whether it succeeded or failed), it increments the spellbook’s spestudied field; the book will eventually disintegrate after casting it a certain number of times.
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.
Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:
Ideas to change terrain symbols to reduce overcrowding of the # symbol:
Slope terrain, which is a terrain that appears like walls but does not block line-of-sight. It blocks movement unless levitating or flying, and cannot be dug down on or into. If you somehow get onto slope terrain (such as by stopping levitation while on it), you can move off it in any unblocked direction. This would allow interesting level designs like pyramids and switchbacks. Is still a bit problematic without implementing actual height values for the terrain, since for things like a large pyramid, you would be able to see straight over the top of the pyramid and down the back side.
A new type of “fence” terrain that is like wooden iron bars: it cannot normally be moved onto but it can be burnt or kicked down, and it does not block line of sight.
New type of terrain, “fire terrain”, a square that is on fire. It displays as an orange period. (If this will be too nasty to people who play with color off, the glyph should perhaps be changed.)
Container traps’ effects scale based on dungeon level (ideally on the level a container generated, not on the current level, so a player can’t bring a chest up to level 1 to make it use the weakest possible trap.)
In addition to adding some more effects, also add some effects which cosmetically are the same as other ones, but are more or less damaging. This would, however, make untrapping containers even more useless than it is now; perhaps a trap should stay armed even after you set it off. Another idea is to give certain traps an arming item, like a potion of oil for the fire effect and a land mine for the explosion effect. Successfully untrapping it will deposit the arming item into the container.
Also, make container traps independent of Luck, because currently they encourage the player to ignore containers until Luck is maximized.
Instead of making all trapped doors explode and stun the player, add more varied door traps. The trap should be determined based on depth. It should also be selected deterministically based on the coordinates of the door (a convenience so that a trapped door will always have the same trap effect without having to store which trap it is.)
Additionally, new traps can also be used with more door states, rather than have all traps trigger by trying to open the door. Nondestructive traps could also remain on the door until the door is untrapped, rather than vanishing.
An interesting addition would be if doors were made restrictedly or completely untrappable, in order to prevent optimal strategy from being attempting to untrap every door that the player comes across. Or possibly an attempt to open or close a door should do a cursory trap check.
List of door traps in rough order of minimum depth necessary to generate them:
Anti-magic fields in Gehennom can attempt to cancel you or your gear, and apply the cancelled status effect.
Deeper in the dungeon, rust traps might target your pack instead of your armor or gear, and could possibly be renamed to “water trap”. On deeper levels and particularly in Gehennom, rust traps phase out to be replaced by acid traps. These deal corrosion and acid damage (and quite a bit of it, like having multiple potions of acid dumped on your head).
Pits get deeper the further down in the dungeon you are, which makes them deal more damage, might cause wounded legs with a chance that increases with depth, and take longer to escape from (or are so deep you can’t climb out at all). In Gehennom, they might deal extra damage on account of being designed and put there by demons. The extra depth could be conveyed to the player by “You fall into a [very] deep pit!”
Falling rock traps can dump multiple rocks onto you at once, up to (depth/4). Damage is taken for each rock. If a trap would drop 4 or more rocks on you, it may instead drop (rocks/4) boulders on your head instead. Helms should be less effective at reducing damage from falling rocks, and almost useless at reducing damage from falling houlders.
If multiple boulders are dropped, they might be dropped on nearby spaces as well, so that a pathway might end up blocked.
Magic traps’ blinding and summoning monsters effects should be split up, since both at once tends to make them much more fatal, especially to early players. Alternatively, make the summoned monster selection with a lower-difficulty pool of monsters.
Advanced spell forms are slightly problematic. Certain spells (fireball and cone of cold) which have advanced versions automatically kick in when the player is Skilled or above, and can’t be cast using the lesser form even if the player wants to.
It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:
real Pw = base Pw / success
rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw
spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting
menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be
calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote
spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw,
spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.Instead of books having spestudied charges which leads to a lot of issues with polypiling, you read them once and they disappear, but you get 3 times the spell memory. This is intended to remove tedious spellbook micromanagement.
The wield slot is fairly underused among object classes, and there are a number of interesting bonuses we can add to spells if the corresponding spellbook is wielded.
In a lot of folklore, iron wards away elves. This could be implemented in the game in several ways:
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.
The current resistance system is unsatisfying, because most resistances separate the effects of something into a binary outcome: worse effects with no resistance, totally ignorable effects with it. Most resistances also are get-once-and-be-protected-forever, which is uninteresting in the long term.
Proposed solutions to this generally assume that there will be some distinction between resistance and immunity, which offers better (or total) protection but is not normally obtainable as a permanent intrinsic effect. This also enables partial resistances (as found in SporkHack) to be used, though some ideas still treat them as binary - either you have it or you don’t.
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.
Define several generic monster strategies, which a monster will follow to the best of its ability, and can be swapped out for other strategies given certain triggers:
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:
Special monster AIs/strategies for golems. Likely requiring a general AI overhaul. The strategy for an individual golem could be selected from a set of possible directives when the monster is created. They follow this directive completely and literally, which may result in some interesting behaviors. The player can #chat to the golem to have it mumble its directive.
“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.
Very intelligent monsters calculate whether it is more advantageous in terms of damaging the enemy versus taking damage themselves to pursue a target in melee, keep a safe distance and attack from range, or flee. Complex solutions would involve the monster storing lots of data about which attacks it has seen its opponents perform; however, this might get memory-intensive and expand save files quite a bit. A possible algorithm that relies only on game state and is based on FIQhack’s dragon AI algorithm is as follows:
If able to attack at range (spit/breathe/shoot missiles/use items/etc):
If the target is in range but not adjacent:
Attack at range.
Else if the target is adjacent, and is at least as fast as the monster:
Attack in melee, or use ranged attacks point blank.
Otherwise:
Try to move somewhere aligned with the target, as far away as possible while still being in range.
Else if the monster is unable to attack at range but will be able to soon (dragon):
Stay out of line with the target.
Otherwise:
Close to melee range.
Items (perhaps only heavily randomized object classes, so NOT armor) can be inspected somehow, or else come pre-inspected, and your character is able to conclude that the item is one of a small set of possible things from that object class. The number of these possible things can depend on role, and the “fakes” are randomized every game. This approach is very similar to the one used in the roguelike Golden Krone Hotel.
Example: a character inspects a potion and confirms that it is either healing, acid, or sleeping. All potions with this appearance will provide the same three possibilities. It’s actually acid, but without other identification methods, or ruling out healing and sleeping, it can’t be discerned which of the three it is.
Has some problems with the interface; a character shouldn’t inspect everything and then have to type-name it. Perhaps this could be automated somehow.
Make the identification game less regimented. Currently, a rational spoiled player (who will not take the risks associated with direct use-ID) is restricted to indirect use-ID (and monster use-ID) of most objects until such time as they can find a general, book, or scroll shop, at which point they can price-ID the scroll of identify and other items. Once identify is known (and could be blessed), the good items (as determined by price ID) can be fully identified. This is problematic because it’s not at all a gradual process, and it feels like it should be.
Some ideas have been floated to remove price ID outright (presumably, a shopkeeper would pay the same amount for each item of an object class as they currently do with amulets). This has some advantages; price ID is tedious, encourages stashing to some extent (because stashing near a shop where you can ID new things is good), and roguelike players who don’t primarily play NetHack tend to hate its price ID system. In this case, either the scroll of identify should start out identified for all characters, so that identification doesn’t take forever to get off the ground, or some other mechanic should be added so identify is easy to pick out for spoiled players (such as retaining price-ID for only that scroll).
A designer may not want to get rid of the price identification system entirely. But there are some options for amending it. Overall, it should become less regimented and predictable, and less necessary of a strategy. NetHack’s entire idea of price tiers doesn’t appear to be based on much of anything, and having items organized into tiers makes it easy to disregard entire sets of items once their base prices are known. Ideas include:
In an effort to make use-testing spellbooks less of a terrible idea, all characters should get a warning when reading a spellbook that’s way out of their comfort zone and they have very little chance of successfully studying it.
Make scrolls and spellbooks in particular partially identifiable outside of a shop without having to formally identify them or guess based on frequency (which are currently the ‘‘only’’ ways to identify them outside of a shop). Ideas:
With respect to other proposals about crafting (involving a craftsmen’s guild or even scattered craftsmen), the process of traveling back and forth to and from it might become busywork. So if players could craft things on their own, that might be better.
Add a Craftsmen’s Guild to the game, as a method of advanced crafting (unlike the player’s simplified crafting such as alchemy crafting potions into other potions, or combining a blank scroll with a magic marker to make magic scrolls). The guild either has its own dedicated special level, or occupies part of a preexisting special level.
Metalworkers are probably the most important sort of craftsman for many characters. There could be multiple types, each specializing in one type of metal, or just one type that does everything.
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.
Address startscumming by introducing a point buy system for starting characters: unrandomizing starting stats and inventory and letting the user spend points on stats and equipment however they like. (Note: dtsund’s class overhaul proposal also addresses unrandomization of starting inventory by simply removing all the random chances to get items, but it doesn’t involve point buy.)
This was migrated from the summary of the “Alchemy” mega-idea following its breakup into smaller independent ones. It is not an idea in and of itself, but is rather design notes on the present state of the alchemy system as a whole which may still be useful.
NetHack’s alchemy system is balanced around the assumption that the player will not hold onto nearly every potion in the game, turn them to water, and polypile them into alchemy ingredients; however, this is not hard to do. Should the player do this, they can amass hundreds of hit points worth of full healing potions, or all the gain ability potions required to max out every stat, or get dozens of potions of holy water.
For most potions in the game, diluting for holy water or alchemizing/polypiling for alchemizing is their ultimate fate, and there are enough potions so that the player never really has to agonize over what to do with a potion. One solution to this would be to make more potions than just acid effective for throwing at monsters.
The color alchemy and gem alchemy patches are unsatisfactory, as is any system that ties alchemy recipes to the random appearance of potions. This is because it makes the game choose at the beginning whether powerful potions can be produced out of junk potions/gems, or out of expensive potions/gems, or not at all — all before the player gets a chance to learn how alchemy will work in this game. It has a large impact on overall strategy that the player can’t discover until probably the midgame. At the same time, having hardcoded alchemy rules is unsatisfactory because it’s inflexible and carries a heavy spoiler requirement.
Random alchemy is also odd: dipping the same potions in the same way can yield different potion results.
Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)
In variants with percentage intrinsics, intrinsics granted by one’s role need not be binary. For instance, monks tend to gain a lot of elemental resistances by leveling up, so rather than having those be all-or-nothing cutoffs at fixed levels, spread it out so that they gain a decent percentage of the resistance with each level near the original cutoff.
This would complicate the enlightenment display, since now it would have to disclose something like “You have 76% fire resistance: 45% from corpses and 31% from your priest levels”.
Lightning doesn’t pass through iron bars. Instead, it electrifies the bars and any bars contiguously connected to them (possibly within some range), causing any creature occupying one of the electrified iron bars squares to be zapped as if the lightning ray hit them.
Add a spell of telekinesis as a high level matter spell, which replicates some of the monster-shoving functionality you can get with #wiztelekinesis.
Monsters with AT_EXPL kamikaze attacks are excluded from the regular is-this-foe-too-strong-for-me level checks. The point of those checks is to prevent a monster from attacking something too strong and getting hurt in retaliation, and if the attacker’s modus operandi is to blow itself up at the enemy, that isn’t relevant.
Flaming, freezing, and shocking spheres explode when killed like a gas spore does.
If you are not wearing gloves, greased rings slip off your fingers as if you had greasy fingers.
Assuming an implementation containing multiple puzzle branches (to offer players an alternative to Sokoban), have all the branches start from an “antechamber” level off the main dungeon. This is a small unpopulated level, and contains terrain clues around each puzzle branch staircase in it, such as boulders and strangely shaped walls for Sokoban, ice if there is an ice sliding puzzle, etc.
Dragonbane starts off as just a weapon with a damage bonus versus dragons, but it gains properties corresponding to every type of adult dragon you have killed with it. So when you kill a red dragon with it, it now gives you fire resistance and/or does fire damage, then you kill a black dragon and it now gives you fire and disintegration resistance and/or does fire and disintegration damage, and so on.
This doesn’t have to be Dragonbane, the concept of an artifact that powers up by killing different monsters could apply to something else, but Dragonbane is a good example since dragons have a big diversity of obvious properties and resistances.
To keep it from becoming overpowered, it could stack up to 2 or 3 properties from the last 2 or 3 unique types of dragons killed so long as neither property is something powerful like reflection or magic resistance (which would clear all other properties).
Wizards receive a spellbook of magic missile as their first sacrifice gift if they don’t already have the spell in their spellbook (even if it’s completely forgotten). In this case, they get Magicbane as their second gift.
If you give an item-using pet an amulet of unchanging, they will recognize that you want them to wear it and put it on.
Snow golems occasionally drop one or more of the following when killed:
New monster “aballin”, from D&D. It is a mobile j-class monster that can appear as a pool of water when not actively moving, and can possibly appear as a water elemental when moving. They can eat organic items like gelatinous cubes, though perhaps not instantly like gelatinous cubes, instead dissolving them some time after engulfing them. They are incapable of climbing stairs, and typically sit dormant imitating a pool until a monster draws near, at which point they become active.
Gold bugs have some interaction with graves if there is one on the level. Perhaps they are found hiding near graves, or will try to pathfind to a grave and dig it up.
Awake (and non-paralyzed, etc) queen bees periodically lay a killer bee egg if there is not already one on their square, and their square is walkable terrain.
Track the highest-reached enchantment of enchantable weapons and armor. If it gets cancelled or disenchanted below this peak amount, you can dip it in a potion of restore ability to immediately raise it back to that peak.
“Teleport armor” monster spell, which is a close-range spell that takes one piece of your armor and teleports it somewhere else on the level (it could be limited to a short distance to be nice).
Foocubi could cast this (but not cast any other spells), since they want to get your armor off.
A nonmagical ring called a “regimental ring”, which when worn makes soldiers peaceful (unspecified whether higher ranking officers should respect it or not). It possibly appears as rare loot in barracks or rarely generated in the inventory of high-ranking officers.
“Psuedopacifist” conduct - you are allowed to kill monsters, but only in self-defense. This means you cannot kill a monster which generated peaceful, even if you anger it, and you cannot kill monsters which are incapable of taking action to harm you such as blue jellies.
Some ways to scale some spell effects with skill. Generally, this consists of nerfing unskilled and basic casting rather than adding even more powerful high-skill effects.
Remove the Elbereth from the floor in Sokoban, since this means that anyone who finishes Sokoban automatically gains knowledge of Elbereth. Instead, place a burnt Elbereth somewhere random on the 9th to 14th levels of the dungeon.
If silver dragon scale mail is your only reflection source, or more generally if your only reflection sources come from your shirt and/or body armor, wearing a mummy wrapping over this prevents Medusa from seeing her reflection (though you are still considered to have reflection in all other respects).
During Hanukkah, oil lamps should burn at a very slow rate (1/8 the rate, unless this is unbalanced) so that they last a lot longer than usual.
You can rub a towel on a greased item to remove the grease from it, just like wiping your face.
Whenever you use a shop-owned item to make a wish, the shopkeeper treats the wished-for item as theirs, in addition to the usage fee.
Temples are always lit up; never dark.
Allow all lawful devils (or a random set of lawful devils) to accept a bribe, not just Asmodeus and Baalzebub. They will not vanish completely, but they will turn peaceful.
When you pass out after drinking booze and “awake with a headache”, you lose 1 HP. If this kills you, your death is “killed by a hangover”.
Eating objects made of different metals should give different amounts of nutrition per unit of weight. Currently all metals give 1 nutrition per weight unit, but it could be that things such as copper or mithril would give less nutrition than iron, whereas gold could give more, for instance.
Speed boots should give bonus movement points equal to their enchantment (or slightly fuzzed as +1 to -1 randomly) on top of, or rather than, what they normally give.
When a thrown potion of acid hits a creature, it may corrode some corrodable armor of that creature.
Add an additional container trap effect which creates a stinking cloud centered on the container. If the player caused the cloud to be created, they are counted as responsible for anything killed by the cloud.
Getting hit with acid can decrease Charisma.
Shopkeepers remember when you have robbed their shop even after you pacify them, including in a bones file with a player of the same name who had robbed the shop. They treat former robbers as suspect, and enforce stricter rules on them and/or raise prices for them.
In variants with some form of a randomly generated garden room - whether a special room, themed room, or random vault - gnome statues generate in them.
Remove holy/unholy water’s ability to bless/curse items. Instead, make blessed and cursed oil serve the same functions. Dipping a stack of uncursed oil in holy/unholy oil will bless or curse the stack, as currently works, but since oil is significantly less easy to get than water, this makes mass-blessing of items harder to accomplish.
Anointing an item with holy or unholy oil ignores effects that would normally happen because of the oil. For instance, dipping an oil lamp in holy oil will just bless it, or do nothing if it was blessed already.
Priests now start with a stack of 4 holy oil.
Water doesn’t get outright removed - other things still dilute to it and turn into it in random alchemy - but it’s not much use anymore except for on-the-go dilution.
Not specified whether you could pray to get a stack of oil potions on an altar blessed, or whether this wouldn’t work.
If adding a new centaur designed to be a significant threat increase over the existing ones, they should generate with good (if non-magical) armor and a good weapon, which is frequently a lance. If they have a lance, they will use it to joust you.
Make it possible to specify blood splatters in the SpliceHack level parser. Then add it to Orcish Town, the “massacre” and “temple of the gods” themed rooms, and the bottom floor of the Convict quest and possibly graveyards.
Add another dig-up-a-gravestone effect that creates a bunch of maggots around the player with the message “The grave is full of maggots!” If maggots are genocided or extinct, either produce a YAFM or defer to one of the other effects.
You can quaff an adjacent water elemental, giving you a YAFM (“The water elemental looks deeply offended.”) and angering it if it was peaceful. Drinking it does not have any effect on you, but deals 1 HP damage to the elemental, killing it if it was at 1 HP (“As you drink the water elemental, it disintegrates into droplets.”)
You can also dip potions into a water elemental to dilute them, which also produces the offended message and angers it, but does not do any potion effect or damage to it.
The potion of restore ability can be used to recover lost maximum Pw. It only restores maximum Pw, not current: if your Pw is 30/80 and you previously had 100 maximum Pw, these potions will only be able to get you to 30/100.
Set the upper bound for the upper limit of nurse dancing at 3 times the amount of maximum HP you had when you first gained your current experience level (which is saved by the game in versions 3.6 and later), instead of having it be a flat 25 times your experience level. This is to remove the rubber-band effect where roles that naturally have less HP can mostly catch up to roles that have a lot of it.
Because vomiting only costs 20 nutrition, which is a strangely fixed amount and not very much, make it instead cost a proportion (say half) of your current nutrition, with a minimum of 20 if half of your current nutrition is less than 20.
A player fear system should track the sources of fear and slow down the timeout for the fear the closer you remain to them, particularly if you remain in line of sight; and/or accelerate the timeout so it goes away faster if you are far away and not in line of sight.
Armor of life saving (unspecified whether it would be magical body armor or some other sort of armor like a helm, or even an object property on existing armor). When it saves your life, it crumbles to dust like the amulet does, as well as any other source of life saving you happened to have, to prevent double-life-saving exploits.
A rare type of mold that can be brewed into a healing potion via the Brewing Patch (assuming an implementation in which no existing molds are brewable into healing).
A system for martial arts users in which moving tactically and positioning yourself translates to combat bonuses. Not a flanking system where you get better positioned with allies in place, but things like:
The ideal balance to strike is that the game can be played without mastering this system, but if it is mastered the player becomes very effective in combat.
Split the blinding and summoning functions of a magic trap. Both still deafen, but no longer blind the player and surround them with monsters at once.
A random set of monsters, deterministic based on their ID number, will not throw a weapon that is usable for both melee and throwing (e.g. dagger, spear) if they have no other melee weapon. Probably over half of monsters should behave like this, but some monsters will indeed continue to throw their last dagger at you.
Assuming a player fear system is implemented, Nazgul should passively cause fear in the player as an area of effect (or a gaze if this is too hard to implement).
Dipping an item into any fountain may erodeproof it with low probability. (Or else have this only apply to magic fountains with somewhat higher probability.)
The wand of magic missile should scale somehow, but explicitly not with wand skill, which may not even exist in a given implementation. Instead, its baseline damage remains 2d6, but your magical stats such as maximum Pw or skill in attack spells can increase its damage output.
A reduced version of the Wands Balance Patch in which there is still a new wand-use skill, but not varying wand effects at different levels of skill (because the skill of the wielder shouldn’t affect the magic in the wand). Instead, increased wand skill gives you higher accuracy (no more/much less missing Rodney with a death ray, for instance) and perhaps other perks such as being able to zap a wand once per turn as a bonus action, as with a stethoscope.
An alternative proposal rather than having a scroll of knowledge (which tells you the randomized appearance of an item type in your game) as its own item, or the same effect as something you can get with a confused identify scroll: have the Oracle sell reverse-identification as a service. This would require some cap on the amount of times to prevent you from learning every important item, perhaps 5 or 7 plus a small random factor per game.
Add 1-tile-wide corridors linking the rooms that contain the temples together in the Astral Plane, likely with secret doors so that monsters don’t start going through them. These give the player the ability to get around the Riders and go from the wrong temple to the correct one faster, but you run the risk of getting bogged down and surrounded if you use them.
It was pointed out that 1-tile-wide corridors may actually make things much easier on the player and would offer a much safer point to retreat to. Ideally they should be designed without long straight areas so the player can’t easily remove a bunch of monsters with a few well-placed teleportation zaps, but also be widened to avert the problem of being a refuge.
After gifting you an item, your god doesn’t give you anything else until you’ve used it to their satisfaction. Such as killing a certain amount of monsters with it if it’s a weapon, wearing armor for a certain number of combat turns, and so forth.
This sacrifices gameplay fun for improved flavor and balance, so tread carefully if implementing it.
Greasy floor, a new type of terrain (or perhaps a trap?) that applies grease to any boots you are wearing and almost always makes you slip. Slipping on greasy floor (which can also happen by walking barefoot or with already-greased boots on) causes you to drop random items, some of which may get greased.
The player can create greasy floor by smashing a potion of oil or applying (multiple?) charges from a can of grease to the floor.
Creatures that move onto a greasy floor patch may “slip and slide and struggle to stay upright”, losing their next turn 70% of the time. This also happens to a creature standing on a greasy floor patch that tries to do something involving footwork (combat, moving off the square, etc) 30% of the time. Or for a more simplified implementation, the trap doesn’t have to cause loss of turn when moved onto (though it might still produce a message), but has a 70% chance of making the creature lose its next turn regardless of the action (still need to keep your balance to take out a scroll to read or zap a wand, for instance).
If implemented as a trap, it cannot be untrapped (except probably by the standard method of digging a pit on it), but will eventually wear out after a slightly randomized number of times it affects something. (This prevents you from setting a single one in Ludios and then standing back to watch the whole army get greased and fall over themselves.)
The player is able to do some sort of ritual that involves sacrificing 25,000 gold pieces to open a portal to Fort Ludios if one has not already been generated. Possibly this would have to be done in a vault. If a naturally generated portal does already exist, the gold is still expended but the attempt to make another one fails.
Any item can be dipped into a potion of levitation to permanently reduce its weight by 20%. This uses up the potion, and it will only affect the item’s base weight, not the weight of any contents (i.e. a bag of holding thus dipped will weigh 12 + contents instead of 15 + contents).
New clerical monster spell (possibly also a player spell) that creates a region of black storm clouds between the caster and target and moves across the map towards the target. The clouds block vision, can strike anything in or near them with lightning (though not intelligently), wet items on the floor beneath them and in the inventories of monsters beneath them, hit things with gusts of wind if those are implemented, and can spawn temporary lightning monsters that vanish when the cloud does.
Another variant of this idea is as a static cloud that can be targeted like a stinking cloud, probably as a level 7 spell (depending on how bad the lightning is).
Blade vortex (v), which is a whirlwind of spinning blades. It has two engulf attacks that deal 2d4 physical damage each, and is difficulty 12. Apart from generating normally, it can be created by polypiling a sufficiently high number of blades at once similar to how golems are created. When killed, it drops an assortment of bladed weapons, mostly smaller ones like knives, daggers, and short swords, and possibly a chain or two. It can be harmed by thrown potions of water, rust traps, and rust attacks.
Another iteration of the proposal is to make its blades its inventory rather than just assumed to be part of the monster, with the following interesting implications:
Scrolls can be “corrupted” or “misspelled”. This basically acts as a toggle on whether the confused behavior of the scroll activates: reading a corrupted scroll while not confused will produce the confused effect and reading it while confused will produce the regular effect. There is no way to restore a corrupted scroll to normal.
Possibly, an unidentified corrupted scroll will have its label deterministically garbled similar to engravings, e.g. “scroll labeled FO0B|E BLe7Ch”. If identified it would simply show as “corrupted scroll of X”.
Writing a scroll while confused will make the result corrupted. Also, scrolls hit by water damage or produced from polymorphing other scrolls may be corrupted.
If you sit down and a cream pie is the top of whatever stack of items is beneath you, it produces a “Splat! You sit on a cream pie!” message and destroys the pie.
Dragonhide bags of tricks only spawn dragons. (Though this would include baby dragons, so it would probably at least approximate being level-appropriate).
Eucalyptus leaves induce delayed vomiting like how tripe does, because they’re actually pretty poisonous to eat raw. They will still cure deathly sickness, though.
Ghosts can possess other monsters. When a possessed monster is killed, the ghost pops out again.
Minesweeper implemented as a themed room: a certain fraction of spaces (probably 10% or less) have a land mine placed on them. Every space adjacent to a land mine bears an engraving of the number of adjacent mines; mines themselves are engraved with “X” or “BOOM”. Spaces with no mines adjacent have no engraving.
Brown puddings (or the player polymorphed into one) can cause trees to instantly rot and die by attacking them. If there are other monsters with a decay attack, this behavior should logically extend to them as well.
Scrolls of enchant armor should prompt the player to choose a piece of armor to enchant rather than picking randomly, since in nearly all cases they are used on a single specific piece of armor by removing all other armor anyway. It should also say “This is an enchant armor scroll.” and auto-identify itself if not previously identified.
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.
An Infidel not carrying the Amulet can still cast spells (in contrast to the current setup where they cannot), but instead of casting the spells with Pw, they use blood magic and use HP instead. It doesn’t necessarily cost as much HP as it would Pw - there can be a scaling factor.
If trying to cast a spell that would cost more Pw than the hero has current HP, they die.
Wearing gauntlets of dexterity allows you to quick-draw a wand (zapping any wand in your inventory as a half action, similar to applying a stethoscope - it costs no time but can only be done once per action).
Also, they allow you to use a container in inventory as a half action. For balance, you should probably only be able to do one half-action thing per turn.
In the #attributes screen, show the time the game was started. This is useful mainly in tournaments to check to see if you started the game a few seconds too early to be eligible.
New object property “of fear” or “of terror”, which is only valid on melee weapons. When a weapon of fear or terror hits a monster, it may scare that monster. If a player fear system is implemented, it also scares the player when they are hit with it.
Artifact sword Galatine, which is the sword of Gawaine in Arthurian stories. It has a damage increase depending on the time of day, after how Gawain’s strength waxed until the hour of noon and faded afterwards. +1 from 9 to 10 AM, then +2, +3, +3, +2, +1, +0, -1, -2, -1. Then from 7 PM to 9 AM, +0.
If you kill a pet while on the Astral Plane (or the Plane of Air for that matter), you hear the rumble of “nearby” thunder, not “distant”.
If there is a scroll of scare monster in a container, monsters will still open the container, but will not take any items out of it.
Award some experience points when the hero discovers a trap door in a “Vlad was here” closet by searching for it (not by triggering it), because this demonstrates that they are learning that such closets contain trap doors.
Corpses dropped by zombies are always or often cursed. Removing the curse from them makes them less likely to revive. This could even be made as strict as every time a zombie drops a corpse and a revival timer is actually set on it (as opposed to a rotting-away timer), it is made cursed.
When you approach Mephisto and he is still peaceful, he does not demand tribute to pass like normal. Instead, he offers to buy your soul in exchange for powerful assistance on your quest to get the Amulet. If you agree, you are given amazing combat advantages (huge intrinsic damage boost, huge intrinsic AC boost, etc).
One of two bad things can happen as a result:
Alternatively he might appear on Astral, but that could be hard to explain flavor-wise. Or just create some test for if the player is in a sufficiently dire condition, and when they are he claims the player’s soul.
If you already have the Amulet the first time you meet Mephisto, he may not offer a bargain at all.
Allow the player to teleport directly onto a magic portal.
When a puddle of shallow water is trying to dry up, first check whether it’s part of a larger water body. Do a breadth-first search to find all connected water terrain and see if it either reaches the edge of the map, or if it connects up to a certain threshold amount of deep water squares. If either of these conditions is satisfied, the shallow water never dries up.
A form of monster species “almost grudge” - the two species will not attack each other on sight, but they are far more likely to attack each other when subject to conflict than two arbitrary monsters would. An example of such an almost-grudge would be elves and dwarves.
Artifact whose main purpose is to soak up water and apply it to other things. It removes a pool or moat square or dries up a fountain when applied to one (moats may refill), gaining a charge each time. You can apply it to spend a charge blanking a scroll, erasing an engraving (any type, not just dust), cleaning your face or hands, and extinguish fiery monsters such as a flaming sphere (possibly instakilling them).
The initial idea was to create a “sponge” object as the base item type, but since it’s undesirable to make a new object just to be the base of an artifact, it could instead either be a “spongestone” gem, or just an artifact towel, since towels can already soak up water. (If implemented as a towel, the towel would only gain one charge of wetness when immersed in water, and could attempt to dry up that square immediately.)
Bearded axes can be used to strip enemies of other things besides their wielded weapons, such as wands and other utility items.
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.
Dwarvish shopkeepers never ask you to leave your pick-axe outside if you are also a dwarf, because they understand the deep cultural offensiveness of asking a dwarf to set aside their pick.
In regular dungeon levels, a certain engraving can occasionally generate which has treasure buried beneath it.
(Note: This idea predates 3.7 themed rooms, and could likely be done as a themed room. One themed room is similar, containing buried treasure but no engraving.)
Multi-turn occupations should be interrupted when the player gets a warning about levitation timing out soon.
A way to transfer charges from one ring to another, within reasonable limits (such as, probably, the ring gaining charges has to roll for an explosion the same way as if a charging scroll was used on it).
In variants with shallow water, pet cats will avoid it similar to how they avoid squares containing cursed items.
There is some interaction you can do at an altar when you bring a zombie corpse there (not sacrificing it, since it will be too old) that sets the soul of the creature free, which will stop it from reviving.
Monks should receive a benefit for fasting. This could be in the form of giving them a point of alignment record every so often when they are Hungry or worse, and/or slowing down their hunger rate when they are Hungry.
Have a special hallucination message if Baalzebub gates something in: “Baalzebub has a devil put aside for you!”
A “spin attack” technique, a la The Legend of Zelda, that you can do if you are wielding a sword. It indiscriminately hits every space in a radius of 1 around you. Possibly if you take passive damage you stop spinning, but possibly not.
When selecting top-10 names from the high score list (for player monster statues, etc), continue looking down the list until 10 unique player names have been found, rather than choosing from the top 10 scorers. So if the top 10 scorers are cluttered up with the same player in multiple runs, there will still be some name diversity.
Fix vampires shifting into fog clouds as an escape method because this doesn’t currently work with fog clouds being slow and easily killed.
Amulet versus magic, which gives magic resistance when worn but also makes it difficult for the wearer to use magic, translating to a sharp penalty in spellcasting rates and, depending on the implementation, reducing or nullifying the effects of magic items.
Wishing for a “mystery box” gives a large box containing 4 (or however many is balanced) completely random items. (Using just a regular mkobj() call; it won’t generate items which are not normally generatable because this is likely to cause bugs.)
As a Peter Pan reference, produce “You hear a faint ticking noise” occasionally and prior to the normal output when stethoscoping a crocodile. Alternatively, produce this noise very rarely when a crocodile is anywhere on the level or near the player. Possibly only if the crocodile’s monster ID number matches a rare condition, like being a multiple of 100.
“Organic” anthole themed room: instead of using a rectangular room, it disrupts its edges so as to not look manmade. Then the room type is specified as anthole to stock it with ants.
“Dragon hoard” themed room: containing a big pile of gold scattered within a radius of 2-3 tiles around its center point, with larger stacks of gold closer to the center of the pile. The pile may also contain a few additional items: random gems, a ring or amulet, (if in an object-materials-implementing variant) a gold version of an item that is eligible to be gold. Atop the center of the pile is a dragon, or possibly a few adult dragons all of the same species, either asleep or flagged as waiting, with possibly a few dragon eggs of the same species and/or a couple baby dragons.
New branch named “The Ancient Library”. It is likely accessed by portal from the main dungeon rather than stairs. It contains some spellbooks and a smaller number of scrolls, which serve as the main loot of this branch, but there aren’t too many of them in order not to be unbalancing. The level design makes it still visibly a structure, but fairly ruined with collapsed walls and such.
The branch is populated by monsters of a new species that either serve as the guardians of the library, or have moved in to inhabit it after its decline. They make for a difficult fight, and compounding the problem, taking a book will awaken and anger all of them on the current level. (Or the books spawn embedded in the walls – bookshelves, and you need to kick the walls to get them out, which triggers this.) There is no singular boss monster in the branch, nor is there any singular reward item.
If bookworms (#1793) are implemented, they also appear in this branch.
Chaotic gods in FIQHack should sometimes grant potions of wonder as a sacrifice gift.
If you have not killed any gnolls by the time Yeenoghu shows up in the game, there is a slight chance he will be peaceful.
Wizards shouldn’t have a Skilled skill cap in polearms; they’re not supposed to be great with martial weapons like that.
As a potential Tsurugi of Muramasa buff, extend its bisection to Large monsters. Huge and Gigantic monsters still can’t be bisected, but Large ones (a fairly numerous set of monsters) become vulnerable to its main special attack.
When the game calls for a message to be shown based on its string id in the quest.lua data file, it also supports running a function that tests whether the hero is blind and/or deaf and returns different string messages accordingly. (E.g. a lot of quest messages describe the surroundings, which doesn’t make sense if you’re blind.)
Statues can generate made out of wax. If the player tries to apply a digging tool to a wax statue, “You hack the statue to pieces.” and it drops several candles in addition to any contents. If the statue is hit by fire, it melts and drops any contents.
Create six new semi-elemental planes that each corresponds to a pair of Elemental Planes. These don’t have to behave exactly like the combination of the two elements (e.g. the Plane of Water and Plane of Earth intersection doesn’t have to be a Plane of Mud); the inspiration for them is levels like SpliceHack’s additional semi-elemental planes.
Randomize the order of the elemental planes, and insert the appropriate three semi-elemental planes between each pair of elemental planes. This leads to an End Game that is highly different from game to game, but has continuous transitions at the same time.
Give a YAFM for attempting to apply a bullwhip towards an adjacent space containing a horse corpse: “Stop beating that dead horse!”
If an (unlit) potion of oil breaks on your head, you get slippery fingers.
Dipping Frost Brand into water potions (or possibly any freezing-eligible potion, which is most of them) should freeze and shatter the potion. Likewise for Fire Brand, which should boil potions and ignite (but not explode) oil it’s dipped into.
By wielding a floating eye corpse and either applying it at monsters or hitting monsters with it, you can paralyze the monsters, provided they can see you. As a potential downside, you might paralyze yourself if you stumble or fall into a pit while wielding it while non-blind.
Gehennom should have various ambient level sounds, less frequent than special room level sounds since there is more Gehennom area when the player will hear them. They could include screams, wails, tortured cries, sounds of evisceration, and evil chanting (and more).
When you throw a gem at a unicorn, it may vanish entirely, like a nurse does, instead of teleporting somewhere else on the level. This makes it unreliable to farm luck from them indefinitely and still have them around to kill later to get the horn and all the gems back.
The chance of vanishing could even be based on the number of gems it is already carrying, so that it won’t or is unlikely to vanish after throwing it a couple of gems but gets more likely after giving it lots of gems.
Hitting a statue trap with cancellation removes the trap, so that it is just a regular statue.
Artifact bow that acts like an infinity bow in Minecraft: if you have bow-compatible ammo in your quiver, it shoots a phantom copy of that ammo (never multishotting) without using up the real ammo. When this phantom missile hits the floor, it disappears.
Candy bars should be colored something besides brown, since there are already so many brown comestibles. The wrapper color could be anything really, but blue or bright blue might be a good choice since there is currently no food with that color.
Minor artifact ring of regeneration whose main ability is not making you hunger any faster than normal while wearing it.
Bump the weight of towels up to 5; they have a lot more cloth than a blindfold and should not weigh the same as one.
If you trigger a rolling boulder trap for which a boulder didn’t generate because there was no room to put it, a boulder may fall out of the ceiling instead (and the trap is removed) similar to a cursed scroll of earth. On early levels, it doesn’t have to fall on the same square as the trap.
Also, rolling boulder traps (beyond early levels) that do find appropriate launch locations may generate with no preexisting boulder on one of those positions. When triggering the trap for the first time, a boulder drops out of the ceiling on one of the launch positions and then begins rolling across the trap.
All of the healing potions heal a slightly variable fraction of your max HP, with some reasonable minimums and maximums, in order to keep healing and extra healing relevant beyond the early game. Proposed quantities are:
When you’re in an engulfer with a digestion attack, the digestion attack hits every turn regardless of the monster’s actual speed. This is because most digesting engulfers are slow, and it takes way too long for their digestion to become actually threatening.
Reduce the spell level of magic mapping, but also reduce its utility: instead of mapping the entire level at once, you choose a point to center your divination on and a circular or square area, with a radius dependent on your divination skill, gets mapped. After this change, it might be similar enough to clairvoyance to be merged with that spell (the difference with clairvoyance is that it currently always centers on the player; perhaps the new merged spell could instead scale with skill by having a fixed mapping area, but the distance you can target it at increases with skill level.)
This does not change the scroll of magic mapping behavior, which still maps the whole level.
Luckstones, when wielded or thrown at a monster, have an inherent +3 to hit.
A spell or other magic item or ability that can be used to apply an effect to a monster that prevents them from teleporting, levelporting, or warping.
Turn the wand of cold Asmodeus has into a special souped up artifact wand of cold, perhaps one that can cast cone of cold when zapped and does not lose charges if Asmodeus is the one zapping it.
A shop type which is one of those magical shops that you only see once and isn’t there when you go back, in which you can buy only one item. One possible implementation is that after buying an item, you are teleported out of the shop or even levelported to a nearby level, and then the shopkeeper and the rest of the items in the shop are removed, as well as possibly the entire room. There may be some need to prevent normal methods of theft from the shop. Alternatively, you could be permitted to buy multiple items, but the shop disappears after you leave.
Revamp Gehennom by making its main branch substantially shorter, a “hub” branch containing stairs or portals to a bunch of sub-branches containing demon lords’ lairs. Most of the lairs are optional, but at least some of them are required in order to enter the Sanctum. Each demon lord that you don’t kill, however, incurs a unique, harsh effect or debuff on you once you have the Amulet. Suggested ones include:
Piercers can actively perform their falling attack from an adjacent space, rather than passively waiting for the player to step onto their space. After falling, they can only make a weak claw attack against the player, and instead of engaging will try to pathfind to a wall. Once they get adjacent to a wall, they return to the ceiling and become able to use their falling attack again.
A further change to make them more interesting than just discovering them and hitting them would be to make them too high to hit in melee while on the ceiling, unless the player is in a Huge form or larger.
Easter egg: a comestible that has very low weight and very high nutrition, thus a very good food to have. They generate very rarely, perhaps only 1-3 per game on average, and generate exclusively in hidden spots: in chests, closets, and vaults, the dead ends of mazes, beneath sinks (revealed when you step onto the sink), in trees (revealed either when you step next to the tree or kick it), etc. The glyph is brightly colored, perhaps purple.
Samurai who twoweapon a katana and wakizashi should get some small bonus to damage or alignment record or similar. Though since they start the game able to do this, it would have to be a small bonus.
Eating a bag of holding confers temporary intrinsic hunger, and eating a bag of tricks confers temporary intrinsic aggravate monster.
When you are hit by a digestion attack, any corpses you are carrying in open inventory may be instantly digested by the monster and disappear, or else become partially eaten. (If the corpse is a cockatrice corpse, it might stone itself, or maybe that wouldn’t happen because of all the stomach acid?)
The Chaos quest should be stocked with a number of chaotic, randomness-inviting things, such as chameleons and tins of tengu meat.
Eating a clove of garlic causes, or can cause (not necessarily a 100% chance), monsters on the level to flee from you for a little while, identical to the “bad breath” fountain quaff effect.
The game tracks players with the highest death counts, and ghosts sometimes pull their names from the top 10 of this list.
Anthill: a dungeon feature found exclusively in antholes that acts as a monster spawner for ants. The ants produced will all be the same type as the anthole is, and ants will not spawn out of it when there are already a certain number of ants in the area. Eventually it stops spawning ants (perhaps with a system where it rolls every time it creates a new ant and if it fails the roll it increments an internal counter; the higher the counter gets the lower the chance of spawning more ants), or the player can prematurely destroy it by digging it.
To compensate for the extra ants spawned, antholes could no longer be packed full of ants.
Fort Ludios has a constant level difficulty, of perhaps 20, not varying based on where the game internally decided to place its floating branch.
Dragons that generate at level creation time also spawn a hoard of gold beneath them, similar to how concealing monsters generate items to hide beneath. Possibly, their AI recognizes the horde as theirs and they are reluctant to stray off of it or far from it as long as there is gold there.
Add an option that forces the hero to be rendered even when invisible and unable to see invisible; terminals may not reliably display a distinct cursor that allows the player to tell where they are.
Camelot Castle, the Knight quest home level, should have a stable containing a couple of peaceful saddled ponies or horses, which the player is free to tame, take, and use as steeds if their original one has died.
Certain high level spells require some minimum amount of skill in their school in order to be able to cast them at all. For instance, create familiar should be impossible to cast if you are not at least Basic in clerical spells, perhaps even Skilled, no matter what you do to improve your spellcasting odds.
Add a ‘configure’ shell script in NetHack’s root directory, which will send it through a rudimentary series of prompts about the user’s system that will get it to run the setup.sh script on the correct hints file. This allows NetHack to be built on unix-like systems from scratch with the conventional “./configure && make && make install” command.
Hitting a shambling horror with polymorph should not polymorph it into something else; instead it should rerandomize its stats and attacks.
This would be better if shambling horrors were randomized per monster rather than per species; it doesn’t make much sense to polymorph a horror on dungeon level 20 and a preexisting horror on dungeon level 17, or new horrors that haven’t even generated yet, get rerandomized.
Quicksand, either as a trap or terrain type (they both have advantages and disadvantages); stepping in makes you start sinking in like with lava, and if you don’t find some way to get out in time, you suffocate to death.
Carrying a substantial number of cursed items in your inventory has some denigrating effect on you. One suggestion is that enough cursed items counts as a negative luckitem similar to a cursed luckstone.
New option ‘spoilers’ or ‘spoiled’. When on, the game is free to enable a bunch of quality-of-life enhancements that spoil various parts of the game, such as auto-identifying wands based on their messages and sorting items into price tiers from price identification. Defaults to off.
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.”
Copper items should generally be colored orange, not yellow, since copper is closer to orange than yellow. (Possibly an exception for explicitly brass items such as the brass lantern, but that might get confusing.)
All quest artifacts, even coaligned ones, will evade your grasp if you have not yet finished the quest. This is because they refuse to be handled by someone who hasn’t yet proven themselves.
Eating the corpse or tin of a jumping spider should (have a chance of?) conferring temporary intrinsic jumping on the player.
If a gold golem is hit by a gold-stealing attack, some gold pieces are put into the attacker’s inventory and the golem loses some of its maximum HP.
Spellcasting monsters, at least the mid to upper range ones, should be able to cast sleeping at the player.
Shallow water shouldn’t be a free and easy method of diluting potions infinitely. Instead, it should have a chance of contaminating or polluting the potion (or turning it to a potion of sickness), where polluted potions can’t just be re-dipped to dilute them to water or cancelled back to water. Or instead of dealing with polluted potions, just have a chance of losing the potion entirely.
5% of the time when Medusa is decapitated, she drops a “head of Medusa” item which can be wielded and used to petrify monsters, but only if the hero is blind (attempted use of it when not blind will petrify the hero).
Using #monster when polymorphed into a demon allows you to call for hell-p from other demons directly, without needing to hit an enemy in melee. This uses up some Pw. It may not work 100% of the time, but will cost Pw regardless of whether or not it works. Another possible restriction is that you need to be next to a known enemy for it to work.
A new game ending where you can take an fake Amulet of Yendor into the Planes. This is only achievable by having your fake Amulet be unidentified, and have some combination of high Luck, being crowned, and high alignment record. The idea is that your god is so blinded by your excellence that they allow you into the Planes without checking that the Amulet is real.
In the Planes under this scenario, the Wizard’s harassment stops (if indeed he was harassing you at all; you don’t need to kill him or do the invocation to get into the Planes under these conditions).
When you get to Astral and offer the fake Amulet, you trigger a different ending in which your mistake is realized and you are condemned to become one of the player monsters roaming around on Astral until the hero with the real Amulet shows up.
When hallucinating and pushing a boulder, the word “boulder” should be replaced in the message with a random object. Possibly this should be extended to any message using xname() to format an object.
Remove the ability of non-blessed stethoscopes to tell you information about undead, so that only a blessed one will work on them. The message for trying to apply it to them is “Foo doesn’t seem to have any vital signs.”
All arrows created by the Longbow of Diana come pre-identified so you can readily see their enchantment.
Very rarely (perhaps 0.3% of the time), a soldier ant will generate in a barracks instead of a soldier.
New shop type “boutique”, which only generates in very small rooms (otherwise it’s converted to a general store) and sells not-very-useful items at highly inflated prices. Also, other sorts of shops that are suitably small and have no useful items in them may be converted to boutiques. They have unique level sounds, such as “You hear a watch ticking” and “You hear someone pouring a cup of coffee”.
Track the major consultations you receive from the Oracle; you will never get a consultation you already received in the current game unless you have received them all.
Wands of light should light up when wielded (in a radius of perhaps 3 or 2). To give them some limiting factor, they either lose a charge each time they are wielded, or there is a fixed chance per turn it’s lit that it loses a charge. It’s been noted that this would provide an incentive to try wielding every wand in order to determine if it’s light, but this may not be a big problem.
Proposals to address the situation where all the candles needed for the invocation are guaranteed in Vlad’s Tower. The current situation removes frustration but many players feel that it’s trivialized, whereas the system in 3.4.3 was frustrating because it was a common occurrence to have to backtrack to the Mines for candles after forgetting they needed to be collected, or worse, having to wish for them because the game didn’t generate 7 of them.
Exploding a bag of holding gives you a respectable amount of experience points (because you certainly learned something from that experience, and it would be hilarious to accidentally level up by doing this.)
Worn rings are targeted last for destruction to electricity damage: they’ll only disintegrate if you’re not carrying any other rings to lose.
Allow lua files to specify a trap as “mapped”/”known”/”seen”/”premapped”/”visible”; when the trap is generated it will set its tseen value so that the player instantly sees it from a distance, like how most holes work.
Because lua scripts can be loaded after level creation time in NetHack 3.7, take advantage of this to make some of the quests be throwing a feast for the player after they return to the home level with the quest artifact or with the nemesis dead, with all hostile monsters killed, a bunch of food spread around, etc.
Intelligent artifact weapons reduce their damage (perhaps nullifying any bonus damage given by the artifact, or dealing half damage) if you are crossaligned, have negative alignment record, or your god is angry at you.
You can apply a wielded war hammer to smash a door down. If the hammer is an artifact, it gets a bonus to the speed or success rate.
Invoking Vorpal Blade gives some sort of message about its keen edge gleaming, indicating that its next hit will have a high critical ratio (perhaps 10% instead of 5%) for increased chance of decapitation.
When a foocubus drains an experience level from you, it gains a level. (This doesn’t work the other way around because the hero doesn’t have level-draining powers).
In variants where a monster can grab the Amulet on Astral and attempt to ascend with it: they gain the ability to shove monsters out of their way while pathfinding towards their high altar, but they are grudged by all monsters who are crossaligned with them.
When you read a magic marker, instead of a single fixed string, it gives a monster-based pigment. E.g. “Cockatrice Yellow”, “Hell Hound Red”, “Gremlin Green”.
Doppelgangers that transform into player monsters may adopt a name from the top 10 list when they do so (but not always). When they transform into something else, they discard the name.
If you pray to your non-starting god while wearing opposite alignment, your original god may try to blast the helm off your head. This can have several possible outcomes:
Ring of increase range, which makes all beams, rays, and projectiles you fire travel farther than normal. Possibly chargeable.
A monster carrying a loadstone is slowed to half or 2/3 of its normal speed.
Eating a eucalyptus leaf always produces the message “You’re having a hard time getting it down” regardless of how satiated you are.
If you directly steal from a shop, even if you pacify the shopkeeper afterwards, the word goes out and other shopkeepers may then charge you higher markups. (Even if you killed the shopkeeper, but not if you killed them without actually stealing anything - perhaps the Kops are sharing this information around).
Dipping low boots into a potion of levitation turns them into levitation boots.
Vampire bats that are actually transformed vampires treat their bite attack as if it drains life (as with a regular vampire’s bite) rather than dealing physical damage.
If you are wearing kicking boots, you can kick even when your legs are wounded.
Artifact whistle Nightingale, based on the Nightingale Robber from Russian folklore. When blown, it causes various effects to monsters in a sizeable radius: stunning, confusion, scaring, possibly even instadeath if they are weak monsters or have low HP (or just HP damage). Any of those effects can also happen to the player. The player is guaranteed to become deaf for several dozen turns from blowing the whistle.
As a limiting factor, it will only cause these effects if blown when its invoke timer is ready, and blowing it will internally set its invoke timer as if you invoked it. If blown when its invoke timer is not ready, it will just behave like a regular whistle (and no “ignoring you” message will be shown).
If a monster with an associated glob comes into contact with it (by moving onto it, or if someone hits it with the glob) it absorbs the glob and heals HP proportional to the glob’s weight. If this would heal it beyond its max HP, it gains a point of max HP.
Ring of criticality, a charged ring that has an (enchantment)% chance per hit of changing the result of the die roll for that hit into a critical hit that deals double damage (and will trigger effects such as Vorpal Blade decapitation). If negatively enchanted, it has the same chance of changing the die roll into a critical failure that deals zero or 1 damage.
Wizard mode command #wizforget, which unidentifies all carried items to the greatest extent possible.
Everything in wizkit.txt that the player gets in a wizard mode game is automatically identified at the game start.
Wishing for “identification” gives you a full inventory identification.
If polymorphed into a voluntarily exploding monster (e.g. a sphere or light), the player can #monster to explode without actually attacking anything. (You can already do this by forcefighting thin air, so this would just add an additional way to do it and a prompt when you polyself.)
Every time a line is printed containing two adjacent spaces, the message is broken into two separate plines so that the (probably separate) statements can be broken up by the windowport better.
Assuming the Wounds Patch (which allows Healers only to see the injury status of monsters from a distance) is implemented: Add a head mirror tool, which is worn in the eye slot, or possibly the helm slot. When equipped, non-Healers can see wounds on monsters like Healers can.
When a monster has multiple spears, it considers them as ranged weapons and will throw them. When it only has one left, it stops considering them as a ranged weapon and will only use it in melee.
Stethoscopes should be made of plastic and colored black, not iron and colored cyan.
Buff Cavepeople by giving them a direct boost to carrying capacity beyond what they get from their Str and Con, to the point that they can carry more weight than any other role.
A monster spell ‘curse weapon’ or ‘curse equipment’, a clerical spell that is a weaker version of curse items: it only curses one item, but selects from among worn and wielded objects. If the target isn’t wearing or wielding anything, it will target one piece of equippable gear from their inventory, or failing that a random item.
A ‘spoilers’ option that toggles on certain interface features that assume a player is spoiled. Defaults to off. An example of such a feature is FIQHack’s automatic identification of a wand of teleportation when the player makes an engraving vanish with it and has already identified the other wands that do so.
Artifact ring of warning that, in addition to providing warning, has some of the properties from UnNetHack’s Clarent. When worn, it shows all pets on the level, wherever they are, and can be invoked to increase tameness of all pets in line of sight.
Tulpas, a W-class monster that is exclusively summoned by casters, especially monk-types and Master Kaen, with several of Kaen’s appearing through the monk quest. They take on some of the properties of their caster, and leave no corpse.
Items that generate with an object property should be eligible for the chance of generating with a name even if they’re only +0.
Allow themed rooms to be specified as joined to the rest of the level, but only at preexisting doors on the edge of the room, and the level generator should not create new doors to connect it to the rest of the level. Internally, this means expanding a room’s ‘joined’ variable from a boolean to a larger type that can hold a third value. This would be useful for making themed rooms where it’s desirable to connect them to the map only at specific points.
Ghosts and djinni can emerge from any bottle, not just potions with the randomized smoky and milky appearance. The rate at which they emerge is cut accordingly.
Corpses dropped by mummies take much longer than other corpses to rot away, since they are all dried out. (They are still unsafe to eat and unable to be sacrificed from the moment they drop, though.)
Make fire giants (possibly only in the Valkyrie quest, possibly others) spellcasters who can only cast a fireball spell. Or, to avoid a flavor issue with giants being not very smart to be good at spells, flavor it as something other than a spell (it could also be implemented as a new attack type).
Candles of invocation have their effect trigger some smallish number of turns (maybe 5-20) after it’s lit, so that you can’t rely on having whatever their effect is available in a pinch and have to plan out its use beforehand. When the effect triggers before the candle is out of fuel, it is consumed anyway.
Casting spells decreases your spell memory by a small amount but one that would be significant if you cast the spell heavily.
Elvish players start the game with knowledge of one low-level enchantment spell that is not sleep or charm monster. They do not start with a spellbook of that spell, though. (If they get the same spell in a spellbook as a Wizard, it could either choose a different one or just not count.)
Make the ring of warning chargeable. A higher enchantment increases the radius in which you are warned, with a +0 ring giving around half to two-thirds of the radius it currently provides.
Add a new monster spell “grease” which inflicts you with slippery fingers.
Artifact wand of fire which casts fireballs instead of rays. (Where a normal wand would zap a ray, this instead casts the Basic form of the fireball spell without needing Pw or knowledge of the spell.)
Artifact magic candle (requires magic candles to have been implemented) which casts a version of the fireball spell (at Basic level, with a single explosion) when invoked.
Taming attempts on sandestins, including things such as throwing food at them to eat if they are a domestic animal, are measured against the sandestin’s stats, not its current form’s stats, because they are intelligent.
You can tell shapechanger pets to change shape (but not what to turn into) via chatting to them.
You can’t name Sting until you have killed a spider. (This could be limited to after you kill a giant spider, but by that point most players probably don’t need Sting.)
When you would shatter an enemy’s weapon with a two-handed weapon, and the enemy’s weapon is a bow, replace the shattering message with one about cutting/snapping the bow string. If it’s not a bow, but it’s made out of a non-brittle material such as metal, change it to “Foo’s weapon is sundered from the force of your blow!”
The rings of the Nazgul generate with names corresponding to 1 through 9 in Elvish (Black Speech would be better but doesn’t have known words for most of the numbers).
There may be an extant patch for this somewhere, but it wasn’t able to be located.
Make the game able to bind the arrow keys (and other escape sequences like home/pageup) to commands. These keys send an escape character plus some other characters following it. Since escape is currently a no-op, it would now instead go into “listening mode” for those character sequences, and be able to parse them.
The downside is that it would now be impossible to distinguish this from hitting Escape followed by the other characters sent afterwards.
When you hallucinate, you see phantom enemies that aren’t really there. They may or may not appear to move, but don’t actually exist and will disappear if interacted with.
One way to do this could be to make invisible I monster symbols affected by hallucination, and randomly place them around the player when they hallucinate.
A minor artifact that turns water into booze. Potentially has an affinity to Priests and they receive it as a sacrifice gift somewhat more often.
Having multiple sources of polymorph control reduces the chance of the controlled polymorph reverting you to your original form by 80% for each source. Thus, wearing one ring of polymorph control produces a 20% chance (as it does currently), and wearing two rings produces a 4% chance.
Angels (or other “blessed” monsters) that make bodily contact with undead monsters deal d4 bonus damage to them, just the same as if a blessed weapon hit them.
Augment struct mkroom with a short string (perhaps 3 or 8 characters). The purpose of this string is to store a unique identifier for non-special types of room, in particular different themed room types. This can then be used later in the game (e.g. for printing an entry message in certain themed rooms) without interfering with the actual room types as far as level generation is concerned.
This uses a string identifier mainly because that makes it straightforward to initialize the string in Lua, versus a numeric constant the name of which would not be exposed to Lua.
Dungeons levels generate random, small Sokoban “rooms” - actually themed rooms, never on a path between the two stairs, possibly using “diagonaloban” rules which permit boulders to be rolled in any direction. There is a minor prize in each room at the end of the puzzle.
Internally, rooms like this should have their own room type, which will help with putting in anti-cheating measures:
It’s unclear what the methods to prevent the standard forms of cheating (breaking boulders, reading scrolls of earth, carrying boulders as a giant, etc) should be. Possibly they will just carry cheating penalties like normal.
Track the amount of time the player has spent on a given dungeon level. As it increases, random monster spawns gradually get less frequent (unless you have the demigod flag set, which overrules this) and more difficult, starting at one or two thousand turns spent on the level.
When the player does something that decreases the tameness of a pet, the amount of decrease should be doubled if the pet is intelligent and “weakly” cross-aligned (either the pet or the player is neutral and the other isn’t), and tripled if the pet is intelligent and “strongly” cross-aligned (the pet or player is lawful; the other is chaotic).
Unicorns always count as “intelligent” for these purposes (they’re not intelligent, but fundamentally understand alignment).
Potion of marksmanship: grants a temporary +10 increase in accuracy, but only for ranged combat.
Because green slime is so flammable, there should be some way to use globs of it as lamp fuel.
A small fraction of Kops should generate with bananas, for slipping on.
Fuzz the turn on which Luck times out by hashing ubirthday together with (turns/300), and taking the result modulo 300. This means that Luck will still time out once every 300 turns, but the player can’t predict the exact turn on which it happens, and figuring out the exact turn it happens in one iteration is unhelpful for any future iterations.
If Luck is timing out once per 600 turns, still do the above, but do nothing on every other iteration. Determining which set of “every other” iterations to use could also be done by hashing ubirthday and seeing if the result is odd or even.
Assuming dtsund’s dragon scale mail proposal has been implemented: Confer extra dragon scale extrinsics (similar to those found in FIQHack: speed for blue scales, free action for orange scales, etc) if and only if the player is wearing dragon-scaled armor and a matching set of scales in their cloak slot.
The player’s natural HP regeneration rate is brought down to zero upon taking any damage or non-damaging hit, then gradually increases over time back to its full rate.
Scale the damage from an anti-magic field (caused by having MR so you don’t get drained of magic power) to your maximum HP, or possibly by your experience level, rather than a few d4s that are usually meaningless to any character with a few levels. Or have it be based on your Pw maximum, with a higher maximum incurring a larger amount of HP damage.
New “doomed” intrinsic, which can be given by late-game things such as demon lords (via something like SpliceHack’s dark speech). This intrinsic causes your Luck to be counted as -10 as long as it is active, overriding your actual luck and any luck items you have, not timing out. (It doesn’t actually change your Luck stat; just makes things that check Luck return -10. When it wears off your Luck reverts to what it was normally.)
When monsters shout to rally their allies to fight, Orctown orcs may choose a random hostile orc on the level (preferably one near them) and call the name of that orc specifically. This could be generalized to any monster giving a rallying shout with a named ally nearby.
New minor artifact, a weapon with either no or minimal bonuses, but which acts as a curse lightning rod rather like Magicbane: a curse items effect will hit only it and cause it to become cursed, unless it is already cursed in which case the curse items effect happens normally. Invoking it removes the curse from itself.
Give giant mimics an engulf digest attack; they’re certainly large enough to swallow you in one gulp.
Increase the armor delay for mummy wrappings to several turns, because unlike most cloaks you can’t just fasten it quickly.
In special rooms with zoo-like generation, meaning they generate a monster on every square, generate the monsters with MM_NOGRP to suppress group generation. This prevents a group from being one of the last things to spawn into the room and overflow into nearby spaces outside of it.
Rather than marathon mode using a fixed value of 999 HP, you can set an option to control how much HP is used. (If the option is not set, it will default to 999). The value should appear in both the xlogfile (so that tournaments can set some threshold of HP beyond which the game doesn’t count) and dumplogs.
Give soldiers (only those, not the higher ranks) javelins as a ranged weapon occasionally, in order to increase the availability of javelins in the game.
Leprechauns have a tiny chance, less than 1%, of dropping a credit card on death (or generating with one). Such a card will always be a “Yendorian Express - Gold Card” or “Shamrock Card” when read. They also are capable of stealing any credit card that says either of these things.
New special room “cursed graveyard”. Its initial generation is the same as a regular graveyard. The difference is that it generates undead monsters on open spaces in the graveyard (with messages like “A zombie claws out of the ground!”) at a much higher frequency than normal, so long as there is still a gravestone existing within the graveyard. When all gravestones in the graveyard are destroyed, the room converts to a normal graveyard and undead stop spawning.
Gravestone texts in a cursed graveyard don’t draw from the regular pool of gallows-humor messages. They instead use a separate pool of ominous, vengeful, and threatening messages.
Regular gravestone-destroying penalties do not apply if the gravestone being destroyed is in a cursed graveyard.
Priests can destroy a headstone in a cursed graveyard by #turning while standing on it.
When attacking certain amorphous monsters (could be just puddings and gelatinous cubes, but also maybe jellies and other blobs) in melee, it is possible for your weapon to get stuck in the monster, yanking it out of your possession and putting it in the monster’s inventory. Unless, of course, the weapon is cursed.
Extend the warning scale up to level 9 (and possibly down to level 0) to offer more granular information on warning threats. However, provide an option to keep the scale at its old 1-5 for players who want to assign monsters to the 6 through 9 glyphs.
Warning levels should either be set directly in the permonst struct or be mapped from a monster’s difficulty somehow, instead of being based on the monster’s level; it’s rather silly when a monster gets drained a level and decreases in warning intensity, when it likely hasn’t lost any offensive capability.
New magic beam trap, which fires a magic beam (probably implemented as a magic missile ray, or possibly a random ray type) from a fixed point several squares away in one of the eight directions towards the trap square.
Internally, the fixed point is stored in the trap’s launch coordinates, and the ray type should probably be stored as the appropriate wand type in launch_otyp.
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.
Cavemen wielding clubs get damage bonuses that increase with their skill in club, to make up for clubs’ awful damage.
With greasy fingers, you are incapable of playing flutes or harps, which require fine finger control. Attempting to do so just gives a message “Your fingers slip on the strings/valves”.
Possibly, attempting to play any instrument with greasy fingers makes you fumble and drop it, since even things like horns and bugles which don’t require finesse still need to be held.
Playing a cursed tonal instrument accepts your input sequence of notes, but then prints “Your finger slips. You play ‘XXXXX’ instead”. This is either a random sequence of notes, or a sequence which is mostly the same as your intention but with one or two notes shifted slightly.
Either guarantee that the potion of healing will be smoky for Healers, or guarantee that it will never be smoky. Guaranteeing them to be smoky is basically an open invitation to startscum them, though.
Add levitation as an object property, so that you can have weapons and equipment that makes you levitate while it’s equipped.
When someone gets lifesaved, the livelog should say “averted being [killed by whatever]” using the formatted killer the game already computes, rather than the generic “averted death”.
When you anger a peaceful monster capable of speech, it may call for help. Other peaceful monsters of the same monster class within a fairly large radius may wake up and, if awake, will become angered.
Make the potion of restore ability alchemizable somehow. Possibly with something non-straightforward but making use of junk potions, like healing + sickness.
Certain monsters can intercept [some of] the missiles you shoot at them. This can involve catching arrows and other non-ammo things like spears, maybe even Mjollnir. It might be a good candidate to put on certain boss monsters or other “skilled combat” monsters such as the Yendorian Army.
Rubbing a moonstone, or perhaps being in the presence of a lit moonstone, forces werecreatures to change into their were form, including the player if they have lycanthropy.
In variants implementing a wand of water or other methods of shooting water: a solid creature with eyes that is hit by a shot of water has a fairly small chance of being blinded.
If a spear trap is adjacent to a wall, its associated messages refer to the spears shooting out of the wall.
In variants that have multiple Norse-based non-quest-artifacts, valkyries recieve a randomly chosen one of them as their first sacrifice gift.
The potion of orcish war juice should be at least situationally useful for heroes of any race. One way of doing this is to make it more in line with the portrayal of a similar substance in The Lord Of The Rings: have it give useful short term buffs to anyone (minor healing, cure wounded legs, one point of increased strength) with long-term penalties such as a boatload of abuse. Meanwhile, the potion remains a good thing for orcish characters to drink: they get much more healing, bigger stat boosts, and no long-term penalties (though there may be short-term penalties such as mental stat reductions).
“Partial” magic mapping from a cursed scroll maps a contiguous chunk of about 1/7 of the map, rather than random tiles.
The “vitamin” effect of a pill shouldn’t give a big chunk of nutrition. It should give a token amount of nutrition (say 10 or 20), but its main effect should be to exercise all attributes that can be exercised several times.
When a pill is generated, its effect is pre-randomized and stored in the pill, and it will only stack with pills of the same type.
While you are hallucinating, any parrot corpses you come across are rendered as “ex-parrot” instead of “parrot corpse”.
If you have an autoreturning artifact wielded, and nothing quivered, using the ‘f’ command will throw the artifact, without making you have to use the t command then select its inventory letter.
Occasionally when a monster decides to use a teleportation wand as a defensive item, and the level is not non-teleport, it decides to zap you instead of itself.
Add a random fountain effect that heals you for a small amount. Magic fountains may heal you for a larger amount (if you are below full HP) and become nonmagic in the process with the standard “wisp of vapor” message.
Wearing cursed rings causes you to hunger slightly faster than if they weren’t cursed.
Add more sources of nausea, particularly in the late game, because it’s an underutilized debuff that only really is relevant early. Proposed sources:
Most of these increased sources of nausea should be subjected to some sort of (low-chance) Constitution saving throw so that characters with better Constitution have an advantage.
Magic collar, an amulet without a randomized appearance, which you can apply to a pet to make it wear it, assuming it has a neck. The pet then becomes visible to you at all times while it’s on your level (similar to seeing it with telepathy) and possibly tracked in #overview if it’s not on your level. Farlooking a pet wearing a magic collar shows HP and other additional information as if you had used a stethoscope on it.
Not specified what effects there would be, if any, if the player wears the magic collar.
Replace Cavemen’s quest artifact with scales from the Chromatic Dragon (their quest then becomes “kill the dragon that is terrorizing our people” instead of “fetch the artifact from the dragon who stole it”). The scales only drop when she is killed, rather than her being generated with them (thus, they can’t be stolen). The scales could either be implemented simply as a base item akin to chromatic scales in UnNetHack which provide a cocktail of resistances, or as an artifact. If implemented as a non-artifact, the Caveman role will have no associated quest artifact.
The scales should NOT be enchantable into scale mail. The pile of resistances is good enough.
Golems are particularly resistant to being tamed, because they have words in/on their head instructing them what to do; magical taming basically has to overpower that and make them do something else.
If blessed, the scroll of magic mapping reveals the vibrating square.
Spellbooks that you have identified but haven’t actually learned display a “(level n)” on them to indicate the spell level.
A monster in the n or perhaps W classes whose main gimmick is that they will dodge or short-range teleport out of the way whenever they see an attack coming. In order to fight them effectively, you can’t be straightforward in attacking. You can use displacement, ray-bouncing, or invisibility (but they’ll recognize you’re using that pretty fast and adjust tactics accordingly).
Inhaling vapors from a potion of gain level produces a message like “You smell hard work” or “You smell elbow grease” (perhaps if hallucinating), granting you 10% of the experience points needed to advance to the next level. Monsters may be similarly affected.
Note that the 10% is calculated just based on the level thresholds and your own experience points don’t matter (only your current level). If you are level 5, with level 5 reached at 120 points and level 6 reached at 200 points, you will always get 10% of (200-120) = 8 points.
Define a special filling algorithm which adds walls to any space to tile it with small hexagons. When a beehive generates, use this algorithm to fill it with hexagons in order to make it look like a honeycomb.
Artifacts have a minimum XL associated with them. You can’t get a given artifact through sacrifice until you are at least its defined minimum XL.
When a cursed unicorn horn makes you nauseous and about to start vomiting, print a message “You feel nauseous.”
Armor can no longer be enchanted with a +/- number that affects AC. It always behaves as +0 with regard to AC. Instead, using a scroll of enchant armor on it gives it a random object property. A blessed scroll gives a good property, a cursed scroll a bad one, and an uncursed scroll any possible one (possibly including situational, double-edged properties that are not available as either “good” or “bad”).
Piercing weapons never generate as gold, because gold is a terrible material for maintaining a sharp point. Either that, or using a gold piercing weapon to attack things regularly decreases its enchantment.
Faction system, which lays the groundwork for more complex monster interaction rules:
Shambling horrors gain their own mextra struct which contains details of their statblock, rather than overwriting the shambling horror’s own statblock in the mons[] array. This allows horrors from a bones file to retain the characteristics they had in the bones game, alongside horrors from the current game that have different characteristics.
It may be possible to look up the attacks and abilities of a given shambler on the map by farlook.
Dipping a unicorn horn in acid dissolves and destroys the horn, producing a potion of healing.
Rainbow sphere, a monster that appears and behaves as if it were any other type of sphere with an exploding attack, but it does not die when it explodes; it becomes a different, random sphere type. There are two possibilities for how it can be killed: it could be brought down to 0 HP like normal, or it could have a limited number of incarnations, after the last of which it explodes and dies normally.
Internally, it should use newcham to handle its transformations; possibly it could be implemeted as a shapechanger capable of turning into any explodable e monster.
Zapping a wand of probing at a wall point-blank will inform you if there is any open space (walkable terrain, ignoring monsters/objects) between you and the edge of the screen in that direction. This can be used to find vaults and closets.
Hitting a shambling horror with a probing beam describes its stats and abilities.
Ring that provides magic resistance, but hinders your own spellcasting while you wear it by increasing your spell failure rates. Additionally, it gradually drains your magic energy while being worn. If you have no energy, the ring stops providing magic resistance.
Assuming an implementation that lets monsters wear rings and lets you pick and choose what your pet equips: You can have your pets wear an amulet of unchanging to make them immune from being polymorphed or shapeshifting; possibly the rings of sustain ability could protect from both as well, and having them wear protection from shape changers could be used to prevent them from shapeshifting, if they are a shapeshifter.
Zapping a wand requires touching it, so unless you are wearing gloves, this causes you to incur any effects, such as silver damage, from handling something of its material. Conversely, monsters usually won’t use a wand that will hurt them (unless they’re wearing gloves), and will incur material effects if they do.
New artifact, The Dwarf Bread, or possibly, The Battle Bread of B’hrian Bloodaxe. It is a cram ration, and if the object materials patch is present it is made of stone. It cannot be eaten; if you try you get a YAFM about how you really aren’t that hungry. Its main effect is that while carried with no other apparent food available, your nutrition will not decrease if it is at or below the threshold of going from Hungry to Weak.
You are considered to “have food available” if:
Possibly, it acts as a club when wielded, though being a cram ration it can’t be enchanted.
Engraving with a wand of create monster on top of a single-letter engraving has a chance of creating a monster of that letter class. (If it fails to do this, it will create random monsters as normal for the wand.)
Possibly, the chance of it succeeding depends on the engraving type: dust engravings almost never work, carved only seldom, burnt or graffitied offering the best chance.
Thrown sleeping potions should knock a non-sleep-resistant target out for more than only 0-1 turns.
Leprechauns have a one-way grudge against gold golems and gold dragons.
In variants that have both healthstones and the ability to eat rocks: Eating a healthstone gives the same effects as a potion of healing of the same beatitude of the stone.
(Note that eating healthstones for purely a maximum HP increase/decrease is also a possibility; SLASH’EM Extended implements this.)
While you are carrying the Master Key of Thievery, all door and container traps that you would have triggered are automatically removed without any triggers and probably not even any message indicating a trap was disarmed. If you actually want to trigger these traps for some reason, you can drop the Key or put it in a bag.
Possibly, these effects are suppressed when the Key is cursed (for rogues) or non-blessed (for non-rogues).
Add another variable to the eshk shopkeeper struct, which tracks how much they dislike you. If you break their door or rob them, they’ll continue to dislike you even after you compensate them. A shopkeeper who dislikes you strongly will inflate their prices. It may be possible to get them to stop disliking you by buying lots of things from them, but probably not.
The “Take out what?” container menu prints how many inventory slots you have available.
Assuming some sort of wind blast is implemented: There is a small percentage chance that any vortex monster hit by a wind blast is dispersed and instakilled. (Air elementals are immune to this, and they’re not vortices anyway.)
For variants with a “frozen in ice” status effect, this effect will be randomly inflicted a small fraction of the time on water-ish monsters (water elemental, water nymph, water troll) that get hit with cold damage.
The corpses of monsters killed by cold effects take longer to rot. (Maybe they should also be fresh for sacrifice longer than usual.)
All monsters in the f class take less damage from falling into a pit than usual. (Also applies to the hero if they are polymorphed into a feline.)
When an undead turning beam is zapped over the corpse of an undead monster that’s set to revive, the corpse is either destroyed outright or the revive timer is canceled so it won’t revive. (In this second scenario, zapping the corpse again with no revive timer set on it could resurrect it like normal.)
When generating corridors in the Dungeons of Doom, make corridor-drawing follow established corridor paths when possible instead of allowing long parallel double-wide corridors to be carved, because these are ugly.
A possible algorithm is to build the proposed corridor without editing the map, then identify all squares where the proposed corridor intersects with or is adjacent to existing ones, then pathfind to see which successive pairs of intersections are not already reachable, then only connect those pairs of intersections along the proposed path.
Another possibility is to let the corridors generate normally, and then do a postprocessing cleanup step, where all “unnecessary” corridor spaces are removed one by one until there are no more. An unnecessary space is defined as a CORR space where for each pair of orthogonally adjacent CORR spaces to it, the common corner of those orthogonally adjacent CORR spaces is itself a CORR. Though this may still produce some odd dead-end corridors.
The chance of you using a forge to repair an item is dependent on player stats rather than being a total random crap shoot.
Shopkeepers offer a lower sell price for a diluted potion, though they still sell the potion at full price.
Monster generation in the Mines automatically selects a G monster on 1/6 or 1/8 of all spawns. It’s odd that the branch’s lawful bias means that dwarves tend to appear over time, but not gnomes.
You can bash things with a wielded acid blob corpse. This inflicts acid damage to both you and the target and has a fixed, lowish chance of destroying the corpse.
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.
Sometimes when your god is angry at you, they will grant a gift when you sacrifice to them. But the gift is a negative item, because the god is trying to kill or mess with you.
Baby owlbears, unlike regular ones, aren’t specified as M3_HOSTILE, allowing them to occasionally generate peaceful for neutral characters.
Eating royal jelly while polymorphed into a killer bee turns you into a queen bee.
Invoking the Longbow of Diana gives you light arrows. These are a special object, weightless, created with the same enchantment as the Longbow, but attempting to enchant them further will fail (maybe making the enchanted arrows evaporate). If they leave your inventory for any reason, they will vanish. As a weapon, they are very powerful (to the point of probably instakilling most weaker monsters they hit). To prevent the player stockpiling them, the invoke effect will only top up the amount of them in your inventory to 5.
When a light arrow strikes a target or falls to the ground (and vanishes in the process), it permanently lights up the surrounding area.
If you are on a staircase/ladder (maybe a magic portal), your pets will always try to approach you (using the appr = 1 code path in dog_goal). Maybe, to make it a little less obvious have pets approach you (with a less than 100% chance) if you are merely near the stairs, with a diminishing chance of intervening to set appr = 1 the farther away you are.
Potion of regeneration. Grants some medium duration (maybe fifty to a hundred turns) of temporary intrinsic hungerless regeneration. Can be brewed using healing potions, perhaps, but should be fairly rare in terms of random generation.
For every historic statue you demolish on the Oracle level, she jacks up her prices.
A fleeing monster will not stop to pick up and equip items as long as it thinks you are somewhere nearby it.
Amorphous monsters that are huge or gigantic cannot squeeze under doors, or through iron bars.
When a container is polymorphed, its contents spill out onto its square rather than vanishing. The contents do not get polymorphed from the same source.
Reduce the nutrition value of eucalyptus leaves to 1 or 2; its current 30 is six times as much as a meatball, which makes no sense.
Player monsters do not generate with dragon scale mail until well after the difficulty where adult dragons spawn.
Imps’ taunting wakes up monsters nearby.
Nearlooking while standing on a crystal chest will show the contents of the chest, even if it remains locked (because it’s see-through). Possibly it only shows whether there is anything in the chest, or it’s empty.
Non-chaotic Priests get punished for having demon pets. The penalty is applied upon taming it and periodically from being on the same level as it, so that you can avoid penalties by abandoning it somewhere. (Internally, it should be applied when a tame demon moves; this means if you have multiple demon pets, the penalties stack up faster.)
Steam vortexes leave behind a trail of non-poisonous, temporary clouds behind them as they move. When they are killed, they burst into a large cloud centered on the spot where they died.
Some method to transform a mimic mimicking something into the actual thing it mimics. Possibly zapping it with a wand of polymorph.
If a special level fails to load, its fallback is not to make a maze - instead, it creates a simple large rectangular open area stocked with some random monsters and objects (and stairs, if relevant). It is named the “Bug Room”.
When you are gifted a spellbook by your god as a prayer boon, the book will always be your role’s special spell if you don’t already know it. (Possibly, they won’t give it to you if you have it identified, or they will give it to you if you know but have forgotten the spell.)
Convicts can uniquely get their god to unpunish them as a special prayer boon (or maybe sacrifice gift that replaces an artifact). This requires some prerequisite like a certain amount of alignment record, so that it can’t randomly happen only a few hundred turns into the game.
Potion of bug repellent; is poisonous or otherwise harmful to drink, but if you smash it over yourself, all insects (classes a, s, and x) will flee from you.
Track the amount of Luck increase you have had from a unicorn. If you steal gems from such a unicorn or kill a unicorn you have gotten Luck from, immediately revert that Luck increase.
Applying a key at a non-door and getting “You see no door there” shouldn’t take a turn. Using the open command at a non-door doesn’t take a turn, so why should keys be any different?
The spell of knock cannot be used to escape from an engulfer (the wand of opening, however, still can). Casting knock into an engulfer produces the message “You knock on the inside of [monster], but nothing seems to happen.”
Polymorphing into any Tiny monster, or a Small non-humanoid monster, allows you to get free of any iron chain around your ankle even if your new form still has legs.
Watchmen don’t yell at you to stop picking a lock if you’re using a key and therefore not picking the lock.
One of the random throne effects is to tame monsters nearby. However, monsters that normally generate in throne rooms are immune to this effect.
As a prayer boon, when you have a certain amount of unidentified objects in your inventory, your god can grant you identification.
Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.
To nerf the strategy of dropping the Amulet to cast spells, but not to the point of UnNetHack’s teleporting it anywhere on the level, it teleports randomly within a fixed radius every time it’s dropped. (Possibly on the Astral Plane it always teleports away from the nearest high altar, so you can’t use it to jump ahead.)
The Amulet drains your power when you cast spells, even if you’re not carrying it, if it’s on the ground nearby. The amount of power drained is proportional to your closeness to it.
Traps track the turn on which they were created in the trap struct. This is used to determine the age of a web; creatures will tear through an older web more easily, and with less strength, than a young one.
(Possibly, when you spend time off-level, this trap timestamp updates to account for that time, because time is frozen when you aren’t on a level.)
Love potion, an item that can tame monsters it is thrown at. Not specified what the effects of the player or monsters drinking it would be, or whether hostile monsters would throw it at you.
In variants that implement flavorful miss messages (“Your [armor] deflects the gecko’s attack”, etc), your T-shirt and body armor are not eligible to appear in those messages if there are other pieces of armor covering them.
Iron safe additions:
You occasionally abuse Charisma when trudging through raw sewage.
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.
Rangers get an alignment penalty for destroying (cutting down, burning, etc) trees.
Assign a different color to the Arch Priest so that he doesn’t appear identically to all the quest guardians milling around in the area.
It’s not possible to dip an item into a forge and have nothing happen. Something should happen, if only a message, in all cases.
Giants don’t get stuck in pits. They can step out without wasting any time on the space.
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:
For variants that have giants as a playable race: A giant who uses the m prefix before moving onto a boulder will step onto that boulder without pushing it, whether or not the boulder has been pushed up against a wall. (Monster giants step over boulders not against walls all the time.)
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:
Magicbane’s usual special effects don’t happen when a disenchanter is being hit by it.
Spell of disarming, a level 2 attack (possibly matter) directional spell, which disarms the first monster it hits, causing the weapon to drop. At Skilled and above, it makes the weapon go flying in the direction the spell was directed.
Cut down on the list of inediate monsters by defining some of them to be either herbivorous or carnivorous (note that the game uses carnivorous to mean “can eat meat” rather than “only eats meat”).
Herbivores:
Carnivores:
Make gelatinous cubes and quivering blobs amorphous, allowing them to pass through terrain like iron bars (however, gelatinous cubes should probably be blocked from squeezing underneath doors).
A new type of pudding or slime (though possibly a j or b monster) that has a high speed and good attack and splits whenever it takes damage. Its entire strategy is based on surrounding you with lots of clones that all have the same high attack as the original. Has a high monster difficulty; possibly, their attack stats and difficulty should be high enough that they will usually not show up until Gehennom.
This is unintentionally quite similar to Brogue’s fearsome pink jelly.
The castle chest containing the wand of wishing requires a special unique key to open (it can’t be opened any other way). The key is carried by a random lieutenant or captain generated on the level.
Giants occasionally generate with a rusty or very rusty two-handed sword or battle-axe, rather than a boulder to throw.
When a monster and a gas cloud are on the same space, and you are adjacent to that space and non-blind, the game should render the monster rather than the cloud.
Gold that disappears by losing it in fountains, to thrones, or by failing to read spellbooks, appears in the Fort Ludios vault.
Add lamias, which are very similar to nagas, but have hands and consequently can use items.
Your skill practice points gradually decrease with time on their own. They will decrease slowly enough that if you are using a weapon infrequently but regularly, you won’t notice anything, but if you go many thousands of turns without using a skill, you may need to retrain and bring it back up to speed. There should either be a message when your skill falls a level due to this decrease, or when you try to start using the skill again only to discover that your skill has decreased.
Pets will never pick up large, bulky containers, like large boxes, chests and ice boxes. For one, picking up a heavy bulky object is unrealistic for many humanoid pets; for another, usually when pets pick up large containers they are doing something annoying like moving around a stash container.
A new branch with infinite levels, whose level difficulty continues steadily increasing the deeper you go. Monsters killed do not drop anything, except that there is a very small chance, increasing with greater difficulty, of dropping a single wand of wishing. Unlike the rest of the dungeon, monster generation cares only about the level difficulty, ignoring the player’s experience level.
Levels in this branch are non-persistent. To prevent destroying any unique items, you either can’t bring them into the branch at all, or you are prevented from leaving a level in any way while they are on the level somewhere other than your person. Not determined what drinking a cursed potion of gain level would do.
One way to increase the challenge and prevent the hero from resting on the downstairs every level and starting each new level fresh is to suppress or remove natural HP regeneration in this branch.
Using an upstairs will take you back to the branch entrance, which may then close off forever. Possibly, 9/10 of upstairs will just crumble to nothing upon arrival in the level (whether this 9/10 is random or happens regularly every 10 levels isn’t determined). This makes it less easy to decide to bail out, though levelport or branchport would probably still work as escape items.
Not determined is to what degree the branch should enforce the player to spend time on each level. The three proposed options are:
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.
When you read a scroll of web, you are repeatedly given a getpos prompt for where you would like to create a web. The area in which you can create webs is identical to the scroll of stinking cloud in terms of line of sight and radius. Each position you select has a web placed on it (though if will fail if a web can’t be placed there for whatever reason, such as another trap already existing there). If you create a web on a square containing a monster, it is immediately entangled in the web.
The amount of webs you can place is 2 if the scroll is cursed, 6 if it is uncursed, and 10 if it is blessed.
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.
After the lamassu created from Sharur is killed, it reverts back into the artifact mace Sharur rather than just dying and never being usable again. You can also #chat to it to make it revert without dying.
Make arrow traps multishoot arrows at higher level difficulties.
Allow quest monster generation to be specified more precisely than having a fixed set of probabilities for two specific monsters and two monster classes (e.g. the Wizard quest has a certain distribution of vampire bats, B, xorns, W, and random monsters; it is not possible to change this distribution without changing it for every quest).
Implementation details: keep the definitions within struct Role, but do it with, say, a struct of { int, bool, int } repeated however many times a quest needs. The first int is the % chance out of a hundred for this struct to be selected. The third is either a PM_* monster index or S_* monster class constant. The second just informs it which of those options it is.
When generating a quest monster, the game can then roll a d100 and iterate through this array of possible monsters, decrementing as it goes, until it hits the right element; if it goes all the way to the end without hitting any monster or class it generates a normal random monster. (This is more or less the same as the algorithm for picking items generated in shops.)
Teleport vortex, a monster which moves around the level sucking up items into its inventory; items in its inventory are periodically teleported randomly around the level. If it engulfs the hero, it will do the same.
Make it so that you cannot rename ghosts. (The ability to rename ghosts makes a bunch of otherwise interesting ideas about interacting with a specific named ghost boring, because you can just rename any ghost to whatever you want).
Monsters pulled out of a bag of tricks are tame whether the bag is blessed or uncursed, and hostile only if it is cursed; however, all monsters created by it are temporary and disappear after several hundred turns.
When you cause a Yendorian Army monster to flee, nearby lower-ranking monsters may also flee. Possibly extend this to other ‘pack animals’ such as orcs or ants.
Artifact figurine, the gimmick of which is that it will always turn into a pet if not cursed, and the monster it turns into will fight anything without fear and maybe also has some extra buffs. When it dies, it reverts to the figurine, which immediately has its artifact cooldown set and can’t be applied again before the cooldown ends.
The inspiration for this idea was the Guenhwyvar panther figurine from the Legend of Drizzt, so possibly this artifact could just be named Guenhwyvar and be a figurine of a panther, which already exists in NetHack.
The gaze attack of an evil eye can destroy or reduce the beatitude state of luckstones you are carrying.
Delicatessens buy and sell tin openers, though they may not actually generate with any (it would internally appear on the list of the shop’s wares, but with 0 frequency).
Also, the canned food factory shop type in UnNetHack should buy and sell these.
It is impossible to multishoot anything when you are fumbling or have slippery fingers.
Remove sleep as a ray. Sleep wands (and monsters with sleep breath like orange dragons and Nazgul) instead shoot a beam of sleep. The sleep spell either also shoots a beam of sleep or causes sleep in an area of effect. Sleep could also possibly be a cone, spreading out in the direction it’s shot in, but cone spells remain unimplemented.
Remove covetous warping entirely. However, a change like this would need to take into account that it makes the vast majority of boss fights a lot easier and more boring in that they would tend to consist just of the hero and boss standing next to each other hitting each other until the boss dies, so it would need to come with some improvements to boss fights, such as more interesting tactical AI where they will disengage momentarily and multiple forms (i.e. you “kill” it and then it becomes stronger before finally being defeated).
If you are sufficiently skilled at a ranged weapon you are using (perhaps only Expert, possibly Skilled some of the time), you can shoot at non-tame monsters behind your pets and the ranged attack will pass through your pets’ squares silently without hitting them. (If there is no apparent non-tame monster behind the pets, it could either be assumed that you’re trying to hit the pets so the attack would hit them, or more generously it would just continue to pass through them.)
When a pudding moves onto a square containing a glob of its own type, it absorbs the glob and gains HP.
When removing a helm of opposite alignment, after restoring your original alignment, increment your god’s anger. Do it after removing the helm because then your original god gets angry at you for putting the helm on, not your new god.
If god anger is tracked separately for each god, it doesn’t need to be done this way; merely make your original god angry when you first put on the helm.
Bronze or brass golem. It would be either ’ or ’, depending on whether trying to avoid color conflicts with the gold golem.
Add several new never-randomly-generated cards, all of which are designed to give strong but short buffs, to you and more often allies. Though their frequencies are 0, they are sometimes dropped from monsters you and your pets kill, at the same frequency the keyed create monster cards do.
Other roles can write these scrolls if they want to or find them in bones, but they are generally intended to be less powerful than many existing scrolls so they shouldn’t steal generation probability from them.
Gently nerf the ability of pets to steal from shops, so that a player with a stack of meatballs or a magic whistle can’t clear out an entire shop. Suggested ideas:
If possible, work in a “pet-ty theft” YAFM somehow.
Assuming the fruit type of a tree has been made deterministic rather than random when kicked: farlooking a tree will describe what kind of tree it is, e.g. “apple tree”, “banana tree”. Fruit trees you have already kicked are described as “bare”, e.g. “bare apple tree”. Trees that never had any fruit, if implemented, are “maple tree” or “oak tree” or something.
Address the spell of magic missile being overpowered for such a low-cost spell by scaling its number of dice on skill level rather than experience level. One solution is to give it 2d6 per skill level, though this means that starting Wizards can cast it for 4d6 damage, which is rather high. Another option is to make it scale on powers of 2: 1d6 at Unskilled, 2d6 at Basic, 4d6 at Skilled and 8d6 at Expert, which has the same respectable maximum as the linear system.
Note that a 4d6 magic missile at Basic for 10 Pw may not be considered too powerful for an early game Wizard (it’s statistically slightly better damage-wise than force bolt but also has the benefits of being a ray), but this is contingent on the existing Pw regeneration formula, which keeps Wizards from casting spells much in the early game, remaining as is.
Change rogue’s special spell to knock rather than detect treasure.
In variants that have the Pirate role, this would free up the spell of detect treasure to be their special spell.
The Seven Deadly Sins can generate randomly in Gehennom. They are the only uniques that do this. There is no guarantee that you will encounter all of them, or even any of them.
Possibly make it so that you need to have committed the associated sin in order for them to spawn; if you have avoided being Satiated, Gluttony will never spawn, if you are celibate, Lust will never spawn, and so on.
You have a boosted chance in getting crowned if you are carrying the Amulet of Yendor. This possibly also nullifies the downsides of crowning, such as an extended prayer timeout.
Remove Wizards’ exclusive access to reduced-hunger and hungerless casting. Instead, tie spell hunger to how experienced you are with the spell; this could either track how many times you’ve cast that specific spell, or use your skill in the spell’s school as a proxy for that, or both. Intelligence could remain a factor, but the important thing is that non-wizard casters can also enjoy the benefits. (Note that Wizards, what with casting spells a lot more than other roles and having high spell skill caps, will still reap a larger benefit from this.)
If you are polymorphed into an inediate monster, you are physically incapable of eating.
Lava on the Plane of Fire regularly erupts in a spray of molten rock, which is extremely harmful and thus very bad for you if you are over it or adjacent to it when it happens. This makes it less appealing to just levitate or fly and completely ignore it.
In variants that have techniques, use the unused ! key as a shortcut for #technique.
Fire and frost horns, rather than shooting a bouncable ray of fire or cold, cause a powerful area fire or frost effect centered on you. The intensity diminishes the farther away from you it gets, but it hits every single creature in its fairly large radius (except you).
This effect could also freeze water and lava or evaporate pools in the radius of effect as well.
Famine’s attack gives you some amount of temporary intrinsic hunger in addition to the direct damage to your nutrition it already does.
Getting hit in the head by a gush of water from a rust trap, or being immersed in water, immediately removes any cream pie on your face.
On Easter, randomly generated user-nameable fruits will generate as “easter egg” rather than slime mold or whatever the user has customized them to be. Despite the name, it remains the exact same item in game and does not break vegan conduct.
Calculating whether a given day is Easter is a complex but solved problem; see here.
Brood wasp infection shouldn’t be curable with a unicorn horn. There should, however, be some way to kill off the infection by harming yourself, like drinking a potion of sickness or otherwise poisoning yourself.
Confused genocide doesn’t necessarily genocide your own species; it chooses a random genocidable species (which might be your own) and genocides that. If blessed, it picks a random monster class containing at least one genocidable monster (including @) and genocides that.
Another option is that confused genocide automatically picks a monster you have probably been thinking about, such as the nearest monster you can see (if you can’t see any other monsters, you can still see yourself!) or the last monster you saw or killed.
If someone steals the Amulet of Yendor and ascends on your altar, your god either still grants you immortality or at least an exalted position because after all, you did all the legwork getting it onto Astral.
Make magic cancellation not work with a fixed rate versus all types of attacks it works on throughout the entire game. Instead, scale a monster’s ability to penetrate your magic cancellation based on its level, base level, maximum HP, or hit dice.
Hit dice and base level are nice if it’s desirable for all monsters of the same species to have the same MC penetration, but hit dice and maximum HP are a little weird since they aren’t meant as offensive stats. Maximum HP and actual monster level are nice because they can be discovered with a stethoscope.
If you are knocked back when levitating, you should fly about 3 times as far, since you’re only being slowed by air resistance and not by e.g. your feet on the ground. This maybe shouldn’t apply to when you throw items when levitating.
When amorphous creatures pass through iron bars, they leave any items they are carrying embedded in the bars. Possibly, small items (as determined by weight) may still able to pass through, subject to a random chance.
Firefly, an a monster that is a light source, but a variable one. It ranges from being totally unlit to emitting light in a radius of 3 for a brief time. Is poisonous to eat, and with very low nutrition; has a mild bite attack. Tends to spawn in dark areas.
Internally, the deciding factor when a firefly should light up should probably use its mspec_used variable, which enables them to light up again when it hits 0. Also, cancelling a firefly should prevent it from lighting.
Remove the player’s Intelligence as a factor in determining the outcome of a foocubus interaction. Instead, use Intelligence (or possibly Wisdom) rather than Charisma as the determining factor in whether they are able to say no to having a piece of armor removed.
Applying a cursed bag of tricks may make it bite you rather than releasing a monster, making you drop the bag. This does not use a charge.
Digging down on a sink does not automatically stop when it becomes a fountain. Some of the time, it goes straight to creating pools, the “Water gushes forth” effect (as if it had momentarily become a fountain then you kept digging), and disappears.
Handling a cursed glob of green slime (picking it up, throwing it, etc) makes it start to slime you, using itself up in the process.
Giants can rip doors off their hinges, by picking them up, to use them as weapons. They do a lot of damage, and can only actually be wielded by giants. Possibly, kicking a door with excessive strength (and/or being a giant) not only breaks it off the hinges, but sends it flying to hit anything unlucky enough to be in its path.
There isn’t really an obvious object class for a ‘door’ object to be in, though WEAPON_CLASS is probably the most straightforward.
Possibly also allow this with sinks or trees. All of these heavy improvised weapons should probably use club skill.
Monsters on the receiving end of a one-way grudge flee from monsters that grudge them.
Rust monsters have a one-way grudge against iron golems.
Kills by cartomancers’ pets should also have the occasional chance to drop a card of summon monster. It should not just be limited to player kills, since this disincentivizes the whole strategy of using temporary summoned monsters to do most of the fighting.
Disenchanters’ touch attacks can cancel individual items in your inventory (not just armor) as well as merely reducing the enchantment of armor. Or possibly add a new R monster that has this ability, and leave disenchanters as they are.
If a system is implemented that tracks the amount of booze you have drunk throughout the game, lawful gods start to penalize the player for drinking too much after a while.
Croesus generates wearing a random gold amulet (probably not change or strangulation, though).
Level that contains a structure with a lot of gargoyle statues. Some of the statues are statue traps.
Remove the graveyard flag from the Castle level, but make it so that undead cannot follow you upstairs past the Valley of the Dead, preventing wraith luring. (Could also apply this restriction to levelport and branchport).
A helm of brilliance no longer boosts Wisdom. It only affects Intelligence.
If you walk over a banana while fumbling, you slip on it, making a lot of noise and destroying the banana. (This won’t happen if the banana is hidden under some other object on the square though).
Cheating in Sokoban no longer affects Luck. Instead, the amount of cheating you do is tracked; the quality of the prize item degrades the more you cheat. So a little bit of cheating might still give you the amulet of reflection, but a moderate amount would turn it into an amulet of ESP, and a lot of cheating would turn it into an amulet of restful sleep or something.
Make djinn genocidable. If djinn have been genocided, they will not come out of smoky potions, so this can be used to ensure that your smoky potions of full healing will work properly.
Objects flying through the air do not interact with a mimic that is currently mimicking something; they just pass through as if it weren’t there.
Put a cap on the number of weapons in a stack that can be enchanted by a single enchant weapon scroll. Maybe 20 for ammunition and 5 or 7 for other stacking weapons like daggers. It’s odd that you can multiply the total amount of enchantment points you’re getting just by wielding a larger number of weapons.
The chance of a foocubus getting a severe headache after an encounter is elevated if you refuse to pay it, underpay it, or have no gold with which to pay it. (Refusing to pay should probably not be random and automatic anymore, it should ask if you want to pay instead.)
Merge the rings of slow digestion and regeneration. Keep the name “regeneration”; make it chargeable. A positive rate boots your regeneration and your hunger rate, up until they are doubled at +10; a negative rate decreases both until they are halved at -10, with the intermediate values scaling as appropriate.
Possibly, since the extremes of &177;10 are hard to attain, make the doubling/halving threshold at &177;7 instead.
Define a “power level” or a “tier” for each artifact, and when gifting an artifact, use the player’s experience level and other stats to calculate an appropriate tier to gift an artifact from. The only reason it feels bad to get Giantslayer is because you know you could have gotten something much more powerful but randomly didn’t; if the more powerful artifacts were simply not possible to get due to you not having the right stats yet, this might not happen as much.
Make potions lighter, on the order of 5-10 aum, on the basis that potions are one-time use and one-time use objects shouldn’t be heavier than many pieces of armor, and also on the realism basis that at their current weight, they’re a few liters of liquid. The counterargument is that if potions are lightweight, there’s less to prevent the hero from scooping up everything in the dungeon as they go.
New artifact The Spear of Mars, an unaligned spear that can be invoked to “charge” it, dealing massive damage (on the order of +100ish) on its next hit, but only works if you’re male. Will only be gifted to a male character.
(Intended as a counterpart to the Mirror of Venus, #2125).
If you have a scroll of remove curse in your open inventory and you get hit with a curse items effect, the scroll occasionally intercepts the curse like Magicbane does, but it gets destroyed in the process.
If a wood nymph is near a tree, or a water nymph is near a fountain, they won’t wander very far from it. Specifically, their AI would tell them to consider any space more than X distance from a fountain to be invalid.
They also don’t teleport away from fountains, unless they’re scared or carrying stolen items. When they do teleport, their destination is biased towards any trees or fountains that are on the level, respectively.
Give iron balls a fairly large to-hit penalty, because they are so heavy that they must be pretty unwieldy.
A chaotic Cartomancer who performs a same-race sacrifice gets not a peaceful Juiblex or Yeenoghu, but a card of summon Juiblex or Yeenoghu.
One possible failure effect for reading a spellbook (or writing it, if it’s possible to fail at writing a book) is for the spell to force itself into your head. Your spell retention is internally -1, a special value that means you can cast the spell, but only once, and then you immediately forget it.
If you get paralyzed by reading a spellbook, there’s some message indicating that you got paralyzed. Currently just getting “You can move again” is weird.
Foocubi treat engagement rings the same as they do the ring of adornment; an incubus will put one on you, and a succubus will take one from you.
A monster spell (or perhaps some esoteric monster damage type) that makes you intrinsically fumbling for some time.
Lawfuls get an alignment penalty for writing graffiti with a marker, even if it’s Elbereth or something else useful.
Convicts get an alignment bonus by writing graffiti. (Graffiti has to come from a magic marker, or a felt marker in variants that have it.)
Being polymorphed into a spellcasting monster boosts your energy regeneration rate proportional to the base level of the monster you are.
Any rings the player starts with can’t be more than +2 or +3, because randomly starting with +5 rings is rather overpowered.
Merge Sunsword and Trollsbane like NetHack Fourk does (a single artifact that emits light, instakills gremlins and instapetrifies trolls, with bonuses to undead), except keep it a morning star and name it Sunflash (because a lot of these consolidated effects have nothing to do with trolls). Having it stay a morning star makes it an attractive choice for Priests, and raises the appeal of training morning star.
Magpies, a bird that has a stealing attack; unlike monkeys, the stealing attack is limited to shiny objects (possibly based on their material) that are under a certain weight. Under that rule, rings, gems, and amulets are common targets of theirs. They probably have a rather fast speed, too. They should likely generate in small groups.
Magpies would have an alignment of 0 and lack the M2_HOSTILE flag, and thus may be peaceful to neutrals, but angering one makes all other magpies angry as well.
A monster that, similar to leprechauns, steals items made out of silver, and only items made out of silver.
Only one hobbit per game will be generated with an elven mithril-coat. Once one generates, no other one will generate.
Randomly generated puzzle mechanisms that reveal secret doors once completed. Things such as finding a mechanism hidden under a statue, or having a boulder generate in a room and needing to push it somewhere else in that room.
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.
When you engrave with a wand of digging, you engrave it just fine, but you also create and get stuck in a pit on your square.
Freezing a fountain does something. All the following have been suggested:
Add another set of outcomes to interacting with a foocubus: raising your Charisma by one point if a good outcome, or subtracting a few points if a bad outcome.
Fog horn, a magical tool that when played surrounds the user with clouds and possibly fog clouds (the monster). It would be best if some type of non-poison-gas cloud were implemented first; it is probably a bad idea to actually change the terrain around the user into cloud.
On deeper Dungeons of Doom levels, when the game randomly places an altar in a room without intending to create a temple, sometimes make the room into an abandoned temple.
The #conduct screen tells how many items you have polymorphed over the course of your game. This is because it will also show up in dumplogs, and can be used to determine how much polypiling was relied on.
All demons are automatically aware of all traps in Gehennom, so they won’t walk into them and trigger them.
When you become caught in a pit, bear trap, or other restraining trap in Gehennom, nearby demons become alerted and aware of your exact location, because they’re the ones who set the traps in the first place.
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.
Change one of the existing boring wand descriptions to “gold”, and make its material gold, for the purposes of being stealable by leprechauns.
Give the Nazgul a black speech attack, possibly replacing their sleep breath attack.
A fairly accessible way to roughly determine the magnitude of the enchantment on an object, but not the sign of the enchantment, without resorting to magical identification. Possibly tiered in a system with levels of 0/1-3/4-5/6+.
Levitation from a blessed potion or an artifact allows you to use < and > to float into the air and descend at will, without the levitation timing out. This would require implementing two additional flags: one that tracks whether your levitation comes from those sources, and one that tracks whether levitation is currently suppressed due to your voluntary descending.
When a door is hitten by an opening beam, it actually opens, rather than becoming unlocked. Also, any doors adjacent to it will also be opened (for the “double doors” that appear in some special levels).
Prevent items from generating on top of the pits and holes in Sokoban.
Triggering an anti-magic field, in addition to draining some of your energy, removes any magical buffs or debuffs applied to you, similar to how cancellation works as described in #2673.
At Skilled or above, the spell of wizard lock can be targeted at any point (that you can see) in a radius. It doesn’t shoot a beam, and you don’t need to be in line with the thing you want to lock.
Possibly, at Expert, it locks everything within the radius, but this is not good unless you have the ability to choose whether you want this effect to be cast or not.
Kicking a tree may summon a couple angry ravens (replacing the bee effect).
Spell of foresight, a high-level divination spell that gives you a short amount of a temporary buff which gives monsters a massive to-hit penalty against you, possibly giving yourself to-hit bonuses as well. It also gives you automatic searching; searching while you have the foresight buff active is guaranteed to find traps.
Eating too much royal jelly polymorphs you into a killer bee.
Queen bees, being heavier and not flying often, should have a lower speed, at least as low as killer bees. They should perhaps get more attacks to compensate.
When you fail to read a spellbook, increment its read counter. The chance of a book crumbling to dust is no longer a flat 1/3; a never-read book will never crumble, and the chance increases the more times the book is read.
Sometimes, eating a quantum mechanic corpse and causing your velocity to become uncertain can give you temporary very fast speed instead of toggling intrinsic speed. (In variants that implement a player-side slow intrinsic, it should also be capable of giving a temporary quantity of that.)
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.
Ballistae, a very large and heavy weapon that takes time to set up and prime, but can be used to launch javelins to deal a large amount of damage. Giants can wield them like crossbows. May appear as defenses in special levels like Fort Ludios and the Castle.
When the demon lords all levelport away into Gehennom on the ascension run, they always land on the downstairs rather than being randomly placed, because they’re smart enough to lie in ambush for you.
Some Yendorian Army monsters, particularly soldiers, are eligible to receive bows and crossbows as starting weapons.
The potion of gain energy has a minimum substantial percentage of your Pw pool that it will refill. Like healing potions, it will only increase your maximum Pw if you would have gone over your maximum.
Monsters summoned by an aligned caster (meaning a caster with a well-defined alignment: aligned priests, angelic minions) will also be minions of that god. Minions additionally get some extra benefits in exchange for directly serving a god, among which is periodically getting their HP topped up every now and again.
If Astral denizens are able to steal the Amulet from you and try to ascend with it: The amulet-bearer uses a special AI algorithm which pathfinds towards their high altar, using a shortest-path algorithm that avoids monsters if possible but if none are available will plot a path that goes through the minimum amount of monsters. They will only attack when the next square on their path is occupied by a monster, and they will only attack that monster.
If Astral denizens are able to steal the Amulet from you and try to ascend with it: Keep track of the god of the current amulet-bearer (whether you or someone else). Priests and angels aligned to that god grudge all others, and all others grudge them.
A certain type of chest (not a new object, just a specially flagged chest) that is magically protected; it cannot be opened, unlocked, be forced open, or destroyed until a certain monster on the level is either killed or leaves the level. Once it’s gone, the chest opens normally.
Some method by which you can capture a djinni into a smoky potion or oil lamp (which in the latter case makes it a magic lamp). It should be non-trivial or somehow costly to do (the original idea just suggested applying the object in their direction, which is abusable). If feasible, the djinni should be angry and disinclined to grant a wish when it’s released.
Also, the game doesn’t track whether a given smoky potion contains a djinni (it would mess with stacking), so this would be tricky to implement internally for smoky potions.
If someone of a different god steals the Amulet from you on the Astral Plane and sacrifices it to their god, your god will hit you with a wide-angle disintegration beam in frustration that you got so close and then blew it.
When you polymorph into a monster which reduces your carry cap so that you’re burdened or worse, you automatically unequip and drop your worn items until you are unencumbered.
Monsters can now zap cancellation at the player; effects of cancellation on the player include draining Pw (and possibly maximum Pw if Pw hits 0) and removing magical temporary intrinsics such as invisibility, speed, and detect monsters. It does NOT cancel the player’s entire inventory, as this does not happen when the player zaps cancellation at a monster.
A magical horn whose effect depends on what material it’s made out of. One effect could be pacification; another possibility is to make it a horn of summoning, with the monster type summoned controlled by the material.
All angelic creatures should be immune to death rays.
When you toss a grenade, intelligent monsters flee (away from the grenade’s location, not you, if possible).
When a silver item would randomly generate within Gehennom, try to reroll its materials (possibly multiple times) so that it’s less likely to be silver. This is because the inhabitants of Gehennom would likely have tried to get rid of all the local silver. Additionally, demons should never receive silver items in their starting inventory.
The spell of protection, rather than giving you a golden haze, gives you a “spectral shield”. It weighs nothing, and automatically equips into your shield slot if your offhand is free. It provides around 3 or 4 AC, and this does not degrade over time. However, the shield is temporary and will dissipate in a hundred or so turns.
If the shield is unequipped but kept in your inventory, it hovers around you and tries to block things on its own, but it only provides about 1 or 2 AC in this form. If it leaves your inventory for any reason, it dissipates. Casting protection again while you are already carrying a spectral shield resets its dissipation timer; it doesn’t give you a second one.
The shield has a price of 0, so you can’t sell it.
You cannot levelport down past a demon lord’s lair level until the demon lord is killed, appeased with a bribe, or otherwise gotten rid of. Attempts to levelport past it will just land you on their lair level instead. However, you can still go below the level by way of the stairs, a hole, or a trapdoor in the lair.
Rather than occurring entirely randomly, a secret passage can only generate to close off a dead end, where exactly 2 of the 4 adjacent squares, on opposite sides, are corridors, and the other 2 are rock. The dead end criterion is tested by trying to pathfind an alternate route from one of the adjacent corridor spaces to the other; if none can be found, this space must be blocking a dead end, so it is valid.
Vaults on deeper levels have walls that take multiple digging actions to dig through, like shop walls do.
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.
Rather than slowly increasing the natural monster generation rate over time, gradually increase other monster stats that are less obvious, such as HP maximum, computed level, or attack power. Though this approach has been criticized for hiding the increase in difficulty from the player, whereas generating more monsters is obvious.
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.
Spell that lets you do a random uncontrolled short-range teleportation, in order to escape from a tricky situation. Actually, it might not be a bad idea to turn the spell of teleport away into this, with a reduced level (3 or 4), and make it unable to shoot a teleportation beam.
When a light explodes, it permanently lights the terrain in a small radius centered on it. Black lights might only light in a radius of 1, or just its own space.
Livelog when you fall unusually far down a shaft (4+ levels, a “very deep” fall).
When a disenchanter hits you, it may drain charges from your wands instead of your armor.
You can use booze potions to clean off your wounds, helping you recover faster. Poison wounds, specifically, though this is debatable because 1) the game doesn’t track wounds you got from poison and 2) alcohol can help treat infections, whereas poison isn’t an infection.
Healers should probably be able to do this more successfully than other roles.
In variants where you can gamble away, sell, or otherwise lose your soul: a character who has lost their soul will get no more help from their god (until they manage to recover it). Sacrifices will be accepted but will never get rewarded with a gift; otherwise successful prayers will fail to give you shimmering-light invincibility, will go unanswered, and will give you no message as to the pleasedness of your god, and possibly you lose your divine protection as well.
Add a new sort of body armor that makes a compromise between studded leather and crystal plate mail - less AC than crystal plate mail, but more than studded leather (so around 5 AC), weighs more than studded leather but less than crystal plate mail (so around 300-350 aum), and doesn’t hinder spellcasting at all. Possibly, “crystal scale mail”.
Possibly crystal plate mail’s base AC will have to be boosted, or its weight lowered, in order to avoid this new armor being just better (as it stands, a gain of about 2 AC in exchange for about 100 extra weight is something most players won’t take).
If you are only getting one attribute restored from a potion of restore ability, it selects the one that is the most points below its former maximum, rather than picking randomly. Or else you just get to pick the stat you are restoring.
Remove the feature where being gifted an artifact in a restricted skill unrestricts it to Basic; compensate for this by fixing the balance of artifact base types and the gifting logic so that your god’s first gift to you is never an artifact whose skill you’re restricted in.
As a reference to the game Centipede, if you hit a centipede (only with a slashing weapon?) and it still has over 50% health, it has a small chance of splitting into two centipedes. Both monsters are flagged or cancelled so that they cannot split further.
Define Angels to have an additional amulet-stealing claw attack. If you aren’t carrying the Amulet when they hit you, this attack is skipped. (Actually, perhaps all Amulet-stealing attacks should work this way, where they don’t happen if you have nothing to steal).
Sharply cut the frequency of lizards spawning (possibly even lower than 1/7), and possibly remove the special case that makes them always leave a corpse. This is because a player will usually accumulate enough of their corpses to be easily safe from any delayed stoning effect for the whole game. This won’t much affect reverse genociding them, if the player really wants a lizard corpse.
Also, possibly elevate their monster difficulty to something higher than 6; not because they are that difficult, but to make them appear only later on in the dungeon.
Alternatively, simply make lizard corpses rot, so that a player who wants to carry around a stoning defense must use other items, such as tins of lizard or acidic monsters, or potions of acid.
Add a new type of eye with a hallucination-inducing active gaze attack. It could be called either “third eye” or “pseyechedelic”.
If you are eating someone’s brains when polymorphed into a mind flayer, and you are very satiated to the point where you aren’t getting the full amount of nutrition from it, you do less damage with the attack because you aren’t eating as much of their brain.
The higher your charisma is, the more powerful conflict will be when you are generating it. Probably, it makes it harder for monsters to resist being conflicted.
Berserking monsters must be below a certain fraction of their maximum HP in order to act berserk, rather than just being constantly berserk. The fraction (or just a threshold) is deterministically computed based on the monster ID.
Polypiling can’t create matter out of nothing. If an item is trying to polymorph into a heavier item, it must absorb the mass from other objects in the pile, destroying them. Note that if polypiling a stack of same-weight objects (potions, or scrolls), none of the candidate items will be heavier, so this will never trigger.
Rename the wand of secret door detection to just “wand of detection”. It detects other things besides secret doors.
Revamp the scroll of scare monster: rather than being good indefinitely as long as it’s not picked up, it will increment an internal counter whenever it scares a monster, by an amount equal to that monster’s HD or difficulty. The scroll disintegrates on the floor after this “total difficulty of monsters scared” counter exceeds some value.
The monk quest is very loot-sparse in terms of random items being generated on the floors of the levels (death drops are unaffected), because all the major players are either monks, without much in the way of worldly possessions, or elementals who don’t have any items.
Glowworms, a w monster that emits light in a radius of 1. Maybe they have a blinding bite attack, but that may be taking the light theme a bit too far.
Engraving with a blade made of softer metals such as gold or silver should dull it faster than an iron blade.
Items that fall into the abyss beneath Vlad’s Tower disappear from the game, and go into a swapchest-like system where they can be shared between different games. Players in other games may find those items showing up somewhere randomly in a demon lord’s lair when it gets generated.
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.
When a pool of raw sewage boils away, it creates a poison gas cloud over that space.
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:
Outside the Plane of Air (where there is no gravity), stepping onto air terrain automatically makes you fall to your death unless you are levitating or flying. (Or possibly you merely fall to a lower level, taking a fair amount of damage, or you have so far to fall that it takes a couple turns to hit the bottom, in which you have a couple turns to take some action to save yourself, by levitating or flying or whatever). However, you are prompted to confirm stepping out into the open air if it isn’t safe to do so.
Items dropped into open air either end up randomly placed on a lower level if there’s a sensible lower level to place them on, or vanish forever (though in that case an exception needs to be made for the unique items).
If falling into air is an instadeath, life saving acts the same as if you die in lava; it puts you on a safe location (“You find yourself back on solid land again”).
Air can use the W_NONDIGGABLE flag, or possibly one of the other struct rm flag bits, to represent a wind barrier, which the level designer can use to make a region of air impassible. Attempting to move onto such a space produces a message like “A strong gust blows you back!” and makes you lose the turn.
One of the greatest problems with air terrain is what ASCII character to display it as; existing implementations use just regular space (which is what it displays as on the Plane of Air), but this is easily mistaken for stone, which can lead to players unexpectedly falling to their death if there is no safeguard against wandering off a cliff, and would present a problem if there were ever a air/stone boundary, which would be invisible. Other suggestions include: space, but highlighted with the terminal’s black color ( ), black pound sign (#), black tilde (~), black right brace (}), or even just gray counterparts of these. All of these have various downsides; for instance, it must be expected that they will render as dark blue for some players who have use_darkgray turned off.
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.
If both of your hands are occupied, you cannot multishoot thrown ammo (e.g. darts, shuriken, daggers). You can still multishoot if you’re firing ammo from a launcher.
Multishot cap is halved if you are wielding something in your main hand other than the requisite launcher for what you’re trying to multishoot, regardless of if your other hand is free.
You can pay the Oracle to identify a single item for you, but this can only be done about 3-5 times per game, after which she refuses to do it any more. She says something on your last identification indicating that you can’t do it any more.
Dipping a spellbook in any healing potion will restore one of its read charges. Dipping it in a potion of restore ability will restore all of its read charges. In either case, the potion is used up.
Occasionally, when generating a level 6+ spellbook, set its opoisoned flag to true. You get “The book was coated in contact poison!” not as a random spellbook reading failure effect, but when you try to read a book whose opoisoned is set to true. Triggering the contact poison usually (but not always) clears the opoisoned flag, so it won’t be poisoned if you try to read it again.
Dipping a poisoned spellbook in any healing potion will neutralize the poison and use up the potion. Possibly, dipping it in a potion of sickness will poison the book, though this would be useless unless monsters read spellbooks.
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.
Give violet fungi a hallucination-inducing touch attack. This either replaces or adds to their existing weak physical damage attack.
Extension of the feature in several variants where monster spawns are concentrated on the upstairs during the ascension run: occasionally, instead of spawning a monster, generate an organized group which is trying to get the Amulet, usually made up of sapient monsters (such as a group of soldiers, or a few priests of the same god, or some elves led by a couple elf-lords). Possibly, this only happens after you get back out of Gehennom and are again visible to the other gods.
A Yendorian Army monster will never hit another Yendorian Army monster with a ranged attack, to cut down on them killing each other, and also because they ought to have good enough skill and discipline to avoid friendly fire.
Gnomes don’t have any special cases to generate with daggers, or else they’re much less likely to get daggers compared to their other possible starting weapons. And if they do start with daggers, they’re much less likely to get stacks. This is to prevent the Mines from being an easy source of dozens and dozens of daggers.
Rogues start with a stack of knives instead of daggers, but their dagger skill cap isn’t changed; if a Rogue wants to use daggers, they have to go find some themselves rather than beginning the game with them.
Add hallucinatory artifacts (it’s not clear where these would actually appear in the game): The Lost Orb of Phanastacoria, the Bizarro Orgasmatron.
If you tell a vault guard that your name is Croesus, and you are wearing gold armor, they might lead you out of the vault without forcing you to drop any gold. The chance of this outcome increases for each piece of gold armor you are wearing.
When a creature is completely surrounded by enemies that have hands, or is completely surrounded by enemies that have hands except for squares it can’t safely move to (like walls, or water that it would fall into), every attack made against that creature is an automatic critical hit. This is to make it more difficult to just wade through a sea of monsters while ignoring most of their hits, and incentivize having pets to surround an enemy with.
Possibly, do a lesser version of this (critical hits only some of the time) when a creature is almost but not completely surrounded. Though it should probably require a certain amount of adjacent enemies or something; two opponents facing off in a straight, empty passageway shouldn’t count as “almost completely surrounded” by the walls.
Several issues have been pointed out with this system if implemented naively: getting “surrounded” by two monsters in a corridor or being surrounded instantly with summon nasties or a cursed scroll of create monster could pretty much spell instant death. The original idea was that being surrounded basically amounts to being held down so that all hits have maximum accuracy.
Revamping melee weapons:
hash(monster id + (turns / 10)) % 10 == turns % 10, lose HP due to bleeding on this turn.)Implement hoard scarabs from D&D. They are a x, which can hide under object piles containing at least 25 gold pieces (and only object piles like that; they can’t hide under single non-gold objects or furniture or anything; possibly they can only hide under a gold-containing pile when the gold is on the top). They have a nasty poisonous bite.
When the game wants to generate one in a random location, it either creates a gold pile for the scarab to hide under where it generates or alternatively it searches around the level for a suitable gold pile and puts the scarab there. (If it can’t find one, it may just fail to generate).
They may also pop out at you from inside randomly generated gold-containing chests, possibly as a container trap effect.
You can read the label on a can of grease. This reads “Yendorian Grease. Caution: water-soluble.”
A much more fleshed out interaction system for sapient monsters. It is initiated by chatting, which opens up a menu offering four key verbs: Ask, Tell, Show, and Give.
Ask is used to gain information from a monster; this could be a whole bunch of things, from rumors to identification to information about the dungeon. Each type of monster you can ask things of has a limited knowledge base, and this knowledge base may contain some inaccurate information. Especially interesting is the possibility that you can ask someone for identification, and they tell you what they think it is - which could be right or wrong, but a good clue either way. You can also ask someone to join you, and pay them some gold to tame them for a certain amount of time.
Tell is currently a less developed part of this idea; the only thing suggested so far is that you can tell a creature about traps you’ve discovered, which will make those traps known to the creature. You can also use “tell calm” on your pets to make them refrain from attacking peacefuls.
Show lets you select any item from your inventory to show to the monster. This can be used for intimidation (e.g. showing a stack of iron skull caps to a goblin).
Give lets you give items to a monster, which in some cases, depending on the AI, lets you test the effects of items.
Note that a potential pitfall of such a system is that if it’s complex enough to do interesting things with, it is probably going to be hard to use without spoilers. And if it’s uncomplex enough, it runs the risk of most possible responses being “I don’t know/care about that”, which also makes it hard to use without spoilers. A middle ground between these is likely to require an enormous amount of work.
Make it easier to destroy non-high altars, perhaps by something as simple as digging them, but destroying an altar will cause its god to smite you hard. If you destroy a crossaligned altar, your god rewards you for it.
Add a random throne effect that polymorphs you into a level-appropriate royal monster.
Assuming an implementation in which Gehennom starts to get destroyed after you remove the Amulet: When you kill the high priest of Moloch, he gives you a multiline death message calling you a fool and saying you don’t know what you have done, and maybe hinting a little bit at why Hell is about to go to hell.
Some mechanic that allows you to capture a defeated monster as a figurine (inspired by SpliceHack’s cartomancer but not tied to a specific role, and also not as easy to come by, probably requiring special magic or a special tool to perform it).
Give a warning message when temporary speed is about to wear off.
When you fall into water, you can choose the adjacent space you climb out on.
Add a new ending where you take the unused wand of wishing from the Castle and exit the dungeon with it, to give to your deity to help the next chosen hero. This counts as an honorable ending and a win.
Rangers have a special bonus towards searching for pits.
Special damage type AD_GNAT: when hit with it, you are compelled to attack the offending monster on your next turn if able. (Or as a weaker version, you can do things other than attack, but if you want to attack you must attack the offending monster).
Not specified what would happen if you are hit by two gnat attacks on the same turn.
Scare system that works on the player: the game tracks a list of monsters (or monster IDs) you are currently scared of and for how much longer you are afraid of that monster. You cannot attack a monster you are scared of in melee, nor can you use a ranged attack towards it when you can detect it in the line of fire, nor can you move directly towards it. (Trying to do any of these things won’t cost a turn.)
Intrinsic telepathy only works in a radius equal to your Int (extrinsic sources aren’t changed). Cooperative telepathy, if implemented, works in the same radius if intrinsic, full-level if extrinsic.
Monks who have passed through all the “Student of X” titles may go back and speak to the Grand Master to choose an elemental specialization and receive a power related to it. Stone gives a physical damage reduction; Air gives a random extra movement point here and there and a rare chance of dodging an attack. Water automatically counterattacks melee attacks. Fire boosts attacking power or gives extra attacks.
Add a NAME: directive to the level compiler. Levels that have this will auto-annotate themselves as such (or add an immutable line with the name) once the level is entered.
Archeologists and Tourists get experience for photographing monsters they haven’t yet photographed.
Break the fumbling intrinsic into fumbling (only for hand-related things, conferred by fumble gloves) and stumbling (only for foot-related things, conferred by stumble boots).
The closer someone is to iron bars when attempting to shoot ammo through them, the lower the chance is of it hitting the bars.
Traits or feats, selected when you create your character, and give you small buffs in the form of slight or situational effects. Buffs could include:
Allow “You hear someone counting money” to show up on levels with no vault but which do have a shop.
Kicking a wall where there is a secret door will always reveal the door and will never hurt you. This first kick may WHAMMM or crash it open as usual for doors.
When you’re brought below 20 HP and also below 10% of your HP, with no status ailments, a special adrenaline buff automatically kicks in that grants to-hit and damage bonuses for a short time, but causes exhaustion debuffs after it times out.
Intrinsic aggravate monster from eating dogs and cats lasts for a few thousand turns; actual cannibalism lasts many thousand turns, but neither gives it to you permanently.
Add a hard cap on the amount of levels you can gain via foocubus, but count each level gained this way - each ‘educational experience’ - as +1 on your chance of a good outcome of future interactions.
An alternate ending triggered by invoking a ring of conflict when within sight of all three Riders. You then take up your true identity as War and the other Riders congratulate you. Possibly tie this into the “break the Amulet” ending, in which case this would massively power you up but not end the game until some other condition had been met.
Some mechanic (possibly a ritual spell) that enchants gems by disenchanting other items. Once enchanted, a gem can be used a single-use Pw reserve, magical grenades, or (rarely and lossily) tranfer their enchantment into some other piece of gear. Gem enchantment rules follow ring enchantment rules with respect to exploding when they get too full of magic.
A race whose gimmick is to continually lose Constitution points every couple hundred turns; going below 1 (or 3?) results in death.
A trap or monster (or possibly change sleeping gas traps or homunculi to this) that causes “sleeping poison”: it starts a very short intrinsic restful sleep timeout, so you don’t fall asleep immediately but have a little time to react.
Certain roles have a small set of monsters that they can tame through non-magical means (such as Valkyries and winter wolves).
Add “magical writing” as a nonweapon skill, which is trained at a fast rate by writing scrolls and spellbooks, and increases your odds of writing unknown scrolls and spellbooks successfully.
Some mechanic for Valkyries that involves escorting the spirits/ghosts of those who die in battle.
One take on this idea: you can chat to ghosts to tame them, and then they will follow you around as pets do. Then you can release their spirits by praying on an aligned altar. Doing this successfully gives you some sort of reward. However, hostile monsters will attack the ghosts you are escorting without provocation, making this not trivially easy.
Kicking a tree may cause you to get hit by a falling branch and take some damage. (Possibly, the branch has a smallish chance of appearing on the ground as a quarterstaff, but only once per tree).
Different roles have different speeds for putting on armor, because they have varying amounts of practice with it. In particular, combat-heavy roles such as Barbarians, Valkyries and Samurai should continue to use the existing armor delays, whereas roles like Archeologists and Tourists should take longer to wear armor pieces.
Cursed or unlucky wishes for scrolls, potions, or spellbooks may give you the blank counterpart instead of what you wanted.
Barbarians who roll a 1 on their damage die get the die rerolled and the second result used.
Tourists begin the game with 1 or 2 Luck.
Allow human Rangers to play as lawful. (Note: this will involve changing the Quest text a bit so that it doesn’t refer to lawful as the enemy.)
If you have previously died and gotten lifesaved in the game, some things or people interact with you differently.
Dipping a weapon into a fountain can as a random effect raise its enchantment by one, to a maximum of +1.
Extend Cleaver’s wide-arc hitting behavior to all battle-axes.
Things that can curse, steal, or change your name in-game.
Non-excessive luck system: start by disentangling luck and religion, and convert rnl checks into other checks. Luck can only be -1, 0, or 1 and can never time out unless a full moon or Friday the 13th ends. Some things can reduce Luck to a base of -1, but nothing can increase it to a base of +1 other than carrying positive luckstones.
Addendum to the brewing patch: you can ferment/dissolve newt corpses to produce potions of gain energy, and can combine various fruits with water to produce fruit juice. Also, since booze tastes like liquid fire, fermenting a red mold corpse produces a potion of booze.
Track how many turns the hero has spent on a level. As they spend more time there, the monster spawn rate diminishes, provided they aren’t in the end game with its special spawning rules.
Pushing a boulder costs d3 or d4 nutrition, in order to balance out its easy source of Str exercise. However, something would probably need to be done to compensate in Sokoban (maybe put even more food there?)
Being strangled for more than a couple turns starts to reduce your Constitution (or maxHP).
The chance of you catching lycanthropy is boosted on a full moon and zero on a new moon.
Archeologists begin the game able to recognize all eggs.
Apply the digging-a-grave-up behavior (summoning undead, alignment penalties, etc) when a gravestone is kicked over, as well as digging it up. (The substitute for “You unearth a corpse” is to silently create a corpse buried under where the grave used to be.)
If trees’ fruit is ever made deterministic to the tree, occasionally scatter some of that fruit around the base of the tree.
You can occasionally get a free food appraisal when you eat something. This is based on a random number computed from the turn and (possibly) the object ID, weighed against your Wisdom somehow, such that higher Wisdom increases the chance that you get the food appraisal.
Make the Vibrating Square a brighter color than purple.
Paralysis only freezes you in place on a square; it doesn’t prevent you from attacking and taking other non-movement actions.
Replace the existing polyself nerf that 20% of polymorphs turn you into your own race. Instead, have it so that the longer you stay polymorphed, each successive polymorph has a shorter duration. If you stay in your normal form for a while, polymorphs will return to their original duration.
Occasionally when suffering from food poisoning, you vomit, which will then save you from dying (but still remove a lot of nutrition which means you’re probably still in some peril).
Gnomes (or a potential Tinkerer role) can loot statues without destroying them.
The passtune can be played at any drawbridge in the game to open or close it, but only the Castle drawbridge gives feedback in the form of gears and tumblers. You have to learn the passtune there in order to feasibly use it at other places.
Every turn on the Plane of Fire, all scrolls and spellbooks in inventory or on the level are destroyed (except for naturally fireproof ones).
Only allow levelporting to go out of a branch in the “direction” it rejoins the parent branch. The main reason for this is so that anything levelporting out of Vlad’s Tower cannot end up on levels above the tower; only on levels lower than it.
If you are not deaf, non-stealthy monsters that you can’t see (because they’re out of sight or invisible) occasionally show up as an I when they move. Blindness has no effect, except indirectly that adjacent spaces also count as out of sight.
Add as rare possible fountain effects erodeproofing and blessing a dipped object. (Possibly only in magic fountains.)
If you die next to a pet that can make you arise from the grave, it infects you and makes you arise from the grave as that, without ending the game.
Role or race that gains a bad intrinsic at a certain fairly low XL, and a very good intrinsic later.
You can use #force to pry open doors with edged weapons; however, this requires more Str and has a higher chance of breaking the weapon (perhaps dependent on the weapon’s weight.)
If you are hallucinating, replace the message “You can’t fight yourself.” with “You can’t come to terms with your inner conflicts.”
Remove the unidentified appearance of “grappling hook” as “iron hook”, it’s confusing and serves no good purpose.
Archeologists begin the game with a grappling hook.
You can force-fight a web to cut it, which may occasionally fail and get you or the weapon stuck in the web.
Alternate ending where you can settle down in an abandoned temple or possibly just a random altar room and become the priest of the temple permanently. (Creating a bones file where you are now an aligned priest).
Track your maximum reached HP and Pw (or maximum “external sources” HP and Pw if using a system where it mainly depends on a stat and XL) and allow restore ability to also fix these.
If the player can displace peaceful monsters, hostile monsters should be able to as well.
If you fall asleep while having astral vision, you get astral projection. This consists of you spawning as some sort of incorporeal monster which can phase next to your body. Your body can’t move. Your projection can use your items like normal (consumables and charges are used up). If your projection dies, you return to your body and sleep out the remaining duration. If you wake up, your projection is destroyed and you return to your body normally; however, combat will not awaken you. If something else kills your body while you’re projected, you die and the game ends.
It gets increasingly hard (maybe even exponentially hard) to raise a stat through exercise as the stat approaches its racial maximum.
Role which is outsizedly powerful in the early game and can tear through the dungeon easily, but has a much harder late game, perhaps enforced through bad skill caps (no Expert), or bad HP growth. Or can’t use most artifacts, or has obstacles to putting together an ascension kit.
Make the Oracle consultation prompts more obvious as to what they’re getting. “Dost thou wish to hear the latest dungeon gossip?” / “Then dost thou desire a serious piece of advice?” Also, it should ask the player even if they have no money, and tell them that they don’t have enough after the prompts are shown.
Nymph race very similar to dNetHack’s yuki-onna, but based on regular NetHack nymphs (so no association with cold and no iron weapons). Has the same unarmed-attack-automatic-stealing ability that yuki-onna have, and has infinite carry capacity, but low HP.
Barbarians get extra nutrition from eating corpses, since they have practice in how to eat them properly. Possibly up to 1.5x the nutrition.
Vomiting subtracts nutrition proportional to your current nutrition instead of a constant 20. (20 is a decent floor though). Perhaps it takes half of your current nutrition.
Wielding a one-handed weapon with nothing in the offhand will double the damage bonus from Strength (but not weapon damage or other bonuses).
Assuming empty potion bottles are somehow implemented so as not to be game-breaking: they should weigh 1 or 2 aum, and can be dipped in sinks to fill them from the faucet. This usually fills them with water, but can have other sink effects such as getting a random potion from the faucet instead.
Levelporting to a level you have never visited may fail and levelport you randomly (except in wizard mode). If you have previously visited the level, levelporting will place you in a spot that has been previously mapped.
Trees can rarely drop slime mold “fruit” when kicked.
Priests can hit incorporeal monsters like shades by default. Their attacks never pass harmlessly through.
When you kick a door that is closed but not locked, it can just crash open and become an open door instead of breaking. This is only if you kick it in one specific direction, deterministic based on its coordinates. Diagonal kicks can count as kicking in that specific direction, but kicking perpendicular or opposite will result in the door breaking like usual. If you kick open a shop door like this and don’t destroy it, the shopkeeper yells at you a bit but doesn’t demand money.
Taciturn conduct, which requires that you not use your voice at all. This mostly means that you can’t #chat with things; there probably aren’t currently enough things in the game which require or incentivize speech to make such a conduct meaningful. To that end, a useful #chat system that lets you do many things with many types of monsters (e.g. the one described in #2576) would be useful.
Certain messages like “You scream in agony as your body begins to warp” would need to be changed to special YAFMs if you have taciturn conduct intact.
You can’t ride clinging monsters (how would you get onto them, or stay on them?).
Disfiguring poison that drains Charisma.
When the player arrives on a newly generated level, any monsters within a certain radius of the player are randomly relocated somewhere else.
Wizards start the game knowing the appearances of several random scrolls, rings, potions, and wands, but don’t actually have them in starting inventory.
Explore mode characters start with 5 blessed scrolls of identify.
Being attacked while asleep doesn’t have a random chance of awakening you, but instead it reduces your remaining sleep time by some amount.
When you hit a tree with fire from any source, it can turn into a burning tree (#). This burns for a few hundred turns before burning out and turning into normal floor. While on fire it acts as a light source of radius 9, and deals fire damage to anything adjacent each turn and occasionally to anything within a radius of 3. Come to think of it, there could also be a “bonfire” terrain using the same glyph.
A weapon slipping out of your hand due to greasy fingers overrides it being welded to your hand by being cursed. Thus, you can get greasy fingers intentionally to get rid of a cursed weapon.
Disable multishot if the player is shooting point-blank.
Assuming unicorn-gem interactions are dropped or otherwise made alignment-agnostic, remove gray and black unicorns entirely, and leave white.
Some special minor effect if you are wearing an ornamental cope as a Priest.
Before you first enter the Valley, demons and undead (chosen from the graveyard monster algorithm, though perhaps excluding wraiths) continually spawn in the maze on the right of the Castle and try to path towards the upstairs. Also before it is set, in the Valley, awake demons and undead will try to path to the upstairs if they have nothing better to do.
If your character is male, a small percentage of AT_KICK attacks deal double damage to you.
You must have at least one free hand to zap a wand. Otherwise the game won’t let you.
The player can shove things, dealing no damage but pushing the monster back. The monster can resist and fail to be shoved; it will resist a lot if the terrain you’re trying to shove it onto is bad for it (like water). You can only shove if you have hands, and you cannot do it to small or tiny monsters. Possibly an AT_SHOV attack should also be introduced for monsters to shove the player.
Walking up stairs exercises Strength.
You can’t safely wear more than N total points of enchantment on all your armor at once. More than that, and armor pieces may start randomly exploding.
If you aren’t wearing armor or a shield and have high martial arts/bare hands skill, you get an AC bonus (probably a higher one for martial arts). The bonus should probably scale up with higher skill, and should be generally higher for martial arts users than bare hands users.
The player gets a small to-hit penalty when nauseous (about to vomit).
If you have confusion charges from the scroll or spell (meaning your hands are glowing red), the Z menu will gain a “confuse” spell option that always has a 0% failure rate, with the associated key being “-“. Casting this allows you to “zap” a confusion charge in any direction, confusing the first monster it touches.
Increase starting HP for all characters by some constant amount.
Archeologists can give artifacts to Lord Carnarvon. At the end of the game, any artifacts in his inventory count towards the game score, without having to drag them up to the Astral Plane.
The usage fee for reading a book in a shop is reduced to 45%, to make it so that unless you have very high Cha, it’s better to pay the usage fee than to buy and resell.
Conflict doesn’t work if a monster can’t see you.
If you are turning to stone and take acid damage from any source, the stoning is stopped.
Rebalance early-game monster base XP; a lichen should not be worth 4 times as much as a jackal.
Attacks that light things on fire also light things on the target square on fire.
If the demigod flag is set, increase the speed of all non-sessile monsters (by giving them extra movement points).
Add the “necrotic” damage type from D&D, so that evil monsters can deal corruptive or decaylike damage without resorting to instadeath, level drain, or disintegration.
Add a joke oracularity about woodchucks.
Monsters only give experience points when they are at least a few levels below your own level (i.e. you can’t level up from level 12 to 14 by killing only newts and grid bugs with any amount of grinding). To compensate, the cutoffs for experience level are brought closer together.
One-and-a-half-handed weapons that are capable of being used either one-handed or two-handed. They default to two-handed if the player is not wearing a shield or twoweaponing. They have better damage stats than pure one-handed weapons, but the damage is reduced if it is used one-handed.
When you first pick up the Amulet of Yendor, you get another screen-overwriting message similar to what happens in the quest and at the beginning of the game, directing you to travel back up the dungeon and give it to your god.
Minimize the impact of enhancing a skill. Effects that changed with the threshold should be migrated to scale directly with practice as much as possible. If you have maxed a skill to its next enhancement threshold but haven’t or can’t enhance further, further practice is not counted.
Teleport at will shouldn’t be gained at different experience levels for Wizards versus everyone else - it should be standardized at the same level for all characters.
Automatic searching triggers standard 1-radius searches even when the player is blind.
If you deliver a staggering blow or other knockback to a cockatrice, and there is a monster behind it, that monster might get stoned.
Change gravestones to display as white instead of gray to help distinguish them from walls.
Inventory wetting triggers every turn you are submerged.
Water turbulence won’t affect your underwater movements unless you are trying to move from one water square to another water square, and the water square you are on has at least one orthogonally adjacent water square.
If polymorphed into a strong clawed monster like a dragon, you can make semipermanent engravings with “-“. However, if your form does not have hands, this will be slower than an athame or wand of digging can do.
The chance of finding a secret door directly relates to how many seen tiles are surrounding the door. The more tiles around it are seen, the more likely it is to be found.
Realistically, a player searching near a secret door will almost always have either 5 or 8 of the adjacent tiles seen; so perhaps just check whether the player has seen the two tiles on either side of the door. If the player has seen both, finding the door becomes a lot easier.
Monks start with potions or a wand of enlightenment.
Sokoban is undiggable until the level is solved.
Doors are much less likely to resist when trying to close an open door.
If you’re being stuck, hugged or grabbed by a monster, you can’t engrave anything.
“while already on Charon’s boat” is appended to the death message whenever the game ends with the player’s own role genocided, not just when they quit. Possibly it’s left off if the player ascends.
Being satiated abuses wisdom for Samurai (at the same rate it does for Monks currently), and gives Monks slow alignment penalties instead of abusing wisdom.
Stat shuffling through self-polymorph should be slightly biased towards reducing stats.
If you have swimming, you can use , to pick items up from underwater.
All thrones are considered historic and Archeologists get an alignment penalty for making one disappear.
Gnomes get permanent detection of gold and gems within a radius 3. Or possibly the radius can scale with XL.
Petrification sources need to be made more consistent - logically, “The cockatrice touches you!” should have the same effect as touching its corpse, but instead it is a mere 1/30 chance of starting a delayed petrification.
Valkyries always get the snow boot bonus while walking on ice (i.e. they never stumble), even if they aren’t wearing snow boots.
Ghosts do not count as undead; they’re just dead.
When you fall asleep, you take d3 damage from falling to the floor. Message for this: “You tumble to the floor”.
If you are wielding a shatterable non-artifact and you are hit by a force bolt, whatever you are wielding is shattered.
New role: the Debtor. You begin the game by having taken out massive loans to buy a lot of very nice (erodeproof, high enchantment, magical) equipment, and so you should be able to breeze through the first part of the game. However, from time to time, your creditors appear and demand large sums of gold as interest payments. If you can successfully find enough gold to comply with their demands exactly, your debt will never actually increase. If you can overpay, you will be paying off the initial loan amount, and hopefully will eventually pay it all off. However, if you cannot meet their demands, they will first disappear with threats and take any current gold you happen to have, then send repossession men to confiscate your equipment (they will sell it for far less than it’s actually worth and not really help to reduce your debt all that much), then send thugs to kill you.
Some YAFMs for pythons should be added, both Monty Python references and jokes about the Python language.
Only knights of XL 7 or higher can dip for Excalibur; but Excalibur is available as a lawful sacrifice gift.
Eating a chameleon corpse has a chance of conveying intrinsic polymorphitis.
After some point in the game (perhaps when you descend below the Valley of the Dead and first “enter Gehennom”), you can no longer buy protection.
The cost of breaking a shop door is at least partially non-deterministic, so you can’t figure out the exact amount the shopkeeper will demand in advance.
Boulders falling on the player’s head deal more damage than they currently do, and they don’t really have their damage significantly reduced if the player is wearing a metal helmet.
Elven priests start with an elven shield instead of a small shield.
When you get a wish from a water demon, it uses the cursed/unlucky wish logic because you’re making a deal with a demon.
Hitting monsters that have a passive shock attack with something made of copper, silver, or gold increases the amount of shock damage.
Some object that you can dip in lava to enhance its properties.
Amnesia makes you forget spells and lose skill points instead of forgetting discoveries and maps. Normally, spell recall is drained; if a spell is at 0%, it is completely forgotten.
You can scare off a vault guard by telling him your name is one of the demon lords. This has the same effect as if you couldn’t say anything, so you’re still trapped in the vault after he flees. The -1 alignment penalty for lawful lying still applies.
Rangers have a role bonus which decreases the overall probability a projectile will break.
If your legs are unwounded and free, Skilled or better martial arts has a chance of dealing a kick instead of a punch. This has a small to-hit penalty but has better damage. If you want to always punch, you can either attack with F or set an option which prevents you from kicking.
At some skill level (Skilled or Expert or maybe even Master) martial arts gives you two attacks.
If you select a travel destination with the _ command that the game cannot find a path to, run pathfinding a second time, this time considering unexplored terrain as eligible. If there is an eligible path running through unexplored terrain, try to move along it; if not, do not move at all.
Give a message when a wand of secret door detection reveals something.
Getpos prompts (when you can move the cursor around for things like jumping or centering a stinking cloud) highlight the path from you to your cursor if that’s a meaningful thing for its use. Meaningful uses include jumping (highlight a straight-line path from you to the destination) or _ travel (highlight the path that you would travel along).
Highlighting could possibly be done by changing the glyph shown, but would probably be better off inverting the foreground and background colors.
Show basic summaries of any pets with you when your game ends. Things such as their inventory, age, basic stats, whether they were a starting pet, etc. This is primarily so that it carries over into the dumplog.
In the C call menu, allow \ to be entered as an alias for d, the discoveries list.
Extend the graphical tile system to support special tiles for artifacts.
When a monster that you can see becomes awake, you get a message like “[monster] wakes up” or “[monster] is roused.”
Untrapping a container, whether or not successful, silently reveals the locked/unlocked state of the container.
New exclamations for peaceful monsters getting mad at the player when they attack another peaceful: “Hey!” “Stop that!” “Get [him/her]!” “Oy!” “Jerk!” “Try me instead!” If hallucinating, add “Dude! Not cool!” to this list.
Treat the vibrating square (if you have located it) as a dungeon feature in the overview, so that the level is shown as having a vibrating square on it.
If you sit on a towel, give the YAFM “It’s probably not a good time for a picnic…”
If you can see a monster only with telepathy, you cannot see its peaceful/hostile status, so all monsters appear hostile by default (except tame monsters, which you can still see as tame). Likewise, you can’t see the monster names of non-tame monsters you can see only with telepathy.
Option to invert the colors of liquids, so the dominant color of the character glyph is the liquid color.
Add the turn a pet was created into the edog struct, so the game can measure how long and loyal of a relationship you have with it. Pets that stay tame for a long time get some combat buffs such as a damage boost or more hit points. They are also more likely to come back tame if killed and resurrected.
Note that if a pet is momentarily untamed and then retamed, it resets the “turn it became a pet” counter.
Donating more than 100 gold to a priest but still less than the required threshold to actually get anything causes the priest to say something gracious, rather than “Cheapskate”.
Watchmen that you chat to on the Tourist quest give special dialogue themed to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.
Add “choose” as a pettype option, which prompts you to select from the available pets during character creation.
The prompt for blessed genocide only accepts single-character strings; specifying a species won’t work. The prompt also says “(type a single character)”.
The wish parser should accept “scroll of recharging” as a valid variation for scroll of charging.
If scare monster is not formally known, change “The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up” to use the called name or label, e.g. “The scroll labeled NR 9 turns to dust as you pick it up”.
Remove the ability to wish for general items such as “scroll” or “ring”, since more often than not these only get used when someone typoes “scroll of identigy” - people almost always want to wish for specific items.
If you try to go up or down stairs or enter a magic portal, and there is a pet that is still eating next to you, you are prompted to confirm changing levels. Also remove the “foo is still eating” message since it will then be covered in the prompt.
The xlogfile saves the spot on the high score list that you achieved at the time the game ended.
Add a config file parse error that appears when your nethackrc does not contain a newline at the end.
Rename the potion of restore ability to “potion of restore attribute”.
Blessed object detection shows (item carried by a monster) for any object which is currently being carried by a monster, instead of just (item).
For variants that implement terrain recoloring while hallucinating: Don’t select the color randomly. Instead use Perlin noise or other continuous noise so that contiguous regions will have the same colors.
Command that saves your non-default, non-duplicated options to an autogenerated config file, or appends them to your existing config file, or writes out a config file with the wrong name and location (so you can copy and edit it).
Paranoid eat option, which makes you have to type out “yes” for “Continue eating?”
Engravings are visible from a distance, having their own glyph which renders only when there is an engraving on top of “uninteresting” terrain (floor or corridor). In ASCII, they render as a “, or possibly a ~, but their color varies based on what type of engraving it is.
If the verbose option is off, replace “A mysterious force prevents [monster] from teleporting!” with “[monster] shudders briefly.”
An option to disable Japanese item naming.
Add a message for when your pet falls down a trap door and you don’t see it happen.
Add a new damage type AD_CHOK, for specific suffocation attacks (so that rope golems’ AT_HUGS AD_PHYS combination doesn’t have to be interpreted as choking).
Nagas should only be MZ_LARGE, not MZ_HUGE.
When starting or resuming the game while hallucinating and during full moon, replace “You are lucky! Full moon tonight.” with “You’re on the moon tonight!”
Review objects that are oc_big. Certain ones like chests and large boxes don’t count as big, but should be.
For TDTTOE, you only receive a “telepathic” message from your quest leader if you actually have telepathy. Otherwise, you merely “sense” the message.
Allow magic fountains to be specified in special level files.
All eggs display their size, which is the same as their monster size (so e.g. an unidentified killer bee egg would be “tiny egg”). Non-monster eggs are small. Could also change the egg weight to match.
Add Dudley to the list of random ghost names.
When you fail to polymorph and get the “new man/woman” message, prior to this print a message that makes it clear that the polymorph fails. You don’t get this message when you deliberately try to polymorph into your own race.
If you fall into water with teleport-at-will, the game should use casting a teleport spell as its last resort, once you have no other options for escape. It’s very annoying to attempt to teleport and lose energy and nutrition when you’re deliberately trying to jump in the water and can easily climb right back out.
Fix the “Farewell” ending message to say “turns” instead of “moves”, since it’s more accurate.
Add a Japanese translation for kelp frond: “nori”.
Whenever a follower monster follows you between levels, print an appropriate message, such as “The wraith pursues you down the stairs.” and “You are surrounded by a shimmering sphere! The Wizard of Yendor grabs your arm as you vanish!”
When you are polymorphed into a monster with a stealing attack, you shouldn’t be able to make a normal attack and also steal something at the same time. Perhaps the stealing attack should only be made when you are barehanded, though this could interfere with martial arts.
Allow all ranged attacks to be targeted at an arbitrary space. The space does not necessarily have to be in line with anything, but it should be hittable by your attack under normal circumstances, so it can’t be out of range. The ranged attack will fly along Bresenham’s line algorithm to reach its target.
When you’re helpless for more than 1 turn, the game tells you exactly how many turns you missed.
Disallow quivering things that can’t be used as missiles (and therefore have no business being in the quiver).
If the player shoots or zaps something and there is a submerged or hiding monster the player doesn’t know is there in the way, it just flies past without interacting.
The game prints a message “You escape the dungeon, never to return again.” when you escape the dungeon, instead of just going straight to DYWYPI.
Allow the player to dip into adjacent pools, as this is not actually hard to do in real life.
Players’ thrown items should, if they miss a monster, continue flying behind it. (It works this way for monsters.)
Instead of storing door traps as part of the door state, use the trap field of struct lev with a special new DOORTRAP trap to indicate that there is a trap on the door space.
Level teleporters’ message “You are momentarily blinded by a flash of light” should be changed or removed because it is the same message as the more dangerous magic trap effect, and it doesn’t actually cause blinding.
If you are killed by a tame monster, the death message reflects that. Perhaps as simple as putting the word “tame” before the monster.
Allow the numeric prefix to work on the zap command. When zapping with a prefix specified, you will try to zap the wand that many times. (This is for easier wresting).
The hero should be able to see from the get-go that the Candelabrum has seven candle holders, so display it as “(x/7 candles attached)” instead of just “(x candles attached)”.
The #terrain command shows unexplored spaces as ? marks.
Whenever a monster tries to read a scroll of teleportation and level teleports to the current level (“foo shudders for a moment”), you are prompted to call the scroll.
When a monster teleports away, show a message “The foo disappears!” Possibly, if you also see where they teleported to, show another message, or just print “The foo teleports!” instead of printing a disappearance message.
Negative messages are never punctuated with ! and favor … but may still use just a period. (Example: “You feel attractive…” for gaining intrinsic aggravate monster in FIQhack, the existing “You feel attractive!” sounds like you gained Charisma.)
Split up the job of TELEPORT_REGIONs in special level definition files into it and NOENTRY_REGION. Now, TELEPORT_REGION defines a region that cannot be horizontally teleported into or out of, whereas NOENTRY_REGION defines a region where you cannot enter the level if arriving in an unusual way (level teleport, falling in from above, cursed potion of gain level).
Opening your current space (“o.”) should be equivalent to doing a loot on your current space.
Since untrapping is more common than the rarely used “seetrap” command, remap the ^ key by default to perform an untrap. If you wish to use seetrap, you need to do #seetrap.
The directional loot command works on adjacent containers, not only on your own square.
In wizard mode, attempting to teleport into inaccessible terrain or into or out of a teleport region should prompt the player to confirm the teleport. If they confirm, they override any restrictions; if not, it prints “Sorry…” and works like normal.
The “You hear someone cursing shoplifters” message replaces “someone” with the name of a known alive shopkeeper on the level.
Add a message for when create monster/create familiar/summon nasties fails to summon anything (may happen in extinctionist games).
You can displace peaceful monsters (but not shopkeepers, priests, or Quest leaders) by either walking into them (as the default choice) or by walking into them preceded by the m key.
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.
There should be a message from when you pacify (not tame) a monster by throwing food at it. “[monster] seems pacified by your gesture”; possibly something about you getting the monster’s order wrong if you’re hallucinating.
When blind and holding a leash with a pet on it, you can see the pet.
For variants with object properties, store a bitfield as the property mask in the objclass struct, and a separate one in the obj struct. This lets you define which properties are inherent to the object type (e.g. acid resistance and poison resistance for an alchemy smock) and which abnormal properties it has, which is useful because all alchemy smocks shouldn’t show up as “alchemy smock of poison resistance and acid resistance”.
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.
When standing on a (not known untrapped) container and using the search command, prompt the player to check for traps on the container. Search normally if they say no.
When the player is prompted to rename an object or a level that already has a name and submits an empty string, ask the player for confirmation to remove that name entirely: “Remove old name? [yn] (n)”
The scroll of remove curse auto-identifies if it removes a visible curse from one or more objects (i.e. the player can compare his inventory before and after reading it and see that the curse is gone).
Option to bring up the prompt to type-name an item any time it would normally be prompted, even if the object is already type-named. The example given is that if you price-id an object and then later see a monster use it, you then have the option to add this new information immediately.
The xlogfile shows which turn a conduct was first broken on, rather than compacting all conducts into a bitmask.
Wielding a wand will give you an accuracy or damage bonus with that wand. Or if the Wands Balance Patch is implemented, you get the effects of the wand at the next skill level. Monsters will always wield wands they intend to use, so you will usually see them doing so before they get a chance to take you by surprise with a fire or death ray.
When you wield a treat in your hand, pets that normally like that treat will follow you even more closely than they would if you simply had it in open inventory.
Wielding a copper object or wearing copper armor protects against an otherwise successful disease attack some of the time, because copper is antibacterial.
Wielding a mirror conveys partial reflection: you will reflect things 40 or 50% of the time.
Bones files created from filler levels should treat themselves as being on the deepest level the player reached in that branch in their game, so that there aren’t situations where a character carrying good gear who died in a silly manner on a higher-up level will leave a bunch of accessible loot.
Occasionally, when a bones file would create a ghost (e.g. most times), and the level difficulty is high enough, create a wraith of the player instead. If in Gehennom, occasionally create a shade of the player.
When the player is killed by a carnivorous (or, more rarely, an omnivorous) monster, the bones file may not contain a corpse because it was eaten by the monster. Never happens if it would be cannibalism for the monster to eat you.
Make bones a composite option that enables you to load only your own bones files, and never other people’s.
Bones levels have a special level sound. Possibly the same “eerie feeling” you get in abandoned temples.
A special level where the area you can levelport into does not contain any stairs.
A Minetown containing a jewelry store, or add a jewelry store to Bazaar Town or one of the less plentiful Minetowns.
Line the long empty corridor in Asmodeus’ Lair with a few statues.
Sokoban levels with water or lava instead of holes (and make it so that boulders never sink without a trace in Sokoban). Air currents will still pull you down into the liquid if you try to go over them. Not specified what should happen if the player tries to boil away or freeze the liquids.
Replace the Plane of Water bubbles with an initial map looking much the same with bubbles of air surrounded by water. However, instead of the bubbles moving on paths, run a fairly slow cellular automaton that shifts the water around gradually and will eventually join up the air spaces. It’s possible for a bubble to collapse completely, but not if the player’s in it.
Using fire on the water on the Plane of Water boils the water away and opens up air space, but spawns in steam vortices.
Ranged divination effects (monster detection, object detection, clairvoyance, maybe telepathy) are suppressed if the level is not mappable.
Level flag that prevents mapping as long as the local “boss” is alive (nemesis if anywhere in the Quest, demon lords/Croesus on their own levels). Maybe make the ‘nommap’ field 2 bits instead of 1.
A level or branch that forces permanent hallucination while you’re in it. Hallucination blocking from Grayswandir may or may not function.
Change Fort Ludios’s door to a drawbridge, and add several more drawbridges leading into the throne room from all sides. When one drawbridge is opened or destroyed, all the others automatically open to let the monsters swarm out and attack.
Put some or all of Gehennom behind a one-way gate that you can’t return past, by any means, until you have the Amulet.
Make Fort Ludios a multi-leveled branch leading upwards; the upper floors are smaller levels with the same footprint as the base of the building on the bottom level.
On the level containing the stairs to the Gnomish Mines, either always or often generate one gnome in a random place.
Big Room variant that has a river cutting the level in half horizontally, with a bridge across it in the center. The upstairs is placed somewhere on the left; the downstairs and all the monsters generated with the level are placed on the right. The bridge sides could be walled.
In the Big Room variant that has squares of light and darkness, make the lit regions circular rather than square (possibly by scattering candles and lanterns on the ground, or just by making random circular spots of light).
Redesign the Plane of Water: instead of moving bubbles, there is just a lot of water and little land; the water constantly sloshes around, changing the land and forcing the hero to follow it, but not every turn like the bubbles.
New Medusa-alternative level (like the Grue and Echo levels in dNetHack): Chrysaor’s Palace, containing a fair amount of water, soldiers, and Chrysaor, who wields a +10 gold broadsword and a gold shield of reflection, and whose attacks and resistances are on par with Croesus or even better.
Make the Wizard’s Tower its own level(s) rather than embedding it in Gehennom.
After the Valley, have a guaranteed special level “The Gates of Hell”. This level design is very clear: “This is hell. These are the gates, and they are closed. You are not wanted here. Go away or perish.” The level is a large cavern, with a massive arc-like fortification across either the left or right side. The gates are implemented with both iron doors and a drawbridge across lava. There is quite a lot of lava, and a lot of demons inside and outside the fortification.
A special level (possibly in a quest, Rogue-locate is a good candidate) level that contains a pond outside some building or city wall, with one iron bars square on the other side of the wall, inaccessible except by going over the water. Behind it is a (maybe randomly generated?) network of corridors inside solid rock representing a sewer. Either there’s something in here required to complete the level, or there’s an alternate path to complete the level, or there’s some treasure.
Add a clear and obvious ice theme to Asmodeus’ Lair, as an indication to the player that he has nasty cold magic at his disposal.
Make the Vibrating Square level into, rather than just another maze level, a level with 3 symmetric 7x5 chambers embedded in the maze, each with four exits, and a smaller 3x3 chamber at the bottom containing the upstairs. In the center of one of the 7x5 rooms is the Vibrating Square. This is intended to be a dark mirror of the Astral Plane.
Add some Hitchhiker’s Guide easter eggs on dungeon level 42.
Remove/replace the guaranteed L and V monsters from Astral; the priests shouldn’t tolerate random high level undead hanging around.
The natural spawn rate of monsters on Astral (and perhaps the other Planes) is zero.
The vibrating square level is just one big open rectangle with the vibrating square in its usual spots.
A peaceful large dog named Sirius is found in the Ranger quest home level near Orion. Ranger starting dogs don’t have to be named Sirius anymore.
Many bear traps generate on the Ranger quest.
The Valkyrie quest home level should not be all ice. It seems like a frozen lake currently.
Gehennom level that is cavernous but with 1-3 defensive fortifications consisting of a slightly twisty undiggable wall with turrets or guardhouses staffed with demons, and lava moats with drawbridges. Stairs on opposite sides of the fortifications.
Vaults with undiggable walls. You must teleport into them. (The guard will appear inside the vault and teleport you out once you drop your gold.)
One of the Oracle’s fountains is guaranteed to be magical, but it’s randomly placed among the four fountains.
Mines’ End variant that is an actual mine, with many twisty corridors dug out of the rock, and many unmined gems in the rock. The luckstone is unmined, in one of several possible spaces, not adjacent to any corridors but not too far away from them, and certainly not as far away as in the Wine Cellar. A pickaxe will be guaranteed somewhere on this level.
The Astral Plane should be brightly lit, what with having all the halls of the gods and being suffused with holy power.
Orcish Town should bear more gear of the deceased shopkeepers and priests: there should be at least one key per dead shopkeeper, five dead shopkeepers’ worth of gold pieces (probably to be picked up by orcs), a robe and spellbooks for the priest, and so on. Possibly even add gear for the wrecked shops. Or it should have a random piece of good gear being carried by an orc-captain.
Guarantee the Big Room in all games, and possibly expand the range of levels in which it can generate.
Sokoban is a one-level branch that strings together a bunch of different puzzles that must each be defeated in turn, all eventually leading to the treasure zoo. Obviously, the pits must be changed to holes that drop you on the level with the Sokoban stairs.
Slightly bias priests’ and angels’ allegiances on Astral to be generated near their high altar so that the player can get a clue, but not enough so that it’s obviously distinguishable from random noise.
Remove the beehive from the Wizard’s Tower. Bees are too easy for a late game player. If, instead, it should be kept (maybe a Wicked Witch of the West reference?), the beehive should open into the central area of that floor, so the bees can come out and attack the player.
Redesign the Wizard’s Tower so the hero enters in the southeast corner on the bottom floor, spirals into the center with the upstair, the second floor has the downstair in the center and spirals out to the upstair in the northwest. The top floor has its downstair in the northwest and basically the same layout as now.
Remove the Fake Wizard’s Tower special levels. Instead, there is simply a doorway you can walk into on the bottom floor of the normal Wizard’s Tower. (If it’s desirable to keep the fake towers, let them be randomly generated features in Gehennom.)
Ludios uses a smaller, elite team made up of mostly captains and lieutenants for defense, with maybe some recruited dangerous monsters, instead of a swarm of soldiers.
The Caveman quest goal level contains several dragon eggs of random colors beneath the Chromatic Dragon.
Add small jails to most if not all Minetown maps.
Add a guardhouse to the Castle outside the immediate drawbridge area containing some soldiers and sergeants, where the player might find a bugle with which to play the passtune.
The top level of Vlad’s Tower is now an open level with Vlad and his throne, and the vampires and their chests are moved to lower floors.
A Mines’ End that has a water theme, though not necessarily as extreme as the Gnomish Sewer.
If a monster steps on a squeaky board near you when you are asleep, it may wake you up. (Really, this should be the case for any effect capable of waking monsters.)
Magic portals are never hidden.
When a magic trap shakes your pack violently, any bells you happen to be carrying get rung. For normal bells this doesn’t do much besides awaken monsters, but the charged Bell of Opening will be rung, do its usual ring effects, and lose a charge.
New container traps:
If there is a web over water or lava and you are a web-walking monster, you can move onto that space without falling into the liquid. Possibly if you’re any monster, not just a web walker.
Rangers have a significantly better chance than other roles at untrapping beartraps (perhaps even just 100%).
Monsters, including the player, under a certain body weight plus inventory weight don’t trigger squeaky boards. This weight factor is fairly light, possibly in the low hundreds (so even a player carrying nothing will still trigger it).
If there are items on a pit space, the vision code doesn’t render them until you’re adjacent to the pit, at which point the pit is automatically mapped and you see the items. If there are no items in the pit, it remains undetected.
Occasionally when a pit or hole is generated, generate a random cloak on top of it (it’s poorly covering the opening and the hero doesn’t notice until they either search while next to it or step onto it).
Empty boxes are never trapped.
Holes always drop you exactly one level (though trapdoors may still go farther).
The rumbling from a rolling boulder trap wakes up monsters.
When the player or any monster frees itself from a beartrap, it removes the trap and puts a beartrap item there instead. The trap shouldn’t magically become primed again.
Lighting a web on fire will burn it away, and also spread to any adjacent webs and burn through them. Monsters on squares containing burning webs take a smallish amount of fire damage.
Traps that shoot out potions. Generate with a variety of negative potions such as sleep, acid, lit oil, hallucination. (Or possibly, they only generate with 1 or 2 potions, because then the player will go over and untrap it for any remaining potions.)
Would work best if the trap struct contained an object pointer for ammunition, as described in #768.
The player can’t cast spells or use magic items while standing on top of an anti-magic field. (Rather than straight up not being able to use the magic items, they would behave either like their non-magic counterparts, or as if they had no charges, as much as possible. Magic instruments would play normally, wands would fail to produce an effect, scrolls would have no effect, and so on.)
Remove the odd feeling messages from magic traps. Instead move them to a new trap, a “foresight trap”, which gives you a vision of something to come. Once triggered, the trap vanishes. Effects can be:
When you try to move onto a known trap with the m command, the game interprets it as you specifically trying to avoid the trap you already know about, and your chance of triggering it is greatly lowered.
When a monster triggers a magic (or maybe polymorph) trap, one possible effect is that they turn into a figurine of themselves with appropriate beatitude. However, the trap exploding on them is more likely, so that it can’t be used to farm figurines. A possibly evil addendum is that if the player would have otherwise died from damage from a magic trap, the bones file may contain a figurine of them instead of a corpse.
Rolling boulder traps don’t expect a boulder at a specific spot: they look up to 9 squares in all 8 directions for boulders, and the first boulder it finds will be triggered. If no boulder is in range, it may create one by dropping it from the ceiling in a suitable location, then rolling it across the trap (but only one boulder per trap will be created like this, and some traps generate incapable of creating a new boulder).
Add a level flag for the level being open to the sky or otherwise no ceiling. Effects of this include: falling rock traps do not generate, cursed potions of gain level do not work, scrolls of earth do not work; monsters that normally cling to the ceiling are unable to. Levels that would have this: lots of Quest levels, the Elemental Planes.
You can untrap falling rock traps. Unlike dart and arrow traps, this just dumps all the remaining rocks onto that space all at once with the message “The rocks clatter onto the ground”. If there is a monster on this space, it gets hit repeatedly by each rock.
Dart traps can make you fall asleep, go blind, hallucinate, get confused, etc. This would mesh well with #1922.
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.
Beartraps are much lighter so as to make them feasible to carry around, and Rangers start out with two or three of them.
Rename rust traps to “water traps”, and the gush of water hitting you may hit your pack, wetting several items.
Using the m command to move yourself into a pit makes you lower yourself into the pit without taking any damage (so you can easily get items and other things in the pit). Maybe a spiked pit still deals a bit of damage, maybe not.
Rolling boulder trap hit chance and damage is based on dexterity and not AC, for how much you can jump out of the way. Only high dexterity will allow you to dodge the boulder entirely.
A floor trap that sounds a loud alarm, waking monsters (a lot more so than a squeaky board, perhaps level-wide).
New container trap effect, a loud alarm that wakes nearby monsters. (Exploding chests already wake nearby monsters, but the chance of it happening is miniscule unless your Luck is below -7; this was proposed as one of the common effects even at high Luck.)
The more gold you pay to a priest, the stronger his god becomes. Newly generated priests of that god could get better equipment, or altars of that god might be harder to convert. In Moloch’s case, Gehennom gets slightly harder if you pour a lot of gold into his temple. This applies with money donated to your own god as well, but the effects are naturally less visible since you won’t go around fighting your own priests or converting your own altars.
Fuzz the effective difficulty of monsters sacrificed, so that you can’t trivially count up and calculate how much more you need to sacrifice.
Praying while standing on a throne, assuming you’re in good standing with your god, causes the god to have an increased chance of crowning you. Possibly, they always crown you if they decide to grant a boon and you are in good enough standing to be eligible for crowning.
Gods can grant you (unique?) pets as a sacrifice gift, or possibly a prayer boon. Example here was Sleipnir for valkyries. If it’s a steed, it will always be saddled.
Temple priests can sell holy water as a donation benefit.
When you escape the dungeon by leaving on the level 1 stairs without the Amulet, your god is immediately set to be angry at you (for abandoning their mission). This will have no effect on the game since it’s ending, but end-of-game enlightenment will show that they were angry with you. Possibly disable this if the hero had the Amulet at some point or is carrying an unidentified fake one.
Monks’ vegetarian-breaking alignment penalty is assessed at -1 alignment per X weight units of meat you consume. Eating a huge chunk of meat will cause a much larger penalty than a jackal corpse.
Alignment penalty, or possibly even angering your god, for Monks and Priests for consorting with a foocubus.
“Awe” intrinsic, granted only as a divine boon for a short duration: any monster you hit or that attacks you automatically gets scared.
Rangers get an alignment bonus for disarming naturally-generated bear traps, or possibly for catching a hostile monster in a player-set bear trap.
Magical taming is easier to do on coaligned monsters and harder on crossaligned monsters.
Increase the rate at which annoyed gods will send down minions to defend their altars from being converted, since this rarely happens.
Possibly, your god will not crown you until you have completed some milestone (finished the quest, probably, but also could be going to Gehennom and back).
When you are crowned, your character gains a literal ethereal crown above their head that causes hostile monsters of (significantly) lower level than you to have to pass a resistance check upon seeing you or else flee.
Add clerical spellcasters that are more dangerous than shamans but less threatening than priests.
Shamans count as clerical spellcasters and follow a god. If they follow your god, they are peaceful. Killing them will anger their god.
A YAFM when you donate exactly 1/10 of your gold to a priest: “You pay your tithe.”
If a god doesn’t have any good artifacts or spellbooks to grant you as a sacrifice gift, they give you a prayer boon instead.
Worshipers of The Lady (neutral Tourists or some neutral Priests) have a permanent full-moon effect with Luck timing out to +1 due to the Lady’s influence.
The Arch Priest specifically offers to open up a magic portal to the Plane of Earth if you talk to him with the Amulet of Yendor, as a Priest benefit, to skip the last dozen or so levels of the Dungeons of Doom.
If a priest gives you two bits for an ale while hallucinating, change the message to “two bitcoins for an ale” (or just use a hallucinatory currency.)
Your god considers both your luck and your alignment record when deciding whether to grant a prayer, and weighs alignment record more heavily. That is, if you have negative luck but good alignment, your god will often still grant the prayer, and positive luck might save you from bad alignment, but not often.
If you get hit by something reflectable, have no other source of reflection, and prayer timeout is 0, your god may rarely intervene (“But it reflects somehow!”). This could either increase timeout a smallish amount or not increase it. Does not break atheist conduct.
Alternatively, instead of “using” prayer timeout, automatically spend a couple points of divine protection. Because you would have had to break atheist to get that, the atheist problem doesn’t apply.
Replace all the priests of Moloch on the Astral Plane with (still hostile) priests of the other gods. Moloch is a disgraced, hated god, and his priests have no business there.
One possible “trouble” if you are praying is having more than a certain total level/total difficulty of hostile monsters around you relative to your own level. If your god decides you are in trouble from this and decides to fix the trouble, they will teleport you horizontally somewhere else on the level far from any monsters. If the level is non-teleport, they will instead lift you up one level like a potion of gain level would. If that cannot be done, they will not attempt to fix it.
When you kill the high priest of Moloch, Moloch himself shows up with the Amulet, and you have to beat him up and take it from him.
You get an alignment penalty for digging up a grave if you are a Priest.
One of the prayer boons you can get from a god is intrinsic light: you become a light source (probably of radius 3, but could be 4). Crowning may give you this permanently, since you’re now all holy.
Don’t gift a character a spellbook as a prayer boon if the character is illiterate or certain roles (like cavemen or barbarians), and if a spellbook is given limit its level somehow so that a character doesn’t get a spellbook of much too high level.
Permanent alignment conversion prevents you from receiving any more protection by donating to a priest ever again.
Crowning makes it impossible to change alignment ever again. You can neither permanently convert at an altar or put on a helm of opposite alignment after you have been crowned.
When you try and fail to wear a helm of opposite alignment in the quest branch, you only lose all your protection if you had it identified as a helm of opposite alignment.
Divine lightning (a god smiting you, particularly Moloch when you attack his high priest) should ignore reflection; it’s a “wide-angle” blast of lightning. Maybe this should apply to the lightning monster spell too. The high priest of Moloch should also be shock resistant.
Polymonsterless conduct: you never intentionally polymorph a monster. (Though defining “intentionally” is probably quite tricky.)
Tins of “pureed monster” or “soup made from monster” do not break foodless conduct. Possibly change tin behavior so the preparation method can be discerned before eating it, or just display the preparation when the tin is opened, e.g. “You succeed in opening the tin. It contains a puree that smells like newts. Eat it?” This doesn’t have to reveal every preparation method, so that greasy fried food remains a danger.
Petless conduct: increment when the player starts with a pet or tames a monster.
This conduct could be accidentally broken by the taming effect of a magic trap, which is problematic. One solution is to have magic traps pacify instead of tame if the player has the pet option turned off, but mixing options and gameplay like that seems like a bad idea. Worth noting that polyselfless is another example of a conduct that can be broken accidentally and is far more likely to happen. Note that xNetHack’s implementation of petless conduct just turns the charismatic magic trap effect into a pacification of adjacent monsters regardless of whether you’re petless or not.
Another issue is the guardian angel; it would be especially cruel to unexpectedly break the conduct on the final level of the game. xNetHack’s implementation prevents the angel from appearing if you still have petless conduct intact when arriving on Astral.
Artifactless conduct: is broken whenever an artifact enters the player’s inventory (since the player never has to pick up an artifact).
You can wish for a shop type. The next shop that generates (of random type; specific shop types on special levels do not qualify) will be that type.
You can wish for health. This restores between 50% (or 75%) and 100% of your missing hit points and cures all status ailments.
You can wish for terrain types and dungeon features. These are already wishable in wizard mode; the justification is “If the player wants to wish for lava, why not let them have lava?” You are allowed to wish for a throne, because the chance of getting two or more wishes off it is tiny.
You can wish for friends. This duplicates the effect of casting create familiar.
You can wish for “polymorph”, which makes you polymorph. Possibly you get control over the polymorph.
You can wish for attributes, which increases whichever attribute you wish for. Maybe a d4 or d5 increase so it’s not inferior to a blessed potion of gain ability.
You can wish for intrinsics. This gives you any intrinsic that you can actually get in your normal form. Wishes for intrinsic reflection, drain resistance, and the like will be unsuccessful. Not sure about intrinsics normally only possible by eating jewelry.
You can wish for luck, which increases your Luck by d5 points.
You can wish for time. This decreases the turn count a bit, or alternatively gives you a large amount of movement points so that time effectively stops for everyone else besides you for a while (like what SpliceHack’s scroll of time does).
Walled-off sections of graveyards with locked doors named “crypts” can generate. Inside crypts are very strong out-of-difficulty mummies. Note that this would require that very strong mummies exist in the game in the first place.
Monster lairs (antholes, cockatrice nests, etc) are not filled wall-to-wall with monsters.
Graveyards can rarely generate visible pits (open graves) with no monster on top of them.
Treasure zoos try to generate only “animal” monsters (those that have the M1_ANIMAL flag).
Add code that allows the game to determine whether a room is a “dead-end” room (contains only 1 door which connects to the rest of the level, but unlike shop-compatible rooms, it’s okay to have closets.)
Certain special rooms (typically ones that have awake monsters in them that shouldn’t wander around the level) always generate with all of their doors locked.
Throne rooms should place the throne along one wall, preferably the narrower wall of the room.
Abandoned temples can generate as a special room, or else a room containing a random unattended altar may be converted into an abandoned temple.
Vaults on deeper levels may generate with four gold golems instead of four gold piles. Or both.
If you are a Monk and the game decides to generate a delicatessen, replace it with a health food store 80% of the time. This is independent from the special case for health food stores in Minetown.
Gehennom special room “ice cavern”, with mixed ice/regular floor, possibly with unnethack-style irregular ice walls, and containing ice devils and cold-themed items like wands of cold and rings of fire resistance.
New shop type “thief shop”. Contains blindfolds, lockpicks, thiefstones (if implemented), rogue/pickpocket gloves (if implemented), cloaks and daggers. Something special should happen when you directly steal from a thief shop.
Spider nest room; a zoo-type room (where every square generates a monster independently) with giant and cave spiders. Each square additionally has a 70% chance of a web. Loot consists of several “bones piles” that have a few random objects but no comestibles.
Special “cell” room. Only valid if one end of the room has no doors. It generates a line of iron bars across this end of the room, with a locked (iron if possible) door somewhere in the line. Independently, it may contain: a prisoner, a sink, a bed (if those exist), and 1-2 chests with random contents.
If cauldrons are added, new special room that contains several gnomish wizards, orc shamans, and kobold shamans standing around a cauldron.
One Gehennom “special room” should be an active temple with a peaceful priest of Moloch.
Storeroom: a special room that only generates in a dead end room, perhaps only if the room is under a certain total area. Contains 2-4 chests or large boxes, and rarely ice boxes. If the game had barrels, it should have some of those too. May contain a couple rats too.
New special room “lich hall”. Contains one difficulty-appropriate or somewhat-out-of-difficulty lich, generated asleep with difficulty-appropriate undead. One or two statues generate along the walls, and there are several spellbooks on the floor or in chests. Within the hall, the lich can summon more undead.
New shop type “thrift shop”. Contains items priced at a steep discount but which aren’t very useful on their own. Examples include negatively enchanted or eroded (not necessarily cursed) weapons and armor, blank scrolls, magical tools with zero or one charges left.
Occasionally, instead of a werecreature corpse being placed in a closet behind iron bars, a live werecreature will be placed there instead.
Assuming a new Gehennom generation algorithm which generates doors, some of which must be passed in order to get through the level: have a special type of “demon key” to open doors in Gehennom. Lots of them generate in Gehennom (though not as many as there are doors; possibly a certain type of monster there generates with them so you can obtain more if you get stuck), but each key is single-use and breaks when used to open a door.
Shops can sometimes generate disconnected from the rest of the level and must be teleported or dug into.
Antholes contain eggs of the type of ant the room is filled with; fewer than the ants themselves.
When the game tries to generate a sink in a room, it tries to place the sink next to the wall (though not in front of a doorway).
Sealed closets (with either a wall or iron bars) generate some additional item loot on top of their guaranteed scroll of teleportation.
Throne rooms generate their monsters awake, but also generate all their doorways as locked.
Weapons and armor that generate in shops can be randomly eroded at any erosion level. Perhaps 10% or 20% of items are eroded, the rest are not.
Aligned altars can generate in Gehennom, and standing on a coaligned altar in Gehennom is the only way to contact your god (via prayer or sacrifice). If the altar is crossaligned, you can try to convert it, but Moloch may seize control during the process and turn it into an altar to Moloch. Molochian altars in Gehennom are very difficult or outright impossible to convert.
Some random graffiti is not rumors; it contains helpful in-game information. Things like “NR 9 is a scroll of earth” (giving object identifications), or “The Big Room is on level 12”.
Put engravings outside or nearby inaccessible closets so that you know that something’s there.
Trees’ fruit is generated along with the tree (possibly buried for code purposes so that it shows up on object detection but not when you just look at the tree, or perhaps just “embedded in the tree” is good enough). When you kick or chop down the tree, this fruit is released rather than generating some fruit on the spot.
Add a “specialness” value to each special room and possibly dungeon feature, based on their approximate usefulness to the player. (For example, a swamp room is virtually useless to the player, a treasure zoo not very useful, a throne room more useful, and a temple or shop the most useful.) A level will start out with some amount of specialness available, and randomly chooses special rooms and features to add until it runs out of specialness.
Random piles of loot can sometimes generate buried in the floor or behind walls on spaces not adjoining any walkable spaces. Nearby engravings are generated to indicate that there is something in the vicinity. Archeologists get an alignment bonus for digging out these items.
If fossils exist, they should generate buried beneath gravestones.
The Mines have a higher rate of gold and gems embedded in rock than the other branches.
Track the number of unattended altars generated in the Dungeons of Doom above, say, the Quest portal level. If zero have been generated yet, the chance of one generating on a new level in that range increases more and more until it’s a certainty on the final one.
A very small percentage of closets have a random item generated in them, even if they aren’t sealed off.
Sconces (perhaps a \ found on the walls of dark rooms, and in dark Mines levels, that may contain (lit or unlit) candles. You can untrap or loot them to remove the candle. Could also generate with an oil lamp, which would give you a potion of oil or a partially filled oil lamp when looted.
Open doors can generate trapped. When you step off an open door to some other space, it closes and locks behind you.
Add a level attribute which serves as a multiplier for the monster spawn rate on that level. Can be specified in des files.
Instead of being completely lit or unlit, Mines levels can generate with large contiguous areas of lit and unlit floor.
Containers never generate with food. Instead, split up the probability of food among other object classes that have nonzero probability, and also allow some tools to generate in them.
Touchstones can generate in hardware stores.
New “hedge” terrain #. It blocks movement but not line of sight (like iron bars), can be chopped down with an axe, and has a chance of blocking ranged weapon attacks passing through it. Possibly it can be jumped over.
Upper Mines levels’ stairs are biased to generate relatively close to each other.
Slightly increase the minimum depth of rolling boulder traps, which is currently 2 and can instakill a character on level 2 easily.
Mud terrain, brown }. It can be walked on, but if you stand in one spot for long enough you will start sinking into the mud. You will be able to pull free if you are only a little stuck, but once you get more stuck you cannot, and if you cannot extricate yourself somehow you will eventually sink below the surface and suffocate.
This might best be implemented with a new “mud pit” trap, which gets created by standing on mud for too long and works similarly to a regular pit in that you are held in the same place by it for a while as you try to move out. Except a mud pit allows you to sink down and suffocate.
Scale the probability of secret doors and secret passages in a room-and-corridor level based on its depth, so that level 1 is almost guaranteed not to contain any blocking the way, and the other early levels are also not likely for this to happen.
Place a statue of every demon lord who has not yet been generated lining the walls of Moloch’s Sanctum. This way, if you really want to fight one (or all) of them, you can do so.
Any lava plain levels that generate should grow the region of normal floor by 1 in each direction, so that the player does not have to walk on narrow and diagonal paths through it. Ideally, this should be provided as a flag to any cavern-fill levels.
Iron doors, which generate 30% of the time a normal door would be generated on dungeon levels 7 or below. They use the symbol +. They work the same as normal doors, but they cannot be burned, kicked, or blasted down, or destroyed any other way. If one happens to be locked, you have to unlock it “properly”.
An artifact often gifted to Barbarians which provides magic resistance and half spell damage but prevents Pw from regenerating. Or assign these properties to the Heart of Ahriman, which makes it good for Barbarians as they rarely cast spells.
New artifact Mirror Brand. It is an artifact short sword that grants reflection when wielded and when it hits an opponent, takes the higher of its own base damage roll and the other weapon’s (then adds its own enchantment to the result).
It is based on dNetHack, though it’s more akin to a generic mirror blades than the actual Mirror Brand artifact in dNetHack.
Intelligent non-quest artifacts will evade your grasp if you are directly cross-aligned (lawful when it is chaotic or vice versa). That is, a lawful can never pick up Stormbringer and a chaotic can never pick up Excalibur, though neutrals can still can and will still get blasted.
When an artifact is destroyed, unset it as existing so that it can be gifted or wished for again.
New artifact The Mirror of Venus, a mirror that confers slotless reflection. If you are female, you can invoke it to charm monsters; otherwise, invoking it will only pacify monsters. Will only be gifted to a female character.
(Male counterpart artifact is the Spear of Mars, #2756).
Trollsbane can be invoked to instapetrify all trolls in a radius of 5.
Artifacts whose base item type isn’t chargeable can be charged; this will clear or reduce any invoke timeout remaining.
Make the Mitre of Holiness invoke effect give temporary intrinsic energy regeneration rather than a single huge boost of power.
Demonbane, while wielded, warns of demons.
New artifact Fishing Pole, some sort of polearm that deals double damage to all sea monsters and can hit squares as if you were Expert (in the full 2-square-wide ring around you), regardless of your polearm skill.
Artifact brass lantern that gives light in a radius of 4. Invoking it recharges it.
New artifact The Silver Shoes, silver low boots that levelport you when invoked. They are the shoes worn by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Make Demonbane a mace rather than a long sword, to make it more attractive to Priests.
New artifact The Captain’s Hook, artifact grappling hook that never fails to do what you want it to do and has zero chance of hooking yourself, regardless of skill. Deals double damage to crocodiles.
The Orb of Detection confers automatic searching while carried, with a 100% chance of succeeding.
New artifact Green Thumb, neutral/unaligned gauntlets of dexterity, or gauntlets of defense if implemented. (Ideally made of wood, if possible). Invoke to create a tree. While you have them equipped and you are near a tree, you get some extra damage reduction.
New artifact Sinsword, a chaotic two-handed sword. If your alignment is positive, it behaves just like a regular two-handed sword. If negative, it gains a bonus to to-hit and damage (capped at 6) based on how negative your alignment is. Deals double damage to angelic beings.
Fire and Frost Brand can be invoked for powerful fire and cold bolts.
If Magicbane has not yet been generated when the player reaches the Wizard goal level, Newt the wizard has a higher-than-usual chance of being given it.
If an artifact has been generated and is on some existing level, wishing for it will remove it from that level and teleport it right into the player’s hands. However, the beatitude, enchantment, and other fields of the wish will fail.
Convert the Master Key of Thievery’s base item type to a lockpick. Because flavor-wise, giving Rogues a key means they never have to pick locks again.
New artifact Gungnir, an unaligned spear (spear of Odin from Norse mythology). Confers nothing, but has +20 to hit (or whatever is necessary to make a hit basically guaranteed) and +d8 damage.
Note that SpliceHack implements Gungnir, but not as described here.
Artifact whose carry effect deflects incoming status ailments onto nearby monsters. If there are no other monsters around (or if there is one monster who is causing the ailment and is ineligible), you take the status effect like normal.
The Tsurugi of Muramasa always bisects long worms, cutting them in half (unless they have only a head segment).
The Magic Mirror and Master Key’s rumor-granting effects are removed or replaced, because they’re stupid and a way to read the whole rumors file while still technically sticking to unspoiled behavior.
Artifact instruments that are actually useful.
The Orb of Detection confers passive detect unseen: every few turns when carried it triggers the effect of zapping a wand of secret door detection for free.
Non-weapon artifact which, when carried, adds bonus fire damage to all of your physical attacks, regardless of what you’re using to make the attack.
As part of artifact weapon rebalance, there should be at least one Ranger-friendly non-bladed weapon that’s available through sacrifice (and therefore available pre-Quest.) Doesn’t necessarily have to be a bow.
New artifact Elfrist, a chaotic orcish dagger which can be named. It has bonuses against elves, of course, but also a smallish flat damage bonus versus any monster, so it might actually be useful to name it early.
Artifact magic marker Scrivener. It generates with 3 charges and cannot be recharged. Instead of using the charges normally, a single charge will write any scroll or spellbook without fail.
Artifact ring Nenya (Galadriel’s ring from Lord of the Rings): a mithril ring of warning that also confers unchanging. If possible, its warning should apply level-wide, not in a specific radius.
Make Sunsword out of gold.
Add one or two artifacts or modify artifact base types such that there is more than one good blunt artifact you can obtain through sacrifice. (The current three are Mjollnir, which is decent, and Ogresmasher and Trollsbane, which are not.)
Artifact shuriken The Silver Star: deals +d8 damage to all targets. Like Mjollnir, it returns to the player’s inventory after being thrown, but doesn’t have any chance of hitting the player. Since there is only one of it, it cannot be multishot.
This would be a good first sacrifice gift for Monks.
Add a non-wielded-weapon non-quest artifact that is a guaranteed first sacrifice gift for Monks.
When the player kills a giant spider with an elven dagger and Sting has not yet been created, the dagger is converted into Sting automatically. Sting is made of rustproof steel, instead of wood (this would be tricky to do because of base items; you would still want to be able to create it by naming an elven dagger, but Sting in the lore is made of steel or at least metal, not wood). Sting has bonuses versus spiders, in addition to its bonuses against orcs.
New artifact dagger The Barrow-blade of Cardolan: has some flat bonuses, some additional bonuses versus undead, and instakills all W, ghosts, and shades. It is either lawful or unaligned. Could also be a short sword, since there are currently no artifact short swords, but for flavor it should be a dagger.
Remove the spell of knock entirely in favor of the wand already being a good enough source of opening magic.
Nerf the spell of knock in comparison to the wand of opening: it should be a melee-range spell (or a beam with range 1), and possibly it can’t be used to open containers until you are at least Basic in matter spells.
Flavor the spell of protection’s messages differently if you are a Priest.
The spell of detect unseen grants temporary intrinsic searching in addition to its usual effects.
Make the sleep spell scale like it does in D&D: you can only put a total of (your level) HD of monsters to sleep.
The player can cast destroy armor at other monsters at melee range.
For role differentiation: each role can only learn up to a certain number of spells. Wizards can learn them all, while roles like Healers can learn about a dozen; valkyries might be able to learn 3 and barbarians 1 (or 0). Possibly combine this with #2084.
The player can never learn, or can learn but never cast, spells that they are restricted in.
Distinguish between monster spells “summon random monsters” and “summon nasties”, allowing lower level casters to summon at-difficulty non-nasties.
When you are hit by the aggravate monsters spell at melee range, you gain intrinsic aggravate monster for a little while.
Summon nasties can only summon nasties on squares adjacent to the target creature. If there aren’t any available adjacent spaces, it has no effect.
The healing spell is a ray. Monsters will cast it on allies, but they might also hit you. But now that it’s a ray, it’ll bounce off you if you have reflection.
Give Healers at least Basic skill cap in enchantment spells, maybe Skilled.
The spell of remove curse may be cast offensively at monsters to bestow a curse.
Magic missile damage depends solely on skill and not XL. (Perhaps realized by scaling its damage die size - d4 for Unskilled, d6 for Basic, d8 for Skilled, d12 for Expert.)
Trying to cast a forgotten spell and getting nightmarish images in your mind drains a few points of Pw.
The spell of invisibility has an advanced form which casts a make invisible beam, like the wand does.
Reduce haste self to level 2, but make its duration significantly shorter.
Make the spell of detect monsters level 2 or 3.
Move the spell of light to the clerical school.
In variants with the Wands Balance Patch, or otherwise have multiple levels of lightning power (Skilled lightning spell or something), lightning should chain into other monsters near the first thing it hits. Chain lightning can still be reflected. The jumps are made in random directions, so hitting a monster close to you may cause it to chain back into you.
At high skill, the spell of wizard lock forces items off the doorway to adjacent squares so it can make the door. If there’s a monster on the door, it also gets forced off to an adjacent square, or becomes embedded in the door if none exists.
Zapping an opening beam at a closed, unlocked door opens it. Casting knock at Skilled or Expert lets you unlock and open all at once.
Rename cone of cold to “frost blast”, because it does not act like a typical D&D cone spell in either of its forms.
The base Pw cost for a spell is specified per-spell, and only correlates with spell level rather than being tied to it, which allows for interesting things like low-level spells that are easy to cast but expensive.
The spell of protection does not gradually dissipate. It disappears all at once, with the player given a warning a few turns beforehand.
The spell of light has an advanced form, which is a ray. It blinds monsters it is fired at like a camera flash does. (The camera flash is also transformed into a ray, which can be reflected.) In Wands Balance Patch-implementing variants, the wand of light should also have this effect for skilled users.
Spells now take different numbers of turns to cast (interruptable by normal means). Combat spells and some of the emergency spells still take only 1 or 2 turns, but utility spells can take up to five or so.
The spell of clairvoyance grants a few hundred turns of intrinsic clairvoyance when cast at Skilled. This makes it useful for Samurai in particular.
Cure blindness is a pretty useless spell, and should probably be removed or its effects folded into some other spell like extra healing or clairvoyance. Alternatively, if see invisible is nerfed so that it cannot be granted permanently, this could be folded into a “spell of true sight”, which grants temporary see invisible as well as curing blindness, perhaps temporary blindness resistance, and blocking (but not curing) hallucinations like Grayswandir’s wield effect.
Reduce the spell level of invisibility to 1 or 2.
Reduce the spell level of turn undead to 2 or 3.
Spell of blindness (possibly also available as a wand), which blinds monsters.
Spells whose main purpose is to buff allies within an area of effect. (They will give the player the buff too, but the buffs won’t be a huge improvement for a single creature. So you get more out of the effect the more allies you can affect with it, and it’s best used when you have allies around).
Spell of necromancy that turns a corpse you’re standing on (or possibly adjacent to you) into a tame undead. Probably in the clerical school, though a case could be made for matter (and certain variants have a school of necromancy which this would much more directly fit into). It will work on corpses of undead that you have killed. Casting this spell would have some sort of penalty for lawfuls; there would be some sort of warning before trying to cast it.
You can normally only create zombies or mummies when an undead monster exists for the kind of corpse you are animating (i.e. a jackal can’t be turned into undead but a gnome can turn into a gnome zombie/mummy). For intelligent monsters that have no counterpart, the spell can create ghosts.
At a high enough skill or caster level, you can create skeletons from the corpse of any vertebrate, and maybe even vampires from humanoids. You can also create wraiths and shades from monsters that have no undead counterparts.
Monster spell that either generally or specifically debuffs the player. It targets beneficial timing-out intrinsics you have, such as speed, detect monsters, and see invisible, and reduces their time remaining, possibly removing them outright. Does not affect permanent intrinsics or extrinsics.
Spell of summon single nasty: summons only one monster, but the game looks at the target’s current gear and defenses and analyzes exactly what sort of monster would be the best for facing it.
Make the sleep spell scale with your skill level in its school.
Animate monster spell: if you cast it at a pile of objects with the correct material, it creates a tame golem of that material.
Spells that give temporary to-hit or damage buffs. Must be carefully balanced; this is intended for fighter roles more than wizards. It also shouldn’t last long enough or be cheap enough to be perpetually castable.
A spell that provides see invisible (but the potion should be objectively better than it by at least an order of magnitude).
Spell of earthquake, mid-level matter spell. Causes an earthquake centered on you; range and power varies based on your skill level.
Add a spell of paralysis, which basically copies the same monster spell. Melee range, better than sleep.
Level 1 divination spell “waypoint”, which reveals the location of all stairs/ladders (but no other spaces) on the level. Does not work if the level is unmappable.
Spell of baleful polymorph: a beefed-up version of polymorph (or an advanced form) that, when it polymorphs a monster, allows you to determine what to change it into. Perhaps this does not work on pets, so you can’t give yourself a army of titans.
Ring spells, level 7 (or even 8) attack spells, which cast a ring of some elemental power emanating from your square that does not hit your square itself. The radius is 1 if Unskilled or Basic and 2 if Skilled or Expert.
Spell of shove: level 4 or 5 escape spell. At Unskilled and Basic, it fires a beam that pushes the first monster it hits back one space (as if receiving a staggering blow, but doing no damage); at Skilled and Expert, it fires a shorter-range beam in all eight directions. What with shoving monsters into moats to drown them and things like that, this could be a pretty fun spell.
Spell of repair: level 3 matter spell. If wielded weapon is eroded, fixes its erosion. Otherwise, target a random piece of worn armor and fix any erosion it has. At Unskilled, the erosion will only be repaired 1 level at a time; at Basic, 2 levels; at Skilled, 3 levels; and at Expert (maybe) the item will be erodeproofed.
Rolling a boulder on ice makes it slide for up to 10 squares (provided it keeps sliding over ice) before stopping. If it hits some other non-ice walkable terrain, it stops immediately on that square. It is treated like a rolling boulder trap, capable of hitting monsters in its path. This mechanic could be used in Sokoban to create interesting puzzles.
Eating a carrot is “crunchy”, and it may wake monsters around you due to being so loud.
Applying a cursed bag of tricks sometimes causes it to explode, causing magical explosion damage to you while also expending all of its create monster charges at once.
Generalize cockatrice-egg mechanics to all eggs: eggs of acidic monsters will be acidic, eggs of poisonous monsters will be poisonous. Possibly even have a (reduced) chance of getting intrinsics from a monster egg.
When a potion of oil gets hit by fire, it ignites and explodes.
Blessed potions of gain level give you at least 75% of the experience points required to reach the next level, instead of being totally random.
Revamp ring explosion on charging them: a ring enchanted to a positive value has a enchantment in 7 chance of “vibrating unexpectedly” or something similar. This is a warning and, like weapon vibration, does not hurt the ring. If you get this message, the ring’s otrapped flag is set. Charging a ring with otrapped set always explodes it.
There is no other way to ascertain the otrapped value of a ring, other than getting this message. A ring that generates at +4 or above has an enchantment in 10 chance of already having otrapped set. Discharging the ring via cursed charging or drain life has a 50% chance of removing the otrapped flag per point lost.
Tinning kits are lighter, but generate with a small amount of charges rather than the large amount they currently have.
Enchanted boomerangs can continue flying after hitting a monster, with an enchantment/7 chance. (Add 2 to the effective enchantment if the boomerang is blessed; subtract 2 for each successive monster it hits.) If the boomerang is cursed, enchantment doesn’t matter - it will always fall on the first hit.
The reason behind this is twofold: because it makes boomerangs a more attractive weapon, and for the slapstick comedy value.
Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of a type it normally “cures” will do nothing if the potion is cursed.
Statues of a monster occasionally contain a figurine of that monster inside.
Hitting a statue with a wand of opening (possibly the knock spell too, but it might be nice to let the wand have a fringe benefit) causes it to drop all its contents without breaking.
When you take shock damage, any brass lanterns you are carrying in open inventory get recharged an amount proportional to the damage taken (possibly up to only 1/3 or 1/2 of its maximum charge).
The amulet versus poison (and only this) prevents food poisoning from tainted corpses.
Reading a noncursed scroll of remove curse will also cure any lycanthropy you are suffering.
Lances go through one or two levels of visible damage (e.g. “cracked lance”) before being destroyed completely, rather than being able to break outright. Repairing the lance with the same methods being used to repair erosion will fix this damage, and erosionproofing it will make it immune to cracking or breaking.
Make the ring of slow digestion’s effects totally opposite those of the ring of hunger: rather than cancelling your normal digestion entirely, it only stops you hungering on every other turn, effectively increasing the hunger rate while you wear the ring from 1/20 to 1/2.
Every unicorn horn cures one type of ailment and no others.
Beams and rays from wands have a slightly reduced range if the wand is cursed, and a boosted range if it is blessed.
Attempting to pick a lock with a credit card may result in it slipping through the crack (ending up either inside the box or on the other side of the door). The chance for this is getting a 1 on a rnd(Dex*2) roll (with an uncursed card; cursed cards will always slip through and blessed ones will never slip through). If fumbling, use Dex/4 instead of Dex*2.
Every lock in the game has a deterministic chance (based on object ID if a box and xyz coordinates if a door) of being unopenable by a credit card. Attempting gives the message “It doesn’t look like this lock can be opened with a credit card.”
Object materials: cursed gold items cannot be dropped.
When you put on cursed gear or worn gear becomes cursed, it gives you a message that it welds to the appropriate body part. When becoming uncursed, it gives you a message that it is no longer welded.
Artifact large box Pandora’s Box: it contains a ton of good loot, but opening it (or destroying it, or tipping it) alters several overarching gameplay mechanics that all make the game tougher.
Since it’s not as straight up beneficial of an artifact as most others, perhaps it shouldn’t count as a generated artifact for gifting/wishing purposes.
Make magic whistles a charged tool. When out of charges, it behaves like a tin whistle. Its initial amount of charges and the amount it gets back by recharging are in the “high” tier like a tinning kit or camera, generating with 30-99 charges.
The cursed scroll of remove curse removes the curse from one item in your inventory at random, to give it at least a tiny bit of use.
Some charged tools (such as horns of plenty, crystal balls, and other charged tools, NOT magic markers) slowly recover charges over time on their own up to a reasonable maximum.
Increase the price of the magic whistle to 50 or 100 zorkmids. Identification of the whistle type is trivial anyway.
If you are not fully healed by a potion of full healing, it prints some other message than “You feel completely healed”, like “You feel vastly better” or “You feel much, much better.”
Remove restore ability vapors healing monsters to max HP, because that makes no sense.
Cursed potions of gain level work in Sokoban, but they always place you on the downstairs of the next level up instead of randomly, effectively letting you skip any level except the last one.
When generating a corpse during level creation, pre-age the corpse a la zombie and mummy corpses so that it’s not weirdly fresh.
Stethoscopes don’t work on non-living monsters.
Greased scrolls and spellbooks, if they catch on fire, burn up and deal additional damage.
Wolfsbane lying on the floor has a similar effect to werecreatures as garlic has on undead: they won’t step on that space.
Eating garlic replicates the effects of the fountain effect “This water gives you bad breath!”, causing all monsters on the level to flee for a limited time.
The chance for writing an unknown scroll or spellbook is based not on luck but on how many scrolls and spellbooks you already have identified (and thus, how familiar you are with their sort of magic).
This was later written up as a more complete proposal.
Failing to write an unknown scroll or spellbook just consumes an average amount of ink; otherwise it implies that the character knew how much ink the job would have taken.
Amulets of ESP occasionally randomly cause a detect unseen effect, because extra-sensory perception is more than just telepathy.
Amulets of change shuffle your stats the same as polymorphing into your own race, without risk of a system shock. Possibly, the stat-shuffling process should be a bit more limited primarily to attributes; it probably shouldn’t affect experience level (and thus HP, Pw, or skills), reset your nutrition, or cure most illnesses like a self-polymorph would.
When a crysknife leaves your inventory, it starts a timer with 10-50 turns. The timer is canceled if it reenters your inventory. If the timer times out on an unfixed crysknife, it reverts to a worm tooth; if a fixed one times out, it loses one point of enchantment and restarts the timer, or if it’s at +0 it reverts to a worm tooth.
Trying to enchant multiple crysknives at once will fuse them together before trying the enchantment.
The ring of conflict autocurses when worn.
Polymorphing a corpse does not turn it into random food, but instead turns it into the corpse of a random level-appropriate monster. Discards any oextra information about the previously existing monster.
Give a YAFM when you gain very fast speed from any source while hallucinating: “Gotta go fast!”
Restore ability (potion or spell) also cures wounded legs, “restoring your ability” to jump, kick, carry, etc, and will cure most status ailments as well.
Meatballs, meat rings, meat sticks, and huge chunks of meat all become possibly tainted at the same age as corpses.
If you enchant multiple worm teeth into a single crysknife, the enchantment of the resulting knife is increased by 1 point for each additional tooth involved. This can go up to a maximum of +9, bypassing normal overenchantment dangers.
If you throw a wand upwards and hit yourself on the head with it, it consumes a charge and zaps yourself. Come to think of it, this should extend to wielding a wand and hitting monsters with it.
The non-cursed scroll of taming always pacifies monsters that can be pacified but not tamed (shopkeepers, priests, watchmen). If blessed, the pacification is extended to all monsters that can be pacified at all (nearly everything, except a few uniques). The MR roll to tame monsters is unaffected.
Placing potions in an ice box makes them instantly freeze and shatter.
Add “gourmet” as a random tin preparation type, giving 350 nutrition. Also add “stale” as a tin preparation type, giving 100 nutrition.
Shuriken may degrade in enchantment when they hit monsters, but they no longer break.
Silver objects are corrodeable but not, of course, rustable.
Hungerful regeneration from the ring only costs excess nutrition if your HP is actually below full. Possibly, to compensate for not having to micromanage your ring finger, accelerate the hunger rate while regenerating HP: instead of double, perhaps triple or quadruple its usual rate.
Convert the potions of monster and object detection into scrolls, since they are a bit of an oddity among potions in that all the other potions have a direct effect on the drinker. These one-time divination effects seem more suited to scrolls.
Dipping a spellbook in a potion of gain level turns it into a spellbook of some spell that is one level higher. You only get “Interesting…” if you try this on a level 7 book. Not determined whether this should count as polymorphing an object to break polypileless conduct.
Chargeable ring (or amulet, if it’s feasible to make chargeable amulets) of energy regeneration.
Almost-rotten corpses, those that give the “You feel sick” message, may cause you to vomit.
Potions of acid and oil are immune to freezing and shattering.
Dipping water into oil doesn’t count as random alchemy.
The confused scroll of magic mapping tells you where some special level or branch entrance exists on the main branch of the dungeon which you have not yet visited. If you have visited every special level including the Sanctum, it gives you a message about the DL 1 upstairs.
If you are wearing iron shoes, you cannot be forcibly knocked back to other spaces, unless you are levitating.
When you equip a ring of hunger or conflict (or regeneration), you get a message about feeling hungrier.
C-rations and K-rations are readable, which give the names of various real-life army food.
The blessed potion of gain ability still only grants one attribute point, but it allows the player to choose which.
Stinking clouds spread out from their origin point instead of using a preset diagonal shape.
There should be three ways to interact with potions: drinking them, getting them spilled on the exterior of your body (e.g. having them thrown at you and hit you), and inhaling their vapors. These should all be fully symmetric between the player and monsters and have noticeable effects for most if not all potions.
Remove the “unlabeled scroll” description. All roles recognize the scroll of blank paper for what it is.
Buff the potion of gain energy so that it refills around 100 points of Pw. If this would take you above your normal Pw maximum, you get temporary Pw equal to that difference.
The scroll of light gives the player a light radius of 3 for a temporary amount of time, rather than lighting up a fixed area.
Scalpels can generate made of obsidian, which gives them extra damage due to a sharper edge, but they can shatter on hard monsters or armor.
Amulets of change don’t disintegrate when you put them on; instead they autocurse. Once you remove the curse and take off the amulet, your original gender is restored.
You need to have hands in order to operate a tinning kit or tin opener.
Athames are a chargeable weapon-tool, or just a tool. Has tinning kit levels of charges and recharging. Once out of charges, it can’t be used to make a semi-permanent engraving anymore.
Tins that don’t contain monster meat can contain either spinach or spam.
Fire bolts light potions of oil on the ground that the bolt is zapped over, and cold bolts snuff them.
When acid breaks on someone’s head and spills on them, it actually does more damage than quaffing it, because it is spread out over more surface area.
Make potions of oil undilutable.
Confused genocide (uncursed or blessed) does not genocide you. Instead, it sets a level flag that prevents any more monsters from spawning on that level via the normal mechanism for the remainder of the game. (Monsters already created are unaffected.)
You can read the label on tins. All player-made tins are unlabeled, while random tins will randomly (and deterministically) either say truly what sort of monster is in them, or have an irrelevant message. Messages could include: “Tuna Fish - expires Feb 6, 1989”, “Rare Meat of a Genocided [hallucinatory monster]”, “Water Chestnuts - be sure to eat while underwater”, “Yendorian Brand Applesauce”, “This Tin Is Not Booby-Trapped”, “Fresh Tinned Adventurer Meat”.
Blessings or cursings on spellbooks does not translate to automatic success or failure. Instead, it acts as a fairly large bonus or penalty to your effective Intelligence when reading it.
If your Intelligence is 6 or lower, reading a scroll may give its confused effect even when you are not confused.
Dipping a scroll of amnesia into some (or all?) non-polymorph, non-water potions will make the potion “forget itself” and turn to water. The scroll also blanks.
Reflavor the hexagonal wand as being a quartz crystal and change its material to GEMSTONE.
Buckled boots take less time to put on than other boots, since they are easier to attach to your feet.
Flint stones should weigh 1, so they are not inferior ammunition to arrows and darts.
Spellbooks can generate pre-read. They will always have at least 1 use remaining in them (and that will be uncommon), but they are not always new spellbooks. If monsters cast player spells and generate with spellbooks to cast them (as in FIQHack), those spellbooks should be pre-read as well.
Dropping a scroll onto a fountain usually or always blanks it.
Breaking a wand of teleportation will teleport as many monsters around you as there are charges left in the wand, always including yourself.
Wearing an oilskin cloak prevents theft attacks by nymphs, monkeys and leprechauns.
Confused cursed scroll of punishment decreases god anger by 1.
Zapping the wand of opening (but not the spell of knock) at a trapped door will cause it to blow up.
Boulders deal 5d4 damage instead of 1d20.
Dunce caps are made out of paper. (They continue to be the same color and tile as cornuthaums, though, so it’s not trivial to tell them apart).
The blessed potion of hallucination, in addition to making you hallucinate, grants enlightenment (maybe a “corrupted” enlightenment where there’s only a 50% chance of seeing things you can’t see through the ^X command)
Make somewhat more of the effects from dropping a ring into a sink not lose the ring.
Genocides can only be targeted on monsters you can currently see. This means if you want to blessed-genocide L, you actually have to go and find a lich and read it in its presence.
When dipping an oilskin sack in water, give a unique message “The water runs off the [bag/oilskin sack], leaving it dry.”, which unambiguously identifies the oilskin sack.
Change the material of the oilskin sack to leather.
Wielding and hitting enemies with a pyrolisk corpse deals fire damage.
Amulets of change generate cursed no more than regular amulets (it no longer generates cursed 90.5% of the time).
Perfectly fine uncursed food should not make the hero pass out.
Getting hit in the head by a potion deals a small amount of damage (unless wearing a helmet). Death reason if this kills you is “hit in the head by a potion”.
Applying a looking glass cures blindness, in some very odd uncommon set of circumstances (like when hallucinating).
Rubbing iron on a flint stone gives the message “Sparks fly from the stone”.
Unicorn horns are a one-handed weapon that does 1d3 damage, and train no skill (the skill is removed outright). However, when wielding one without gloves, you automatically “apply” it (not consuming any turns the same way as a stethoscope), every turn.
If blessed, the potion of polymorph gives you control over your polymorphing form when quaffed.
The scroll of teleportation now levelports when blessed and limits your possible teleport destinations to a small radius when cursed. Confused teleport gives you a single controlled horizontal teleport.
Recolor the lump of royal jelly to %.
Darts can be dipped in several different potions besides sickness to get different effects. Blindness, hallucination, sleeping, confusion, etc. Implementation-wise, this can be done by overloading the corpsenm flag on ammunition to indicate which potion it’s been dipped in.
Zapping a digging ray upward may either detach a boulder from the ceiling, or several rocks, instead of a single rock. If several rocks are released, each gets a separate damage roll.
Detect monsters shows invisible monsters as I (or whatever S_invisible happens to be).
The “weakest” beatitude of the potion of acid (usually blessed in vanilla, but if #1918 is implemented it will be cursed) may not cure stoning.
Swap the blessed and cursed effects of the potion of acid, which means that blessed acid is more powerful acid, while cursed acid is kind of cruddy.
If you try to drink a potion underwater, it will first go through the normal dilution routine. This means that an undiluted potion will become diluted (but will generally be fine to drink), a diluted potion will become water (and thus useless), and a potion of acid will blow up in your face.
In variants that have mud or muddy swamp terrain, wearing mud boots confers a benefit on that terrain (depends on what the terrain does).
Potions of acid have a splash radius effect when broken (could probably be implemented as an acid explosion).
New non-magical gauntlet which is metal and has no special effects but has 2 or 3 base AC. Knights start with it instead of leather gloves.
New container trap effect: a monster is generated from the box (was hiding in the box and pops out at you), taking you by surprise. It gets a free attack on you.
Wearing a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor gives you the sucker markup in shops.
When you zap a wand of undead turning at a corpse that has an undead form, unless there is a ghost above it, it will resurrect the corpse as that undead. Also do this for living monsters that have undead forms, subject to monster magic resistance.
Improvising on a wooden flute may compel all r monsters (or just the rats) within its audible range (or the whole level) to move closer to you or follow you, a reference to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
You don’t take damage when tossing lightweight, non-hard, non-weapon objects upward. “Light” is defined by some weight threshold. (It’s very weird that you can take damage by tossing, for instance, a eucalyptus leaf in the air.)
Spellbooks cannot be written by appearance. If you don’t know the spell, you can’t unknown-ID write it based on appearance (though you can still try to make an attempt to write it based on the spell).
The amulet of life saving does not restore the hundreds of hit points it can currently restore; it restores something on the order of 6d10, enough to buy time to quaff a potion of full healing, but not enough to repeatedly put on more amulets and let the massive HP store run down on its own.
Hitting monsters with a non-cursed unicorn horn cures them of status afflictions. Hitting them with a cursed horn gives them status afflictions.
A blessed scroll of light lights up the entire level.
Putting on a ring of protection from shape changers and forcing a shapechanged monster somewhere on the level to revert to its normal form wakes it up if it’s asleep.
All the various fruits and vegetables have slightly different (and generally good) non-nutritional effects, like with carrots and blindness. Ideas:
The cursed Book of the Dead will occasionally raise the dead around its location on its own without warning.
Accuracy, damage, and AC bonuses should not be available as intrinsics, and eating their rings should not do anything.
Non-erodeproof copper items corrode over time.
Speed boots’ speed is gently nerfed to be better than intrinsic speed, but worse than temporary sources.
Writing an unknown spellbook is not as likely to fail outright as it is now. Instead, there is a chance that it will “warp strangely” as normal, and become some ‘‘other’’ spellbook you don’t know yet.
The wand of speed, zapped at yourself, grants temporary very fast speed and does not grant intrinsic speed. Intrinsic speed can be gained from a non-cursed potion of speed, and a blessed potion will still grant temporary very fast speed. These would be more useful in a system where permanent very fast speed is unobtainable.
Invoking the Staff of Aesculapius allows you to select a direction. If you pick a direction with an adjacent monster, the monster will get the healing effect instead of you. If you aim at yourself or a direction with no monster, the healing effect applies to you as normal.
Reading a scroll of confuse monster while confused confuses nearby monsters in a large radius akin to confused taming.
When a bag of holding explodes, each item inside has a 1/13 chance of being destroyed and a 12/13 chance of being scattered (using the same code that scatters drawbridge chains). Note that scattered fragile items such as potions are liable to break by crashing into things.
You can apply a spear to hit things two spaces away like an unskilled polearm.
Because you pass beyond the mortal realm when you exit the Dungeons with the Amulet, life saving does not work in the Planes, at all, even for monsters. (In wizard mode you can still choose to die of course.)
Objects thrown at hidden monsters (whether the monster is hiding under something or an undetected mimic) pass right through the square as if no monster is on the square.
Junk mail is not only addressed to the finder of the Eye of Larn, but contains references to other games too.
Colored glass frequency corresponds to its real-life frequency; red, orange, and yellow glass are rare; green and brown common, etc.
A blessed scroll of destroy armor should allow the player to select which piece of armor to destroy. If they decline to choose, it selects a random piece of armor like the uncursed scroll.
Flip the blessed and cursed effects of the scroll of create monster, with the argument that if beatitude influences an object’s effects at all, blessing should amplify them and cursing should reduce them.
However, consistency along these lines conflicts somewhat with the current behavior of objects, which is that blessing generally always gives the player a better effect and cursing gives them a worse one. The create monster scroll is in a weird place because both its blessed and cursed effects could be considered beneficial in different contexts.
Whenever a diluted potion of acid would be created (i.e. by wishing or polypiling) it immediately explodes in an alchemic blast.
Reading a blessed scroll of fire allows you to select a spot to center the blast of fire, similar to the selection for a scroll of stinking cloud or the advanced fireball spell. The damage of this scroll is also increased somewhat from what it is now, about four times the current damage, to make it worthwhile to use.
A small fraction of wearable items are generated with a “trendy” property, which is pre-identified and not hidden from the player. Trendy items have an increased base price and add one charisma when worn.
When breaking an identified wand of nothing, give a YAFM: “Predictably, nothing happens.”
When the hero sits in a corner while wearing a dunce cap, give a YAFM and exercise wisdom.
Rename the two-handed sword to “greatsword”, moving “two-handed sword” to its unidentified description.
The amulet of restful sleep confers hungerless regeneration whenever the player is asleep.
Applying a blessed whistle (either type) will unparalyze pets in range.
Breaking an amber stone (e.g. when fired from a sling and hitting a monster) has a chance of releasing a random a.
Gold nuggets as a replacement for loadstones. They are expensive, but heavy, and generate cursed. Like loadstones, cannot be dropped when cursed.
Skeletons for vertebrate monsters. Corpses turn into these when they rot away. They cannot be undead turned into their monster; trying to do this will create a skeleton monster instead. Lawfuls might get an alignment boost for burying a skeleton in a pit and filling it.
A magical whistle that instead of warping pets summons a temporary ally who disappears after a while.
Gloves of fortune, which unlike SporkHack cause killed monsters to drop d10 gold pieces that didn’t previously exist, and rarely a gem.
Boots of earthquake: when you stomp the ground with them (by kicking downward), an earthquake happens. However, this spends 1 point of enchantment on the boots (not going below 0; if they are 0 or less then no earthquake happens.)
Potion of elixir, which heals more HP than healing, but less than extra healing. It also recovers the same amount of Pw and restores 1 ability point in all attributes. HP and Pw maximums do not get raised.
Another type of magical horn, a “horn of heroes”, that when improvised on creates powerful allied monsters (dead heroes?). Ideally the summons would be temporary.
Ring of gold detection, which provides persistent passive gold detection in a radius. Lets you see how much gold a monster is carrying when you chat to them or use a stethoscope. Vault guards are guaranteed to carry one; leprechauns very rarely generate with one.
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.
Dowsing rod: chargeable magical tool that when applied tells you the total value of all gold and gems on the level that isn’t being carried by the player (but not their locations), and whether there are any artifacts on the level that are not carried by the player.
Stealing gloves (also possibly named “rogues gloves” or “gauntlets of thievery”). 0 base AC, and Rogues begin the game wearing a pair. When you hit a monster barehanded while wearing them, you deal no damage (and don’t train bare handed combat skill) but you get a Dex-versus-monster-AC chance of stealing a random non-equipped item or some gold out of their inventory. You can also attack a peaceful monster with them to attempt to steal something; in addition to the Dex-vs-AC roll, this requires passing both another Dex check and a Cha check for them not to notice. If the Dex check fails, you don’t steal anything successfully; if the Cha check fails, they notice (waking up if asleep) and get mad. If the stolen item is currently equipped, there’s no Cha check; the monster just gets alerted and angry.
Nuggets of various metals (copper, gold, iron, silver, mithril, maybe generic metal). These are all * class and are basically rocks but worth more.
Wand of detect magic. Non-directional; if you are carrying any items in your inventory which are magical, “You feel a magical aura inside your knapsack.”, and any object classes in open inventory which are magical but not type-identified are identified as being magical.
Ring of item protection (ported from Rogue’s ring of maintain armor): protects all inventory items from damage of any sort, which includes outright destruction such as monsters casting destroy armor and ring/wand explosions. Also includes protection from disenchanter disenchantment.
Scroll of create magic item, which attempts to generate a magical item. If the scroll is blessed, you can choose the object class; if cursed, the object will be cursed.
Assuming the game supports creating temporary regions of non-poisonous gas clouds: New “smoke bomb” potion. It makes you choke/vomit when quaffed. Intended to be thrown; where it shatters, most of the surrounding terrain will be transformed into cloud.
Vanilla has since added non-poisonous gas clouds (for things such as mist from zapping fire over water), and this effect could work just as well by breaking a smoky potion, instead of adding a new object.
Woolen shirt, shirt-slot armor which gives zero AC but cold resistance.
Jars, which are like tins except made of glass (or possibly, tins made of glass material, in object materials implementing variants). Generate quite often as chest contents. Possibly, what is in the jar is apparent just by looking at it.
Bodkin arrows that have heavyshot (from DynaHack): instead of multishooting, they deal double or triple damage depending on how many you would have multishot otherwise.
Assuming that some limit has been implemented on the number of pets you can have at one time: New amulet that allows you to have more pets than you normally can.
Some consumable object that lets you freshen a corpse (for eating or sacrifice) that doesn’t require resurrecting it with undead turning.
New randomized appearances: “starry spellbook”, “iridescent potion”, “creamy potion”.
Amulet of drain resistance, which also gives immunity to death magic. Useful if monsters casting drain life are implemented.
Scroll of repair: uncursed repairs all levels of erosion on an item of the player’s choice; a blessed scroll repairs all erosion in the player’s inventory; cursed scroll attempts to erode one random item in inventory 1d3 times. If confused and non-cursed, will erosionproof an item of the player’s choice; if confused and cursed, will remove erosionproofing from a random item and then erode it 1d3 times.
The scroll of enchant weapon retains its confused effect of erosionproofing a weapon, but it no longer erosionproofs non-weapons or repairs the weapon. Enchant weapon scrolls are also made much less common, with the probability dumped into the scroll of repair instead.
Wand of charging: non-directional wand that uncursed-charges an item in inventory. Will explode if an attempt is made to recharge it.
Wand of identify: a non-directional wand that will always identify one item when zapped.
Tomatoes, a type of comestible that you can throw at monsters to decrease their charisma (if they had charisma).
Whetstones, imported from SLASH’EM, but with some additional effects.
Party hat, a conical hat which increases Cha by 1 if uncursed, 2 if blessed, and decreases it by 1 if cursed.
Lemons, a comestible that deals 1 point of damage when eaten unless acid resistant and exercises Constitution. If you are killed by eating a lemon, the death reason is “killed by citric acid”.
A cloak of flying.
Chain whips and silver chain whips, which use whip skill.
Blowguns, a weapon which can be used as a launcher for darts. (Cavemen can thematically use these.)
Characters with at least Basic in sling can do something (use a touchstone? flint stone? any gray stone?) to break rocks into slingshot, which weigh 1 and have comparable to-hit and damage to flint stones. Slingshot may be weapon-class instead of rock-class. The higher the sling skill, the more shot that one can get out of a single rock. There should also be rare silver rocks, which can be broken into silver shot.
Armor of training: has no AC, but gives you a small multiplier to your experience point gains (and possibly skill point gains) whenever you are wearing it.
FIQhack has added this, but as an object property rather than a new object.
Potion of training: gives you a temporary multiplier to your experience point gains (lasts for the next N monsters, not the next N turns). Might also give you a temporary multiplier to skill training point gains.
Add “candelabrum” as a new randomly generated tool. It can hold 3 candles and gives a light radius of 2 with one candle, 3 with two candles, and 4 with three candles. Its material is brass. The Candelabrum of Invocation’s unidentified description is now “ornate candelabrum”.
Queen bees drop a few killer bee eggs.
Corpses dropped by aligned priests or priest player monsters are always blessed.
Straw golems have a smallish chance of dropping a T-shirt.
Corpses dropped by mummies are always cursed.
Air elementals drop some rocks (and “sticks” - the occasional wand of nothing?) which is the debris you have been pummeled with. (Also makes the Plane of Air a little less difficult to cross if you haven’t got a levitation source.)
Rock moles and other item-eating monsters drop any gold or gems they have eaten (digesting them can’t be a fast process), or they destroy 10% of all gold they eat and have a 10% chance of destroying any other items they eat; otherwise those items will be placed in the mole’s inventory.
Skeletons may drop skeleton keys when killed.
Killer bees occasionally drop lumps of royal jelly when killed.
Adult female dragons drop eggs (more so than the usual oviparous drop odds).
Eating a rust monster while polymorphed into an iron golem is instantly fatal to your polyform.
Gas spores, because they are volatile, always have exactly 1 HP, regardless of their level or HD.
Not all vampires are capable of shapechanging. Some of them will remain in their ordinary form. A smaller fraction of vampire lords is the same.
Flavor the Dark One as either a servant/lieutenant of the Wizard, or someone ambitious who wants to attack him.
If a peaceful unicorn sees you wielding or applying a unicorn horn, it gets angry.
Make trappers and lurkers above mindless, so they’re not trivial to find and avoid with telepathy.
Shopkeepers will buy identified glass for the same few zorkmids they will buy it unidentified, rather than refusing to buy it, because it makes no sense that they buy it when the player doesn’t know that it’s glass and refuse to when the player does.
G-class monsters will pick up tools if they wander onto them. (They won’t specifically seek them out and pathfind to them though).
When a light explodes, all monsters adjacent to it are affected equally.
Shopkeepers won’t buy wands from you if they are empty.
Allow monsters to hallucinate (mostly from the same sources that cause the player to hallucinate, e.g. exploding black light). Hallucinating monsters will, after choosing a target, refuse to attack it 90% of the time (because it sees it as a fellow hostile monster). They also will not pathfind to items on the floor because they cannot see them clearly.
Ants can dig and tunnel out corridors when there is an anthole on the level, eventually turning the whole level into an anthole-like network of corridors. The tunneling AI prioritizes connecting up existing corridors rather than just destroying rock indiscriminately.
Monsters can drink potions of booze as a defensive item, but only when fleeing. It cancels their fleeing and confuses them.
Monsters can wear amulets of ESP. This allows them to know your exact location (regardless of invisibility or displacement) when you are within the telepathy radius.
Ants (or locusts, if implemented) can eat food off the ground, and they create more of themselves when they do, proportional to the nutrition consumed. They can also eat food out of the inventory of something they are attacking, and if the target is carrying food in a bag, they can reach into the bag and either eat the food there or spill it out on the ground. Locusts that can’t find any food to eat could inflict illness with their bite instead. They could also eat grass terrain, if implemented (turning it into normal floor) and multiply that way.
Maybe, to avoid the problem of how unchecked gremlin multiplication creates a bunch of low-HP, one-shottable gremlins, locusts will increase their maximum HP by eating if their own maxHP is below some threshold. (Then they’ll split again by eating more after getting over the threshold.)
Werecreatures, including the player, never change into their beast form during new moon. (If a level is restored with the creature in beast form during new moon, it will be forced into normal form.)
Demon gating happens more or in greater quantity when in Gehennom, and less often outside Gehennom.
Monsters can defensively zap you with a wand of teleportation if you are not on a non-teleport level.
If a monster would receive a teleport item but the level is non-teleport, don’t give it to them.
Assuming monster casting has been expanded somehow to include ally buffing: an orc shaman can generate with a group of other orcs.
Aligned priests can sometimes generate with 1-2 holy water instead of 1-2 of their spellbooks. Moloch priests will get unholy water rather than holy.
Assuming an implementation in which player monsters can steal the Amulet of Yendor from you: they may instead steal an imitation amulet you are carrying in main inventory.
Up for debate whether they should have, say, a fixed 50% chance of stealing the real Amulet regardless of how many fakes you are carrying, or whether they should pick one of your apparent Amulets at random, which would give an advantage to carting around more fakes.
Shriekers caught in a flash of light shriek (however, this should only come from non-renewable sources to avoid being able to use them to farm monsters, or possibly this shriek should be unable to summon monsters.)
Zombies can’t open doors, but if there are multiple adjacent zombies on one side of a door, they can bust it down.
When a monster picks up an item owned by a shop, its base price is deducted from any gold they’re carrying and gets transferred to the shopkeeper. If they’re short on cash, they don’t have to make up the difference at all.
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.
Vampires grudge werewolves.
Vault guards grudge leprechauns.
Mimics can mimic other pieces of furniture like sinks, thrones, and altars. (They can already mimic doors and stairs.)
Croesus is able to displace other monsters, because he’s the king. Perhaps all king-type monsters should be able to displace other monsters.
Monsters only spend their turns on picking up items and equipping weapons and armor if they don’t think you are close by. So when fighting a group through a choke point, you don’t get free hits on every monster that steps onto the pile of dropped loot and begins to equip themselves from it.
A monster flag that designates that its inventory is actually the contents of its stomach and is therefore not stealable, nor usable by the monster. Gelatinous cubes, rock moles, and purple worms should get this flag. (Also some other proposed “eater” monsters, like the bookworm.)
If a monster (like a purple worm) eats another monster, that monster’s inventory should be added into the eater’s stomach.
If you try to buy a high level spellbook in a shop while outwardly looking unqualified (low XL, low Int, Barbarian), the shopkeeper raises an eyebrow and condescendingly asks you if you’re sure you can read it. This can help you informally identify high level spellbooks.
Famine’s hungering attack takes the maximum of his current 40-80 nutrition and a large fraction (1/2 to 3/4) of your current nutrition.
The Wizard will only cast Double Trouble if he has already been killed at least once.
Monster speed system that tries to keep all the good qualities of 3.6.1’s while also not letting randomization make monsters super fast or super slow: add a 16 bit int to the monst struct, and every 12 turns set (speed % 12) of them to 1. Then on each turn, the monster gets (speed / 12) moves, plus 1 if the bit for that turn is 1. This 12-turn cycle would need to be phase shifted randomly per monster (probably using hashing based on monster ID) so that you can’t move-count based on the turn clock.
Research on an efficient algorithm to generate the series of 12 bits has found this, though it might be more entropy-efficient in the long run simply to generate all 4094 permutations of bits and randomly pick one with the correct number of bits whenever needed.
Some angels generate with a harp. A fraction of those that do get a magic harp; the rest get mundane ones.
Add another negative foocubus result: you get a headache, which gives 10-20 points of HP damage.
Dwarf and gnome kings will never pick up worthless glass or gray stones on the ground (they continue to pick up all valuable gems).
When a monster is about to wake up from sleeping or unfreeze from paralysis and you can see it, give a message to that effect.
Monsters that divide/split must find a space adjacent to the splitting monster that is safe for the new monster to be on; if no space exists, the split doesn’t happen (and any effects on the monster’s current or maximum HP are nullified).
Currently, the split monster lands on the closest available square, which could be not at all close to the original monster in a packed environment, and this is weird.
Instead of actually becoming any random monster, chameleons choose any random monster type to display as, but their attacks and stats remain those of a chameleon.
Ghouls eat rotten corpses they find on the ground.
Some monsters, a subset of item-using monsters, can’t read scrolls even though they can use all other items. Trolls and some orcs would be in this set (possibly even allow some members of a species to read and some not to, based on their internal monster ID.)
The hostile angels created on the Astral Plane by wearing conflict are immune to conflict.
Hostile monsters zap wands of make invisible at fellow hostile monsters, allowing monsters that can’t usually use items to become invisible.
Monsters will only pick up projectile ammo if they are carrying an appropriate launcher; they will otherwise ignore it. (This does not apply to darts and daggers and other non-launcher missiles.)
Remove the monster spell destroy armor, and instead allow them to read destroy armor scrolls at you offensively.
Increase piercer damage by a lot, make the piercer hit ignore AC so that it hits most of the time, and make helms not count for much against a falling piercer.
When you trigger the Kops, it doesn’t immediately summon massive swarms of them all at once. Instead, it triggers an effect that lasts 50+d50 turns, which causes one Kop to spawn on the upstairs and downstairs each turn, and occasionally on random spaces. Reconciling with the angry shopkeeper cancels the remaining duration of the effect and vanishes any existing Kops on the level.
This might have odd interactions if you leave the level while Kops are still spawning. Perhaps it should internally be tied to the level structure, not the player or a global variable; the effect would be suspended while off the level and resume once you reentered it.
Ants can dig tunnels in rock (slowly).
If you have egg on your face, your Charisma is temporarily and sharply reduced, lasting until either you get hit by or immersed in water or #wipe with a towel. This could also apply to having cream pie on your face.
A possible addition is for monsters to throw random (non-cockatrice) eggs at you.
Another possible addition is to add a new “egg trap”, which fires eggs at you with the intention of getting egg on you.
Cancelled monsters can quaff potions of restore ability to uncancel themselves.
Fiery monsters and possibly some demons get healed by fire traps and will deliberately jump onto them in order to heal up.
Gnomes generated outside the Mines generate carrying one or two random gems (possibly none, subject to current level difficulty).
Nazgul have limited gating ability. Every time one lands a hit on you, there is a small chance that another nazgul spawns somewhere else on the level.
When a vampire is killed in shapeshifted form and reincarnates in its normal form, it comes back at half health. Due to this, vampire AI sometimes chooses to stay in normal form at full health.
Give Croesus a gold-stealing attack in addition to the regular attacks he has now.
Monsters that generate with weapons should automatically be wielding those weapons, unless they generate asleep or peaceful. The player shouldn’t get a free turn while they use theirs to wield the weapon (notable with player monsters on Astral).
Djinni released from bottles and water demons released from fountains don’t care about beatitude or depth for giving a wish; instead they will give the hero a wish if the hero is intimidating enough. “Intimidation” is based on stats like Charisma and XL, and the chance of successfully intimidating them increases as they do. Djinni from lamps are not affected by these rules.
When werecreatures summon help, the help appears at random locations on the level, out of sight if possible, not around the player.
Give a YAFM for telling a vault guard your name is Spartacus.
Same-sex foocubi will use an amulet of change on themselves as an offensive item.
A pet will only eat a corpse that will make it polymorph if its tameness is very low. Otherwise it will avoid it.
Vampires can only regenerate while standing on top of a gravestone or in a graveyard. (Ideally, they could only regenerate in a coffin, but nethack lacks those.)
When a monster that hides under objects moves from one hiding spot to another, there’s a very low chance that you notice it and it becomes unhidden. This chance is boosted by higher Wisdom, and having searching provides a boost.
Monsters that hide under objects can also hide under or behind various types of terrain, such as sinks, ladders, thrones, and gravestones.
Fog clouds block line of sight.
When you kill a jabberwock while hallucinating, give the message “Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
When a monster is crushed in a drawbridge, its inventory might be dropped instead of totally destroyed.
It should be possible to have monsters that are sessile but still get “movement points” to make active attacks. Lichens and spotted jellies are two good examples of monsters that could be like that.
Fire vortices uniquely among whirly engulfers don’t make your lamp or candle go out when they engulf you; they keep it ignited. In fact, they might ignite any candles you happen to be carrying in main inventory.
Stalker corpses don’t confer see invisible anymore, and have their odds of conferring invisibility decreased from 100%.
The first major consultation from the Oracle is always free, and subsequent ones are always cheaper than they are now.
Telling a vault guard you are Croesus or an alias might fail, depending on your Charisma. If it fails, the guard becomes hostile.
Golems will pick up (and add to their body?) any item made up of the same material as them.
If you kill a grown-up form of a monster, all equal or lesser forms of it that see it die turn hostile even if they were formerly peaceful and the monster you killed was hostile.
Monsters that are MZ_HUGE or larger block line-of-sight like the giant turtle does in dNetHack.
Shopkeepers can be cancelled. When cancelled, they won’t buy or sell any items. They will still react to theft, but they can’t be paid and they don’t offer any money or claim ownership of items you drop in their shop.
On March 15th, your first minor consultation from the Oracle will always be “Beware the Ides of March.”
Unicorns (possibly only coaligned) can be tamed by throwing them a specific gemstone, which is deterministic for each individual unicorn and is random. Or else keep it simple and make it a low-ish chance per gem thrown.
Rock moles (and other tunneling monsters?) can’t eat through wooden doors.
Change how drowning attacks work, by making them pull you into a water square that is adjacent to both you and the attacker, and then sticking to you so you can’t move out of the water. This requires that the hero be allowed to survive (with a suffocation timer) underwater for several turns without magical breathing. If there are no mutually adjacent water squares, the attacker can’t use their drowning attack (it would either do nothing or you’d still be held but not get pulled anywhere). Unlike regular drowning, this wets your items each turn.
More randomization or unpredictability in foocubus results so a player can’t be nearly or actually guaranteed of a good result by having a certain amount of Int and Cha.
Creatures that are stuck in a web (either the player or monsters) get a to-hit penalty.
Spiders have an attack that wraps you in a web (using sticky attack behavior?) or creates a web on your square and traps you in it, so you can’t move.
See also #1409, which discusses a similar idea where spiders can do this sort of thing at range.
Give Lord Surtur fire attacks, since he doesn’t actually use any.
Spiders can spin webs as they move along (cave spiders with less frequency than giant spiders.) This chance is boosted if they move into a doorway or choke point.
Priests object to you locking the door of their temple, and will unlock it if you try. If they cannot for some reason, they get angry.
When you ride a clinging monster like a wumpus, you get a message about all the blood going to your head.
When something infects you with lycanthropy, the infector and all of its summoned monsters become peaceful.
All monsters of class W (except perhaps Nazgul) get the PASSWALL monster flag, allowing them to phase.
Chatting to the ghost of a dead player may tame it. At least one of your role, race, name, or alignment must match the ghost’s, with an increased chance the more factors match. If the attempt to tame fails, it may become peaceful or remain hostile. In either case, subsequent chatting attempts won’t work.
When the hero observes a fox take fire damage, print a YAFM about Mozilla Firefox or automatically name the fox “Mozilla”.
If a monster has horns, AT_BUTT attacks deal extra damage.
Change rothes’ AT_CLAW attacks to AT_BUTT (also probably do this for most q).
Croesus is generated with 2 random amulets and 5 random rings (bling) in inventory.
Soldiers and watchmen can be tamed by throwing gold at them. In order to make them tame, you must give them over a certain initial amount X, which will give 1 point of tameness, and giving them additional gold will increase tameness by 1 for every Y gold. Tameness steadily declines over time, removing Y gold from their inventory each time it drops by a point. Should tameness drop to zero, they become hostile. Chatting with them while tame will give you a clue about how tame they are: they will either talk about how they’re going to spend all their money, or wonder when the next payment is coming, or threaten you for more gold, depending on the amount of tameness. Normal magical taming methods do not work on them (as currently happens).
Dwarves don’t go within two spaces of a tree if they can help it. (This is an Order of the Stick reference.)
Intelligent pets don’t eat shapeshifter corpses unless you give it to them.
Scale M1_CONCEAL with monster size, so that larger monsters with M1_CONCEAL can hide behind objects of a sufficiently high weight or those that are oc_big.
Monsters lacking hands can only carry up to a certain weight maximum which depends on their size. The player, if polymorphed, gets this as carrying capacity.
Piranhas and other sea monsters’ bite attacks can only hit you if you’re actually in the water, in a water space next to them.
Throwing a treat at most non-domestic d or f will make them devour it, and will often pacify them and occasionally tame them.
Unicorns can only be tamed/ridden if you have never consorted with a foocubus.
In the absence of monster hallucination being implemented, make a monster stunned whenever it would become hallucinating.
Fleeing monsters may randomly get a few bonus movement points each turn.
The proper way to make late-game elemental damage matter is to give late-game enemies elemental attacks with large enough damage to matter, which don’t care about reflection.
Foocubi can be pacified or tamed by throwing a ring of adornment at them.
Ghosts cannot be touched with most items, or the player’s body, similar to shades (probably blessed + silver objects would suffice; though silver does not sear them like it does shades). They don’t need to have an amazing AC anymore because of this.
Make killer bees’ evasiveness so high that a player should still be missing them a lot even in the late game. To compensate for this, reduce their HD to 1. However, area of effect attacks always tend to hit monsters regardless of evasiveness, so are still useful against them.
Whenever a zombie steps over a zombie corpse, it revives.
Consorting with foocubi abuses Wisdom.
The crossaligned high priests on Astral are hostile.
When the Wizard of Yendor has the real Amulet, he gets an infinite mana pool to cast from, or otherwise his magic becomes more powerful.
Pets are not stealthy by default, and wake up sleeping monsters just like the player does.
Golems do not regenerate hit points, and healing spells do not work on them.
Balrogs have a fire attack.
Skeletons can spawn in places that aren’t Orcus-town.
MZ_GIGANTIC monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on at least one pair of opposite sides in any direction (like a doorway, with walls on opposite sides). MZ_HUGE monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on 2 (or maybe 3) pairs of opposite sides (like a corridor).
Whirly engulfing monsters have a random chance of causing dizziness (stunning) every turn you are engulfed.
New monster behavior flag M2_CLIMB or M3_CLIMB: added to monsters that are natural climbers (spiders, ants, most Y) and with effects like being able to get out of a pit in one turn, or who can climb up ladders without having hands.
All Riders have intrinsic player-style MR, making them immune to death rays, but summon insects and summon nasties don’t work on the Astral Plane.
Mimics are very likely to mimic chests, instead of random items most of the time.
Monsters that spawn in groups are regarded by the monster-generation function as having a higher difficulty than they actually do.
You can pay the Oracle to tell you the depth at which various branches split off from the main dungeon. These are then recorded in your #overview.
Dragons’ alignments are adjusted so that the values actually matter (at the least, yellow should be very lawful, gray should be pure neutral, and black should be very chaotic), and are not specified as M2_HOSTILE anymore so that they can rarely be generated peaceful. Perhaps more interestingly, their difficulties should be varied.
Shopkeepers charge a hefty fee for digging pits in their floor, hundreds or thousands of zorkmids. The shopkeeper will warn you when you start digging.
When chameleons polymorph, they retain their same number of hit dice and hitpoints. So while you may be facing a minotaur or an arch-lich, it’s a very fragile one.
Most d and f monsters can be pacified, but not tamed, by throwing appropriate food at them (they will eat it, so you can’t reuse the same food item).
Increase the difficulty of werecreatures, to compensate both for their lycanthropy and that they are capable of summoning many monsters of equivalent difficulty.
Gelatinous cubes can eat wooden doors in their path.
The monster generation rate in the Quest gets reduced to almost nothing once the nemesis is defeated.
Alternatively, monster spawn rate in the quest is very, very low, and more monsters are generated with the level.
Alteratively alternatively, defeating the nemesis removes the Quest-specific monster generation; newly generated monsters will be random like ones outside of the Quest.
Any G that generate inside the wine cellar secret area in the Gnome King’s Wine Cellar are automatically hostile regardless of the player’s race or alignment.
Trappers’ and lurkers’ above digestion happens much more quickly than purple worms, on a shorter timer. As it stands, most digestion attacks aren’t very threatening as an instadeath because the player almost always has time to kill the digester.
For that matter, all digestion attacks should probably be accelerated somewhat, even those of purple worms.
Purple worms going “Burrrrp!” wake up nearby monsters.
Purple worms eat corpses in 1 turn, because they can eat the monster in 1 turn so why not the corpse?
Demon and undead pets move reluctantly over blessed items.
Rock piercers instakill stone golems, glass piercers instakill glass golems and iron piercers instakill iron golems.
If you attack a spellcasting monster that is currently at full potential to cast a spell, it may cast a counterspell to ward off your attack.
New monster strategies:
Black lights have a radius 1 area of darkness instead of light.
Elemental giants and Lord Surtur get elemental attacks corresponding to what kind of giant they are.
A b-class monster which is a shapechanger and may transform into any P, b or j monster.
A sessile invisible monster with a nasty passive attack.
Undead in Sunsword’s light radius will flee.
Undead caught in a flash of light (from cameras or just from casting an area light spell) get awakened if they were asleep or confused (with a chance that decreases at higher levels) if already awake. Possibly, just illuminating their space by carrying some light source near them should be enough to wake them up.
Some monsters’ corpses, like rats, have a chance of conferring FoodPois when eaten, regardless of whether they are tainted.
After you finish the Priest quest, Nalzok may appear once more, randomly in Gehennom, since you didn’t actually kill him the first time, just banish him.
If a shrieker summons a purple worm with its shriek, check for difficulty first. If purple worms would be out of difficulty, generate a baby purple worm instead.
Hippocrates, being sick and frail, does not start moving around when you first chat to him. You cannot use his throne or chest until you complete the quest and heal him with the Staff of Aesculapius. Before this, if you wish to kill him, he is extremely easy to kill and should be easily one-shottable.
Zombies and possibly mummies have a new sound MS_GROAN instead of MS_SILENT. This would not do anything at the moment except give you “The zombie groans.” when chatted to.
Change covetous warping so it only works for demon lords on their lair levels, and then they can only warp back into their lair.
Vampires drain levels much less than they currently do, or not at all; instead they use a bite with an AD_DRHP damage type (described in #1627). Possibly give vampires one AD_DRHP attack but let vampire lords keep one AD_DRHP and one AD_DRLI.
Chameleons randomly select a monster of up to (level difficulty + N) when shapechanging, not any monster ever.
If ents exist, chopping down a tree angers any ents on the level.
Disintegration rays have a small (on the order of 5% or 10%) chance of destroying the player’s reflection source instead of reflecting. This terminates the ray, so the player can’t get hit twice by it.
Sandestins, when they can see the player, examine the player’s worn equipment and try to shapechange into something that the player appears to be vulnerable to.
Storm giants have active and passive lightning attacks. Not sure why they don’t actually have anything to do with shock currently.
“You hear the splashing of a naiad” may happen if there is a water nymph on the level at all.
Water nymphs may create a pool on their spot when killed. Items they stole from the player fall into it, of course.
Wood nymphs may create a tree on their spot when killed, and mountain nymphs may leave a boulder.
Nazguls’ sleep gas acts as a beam, not a ray, and therefore cannot be reflected.
When riding a non-flying, non-swimming steed, give a warning by making the steed stop and “shy away” before riding into water. Only allow this if you use the m command or the steed has already shied away once. But it’s not very fair or realistic to have the steed instadrown under you.
Intrinsic cold resistance only halves damage from Asmodeus’ cold attack. Only extrinsic cold resistance protects against it fully (or cuts it to 1/4?).
Monsters may spawn on the upstairs or downstairs in sight of the player; this is easily flavored as them coming in from other floors. If the monster selected spawns in groups, it picks somewhere that isn’t the stairs, though.
Asmodeus and Baalzebub have a chance of re-appearing hostile to their levels (not a certainty; if they always came back there’d be no reason not to kill them off) when the player is on the way back up with the Amulet. Flavor-wise, this is because the player only paid for safe passage ‘‘down’’, and now the player has their coveted Amulet.
Add a knockback attack and a monster that can use it. Getting knocked back into a wall deals some extra damage, and getting knocked back into water or lava has predictable effects.
Hostile conflict angels don’t appear on the Astral Plane any longer, but all angelic and human beings are now immune to conflict on the Astral Plane.
Wandering hostile priests of Moloch occasionally generate in Gehennom.
Small mimics (but not large or giant ones) can mimic the floor, looking like nothing in the same way a trapper or lurker above does.
Green slimes have an engulfing attack that guarantees to start the sliming process (assuming the player isn’t unchanging, on fire, etc).
Aggravate monster from a ring (and only from that) gives pets a special behavior: as they are aggravated, they will attack enemies with no regard to their current HP or the enemy’s level, basically ignoring the checks that exist. Enemies might also attack pets of their own volition (which they don’t do under normal circumstances except in retaliation).
Goldfish, a ; monster that is level 0, always generates peaceful and has no attacks. The purpose of having it is for flavoring special levels, especially quests.
Fire/flame nymph, n, which normally only spawn in Gehennom (or possibly near lava not in Gehennom) and are noticeably stronger than other nymphs. Have two steal attacks which burn any items stolen, and also a fire attack. Potentially a passive fire attack as well. They also explode into fire when killed.
Bookworm, a w monster that eats books (they end up in its stomach/inventory and aren’t destroyed, though they may lose a read charge). Levels up, gaining power and speed, for each book it eats (higher level books give it more power), eventually gaining more attacks. Possibly can also eat scrolls. Initializes as having already eaten a few books.
Satyr, a h monster that is either chaotic or lawful (either could fit), are always male, generate with booze frequently, and chase after any nymphs nearby (who flee or teleport from them). Appear in the Ranger quest frequently.
Carpenter ant, which eats wooden items on the floor and can tunnel, but only on wooden terrain (doors, trees).
Bumblebee, very like a killer bee, but its poison sting is worse. However, when it stings you, it becomes cancelled and can’t sting you again; a cancelled bumblebee additionally loses 1 HP per turn.
Fairies, a n monster similar to pixies: very small, flying, capable of hiding under objects. However, they are lawfully aligned and (?) always generated peaceful. If you chat to a non-hostile fairy, it will heal you a moderate amount (as in the Legend of Zelda) and become cancelled (a cancelled fairy can no longer heal you).
Burrowing monsters that don’t actually dig out tunnels (or phase), but instead move through solid rock non-destructively. They ‘‘only’’ move through solid rock; they won’t move into wall spaces or move into corridors or rooms of their own volition.
Will-o-the-wisps: gray or possibly bright blue y-class monsters that spawn individually, leave no corpse, and have no attacks except a passive blindness attack. They emit light radius 0 so you can see them, but no surrounding squares, across a dark area. Not infravisible, and could have teleportitis to replicate their folkloric effect of suddenly vanishing. Spawn rarely in swamp rooms and may not spawn at all in a lit area. Most importantly, they have a special AI that causes them to avoid the player and orbit around treasure (occasionally) or around hazards like monsters or traps (commonly).
Darkness elemental: darkens squares it moves through (removing the lit state, if the square was permanently lit beforehand).
Wyverns and/or wyrms that share the D glyph but don’t have breath attacks. Probably brown colored, since no dragon uses that.
Itinerant merchants who, if chatted with, offer one of several non-renewable trades. Generate on stairs, path to the opposite stairs, and once they reach them they disappear forever from the game. Generated with the requisite inventory to make all their trades. Always peaceful. Tougher than shopkeepers, since they have to defend themselves out in the dungeon. If you kill one, no more will ever spawn.
Dementors, W monsters that have some sort of blinding, despair-inducing attack. Lawful aligned. If you become completely incapacitated by one, they suck out your soul for an instadeath.
Arch-foocubi which do the same seduction as regular foocubi, but the random number they choose has a higher average than a foocubus’ 1-35, so the chance of a bad effect is greater and it’s less effective to boost your own stats. Perhaps rnd(35) + 25. They are also more grabby than regular foocubi, and will steal jewelry if you have insufficient gold.
Monster or damage type that un-erosionproofs gear, not very common.
Monster that steals your intrinsic invisibility (but only that, unlike gremlins).
Some sort of late-game nymph monster that steals items. Helps mitigate an underlying issue: some of the early-game threats like stealing are completely absent in the late game, with no particular reason for that being the case.
Pixies, an n monster that can hide under objects. Chatting to them will make them say “Hey! Listen!” as an Ocarina of Time reference.
Mosquitoes, an a-class monster which uses an AD_DRHP attack, which replenishes the mosquito’s health by some fraction of the damage it dealt you.
Slime mold as a new F monster, which is guaranteed to drop a slime mold comestible on death.
Silver golem, which naturally causes silver damage to silver haters, and drops silver items on death. Should be pretty rare to avoid giving the player their pick of silver items.
Demon lord who has no real special abilities, but has a very, very high physical damage output. Or give one of the existing, uninteresting demon lords a high physical damage output.
New demon lord with a fire attack comparable to Asmodeus’ cold attack (this is actually already implemented, but is unused). It seems weird that no demon lords are really associated with fire.
New demon lord who spellcasts, favoring touch of death and summon nasties. However, the only thing it summons and gates in are incubi and succubi.
Rat king (a randomly generated monster, not the SLASH’EM unique Rat King), based on the real-life rat king. It is a r, not much faster than a rock mole, but has several bite attacks (possibly scaling the amount by monster level). Each bite has a small chance of conferring disease. Its level corresponds to the number of entangled rats, so a slashing attack could sometimes cut off one rat, which then appears on the floor as a new rat, and makes the rat king lose a level.
When you wish for an artifact and it arrives with an angry person, that person gets an appearance message, or at least a single line of dialogue.
Some monsters can block being detected by your telepathy, either innately (disenchanters, perhaps) or as a monster intrinsic conferred by armor (such as a tinfoil hat) or spellcasting by an ally. Also, possibly allow for area-of-effect “telepathy dead zones”.
An artifact T-shirt that provides free action when worn, but only if no armor is worn over it.
You can somehow weaponize globs of green slime to forcibly transform other monsters into slime. Possibly this could be as simple as throwing or flinging the globs at them, perhaps subject to a monster magic resistance check for the transformation to work.
You can use stethoscopes (or possibly probing) on eggs to identify them.
Dwarves don’t tunnel within Minetown limits (they can dig up the outer areas of the level just fine).
Hallucinatory message for squeaky boards: “You hear a chicken squawk a B note loudly.”
Foocubi gain a level when you get a negative result from them. This should perhaps be extended to other types of enemies with draining powers.
When hallucinating, replace “You hear a chugging sound” with either “You hear a steam locomotive passing by” or “You hear someone chant ‘Chug, chug, chug!’”
Excalibur starts out much weaker than it currently does, but you can perform further feats to enhance its power and give it more abilities as the game progresses. Such feats include: slaying a dragon, returning to King Arthur having finished the Knight quest, getting crowned as a lawful, re-dipping it into a fountain at a high experience level.
Fix the problem with Aleaxes creating a copy set of your gear which can then be used as polyfodder by flagging the armor that gets generated with an Aleax to polymorph only into non-magical items.
Unicorns of different colors grudge each other.
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.
Merge the wand of enlightenment into the wand of probing: probing gives enlightenment when zapped at yourself.
Spell of probing, in the divination school, that probes monsters based on skill:
The wand of probing is raised to be on par with the Skilled effects.
Use a miniature cellular automaton to determine which spaces in a swamp room will become water, rather than using a fixed checkerboard. This may not work well for tiny rooms, so enforce a minimum size constraint on what can become a swamp room if necessary.
Fuzz the base prices of objects at the start of every game, between 75% and 125% of the item’s defined base price.
“Piercing” object property, eligible on ammunition, which makes them not stop flying or break when they hit a monster, continuing on to possibly hit more monsters behind it.
Improvements to secret doors:
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.
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.
Add a TDTTOE message about swinging your dead cat if you start hitting things with a wielded cat corpse. Also have a separate message “There isn’t enough room to swing your dead cat” if there are 4 or more walls adjacent to you.
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.)
A “blank ring”, which has no powers. A gemstone can be inserted into it, which will turn it into that type of gemstone ring, whatever it happens to be. Possibly can be obtained by canceling other rings.
Cartomancers start with the create monster card identified and they have a whole bunch of them containing various early to mid game monsters in starting inventory.
Striped shirts have random per-shirt prisoner numbers on them when you read them.
Illithids and illithid-race players can only eat brains and corpses that have brains. If you kill a monster after eating its brain, its corpse offers no nutrition.
Elven characters can read the runes on runed objects (which presumably don’t say much of interest, except possibly a runed wand will say what it is).
When you are turning to slime, higher luck increases the odds of a container trap or magic trap being a tower of flame, and increases rather than decreases the odds of any tower of flame trap (container, magic and fire) hitting you.
A mechanism for checking the health of your steed that isn’t as specialized as a stethoscope. Possibly chatting downward at it gives you a clue.
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.
Invoking artifacts for invisibility makes you visible again if you are already permanently invisible. Also, move the Orb of Detection’s invoke invisibility ability to some lesser artifact because it’s a lame power for a quest artifact.
Give the Magic Mirror of Merlin an invoke effect of enlightenment.
Assuming that shopkeeper identification services have been implemented: Shopkeepers of stores besides general stores will identify any item that can be sold by their shop for a fixed price. General store shopkeepers either don’t identify anything, or can identify everything for you with an exponentially increasing price.
Something would have to be done to avoid trivial item identification of items that shopkeepers sell only one or two of in a class (e.g. showing a bunch of potions to a delicatessen shopkeeper, they reject most of the potions as ones they wouldn’t sell, and informally identifying the potion of fruit juice by not rejecting it). Perhaps they should only offer identification for items for which they sell the entire object class.
“Homing” object property, which generates on ammo and guarantees a hit.
Lightning spells:
Give Sunsword an invoke effect that creates permanent light in a radius like the wand of light. “PRAISE THE SUN” optional.
Make it possible to leave bones on certain levels that have a branch entrance in them (mainly mine entrance, sokoban entrance, quest), by virtue of removing the branch entrance before saving it as bones. If branch upstairs are removed in this manner, replace it with a pile of rocks; if downstairs are removed in this manner, replace them with a pit.
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.
Implement directional looting for objects embedded in a wall where the object is a spellbook and the room type is LIBRARY, so the player doesn’t have to kick the wall to retrieve the books.
Bringing back different types of keys for different sorts of locks. This is not the old random key shapes and random lock shapes system; the discussion concluded that special keys should be used for a few specific purposes: game progression, a one time use reward, or some non-unique type of door where each key is one-time use or limited use. In particular, this third one could be used in Gehennom to block off areas, with “soul keys” or something similar that open special doors there and are generated with demons. Gehennom doors could also involve a blood ritual requiring some sort of expenditure of resources or damage to the player.
Premonition system: under various conditions (crystal balls, clairvoyance, dreaming while you sleep, the Oracle) you can receive a premonition of something that will appear later in your game (this could be almost anything: a monster, object, dungeon feature, special room, etc) which then has a very high chance of generating subsequently.
If you attack a peaceful monster, other peaceful monsters that saw the act but grudge the first monster will not be angered.
Thirsty weapons sometimes gain a point of enchantment when they drain a level from something. Probably only up to a certain maximum.
Yellow dragons digest the player much faster than the other types of dragon, because they’re all acidic.
Various ideas to give the bonus from certain sources of speed only as a bonus to movement, not to getting more turns to attack, use items, etc.
Remove your experience level as a factor from the logic that determines how large a newly generated monster group will be. Instead, scale the group size based on depth. (And to take this further, groups created by magical means such as create monster should be independent of both factors).
Some limited way to charge rings that isn’t the general-purpose magical charging that also charges wands and tools. Maybe add a “scroll of enchant ring” that, like armor and weapon scrolls, only works on rings.
See also L’s Scroll of Enchantment patch, which merges ring, weapon and armor enchanting into a single scroll.
Wishing for “world peace” pacifies all non-unique monsters on the level, possibly subject to monster resistances.
Assuming bhaak’s bag of tricks proposal is implemented, allowing an empty bag of tricks to function as a sack:
When the bag is recharged, don’t destroy the contents. Instead, just make the contents inaccessible until it becomes empty again. Also, add a possible random effect to using the bag while charged: it spits out one of its contents at random.
Another proposal is to place the items in the bag into the inventories of the monsters created by the bag. It could even influence which monsters get created (e.g. a monster who will receive an orcish helm from the bag is likely to be an orc).
Not all zombies are hostile; only the hungry ones are. Thus, some zombies might be generated peaceful. However, a nonhungry zombie has a small chance of turning hungry each turn.
Karma stone: a type of gray stone that, if it is blessed or cursed, can be rubbed on another item to transfer the blessing or curse to that item, making the stone uncursed in the process. Cursed karma stones in inventory eventually transfer their curse to a random item on their own; the stone might remain cursed after doing this. The loadstone in the Mimic of the Mines is replaced with one of these.
Dungeon branches that are completely submerged: their levels have a special level flag that treats you as underwater no matter what the terrain is. Would work better if a breath timer were implemented rather than instant drowning if a magical breathing source is lost. Trying to go down the stairs leading into the branch without the ability to survive underwater is equivalent to jumping into a pool: you will get wet and then crawl out (still on the stairs), without changing levels.
If you attack a peaceful monster in sight of your quest guardians and leader, they give you a warning rather than instantly becoming angered.
Elven daggers and arrows (and really any pointy wooden weapon) has a 5% chance of instakilling any vampire who is not wearing body armor.
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.
The scroll and spellbook of web allow you to fire a web projectile (which would work similarly to a venom projectile, probably also being in VENOM_CLASS) or beam in a direction. If it hits a wall, it creates a web on the last non-wall space; if it hits a monster it creates a web on the monster’s space and immediately entangles it. If it goes far enough without hitting anything, it creates a web at the end of its range.
Giant spiders should possibly also be able to shoot a web like this, and if so the player should be able to do it via #monster when polymorphed into one.
Izchak sells scrolls and wands of light, maybe spellbooks too, at low frequencies.
When choosing the monster type for a mask, use a higher difficulty threshold than it would take to generate monsters; otherwise masks only generate with level-appropriate monsters which the player probably doesn’t want to turn into.
When a packrat generates normally, a random item is created that it carries.
If you dip for Excalibur while using a helm of opposite alignment to be lawful and the attempt would succeed, the Lady of the Lake notices that something is wrong. She emerges from the fountain, grabs your sword, turns it into Excalibur, and rips off your helmet. This allows non-lawfuls to get Excalibur, but only by defeating her.
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.
Nerf the effects of diluted potions in order to disincentivize diluting them and fix alchemy abuses. Start with healing potions: a diluted healing potion of any type heals only half as much as otherwise, and either confers half as much max HP as an undiluted potion or possibly no max HP at all. When alchemizing with diluted potions, half of the amount dipped will bubble or steam off as water, wasting those potions entirely (e.g. 6 diluted healings + gain energy = 3 diluted extra healings).
A #ragequit command, that quits the game without any confirmation. But it’s a non-autocompleting extended command, so you do have to type the whole word out.
Rather than making weapons train 1-to-1 on all successful hits, make them train differently:
Gauntlets of force guarantee that any #force attempt will succeed, and will not break your weapon or items in the container being forced.
When a spellbook’s ward is studied, it is possible to get a non-failure, non-success result of “you’re not skilled enough to tell if there is a useful ward here”. This is done by throwing the player’s Int, XL, and possibly other stats into some deterministic function along with the book’s object id and the ward it actually contains.
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.
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.
New object property “sacrificial”. When something bad happens to you (any one bad effect, really), if you have a sacrificial object equipped, the object disintegrates and the effect is nullified.
Give potions more side dipping effects:
Weapon differentiation - possibly a replacement of the old D&D “damage vs. small / damage vs. large” system currently in use. Weapons would do the same damage regardless of what size the target is, but might get a damage bonus or penalty based on if the target is vulnerable or resistant to piercing, slashing, or whacking/blunt weapons. Being resistant to this weapon type means that the damage is halved; being vulnerable to it means that the damage is multiplied by 1.5. Some obvious examples:
A bunch of scattered ideas for handling candles, given that the hero almost always wants to have only one lit at a time:
The #attributes screen gives you several time-related pieces of info:
The portal on the Plane of Fire moves around, one space in a random direction each turn. Never onto lava or another trap.
Negative “paranoia” intrinsic that randomly adds and removes fake invisible monsters on the map.
When you have greasy fingers, you can touch and pick up cockatrice corpses safely.
When you forget a spell, give the player a message “You have forgotten the ‘foo’ spell.” Also give warnings when you reach 10% and 1% memory.
Invoking the Amulet of Yendor gives you a random possibly helpful, possibly harmful effect:
Remove fainting and direct starvation as a game mechanic.
You can haggle with shopkeepers to sell items. They’ll make an initial lowball offer, you can counter with something, they can counter it, eventually converging to a mutually agreed price. Sometimes refusing to go lower can convince the shopkeeper to accept the higher price; sometimes the shopkeeper will refuse to go higher. If you make an offer lower than their current offer, give them a YAFM ‘[shk] raises his/her eyebrow. “Deal.”’
A conduct that is broken if you use a unicorn horn. (Possibly, only if you get healing effects from a unicorn horn; using it as a weapon is fine.)
Custom-order shop: you pay up front for an item which is not there, and come back a certain (random maybe?) amount of turns later, when a mail daemon will deliver the item.
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).
Artifact flail or short sword, the Debugger. Deals double damage to all a-class, s-class, and x-class monsters.
When remove curse changes the beatitude of things in your inventory, those things glow the appropriate color (or feel warm if you’re blind). The scroll is identified only if at least one beatitude-identified thing changed its state.
If you escape the dungeon, a short blurb prints describing your post-dungeon career. This factors in your material wealth (gold, gems, and other things you escaped with), deity anger (they will be mad at you for abandoning the mission regardless, but if already angry before your escape you will not live long outside the dungeon), and alignment record (bad alignment could cause you to get spurned by your peers), along with possibly more factors, such as if you escaped with a fake Amulet.
When a container containing items is polymorphed, it can only turn into other containers (possibly never a bag of holding to prevent abuse). Or else the contents just get spilled out (and possibly polymorphed themselves).
You can invoke the Amulet on Moloch’s high altar to destroy it; this does something good later for you (more points? prestige?) but Moloch will now harrow and hound you down all the way back through Gehennom even more fiercely than usually.
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).
You can stomp your foot by kicking at the ground. This causes noise around you, waking monsters, depending on how much weight you’re carrying. Cannot be done over a certain encumbrance.
Intrinsic teleportitis is no longer binary; you build it up by getting the intrinsic from multiple corpses. With more of it built up, the random teleports happen more frequently (essentially, “teleport opportunities” happen at the same rate the currently do; if you have N% teleportitis, you have an N% chance of teleporting on each opportunity).
However, the effect wears off over time and eventually fades completely (with some message like “You feel less jumpy”, so the hero knows they can’t Ctrl-T at will anymore).
Extrinsic teleportitis remains the same, triggering a teleport at the same rate it does currently.
This implementation meshes well with a partial intrinsic system like in SporkHack or EvilHack.
Applying a pruning hook (or possibly any polearm) to a space containing a tree, assuming there’s no monster occupying that space, it triggers the regular bees/fruit from the tree without needing to kick it.
If you apply a mirror at an empty square and that square is a “corner” (in a corridor), you gain temporary vision in the perpendicular line around that corner. If it’s a T-junction you look both ways. There is a “Done.” at the end like detect monsters has.
Unconsecrated or minor altars. They are either to some unnamed lesser god, or to no one in particular. They can be converted to your god like normal, but don’t have any penalty for kicking or attempting to engrave or anything while still unconsecrated.
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.
Boulders tear through spider webs (whether from a rolling boulder trap, thrown by a giant, or pushed by the hero). For extra realism, the web slows its momentum.
Delicatessen shopkeepers chide you if you eat something while in their shop that doesn’t belong to them and that you didn’t buy from them. “Buy something or get out!”
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).
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”.
General artifact-stealing attack; like the Wizard’s quest-artifact-steal attack but applicable to all artifacts and without Amulet of Yendor theft baked in. Archeologist player monsters might use this (“That belongs in a museum!”).
Various alternate endings for the game:
Also see the Astral Escape Patch.
Generalize health food stores into a special type of role-specific shop. This shop isn’t an actual shop; it signals the level generator to transform it into a different specific type of shop depending on the player’s role. The role-specific shops contain role-helpful items like health food does for Monks. They can be found randomly generated with probability around 5%. If a role doesn’t have a specific type of shop associated, the shop becomes a general store instead.
Glass doors that you can see through and kick to break with ease.
Non-weapon stethoscope skill, which gives less information than it currently does at Unskilled (perhaps just HP), the same amount of information as currently at Basic, more information like pet tameness and apport at Skilled, and a full probe at Expert. Possibly it also takes a full turn to use until Basic or Skilled.
Gloves that give a boost to multishot somehow: either increase the maximum by 1, or reroll the roll if it happened to be 1, or something. There’s debate on how not to overpower multishot with an item like this.
When starting or restoring the game while hallucinating, after the “welcome to NetHack!” message, print the message “NetHack is filmed in front of a live studio audience.”
F corpses can be dipped into potions to make different potions: juice + violet fungus = booze, juice + yellow mold = sickness, water + green mold = acid. (Note the existence of the Brewing Patch, which dissolves most F in juice to produce confusion, hallucination, booze, sleeping, and healing.)
Later suggested recipes which involve dipping a corpse in acid to dissolve it:
Losing alignment makes it permanently harder to regain alignment. Do this by instead of using a linear scale where current alignment equals alignment gained minus alignment lost, use a ratio where current alignment is alignment gained divided by alignment lost (probably with some constant factor in there somewhere).
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.
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).
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.
Engraving (or ward) that is bad/cursed, and it causes bad things to happen on or around it. Anti-Elbereth of sorts. Monsters may deliberately engrave it to hurt the player.
Extend the Advent Calendar patch to include Hanukkah gifts: behind the same appropriate doors depending on the date in December, you can find candles and potions of oil. If mundane candelabrums are added, possibly add those too.
Archeologists (maybe gnomes too) start the game with all valuable and worthless gems (but not gray stones) identified. If this is too powerful, perhaps they only begin the game with all worthless glass identified.
Wearing gauntlets of power, you can snag a boulder and pull it with a grappling hook. If in Sokoban this incurs a penalty.
Confused scrolls of wishing let you wish for a terrain type that appears under you, like in wizard mode.
Ghosts lose their physical touch attack in favor of a reusable attack that scare-paralyzes you. Possibly, if this is unflavorful due to it just being the same ghost, change their AI to make them turn invisible after a certain amount of time being visible and not next to the player. Then they path towards you, and if you either stumble into them or they are next to you and get a move, they turn visible, paralyzing you. Since the actual action of them appearing out of nowhere would be what frightens you, see invisible would negate the effect.
Object property “frost walker”, which only generates on boots. When worn, lava cools into solid floor and water freezes into ice in a radius 1 around the wearer. Optional if they unfreeze afterwards. Alternatively, make this an artifact pair of water walking boots.
Give a different message for when you injure your legs by kicking. Possibly as subtle as “Ouch! That really hurts!”, but could be more explicit like “Ouch! You injured your leg!”
Reading a scroll of knowledge while confused or hallucinating gives you enlightenment instead.
If Aeglos/Aiglos, the Spear of Gil-galad, is ever implemented, it should have cold-related effects, because it means “Snow-point”.
If you stack up too many extra movement points from scrolls of time, time freezes even for you, and your game ends with the killer reason being “became frozen in time”.
When you throw ammo without the proper launcher, the game makes it clear that you’re doing it wrong, e.g. “You clumsily throw the arrow”. This also abuses Wisdom.
New artifact: The Trident of Poseidon. Chaotic (only because Poseidon is in-game). While carried, grants magical breathing, swimming, and protects items from water damage. When wielded, confers water walking. Double damage versus aquatic monsters, and gets a damage bonus versus all that scales with the amount of water squares adjacent to you. Invoke to get an UnNetHack-style flood.
Armor made of bone increases your spellcasting ability somehow (many ways to do this; decrease failure rate? Decrease Pw cost?)
Instead of being perpetually rechargeable (that opens up a lot of exploits and farming like smoky potion farming and infinite altar farming with the Platinum Yendorian Express Card), horns of plenty now stop being rechargeable after 7 recharges.
Silence auras that prevent both you and monsters spellcasting. Maybe also a directed silence spell, which silences an individual monster. While silenced, monsters can’t be chatted to, and nothing they do will make noise (possibly only if in a silence aura).
While under the effect of silence, the player’s stealth is elevated.
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 wield a c corpse and take any of several actions that normally turns you to stone, it instead rolls a body part to see which part of you touches the corpse. If this part of you is wearing armor, you don’t touch it and so don’t turn to stone. However, it’s impossible to cover yourself completely.
When potions break on the ground, they leave puddles of that potion. Pets can drink this puddle to get the effects. They also give effects (vapor effects, plus acid burning) to any monster standing in them, which is nice because it makes it harder for the player to stand in one place and fight a horde of enemies. Not defined what should happen if multiple potions mix in one spot - alchemize perhaps.
Magic lamps and regular lamps can generate as various different materials. For rare material variants, a djinni that comes out of a magic lamp of that material and grants a wish will return back inside it one or two times, thereby granting multiple wishes.
You can pray at a gravestone, or possibly ring a bell at one, to cause any of a number of good and bad effects:
After you get one effect, the gravestone is flagged so that it doesn’t happen again (or, more evilly, that any further attempts will only result in bad effects). Possibly shouldn’t work at all on graveyard levels, because they have too many graves to balance these effects.
Caltrops: a nonmagic stackable tool that when applied creates a “caltrop trap” on your space, which damages / immobilizes / slows the first monster to enter it. Rangers and rogues excel at using them and possibly get some bonuses from them. Not difficult to untrap, though it would be nice if some caltrops could gradually be lost in the process. Maybe spreading caltrops consumes five or so of them, and you won’t always get five back during an untrap.
New artifact Callandor, a glass long sword or crystal sword in dNetHack. Lawful, provides double spell damage when wielded. Possibly only gifted to male characters (based on its source mythos, the Wheel of Time, where it is a male-magic amplifier).
If you drown while playing as a Pirate, the death message is changed to “went to Davy Jones’ locker”.
When either 1) you are hallucinating and hit something well enough to have gotten a ! on the hit message or 2) hit something with a type weakness (fire versus cold-resistant, cold versus fire-resistant, electricity versus water, etc), an additional “It’s super effective!” message is printed.
Add un-eroding a dipped item as an additional fountain dip effect.
When an imp says “Look! Thy bootlace is undone!”, he might tie your shoes together and cause you to fumble for d10 turns.
The game opening text for certain roles is changed from “It is written in the Book of [deity]:”
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.
Rework hard helmet mechanics so that for large objects like boulders, they only take a few points off if anything.
Drop bears: possibly t-class monsters (or z-class, if the SLASH’EM zouthern animals monster class is used) that hide on the ceiling, generating next to or near trees. They are unimpressive in combat, except for the nasty amount of damage they deal with their initial dropping attack. Can only go back to hiding when next to a tree.
For most calculations that involve the depth of the Sanctum (score, level difficulty with the Amulet) use a constant 50 in place of the Sanctum depth.
Bird pets are better at combat than mammals, but can carry much less due to weighing less.
Random killer bees always spawn female. Male ones can only generate in beehives.
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.
Shepherds’ crooks: a wooden multi-purpose weapon-tool.
Itlachiayaque can be read to get a clairvoyance mapping, with the message “You see nearby terrain reflected in the depths of the shield.” This should possibly be limited so that it can’t be done infinitely; perhaps it only works when the invoke timeout is zero and increases the invoke timeout by some small amount when read.
Assuming a scroll of consecration exists: confused scroll of consecration consecrates your weapon, which blesses and fooproofs it and maxes/increases its enchantment with no possibility of evaporating. Possibly, turn it into an artifact as well.
Magic missiles, and possibly other rays, stop at the first creature they hit and don’t continue to other creatures behind it. Possibly this should only happen on the first magic-resistant creature and “the missiles bounce off” (they clearly aren’t bouncing off in the same exact direction they were traveling before hitting the target, and the message implies they scatter harmlessly).
Ice boxes occasionally contain potions of booze or fruit juice in addition to corpses. A proposed frequency is 1% of ice boxes, and they contain d3 of either type of potion (possibly both).
Ideas about nerfing the player’s ability to scare off a large group of Yendorian Army troops at once:
This doesn’t necessarily have to be only the Yendorian Army; the rule could be extended to all monsters being “supported” by other monsters of their same species, with some special cases for things like all orcs supporting each other.
Brass knuckles, an item that increases damage done with bare hands and martial arts if you are unarmed. There are multiple takes on it:
Cavemen get a large damage/to-hit bonus when throwing spears at large mammals, or an alignment bonus for killing large mammals with spears.
A digging ray shot into amorphous engulfers (such as green slimes or gelatinous cubes in some variants) splits them instead of reducing their HP to 1. This automatically makes you not engulfed anymore. (Does not change the effect on things like purple worms. Not specified what should happen with unsolid engulfers like vortices and air elementals.)
New or replacement (or hallucination-only) flavor-only message for magic traps: “Your spider senses are tingling!”
Yellow dragon scale mail gives petrification resistance instead of (or possibly in addition to) acid resistance.
Pets cannot move and eat in 1 action. Also, pets eating food off the ground merely makes it partly eaten, rather than completely destroying it.
Drinking booze while already under its effects, or occasionally when its confusion effect wears off, causes hallucination.
Give some monsters the M2_SWIM ability: rats, possibly dogs, possibly horses.
Graffitist role, in which your job is to go around making graffiti everywhere.
Am amulet versus thievery, which protects you from all theft attacks including nymphs, leprechauns, foocubi, and possibly even Amulet-stealing attacks.
A way to allow the player out of locked shops they teleport into. Possibly chatting to the shopkeeper, or trying and failing to open the locked door from inside the shop.
Conflictless conduct: never have a monster attack another monster while influenced by conflict. Would be best if you can safely ring-test conflict, perhaps it gives some message like “You feel aggravation” or “You feel irate” when wearing it (these messages would be shared with the ring of aggravate monster so as not to be unambiguous).
Wielding a light source increases its radius by 1. Or possibly 1 if offhanded and 2 if directly wielded.
Dipping mundane tools into potions of gain energy charges them with the same beatitude as the scroll would. Possibly extend to magical tools and wands, but only allow the uncursed charging effect.
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.
The Caveman pantheon should be changed to monosyllabic god names like the rest of the Caveman-specific text.
One or two Orcish Town exits are blocked by boulders instead of iron bars. This allows the player to get inside when they’re ready without requiring digging or acid, but won’t allow the orcs to escape.
Setting fire to a web should burn through it, spreading to any adjacent webs and destroying all of them.
Peaceful priests and angels of your own god on Astral help you out by attacking hostiles. Possibly only if your alignment is good.
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:
Certain monsters (e.g. the Riders) shouldn’t be able to be frightened by getting a ghost from a bottle.
Guarantee a random sack somewhere in all Minetown variants.
Vapors from the potion of polymorph should cause a brief or minor polymorph. Possibly the “you feel like a new foo” effect.
Better ghost scaling in general. Ghosts should have a wide range of strength levels, and should be capable of posing problems even to late game characters. The more ghosts you summon by repeatedly entering a haunted temple, the stronger they get.
The scroll of create monster now summons only 1 monster (occasionally 2 or 3). The beatitude determines whether they will turn out allied with the reader (blessed), created normally with the usual probabilities of being peaceful (uncursed), or whether they will be hostile to the reader or omnicidal (cursed).
Polymorph, teleport and levelport traps should disappear once used by any monster (including the player). Or else they have a low-ish chance of disappearing per each use.
Monster hallucination, if implemented as a status, should be rather stronger than confusion: when confused, monsters can still see what the other monsters around them are, but when hallucinating they ought to see the same random monsters as the player does, and lash out at any of them.
Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you’re carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn’t work when put into containers, or at least doesn’t get multiplied by the effect of a cursed bag of holding. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed (or vice versa).
Helms of opposite alignment use a hash function for determining what alignment they’ll set a neutral to, instead of just using object ID mod 2.
Fix race base monster weights: human weights should be dropped from 1450 to 1000, elves should be dropped to 500, dwarves should weigh a bit more than elves, orcs should be between dwarves and humans, gnomes should be lightest.
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.
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.
You can wield artifacts in your offhand, but they must be non-intelligent, non-gifted, and non-crossaligned. (Non-wished-for is an option, but may be too exclusive.)
If you take damage from eating a hot corpse while hallucinating, you get a YAFM about spicy food.
Various ideas to prevent powerful bones generated on a level’s upstairs from instakilling a player:
You can convince peaceful intelligent monsters to join your cause (taming them) by chatting with them. The outcome depends on several factors: your respective alignments (lawfuls have a very hard time recruiting chaotic monsters), respective levels, respective races, your Charisma (which should be a large factor), and possibly others. Failing might turn the monster hostile, or do nothing. You only get one attempt per monster; if they don’t want to join you, trying again will never work. More complex behavior could possibly be implemented with the monster demanding something from you or making you do something before they will follow you. E.g. “I’ll only join you for 100 zorkmids,” or “Bring me the helms of three goblins to prove your worth!”
Internally, this would probably work by having a new flag “recruitable” on a monster, which is only set to true when a monster generates as peaceful (and is not set at all for certain monster types like shopkeepers and priests). Chatting first checks this flag: a taming attempt is only made if it is true, and it is set to false regardless of the taming outcome. Some peaceful monsters of a recruitable species could also generate with the recruitable flag as false.
To avoid this conflicting with existing #chat, there are a few options:
The maximum difficulty a monster can be generated at is independent of player experience level. Only the level difficulty (and perhaps other player-independent stats such as branch) matter. The details of how the curve of monster difficulty compared to level difficulty should look are up to debate; NetHack4’s is a piecewise function that climbs slowly until level 10 and thereafter is (level difficulty - 5).
As a more minor version of this, only enforce this rule during level creation, and respect experience level for monsters generated after creation.
When “Sting cuts through a web!”, the web is destroyed. Currently it only allows you to escape the web in 1 turn and does not destroy it.
One or two softball easy player monsters that generate early in the dungeon, with mostly starting gear, and are not hard to kill.
Nymphs are weak spellcasters and may generate with a few enchantment spells or have hardcoded ones like sleep and charm monster.
Overhaul poison so that its effects are less random: some might still cause instadeath, but it would only be found in the late game or via bosses like Demogorgon and Scorpius; early game poison shouldn’t drain multiple stat points at once.
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).
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?
More harassment effects: the chance of respawning the Wizard is a fixed 1/7 and the rest of the effects are equal probability. Multiple non-duplicate effects may happen at the same time.
If you polymorph, and are not helpless, all of your torso armor that has a delay of 1 or less and isn’t stuck under slower armor is automatically removed. This includes all cloaks and shirts.
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.)
When the player is afraid of a monster, to-hit is reduced and they may not be able to attack that specific monster at all.
Make the amount of bonus movement points from temporary speed directly dependent on its remaining duration, with it gradually decreasing back to normal as the speed wears off. Also provide diminishing returns where giving yourself more speed boosts on top of already having temporary speed gives you less extra duration than it otherwise would, until eventually you can’t get any more duration than 1 per turn. These bonus movement points should also stack directly with all other speed sources, and be visible to the user in the status bar.
Ring or amulet that causes your spellcasting to draw on HP instead of Pw, possibly only when your Pw is zero, or possibly not requiring a ring. Each point of HP is worth 2 Pw points. If cursed, doubles spell Pw costs. If blessed, energy regeneration will regenerate HP until full before regenerating Pw. Casting from HP too much may decrease your HP maximum. If implemented as an artifact, possibly flavor it as an evil counterpart of the Eye of the Aethiopica.
Note that a couple variants have implemented this as a “ring of blood magic” or similar items.
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:
Lure, which attracts monsters to you. Could be a magical non-consumable item, or a charged item that amounts to spraying yourself with scents. The Amulet of Yendor should also have this effect, at its maximum level at all times.
Temporary hit points and Pw: your maximum goes above its normal bounds for some time, before returning to normal. If your normal maximum changes for some reason, the temporary maximum changes by the same amount. There are two proposals for how the effect should end:
Elves and possibly Rangers get an alignment penalty for cutting down trees. Dwarves get an alignment bonus.
The confused scroll of identify, if non-cursed, identifies a random unknown object class and adds it to your discoveries list, even if you’ve never seen any of that object.
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).
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:
Hallucination should prevent against all death magic, including death rays, using the “near death experience” logic. Not just the touch of death.
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).
The monster spawn rate gradually decreases the longer you spend on a level. (May not apply if you have the demigod flag set or are carrying the Amulet.)
Dogs will eat candy bars off the floor, but will then get sick or nauseous from eating it.
If you have divine protection and become near death from a timed instadeath or low HP, some or all of your protection may automatically convert itself into a cure: “You suddenly feel the power of [deity] surround you! You feel limber/cured/much better/etc.” This should probably work for a narrow range of symptoms (probably not HP loss, possibly any major trouble), and the help delivered should be strictly worse than a prayer if possible (because having this trigger will not affect your prayer timeout).
It should also probably not work in Gehennom, and a key factor is that it should not be reliable, either. Possibly, also track which gods you got it from; protection from donating to crossaligned gods (especially Moloch) will trigger less often.
A slightly more extreme version of this idea is to make divine protection no longer grant AC at all.
Reduce the odds that a nonmagical potion polypiles into a magical potion, to disincentivize mass-blanking potions and polypiling them.
Attacking in melee with an unsuitable weapon like a launcher should negate the player’s Str bonus or monster’s weapon attack bonus.
Engraving should be an occupation rather than weirdly leaving the player paralyzed but still writing until it’s finished. If it is an occupation, the usual interruptions will make the player stop engraving.
Raise the XL threshold of dipping Excalibur for non-Knight roles to around 9-12. Knights can still dip at level 5.
Provide an option to label branches with the branch name instead of using “Dlvl:” all the time. Also allow it to be shortened to “DL”, with no colon, for those who want extra space in the status bar.
Skeletons, or any other monster with MS_BONES, don’t paralyze you by rattling their bones if you’re hallucinating; instead you get a message about it playing the xylophone.
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).
Condensing all of NetHack’s poison mechanics into one unified mechanic:
Frost lamp, a tool which gives out a radius 3 cold aura. Water and lava within the radius freeze and then revert once out of the radius. Fiery monsters take damage from being in the radius. Eventually runs out and has to be recharged.
Smoke cloud monster (v), has a mild fire damage attack and a suffocating smoke attack. Generates in fiery areas.
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.
If you consort with a foocubus while Lawful, “You feel unclean.”
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.
Sell price depends on Charisma, whereas buy price does not. (Slightly more flavorful.)
The hunger property, instead of doubling hunger rate, halves any nutrition you get from any source, making it marginally more useful for eating large corpses. (This should probably only be granted by the actual hunger intrinsic, i.e. the ring of hunger, as opposed to other intrinsics like conflict and regeneration that burn through nutrition fast but aren’t explicitly about being hungry.)
New conduct for not hitting things with thrown items, and another conduct for not casting offensive spells.
Special message when a self-concealing pet “reluctantly hides under” a cursed item instead of stepping over it. Or maybe pets which hide under objects will never hide under cursed objects.
Cannibalism angers your god instead of removing telepathy.
Non-intrusive ways to tell new players important parts of the game, like how to use #enhance. For instance, “You feel more confident in your skills. (Use #enhance to advance this skill.)”
Healing potions don’t give you different HP maximum increases depending on their beatitude any more. Instead, if they would have taken you above your maximum, your HP maximum is increased by that amount, to a maximum of +1 (healing) / +2 (extra healing) / +4 (full healing).
Random earthquakes. Same effects as drums of earthquake, except not triggered by anything and not necessarily centered on the hero or anything special. Earthquakes (from any source) now can collapse diggable walls (turning them into floor spaces without pits) and drop rocks and boulders out of the ceiling. No effect in any Plane except Earth. Possibly, to limit this, a finite number of earthquakes can happen on any given level (after which it either collapses entirely, or just fails to produce more free rocks and boulders.)
Instead of a mslow flag in the monst struct, use a signed char called “speedbon” which represents the amount of speed offset that the monster should have from its normal speed. This allows for more nuanced speed mechanics, like zapping a wand of speed monster or slow monster multiple times and having the effects stack.
Shop type “psychedelicatessen”: contains some normal delicatessen food, but also hallucinogens and lots of drugs.
Proposed nerfs for ring and wand destruction due to electric damage (some of them extensible to scrolls, spellbooks and potions for fire and cold damage):
Replace the shield of reflection with a “polished shield”, which is nonmagical. It can come in any material, but only brass, copper, silver, and gold are shiny enough to make it also confer reflection. (That is, you can have a polished wooden shield or a polished iron shield, but the material just isn’t lustrous enough.)
Merge the rings of sustain ability and slow digestion into a “ring of stasis”. Double-edged effects: slows down digestion like normal, but also slows down healing, energy regeneration, timer effects like confusion and sickness, any timing-out intrinsics, prevents exercise from happening, blocks or reduces to 1 effects that directly change attributes.
When a gremlin steals an intrinsic from you, you can recover the intrinsic by killing it or eating its corpse.
Add a “summoned” bitfield to struct monst, which is used to identify monsters that have been created through magical means. Should be a bitfield rather than a flag so that it can track different details of how it was summoned (from trap/wand/etc, by player or by something else; it probably doesn’t warrant a mextra struct). Summoned monsters can have various anti-farming nerfs applied to them: no training skills, no corpses, no deathdrops, no starting inventory, no experience, etc. Possibly, summoned monsters also disappear after a few hundred turns.
The Candelabrum refuses to light if it has fewer than 7 candles.
The hero can either not write unknown scrolls and spellbooks at all (writing by appearance is still fine as long as the appearance is known), or else the chance of writing one increases with every scroll and spellbook the hero identifies.
In variants with felt markers, allow them to write spellbooks and scrolls of mail - the other scrolls are the only thing they can’t write.
Augment the stealth system by adding a monster AI attribute representing “hasn’t sensed you yet, or has lost sense of you”. Also allow players to take a deliberate action to conceal themselves. This would allow for players to hide in (or flee into) a corner or closet and allow a monster to pass them by, then get the jump on them afterward (perhaps in the form of a bonus for attacking an unsuspecting monster). Some monsters should ideally be able to conceal themselves as well, perhaps even by casting illusions that make a door appear as a wall or something to the hero, until discovered.
Vampires can’t step onto sinks, because they “can’t cross running water”.
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).
You have access to the full total allotment of skill points from the beginning of the game (effectively making it so that gaining more levels isn’t required to unlock skill slots). To compensate, you can only train skills by fighting at-difficulty monsters or higher, so you can’t train everything by farming weak monsters.
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.
Don’t allow giants to carry an infinite amount of boulders.
Remove the scroll of genocide, or else institute some awful (divine?) punishment for genociding monsters, because it is a heinous act. (This would help with symmetry for monsters using genocide.)
Use the builtin pathfinding algorithm to trace a path between the upstairs and downstairs of each level in the Dungeons of Doom. Along this path, remove or relocate any traps, and (in early levels, perhaps up until the Oracle) convert any secret doors or passages along the path into regular ones.
Monster flag M3_TELWITHU. Monsters with this flag (examples: quantum mechanics, some devils) will follow you when you teleport horizontally.
A demon lord who lives in Gehennom who you can sell your soul to in order to gain levels. This will have drastic effects on your score (or something) at the end of the game.
A Minetown (or some other town) minigame based around classic survival/area defense games:
In order to make extrinsic regeneration scale better, it acts as a multiplier to your natural regeneration rate. x2 is an option but may be too high; x1.5 might work better.
Another idea is to make it so that regeneration gets better the closer you are to dying of HP loss, formally: if current HP = X * maxHP, regeneration will heal you at a rate of (2 - x) times its normal rate.
Change Vorpal Blade to do very high damage (on the order of x3 or x4) when it critical hits, instead of decapitation, in order to remove YAAD potential in monster hands. The new critical hit message is “Your Vorpal Blade goes snicker-snack!” (Some other message might be needed to replace the existing message when you are neutral crowned but already holding Vorpal Blade).
When you attempt to interact with (or possibly explicitly search) a door or container, you get “There [are no traps / is a trap] on this [door / container].” which guarantees that there is not or is a trap, rather than an ambiguous “You find no traps”.
“Coffin” boxes should use corpsenm instead of spe to represent whether they contain a vampire. Useful because it could be used for other creatures (including Schroedinger’s Cat).
Modify Sokoban maps so that a monster can never get stuck in an awkward place except by the player doing something foolish. Possibly make the corridors leading to the goal double-sized or have alcoves off to one side where a monster can move.
Saltwater or murky water, intended as a nerf for “just dilute most potions”:
Alternatively, don’t actually make saltwater a separate potion; just use saltwater as a flavor reason for why the player can’t intentionally dilute potions to water. (Can use a separate flavor argument, that potions are generally corked while not used, to explain away the lack of dilution for water damage.) Also, make most potions cancel into non-water base potions (such as confusion and hallucination to booze), with the notable exception of polymorph. It’s also harder or impossible to get water from random alchemy or polymorph.
A third option is naming blessing-capable potions “purified water” and leaving the mundane potion of water as it is. Things such as unicorn horns can neutralize toxins but can’t actually remove them, so the resulting water isn’t purified.
The number of levels a trap door will take you down is deterministic for every trap door. Possibly also extend the trapdoor and migration code to allow deterministically placing coordinates of things that fall through a trap door as well.
Nazgul cannot be killed “incorrectly” (unclear on what this needs to be, perhaps stabbing them with a barrow-wight’s knife, or being female). If you happen to kill one incorrectly, it will be killed without giving experience and its inventory will be deleted (minus unique items). The Nazgul born counter then ticks down by one, so it can be spawned again elsewhere by the normal mechanism.
Rename AD_SEDU to AD_CHRM because it’s not really seduction.
Cave-like or cavernous levels, like the Mines and the Caveman home level, spawn bats fairly often.
Dart and arrow traps are much more likely to generate if the trap is next to a wall. Alternatively, when generating a dart or arrow trap, look for a wall tile in line within 3 squares that contains the launching mechanism; if no such tile exists, the trap cannot generate. The player must then untrap the wall square, or dig it out, to remove the trap.
Restructure Gehennom as follows: the main trunk consists of the Valley, then 5-7 filler cavern/lava levels interspersed with two bribable demon lairs, then the Vibrating Square level (also cavern/lava), then the Sanctum. The Vibrating Square level contains six revealed portals, one of which leads to the Wizard’s Tower, one of which leads to Vlad’s Tower, and the others all lead to demon lairs in which you can’t leave the level until the demon is defeated.
Kicking down doors exercises Str and not Dex.
Black pudding globs convey only one of the three intrinsics they currently convey (maybe shock resistance), and brown pudding globs convey another (maybe cold resistance).
If a scurrier selects , or . when asked what to eat, they attempt to chew through the floor.
You can engrave on walls or doors. Elbereth on walls or doors doesn’t work. You can read it by standing on the nearest space. Random graffiti, if it generates on a floor square next to a wall or door, may say “Something is written on the wall here.” instead of the floor. Graffiti could render as ~ or something similar.
Intelligence can be abused and exercised, but unlike other stats, exercise will never bring it above its base value (or the value you have raised it to through gain ability).
Sources of abuse: mind flayer brain eating, zombie attacks. Sources of exercise: reading spellbooks, writing spellbooks, writing scrolls, learning a new spell, getting a major Oracle consultation for the first time, possibly some of the uncommon, non-farmable ways stolen from the things that exercise Wisdom.
Resolve the problem of having to double-enchant launchers and ammo and get double bonuses in one of two ways:
The Oracle centaur statues may contain sizeable piles of ranged ammunition, particularly arrows and crossbow bolts.
Reflavoring of Heaven or Hell mode: everything explodes when it gets hit by anything. A.k.a. “HackSplosion”.
Every spellcaster should have its own list of spells it can cast. (Archons and possibly nalfeshnees should be casting clerically aligned spells rather than mage spells.)
Challenge rooms that occasionally get embedded into Gehennom levels. They are sealed off somehow, perhaps with solid stone you need to dig through to enter. They are not intended to be required, and contain some sort of reward. Rooms might include:
You occasionally get an alignment bonus if your alignment record is negative and you are Weak, because you are doing hunger penance. (Possibly only works for lawfuls, since chaotic gods are unlikely to approve of weakness.)
Special room that is lined (not filled) with statues of you, and contains no monsters, items, traps, or anything else interesting. All doors in contain traps that will make them lock behind you. Intended only to make the game more creepy.
Mummies have a curse item attack that would probably make them not fun to have in their current quantities. So mummies are not randomly generated; they appear in graveyards and some special levels like the Catacombs and the Archeologist quest, but otherwise do not appear.
Buff zombies, to make them more of a threat. Import FIQHack zombification (a zombie bite will place you 90-100 turns away from turning into a zombie, each additional bite decreases the timer by around 10 turns, but it will go away by itself if the timer doesn’t dip below 40); boost their difficulty, but keep their HD low; allow them to revive themselves less frequently than trolls, but also revive themselves whenever another zombie steps over their corpse.
Add a monster species flag for “zombifiable”, and track zombification or mummification as flags on an individual monster, removing the need for Z or M to be separate classes.
Set the minimum dungeon level for polymorph traps to a deeper level, to perhaps 12 or 15. Polymorph traps now polymorph you in spite of magic resistance, but you can acquire some property (not as strong as polymorph control) that makes it much more likely or guaranteed that you will polymorph into a form that will preserve your armor and your hands.
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.
Demon lords that accept a bribe don’t actually go anywhere. They get out of the way to the stairs if they were previously in the way, but otherwise they have their movement points set to 0 and cease warping for as long as they are peaceful.
Change the confused effects of the scroll of punishment: blessed mollifies your god if angry, uncursed increases anger by 1, cursed increases anger by 1 and your god smites you.
Your success chance of writing an unknown scroll or spellbook should be based on Intelligence, not Luck.
More marginal corner-case uses for gems (similar to the amethyst/booze interaction):
Jumping either acts on a timeout and can’t be done right after a previous jump, or else it takes a full turn’s worth of movement points (more so than the existing mechanic of reducing movement points to 0).
Remove the scroll of stinking cloud in favor of a potion that when shattered releases a stinking cloud. Drinking this makes you vomit or become ill.
As part of artifact rebalance: guaranteed sacrifice gifts should probably not be ascension kit quality gear, since otherwise sacrificing for such gear becomes a dominant strategy. (Most important for weapons; you don’t want to be able to obtain a weapon early that will obsolete all other weapons in the game.)
Revamp Astral so that the challenges to player mobility, options, and time don’t all depend on being crammed in by monsters. One idea is to have spellcasters that summon force fields / temporary walls to block your progress.
Determining whether you escape or dodge trap effects should be based on stats like Dexterity and maybe role and XL, rather than Luck.
Charging a potion of fruit juice turns it into a potion of see invisible. Dipping fruit juice into confusion turns it into a potion of booze.
H-class monsters are tall enough to stand above water, and don’t drown in it. Or maybe they only drown on water spaces completely surrounded by other water.
Paper bags that are a container but disintegrate when wet. They can generate with a potion of booze inside.
In variants that have multiple selectable Sokoban prizes, one prize is multiple random rings and a random amulet, but there’s no way to see what they are without sealing off the other prizes.
In variants with reviving undead, you can apply a weapon downwards at a dead zombie’s corpse to destroy it so that it can’t revive. This may take several turns.
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).
Mjollnir confers shock resistance.
Restore the Amulet Delivery Service to the game: demon lords in the Sanctum, but not the Wizard, will fight the current holder of the Amulet of Yendor for it. Only do this if lugging a demon lord down to the Sanctum is considerably harder than just fighting through the Sanctum is itself, and no demon lord is actually guaranteed to win against the High Priest.
Fort Ludios is a visit-once level: once you leave by the exit portal, the Dungeons of Doom portal disappears and the level becomes inaccessible forever. (Maybe if you leave any of the invocation items or the Amulet there, the portal refuses to let you out so the game doesn’t become unwinnable.)
Single-level branches whose portals, found in vaults, disappear after one use; they are subdivisions of the Magic Memory Vault, and modeled after ADOM “vaults”. These are basically challenge levels, smaller and less rewarding than Fort Ludios (the master branch), that contain some nice loot and harder-than-usual monsters. Portals to them can also be found in vaults in Gehennom.
You can walk diagonally into or out of an open door if there is also another open door adjacent to both your starting and ending location.
Artifact bullwhip that grants extra damage against tigers and other animals, and grants better passive pet-control effects.
Have different summon nasties lists, based on what monster is doing the summoning. If a demon summons, you get mostly demons; if an undead summons, you get mostly undead. Needs some more lists for lawful summoners like titans or Archons and Quest nemesis spellcasters. The current list is kept for the Wizard of Yendor.
When tame shapechangers polymorph, they attack creatures based on their current monster level (or perhaps the maximum of their current level and their new form’s level), not blindly use the new form’s level.
A type of boots, perhaps high iron boots, that protects fully against xans.
The scroll of scare monster, on the ground, will do a check versus monster magic resistance before it actually scares a monster.
Luck ideas:
New unaligned artifact dagger Almagest: uses the powers of scrolls to augment itself, and bears a scroll label signifying which scroll ability it is imbued with. Opinions vary on whether this label should be randomly generated by the dagger (and the player may choose to read it, upon which it gives the uncursed scroll effect and disappears for 1000 turns, eventually returning with another label) or whether the label should be deliberately imbued by the player by rubbing it on a scroll. It gains +d4 to damage and +d4 to hit when it has an inscription.
There are additional special effects if the player has formally IDed the scroll whose label is on the dagger:
Bows might break, like boomerangs, when you whack things with them in melee. (Will require an AI rewrite so 500 gnomes don’t break their bows on you.)
Levels between Medusa and the Castle generate with roving contingents of the Yendorian Army, and have large open areas if they are maze levels.
Rock moles can be tamed by throwing a metal weapon at them, which they will catch and eat.
Touchstones no longer count as magical items. (Real-life touchstones aren’t.)
Kicking a lightweight object into a wall will cause it to “rebound” or “clatter” (for wooden objects) off the wall, not just “Thump!”. The object might move a couple spaces.
Monster spell that creates a wall, or possibly just a boulder, to block the hero’s progress.
New slot for belts:
Rogues have a 20% (or 10%, or whatever is balanced) chance of stealing a random lightweight item (say, less than 5 aum, or less than 20 aum to include potions) out of a monster’s inventory with every successful melee hit they make. This chance is increased if they are hitting with no wielded weapon or have no secondary weapon or shield, and maybe should scale with experience level too.
Rebalance Fort Ludios so that it can realistically only be completed after finishing the Castle. One way to do this is to make soldier AI better, another way is to put the entry and exit portals on opposite sides of the level (or put the exit portal inside the fort), so the player can’t return to the Dungeons of Doom when things get hairy. The goal of doing this is to delay a large power spike due to collecting all of its gold until the player is truly ready for it.
Priests can sacrifice corpses anywhere, with no need for an altar, except in Gehennom. (This should be strictly worse than altar sacrifice - maybe it only reduces prayer timeout, by less than it would normally, and can’t result in gifts.)
Make being on fire a status effect, which deals damage over time. (Other obvious things to make into damage-over-time effects: poison, bleeding/internal damage.)
Special room that contains a demon gate in the center. This continually spawns monsters who try to defend the gate; the player has to make it through the spawns to destroy it or block it off. The gate could be implemented as a magic portal to a special challenge level like an ADOM-style vault.
Autocursing armor always generates cursed; it is thus perfectly safe to wear any confirmed non-cursed armor the player finds.
The Oracle now prompts the user to ask a question. Her oracularities now have associated keywords (a many-to-many relationship); if you use keywords, she will select an oracularity matching as many of them as possible. If she doesn’t know what you’re asking about, she gives you a random oracle (with a slightly different message to rationalize why she’s going off topic). This could even be leveraged to ask about information that’s normally hidden from the player; for example, asking about the Sokoban reward or the location of branch stairs.
Change up and add new failure effects of spellbook reading:
Books no longer have a 1/3 chance of disintegrating when failing to read them; instead, a cursed book will always disintegrate.
Dropping an item on an altar to Moloch may, in some cases, curse the item. Ideally this should not be exploitable, so things like a very small chance per drop of an item would not be good. Maybe tied to object ID number if that can’t be exploited.
Give all roles a warning when they might fail to read a spellbook, but make the numbers involved much less useful than the Wizard’s warning. (Possibly, just give players “difficult to comprehend” when success chance is less than 100% and nothing else, and buff Wizard warning to add more levels: “somewhat difficult”, “difficult”, “very difficult”, “extremely difficult”).
Artifact chaotic amulet Amulet of Splendor: provides every single amulet effect, as well as unchanging-ignoring controlled polyself when invoked. Wearing it conveys life saving (this WILL disintegrate the amulet if triggered), magical breathing, unchanging, poison resistance, ESP, reflection, strangulation (doesn’t kill you due to magical breathing but maybe it makes it so you can’t eat food or something while wearing it, or it autocurses), restful sleep, and gender change for as long as you wear the amulet. Base type is a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor.
The blessed scroll of gold detection also detects gems, and possibly type-identifies any pieces of worthless glass on the level as well (more to prevent interface annoyance than anything else). Maybe rename it to “scroll of treasure detection”.
The fireball spell’s unadvanced form creates a single fire explosion at a targetable square, rather than a ray that explodes, so you can cast it at squares that aren’t directly aligned with you.
Strength should not give a to-hit bonus; the encumbrance system is already there to address that.
The Master Assassin offers you the Bell of Opening if you will leave him in peace and let him keep the Master Key. If the player wants to play a chaotic good rogue, they are able to go back and kill the Master of Thieves (without immediately being kicked out of the quest), after which the Master Assassin will give you the Master Key.
If you have all three invocation items and have not yet performed the invocation, the Oracle always gives you the message about going to the bottom of Gehennom and performing the invocation. If you are missing one or two of the items, she will give you a message focused on (one of) the missing items. If you have the Amulet, she will give you an otherwise unreceivable message about continuing upward through the Elemental Planes.
If you end the game by ascending, you get a fixed baseline score instead of one based on the maximum dungeon level reached. Complementary YASI: this fixed score is zero, so that true zero-point ascensions are possible.
An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.
New type of book “encyclopedia”:
Add a message for a monster you can see that polymorphs via a polymorph trap (or, come to think of it, any source, like the player zapping it at them).
Sunglasses, an eye-slot tool that protects versus being blinded by flashes of light from things like lightning bolts, cameras, and yellow lights, either completely or with an 80% chance. (They probably shouldn’t block blinding from spat venom.) May also block certain gaze attacks. They should have some downside when worn, such as limiting your maximum vision radius or impeding searching.
Tourists start with a pair of sunglasses.
Valkyries offering fire giant or frost giant corpses get double the sacrifice value. Possibly this could be generalized to other roles sacrificing “enemy” monsters.
Racial shopkeepers give the player discounts. This could be in the form of a direct buy price reduction (must be capped at 50% of the base cost though to prevent farming) or treating the player as if they had higher Charisma. If the shopkeeper hates your race (for example, elves versus orcs), they will also block the entrance to the store as if you were carrying a pickaxe.
In the last level of the Dungeons of Doom (normally the Castle), the powers of your god and Moloch are approximately equal, and prayer may or may not work here. (The Valley is strictly Moloch’s territory.)
The ascension run through the Dungeons of Doom (the instant you come back into your god’s sphere of influence) is trivially easy: your god will regularly smite any enemy that dares attack you, and will ignore prayer timeout when answering prayer (but only to fix problems; if timeout is not 0, the god will not grant you any boons.) However, once you reach the Planes, the other gods step in and start interfering with the god so that they can’t directly help you anymore. These other gods don’t want to kill you since you’re still bringing the Amulet closer to them. But when you reach Astral, the other gods will do all they can to kill you, relieve you of the Amulet, and bring it to their own high altar. Your god sends you several A (might be Aleaxes, ki-rins or possibly even Archons) instead of just one, but you are now faced with elite teams of player monsters, priests, and A sent by the other gods, who have amulet-stealing attacks. The gods’ struggle to each get the Amulet manifests in all sorts of ways: disintegration beams blasting at you but being redirected onto a hapless monster nearby, inventory cursing, lightning bolts, resurrecting the corpses of dead player monsters or priests, and so on.
Maximum HP depends totally on three factors: function(role, race, XL) + function2(XL, Con) + (all bonuses or penalties from other sources, like nurses, full healing potions, fire traps, etc), with some diminishing returns on the third factor.
To avoid the annoyance of disrobing in a closet to cast utility spells, mark certain types of spells as being non-combat, utility spells. Such spells have a much reduced armor penalty, but take several turns to cast.
Dragons, and probably all MZ_HUGE monsters, can’t enter corridor tiles or go through open doors because they’re too big. (This would probably mean that corrmaze levels in Gehennom would need to be removed or not generate huge monsters.)
When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it will become a “garbled scroll” instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can’t be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll.
For variants with scrolls of consecration, the confused effect will remove the graveyard flag from a level if non-cursed, and add it if cursed.
If the player is polymorphed into a red or blue dragon, they can burn-engrave on the floor with their fire/lightning breath.
Reduce the base price of the scroll of blank paper to something low and unique. It should probably cost less than the scroll of identify, but not be incredibly cheap.
Stick some orc corpses in Orctown, because they can’t have defeated the entire town without any losses.
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.
You can break and destroy a loadstone in inventory by applying a pickaxe to yourself, or rubbing the pickaxe on the loadstone.
Give a YAFM when confused and trying to read a scroll of blank paper: “Being confused, you mispronounce the lack of words…”
Monsters should not be able to unlock, open, and move into the space of a door all in one turn, or move and eat in one turn.
When the game looks up the scoreboard to generate a player name for a corpse, statue, or ghost, ignore any games that ended in an ascension.
When reading a scroll of identify when confused, you get enlightenment (you’re “identifying yourself”).
The spell of identify is an unlimited replacement from the scroll that makes them rather useless, so nerf the spell so that it only type-identifies items (beatitude, enchantment, and charges will not be considered). If you want to learn these things, you must use scrolls of identify.
When a god decides to give you a gift and you are already wielding a weapon of the same type, the wielded weapon becomes the gift, and retains its original enchantment and beatitude. Erosionproofing is still added if the weapon doesn’t have it.
Archons emit light, in a radius of 2 or 3.
All Sokoban levels add extra spaces to the corridors to let you push spare boulders all the way into the room if you so wish, which lets you handle monsters zapping wands of digging in the doorway or corridor.
Skills should be trained even when damage output is 1 (but cutoffs would probably need an increase). Skill level cutoffs should probably be rebalanced anyway; for example, it should take longer to train long swords than it does for broadswords, and this could add an extra dimension to weapon choice.
Replace the Sokoban rewards with something that is still nice but not AS nice.
Replace the passtune boon with something more useful, since it is only marginally useful to spoiled players. Then, let the Oracle provide the passtune as either a major consultation or as a service. The Oracle can also be used to tell you which prize is at the end of Sokoban.
Ordinary monsters should attack any player monster with the same priority as the actual player.
If wind dragons are added, their scales should grant speed or slow resistance in addition to flight.
In variants that give Geryon a lair, implement his two-headed dog Orthus.
New artifact The Phial of Galadriel. It is a potion of water (potion of starlight in dNetHack) that acts as an infinite light source which scares giant spiders and Nazgul that come into it, and can be invoked to bless 1 item. May need more powers to make it better, and behavior for what happens when you drink it, but these are unspecified.
When killed by a monster that brings you back as something else (zombie, vampire, green slime), you might not die; you may continue playing in that form with permanent intrinsic unchanging. This might make it actually beneficial to get killed by a vampire, so the chance of continuing can’t be 100%, or else it can only work in a limited set of mostly-uncontrollable circumstances (like maybe a vampire’s or zombie’s bite takes you down to exactly -1 health). Green slime death is probably okay to stay at a 100% chance, though. Also needs some thought for how the unchanging squares with being a vampire and wanting to #monster into different forms. Perhaps intrinsic unchanging, unlike extrinsic, allows a monster to change into its normal alternate forms, but nothing else. Some other downsides should possibly be present too, like you don’t get your normal amount of HP and are stuck with the amount given by your new form.
Ring and amulet hunger should be counted all on turns that are a multiple of 20, to close the two-slow-digestion-rings loophole.
Make the “Destroy old game? [yn]” prompt harder to destroy a game than simply hitting y. Probably ask “Are you sure?” and force the user to type out yes.
Female oviparous monsters sometimes drop eggs of their species when killed. The chance is reduced if the monster was dead and revived.
Add a field to struct rm (or possibly reuse the flags field which is 5 bits) that determines the type of tree that is on that space, if typ == TREE. This enables you to control what kind of tree it is, and what kind of fruits you will get by kicking it, and whether you can get bees from it. Also add a level flag that allows a level designer to specify that all trees on the level should be barren.
Alignment record changes: chaotics get -1 penalties over time for failing to do any chaotic behavior, neutrals get +1 alignment bonuses more slowly over time by not doing anything, and lawfuls get neither of these and need to get their bonuses on their own. Alternatively, lawfuls accumulate bonuses by doing nothing (not breaking the law).
The Archeologist quest has either a lot of fairly weak artifacts or a lot of mundane items (golden staffs, death masks, sacrificial daggers etc) that are worth a lot of money in the locate and goal levels of their quest.
War hammers are a two-handed weapon, with much higher damage than they currently have. Slashing and (maybe) piercing weapons no longer get a Str bonus to damage, only bludgeoning ones do. Probably need to rebalance weapon damage types and attribute bonuses completely.
A flying monster with a displacement attack, which attacks from water in order to displace you into water. Also a bull monster that charges at you, and will either displace you if you pass a Dex save or gore you.
Uncontrolled teleportitis counts as a minor trouble; a god may decide to fix it by removing it, but only if there are no other troubles. If there are other troubles, teleportitis will not be removed.
The player is given the ability to seduce peaceful characters in a fairly weak, non-magical way (to get better shopkeeper prices and such). This is initiated if you chat to them while wearing no armor. Works best when the target is the same race as you, you are opposite genders, and you have high Charisma. Possibly, seducing a priest in a temple risks the god smiting you.
Yellow lights possibly have a light radius of larger than 1. Also add white lights, white-colored y-class monsters which have a light radius of 3 or 4, with a blinding gaze attack and no explosion attack (unless keeping the explosion attack is too thematic to the y class, in which case it should blind for a long time).
Add herblore (possibly as a non-combat skill). This allows you to brew various potions using herbs and potions of water. Healers are quite good at it, and their quest contains many herbs. Requires actually implementing herbs, which cannot be planted or grown like in ADOM.
Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they now have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a “bleeding” status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)
Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius no longer has level-draining powers. Instead it has a drain HP attack that heals the wielder.
Add more non-magical ways to get pets that are better than what your starting pets can level into. Such as pet stores with figurines, or being able to tame watchmen by paying them money, or by healing a monster at low HP.
Polymorph traps do not instantaneously polymorph you; instead they start a short timer during which the player has time to either stop the polymorph from occurring (through healing potions, or prayer, or some other decently common consumable) or put on a ring of polymorph control or amulet of unchanging. However, magic resistance no longer protects against this effect.
When rock-eating is implemented (or in variants that already have it), eating a luckstone gives you -1, +1, or +2 Luck depending on the beatitude of the stone.
Change the sickness instadeath to a HP-based form of damage, since it is very obscure about how long you have left to live and can be drastically reduced.
A lamp with the same unidentified appearance and base cost as a magic lamp. It is a charged magical tool (has a lifetime, comparable to an oil lamp) that sheds no light, but instead detects unseen in its range whenever it is turned on. This includes invisible monsters, secret doors, and all traps. It also allows vision to penetrate through clouds.
Store type “sushi restaurant”, which sells sea monster corpses, kelp fronds, various sushi rolls, and sushi mats, tools which allow you to combine kelp and sea monster corpses into higher-nutrition sushi rolls. Sushi rolls include kraken sushi, eel wrap, and shark tempura.
Bed, a \ which if you sit on it makes you fall asleep for d10 turns or you have fully recovered your health. While sleeping on the bed, you get the same effects as hungerless regeneration. Found in barracks and some special levels. Breakfast not provided.
Farlook allows you to see a list of all items on a square as if each were the only item on that square. Items hidden under others are not obscured. Also works if there is a monster standing on the square; you can still see the items under it.
Gods’ “Prove thyself worthy or perish” message is flavored as “Prove thyself worthy, because I can do no more for you”. On the Planes, the gods’ balance of power prevents your deity from granting you any extra help (apart from sending angels when you arrive in Astral). If this were not the case, one would expect to be able to breeze through the Planes, with your god smiting down any enemy that might threaten you getting them their Amulet. Prayer will not work, though it will still break atheist conduct.
Give the player a slightly different warning if they attempt to go up on the DL1 upstairs after handling the Amulet, if they do not have the real one.
Erosion has more than four states, though it still only displays as “eroded”, “very eroded”, or “thoroughly eroded”; different rusting sources can cause different levels of rust (e.g. dipping a long sword in a fountain or getting hit by a rust trap would probably only cause a small amount of rust, whereas a rust monster might cause a lot.) This would enable a more fair way to have things “erode away completely” like they do in Grunthack, since you would be able to disengage any thoroughly eroded piece of gear before it was at serious risk of vanishing.
Add a scroll of air (as well as the scroll of flood, which is renamed to the scroll of water) so that there is one scroll for each element. When read normally, it could give a message “You feel a fresh breeze” and either reset your strangulation counter or give you temporary breathlessness. (Breathlessness seems like a potion effect more than a scroll effect, but then again, during those times when you need emergency breathlessness, you’re probably not capable of quaffing a potion.) If you read any of the water, earth, fire, and air scrolls while confused, it summons elementals, whose tame/peaceful/hostile state depends on the beatitude of the scroll. If you read it while on the Plane of Water, it either creates a new air bubble if you’re not in one, or expands your bubble permanently if you are in one. If cursed and in a bubble, the bubble shrinks to one space.
SpliceHack has since implemented the scroll of air as an burst of wind that shoves adjacent monsters away in all directions.
Add in master lichens as a real monster, which are only a bit more threatening than normal lichens (maybe speed 2 or 3, have a passive sticky attack like mimics) but have an increased difficulty so that they generate deeper in the Dungeons, and are a source of nonrotting corpses. Possibly, the passive sticky attack should also be given to regular lichens.
If attribute changes from exercise and abuse are blocked due to the ring of sustain ability, they accumulate, and once you take the ring off they will all gradually apply over the next few exercise cycles.
Make permaconverting harder to do by accident, since confusing the actions of rededicating an altar and rededicating yourself seems unlikely. Maybe make it happen if you sacrifice or pray on a crossaligned altar while confused.
Gods are more likely to give gifts for higher-difficulty sacrifices.
In variants or proposals where you can kill your quest leader to get the Bell of Opening, if you have permanently converted alignment already, killing your Quest leader does not give you a massive alignment penalty.
Attempts to analyze good instadeaths versus bad instadeaths (loosely defined as ones that are instant hard-to-avoid deaths that aren’t really similar to running out of HP):
Blessed potions of polymorph, when quaffed, grant you immediate polymorph control over just that one polymorph either 50% or 100% of the time. To compensate, cursed potions of polymorph will ignore changing into a dragon and will try several times to roll a monster that will make you break out of your armor. Or the cursed potion could have a wildly variable duration, so you have no idea when it will end and cannot rely on it.
Your god respects any conducts you currently have when giving you stuff. If illiterate, will not give you a spellbook. If weaponless, will not give you artifact weapons (maybe could give a +1 intrinsic damage bonus instead). If pacifist, may send tame minions. However, this is only if your deity is lawful or neutral - chaotic gods will ignore these rules and give you whatever.
Sickness resistance negates the effects of potions of sickness. However, a cursed potion of sickness will now give you fatal illness instead of the normal poison effects.
Gentle relaxations for the quest XL requirement:
Invisible monsters wearing a mummy wrapping show up as an I (you don’t get to see what they actually are), but an I that moves and doesn’t persist on the map.
Player monsters, crossaligned priests, and hostile angels on the Astral Plane are able to steal the Amulet from you. Should they get it, they will try to make a beeline to their high altar to sacrifice it. The player is also able to steal the Amulet back, though; and wearing the Amulet acts as one turn of protection against it being stolen; an attempt to steal it will just remove it from your neck. If something else ascends, your game ends in an escape. However, all these monsters are hostile towards the Amulet-bearer, not you; so if it gets stolen from you, the pressure will let up a bit.
Pool rooms, a special room type that consists of a perimeter of normal floor surrounding a region of water taking up the rest of the middle of the floor. It is populated with sea monsters and some sunken treasure. It could also contain a fake bones pile, a pun on “bones pool”.
Rebalance armor so that all “mail” armor and most of the iron body armor in general is not useless. Ideally, the worst iron armor (orcish chain mail) should be considerably better than studded leather, but they are equivalent. The ideal balance, keeping leather armors and all weights constant and not accounting for to-hit or damage reduction, is probably something like the mails going up to 9 or 10 AC, and splint and plate getting up to around 14, but this is not possible to implement without changing the combat system.
Make the Magic Mirror of Merlin give slotless reflection instead of magic resistance; this is more thematic and makes for more interesting strategy.
Change the Knight quest artifact to be the Holy Grail. When quaffed from, something good happens; perhaps it needs to have charges or invoking it fills it up so you can drink from it (and you don’t have to drink from it immediately, allowing strategic choices). Should give magic resistance when carried. Possibly gives the effect of a random potion when quaffed: always a “good” potion when blessed, a random one if uncursed, and a “bad” potion if cursed. Or it blesses items dipped into it.
Several improvements to the level-defining des files:
Make candle stacking for more light actually useful and realistic: the number of candles required for another square of radius increases quadratically instead of exponentially, so 1 candle gives radius 2, 4 give radius 3, 9 give radius 4, 16 give radius 5, etc.
Later extended into a more general idea allowing light sources of any type to stack: candles each give 5 lumens (because a single candle’s light reaches up to sqrt(5) squares from the center), lamps give 10 lumens, potions of oil 2, and the full Candelabrum gives 20. To compute your total light radius, add up all the lumens and take the square root. (Note that this exact formula might scale too fast: 4 candles equals the Candelabrum).
If you ascend with your alignment mismatching your align0 (meaning you changed alignment at some point), your game-end reason is recorded as “ascended in dishonor”.
Allow taming of player monsters in bones with one prerequisite: you must tame its ghost, draw the ghost over the corpse, and then revive the corpse. To facilitate this, killing a player monster should always generate a ghost over the corpse, possibly with a gravestone and 80% of inventory being cursed.
Candle additions:
Liches drop or are generated with fairly good magical items, like potions, scrolls, spellbooks and even wands, to incentivize not genociding them.
Replace Venus with Diana and Mercury with Apollo in the Ranger pantheon. This is nice because Apollo and Diana are actual gods of archery, and it removes the Mercury/Hermes conflict with the Healer pantheon.
Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:
A Barbarian rage mechanic (possibly an effect on Cleaver replacing its current damage bonus) where a damage bonus is assessed based on how long ago you last killed a monster. Originally a buff to Vorpal Blade where it beheads anything it hits if the last behead was N turns ago, but this is unbalanced.
Reduce the cost of a major Oracle consultation; the current price could be too high for unspoiled players to consider it worth it.
Attempt to address the ascension kit problem: make the highest-tier, really good quality, +8 or +9 gear be generated on the toughest monsters or even bosses deep in Gehennom. The high enchantment makes it incredibly hard to get through normal means, even if the base gear is wished for elsewhere. Overall end-game difficulty would need a bump if the average player is expected to pick up and use some of this gear.
Potion equivalent of extra healing for magic power, or else some consumable way to recover 20-40 power in one go; the normal potion of gain energy is currently more useful for raising maximum power than it is for restoring it. This new thing need not be more effective than gain energy is at raising maximum energy. (Perhaps “potion of restore energy”, which does not raise maximum at all.)
For Luck balance, there should be some Luck-based effects that are really good at low Luck but get kind of uninteresting at high Luck.
You take fire damage from standing next to lava, levitating or flying over it, or walking on it. Damage from standing next to it is (number of adjacent tiles)d8, whereas being over or on lava has rather higher damage. Fire resistance does not prevent this damage completely.
Ankh-Morpork levels in the Tourist quest should be populated with some peaceful humans, dwarves and trolls. However, the levels should also then avoid having lots of narrow corridors so it’s not incredibly frustrating to traverse them. (Or implement peaceful displacement).
Implement a strangulation or “can’t breathe” timer, which unifies strangulation, suffocation, food choking, rope golem choking, and drowning, and also provides a clean way for monsters to have a suffocation attack.
Saddlebags, a rarely generated container that can be applied to a saddled mount and then have gear put into it, allowing the player to offload some of their weight onto the mount. While they are as nonmagical as a sack, they have a higher base cost and weight. You can loot it on an adjacent mount by using the directional #loot command. Knights may start with one.
Remove the bell from the list of musical instruments that Elf characters can receive at the start of the game. This is because it’s atonal and its only half decent use is to attract pets (note that elves can’t get tin whistles, so clearly summoning pets is not important enough to qualify something for initial inventory).
In UnNetHack and other variants with a black market, you never hear “You hear someone cursing shoplifters” in the black market, unless you have angered One-Eyed Sam.
Finger of death is renamed to touch of death, and works equivalently to the monster spell (melee range only, and it may fail). Because of this, its level should be reduced, which for some people means that there should be a replacement level 7 attack spell (ball/ring spells might work here).
Since boulders are round (clearly so; any character regardless of low Strength can roll it easily), and corridors are presumably not round, you can always squeeze yourself into the opening between the boulder and the corner of the passage. Inventory weight does not matter, because any reasonable character would push their knapsack through the opening first, rather than trying to go through while carrying it.
Invisibility works completely when the invisible monster and the detecting monster are far away. When within 5 (or 4?) squares of each other, its location is known to within 1 space (fuzzing the real location by 1 space in all directions). When the invisible monster takes a direct offensive action, or with some probability when it is adjacent, its position becomes known. It still appears as I, but the I will move wherever the monster goes until it becomes 5 or more spaces away, at which point invisibility once again works fully. This could work differently if the invisible monster is stealthy.
Ideas around a system in which you can cook corpses:
Split curse resistance off from magic resistance. Curse resistance is granted only as an extrinsic by a couple of artifacts, including Magicbane, and ‘‘maybe’’ some mundane item that isn’t any good otherwise (a mummy wrapping?), and behaves like Magicbane’s curse resistance does currently (“You feel a black aura surround the [item].”) Half spell damage without curse resistance no longer helps limit the number of cursed items, and a curse may still manage to bypass resistance, with current probabilities. There could also be an amulet versus curses.
Change zombies’ and possibly mummies’ claw attack to a bite attack.
The ring of protection from shape changers should apply to the wearer as well as other monsters; if the wearer has lycanthropy, they will not transform; if the wearer is a different shapechanger like a vampire, they cannot transform.
Rays should reflect erratically or not at all from non-wall rock terrain, Walls are smooth, but rock is rough.
A new “illusion” or “disguise self” monster spell, which makes the caster or an allied monster appear as another monster of its choice until something disrupts the illusion (it gets attacked, otherwise takes damage, or it makes an attack). Monsters specifically cast it when you cannot see the target monster. It might be possible to implement this spell to be player-castable as well, but this would be less effective. (you could use it to fool monsters into thinking you’re another hostile monster so they don’t attack you, but not much else).
The illusion favors nasty monsters, but low-level spellcasters may only be able to create illusions of somewhat higher-difficulty monsters. A potentially evil addendum is that high-level spellcasters may use the spell to make themselves or other powerful monsters appear to be weaker monsters.
Perhaps if you have extrinsic see invisible (and only extrinsic), you can see through such illusions.
A colorless or colorblind conduct, settable with OPTIONS=colorblind or something similar at the start of the game, as a permanent affliction. When you are colorblind, it is as if the color option is forced off, and any items with colorful random appearances cannot be distinguished from one another (all gems are just “a gem”, all colored potions (but ‘‘not’’ ones such as fizzy, bubbly, white, black) are just “a potion”, ditto for colorful spellbooks) until formally IDed. Figuring out how calling object classes works might be tricky, because having it work as it currently does would mostly nullify the identification challenges of being colorblind.
You can loot trees to get less fruit than you might by kicking it, but the chance of getting bees is much reduced. This might fail, in which case you might fall out of the tree and abuse Dexterity or something similar. If you are polymorphed into a Y, it has a 100% chance of success; if a human or elf, probably 80%; if an orc, 40-50%; if a gnome or a dwarf, 1-5%.
If you die with zero points, end-of-game enlightenment says “You were a noob.”
Getting lifesaved gives you experience points (because it’s a near-death experience). So should having a out-of-body experience from getting hit with death magic while hallucinating.
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.
If the metal spellcasting penalty were to be removed entirely for one armor slot, it should be the boots slot, because your feet are very distant from the magical casting part of your body.
Whenever a player is killed by a mind flayer, they become a thrall in their bones file. In FIQHack, this means they leave an active hostile player monster in the bones with 100% chance instead of 33%.
Mind flayers seek out your pets to eat their brains and turn them into thralls, which makes them effectively a pet of the mind flayer instead.
Tourists should be able to swim. Alternatively, tourists should specifically NOT be able to swim, but other roles might.
You can wish for object properties in FIQHack, but only on items that aren’t inherently magical.
80% of locks on containers, determined by the object id of those containers, can’t be opened by a credit card because they’re a latch or padlock or something that can’t be jimmied open. Perhaps Tourists get a bonus that allows them to open more locks.
Add a silvery potion, either as a random appearance or a dedicated potion like dNetHack’s potion of silver starlight, which will silver ammunition dipped into it, perhaps temporarily. It might also silver other weapons (spears, daggers) or other items. Random appearances have the possible problems of the potion potentially having a defined dip effect already (polymorph, for example), and it potentially not appearing in the game if there are extra random appearances. Dipping fragile silver items, like silver arrows, into a potion of acid could create a silvery potion.
Add a dogcatcher, who will come and impound your pet if it misbehaves (stealing from shops, killing Minetown citizens) and you don’t get it leashed before a certain amount of time has passed.
Stethoscopes and probing on a pet shows when that pet is satiated.
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.
Some roles get food appraisal as a permanent intrinsic. Caveman at level 6, Tourist at level 10, maybe Healers at level 1 but they already get poison resistance so maybe not.
Wind dragons, a cyan D whose breath is a wind beam: it doesn’t damage you, but blows you backward, and can’t be reflected. Their scales grant flight, which now confers resistance against knockback and Newton’s Third Law.
A number of ways for weapon enchantment to be learned without formal identification.
A role whose starting pet, if eaten, confers amazingly good benefits, so that the player has to make a hard choice of whether to deliberately kill and eat their pet, and suffer the penalties.
Gnomes get a racial bonus using aklys and crossbow. Should probably be implemented by affiliating an item type with a certain race, adding this as a new object attribute, and only specifying it on racial items (elven armor, orcish weapons, the aklys and crossbow, etc.)
Buff late-game undead, because undead’s significance in Gehennom tends to be pointless since they aren’t scary by the time the adventurer gets there.
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!”
Special room “ruined church” that contains ghosts, pieces of glass scattered around the floor, maybe an altar, maybe a spellbook, and blank paper/scrolls of junk mail scattered around the floor.
Untrapping a lavender trap gets you potions of lavender essential oil. Ants naturally dislike lavender oil, so ants will flee from a player that has been sprayed by a lavender trap or used a potion of lavender oil.
When invisibility is about to time out, give the player a warning message “You thought you saw yourself for a moment” (“You seem to unfade for a moment” if you can see invisible, “You feel introspective for a moment” if hallucinating.
Players can polymorph dungeon features by zapping a polymorph beam down at it, with some special cases:
Several small spellbook additions:
Asmodeus and Baalzebub demand gold proportional to their difficulty or monster level, not the player’s wallet. Possibly, if the player does not pay, they remain on the downstairs and will not move until the player has paid, which allows the player to return with the requisite amount of gold (and may charge interest for the time you spent keeping them waiting). However, they will get angry if you get below their lair in any way (possibly measured by testing your lowest level reached each time you enter the lair).
Level sounds on every level with a branch stairs. For spoiled players, the main benefit of this is to help locate the stairs to Vlad’s Tower.
Easter eggs as an actual item, in addition to monster and chicken eggs. Possibly they have a chance of containing a candy bar, or a figurine.
Merge the P and b monster classes, on the grounds that puddings and blobs are both classes of amorphous monsters that are sparsely populated. (Some attempts have been made to also merge the j monster class in.)
The scroll of detect magic shows magic fountains on the level as well as magical items. Fountains discovered this way are then displayed as “magic fountain” when near or farlooked. Wizards can see them as magic fountains already without needing to detect magic.
