Amulet of protect inventory: negates any erosion, destruction, disintegration, or theft of your items, but every time it does, you take damage.

Add Sokoban levels with a pinball-inspired mechanic: some of the walls are a new “bumper” terrain type. An object or creature that moves into a bumper will be hurled away from the bumper in a non-random direction (which could be straight back in the direction it came, always at a 90 degree angle, or vary based on the particular bumper). The puzzles involve moving boulders into the bumpers to propel them in ways regular pushing can’t accomplish.

Energy recovery rate should be leveraged more as a role differentiator - basically, roles that are intended to cast frequently should regenerate power faster than roles that aren’t.

One way to do this is tie energy recovery strongly to Wisdom, and then bias starting stats so that caster roles usually have high Wisdom.

Solve the problem of pets wasting their hard-trained apport by picking up and dropping objects randomly all over the dungeon, by triggering them only to use it when the hero plays any instrument (or maybe any non-magical instrument). Bonus points if the player can train the pet by playing an arbitrary sequence of notes (chosen by the player) on tonal instruments.

You can only ascend if your alignment record is pious. Otherwise, you either escape in celestial disgrace, or less evilly, your god just rejects the sacrifice until such time as you are pious.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Spell of collect arrows: it magically retrieves all objects on the current level that you’ve thrown or fired at some point in the past. (Possibly limited to weapon class objects).

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:

• Ball spells which consume a gem as focus and create a ball of elemental power that hits surrounding squares but not you. (Long casting times would probably make rituals infeasible for combat though.)
• Temporarily increase your carry cap by a great amount. (Other new intrinsics as required.)
• Resurrect a corpse as a tame monster (necromancy).
• Grant temporary intrinsic life saving.
• Single controlled polymorph with a greatly increased duration.
• Summon a demon, demon lord, or demon prince. Requires 5 cursed candles and a marker (to draw the classic pentagram). If summoning a named demon lord, it’s either random or there’s some expensive way to control who shows up. The demon lord could be peaceful, but with current behavior this is useless. Possibly summoning them allows you to make a pact with them.
• Remove the graveyard status from a level (would need to be expensive, and perhaps involve the Book of the Dead, and multiple different headstones).
• Grow a tree. This consumes at least a piece of fruit. For anti-farming the tree should probably not produce fruit or bees when kicked.
• Create a portal between two levels of your choice (doesn’t work with the Amulet obviously, but otherwise works)
• Create an artifact (that is, you somehow imbue an item with properties it can’t normally get).
• Bless items. Consumes a blessed scroll of remove curse.
• Genocide a genocidable monster. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other costly things.
• Reverse genocide a monster. The monster may or may not have to be normally reverse-genocidable. Consumes a figurine of that monster plus other moderately expensive things.
• Charge something. Requires a rare ingredient - perhaps a dilithium crystal.
• Summon tame elemental(s). Among other things, ingredients include: a potion of water, any beatitude (water); a rock (earth); lit candles, a lit oil lamp, or a lit potion of oil (fire); an amulet of magical breathing (air).
• Create a magic lamp. Needs an oil lamp (of course) and a figurine or mask of a djinni (or possibly a nearby live djinni).
• Make the current level non-teleport. Requires a scroll of teleportation and that the caster be standing on an anti-magic field at (?) either the start or the end of the ritual.
• Create a fountain. Requires a statue of a medium-sized or larger monster, which gets destroyed (by turning it into the centerpiece of the fountain). There may be potential for wishing abuse; perhaps the fountain should be flagged so that it can’t produce a wish-granting water demon.
• Turn a regular knife into an athame. Components include other bladed weapons with positive enchantments adding up to 20 or something; all of these charges will be drained to +0 in the creation of the athame. The resulting athame is +0, regardless of the charges on the component weapons or original knife.
• Create a tame golem or golems. Requires a large amount of total weight of objects made out of the golem’s material.
• Summon a coaligned angel or other minion of your deity as a pet.
• Create a tame wood nymph from a tree (only once per tree).

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.

• You begin the game with polymorph control and get polymorphitis at XL 5 or so.
• Possibly you start with a wand of polymorph, or potions of it.
• Inventory could be severely restricted, so you have to figure out how to do most things through polymorph.
• You have the power to change into a tree, which will make most monsters ignore you. While in tree form, you are immobile but regenerate HP and Pw faster. Orcs might attack you with axes, a la Tolkien.
• Without extrinsic polymorph control, your polymorph control limits you to changing into forms with the M1_ANIMAL flag.
• Possibly have limited access to #polyself outside of wizard mode, so they can change intentionally and not randomly. Would work best as an ability with a timeout, or cost Pw outside of wizard mode.
• Possibly, the monsters you can polymorph into must have a certain base level or difficulty that’s tied to your XL somehow (maybe XL/2). If their base level is too high, you can’t polymorph into them.
• Your controlled polymorphs always succeed - you will never accidentally fail and “feel like a new woman” with the 20% chance that all other roles have.
• You are seriously bad at combat in your regular form, having very little weapon skill (nothing can be advanced to Expert, possibly not even to Skilled), and physically weak in your normal form. Combat in a polyform should be incentivized enough so that it isn’t really worth it to wear any armor. Maybe you should get to-hit and damage bonuses while in a wild form?
• Diminishing returns on polymorph time limit that prevent you from reusing the same form(s) over and over and over again. (This may actually be applicable as a general YANI for polymorph control).
• The critical balance needed is to make polyselfing powerful and awesome to play with and use for typical combat, but simultaneously polyselfing needs enough restrictions that it doesn’t just turn into Master Mind Flayer: The Game.
  • One proposed restriction: you can only turn into monsters you have already encountered, or if that is too lax, into peaceful or tame monsters adjacent to you at the time. The druid should be able to pacify most animalistic monsters to take advantage of this (temporarily?)
• The starting pet is a woodchuck (or wolf). Pantheon is probably drawn from Celtic mythology, though hopefully not overlapping with Knights.
• Some heavy polymorph / monster / player as monster tweaking is probably required, in the sense that there should, ideally, be valid reasons to exist in any given polymorphable form.
• You should keep the intrinsics from a polyform after you no longer have that form, but only temporarily, so they time out eventually.

Ideas to change terrain symbols to reduce overcrowding of the # symbol:

• Iron bars and fences render as cyan or brown wall glyphs.
• Sinks render as white or blue \.
• Closed drawbridges render as some color of + which is not used by many spellbooks - perhaps red or orange.
• Corridors could be moved to a period glyph but this would probably be very unpopular and make levels look a lot worse.
• Trees could be green +, or possibly green \ to avoid spellbook confusion.
• Clouds could set the background color of a space and not change the foreground color, and could possibly be rendered with a blank space character, but this would probably have issues on non-color terminals.

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).

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.

• Some variants give you the choice of casting the basic or advanced form, but this suffers from an interface annoyance (an extra y/n prompt) and the fact that the advanced form counts as the same spell level so it is not actually any more difficult or expensive to cast.
• Advanced forms are castable even at Basic skill, but have a higher failure rate.
• The advanced form appears in the Z menu once you are Skilled.
• The advanced forms are implemented as higher-level never-generated spellbooks, e.g. “fire storm” and “frost storm”. Reading the basic spellbook automatically teaches you the advanced spell as well. This is dNetHack’s approach.
  • This allows you to balance them separately; in the case of fireball and cone of cold, the lesser spells could be dropped to level 3 or so and the advanced forms elevated to level 6.
• The advanced forms are broken out into completely separate spellbooks that must be discovered and learned separately.
  • This makes the balance of spellbooks a concern, since it would add more books of a certain school.
  • Both of the ideas that involve higher level spellbooks may create a problem with the Z menu only allowing 52 different spells if more advanced forms come along, not that that can’t be worked around.
• Skilled+ casting does nothing to the actual spell effects, but allows you to cast the spell mentally: you do not need to be able to speak or move to cast it.

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:

• Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
• Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
• Make spells never actually failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically: 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.

• Spellbooks would need to be considerably more common than they are in vanilla. In FIQhack, where this was originally discussed (and later implemented), spellcasters generate with books, and the level of dropped spellbooks scales well as the game progresses since more dangerous monsters carry higher-level books.
• This addresses polypiling by allowing the player to polypile the book as much as they want, but they can only read it once. (Does not fix the problem of polypiling a book multiple times and identifying but not reading the results – perhaps an increased chance of going blank is in order.)
• Slightly makes things tougher for people who finish their games in under 60,000 turns, since they can’t use a spell for free confusion. Which may actually be a good thing.
• Also a problem for people who play very long games, because they will need to find or write replacement spellbooks; however, this was sort of already the case.
• May make polypiling unknown spellbooks too popular, since an unknown spellbook is likely not to be the one you want, or you have price-IDed it and know it’s something you will never use, and you can now poly without consequence. Perhaps address this by giving polymorphed spellbooks an elevated chance to become blank, and blank spellbooks do not poly into anything else.

In a lot of folklore, iron wards away elves. This could be implemented in the game in several ways:

• Elves take extra damage when hit by iron. Not as much as silver, but still appreciable.
• Elven players take a small amount of damage when putting on or wielding iron gear, but get no further penalty. (dnethack hurts their regeneration rate while wearing iron, which is another option).
• Possibly some detrimental effect when wielding iron weapons as well, a to-hit or damage penalty, or negating bonuses from dexterity, strength, and skill, or something.
• This is balanced by elven racial equipment being better (not improved; it’s already better).

Mithril body armor prevents the Tsurugi of Muaramasa from bisecting you (or a monster wearing it, for that matter).

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.

• Extrinsic immunity isn’t as good as inherent immunity.
• Resistance halves HP damage and cuts attribute loss down to 1 point.
• Role benefits should probably only be resistance and not immunity.
• For partial resistance, damage is easy enough to do (express your resistance as a percentage and cut damage by that percentage), but many effects, particularly those protected by MR, are binary, and will be tricky to adapt.
• Resistances could start at 100% when you get them, but decrease by 1% every time it protects you from something.

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

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

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

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

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

Monsters have different degrees of intelligence, which changes their strategy for doing certain actions like fleeing (do they flee intelligently like monkeys do, or in a random direction?) and using items (a dumb monster might try to read a scroll of fire and burn itself to death). At any rate, more intelligent than the current definition of “having hands and neither mindless nor animal”.

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.

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:

• Change price ID so that each item is assigned to a “band” of possible prices. There are four price bands, and each item class has its base price randomized based on its band. The price bands show up on unidentified items, e.g. “an expensive scroll labeled KIRJE”. Some items might fall into more than one price band.
• Implement price tiers (e.g. all scrolls cost either 100, 150, 200, or 300), and items are placed into 1-3 possible tiers at the start of the game.
• Fuzz the prices of items so that it’s not possible to definitively say what an item is, only that it’s cheap or expensive.
  • One way to do this is to scatter the base price of each previously tiered item each game on an interval so that it overlaps with the intervals from other previous tiers, perhaps a random number from 1/2 the original price to 2x the original price.
  • Or fuzzing is done on a per-shopkeeper basis. Each shopkeeper sees each type of object as having a different base cost, based on hashing their monster ID. Asidonhopo sells a scroll of fire with a base cost of 86; Enniscorthy sells it with a base cost of 103.
  • Or, do away with tiers entirely and simply scatter the base costs permanently. A ring of free action might be 240 or 260 base, because it’s on the higher end of usefulness in the former 200 tier. Some fuzzing would probably be needed here to keep things from being unambiguously identified.

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:

• Higher level spellbooks could be heavier. D&D does this. However, unless the game shows the weights of items to the player, it will be tedious for the player to figure out the exact weight of a book by picking up and dropping items of known weights.
• Make spellbook appearances more complex based on level. A simple color indicates a 1-2 level book, an unusual color or appearance indicates a 3-4 level book, a very odd or ridiculous appearance or material indicates a 5-6 level book, and a completely over-the-top appearance indicates a level 7+ book. (Example: “red”, “steel”, “bone”, “jewel-encrusted”). Shuffling of the random appearances would need to be changed so that the books retain an appearance in their original bracket.
• Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
• When you read a spellbook, you are given a menu with three options:
  • Give the book a cursory glance-over. This can fail with low Int/XL but is fairly unlikely and has very minor failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell level of the book. Takes 1/10 the usual spell study time.
  • Briefly study the book but don’t try to learn its spell. This can fail with mediocre Int/XL but will be reliable at high ones. Moderate failure effects. If successful, it identifies the spell contained in the book. Takes 1/3 the regular spell study time.
  • Study the book normally with normal failure effects and normal spell study time. Learns the spell if successful.

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.

• The guild is populated with master craftsmen who work on the principle of “valuable junk items + very large sums of gold = desirable items”. They can also do some things available to the player, like increasing weapon enchantment, without needing the specific consumables needed for the player to do it.
• Would serve as a replacement or stand-in for the black market. Resolves some of the problems with balancing black market shopkeepers: if you kill the black market staff, you can have every item in the market, so black market staff must be insanely powerful. If you kill a master craftsman, however, you don’t get anything of value. Therefore, master craftsmen don’t have to be insanely powerful, or even good fighters.
• Not as good as wishes; there are some things they cannot make for you, like magic lamps, and many magical tools. You cannot specify enchantment or blessing either. For items for which enchantment doesn’t matter, the material cost will be higher.
• The interface works by #chatting to them. They will ask you what you want to create, and you enter it (using the wish parser logic to extract the proper object class), and then they will tell you the items and gold they will need for it. These could either be randomized or use certain fixed ingredients with some randomization or use completely fixed recipes; if randomized it will be deterministic for that item for that craftsman in that game. You are then prompted to select the items from your inventory.
• For gold and other balance reasons, this would probably work better the farther it is into the game; maybe it could even be found deep into Gehennom. Maybe you even have to liberate it from a demon lord.
• Craftsmen might include:
  • Metalworkers (see below)
  • Wandmakers (produce wands)
  • Scribes (produce scrolls and spellbooks)
  • Alchemists (produce potions)
  • Toolsmiths (produce mundane and some magical tools)
  • Jewelers (produce rings and amulets)
  • Sculptor (produce statues and figurines)
  • Leatherworkers (produce leather items and saddles)
  • Chefs (produce food)
  • Arcanologists (transfer charges/enchantments from one item into another, consumes only gold and not items)

Metalworker notes

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.

• Silvering items (or gilding, or copper-coating) should require you to use up junk silver items equal to some amount of weight proportional to the weight of the new item. The zorkmid cost of silvering should be very high.
• A forge room type (probably containing lava and maybe some junk items like iron chains) could be added which has one or more smiths in it (silversmiths, goldsmiths, blacksmiths).
  • Goldsmiths seem rather pointless right now, since there is only one gold item (the ring). They would be more useful if gold equipment existed and conferred some benefit.
  • Blacksmiths don’t have much to do as far as turning items into iron goes, but they could produce iron weapons of a type the player wants, or repair and improve iron weapons and armor (increasing its enchantment).

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.

• Increase the odds of monsters dropping a corpse in the next few turns.
• Create an empty unlocked chest. (This would need some restriction so you can’t farm and sell them; perhaps you can only create up to 10 or 20 chests per game with this.)
• Mark a map square with a symbol, perhaps a comma, that is no different from normal floor but shows up on #overview and the normal map view.
• Deal some small damage, such as d5 or d6, to a nearby creature. (Acid Bubble from D&D is a nice corresponding cantrip.)
• Dig out a single square.
• Create a cancelled hostile yellow light. It cannot explode at you since it is cancelled, so it becomes an autonomous light source of radius 1, which can’t follow you down levels like a pet can. Killing it should not grant you any experience; otherwise this would be easily farmable.
• Light a radius 2 or 3 area permanently, like a weak form of the spell of light.
• Mage hand: you indicate a direction and the nearest item on the floor in that direction, assuming it’s under 100 weight or so, is brought to you and is placed in your inventory. This can be used > to get things out of pits.
• Create an illusion of yourself at your spot. The illusion never moves. Monsters that see it assume it is you and will attack whichever one is nearer (the illusion is instantly destroyed if attacked).

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.)

Starting stats

• Any point buy for stats is likely to involve a tedious interface. Developers could get around this by making it options-only, perhaps in a way that allows the user to say “buy to get my Strength up to 10, and my Int up to 9, and randomly pick the rest”, but specifying it per-role could get annoying.
• It’s important to allow people who want to start and splat games rapid-fire to do so, and it would be preferable if new players didn’t have to learn the complexities of a new interface.
• The rc file must allow the user to specify starting stats per-role in this case, or specify that they want random stats.
• “Dump stats” like Cha, and Int and Wis for non-spellcasters, allow people to buff their important stats at the expense of unimportant stats, which may indicate some underlying balance issues with these stats or that the stats can have too wide of a starting range.

Starting inventory

• Even in a non-point-buy system, for starting inventory in cases like for Monk and Wizard where the player gets a random spellbook with equal weight among the possible choices, the player should be able to select which.
• Any point buy system for inventory should probably be options-only, since designing an interface to do so would be complicated.
• Naturally, items like magic markers and rings of polymorph control cost lots of points, whereas things like apples and oil lamps cost only a few.
• Some items should probably have maximums.
• This would come at the expense of players who actually want different nonrandom starting inventories and don’t want to have to edit their rc file every time.
• If the player’s options leave some or all of the available points free, the game will randomly buy items until there are no points left.
• Unspent points should probably convert into a certain amount of gold.
• Possibly the default items are expressed as a list which consumes most or all of the points and is sorted from highest priority to lowest, and ones the user specifies get moved to the beginning of the list, which will push the low-priority items into the range of not being able to be purchased.
• Certain items, like the knight’s lance and probably most armor, should not be purchasable, and the character always gets them.
• FIQ proposed a system in which you can specify one item, and the game will try to reroll your starting inventory many times until it gets that item. Since this is effectively built-in tool-assisted startscumming, it gets tracked as a conduct. However, making it a conduct could be self-defeating in that people who don’t want the game to show they broke the conduct will not use this system and continue to startscum.

Allow sinks to be catalysts for alchemizing things. (Or possibly add a “cauldron” as a new piece of dungeon furniture, but that’s iffier.)

• You can dip potions into sinks to pour them down the drain, experiencing the vapor effects in a safe way. (Pouring polymorph down the sink of course polymorphs the sink.) This requires vapor effects to be implemented for many of the potions that don’t currently have any.
• If you don’t pour the potion down the drain, you instead mix it with the fluid from the tap, which is usually water but can already be a random potion.
• Possibly, doing alchemy in/on a sink is more efficient. There are many possible forms this could take, such as:
  • Potions not diluting when you mix them.
  • Reduced or zero chance of an alchemic blast.
  • You can get results from mixing potions that you can’t otherwise. (Flavor for this is weak. Is the character heating them somehow with the hot water?)

A radically different system from how alchemy currently works, known as “1 + 1 = 2”: no matter how many potions are in the stacks being dipped, only one from each stack is consumed, and two alchemized potions are always produced (unless they explode).

• Intended as a balance fix for the player’s current ability to make stacks and stacks of full healing, gain ability, or gain level potions, and promote use of found potions instead of diluting them.
• Significantly, potions of holy water mostly work like they do now - the holy water does not mix with anything and is consumed, while the dipped item becomes blessed - but you can only dip a singular item into the holy water, including other potions. This loss of the ability to mass-produce holy water creates a significant balance change.
  • Or it could sometimes make two holy waters, but be biased against it, and allow both waters to become uncursed in the process.
  • Still unbalanced, since holy water can otherwise be mass produced through water prayers and blessed confused remove curse.
• Undiluted potions can be duplicated by dipping them in normal water, e.g. one potion of gain level + one water = 2 diluted potions of gain level.
  • Diluted potions may need to have weaker effects to compensate for this, or undiluted potions stronger effects.
  • Or potions in general should become rarer, and possibly generate diluted.

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.

Artifact club The Pool Cue: it has the same damage as a regular club but causes several tiles of knockback to anything it hits.

Vampires shouldn’t be able to harm any monsters with a bite attack if the victim is bloodless, not dealing any damage or level drain. (Also includes the player if polymorphed into a bloodless form.)

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.

A monster, possibly called a “maid”, that cleans up the dungeon. It will pick items lying around on the floor, move chests and boxes into corners, wipe out engravings it finds on the floor, and so forth.

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:

• The mysterious force, as it exists in vanilla.
• When you try to ascend the stairs, they vanish and several illusory copies of stairs appear across the level, along with one real one which you have to find.
• Walls extrude from existing walls around the hero in random directions, never entirely closing off, via a cellular automaton that looks for walls with a 3x2 area of walkable spaces in front of them, with the space directly in front a regular floor space - the effect of this given enough iterations turns the terrain around you into a maze.
• Generic damage over time, not severe but enough to provide a headwind. Or partial or total disabling of natural regeneration.
• Asmodeus: Some damaging cold effect that happens periodically, or your cold resistance is nullified and replaced with a vulnerability to cold effects, or a slowing effect (flavored as due to cold).
• Baalzebub: Something to do with insects, either periodic summon insects from nowhere or stronger/more frequent insects. Or buffed insects that routinely spawn around you.
• Juiblex: You may randomly become ill, or have your regeneration dampened or something
• Geryon: Hordes of buffed q generate and rampage periodically.

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.”

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.

If you are wearing a greased cloak, it should not count as one of your carried items for purposes of determining if you can squeeze through a diagonal choke point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Collect a bunch of Evil Patch Ideas and turn them into scary false rumors.

Implement multiplayer as a system where each of the players is in a completely independent dungeon, generated with the same seed so that all levels and branches are created identical. There is a swapchest-like system for exchanging items between the games, without any limits on what can or can’t be swapped, other than unique items and that items can only be swapped within the same co-op game, not all existing games.

Merge the potions of booze and confusion together, because booze is basically just a weaker form of confusion that also has a minimal amount of nutrition. It’s not certain which way they should be merged: deleting booze and favoring confusion has the advantage that monsters can still flavorfully throw it at you in order to cause confusion (you don’t get instantly drunk from being splashed with booze), but deleting confusion and favoring booze is attractive because it’s a more flavorful item in general, what with having a dual confusion/nutrition effect, being nonmagical, contributing to levels like the Wine Cellar, etc.

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).

Create a procedural level generation algorithm for tower levels, particularly Vlad’s tower. Vlad’s tower should also be larger on the bottom than it is on the higher levels.

Add hallucinatory artifacts (it’s not clear where these would actually appear in the game): The Lost Orb of Phanastacoria, the Bizarro Orgasmatron.

A monster that gets more powerful every time an attack misses it.

Placing bag-of-holding-explosion-causing items into a bag of holding blows up the item that is trying to be placed inside, but does not harm the bag itself. If the item causing the explosion is a second bag of holding, its contents end up inside the outer bag.

When you are quoted a price for an unidentified item, it is automatically remembered on the discoveries list. (Not specified how this would interact with being quoted a different price by different shopkeepers, or being quoted both a buy and sell price for the same item, or whether this price should be stored as the object type-name or independently from it.)

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

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

Additional clerical spells for aligned priests to cast: raise undead, floor to lava, ball lightning (not a ray and thus not reflectable), summon elemental.

If a mind flayer eats your brains while you are confused, it becomes confused.

Improvements to secret doors:

• When the player discovers a secret door, monsters still don’t know about it unless they see it open.
• Monsters know about some secret doors and passages in their native area, and will use them as if they were normal doors/floor. If the player sees a monster traveling through one (defined as being able to see the actual square of the door), it becomes unhidden. The proposed implementation for this is to have some monster types (the Wizard, angels, etc) have full knowledge of all secret doors everywhere, and all other monsters have a bit that represents whether they know about secret doors, which sometimes gets set when they are generated and always gets set when they see some other monster use a secret door. A cruder implementation is just to convert the secret feature into a normal one when used by a monster.
• There are fewer or no hidden doors between the upstairs and downstairs on a Dungeons of Doom level.
• Less of a Dungeons of Doom level’s loot appears on a direct or near-direct path between staircases, and more of the loot appears in rooms hidden behind secret doors.
• Remove secret passages from the game; they don’t add much of relevance and it’s harder to find ways to make them relevant.

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.

Deafness should provide total protection against cockatrices’ hissing attacks.

Make orcish armor out of bone rather than iron.

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.

If the player drops a leash that’s in use or gets teleported away or dies, etc, the pet starts dragging the leash visibly on the map like a player drags an iron chain.

You can douse an angry shopkeeper in Lethe water to make him forget you.

Fruits can be applied to create potions of fruit juice.

Digging through a vault wall counts as 5 tiles (for digging time or wand of digging purposes), and dulls your digging tool’s enchantment by 3.

Falconer role that starts with a kestrel and special arm-protecting gloves.

Make the Castle a side branch, putting two down staircases on Medusa, one of which goes to the Valley and the other of which goes to the Castle branch, first preceded by several maze levels.

Allow the game administrator to put a random value that will be mixed into the game’s seed into the sysconf file, so that RNG-predicting manipulation can’t be used.

Sunsword does extra damage to vampires and trolls, on top of its normal bonuses versus undead.

Deafness protects against cockatrice hissing and therefore their stoning. (This might be too powerful; it might need to just reduce the chance of stoning rather than eliminating it altogether.)

Allow sufficiently skilled characters to multi-fire while levitating.

Make the breakage rate of ammo tied to the player’s skill ‘‘cap’’ in its corresponding skill, in addition to the actual level the player has advanced that skill to. This incentivizes roles which start with ammo to use it rather than finding a subpar melee option because any ammo they would fire early on would break..

Allow Rangers to advance bow skill to Master.

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.

Some, most, or all roles begin the game with high or maxed Luck. Of course, without a luckstone, this times out over a few thousand turns.

Various alternate endings for the game:

• You can take over an abandoned shop, stock it with items and mimics, and settle down as a new shopkeeper, ending the game. This creates a bones file with you replaced by a shopkeeper bearing your name.
• You can eradicate the Wizard of Yendor from the game entirely and forever, becoming the next Wizard of Yendor yourself. This is done by standing in the center of the Wizard’s Tower wearing the Amulet of Yendor and invoking it. This respawns a beefed-up Wizard; defeat him and the game ends with you as the next Wizard. (It’s missing an end condition for what happens if you escape the dungeon while in this semi-powered-up state.)
• You can claim the Amulet’s power for yourself rather than giving it to a god. While anywhere on Astral, invoke the Amulet while wearing it. You get some big and unspecified surge of power from it. Furious at your betrayal, your god smites you every way they can, joined in by the other gods and the Riders, calling to bear all their priests, angels and Archons, which spawn in swarms on the high altars. (You also lose sanctuary.) You have to reach each high altar and shut it down/destroy it. Once you have done this, you win and keep the Amulet’s power for yourself, as long as you can manage to hold on to it.
• Alternatively, there is another way to do the “claim the Amulet for yourself” way: once you invoke the Amulet, a timer starts. The gods have only this much time to kill you or take the Amulet away before you become invincible to them. Would require some anti-boulderforting measures though. Or, you have to escape the Astral Plane back to the surface wiht all the gods trying to impede your progress.
• You want to break the power of the Amulet so no one gets it, and break the gods’ dominion over the world. You must invoke the Amulet while standing on each high altar to destroy it. (Not mutually exclusive with the other ending: you don’t channel the Amulet’s power into yourself, but into the high altar. In a game with both endings, you trigger the other one by invoking it anywhere except a high altar.)

Also see the Astral Escape Patch.

Ranged attacks get an accuracy bonus if you rested the previous turn.

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.

Restore ability sources (including unicorn horns) only restore stat points up to their starting values, not to the highest values reached. Alternatively, restore up to the average of the starting and maximum value, rounded down.

Tourists begin the game with walking shoes.

Give some monsters the M2_SWIM ability: rats, possibly dogs, possibly horses.

One of the playable races, possibly halfling, should get a permanent +1 to Luck similar to the full moon effects.

Higher skill in a spell school allows you to subtract some points off its Pw cost.

Make quasits generate in large groups.

When hallucinating, you hear monsters that can speak say funny things. Possibly only when chatted to; they say “O great wise [bogusmon], how may I help us defend us all against wicked adventurers who quest for the sacred Amulet?”

Have a value that tracks the next turn Luck will check its timeout. Once the timeout ticks, it will re-randomize this value to some other turn.

Make most if not all rings chargeable:

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

Give unicorn horns a to-hit penalty: they are not a manufactured weapon, and are not designed to be wielded in your hand.

Being very fast reduces your AC and/or to-hit.

A “reset button” for Sokoban, which restores all the original holes and resets all the original boulders, and places the player on the downstairs (or is reachable only from the downstairs). Probably not activatable after the level is solved. Flavored as some sort of mechanism.

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).

Manes and lemures should count as undead rather than demons, and should perhaps be moved to the ghost or wraith monster class.

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.

Higher wand skill makes the shooter’s wand rays harder to dodge.

The higher your skill is with your wielded weapon, the lower the chance is that an enemy will yank it out of your hand with a bullwhip.

Engulfing by a water elemental or a monster with a digestion attack cleans off any cream pie blinding the hero has.

Leprechauns are occasionally generated with a sack of gold rather than gold pieces in free inventory. Though this would either have to be quite rare or only be possible on leprechauns generated outside leprechaun halls.

Potion throwing is a skill, and enhancing it will let you get stronger effects out of thrown potions. Later game monsters may throw potions with this skill enhanced. If traps throw potions, they always do so at Unskilled.

Wizard-harassment summon nasties should produce a “Monsters appear from nowhere!” message, and this message should force a –More–.

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.

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:

• A damage bonus, or even double damage
• Temporary HP
• An accuracy penalty (or a Dexterity penalty)
• Slight reduction of speed
• Temporary cold resistance (debatable; if possible it should probably make you not feel cold attacks but still take regular damage from them)
• Attacking an enemy makes you automatically keep fighting it until one of you is dead
• Monsters are treated as having higher charisma (currently no monsters are treated as having charisma at all, but this could also hurt or nullify your ability to refuse a foocubus removing your clothes)
• You may pass out when the confusion ends, and end up with a hangover when you wake up. (Not described what the effects of a hangover would be). You may also find yourself suddenly on a different level when you wake up.
• You are protected from gaze attacks due to not being able to focus enough to meet someone’s gaze.
• If you’re a dwarf, the effects get magnified
• If there is any such thing as a player-is-scared effect, it is canceled when you drink the booze and blocked while you’re under the influence. This goes for however long the confusion persists, so you can extend it by drinking potions of confusion if you want.
• Any AC from your armor is nullified (this would also contribute to monk “drunken boxing” proposals, since monks don’t usually have as much armor AC)

Casting a forgotten spell consumes some Pw, perhaps one point per spell level, or just a random amount, in addition to its confusion and stunning effects.

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.

Blessed scrolls of identify, if the player selects a container, will bring up a second menu that allows items in the container to be identified.

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.

Long worms and pythons can be saddled and ridden as steeds, but only if you are a small monster.

When you have displacement, you displace your pets appropriately even when stunned, confused, or hallucinating, rather than attacking them.

Dogs will eat candy bars off the floor, but will then get sick or nauseous from eating it.

Turn trying to open a door into an occupation: if you get attacked or otherwise distracted while trying to open the door, you will stop, but you don’t have to manually keep trying and failing to open it.

Covetous monsters can warp to the up stairs only if they know where the up stairs are. Demon lords would know this in their own lairs, but not otherwise, and monsters randomly spawned on a level may or may not.

Cancelling a unicorn horn makes it non-magical and removes its curative properties.

Make identify scrolls generate blessed more often (perhaps 1/3 of them blessed, 1/3 uncursed and 1/3 cursed, or 1/2 1/3 1/6, or something) to remove the incentive for players to hoard everything until they can get holy water.

Use timing-out intrinsics (beneficial ones gained from corpses) to invert the hunger clock: use the limit on how fast you can hunger as a restriction on how many intrinsics you are maintaining.

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.

Track “did not enhance any skills” as a conduct.

Merge the rings of slow digestion and hunger into a single chargeable ring of digestion. Negative values increase hunger faster, positive values slow it down. Duplicating the effect of a vanilla ring of slow digestion would require getting a +10 ring or stacking up to 10 with two rings. (Possibly the negative/positive values should be switched, but that would complicate the generation code.)

Kicking a sink can dislodge a small swarm of sewer rats (and possibly some other random r monsters), or snakes, in addition to its other kick effects. Unlike puddings which are one per sink, these don’t stop coming until they’re extinct.

All sinks spawn with a ring buried beneath them. If you kick the sink and get the “Flupp! Muddy water” message, the sink will spit out one of the rings buried under it. This removes the need for the S_LRING flag, and also allows players a non-destructive way to retrieve rings they dropped down the sink.

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

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

Sokoban will either contain a prize of ‘‘three’’ amulets (one reflection, one versus poison, one other), or three bags (one holding, one oilskin, one other).

Meleeing monsters while you are afflicted with a zombification disease will start zombifying them.

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.

Some weapons’ unidentified appearances are shared with other weapons, so characters who start the game without knowledge of many weapons have to play a bit of an ID game with them. For instance, scimitar and katana could just be changed to “curved sword”. This has problems, though: it doesn’t translate very well to tiles (tiles of weapons sharing a description would have to be made identical), and it’s vulnerable to weight-ID if two weapons with different weights share the same description.

Add a “fruit” database entry: “They say this is edible. Some adventurers have strange tastes.” and tweak the database code to recognize a typed-in fruit name in the game as this entry.

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.

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):

• Rings never explode, as they are rarer and a more crucial part of a player’s gear. Only wands explode.
• Wands and rings made of metal never explode.
• The amount of wands and rings that can be destroyed by a single shock attack has a fixed cap. (Currently it has no cap and everything can be destroyed if you’re unlucky.)
• Extrinsic shock resistance (and only extrinsic) protects against these effects completely.
• Wands and rings hit by electricity act similarly to being charged, though they don’t actually get charged. Wands have their recharge counter incremented then roll for explosion. Chargeable rings roll for explosion at their current enchantment (meaning +0 rings will be safe). Not specified what should happen to unchargeable rings; perhaps they should just behave like +2 rings or something.
• The maximum number of items that will be destroyed is the amount of damage divided by 10, so an attack dealing less than 10 damage will never destroy anything, and e.g. a 6d6 damage attack from a wand will destroy at most 3 things. Combined with a possible hard cap of 5 or so items per damage.

The chance of failing to polymorph into a target monster (whether chosen randomly or intentionally) depends on the base level of that polyform relative to your own level.

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.

See also this proposal which expands on the idea.

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.

Clerical spell that gives you a certain duration of a property that steals enemies’ maxHP and heals you when you hit things in melee.

You can put rocks into a sack, oilskin sack, or bag of holding and then wield it and swing it at enemies. (This uses flail skill.) Damage depends on the total weight of the rocks.

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.

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.

Make potions of oil more common, so that the player has more area-of-effect combat options (for throwing firebomb potions of oil). Possibly allow hardware stores to stock them.

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).

The game makes fully clear to the player, in-game, how the skill system works and what the consequences of investing points in a skill means.

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.

You can light a greased sword on fire. Attacks with it will deal fire damage for a few turns until it burns out.

New object property “identification”. Generates on containers, and type-identifies any item put into it.

When a boulder drops on a tile containing another boulder, it tries to roll to an adjacent tile. If it can’t (because all adjacent tiles have boulders or are walls), it drops as a second boulder like normal.

Don’t allow giants to carry an infinite amount of boulders.

Thrones have an affiliation with a monster. Only the affiliated monster can sit on it and use it. It starts out as the king monster generated on the throne. If the monster dies, its killer becomes the new affiliated monster. This would need some flavor for why the king doesn’t just sit on it and use it until it vanishes; there are a few possible ways to handle that. One is that though the throne effects are good, the king is flavored as not wanting to lose the throne. Another is that throne rooms will start empty except for the king and maybe a couple guards, and the king does in fact use the throne’s powers against you (without risk of it vanishing since he is the original owner, or something).

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.

Flesh-eating scarab beetles: they may reproduce every time they bite you.

Hallucination should cause statues to be seen as monsters that don’t move and perform nonsense actions.

Rename AD_SEDU to AD_CHRM because it’s not really seduction.

Erosionproof items should be immune to disintegration as well.

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.

Random chance of getting lead poisoning while quaffing from a sink. This abuses Int and Con.

Reflavoring of Heaven or Hell mode: everything explodes when it gets hit by anything. A.k.a. “HackSplosion”.

Summoning spells examine how many summoned monsters are currently on the level, and cap it at some point so the level can’t fill up with more and more summonstormed monsters.

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:

• Demon den: one or more demons guarding some gold and gems. (In a cavernous Gehennom, we can expect that most of the mineral wealth has already been mined out by millennia of demon activity.)
• Seminary of Moloch: contains an altar to Moloch, one peaceful priest of Moloch, and multiple hostile priests of Moloch.
• Fake wizard towers: the standard 7x7 footprint consisting of moat and tower, with an amulet in the center of the tower (possibly EPI: this could be a fake Amulet of Yendor), and a few monsters inside the tower. The flavor basis for these is that they are the Wizard’s earlier settlements.
• Hostage room: contains a lot of monsters guarding a prisoner or player monster hostage. The reward here might be that the monster auto-tames when freed.

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.

Add hallucination effects to (many, perhaps all) scrolls:

• Scroll of punishment: changes your Luck based on scroll beatitude

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.

Differentiate between poison, which comes solely from ingesting it, and venom, which comes from getting toxins in your bloodstream from a bite, claw, or sting. Monsters like spiders can be both poisonous to eat and venomous when attacking.

More marginal corner-case uses for gems (similar to the amethyst/booze interaction):

• Throwing a diamond (or a diamond ring) at an opposite-sex foocubus will tame it.
• Rubbing an amber stone generates electricity, perhaps giving you a static charge that will add a bit of damage to your next melee attack.
• Hitting a demon with obsidian traps it as if it were a bear trap: it can’t move or teleport, though it can still attack. This also destroys the obsidian.
• Moonstone allows you to control lycanthropic shapeshifting. (Moonstone exists only as a ring in vanilla, not as a real gemstone.)
• Rubies and sapphires provide some very marginal protection against cold and fire respectively.

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.

Add “You vaguely feel a vague sense of vagueness” as a hallucinatory message.

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.

Higher pickaxe skill increases digging speed.

There is a cap on the number of smoky-potion wish-granting djinni that can appear in one game.

Eating a cockatrice corpse only petrifies you 85% or so of the time, the rest of the time it “tastes like chicken”.

Make death magic resistable by an amulet or ring. Possible names and corresponding exact effects vary:

• “life protection” (bad name, life saving is very similar)
• “unliving” (makes you not count as living and life saving won’t work)
• “undeath” (actively makes you count as undead, you are vulnerable to turn undead effects and lawful gods may be annoyed at you)
• “versus death magic”

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.

If hovering over a trap door and zapping an opening beam downwards, the trap door becomes a hole.

Luck ideas:

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

Touchstones no longer count as magical items. (Real-life touchstones aren’t.)

Fixed crysknives never revert.

Tinning kits include tin openers implicitly, so if you wield it you can open tins.

Monsters who can use items and estimate that they are strong enough will attack crossaligned unicorns to get the horn.

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.

Shopkeepers type-identify any item they sell you. (This allows the player to type-identify an item by selling it and buying it back.)

The Oracle sells type-identification of any one carried item for a fee.

Werebane provides protection from shape changers and immunity to lycanthropy while wielded.

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.)

The Oracle has the same item as the prize in Sokoban, so you can pay her to tell you what the prize is (because she’ll have it with her). This opens up a strategic choice where players can decide whether to kill her and skip Sokoban, or not. She will need to be quite stronger than her current abilities are, with passive attacks that work even at range. Alternatively, she could carry the other Sokoban item, depending on how formidable she is.

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.

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.

Change trap symbols and colors to be more unique: holes should go on their own glyph, level teleporters should be colored bright magenta, trap doors should be colored green.

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).

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.

Wishing for an artifact drains two charges from a wand of wishing. If it’s a wrest wish or from a source that only gives one wish like a djinni, you merely get the base item type instead.

New object property, burden. Makes the item heavier than it is normally. Objects with this property generate cursed 90% of the time.

Reduce the level of the spell of create familiar to 2, and give it a dedicated list of summonable monsters based on skill level: Unskilled creates only kittens and little dogs, Basic will pick a random non-fully-grown dog, cat or horse, Skilled will not create kittens, ponies, or little dogs but otherwise will choose any d, u, B, or f that isn’t a unicorn. Expert will choose from the Skilled list, plus any q or w. If not doing that, as a more minor change, don’t create any monster that is always hostile.

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.

Reorganize which roles get which special spells, based on the change that every role should always have a 0% failure rate at casting its special spell.

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.

Split weaponless conduct into melee-weaponless, ranged-weaponless, and spell-less conduct.

Fire elementals and vortices have a light radius of 2, not 1.

Humans have a slight advantage in their chance of taming creatures.

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.

• Alternatively, blessed scrolls of identify could be buffed, for example they always give a full identification of everything in inventory, or they identify several additional object classes that are not yet in your discoveries list.
• Also, the identify spell could scale with skill, so that it identifies beatitude at Skilled and enchantment/charges at Expert.

Archons emit light, in a radius of 2 or 3.

Unicorn horn skill is also trained by curing things with it, and its chance of fixing something increases with skill level.

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.

Expert use of the wand of lightning doesn’t create a lightning explosion on the first target it hits; it creates chain lightning instead that may hit adjacent targets.

Reduce gnomes’ Str and Con caps, but ensure they get decent Dex and Int. They should be obviously different to play than humans (rather than being mostly superior). Dwarves should have a Wis cap of 16. Elves’ Dex cap should be higher than humans’.

A t-class monster that generates on a wall space and pretends to be part of the wall, then attacks/eats you when you step next to it.

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.

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.

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.

Expert and higher martial arts lets you hit twice, but only if your first attack hits and you are wearing no shield.

Elbereth should work from the very outset of the game, but get less effective over time.

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.

Vary the monster AI for using miscellaneous items; some monsters like trolls are “hoarders” and will not use misc items unless there is a compelling reason to do so; others will use them at the first opportunity.

Remove deathdrops entirely, and instead give monsters items in their starting inventory with the same rules as a deathdrop.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Knights start mounted, or else are trained enough to mount their horse from turn 1.

Elves should be able to squeeze between two trees diagonally.

Monsters that are in a “wait for the player” state should use different AI for decision-making (i.e. not using their teleport control to attack the player).

Several improvements to the level-defining des files:

• General goal is to be able to get the MAP as close to pasteable into the wiki as possible.
• Interpret < and > on the MAP as STAIR commands for that specific spot.
• Interpret ? on the MAP as “terrain to be filled by this level’s filler algorithm”. (This would allow for things like Asmodeus’ Lair to not have to be chunked into multiple pieces).
• Allow ^ to be placed on the MAP, and it is an error if there is no TRAP command for that space (the parser will assume that ordinary floor should be the type of floor). Same for + and DOOR, and for boulders.
• Allow monsters’ inventory to be specified.
• Allow objects to be specified by random appearance, with a flag that defines whether it will pick a random item or simply fail to generate if that random appearance does not exist in the game.
• Allow the level size to be specified so that ROWNO and COLNO are out of the question.
• Extend 3.6.0’s REPLACE_TERRAIN to work with non-rectangular areas.
• Most importantly, parse the files with something not written in yacc, because this adds an additional layer of complexity to anyone who wants to work with the code. (As of NetHack 3.7, the custom des file format has been replaced with Lua scripting.)
• Maybe even read in the .des files at runtime, so they can be modified without doing a recompile of them and the intermediate .lev form isn’t even needed. This would require giving each level its own .des file and distributing them with the game. This means you don’t get the benefits of using a parsing library, but you no longer have to code for or depend on that library either.

Foocubi levelport away instead of teleporting on the same level.

Djinni (except on the Plane of Air) may drop a scroll or wand of wishing when killed. But when you kill a djinni, all future djinni will spawn hostile.

Mummy traps, a new trap type that generates with a very desirable item: highly enchanted gear, magic markers, items with object properties, etc. However, when you pick it up or interact with it in any way like teleporting it or having a pet collect it, a bunch of mummies appear around you (they would obviously need to be more threatening than they are right now). Also can have a “mummy room”, a special room that contains one mummy trap and nothing else.

Add some region code preventing monsters from generating in (or even better, moving into) the pit corridors in Sokoban until the level is solved.

Elaborations on the Fort Ludios minesweeper proposal by ais523:

• Should spaces with 0 neighboring mines get 0 gold? Good because it makes the game possibly more instantly recognizable as minesweeper, bad because it makes the overall amount of gold less predictable
• Need to guarantee somehow that the person stepping into the room doesn’t trigger a mine instantly, and set up the level accordingly.
  • The column nearest the entry door could be clear of mines and gold.
  • The whole border could be clear of mines. However, this means that the total amount of gold must end up being an even number - not ideal.
• What happens if a monster steps on a mine?
• Possibly this needs an Oracle consultation to explain it to unspoiled players. Or make an engraving when you enter - possibly “xyzzy” as a reference to the cheat code in Windows Minesweeper. Or start off with one mine uncovered and identified on sight.
• The number of adjacent mines could be expressed in the ones digit of the gold amount. Possibly with a large round number added, so every space is 3001 or 2002, which hopefully clues the player into the fact that it’s a significant number. But this might be too restrictive.
• How to reach the magic number 69105, and do so in a way that guarantees it can be generated? May need to bias the level generator so that this must happen.

Non-inaccessible closets have a small chance of containing a monster on level generation.

Poison is either changed or extended so that it is a lasting status condition that gives you negative HP regeneration, or some other source of this property is added.

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.

• This means that choking over food is no longer instantaneous. Each turn while choking over food, you have a 20% chance of vomiting and lose 1000 nutrition. At certain points while the strangulation timer is getting closer to 0, you take one point of Con damage.
• Drowning monsters now grab and pull you underwater in 1 turn, but you have until the timer runs out to kill the monster or escape in some other way. Lifesaving while drowning does not give you a free escape, but resets the drowning timer.
• Rope golems are now more dangerous, since they represent a delayed instadeath.

Make all magic portals on the Elemental Planes immediately visible. The challenge should be surviving for long enough to get to the portal, not wandering around till you find it. This is because “Hunt for the Magic Tile” already exists on the vibrating square level, and is not very compelling.

You can invoke the Amulet of Yendor exactly once for a wish, with some unspecified major drawbacks.

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.

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.

More monsters should be locked to the grid and can only move orthogonally, like grid bugs.

A Word of Recall spell, which after a sizeable delay (3d5 or 5d6 turns) levelports you to one of several possible locations: Minetown, dungeon level 1, the Oracle, the Castle, the Quest. You will not travel anywhere you have not already visited. Does not work if you have the Amulet.

Fire and cold should both work as a cone, and should spread out over distance and possibly hit multiple targets, but with damage decreasing over distance.

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.

Gold generated from monster inventories should be tracked by the game and tail off after a while.

The list of monsters that ignore Elbereth should be increased, but the list of monsters that ignore scare monster should remain the same or decrease (3.6.0 Quest nemeses excepted). Perhaps scare monster should be renamed to “scare creature”, as it scares humans and elves, which are not really monsters.

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%.

Disintegration blasts don’t reflect from a wall; they dig it out instead. If the wall is undiggable, the ray merely stops - it never reflects.

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.

A “morale” stat which replaces charisma, and decreases when you die and get lifesaved, eat terrible food, and so on, but it needs effects other than making you lose the will to go on if it gets low enough.

Dragon with slowing breath. The effect stacks with previous effects of slowing breath.

Carried loadstones prevent knockback, including Newton’s Third Law effects. Possibly it prevents levitation entirely.

Blessed potions of gain ability allow you to choose which stat to increase. Possibly, since this would ordinarily be a nerf, max that stat or give you a few points in it.

Throwing a cockatrice corpse into water turns it into a hard floor, or possibly ice, with the corpse buried in the new floor.

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.

Silver weapons should be rarer than they currently are outside Gehennom and fairly common inside it.

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.

Stealing from shops via your pet doesn’t directly anger the shopkeeper, but the shopkeeper is aware of it and raises their prices to compensate and eventually won’t let you reenter the shop. Alternatively, the shopkeeper simply will block the entrance as long as ‘‘any’’ monster in the shop is carrying unpaid items, but this could be circumvented with a magic whistle.

Some version of key breaking, perhaps when trying to use a cursed key. However, this should not go the SLASH’EM route of allowing any unlocking device to break, since that just makes the player carry around extra keys. Skeleton keys should be made of bone and can break. Perhaps add a new key that is not breakable but is rarer than skeleton keys (stealing some of skeleton keys’ probability).

Lock picks and credit cards should possibly be able to break too.

The preparation method of tins should be deterministic, so that tins that stack together will have the same method.

Amulet of zombification. Increases your zombification counter while you are wearing it. Taking it off cures the zombification.

Searching finds everything in your range, but is an occupation that takes multiple turns. The s command by default will take some constant number of turns (somewhere from 10-20) and will either tell you about all the hidden things around you or tell you that there is nothing interesting; you can specify a numeric prefix to search for less than that if you want.

Greed as an object property for containers: the container will refuse to open 80% of the time, costing a turn. Either any gold put into the container vanishes permanently or gold weighs nothing when in the container.

A monster that stands helpless if you can see it with normal vision (not infravision, or telepathy, or detect monsters or anything else), and attacks viciously if you cannot.

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.

Split up the effects of magic resistance, as it is too extensive. It protects against magical force, death magic, teleportation, polymorph, etc.

• Death resistance conferred by a helm, an amulet, maaaaaybe as an intrinsic gained through crowning

Most artifacts should have a negative to-hit bonus, so you’re encouraged to train the weapon’s skill with some weapon that isn’t the artifact.

A skill system with more intermediate levels, such as Unskilled, Basic, Competent, Skilled, Advanced, Expert, Master, Grand Master.

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.

• Zombies can resurrect in Gehennom akin to GruntHack zombies.
• Spectres, which are like wraiths but much faster and with more attacks.
• Vampire mages.
• Skeletal dragons.
• Minotaur zombies.
• Z might need to be made ungenocideable.
• GruntHack-like zombies, which inflict zombification sickness and eat your brain to drain Int.
• Shades can generate in graveyards in Gehennom.

Add some effect to Snickersnee so that it’s not just a slightly better katana. Ideas include confusion resistance, stunning resistance, displacement.

Rust monsters and disenchanters are quadrupeds, and should be q. (This would leave R empty though.)

Tripe rations should not generate randomly very often, but they should appear in the inventories of monsters that like tripe, such as orcs.

Players can polymorph dungeon features by zapping a polymorph beam down at it, with some special cases:

• Gravestones can be created by polymorph and are more likely than other outcomes, but cannot be polymorphed into anything else. Trying to do so only polymorphs its epitaph.
• Polymorphing an altar angers that altar’s god and any attendant priest since you effectively destroyed their altar
• Fountains either cannot polymorph into anything besides headstones or have a very limited chance of becoming something else; this is to prevent the player from being able to generate a bunch of thrones from fountains.

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).

The timeouts for intrinsic invisibility and see invisible from eating a stalker corpse should be very long.

The water walking property protects inventory from water and protects against drowning attacks.

Chicken eggs identify as such when you formally ID them, and all eggs of a known type stay identified for the rest of the game.

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.

Roditaur: new humanoid monster that has an oversized rat’s head and four arms. Has a powerful bite attack and four weapon attacks.

The Bell of Opening is carried by your quest leader, who gives it to you when you return to them with the quest artifact. This solves the problem of making a game unwinnable by permanently changing alignment, since you can also get it by killing the quest leader. Should the leader leave the level (by levelporting down, for example), they are considered derelict of duty and the player can start the quest.

Monster status “discord”, which causes a monster to be seen as a target and be attacked by other enemies. On the player, discord is the same as wielding Stormbringer. Discord is available through the spellbook of discord.

Conflict affects things in a radius. The ring of conflict is a chargeable item, affecting this radius. Wearing multiple rings of conflict stacks the effects.

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.)