Various types of floor traps trigger based on your weight. This makes the trap more likely to trigger on a heavily armored character or one who has collected a lot of loot. Would work nicely in the Gnomish Mines, since gnomes are light and don’t tend to carry much stuff. Certain traps could also trigger to a lesser degree if you weigh enough to trigger it but not a whole ton.
Monsters that exist in groups are currently completely individualistic and try nothing more complex than charging towards the player and hitting in melee once they get there. This makes it easy for the player to cheese what would otherwise be tough battles, e.g. by standing in a doorway and killing them one by one, or by kiting them. There are some proposals for smarter AI:
Special monster AIs/strategies for golems. Likely requiring a general AI overhaul. The strategy for an individual golem could be selected from a set of possible directives when the monster is created. They follow this directive completely and literally, which may result in some interesting behaviors. The player can #chat to the golem to have it mumble its directive.
Give all roles permanent knowledge of their role’s special spell starting right at the beginning of the game. The expectation is that a starting character probably can’t cast it, but will be able to given time.
Priests cannot convert aligned altars, because they respect those other religions. However, they can convert Moloch’s altars, including the ones in Gehennom.
Merge the clockwork automaton and gnome races: you are a gnome in a clockwork suit. You are able to leave the suit and wind it up instead of needing to find other people to do it. However, if the suit gets destroyed in any way, you have to play the rest of the game as a gnome (which is probably nerfed compared to the current gnome).
Cartomancers can use monster cards (i.e. scrolls of create monster) by throwing them as well as reading them. If thrown, the monster is created on or adjacent to the space where the scroll hits the ground.
Cartomancers don’t spellcast using Pw. Instead, they read the book (which is instantaneous for them, and possibly subject to a failure chance like normal if the spell is not known) and the spell immediately takes effect. This increments the read counter for the book, so each book can be used to cast a spell 4 times before it blanks.
Getting cancelled should end a bunch of magical effects:
You can rub a towel on a greased item to remove the grease from it, just like wiping your face.
Because it’s a status effect with some downsides, make unicorn horns cure invisibility by removing it. Maybe temporary speed too.
In order to incentivize bullwhip use or other creative problem solving, Vlad wields the Candelabrum in his offhand.
In an effort to remove the variance of randomly choosing the right or wrong altar on the Astral Plane: The first high altar you step on is always a wrong one, and the second one is always right.
If the hero gets decapitated, they don’t die, but their head falls into their inventory. Thereafter, they are permanently blind unless wielding the head in the offhand slot.
Make it possible to specify blood splatters in the SpliceHack level parser. Then add it to Orcish Town, the “massacre” and “temple of the gods” themed rooms, and the bottom floor of the Convict quest and possibly graveyards.
Body armor imbued with a monster’s soul in a forge can convey you some resistances of the monster.
You can wear a second towel on top of an existing one. This makes you deaf as well as blind.
Fast food shop, a type of comestible-containing shop in which no vegan food generates. All the food that does generate in the shop has a special flag set so that it is guaranteed to satiate you (or at least have its nutrition multiplied), gives you greasy fingers, and costs more than usual.
New command, #use. It is undocumented and hidden in the list of commands so that only experienced players or source divers will know about it. It translates into the typical command an experienced player would situationally use. E.g. on a throne with no items it turns into #sit, on a box it does #loot, on an altar it turns into #offer.
Cursed bags of tricks create tame monsters instead of peaceful or hostile. This is a “bad effect” since you cannot use them for sacrificing.
In the context of restoring the tension and strategizing created by encountering a mind flayer, which used to be a lot higher when their amnesia caused forgetting maps and discoveries:
The psychic blast of a mind flayer may make you hallucinate, to create short-term tension, and possibly create long-term strategic tension by counting as Intelligence abuse.
However, since mind blasts are a lot less avoidable and harder to strategize around than getting into melee with a mind flayer, it may be better to add these as additional things they can do in melee (but probably not Intelligence abuse, since they already directly drain Intelligence points).
A magic leash, which gives your pets enough speed to always stay by your side so that can move at your regular rate across a floor without constantly getting ahead of it and having to stop to wait for it.
Spellcasters who have summoned insects or nasties can sometimes also cast a spell that makes the summoned monsters explode at you.
To reduce the reliance on general stores and the tedium of throwing scrolls into shops to price-identify them, all shopkeepers will buy scrolls of identify, or at least look at them and go “ew that is a really cheap scroll” so you can figure out what the identify scroll looks like.
If you talk to the Oracle while still qualifying as a “beginner” score-wise, she gives you a fortune cookie for free.
Strip pick-axes of their weapon-tool status: they no longer deal damage as a weapon, and are not normally wielded. They’re just a tool that will dig in a specified direction. The purpose is to prevent people from accidentally attacking with the pick.
Bags of holding give a flat reduction in weight (proposed amount is 150 aum) and only apply their usual halving or quartering to any weight in excess of that. This makes it beneficial to find and carry multiple bags of holding.
A #drag command, which enables you to transport items heavier than you can lift across the ground, such as corpses, stash chests, and ice boxes.
Cursed wind instruments (bugle, whistle, most horns) stick to your face when used, preventing you from using #chat or making other forms of conversation (to shopkeepers, demon lords, priests, etc, though most of these are ambiguous on whether the hero needs to speak) and possibly also preventing eating.
Alternatively, using the cursed wind instrument could simply produce “You hurt your vocal cords!” and make you mute for some length of time.
Some monsters, when dealing what otherwise would have been a killing blow, instead leave you at 1 HP, strip you of some or all of your possessions, and possibly vanish/teleport. Shopkeepers in particular may decide to do this (but some may still decide to kill you).
Remove all ways of immediately acquiring a permanent intrinsic (potion, corpse, wand, whatever). Instead, at some unpredictable point after you’ve cumulatively had that intrinsic for a couple thousand turns, you gain it permanently.
If you fall downstairs while fumbling, you may land on a monster that was already occupying the upstairs of the level below, damaging them proportional to the weight of your armor and possibly reducing the damage you took from falling down the stairs.
You can wish for your god to be mollified, which has the same effect as doing it at an altar. Not specified if this should break atheist conduct, but it probably should, since you’re affirming there is a god that you want to placate.
The parser could look for “forgiveness” as the phrase to trigger this.
Make see invisible an instantaneous effect rather than an intrinsic. After seeing invisible for one turn, players must guess where invisible monsters are (or use something to get more see invisible effects).
Punching a mimic with a worn/wielded ring of protection from shape changers makes them die instantly.
NetHack should contain something that turns you specifically into a newt.
Grimtooth can be used to engrave a special name, similar to Elbereth, that scares only elves and hobbits.
Minetown shopkeepers should be gnomes, and the priest and Watch should be dwarves, either by creating new racial variants of those monsters or via a monster race implementation. It doesn’t make any sense that everything in the town is run by humans.
By wielding a floating eye corpse and either applying it at monsters or hitting monsters with it, you can paralyze the monsters, provided they can see you. As a potential downside, you might paralyze yourself if you stumble or fall into a pit while wielding it while non-blind.
The Wizard tracks how many times you have blundered into unseen traps, engraved Elbereth, been lifesaved, and had your god fix your HP, and he mixes insults about embarrassing amounts of these into his taunts.
The player shows up as a 4 on warning whenever at least burdened, because they are a danger to their own self.
Anything that is carrying a cockatrice corpse, including the player, shows up as a 4 or 5 on warning due to its high threat level.
Displacer beasts may drop a hide, which can be enchanted or otherwise crafted into a cloak of displacement. (Or else this could just work with a displacer beast corpse which could be enchanted/polymorphed/crafted, without requiring a new object for the hide).
Moth larvae trap, which destroys cloth items you are carrying such as bags, cloaks, blindfolds and towels.
Some Dungeons of Doom levels are corridorless - rooms directly adjoin, and do not all have to be rectangular, though most will. Rooms can have longish, nonlinear extensions - like corridors, but made of ordinary floor, walled, and anywhere between 1 to 3 spaces wide.
When falling down a hole or trap door, monsters’ spaces are considered valid locations to land. If you land on one, you instantly kill it.
Elves sing while attacking, which automatically draws the attention of any other elves and orcs on the level.
A monster that can move any number of spaces in a straight line at once, but otherwise is only speed 16. It’s tough enough in combat to incentivize running out of its way or locking it behind a door.
Monsters should be immune, or less likely, to turn to flee if you have aggravate monster. This should probably only affect monsters fleeing after being harmed in combat, rather than all forms of scaring.
The stated goal of this is so that Knights who are tired of taking caitiff penalties on fleeing monsters can give themselves aggravate monster to sidestep the penalty.
Giantslayer gets its bonuses against any monster that is larger than you, rather than just giants specifically. (Possibly it still gets bonuses against giants specifically even if you are as big as one.)
Note that dNetHack has a similar feature in which Giantslayer gets bonuses against any monster that’s Huge or Gigantic. It’s also been suggested to drop that to any monster of size Large or larger.
Elbereth only protects you when the game considers you a beginner.
Rename the gauntlets of dexterity to gauntlets of accuracy. Similar to gauntlets of power, their enchantment doesn’t matter for anything beyond AC. Instead, they now grant a +5 to-hit bonus when equipped, which applies to all to-hit rolls (thrown objects, wand and spell zaps, etc).
When a thrown potion of oil lands on (or possibly even passes over) a furnace/forge, it ignites and explodes.
You can affix a ring to a suit of ring mail. This will make it part of the ring mail, and will raise its enchantment by 1 if it’s negative.
Revamp luck so that it’s mostly permanent and tied to game milestones such as Oracle, Sokoban completion, clearing Medusa, passing the Castle, finishing the Quest, and getting crowned. All of these increase base luck by 1 (like the full moon benefit, only more so.) Carried luckitems adjust by -2 if they’re “net cursed”, +2 if net uncursed, and +4 if net blessed. All other things that affect luck still do, with no way to prevent them timing out back to the new base value.
Remove the random element of artifact wishes. In each game, you can either wish for one quest artifact, or up to three non-quest artifacts, which you are guaranteed to get on the first attempt. Artifact wishes beyond that will always fail.
Chaotic Archeologists gain alignment for taking historic statues and moving them off-level. Neutral Archeologists gain alignment from bringing historic statues into their quest home. (Lawful ones get nothing, because it’s right for them to leave the statues where they were.)
Any effect from a worn amulet applies also to your steed.
Wearing kicking boots automatically adds a kick to melee attacks you make.
Creatures that get caught in a wand’s explosion (from the wand actually breaking, not from the regular effect of the wand) become uncancelled, unless the exploding wand is a wand of cancellation. Notably, this can be used by the player to remove the Cancelled status.
Allow tourists to play as gnomes, and they start the game in Minetown instead of dungeon level 1.
Either guarantee that the potion of healing will be smoky for Healers, or guarantee that it will never be smoky. Guaranteeing them to be smoky is basically an open invitation to startscum them, though.
Kicking towards a pet causes it to move in a random direction and produces the message “You push Foo aside with your foot.” Not specified what this should do for pets that are too large to move aside, or if the pet has nowhere to go.
Do away with all non-randomized object descriptions (things like “high boots” for jackboots).
Putting a wand of cancellation into a bag of holding does not blow up the bag at all; it cancels the wand (as in NetHack4) and additionally “cancels” the bag by turning it into an uncursed sack (which does not normally happen when zapping magical bags with cancellation).
Not specified whether putting in a bag of tricks or second bag of holding would also have this effect, or whether it would still blow up the bag.
Gelatinous cubes specifically seek out scrolls labeled YUM YUM to eat.
When wearing gauntlets of power, thrown javelins (or other spear-likes) continue flying after hitting monsters, and may damage monsters standing further back.
Ignore missing “of”, “the”, and the like in wishes.
You can use whole object classes when using the numeric prefix with the D command, e.g. D 1 ? will drop 1 of each scroll you are carrying.
Add “You vaguely feel a vague sense of vagueness” as a hallucinatory message.
On the Plane of Water, fire wands and fire spells expand your bubble, and throwing a bag of holding out into the water creates a new huge bubble (as a large but finite amount of the water is sucked into it).
Revenant race. Only available for roles you have died playing and didn’t leave bones. Gets death-magic resistance and unbreathing from XL1, has an automatic counterattacking kick. Does not have starting gear; any starting gear your role has is scattered randomly across dungeon level 1. Cannot start with a pet.
A level sound for when there is a dragon somewhere on the level.
When a monster kills a monster that it grudges, it gets some bonus like a small HP boost or a level up.
The wand of death at master skill kills and automatically zombie-enslaves the monsters it hits.
Sokoban provides a choice between an oilskin bag of holding and an amulet of reflection and magical breathing. Neither of these is very likely to generate randomly.
Special room that contains a demon gate in the center. This continually spawns monsters who try to defend the gate; the player has to make it through the spawns to destroy it or block it off. The gate could be implemented as a magic portal to a special challenge level like an ADOM-style vault.
If escaping a prompt would use up an item or charge, re-prompt at least once (or maybe have an option configuring how many times it re-prompts.)
Applying a blessed magic whistle while confused teleports you to one of your pets.
Barbarian unarmed skill enhances for free when you finish the Quest, get crowned, or reach a certain level.
Cursed magic whistles send pets away from you. (This is perhaps exploitable with e.g. purple rain strategies on Astral.)
Golems hate existence so much that they attack all other creatures, but the other creatures don’t hate golems, so they just defend. This is a special case of implementing one-way grudges.
Petrification is a contact poison secreted by cockatrices, and only partially stones the body part it touches. If you touch one with your hands, you cannot use your hands anymore, etc.
Players polymorphed into nymphs have infinite carrying capacity.
Don’t print a message or interrupt anything when your Pw reaches full while you are maintaining a spell, if you haven’t actually cast a spell manually since the last time it was restored.
Resting on a bench regains Pw as well as HP.
Make monster stunning work like player stunning: it moves randomly and may cause them to miss turns.
Interface option to shorten “blessed”, “uncursed” and “cursed” to three letters so that you get more use out of the inventory sidebar.
An addendum to ideas where the player starts the game with some random object types identified, without actually starting with such objects. Use a different ID state for these types, so the player will recognize them when they come across those items, but they can’t startscum for “good” discoveries by checking the discoveries list at the start of the game.
Dragonbane gives 100% reflection versus dragon breath.
Valkyries can fly at will with the #fly command, but it costs Pw per turn/flying action to maintain.
Object properties are more likely to appear on poorer weapons and armor.
Valkyries have some drain life power, as they are “choosers of the slain” in Norse mythology.
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.
Water walking boots give you the same extra speed as speed boots if you are standing on water or a fountain.
Arch-liches sometimes generate with potions of unholy water in their inventory.
Add a message for when the player first satisfies both conditions of having teleportitis and being able to teleport at will.
Pets get a speed increase of (Cha + 6).
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.
The Oracle stands on a neutral altar, but killing her sets your luck to -10.
Eating a shimmering dragon corpse has the effect of quaffing a potion of wonder.
The demon lords take no interest in you until you are on the ascension run with the Amulet. At which point they attack.
To avoid the annoyance of disrobing in a closet to cast utility spells, mark certain types of spells as being non-combat, utility spells. Such spells have a much reduced armor penalty, but take several turns to cast.
Kicking down a door may damage a creature standing on the other side. This is guaranteed if you are wearing kicking boots.
Artifact pickaxe that blows up the wall instead of simply digging it.
When you fail to write a scroll because you ran out of ink, it will become a “garbled scroll” instead of disappearing. Garbled scrolls can’t be read (or possibly they could be read, for a number of generally negative weak magical effects), but they can be re-blanked so the scroll can be written again. This could also happen when you fail to write a scroll by not knowing it. There is a slim chance, probably less than 10%, that you end up writing some random scroll instead of a garbled scroll.
If you have autodig enabled and a digging-capable pet is next to a wall or rock square you move into, it will dig that square out for you.
If the player is polymorphed into a red or blue dragon, they can burn-engrave on the floor with their fire/lightning breath.
Increase the damage of slung touchstones. Thrown luckstones retain their lowish damage but have a chance of getting “lucky” hits that do much more damage or instakill monsters.
Kicking option or game mode which changes your bump attack into kicking.
Yumis are treated as “very well-crafted bows”, and allow elf or orc multishot to be used with them (as opposed to the current where you need to use an elvish/orcish bow). The Longbow of Diana is now a yumi.
Stick some orc corpses in Orctown, because they can’t have defeated the entire town without any losses.
Blessed charging can select a nonmagical instrument, converting it into a (uncharged?) magical version of the same instrument.
Elven gloves, which grant stealth and can be enchanted to +7.
2-handed weapons can be enchanted up to +7 as normal, but one-handed weapons can only go up to +5. Alternatively, +9/+7.
Gnomish characters get some interesting starting items, like tin openers, candles, oil, or cans of grease.
Replace Sokoban with some other game like mahjongg. Instead of a pass/fail, you can achieve a degree of success. Doing really well nets you both the amulet and the bag, doing slightly less well lets you choose, but ordinarily you will get only one.
More acid resistance sources in FIQHack, to balance yellow dragons’ exploding acid breath. Possibly a ring or amulet of acid resistance.
Add rumors to FIQHack that warn about dragons, which can be fairly dangerous.
