Recently Added Ideas

This is the latest batch of YANIs, spanning from 2023 March 15 to 2023 July 21.

#4456

 · 
vanilla

It is possible to get a scroll of genocide both blessed and cursed at the same time. The effect of this is that it prompts for a single monster, genocides most of that monster, and sends in the remaining several monsters who are now looking for revenge.

Alternatively, make this a confused effect instead of opening the can of worms of allowing items to be simultaneously blessed and cursed.

#4457

 · 
vanilla

Eating a wraith’s brain when polymorphed into a mind flayer should give you some experience points.

When the player is on a water space, track whether they are submerged or swimming on top of the water. By default, entering water without the risk of drowning still puts you at the bottom, but you can use < to ascend to the top.

A primary effect of this is to establish consistency with what you can and can’t interact with while in water - it doesn’t make much sense that monsters standing on an adjacent land square, or monsters flying on an adjacent water square, can hit you in melee when you’re underwater, nor the other way around. If being on top or bottom of the water is tracked, these cases can be prevented, but care would have to be taken so that the hero can’t dive underwater and be completely safe and able to recover with impunity.

One possible mitigation (in addition to blocking an underwater hero from using melee attacks on adjacent monsters that aren’t in the water themselves) would be to make monsters that can’t currently attack the swimming hero avoid getting into melee range. Though this still wouldn’t deal with zapping them with spells from a safe distance.

#4459

 · 
vanilla

When you identify a piece of worthless glass that belongs to a shopkeeper, they get angry and attack you because you have exposed their fraudulent business practice.

#4460

 · 
vanilla

Tourist trap: a trap that vanishes all of your gold, but only if you are a tourist.

#4461

 · 
vanilla

Lawful-aligned characters should feel guilty and incur an alignment record penalty in addition to the normal Luck penalty when they cheat in Sokoban.

#4462

 · 
vanilla

You should be able to give a potion of see invisible to a shopkeeper while you are invisible. They will then quaff it, and stop blocking their shop door. Depending on implementation, if the shopkeeper’s see invisible is temporary and later times out, once they can no longer see you, they will again block the door.

#4463

 · 
object properties patch

If enlightenment tells you something like “You have [intrinsic] from your [piece of gear you didn’t know the property of], that object property becomes identified on that piece of gear.

#4464

 · 
object properties patch

Food can have object properties which convey some special magical effect that it normally doesn’t. For example, a “food ration of fire” is spicy chili flavored and confers fire resistance for a few hundred turns.

#4465

 · 
EvilHack

If you use an artifact hammer in forging, it should have some special effects, perhaps dependent on which artifact it is. For instance, using Hammer of the Gods should always result in a blessed item.

#4466

 · 
vanilla

Fake Amulets of Yendor can generate with the same name as whatever you’ve named the real one, e.g. ‘REAL’, to keep you on your toes.

#4467

 · 
vanilla

Artifact polearm of unspecified type The Ten-Foot Polearm. When wielded, it confers immunity to stoning from c corpses, artifact blasts, and special damage from bane artifacts that hate you, because “you don’t touch them with a ten-foot pole”.

#4468

 · 
vanilla

Artifact horn of plenty that gives slow digestion when carried and never needs to be recharged; however, it never dispenses potions because allowing the player to get infinite potions is obviously not a great idea.

It’s been noted that an artifact such as this makes it so you never need food again, removes that aspect of gameplay, and should therefore probably only appear very late in the game.

Wielding Tempest, in addition to its existing effects, protects you from being paralyzed by lightning on the Plane of Air. Also, when its area-of-effect lightning effect triggers, fog clouds and gas clouds around the center of the effect are destroyed or blown away, “clearing the air”.

#4470

 · 
EvilHack

For every demon lord you kill (not just bribe), the chance of the Magic 8-Ball giving a wish increases from its very low baseline, up to a reasonable amount where it won’t take too much spamming to get the wish after you kill them all.

#4471

 · 
vanilla

Remove the ability of speed potions to always, reliably confer the speed intrinsic. Instead, you need to already have a lot (at least 100 turns) of temporary very fast speed before drinking a potion of speed will give you the intrinsic.

#4472

 · 
EvilHack

Reading a blessed scroll of punishment should give you a clue towards how much you have abused your alignment record.

#4473

 · 
vanilla

Energy vortices should emit radius 0 light, so that when they are in a dark area and you have clear line of sight to them, you can see them (made of whirling energy, they are obviously visible but don’t really throw light on anything else).

#4474

 · 
vanilla

Every time Sunsword hits a monster, it should cause temporary blindness to the tune of several turns.

Alternatively, since that type of blindness may be tricky to implement, have it induce regular monster blindness upon a “critical hit”, with the same frequency as other artifacts like Vorpal Blade.

#4475

 · 
EvilHack

Drow characters get a luck bonus during the new moon instead of the full moon.

To be more true to their source material, jabberwocks should randomly whiffle and burble when you are close enough to see/hear them doing it. Additionally, when Vorpal Blade is used to kill a jabberwock, it should go “snicker-snack!”

#4477

 · 
EvilHack

The prison sections of Goblin Town should contain some item in there that incentivizes the player to open up the prison, such as a small amount of food. Better yet would be to have the prisoners themselves give such a reward to the player upon being freed.

#4478

 · 
vanilla

When you enhance a skill, the message should be “You now have [level] skill in [skill name]”, instead of simply “You are now more skilled”.

#4479

 · 
vanilla

If you die to a bag of tricks (“carnivorous bag”) and produce a bones file, neither your ghost nor any of your possessions will appear in the file… just the bag on the floor. Someone who subsequently finds and applies the bag will cause a hostile player monster with all the “dead” player’s gear to pop out of it.

#4480

 · 
EvilHack

If you have a resistance extrinsically, taking (and negating) damage from that elemental source gives you a small 1 or 2 point recovery of your magic energy, in order to give some benefit to having extrinsic resistances you will almost certainly have intrinsically for most of the time it matters.

#4481

 · 
vanilla

When an Angel or Archon spawns, the area in a light radius of 2 centered on its starting spot becomes permanently lit up.

#4482

 · 
vanilla

If you are playing a dwarf, monsters pick a random gender pronoun when referring to you in their dialogue (random but consistent for each separate monster) because they can’t tell which one you are.

#4483

 · 
object properties patch

An object property that confers slow digestion.

#4484

 · 
vanilla

Change Werebane’s base item to a ring of protection from shape changers. Confer the same sort of properties as it currently has now: while wearing the ring, you will deal double damage to and possibly even sear werecreatures even if your weapon is not silver, and possibly even instakill them on a critical hit.

#4485

 · 
vanilla

Potions of booze in a liquor emporium should be automatically identified. If you observe one inside a potion shop, it should formally discover that potion.

#4486

 · 
vanilla

A unicorn (possibly “red unicorn”) that is unaligned - i.e. aligned to evil/Moloch. Unspecified if it would behave differently with respect to gems thrown at it.

#4487

 · 
vanilla

There is some mechanism by which scrolls of consecration can be used to “ordain” (transform) certain types of monsters into aligned priests.

#4488

 · 
SpliceHack

Quaffing from a toilet cures you of a brood wasp infestation (or any other sort of infestation of parasites in your body).

Add an artifact crysknife, which is nameable. Add a obj_resists call in the crysknife reversion process to make it so that artifact crysknives either never revert to worm teeth or do so very rarely.

The other properties of such an artifact are unspecified.

#4490

 · 
vanilla

Getting crowned as a lawful character should unlock the ability to dip for Excalibur if you are currently unable to, or raise the odds for successfully dipping to what Knights get.

#4491

 · 
SpliceHack

If you are a gnome and encounter a monster wearing stomping boots, they can stomp on you to instantly kill you, just like the hero is able to do to small monsters while wearing those boots.

#4492

 · 
SpliceHack

Support blood splatters with no particular associated monster type (NON_PM). Such splatters will render as nondescript blood.

When saving a bones file, go through all the blood splatters on the level and set them to this nonspecific type. This avoids a bit of weirdness where a new adventurer enters the bones file, sees the splatters, and can immediately identify what type of monster each one came from.

#4493

 · 
vanilla

You can hit monsters with a spellbook of cancellation to cancel them.

#4494

 · 
vanilla

An option that only triggers at the start of the game and adjusts objects into certain letter slots, so players can start the game with items in familiar locations. It would probably be regex-based.

Also mentioned was full lua scripting support similar to what DCSS allows, but that is potentially overkill for this feature.

New ‘Soldier’ role. You start with various gear typically issued to soldiers: a basic weapon or two, basic armor, some K-rations etc. The quest involves working with other soldiers to defend a castle (probably not THE Castle?) from adventurers. Other army members would be generated peaceful.

Another take on this is a “Defector” role in which you have defected or escaped from the Yendorian Army. The starting gear would be the same, but the quest would probably involve sabotaging the army somehow.

#4496

 · 
vanilla

Pleather armor, an object that is mostly identical to leather armor, but is made out of plastic.

  • If you somehow eat it, it counts as vegan.
  • It’s much lighter than leather armor.
  • If it gets exposed to extreme cold, it can become brittle and break.
  • If it gets exposed to fire, it can melt, causing extra damage to the wearer.

#4497

 · 
vanilla

Standing on a magic trap’s space causes your magic energy to regenerate faster than normal; not incredibly so as if you had the energy regeneration extrinsic, but a noticeable boost.

#4498

 · 
vanilla

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.

If the Minetown Watch are hostile and subdue you (reducing you to 0 or low HP, or possibly only if you chat to them to surrender), they throw you in jail instead of simply killing you. This probably takes the form of a special jail level where you start out having regained your HP but have lost most or all of your possessions. The jail level is staffed with more watchmen (it could also be guards, but those are specifically guarding vaults).

There could be a variety of ways to escape:

  • solving a special puzzle involving moving iron bars or walls and levers/buttons
  • bribing or seducing the guards
  • using stealth to sneak past the guards
  • or just waiting a certain amount of time without dying.

#4500

 · 
vanilla

Chaotic artifact weapon that has a 10 or 20 percent chance of randomly teleporting its target somewhere else on the level, assuming the level isn’t non-teleport. Possibly, enchanting it increases the chance of the teleport happening.

#4501

 · 
vanilla

Rangers have a lower chance of triggering a trap they created themselves, since they are supposed to be pretty experienced in laying traps for creatures and not triggering them.

#4502

 · 
vanilla

On April 20, all petrifying attacks of monsters have the same effects they do on a new moon, i.e. making stoning more likely.

#4503

 · 
vanilla

On April 15 (tax filing day in the United States), you are charged a sales tax in shops.

#4504

 · 
vanilla

Alternate design of Fort Ludios that has a bigger, three-part fort containing a room with multiple copies of “Croesus”, one of which is the real one and the others are different monsters in disguise.

The idea here is to reinforce the implication that he regularly uses different guises to guard his riches, which explains why you can so easily lie to guards that you are Croesus in a better way than them just being super gullible.

#4505

 · 
EvilHack

Shops run by drow shopkeepers should always be unlit rooms.

#4506

 · 
vanilla

You should be able to #tip potions onto your own square or onto an adjacent square. When tipped, it causes vapor effects to all monsters in the 3x3 area around that square, including yourself, and also causes “potion on skin” effects to the monster it was tipped onto. Some potions may not have such an effect beyond their vapors, but ones like polymorph, acid, and healing ought to.

Among other things, this provides a way to administer polymorph or healing potions to a pet without attacking it with a wielded potion.

#4507

 · 
vanilla

If you do not have fire resistance, lava is too hot to levitate or fly over due to the enormous amount of heat it produces. Doing so anyway will burn you up as if you had stepped into the lava.

#4508

 · 
vanilla

Chatting to a quantum mechanic can result in them talking to you about physics, causing you to become confused.

#4509

 · 
vanilla

Wielding Stormbringer cuts the failure rate of the drain life spell, and only that spell, in half.

#4510

 · 
xNetHack

In Cocytus (or possibly any levels with a “cold” temperature), corpses rot more slowly.

#4511

 · 
vanilla

On the vibrating square level, there is a small (perhaps 5% or 1%) chance that a death drop will produce one or a few candle instead of the random item it would be otherwise, meaning that even if you have used up all the other candles in the game, you don’t have to resort to either wishing or grinding for the much lower odds of naturally getting candles from a death drop.

#4512

 · 
vanilla

The ring of sustain ability also protects you from level drain, though to be consistent it also prevents you from gaining any levels.

#4513

 · 
vanilla

There should be some way to enter the Valley of the Dead without requiring fighting through or looping around the Castle, in order to allow a player struggling to get up to the Quest experience level threshold to access the resources in the Valley.

#4514

 · 
vanilla

When the player is polymorphed into a gelatinous cube, their carrying capacity should be infinite or otherwise maximized, similar to if they polymorphed into a nymph. This is because gelatinous cubes can “carry” everything inside their body without it encumbering them.

#4515

 · 
vanilla

HP recovery is faster when your HP is at a lower percentage than it is at a higher percentage (i.e. you heal fast, but it gradually slows as you heal). This would mean it’s an advantage in terms of turns spent to rest only when injured.

#4516

 · 
vanilla

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.

#4517

 · 
vanilla

If you have maintained the pacifist conduct, any Healer player monsters that generate will be peaceful.

#4518

 · 
vanilla

Make unicorns capable of healing only fatal illness, in order to stop it from rendering every other status recovery item pointless.

#4519

 · 
vanilla

Armor enchantments should slowly time out and reduce to a lower state. The rate could be either linear, i.e. a point of enchantment expires every 2000 turns, or it could be faster at higher amounts of enchantment, i.e. a +1 armor is pretty stable but a +5 will decay to +4 fairly fast.

#4520

 · 
vanilla

Reduce the ability of holy water to bless large objects and stacks, by telling the player “Your [item(s)] is too large to dip into one bottle”. From there, it could either prompt “Use X bottles instead?”, tell you you don’t currently have enough potions, or suggest you apply multiple potions instead of dipping.

Small and single objects would still be blessable by using one potion.

#4521

 · 
vanilla

Replace the random markup on only some unidentified items sold by a shop with a multiplier that is always between 1.0 and 2.0, but is always the same within the same shop, and is applied to all unidentified items in it. The multiplier is biased towards the lower end of that range by taking the square root of a random number from 1 to 4 (or mathematically equivalent constructions that minimize reliance on floating point calculations in the code, such as taking the square root of a number from 25 to 100 then dividing the result by 5).

#4522

 · 
vanilla

Amulets of life saving only generate when a lich generates, either in its inventory or somewhere else on the level where it first generated. Each amulet is tied to its lich, and the lich can only be permanently killed when its amulet is destroyed (including by the player using it up to save their own life, but not limited to that; any method of destroying it such as looting it from a cursed bag of holding would work). If the amulet remains intact, the lich will eventually resurrect.

If a lich is genocided, any amulets connected to liches of that type aren’t destroyed, but stop being effective to save lives. Possibly there should be some visible indicator of this, such as the amulet being cracked. If all liches are genocided, then no amulets of life saving will work.

Not specified what would happen if an amulet of life saving is wished for; probably either the amulet doesn’t work, or it spawns a random lich it’s connected to somewhere on the level.

#4523

 · 
EvilHack

In variants with a playable giant race which has a faster hunger rate, heroes of other races who polymorph into giants should also experience this faster hunger rate.

#4524

 · 
vanilla

Eating an amulet of reflection (which doesn’t provide any intrinsic) causes you to “reflect on your inner self”, providing enlightenment.

#4525

 · 
vanilla

Archeologists never get charged an unidentified markup in shops, because they know when a shopkeeper is trying to cheat and take advantage of their lack of knowledge.

#4526

 · 
FIQHack

The potion of wonder gives both a positive and negative intrinsic when quaffed, and both a positive and negative object property when something is dipped into it.

#4527

 · 
vanilla

Add more monsters, probably additional types of eyes, which have various area-of-effect “auras”: not attacks, but things which inflict both good and bad statuses on everything around them. Effects could range from slowing down, to conflict, to confusion, and various other things.

#4528

 · 
vanilla

Mirrors carried openly in your inventory act as a weak source of reflection: if you have no other source of reflection, they will block an incoming ray (possibly only a death ray), at the expense of breaking and costing you 2 points of luck as breaking a mirror usually does, except if your luck is already negative it won’t be penalized further. Arguably it shouldn’t apply a luck penalty at all unless the player caused the ray; after all, you aren’t punished for a monster zapping a wand of striking and breaking a mirror on the ground.

This would allow better protection against random attack wands early in the game, when mirrors can be found but a permanent reflection source is rare.

#4529

 · 
vanilla

If the player is about to be hit with a death ray and has not yet expended their saving grace, the saving grace protects them from the instadeath. Probably by converting the ray hit (and any reflections from the same ray?) into a miss; otherwise the game would have to explain why a non-resistant character got hit by a death ray and failed to die.

#4530

 · 
vanilla

An uncursed scroll of enchant armor that targets a +0 (or below?) piece of armor will raise its enchantment the same amount as it would if it were blessed (1 to 3 points).

The purpose of this is to incentivize players using them earlier in the game, and therefore smoothing out the gain in AC over time, rather than hoarding them and only ever using them when blessed and on ascension kit items, which tends to mean a huge gain in AC all at once. This isn’t intended to make using them earlier the clearly best strategy, just to make it a more balanced choice.

#4531

 · 
vanilla

Orctown generating should force a temple to be generated somewhere else in the main dungeon, possibly around level 15. Without this, there is a possibility the player’s first opportunity to buy divine protection will be late in the game at the Valley of the Dead.

A ramification of this change is that the game would have to know it is generating Orctown at the beginning of the game, rather than deciding it when Minetown generates by picking among its variants randomly.

#4532

 · 
vanilla

Remove the ring of levitation. This is because it is too good at solving interesting problems from the player: for the low cost of a ring slot used only situationally, the player can bypass water, lava, most traps, and wield cockatrices with almost total immunity. It can then be taken off when not wanted and put back on whenever situationally needed again.

As an alternative to removing the ring, add some cost to using it, such as requiring them to be invoked to get levitation, subject to a cooldown to use them again, although that is strange and unprecedented for non-artifact items.

The boots of levitation have more or less the same problems as the ring, only slightly less so because they are heavier and swapping out boots takes a little longer. These could also be removed, and replaced with an artifact pair of boots that confers levitation, themed after the talaria winged boots Perseus borrowed from Hermes. (This also has some potential for strangeness, because Perseus’s statue appears in the game and sometimes contains levitation boots; would the boots always be this artifact if it doesn’t exist already?)

#4533

 · 
vanilla

Conflict should cause monsters to prioritize moving toward and attacking targets they would attack anyway (like the player) over targets they wouldn’t (like other monsters), instead of it being fully random.

The purpose of this is to maintain the offensive use of conflict (monsters deal damage to each other) while nerfing the defensive use of conflict (monsters are too busy attacking each other to worry about or even approach the player), and so make conflict overall not quite as powerful for trivializing tough areas of the game like the Sanctum and Astral.

#4534

 · 
vanilla

Add some way for the player to spawn a sleeping, non-mindless monster on the magic portal in the Elemental Planes. This provides an alternate method of portal detection, and additionally allows the player to track the moving location of the portal on the Plane of Water.

#4535

 · 
vanilla

Allow some Gehennom filler levels to be non-persistent in a limited manner. They will generate new maps and terrain upon being re-entered, but will retain all the monsters and objects they had, which will be placed in random spots. Since this compensates for the mysterious force by delaying the ascension run and offering more time for harassment and monster spawns, remove the mysterious force as well.

Implement “special abilities” for each role that behave like (or simply are) techniques, but which would probably use the #monster command. These include:

  • Monks’ ability continuously doubles their martial arts damage (i.e. x2, x4, etc) for as long as they keep landing hits within one action. Missing or declining to attack breaks this effect.
  • Wizards can extract magic from the air, which drains Pw from enemies and gives it to the hero.
  • Tourists can throw a party, which pacifies everyone within some range until someone takes damage.
  • Barbarians can buff their attack, perhaps by giving any weapon a Cleaver-like arc (though they often get Cleaver anyway).
  • Archeologists can detect enchanted treasure (not just all objects) on the level.
  • Priests don’t get a new ability because they already have one: turn undead.
  • Valkyries can freeze an area near them, freezing water into ice and dealing cold damage to monsters that is higher the closer they are to the hero.
  • Samurai can swap places with a hostile monster, dealing some damage and stunning them in the process.
  • Cavemen can get a big boost to stone throwing/slinging range and damage, or can get some sort of “primal rage” that boosts speed and doubles all damage.
  • Knights can give their steed a free attack after each hit they land on something (which can extend to dragon breathing if they are riding a dragon).

The other half of this idea is to give other unique abilities to each demon boss, but these aren’t specified.

Interestingly, using the #monster command implies that you can only use these abilities when in your normal non-polymorphed form.

#4537

 · 
vanilla

Insects on Baalzebub’s level have double speed and deal double damage. Baalzebub can cast summon insects (or otherwise has that as a special ability that isn’t actually spellcasting).

#4538

 · 
vanilla

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

#4539

 · 
vanilla

Aligned priests can use turn undead against undead monsters they want to attack. “Want to attack” is not currently well-defined for priests vs undead in NetHack, but it would probably follow these rules:

  • High priests don’t turn undead, for simplicity.
  • Priests of Moloch turn the player if they are polymorphed into an undead, but don’t turn other undead monsters.
  • Other priests turn undead that are near them, whether that is the player or not. This opens up an interesting strategy where you can flee from undead into a temple and the priest will help you out.

#4540

 · 
vanilla

When a monster or the player levelports or branchports, it leaves a magic portal behind which lasts for 5 turns. Other creatures can enter this portal to appear on the same level in the same spot as the initial creature did. The portal is probably one-way, and can’t take you back to the original spot.

#4541

 · 
vanilla

If you are wearing crystal plate mail over a shirt, you can still read the shirt, because the mail is transparent.

#4542

 · 
vanilla

Baluchitheria should eat (and thus destroy) trees they happen to encounter, since they did this in real life.

#4543

 · 
vanilla

Have a small visual element on the screen like a border or a 2x2 area in the corner. When NetHack completes a screen redraw or is otherwise ready for input, update this element with a symbol crawling around the border or bouncing around the corner to provide a visual indication to the player. This is intended for laggy connections, so you can tell whether your input was processed or not.

#4544

 · 
vanilla

When you unpolymorph, you temporarily keep any intrinsics you had from that form and which you no longer have. How long it is before these intrinsics time out isn’t specified, but probably contains some random component so you can’t plan around when the intrinsic will lapse.

This was suggested for a hypothetical druid role, but noted that it doesn’t have to be a role-specific mechanic and could apply to other roles as well.

#4545

 · 
wands balance patch

Zapping a wand of polymorph at Master skill gives you control over the form the target monsters polymorph into, whether that is yourself or others. Other monsters still get their chance to resist the polymorph entirely.

It would not give you control over what an object would polymorph into, for obvious reasons.

However, if there are monsters that can use the wand of polymorph at master skill, this has the potential to become very annoying very fast, since they would be able to turn the player into a sessile monster, make them break their armor, or turn themselves into something very threatening and out of depth.

#4546

 · 
vanilla

New conduct, permaconflict, which must be enabled by setting an option. If you play the game with this, you constantly generate conflict, which likely makes some aspects of the game much easier and some much more difficult.

Not specified whether the permanent conflict would cause extra hunger like the ring does, or not cause any like artifacts do.

#4547

 · 
vanilla

Remove the recharge counter from objects. Most tools can be infinitely recharged, so they don’t need one. For wands, replace the recharge count with a chance of a wand becoming eroded when the wand is recharged, or of exploding if recharged when already eroded.

Not specified what happens for the few items that don’t follow this pattern, such as magic markers and the wand of wishing. For the wand, it will likely work to make the erosion guaranteed the first time, and the explosion guaranteed when it’s already eroded. Magic markers could possibly just be un-rechargeable.

#4548

 · 
FIQHack

A game mode that allows you to keep playing after death. There are two ways this could go:

  • Continue playing as the monster who killed you. This game mode would likely be non-scoring, and your actual character’s death would be written out in the normal manner.
  • Continue playing as your own corpse. In this mode, you are effectively a blind, deaf, and sessile monster who can take no actions other than resting. The game finally ends when your corpse rots away. This is mainly interesting combined with an implementation where allies can zap your corpse with undead turning to resurrect you; if they do so before you rot away, then you can keep playing. It’s not clear what would happen if you are petrified instead; a statue can survive indefinitely, and the odds of a pet being able to stone-to-flesh your statue are low but not zero, so possibly the criteria should instead be “you die when there are no more pets on the level”. This still has a problem in that some pets could survive indefinitely, though.

#4549

 · 
vanilla

Disarming all the land mines in Fort Ludios without any of them exploding increases Luck by 1.

#4550

 · 
vanilla

Give a paranoid confirmation prompt when the player is levitating or flying over a liquid and attempts to remove an item that would result in them losing that levitation or flying and falling in.

#4551

 · 
vanilla

Expose some additional information to Lua special level files in order to let level designers put sanity checks and impossibles into their code which won’t be hit in the course of “normal” gameplay. This could be any combination of the following:

  • nh.is_sanity_check_on(), which exposes the sanity_check flag.
  • nh.in_wizard_mode(), which is true if the game is in wizard mode and is therefore being debugged.
  • nh.devel_status() which returns a string version of NH_DEVEL_STATUS - “released”, “beta”, “work-in-progress”, etc.
  • nh.iflags("xyz") which returns the value of the boolean “xyz” in iflags; especially useful for the debug_fuzzer flag.

#4552

 · 
vanilla

If a monster is both covetous and has the ability to break boulders, allow them to warp onto the same space as a boulder next to the hero if there is no free space to land, and destroy the boulder with a message like “[Mon] materializes in the same space as the boulder, shattering it to bits!”

#4553

 · 
vanilla

When a unique monster is removed from a bones file and the bones file is subsequently loaded, a special message is produced that hints at what the monster would have been.

#4554

 · 
vanilla

Further nerf drain-for-gain tactics by having the game remember what you spent each new experience level’s skill slot on and automatically restore those skill slots when you regain levels you lost. If you want to reskill, you can use amnesia.

#4555

 · 
vanilla

Crystal balls can be used to find which level any of the unique items is currently on. Unspecified how it would show different branches or if this works on items you have never seen (if it did, you could use it to look for the Amulet and figure out how deep the dungeon is).

#4556

 · 
SLASHTHEM

Add a new Researcher role to SLASHTHEM, based on its Drunk role, but based on scrolls instead of potions: they start with a bunch of random scrolls but not much else, and have a technique that creates identify scrolls but stuns you in the process (which might be redundant with the existing research technique).

#4557

 · 
vanilla

A new role (or possibly just a new mechanic attached to something like Infidel) flavored on being a cultist. The key feature is being able to create a summoning circle on the ground and somehow expend corpses inside that circle to summon a pet; better pets can be gained at higher levels or with more powerful monsters’ corpses.

#4558

 · 
vanilla

If a pet attempts to attack a monster a certain amount of times and misses every time, it will give up and stop trying to attack that specific monster.

You can use a wielded saber to parry attacks from other monsters made with bladed weapons. There are a few proposals for how this would work:

  • Reduce the monster’s to-hit, so it misses more often.
  • On some low percentage of attacks that would hit, negate all damage from the attack and produce a message indicating you parried it.

#4560

 · 
vanilla

Certain monsters with heavy tails (possibly defined as all slithy monsters, but there could be non-slithy monsters as well) can use tail slam attacks. This could be implemented as a new attack type, but more likely should just be implemented with the regular AT_KICK attack with the messages changed to reflect the tail doing it.

#4561

 · 
vanilla

On Easter, eggs appear in various bright colors instead of plain white.

A new object either inspired by, or literally, a Pokeball. It allows you to “pick up” pets by putting them into the ball (probably not along with any items), carry them around, and re-release them at a later point.

#4563

 · 
vanilla

Rework figurines to behave sort of like dNetHack crystal skulls. Applying them summons a tame monster of the figurine’s type, but produces a message “You call forth the spirit in the figurine”. The figurine does not get used up, and remains linked to the monster; reapplying it while the monster exists will recall it; it can then be resummoned again right away. If it dies while summoned, the figurine cracks and becomes unusable. Possibly there is some way to restore it, such as dipping it in a potion of restore ability.

In order to avoid tricky cases such as the summoned monster dying when the figurine is not on the current level, it might automatically unsummon the monster when the figurine and the monster stop being on the same level.

#4564

 · 
dNetHack

Artifact helm of telepathy, neutral aligned, that either enhances or blocks telepathy level-wide based on whether you have it from some source other than the helm (or alternatively, it’s not a helm of telepathy, and just bases things on whether you are telepathic), and grants a Charisma-based bonus to your armor class.

If you do have telepathy, all other monsters get telepathy too and you can sense them, and they will be affected by telepathy-targeting effects, including yours if you have any psionic abilities.

If you don’t have telepathy, all other monsters will be treated as if they are not telepathic, even if they are; they will also be blocked from using any mind blasts or other psychic powers.

New role based on a “loup du noir” archetype, possibly called the Lycanthrope - you start with a pelt, a new sort of cloak-slot armor that polymorphs you into a specific type of monster when you wear it. You also are inflicted with some sort of delayed lycanthropy - you won’t randomly polymorph into a monster like with standard lycanthropy, but after not using a pelt for a while, you do start feeling the urge to put one on, and if you still refuse, you are eventually compelled to put one on. (It isn’t specified what happens if you get rid of your pelt(s) by the time you would be compelled to wear one; possibly you just die from insanity, or else the addiction is implemented in some other way like continuous worsening HP damage.)

The form you get from wearing a pelt has some boosted stats from the base form - in particular, your carrying capacity and damage would be better than the stat blocks for the monsters suggest.

You could start with either a “default” pelt which is not very good, but can be turned into an ideal one later, or start with a specific animal’s pelt, which you can control with the pettype option. This role never starts with a pet.

Pelts might also work as a standalone concept or one that works with a druid, ranger, or caveman role:

  • You can obtain a pelt by using a knife to skin the corpse of some monster that would reasonably have a pelt. This will probably be an occupation, and either its time or success rate will vary based on your knife skill and if you have a role-specific bonus.
  • By using some sort of magic (instead of it being inherent to a role), you can transform into the animal whose pelt you are wearing.
  • Pelts confer some benefit when worn as a cloak besides the ability to polymorph, which varies depending on the monster species, such as a boost to damage.

#4566

 · 
vanilla

A cloak which, if worn by a light-emitting monster, blocks them from emitting light. Also applies to the player if they are carrying a light source or polymorphed into a light-emitting monster.

#4567

 · 
dNetHack

Clockwork dwarves you encounter should occasionally drop their own form of “booze” (i.e. oil) instead of regular booze.

#4568

 · 
vanilla

If you are in a form that has a headbutt attack and are wearing a helmet, the helmet’s enchantment should be added to your to-hit and damage calculations.

#4569

 · 
vanilla

A sort of marker that has non-water-soluble ink, and produces books and scrolls that are immune to blanking in water.

#4570

 · 
vanilla

You can tip a potion of levitation onto the ground, which in addition to its normal vapor effects, causes any objects buried there to float to the surface.

Not specified on if this would have an effect when over a liquid; perhaps the items would temporarily float to the surface and immediately sink back down.

#4571

 · 
vanilla

Bones are only loaded when the experience level (or highest experience level reached) of the dead player is less than or equal to the current player’s experience level.

Add a themed room commemorating the long-lived tactic of pudding farming. It has the following properties:

  • It is a huge room, possibly a variant of the “Huge room” themed room with no subroom.
  • On one space in the middle of the room is the pudding farmer, a random player monster.
    • They generate at level 15-30, as they do on the Astral Plane, but don’t have the same equipment as they would get on the Astral Plane, just the regular gear a player monster would get. Possibly some nicer gear under the assumption they’ve farmed it off the puddings.
    • They are hostile to the player, unless of the same role, in which case they are peaceful.
    • The pudding farmer also carries a thoroughly rusty -3 knife or stiletto, their Puddingbane, though it is not named as such.
    • Messages and farlook show their name as having replaced their rank title with “Pudding Farmer”, e.g. “Fred the Pudding Farmer”.
  • The remaining spaces in the room have some reasonably high chance of spawning a black pudding, with varying degrees of reduced current and maximum HP.
  • There may be a sink somewhere on the room’s floor, from which the initial pudding came.
  • No globs of pudding on the floor from already-killed puddings; the thematic thing would be to have pudding corpses, which no longer exist in vanilla. Globs would imply the player monster has been pudding farming in NetHack 3.6 or later, which doesn’t make much sense.
  • The minimum level difficulty of this room is 4, though that seems awfully low given how dangerous it’s likely to be. It could be based on the difficulty of black puddings, such as the difficulty of a black pudding + 3.
  • One option to cut down on the gimmickiness of it is to have the corpse of a player monster, possibly with some gear, but not the player monster themselves, implying they slipped up and fell victim to the puddings.
  • Since it was possible to pudding farm brown puddings in earlier versions of NetHack, there could be some chance that this room consists of brown puddings instead, which could then appear at a slightly lower difficulty and would lack a sink. Though this would be strange in the above case of there being a corpse rather than a player monster, since brown puddings cannot deal damage (maybe they choked?)

Themed room named “Home Sweet Home” - one that a former adventurer has retired in and made their own. There is a peaceful player monster inside, and some trappings of home life such as a sink, a chest, food, and so on. If beds as a dungeon feature exist, there is also one of these.

The game doesn’t adequately signal that sinking in lava while fire resistant will become fatal given time. There are a few possible solutions depending on how much the model of “dissolved in molten lava” is changed:

  • Messages involving sinking in lava should indicate more clearly to the player that even though they are fire resistant, they will eventually die by sinking below the surface and dissolving. Possibly separate messages when the timeout is getting low, such as “You are beginning to dissolve.” and “You are dissolving faster.”
  • Sinking in lava while fire resistant is fine, and doesn’t kill the hero if they have magical breathing. The death that occurs if they don’t is changed to “drowned in molten lava”. This could mean the hero can swim through lava so long as they retain both fire resistance and magical breathing.
  • Sinking in lava dissolves parts of the hero’s body as they go deeper, causing progressively increasing amounts of HP damage, probably fractions of maximum HP, which eventually go over 100% as they slip fully underneath and kill them outright even if they’ve been healing the damage every time. Messages would also need to be updated.

#4575

 · 
vanilla

If you manage to avoid dying by sinking in lava by freezing it solid, you are stuck to the spot for a few turns and when you escape, you leave your boots behind (probably either destroyed, since they cannot be recovered from the solid stone, or buried, and recoverable by digging a pit on the spot).

#4576

 · 
vanilla

Replace the amulet in the portal-less fake Wizard’s Tower with a magic marker.

#4577

 · 
vanilla

Intrinsic teleportitis gained from eating corpses is temporary if you don’t already have it. Eating additional corpses while having the temporary intrinsic has a chance (less than 100%) of providing the intrinsic permanently.

Eating a ring of teleportation should probably be unchanged: if you digest the magic in the ring, you always get the permanent intrinsic.

#4578

 · 
vanilla

Aligned priests that have cursed gear can cast remove curse on themselves to get rid of the curse. It would be one of their clerical spells that can be cast when idle, such as healing. Possibly only if they have a spellbook of remove curse in their inventory.

#4579

 · 
vanilla

Special armor that some role starts with, either magical or very good stats-wise, but once you remove it either suffers serious damage and requires requires resource-expensive repair to put back on, or simply disintegrates. The flavor would probably be something like spiritual armor gifted to you by your god. The armor would have to be not so good that one would never want to take it off; decent mundane early-game armor would be a general improvement over it, perhaps suggesting that the special armor should be magical in a very situationally useful way.

Inspired by a bug in which a giant character could start wearing body armor, which was too small for them and which, being a giant, they could never put back on once taken off.

#4580

 · 
vanilla

A “slotlocks” option, taking a string which specifies the inventory letter slots you really do not want newly-acquired items to go into, such as the ones you usually reserve for key pieces of gear.

As an example, if you have OPTIONS=slotlocks:aGHsdy, no inventory items will be placed on any of those letters until they are the only remaining open slots. Once that happens, the first open slot in the string, “a”, will be filled, unless you already put something in that slot, in which case “G” will be attempted, and so on.

Adjusting items to different slots is not affected by slotlocks since it’s presumed you are deliberately putting an item in that slot.