Certain races should be able to forge using materials other races can’t:

• Dwarves can forge with crystal items, and possibly stone.
• Orcs can forge with stone items. Bone would be more flavorful for orcs, but less flavorful in being something that can actually be forged with.

If Kathryn the Ice Queen misses with a spell or fails to cast a spell, she should pout or stamp her foot (or something else appropriately childish) rather than cursing.

If you have 25 Charisma, you become capable of declining Graz’zt’s attempts at seducing you.

Limit over-genociding in some way. The exact mechanism is unspecified, but the general idea is the more things you genocide, it either becomes harder (i.e. genocides may randomly fail) or each additional species genocided carries an increasing penalty of some sort.

Genociding a type of dragon destroys all dragon scales and dragon scale mail (or dragon-scaled armor in certain variants) that exist in the game, and makes them impossible to wish for in the future.

A new branch, probably in Gehennom, consisting of an underground mind flayer city. There are some neothelids attacking the city and mind flayers are trying to kill them, but everyone involved still wants to eat the player’s brain.

Zombies should be able to pick up and put on mummy wrappings they find on the ground, which instantly turns them into their corresponding mummy.

Dramborleg and Ashmar should have an invoke effect that only dwarves can use, or alternatively should synergize and give a buff when both wielded by a dwarf.

Modify iron balls so that they become a viable weapon to use. This means they need to be enchantable, much lighter than now (possibly the two can be combined and enchanting makes them lighter without reducing the ball’s damage), and still attached to the chain while the other end is not attached to the hero’s leg.

Allow a random set of player monsters to not know about blowing up bags of holding. Ones that do know about it will avoid storing items in a bag of holding they’re carrying that would blow it up; ones that don’t will store anything, and may blow up the bag if they insert a dangerous item.

An artifact magic whistle that can find your pets on any levels they have wandered to and summon them to your side, the same as a regular magic whistle can do for any pets on your level.

Infidels are the opposite of priests, so they should only be allowed to use edged weapons and be banned from using just-piercing or blunt weapons, as an inverse of priests’ weapon restrictions.

If you cast flame sphere or freeze sphere, and there is already a tame sphere on the level that you summoned with the spell, the first one should explode. This would allow you to get them to “attack” monsters that they currently won’t attack.

If you are a chaotic Knight, Excalibur should evade your grasp, being impossible to pick up as if it were a crossaligned quest artifact.

(Additional rule for EvilHack: Dirge should evade the grasp of lawful knights.)

There should be a “black glow” message for when items get cursed by a fountain (either by quaffing or dipping).

A new game mode or role that allows the player to play as the Wizard of Yendor. The goal of the game is not to get the Amulet of Yendor, but to get down into Gehennom, find the Book of the Dead, and establish themselves in the Wizard’s Tower.

Hobbits should get a bonus for remaining barefoot (or alternatively, should get a penalty for wearing boots).

It should be possible to forge spell staves, possibly by combining a quarterstaff with multiple spellbooks of the appropriate school. The only problem is this is not very flavorful with a red-hot forge, which might suggest that there should be some alternate crafting method that can be used to create them.

If you are wielding Dragonbane, dragons should not like eating it. So they should either not try to eat you at all, or regurgitate you after eating you as if you were wearing slow digestion.

To make them more accurate to D&D lore, all beholders should grudge all other beholders.

Quaffing a potion of unholy water as an Infidel should cure any deathly illness you are suffering, as an inverse of how quaffing holy water works for everyone else.

Leprechauns should get buffed on St. Patrick’s Day. There are various ways this could be done; probably the easiest is giving them more starting gold but also increasing the damage of their attacks.

When you push a boulder onto a polymorph trap, it should get polymorphed into a statue or, possibly, another boulder.

Change Sunsword to Sunshield, a shield of light (or shield of reflection in variants that lack a shield of light) which does not impede spellcasting when worn.

There should be a method of fixing the speed of pets which have been permanently slowed and which have a high monster magic resistance. Either the wand of speed monster should ignore monster MR on tame monsters, or it should be possible to break a potion of speed on the pet to remove the slowness.

Replace monsters’ “ice bolt” spell with a spell of freezing and/or flaming sphere. The intention of this is to make it more tactical to fight early-game spellcasters who currently cast ice bolt.

One of the dragon armors should confer energy regeneration as its primary or secondary extrinsic. The problem is there aren’t any obvious candidates which would be appropriately flavorful, other than gray dragon armor, and that is unsuitable because it would be overpowered.

Drow knights should start with a baby cave lizard, which they can ride.

Reading a scroll of scare monster teaches you about Elbereth.

The spell of light has an advanced form that makes you a light source for some temporary length of time, flavored as summoning an incorporeal globe of light that follows you around.

The interface for interacting with containers should replace ‘A’ as the key for “insert all” with a harder-to-hit key such as “`”, because most bag of holding explosions come from fatfingering “A” instead of “a”.

Drow get more nutrition when eating fungi and mold, since they come from a culture which has spent generations cultivating them underground.

Wizards should have be restricted in all weapons. To compensate, Magicbane should have its base type changed to a wand, and its specialty should be that it has a random wand effect when zapped, with infinite charges.

Monsters that spellcast should get assigned (or deterministically hashed based on their monster ID) a randomized spell list when they’re created, and are capable of casting only the spells from that list. It would add diversity to spellcasters of the same monster type.

A new spell called “forceful palms” that grants you a temporary buff. This buff increases the damage of your unarmed attacks, and either increases the chances of or guarantees the monster you hit will be knocked back.

Every time you genocide something, all shambling horrors gain another new ability.

Remove centaurs’ ability to wear body armor, but allow them to wear barding instead.

Since giants cannot wear chromatic dragon scales, it should be possible to combine 3 sets of each dragon’s colored scales into a giant-sized chromatic dragon scale cloak.

Draugr should have a chance of failing to revive on graveyard levels.

Monks should start the game knowing the burning hands spell instead of confuse monster, as they’re both melee-focused enchantment spells, but burning hands lets them situationally increase their direct damage rather than indirectly debuffing the opponents.

A player turned into a zombie permanently via dying to one and continuing their game as a zombie can no longer cast spells. (A player temporarily polymorphed into a zombie retains their mind and can still cast spells.)

Draugr should be able to scare non-undead monsters by chatting to them.

If you use Ogresmasher as your hammer at a forge, the resulting forged object should have a small chance of being imbued with an object property.

In variants with both menuglyphs and object materials, the glyph shown in the menu should match the object’s material.

This could be done relatively easily with a hacky solution in ASCII windowports, but a proper implementation for tiles-based windowports would be challenging since it amounts to adding new tiles for every object-material combination.

Draugrs should be able to bite trees to turn them into dead trees.

Draugr should be shown either in #conduct or in #attributes how many times they have resurrected after being killed.

The Mitre of Holiness should, when worn, passively provide a damage bonus against undead and demons you attack.

Scrolls of magic detection should work on the contents of a magic chest, if you read the scroll while there is a magic chest on the level. This would treat magic chests the same as in other containers rather than as a weird exception.

It should be possible to get a tame player monster, but only from a bones level: you would need to tame the ghost of the former player and use undead turning to draw it back into its body. The tameness of the ghost would then be reflected in the player monster being tame.

A draugr Infidel should have their starting fire horn replaced with a frost horn, since they’re undead.

There should be more types of skeletal monsters in the game beyond the one-level-wonder ordinary skeletons (and technically liches). Particularly, there should be skeleton dragons, whose scale mail makes you inediate (not just slow digesting).

More types of skeletons appearing in more places would also allow for a “bone” item to be dropped, which various interesting things could be done with.

An identification-less conduct - you are prohibited from identifying any items. There are three possible implementations of this, in ascending order of strictness:

1. The conduct is broken when you use identification magic to fully identify an item. This does mean it’s a risk to sit on thrones, as the “insight” effect may fully identify your inventory without warning. Use-identifying (e.g. zapping a wand, seeing a bolt of fire, and learning that all wands of that type are wands of fire) is fine.
2. A birth option which shuts off formal identification and use-identification. This would likely just create a lot of tedium, though - the player would be incentivized to type-name object classes that they know for certain as soon as they learn them.
3. A birth option which shuts off formal identification, use-identification, AND the discoveries list (so type-naming is not allowed and you always just see items as their appearance). This nominally removes the tedium of the above approach, but could still result in tedium if the player wants to replicate the discoveries list outside the game.

If you have a melee combat buff that causes a visual effect, such as from a confuse monster effect (or other ones in variants, such as the burning hands spell) it should be readily visible in either the #seeweapon ()) command if you are non-blind as e.g. “a - a dagger (weapon in hand). Your hands are glowing red.” or in the #attributes (ctrl-x) command as e.g. “You are able to confuse monsters that you hit.”, or both. Possibly, if implementing both, the effect should not be provided in #attributes, but only in feedback from enlightenment.

Charges have physical weight in wands. Not a huge amount, perhaps only 2 aum per charge, but enough to make a difference in carrying around tons of loaded wands.

There should be a penalty for reading scrolls with an Intelligence score of less than 8, probably in the form of messing up the reading and getting some undesirable chaotic effect, or possibly just blowing up the scroll and dealing damage.

Portable black hole, a type of bag that automatically destroys any item put into it (except unique items, which “cannot be confined in such trappings” like any other container). The intended use is dungeon cleanup - getting rid of altar farming junk, corpses that will auto-revive, and keeping weapons off the floor that the player doesn’t want to use but doesn’t want monsters to get either.

Items sucked up from the floor into an antimatter vortex (or given to them by #loot, if the vortex is tame) should be disintegrated, rather than held in the vortex’s inventory.

After an milestone that is achieved around early Gehennom, such as killing Cerberus, your god will no longer give you mundane items as sacrifice gifts if there are artifacts available for them to give you.

If you get crowned while wielding a saddle or while mounted, your god should unrestrict riding skill.

A new object that creates a magic chest on any ordinary floor square you want. Proposed as a seed that you plant in the ground, which grows into the chest and whose roots are implied to stretch to the other magic chests.

Draugr (and any undead playable race) should deal double damage at midnight.

If you are attempting to ascend on the altar of a god to whom you permanently converted alignment, you sense a conflict between that god and your original god. There is a 1/3 chance that the original god prevails; in this case you feel their power increase and their voice booms: “You were destined from birth to deliver the amulet to me!” This forcibly converts you (but not the high altar) back to your original alignment. You retain the Amulet of Yendor, and now must make your way to your original god’s altar in order to ascend properly.

Gently discourage Rangers from heavily using daggers by limiting them to Basic skill in dagger.

Extend the weapon wielding system to have a third slot for “alternate weapon, not wielded” when already twoweaponing, and provide a way to switch between the two sets. This would allow you to keep a launcher ready and switch to and from it with minimal friction.

Shops should pay more for older objects than new ones, using the existing age field on the object. Items from bones files would have the previous game’s age added to their age in the current game and therefore would be highly valuable relics.

In variants where gods give non-artifact gifts for sacrifices: There should be some sort of scale, or defined thresholds, of the various object properties, materials, and minimum enchantments available from a non-artifact gift. The idea is that having them be completely random is too swingy and incentivizes early altar farming (if you can get an amazing property/material/both off a newt sacrifice as easily as a minotaur, why not just sacrifice all the newts you can?) and allows for possibly early-game-breaking gifts.

It’s not specified what exactly the scale should be based on - your own experience level, the monster difficulty of the sacrifice, the level difficulty or depth of the altar, or something else.

When your god decides to gift a non-artifact, they should actively avoid gifting any object type the player is already carrying in their inventory or, even more in depth, in any containers in their inventory. Though this raises the possibility of abuse (carrying lots of different candidate gear to make the god pick something else) and the possibility that a player will be sacrificing and hoping to get a certain thing, not remembering that they do already have one of that so they will never get gifted it.

Some priests, not all, should be able to speak sign language so you can purchase protection from them even if you are playing the game permadeaf.

When something has debuffed you to be vulnerable to a certain type of elemental damage, you should be able to eat a corpse or tin of a monster that conveys resistance to that type of elemental damage to cancel out the debuff.

Unicorns should be able to attack you from a knight’s move away without moving from their spot, to make them more tactically challenging to face.

Since the encyclopedia entry on psuedodragons says they change color to blend in with their surroundings, they should do this in the game too: whatever color the walls of the branch are, psuedodragons should be that color.

Jar of honey. This would be either a food item or a potion, and can be applied to smear it on yourself or on your armor like grease. You can also remove it like grease, unless the jar was cursed.

While you are honeyed, monsters generate more frequently, and bees and bears are especially likely to generate. It might also automatically steal noncursed weapons you are hit with in melee, flavored as them getting stuck in the honey.

When a mimic generates on a dungeon feature, they currently choose a random feature to mimic. They should instead always choose the feature on their square.

The Priest forbiddance on using edged weapons should not apply if the weapons are negatively enchanted, because the edges of those are dull.

Occasionally, large groups of monsters with a mutual grudge, such as orcs and elves, should spawn on the same level near each other so that the hero might walk in on a skirmish.

Monsters that can phase should be able to escape bear traps without resistance. If they are solid like xorns, they should still take damage, but they should logically be able to just phase out of the trap.

If you are at low HP and transformed due to lycanthropy, praying to your god should fix the lycanthropy rather than fixing the low HP, which is nearly useless since it’s polyform HP. If they decide to fix multiple troubles, and your regular form is then at low HP, they should consider that as another trouble to fix.

Add a monster spell that makes a nearby other monster berserk. The behavior for a berserking monster is unspecified, but presumably involves it attacking anyone (besides the caster?), or attacking the player, with no regard to whether it was previously peaceful or tame and no concern for its own health.

Gods should use a wider array of solutions to fixing troubles. For instance, a god might give you a pile of corpses or food items that respect conducts you have kept rather than magically filling your stomach.

An ideal implementation would respect the gods’ personalities - e.g. if you’re low on HP and facing a lot of monsters, a “war god” could blast everything near you (but not you) with wide angle disintegration beams, while a “peace god” might pacify everything near you.

Convicts should have a 10% chance of starting the game wearing walking shoes, as a reference to The Shawshank Redemption.

Add a “magic forge” which is like a magic fountain but with forges. It can generate wherever forges generate randomly. Dipping a nonartifact metal weapon in it always grants it 1 random object property, and then the forge either becomes nonmagic or disappears.

Every time a forge blesses a metallic item dipped in it, it should have a small chance of drying up afterwards. Currently this is infinitely repeatable to bless any quantity of metal items since it has no chance of drying up afterwards.

Dragon egg alchemy: Dipping dragon eggs in potions causes them to turn into the potion of the closest color to the dragon’s color.

The healing invoke effect from the Staff of Aesculapius should be made into a directional beam, so you can heal your pets with it. Directing it at yourself would produce the same effects it currently has.

The Staff of Aesculapius’s base type should be changed to a staff of healing. Ironically, this would mostly affect non-healers using it, since healers already get expert in healing spells, but it’s more flavorful to be this rather than a quarterstaff.

Wielding Giantslayer should enable you to pick up and throw boulders like giants can.

A new “insult” attack type, which is sort of like Vicious Mockery in D&D: it deals psychic damage, but you have a chance of resisting or reducing its damage based on your Charisma.

There should be some additional types of wolves (white wolf, black wolf, giant wolf, direwolf, maned wolf, etc) added to flesh out the canine monster class, mainly because in Druid games so many regular wolves will generate that they go extinct and random monsters start generating instead, which hurts the flavor of places in the game designed for wolves.

In variants with partial resistances: crowning confers only up to 50% for all the resistances it grants, to prevent it from making the resistance-acquiring metagame obsolete.

There is some special message or behavior or feeling you get from your god to convey “I can give you no more artifacts” after you receive your first non-artifact gift and there are no artifacts left that they can give you. This saves you from altar farming indefinitely and waiting for a gift that will never come because it already randomly generated somewhere. (Granted, exhausting the artifact gift pool means you have already done quite a lot of altar farming already.)

Tortles should regenerate more quickly when in water.

Wearing boots with the description “riding boots” or gloves with the description “riding gloves” should have a minor beneficial effect related to riding, though what effect this could be is unspecified.

When a monster drinks a cursed potion of invisibility and you feel aggravated at it, you should additionally gain detection of that specific monster for some time (or just permanently, since monster invisibility doesn’t wear off).

Any animal with “rabid” in its name should stay away from water (even things like fountains).

If a monster is decapitated by Vorpal Blade and you are not deaf but can’t see the monster for whatever reason (whether or not you were the one wielding it, or it happened out of your sight elsewhere on the level), you should get the message “You hear a snicker-snack!” or just “Snicker-snack!”

Werebane slows or stops the HP regeneration of monsters it hits. (Most monsters regenerate HP pretty slowly, but it could be nice on ones that regenerate 1 HP per turn.)

Kicking a tree should sometimes knock off dead branches (represented in-game as a few clubs). It should be implemented a third type of tree looting, with its own looted flag, making it non-repeatable on the same tree.

Slumber hulks should have a small chance of dropping a blindfold upon death.

You can apply a shackle to a monster’s corpse. In most cases this does nothing, but if the corpse happens to get revived before it rots away, it will still be shackled.

New object, a fishing rod. It can be applied to adjacent water squares to possibly catch piranhas or snag small items from the bottom of the water.

The messages “You feel less concerned about becoming petrified” and “You no longer feel secure from petrification” should be tweaked, since they don’t really read stylistically like other NetHack messages.

Skeletons should only have partial stoning resistance. If they would become petrified, their bones do petrify, which leaves them still mobile but slowed down, and unable to be cured by speed monster. (This does raise the question of what happens if you cast stone to flesh at the petrified skeleton - does it create a “meat skeleton” or just restore its ordinary bones?)

Wearing white dragon scale armor prevents corpses in your inventory from rotting, which enables you to wield a cockatrice corpse indefinitely.

There should be shops that generate in Gehennom; they have amazing items, but only take payment in gems, with better gems buying better items. There are a couple issues to resolve, though: first, the shopkeeper has to be buffed enough that you can’t just kill them; and second, by Gehennom most randomly generatable items aren’t super useful to the average player.

One way to address the first issue could have these not appear as a traditional shop, but as some sort of wandering peaceful demon species (or randomly peaceful members of existing demon species), each of who offers a single item in exchange for a set list of gems. When paid, they summon the item out of a globe of darkness, so they can’t be killed to get it for free. If you decline the offer, they will turn hostile.

The second issue could be addressed by any of the following methods:

• Sell a limited set of items known to be useful in the endgame such as full healing and gain level potions, genocide scrolls, magic markers, etc.
• Sell items that are highly unlikely to be generated other than via a wish, such as figurines of high-level monsters.
• Create entirely new powerful items, which can only be purchased from those shops and cannot be wished for.

Make the game aware of when there is a solar or lunar eclipse happening (either anywhere on Earth, or specifically where the game is being played or where the server running the game is located). During this time, monsters that ordinarily are restricted to spawn in Gehennom can spawn outside it.

It should be possible for Priests to start the game with a pantheon composed of a lawful, neutral, and chaotic player from the high score list.

Cursed scrolls of genocide should have a 50% chance of prompting for a monster class instead of a single species. If it does, the monsters that get reverse-genocided come from various species in that class.

If you die and are not life-saved, any nearby intelligent pets should be able to zap a wand of undead turning at you in the next few turns to resurrect you, with the message “But wait… You are revived by your faithful [pet]!”

In variants that implement shambling horrors: The attacks and special properties of shambling horrors in a game should be printed to that game’s dumplog (but not shown in the in-game disclosure).

After you get the Amulet of Yendor, priests of Moloch turn hostile or always generate hostile. (This would mainly affect the one in the Valley of the Dead, and ones on Astral, since there are no peaceful priests in the Sanctum.)

A negatively enchanted ring or cloak of protection reduces your magic cancellation by its enchantment amount rather than increasing it. Your magic cancellation stat is also allowed to go negative, rather than being floored at 0.

You can configure a “list for Santa” or “wishlist” in your configuration file which specifies which gifts you would like your god to give you, and they will try to respect this wish.

Gigantic monsters such as dragons cannot be crushed by a drawbridge. They will take a fair amount of damage, but it will destroy the drawbridge instead of them.

Higher monster difficulty sacrifices should have higher odds that a sacrifice will be given than lower-difficulty sacrifices.

(Note that this is not the same as the NetHack 3.7.0 feature in which higher-difficulty sacrifices have a larger, better pool of artifacts that can be given.)

A few extra roles, such as valkyrie and barbarian, should start with Basic riding skill, even though they don’t start with a steed.

Remove the ring of levitation from the game, because it trivializes too many interesting problems - crossing water and lava, fighting monsters that can drown with impunity, avoiding trap doors and holes, freely crossing the Planes of Air and Fire - for the fairly low “cost” of one ring slot. Other gear alternatives to the ring such as levitation boots and the amulet of flying occupy more valuable slots and therefore aren’t as big of an issue.

The priest of Moloch in the Valley of the Dead should always have a cloak of magic resistance, to guarantee that there is a source of magic resistance in the game even if the player is playing wishless.

You should be able to create a sack from a crocodile corpse, similar to how you can turn it into a pair of low boots.

If you kick a wall (or stone terrain), there is a small chance that a rock comes loose from the wall and drops at your feet, or sometimes from the ceiling, in which case it hits you on the head.

A drum of earthquake also causes rocks to randomly be shaken loose from the ceiling in their radius of effect and hit any monster that happens to be on their square.

A “can of mortar” tool, which has charges and can be applied at a stack of rocks to construct a wall or boulder.

If you zap locking or wizard lock at an open doorway containing a boulder, it rebuilds a wall in that space.

If you a destroy a quest leader’s throne, there is a 1 in (Luck + 1) chance that they become angry, but they won’t expel you from the quest until you attack them.

If you eat Ogresmasher, there is a 5% chance that you digest the magic of the artifact and raise your maximum (but not current) Constitution to 25.

Potion of dragon breath: when quaffed, it enables you to use the breath attacks of a specific type of dragon without being polymorphed into that dragon, either for a limited time or for a limited amount of uses or both.

The potion can be crafted by dipping any type of dragon scales in a potion of acid, which destroys the scales and turns the potion into dragon breath. It could be randomly generated, or never generate and rely on the player to make it.

If you specify a wish that has 2 contradicting terms, “rustproof”/”fixed” etc alongside a specific object type that doesn’t suffer from erosion, there should be a chance that the wish parser resolves the contradiction by respecting the erodeproof part and not the object type part, so you end up getting an erodable but erodeproof object that wasn’t the type you asked for.

Since Barbarians are thematically supposed to be wary of magic use, they should get an alignment penalty whenever they use magic. This could just be for casting spells, or it could be made harder (but more relevant since Barbarians tend to do very little spellcasting anyway) by also assessing the penalty when using obviously magic items like wands or scrolls.

Ideas for a Sudoku puzzle system that could coexist with or replace Sokoban:

• The puzzle part of the level would be represented by an 11x11 grid (9 3x3 areas with 2 rows/columns of some other terrain to separate them).
• The solution must be given by engraving numbers on squares, with certain numbers burnt into the floor. This would require a level flag that provides 2 special cases to engravings: 1) that non-Elbereth engravings do not degrade normally, so you can write numbers in the dust without smudging them; and 2) it is impossible to erase a burnt engraving.
• The solution must be given by dropping rocks of the appropriate quantity onto the squares of the grid to represent each number.
• Both of the above solutions have the issue that the grid is practically unreadable and it basically forces the player to copy the puzzle out of the game, solve it, then copy the solution back in. One solution is to have spaces containing nothing except the requisite solution display as one of a set of 9 new glyphs that display as the number 1-9.
• Another solution is to avoid numbers and use object classes (weapon, armor, scroll, ring, wand, potion, gem, spellbook, and amulet), since there is no particular reason Sudoku has to use the numbers 1-9.
  • This means the puzzle would be solved by having 1 of each object class in each row, column, and sub-grid.
  • The “fixed” objects provided as a starting point could either be immovable, or movable but required to put back in place for the puzzle to be solved (i.e. the puzzle is checking not for any valid Sudoku solution, but a valid Sudoku solution in which the starting objects haven’t moved).
  • The main issue with this suggestion is avoiding providing the player with a bunch of free resources and not requiring them to amass 7-9 of each object class before starting. One way to work around it is to add a new object to each object class that does nothing and never generates outside of the Sudoku level, where exactly 9 of each will appear in every puzzle between the initial ones and the “stock piles”.

Nonograms as an alternate puzzle branch or Sokoban replacement. This consists of a map area where items are to be placed, and burned engravings in the rows and columns to the top and left specifying the amounts of rocks to place in contiguous blobs in that row or column. There is a “stock” of some low-value item (probably rocks) that can be placed in the spots, but the puzzle will accept any item dropped on the floor.

Whenever an item is dropped or picked up from the floor, the game checks the presence or absence of an item on the floor in each square of the nonogram map, and considers the puzzle solved if the number of squares containing any amount of objects in each contiguous blob in each row and column matches its specifications.

The puzzles could be drawn from a set of stock specified puzzles, or completely randomized.

Add an office into Fort Ludios containing administrative staff - a captain of the vault guards, a secretary or treasurer who has a stash of money implied in some way to be derived from taxes on shopkeepers, and a nurse who is there to tend soldiers’ injuries.

There should be a role, possibly Priest for flavor, that starts out with a few candles as a light source instead of an oil lamp.

Since cartomancers can get mail daemons as pets from randomly dropped summon cards, but the mail daemon is a useless pet because it has no attacks, there should be a new monster either as a grown-up form or replacing mail daemons entirely, called a “postmaster”, which is a useful and capable pet.

A chest of holding, which has the same weight-reduction properties as a bag of holding has, except it’s a chest.

In variants that have randomized alchemy recipes (rather than fixed, as is the case in vanilla): Randomly generated potions can sometimes be “labeled”, and labeled potions can be read. The label will say one of three things, albeit the text will be garbled like graffiti:

• The true identity of the potion’s type.
• A false identity of the potion’s type, chosen randomly, which will be “polymorph” somewhat more frequently than the actual distribution of potions would produce.
• A true clue towards a randomized alchemy recipe that involves this type of potion, but does not mention this type of potion (i.e. “Mix with speed to make levitation”).

Labeled potions never stack with unlabeled potions, even if they are otherwise identical and would merge into one stack.

Water damage will always remove the label from a potion. Possibly there should be some way to non-damagingly get rid of the label, such as using the #rub command to rub your hands on the potion.

There are a couple possibilities for the internal implementation of the label:

1. The label is deterministically computed based on the potion’s object ID, and labeled potions do not stack with each other. If the potion gets canceled, alchemized, or polymorphed, the object ID is still the same so the label will be the same, even though it’s now incorrect.
2. The label is stored using the unused-for-potions “usecount” field, which encodes which of the above three texts is on the label and the object types involved in what the label says. If the potion is canceled, alchemized, or polymorphed, the label still does not change. Labeled potions may stack, but only with another label that happens to convey the same exact information.
3. The text of the label is simply stored in an oextra field.

New type of potion “unstable potion”, which is a possible result from alchemy. After a certain timeout, it “stabilizes” into some other potion type. Not specified what happens if you drink it while it’s unstable.

Statue traps should not depend on there being a statue on the same space as the trap. Instead, a statue trap should internally store a coordinate as its “launch point”, ideally a point within line of sight, and when the trap is triggered it will animate a statue at that coordinate, if one still exists. (Statue traps will still generate a statue upon creation, just at the launch point).

In variants that implement object lookup: looking up an object should show that object’s relative probability within its own class.

Statistics that might be more useful to players, but harder to estimate, include the overall generation percentage for an object per level in each branch and per deathdrop, and whether or not monsters can generate carrying it. The overall percentages are tricky because object class distributions vary per branch, and it’s hard to estimate the amount of rooms in a level. Which items generate with monsters is less tricky but would need significant refactoring to avoid coupling the object lookup code to the monster generation code.

New artifact with an invoke power of identification, which is interesting because it is useful in the early game and gets less important later on.

The base item type could be a blank spellbook or a scroll of identify (not a spellbook of identify, because then you just have the spell).

If implemented as a scroll, reading the scroll would either be special-cased not to disappear (possibly giving the same effect as invoking it, subject to the same invoke timeout), or it would give a powerful one-time identification effect such as a full inventory ID and then disappear.

Putting a disenchanter corpse into a bag of holding should make it explode.

Eating a charged ray wand gives you the ability to breathe or shoot that kind of ray for a few turns. The UI for this would be either zapping “-“ or using #monster since no form that can eat wands currently has a defined #monster command.

A containerless conduct, which prohibits you from applying containers in inventory and picking up containers not in inventory.

It does not prohibit merely having a container in inventory (which would make Rogues and Archeologists break the conduct immediately), nor does it prohibit looting containers you find in the dungeon. The point of the conduct is to play without being able to ever have more than 52 non-loadstone items at one time, protect your carried items from elemental or water damage, or get weight reduction from a bag of holding. Allowing looting of containers means that players don’t have to resort to bad workarounds for random chests such as locking and bashing them until they break apart.

Heroes that start with sacks still get a small benefit from them, in that they can choose where to place a container as an early stash and put items into it rather than leaving them in piles on the ground.

The feedback in #conduct is “You have never picked up nor applied a container.”

Zapless conduct, which bans any zapping of wands and casting of spells, or more specifically anything in which you use the ‘z’ or ‘Z’ command and don’t immediately decline to select a wand or spell. Cursed wands exploding, selecting a directional or spell to zap then escaping out of the direction prompt (“The wand glows then fades” / “The magical energy is released”), or casting a forgotten spell to become confused all break the conduct. The feedback in #conduct is “You have never attempted to zap a wand or cast a spell.”

The intent of the conduct is to create a game without magic that can be used repeatedly or spammed. There is one important repeatable use of magic via wands that is not covered above: engraving with wands, which allows using all the charges in nondirectional wands and burning or carving Elbereth in the ground. In particular, banning wand engraving would mean a follower of the conduct cannot use wands of wishing. If the implementation of the game does not already have an Elberethless conduct, banning wand engraving could be a good addition to this conduct.

Potionless conduct, which prohibits the hero from using or breaking a potion (i.e. quaffing them, dipping things into them, throwing them; also breaking them with a force bolt). Monsters throwing potions at you or breaking potions with force bolts do not break the conduct even if you breathe the vapors, which does mean there’s some possibility for abuse in putting a potion on the ground and giving a nearby intelligent monster a wand of striking, but the alternative is too strict.

Whenever you use a cursed key to unlock a container, there is a chance that another item in your inventory gets cursed.

Items that get thoroughly eroded become unusable until they are repaired, with some message like “Your shield is so burnt that it can no longer stay on your arm. It falls to the ground.” or “Your sword is so thoroughly rusted that you can’t wield it.” This is intended as a better alternative to the system in several variants where items that erode 1 stage past thoroughly get destroyed entirely. An alternative implementation is that thoroughly eroded armor is still wearable but provides no AC benefit anymore, and thoroughly eroded weapons can still be wielded but do no damage, or minimal “improvised object” damage.

This probably requires a secondary change in providing an easier way to repair eroded gear than the existing confused enchant weapon/armor behavior, especially since you won’t be able to wear armor to get enchant armor scrolls to affect it.

Add a “Light” on the status line that shows up when you have a lighted object in inventory, in order to help players who forget they are using up a light source when they don’t need it.

The Wizard of Yendor, in his first appearance, should generate with a cloak of magic resistance, so you must fight him at least once without being able to simply zap him with a wand of death. He would not have any elevated chance for the cloak in his subsequent appearances.

Leprechaun race: gets unlimited gold-stealing attacks that allow you to teleport each time you steal gold from a monster’s inventory or beneath their feet, which allows you to set up teleportations in advance by luring a monster onto a pile of gold pieces. However, it has weak attribute maximums.

If a beam from a wand of opening (but not the spell of knock) hits a wall, it will open any doors within 2 squares of the wall spot it hit, including secret doors if there are any.

There should be a way to combine different colors of dragon scales or scale mail into new colors, according to color theory; i.e. red dragon scales plus yellow dragon scales equals orange dragon scales.

Holes and trapdoors should be made determinstic, by doing the following: Any time something uses a hole or trapdoor, seed a special RNG with the x, y, and z coordinates of the hole or trapdoor, and use it to generate the destination level. Store the RNG state with the migrating monster or object (or player), and use it again when that level is loaded to select a landing spot.

When you save the game you are given the opportunity to write a message which will be shown to you when you restore the game, to be used for reminding yourself of important things.

Elves can ride bareback, not needing a saddle to do it.

Armor that becomes cursed should have its enchantment effectively reversed; e.g. a piece of armor will still be +3 but it will make armor class worse by 3 points instead of better. If the armor is negatively enchanted, it still makes armor class worse by that amount.

The game should follow the D&D rules of what happens when a bag of holding is placed inside another bag of holding, and send items that “vanish” to the Astral Plane, where they get placed randomly.

As a side effect, this change would create a weird way to send items to the Astral Plane without carrying them, but of course you wouldn’t be able to rely on them being in any particular spot.

Being sufficiently close to a shrieker when it shrieks, maybe directly adjacent or within a radius of 2, should make you temporarily deaf.

Crystal plate mail should confer reflection if you wear it as the outermost layer of body armor, with no cloak.

Add an artifact spear of Odin that grants flying when wielded, and replaces Mjollnir as the first sacrifice gift for Valkyries. This is intended to give them a reason to use their starting spear and reduce the inevitability of Excalibur, while being flavorful towards both Odin with the spear, and towards Valkyries with their mythological power of flight.

Valkyries should be able to guarantee Mjollnir auto-returns safely (with no chance of hitting you) either by being piously aligned or having maximum Luck.

Artifact pair of scimitars (probably with slightly different names) that grant bonuses of some sort when used in two-weapon combat.

Knights should be given a tame ki-rin from their god when they get crowned. Possibly only if they have enhanced their riding skill; a knight who hasn’t enhanced it probably wants some other gift. Since ki-rin are lawful, a knight who has converted to some other alignment and is being crowned by a non-lawful god probably should not be granted one.

A blessed ring of sustain ability will protect you from getting level drained, but only once. This could possibly be achieved by removing the blessing, so you could protect against another level drain by re-blessing the ring; or it could be implemented by setting a flag on the ring, so once a ring protects you, it can’t ever be used again; you would need a different ring to get the benefit again.

Make paranoid trap not a universal option, but tied to gear: certain “careful” pieces of gear such as elven boots passively warn you of known traps before you step into them.

Alternatively, add a ring of paranoia which enables the paranoid warnings for traps and liquids. Or simply add this functionality to the ring of warning.

Redesign the locate level of the Priest quest by removing the single temple and huge wall of undead and instead doing it as smaller copies: a complex of buildings with graveyards blocking the entrance of each, and randomizing the temple. To prevent the player easily finding out with telepathy where the correct temple is, either scatter some more hostile priests of Moloch in the other buildings, or add other peaceful priests of Moloch who are not tending altars, just milling around in their buildings.

Artifact saddle that, when equipped on a pet, causes the pet to share your intrinsics while you are riding, and halves the tameness penalty for dismounting the pet.

The game should play sounds (if on a supported platform) or at least provide the hook for playing sounds in several scenarios: wielding a cockatrice corpse, experiencing a psychic blast from a mind flayer, and one that plays constantly at low HP which is supposed to be annoying.

In variants which allow weapons and armor to be different sizes: giants can use a gigantic-sized sling to fire boulders.

Since EvilHack has lava gremlins and regular “water” gremlins, it should also have earth gremlins and air gremlins. Earth gremlins steal intrinsics at night, can phase through rock and eat gold, and split when they eat gold. Air gremlins are permanently displaced, like displacer beasts, and steal intrinsics during the day (it’s not specified what would prompt them to split).

Hitting a monster with a headbutt attack while wearing the War-helm of the Dreaming causes that monster to be put to sleep.

An artifact bag into which you can only put worthless glass. Invoking the bag either summons a shield with a damage-reduction buffer, or grants you temporary HP, equal to the number of pieces of worthless glass in the bag (which get used up).

You can assign names to the locks on the magic chest to help remember which compartment is which. The interface for this works by attempting to call the magic chest on the floor, which prompts “What do you want to name the currently open lock of the magic chest?”

Ring of shooting stars (more or less a straightforward port of the ring of the same name from D&D): a chargeable ring which can be applied or invoked and then prompts for a direction. Once entered, a “shooting star” object (in the venom class?) flies in that direction, with no range limit, and explodes when it stops or hits the floor, possibly creating multiple explosions like the skilled fireball or cone of cold spell, and the ring loses a charge.

The damage type could be any of the following:

• Use AD_STAR from dNetHack (a damage type that deals physical damage and is also treated like silver for monsters which hate it), though this may be too much work to implement.
• Each use of the ring randomizes among physical, magic missile, fire, cold, and shock explosions. (If multiple explosions happen, they could all be of one type, or different.)
• Each individual ring deterministically randomizes from those damage types, and all explosions it produces will be of that type.

How the ring should work with negative charges is not well-defined. It should probably never generate with negative charges anyway, but options here include special-casing the ring so it can’t have negative charges, doing nothing while applied with negative charges, or consuming a negative charge, but with some bad effect like a large chance of exploding on the hero’s space.

This ring is a bit of an oddity in that it has no effect when worn. It probably should have to be worn in order to use it, which makes it more tactically interesting.

In variants that implement shambling horrors: When playing in a graphical windowport, the tile for shambling horror should be randomly generated each game.

Beholder corpses have a chance of conveying a Charisma increase accompanied, if you are hallucinating, by the message “Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.” Alternatively, do not have a message, but add this line as a comment in the source explaining why a beholder would grant Charisma.

A quest that is filled with Chinese lore and new monsters from Chinese folklore. Possibly a variant of an alignment quest, or a straightforward implementation of the Monk quest, or a Noble quest for a race which doesn’t already have an overridden alternative Noble quest.

When you wish for an artifact that already exists and fail to get it, the game should either hint at or outright tell you the location where the artifact was generated so you can go track it down.

Do this by saving the X, Y, and Z coordinates at which the artifact was created when it gets generated. If the artifact happens to get uncreated, like as part of level generation, the saved coordinates should be reset, because the artifact is then able to be generated again.

New monster, enchanted snowman, based on Frosty the Snowman.

It is never randomly generated, but is instead supposed to be assembled by the player as an ally. Assembling it requires the following:

• A top hat, which is implemented as a helm which conveys no AC like the fedora. If being true to the source material, this would be a magical piece of armor, but it’s unclear what magical effect it would have.
• A corncob pipe and button nose, which are new tool-class objects that are unusually heavy for their size (with a message like “This feels unnaturally heavy for such a small object” when you lift them). Arguably, the button nose should be gem-class instead of a tool. The heaviness is intended to discourage carrying around lots of these.
• Alternatively, instead of the button nose, an ordinary carrot.
• Presumably, some source of snow or ice, likely implemented by simply requiring ice terrain (which means a source of cold magic is required for most heroes).

The exact mechanism or commands required to assemble it are not specified.

Once assembled, it has the following properties:

• Has extremely high attack and defense, and is moderately fast.
• Will melt in 100 turns, or 250 turns if standing on ice.
• It will usually be tame, influenced by your Luck, with a hard upper bound of 95%. It will otherwise be hostile.
• If it loses the top hat for any reason, it instantly dies.
• It should drop some of the material components used in its creation when it dies, although probably not all of them (otherwise you could make new ones using all the same items).

Weapon and armor shops of a certain size should contain plastic statues of various humanoid monsters. Either the statues generate underneath the shop’s items (in order to avoid not reducing the amount of items in the shop), or they replace the shop’s normal stock, but only in sufficiently large shops.

Remove the blessed scroll of genocide’s whole-class genocide ability. Make it instead do what the uncursed scroll currently does, where you name a species and it gets genocided. The uncursed scroll of genocide is now the one that prompts for a monster class, but instead of genociding the entire class, it genocides one random, genocidable species from that class.

Archeologists should get a combat bonus for discovering artifacts. Flavored as studying and learning from the artifact to determine how it does what it does, either identifying or merely touching an artifact grants them a permanent bonus in line with whatever the artifact does. For instance, studying Demonbane could grant an additional d6 of damage to demons throughout the rest of the game. The less useful an artifact is, the better its bonus could be, in order to make it so that at least one role is happy about finding them.

(Not all artifacts may have a special permanent effect for Archeologists; in particular, other roles’ quest artifacts and any sort of non-weapon artifacts probably shouldn’t.)

Generating Orcish Town guarantees that there will be a priest of Moloch tending an altar on a level below.

If you die to Schroedinger’s Cat, there should be a 50% chance that you do not actually die.

If you are turning into stone or slime while hallucinating, the status bar should replace “Stone” and “Slime” with random other substances that you believe you’re turning into.

Muzzle: a tool that can be applied to an adjacent hostile monster to attempt to muzzle it. Success depends on your Strength and Dexterity, and if you do muzzle the monster, any bite attacks it has are prevented from happening.

New type of lamp, lava lamp, which only randomly generates in Gehennom.

Corpses in the Valley of the Dead, or at least corpses created in the Valley of the Dead, should be preserved indefinitely without rotting away. This could be implemented either by simply keeping them fresh and unaging, or they could get completely rotten and bad to eat, halting just before they would have rotted away completely.

Not specified if this would have an effect on wraith corpses from the Valley’s graveyards, which instantly rot away if they produce a “Blecch!” message.

If you overenchant Stormbringer and it vaporizes, it should turn into an actual storm: a region of clouds that shoots paralyzing lightning, the same way as the storms on the Plane of Air work.

The cost of buying divine protection should increase the more you have abused your alignment.

Chatting to priests should produce a menu of the things they offer in exchange for donating. The menu clearly shows how much gold is required for each donation, and indicates ones that are too expensive given how much gold you currently have. Selecting an option donates that minimum amount.

One reason for doing this is that it’s very difficult for an unspoiled player to learn that you can even buy protection from priests, much less the formula for how much gold should be donated. This would also enable adding in other variables beyond simple experience level, which is currently infeasible because it would make knowing the right amount to donate too complicated.

There should be a cooldown on using Elbereth to discourage overusing it in situations where you’re in over your head. For example, after successfully engraving it, all attempts to engrave another for the next 30-50ish turns will fail, possibly even if it gets smudged.

The scroll, wand, and spellbook of light should all weigh less than other objects of those classes. This makes them trivially identifiable, but it isn’t considered game breaking to be able to tell these 3 objects.

The light from a magic lamp should show any invisible creatures in its radius. This would probably be most easily achieved by iterating the squares in a radius of 3 around each magic lamp and mapping or unmapping any “I” glyphs, rather than tying it into the light source code.

A new mimic-class monster that can imitate an object (such as a scroll, potion, or wand) so deeply that it actually exists as that object, and you can pick it up and move it around without it revealing itself. It will only reveal itself, which destroys the object and creates the monster in its place, when you or some other monster attempts to use it (or possibly when it would stack with some other object, because an object that is a mimic clearly should not stack with regular objects).

Alternatively, just give this feature to small mimics.

Internally, this would probably work by generating a mextra struct on the object to store the details of the mimic.

Mimics should try to impersonate containers more frequently than they do. There are a few proposals for accomplishing this in the Dungeons of Doom:

• Have a special case that generates a mimic in each room with very low probability per room; if a mimic does generate it will always imitate a chest or large box.
• When a large box or chest is generated in a room during level creation, there is a small chance it instead becomes a mimic imitating that type of container, replacing the box. However, the chest contents must be carefully discarded to unmake any artifacts that happened to generate inside it.

Both of these only happen on levels where the mimic being generated is within its ordinary level difficulty range.

In the end-of-game disclosure and/or the dumplog, if you touched any artifacts during the game, you may choose to see a list of all artifacts that generated in the game and whether or not you obtained them, and all artifacts that existed in the game which you never touched.

Add another divine smite in the form of inflicting some duration of temporary intrinsic hunger. It’s a nice counterpart to your god filling your stomach when you pray (which is inaccessible if you get smited with hunger, since the god has to be angry).

This may be tricky to balance because either it happens early in the game and there is not sufficient food, making this a death sentence; or later in the game and there is so much food that this is a minor annoyance.

A power outlet dungeon feature, which you can put a brass lantern on to plug it in and recharge it for free, although this takes a fair amount of time.

Sprigs of wolfsbane should be poisonous to eat, and cause the same effects as a poisonous corpse does, because the plant is poisonous in real life.