Allow wielding some types of traditional magical implements to reduce spell failure rates:

• Wielding a quarterstaff confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding a wand of nothing confers the same benefit as wearing a robe but does not stack with it.
• Wielding an identified wand which matches a spell (wand of light -> spell of light, wand of death -> finger of death, etc) drastically reduces your failure rate when casting it. Perhaps casting the spell while wielding the matching unidentified wand should identify the wand.

Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:

• Dies and turns to normal floor if hit by fire or have a death ray zapped over it.
• Turns into fire terrain if hit by fire and can spread to nearby grass.
• You can plant trees on them, whereas you cannot do this on normal floor.
• Small monsters that are capable of hiding under objects can hide in grass.

It’s a problem that utility spells with a high failure rate, such as identify at 95% fail, is a mere inconvenience to players, since they can sit in a closet with a stack of food and wait for their Pw to recharge until they succeed. This is not really a problem with combat spells, since the penalty for failing to cast the spell correctly is a disadvantage in combat, where time and Pw matter. Some possible ways to address it:

• Large penalties for failing to cast a spell, like a 1% memory loss and 50 hunger.
• Failing to cast a spell locks it for a certain period of time. It would be hard to make this not turn into an even slower grind for utility spells, since the lockout period could just be waited out.
• Make spells never actually failable, but Pw cost is increased proportional to the failure rate, specifically: real Pw = base Pw / success rate. Under this formula, a 15 Pw spell at 95% fail becomes a 300 Pw spell at 0% fail. This means the Pw cost should be exposed in the spellcasting menu rather than failure rate, even though failure rate still needs to be calculated. Maybe use different colors in the spellcasting menu to denote spells you can cast now, spells you can cast by waiting to recover more Pw, spells you can’t cast even at your current maximum Pw, and forgotten spells.

Rock trolls are immune to stoning; not because they are made of rock, but because they already have an affinity with it.

If an (unlit) potion of oil breaks on your head, you get slippery fingers.

Exploding a bag of holding gives you a respectable amount of experience points (because you certainly learned something from that experience, and it would be hilarious to accidentally level up by doing this.)

When a foocubus drains an experience level from you, it gains a level. (This doesn’t work the other way around because the hero doesn’t have level-draining powers).

Nazgul can innately see invisible.

Dart and arrow traps should shoot a consistent type of dart or arrow (i.e. not shooting a +1 dart and then a +0 silver dart), and if there is a stack of them pregenerated on the trap those should be consistent with it too.

If you have an autoreturning artifact wielded, and nothing quivered, using the ‘f’ command will throw the artifact, without making you have to use the t command then select its inventory letter.

When a container is polymorphed, its contents spill out onto its square rather than vanishing. The contents do not get polymorphed from the same source.

Steam vortexes leave behind a trail of non-poisonous, temporary clouds behind them as they move. When they are killed, they burst into a large cloud centered on the spot where they died.

Make indirect identification more common and reliable through the game, but make the scroll of identify less likely to identify multiple items and impossible to identify your entire inventory. Thrones can still identify your whole inventory as a random effect.

Mummies have a constitution-draining touch attack, which possibly also inflicts a ‘withering’ intrinsic that deals damage over time and abuses Constitution every turn.

Mummies could also “cast” a curse on you, not to curse your items, but to make you sink through the floor, sending you down 1-3 levels.

Make it so that you cannot rename ghosts. (The ability to rename ghosts makes a bunch of otherwise interesting ideas about interacting with a specific named ghost boring, because you can just rename any ghost to whatever you want).

If you get paralyzed by reading a spellbook, there’s some message indicating that you got paralyzed. Currently just getting “You can move again” is weird.

Giant spiders grudge killer bees.

Using digging to escape from an engulfer no longer leaves it teetering on the brink of death at 1 HP. Instead it cuts the engulfer’s HP in half. For unsolid or amorphous engulfers (e.g. Juiblex), it does even less damage than that. It still lets you escape in all cases though.

Make the Vibrating Square a brighter color than purple.

Archeologists begin the game with a grappling hook.

You can force-fight a web to cut it, which may occasionally fail and get you or the weapon stuck in the web.

When a monster that you can see becomes awake, you get a message like “[monster] wakes up” or “[monster] is roused.”

If you sit on a towel, give the YAFM “It’s probably not a good time for a picnic…”

Engravings are visible from a distance, having their own glyph which renders only when there is an engraving on top of “uninteresting” terrain (floor or corridor). In ASCII, they render as a “, or possibly a ~, but their color varies based on what type of engraving it is.

• Dust engravings: brown
• Actual engraving (e.g. athame): gray
• Burnt engraving: black
• Scrawl of blood: red
• Graffiti: bright green, bright blue, or bright purple

Add Dudley to the list of random ghost names.

Whenever a follower monster follows you between levels, print an appropriate message, such as “The wraith pursues you down the stairs.” and “You are surrounded by a shimmering sphere! The Wizard of Yendor grabs your arm as you vanish!”

The hero should be able to see from the get-go that the Candelabrum has seven candle holders, so display it as “(x/7 candles attached)” instead of just “(x candles attached)”.

The “You hear someone cursing shoplifters” message replaces “someone” with the name of a known alive shopkeeper on the level.

You can displace peaceful monsters (but not shopkeepers, priests, or Quest leaders) by either walking into them (as the default choice) or by walking into them preceded by the m key.

The scroll of remove curse auto-identifies if it removes a visible curse from one or more objects (i.e. the player can compare his inventory before and after reading it and see that the curse is gone).

Wielding a copper object or wearing copper armor protects against an otherwise successful disease attack some of the time, because copper is antibacterial.

Wielding a mirror conveys partial reflection: you will reflect things 40 or 50% of the time.

Bones levels have a special level sound. Possibly the same “eerie feeling” you get in abandoned temples.

Remove/replace the guaranteed L and V monsters from Astral; the priests shouldn’t tolerate random high level undead hanging around.

The Astral Plane should be brightly lit, what with having all the halls of the gods and being suffused with holy power.

Orcish Town should bear more gear of the deceased shopkeepers and priests: there should be at least one key per dead shopkeeper, five dead shopkeepers’ worth of gold pieces (probably to be picked up by orcs), a robe and spellbooks for the priest, and so on. Possibly even add gear for the wrecked shops. Or it should have a random piece of good gear being carried by an orc-captain.

Add a level flag for the level being open to the sky or otherwise no ceiling. Effects of this include: falling rock traps do not generate, cursed potions of gain level do not work, scrolls of earth do not work; monsters that normally cling to the ceiling are unable to. Levels that would have this: lots of Quest levels, the Elemental Planes.

Beartraps are much lighter so as to make them feasible to carry around, and Rangers start out with two or three of them.

A YAFM when you donate exactly 1/10 of your gold to a priest: “You pay your tithe.”

If a priest gives you two bits for an ale while hallucinating, change the message to “two bitcoins for an ale” (or just use a hallucinatory currency.)

Petless conduct: increment when the player starts with a pet or tames a monster.

This conduct could be accidentally broken by the taming effect of a magic trap, which is problematic. One solution is to have magic traps pacify instead of tame if the player has the pet option turned off, but mixing options and gameplay like that seems like a bad idea. Worth noting that polyselfless is another example of a conduct that can be broken accidentally and is far more likely to happen. Note that xNetHack’s implementation of petless conduct just turns the charismatic magic trap effect into a pacification of adjacent monsters regardless of whether you’re petless or not.

Another issue is the guardian angel; it would be especially cruel to unexpectedly break the conduct on the final level of the game. xNetHack’s implementation prevents the angel from appearing if you still have petless conduct intact when arriving on Astral.

Artifactless conduct: is broken whenever an artifact enters the player’s inventory (since the player never has to pick up an artifact).

Graveyards can rarely generate visible pits (open graves) with no monster on top of them.

Treasure zoos try to generate only “animal” monsters (those that have the M1_ANIMAL flag).

One Gehennom “special room” should be an active temple with a peaceful priest of Moloch.

Iron doors, which generate 30% of the time a normal door would be generated on dungeon levels 7 or below. They use the symbol +. They work the same as normal doors, but they cannot be burned, kicked, or blasted down, or destroyed any other way. If one happens to be locked, you have to unlock it “properly”.

Demonbane, while wielded, warns of demons.

Make Demonbane a mace rather than a long sword, to make it more attractive to Priests.

Make Sunsword out of gold.

Add “gourmet” as a random tin preparation type, giving 350 nutrition. Also add “stale” as a tin preparation type, giving 100 nutrition.

Silver objects are corrodeable but not, of course, rustable.

C-rations and K-rations are readable, which give the names of various real-life army food.

Stinking clouds spread out from their origin point instead of using a preset diagonal shape.

Make potions of oil undilutable.

You can read the label on tins. All player-made tins are unlabeled, while random tins will randomly (and deterministically) either say truly what sort of monster is in them, or have an irrelevant message. Messages could include: “Tuna Fish - expires Feb 6, 1989”, “Rare Meat of a Genocided [hallucinatory monster]”, “Water Chestnuts - be sure to eat while underwater”, “Yendorian Brand Applesauce”, “This Tin Is Not Booby-Trapped”, “Fresh Tinned Adventurer Meat”.

Blessings or cursings on spellbooks does not translate to automatic success or failure. Instead, it acts as a fairly large bonus or penalty to your effective Intelligence when reading it.

The blessed potion of hallucination, in addition to making you hallucinate, grants enlightenment (maybe a “corrupted” enlightenment where there’s only a 50% chance of seeing things you can’t see through the ^X command)

Perfectly fine uncursed food should not make the hero pass out.

The amulet of life saving does not restore the hundreds of hit points it can currently restore; it restores something on the order of 6d10, enough to buy time to quaff a potion of full healing, but not enough to repeatedly put on more amulets and let the massive HP store run down on its own.

A blessed scroll of light lights up the entire level.

The wand of speed, zapped at yourself, grants temporary very fast speed and does not grant intrinsic speed. Intrinsic speed can be gained from a non-cursed potion of speed, and a blessed potion will still grant temporary very fast speed. These would be more useful in a system where permanent very fast speed is unobtainable.

When a bag of holding explodes, each item inside has a 1/13 chance of being destroyed and a 12/13 chance of being scattered (using the same code that scatters drawbridge chains). Note that scattered fragile items such as potions are liable to break by crashing into things.

A blessed scroll of destroy armor should allow the player to select which piece of armor to destroy. If they decline to choose, it selects a random piece of armor like the uncursed scroll.

When breaking an identified wand of nothing, give a YAFM: “Predictably, nothing happens.”

Monsters can wear amulets of ESP. This allows them to know your exact location (regardless of invisibility or displacement) when you are within the telepathy radius.

Some angels generate with a harp. A fraction of those that do get a magic harp; the rest get mundane ones.

Gnomes generated outside the Mines generate carrying one or two random gems (possibly none, subject to current level difficulty).

A pet will only eat a corpse that will make it polymorph if its tameness is very low. Otherwise it will avoid it.

Monsters that hide under objects can also hide under or behind various types of terrain, such as sinks, ladders, thrones, and gravestones.

When you kill a jabberwock while hallucinating, give the message “Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

More randomization or unpredictability in foocubus results so a player can’t be nearly or actually guaranteed of a good result by having a certain amount of Int and Cha.

Spiders can spin webs as they move along (cave spiders with less frequency than giant spiders.) This chance is boosted if they move into a doorway or choke point.

If a shrieker summons a purple worm with its shriek, check for difficulty first. If purple worms would be out of difficulty, generate a baby purple worm instead.

Zombies and possibly mummies have a new sound MS_GROAN instead of MS_SILENT. This would not do anything at the moment except give you “The zombie groans.” when chatted to.

Chameleons randomly select a monster of up to (level difficulty + N) when shapechanging, not any monster ever.

Green slimes have an engulfing attack that guarantees to start the sliming process (assuming the player isn’t unchanging, on fire, etc).

You can use stethoscopes (or possibly probing) on eggs to identify them.

Cold rays are colored light blue, to be distinct from lightning.

Deafness should provide total protection against cockatrices’ hissing attacks.

All spheres should explode in a 3x3 explosion like gas spores do. They should do this regardless of whether they died by attacking or some other method, so they should have an appropriate AT_BOOM attack.

Cancelled trolls won’t rise from the dead.

Elven daggers and arrows (and really any pointy wooden weapon) has a 5% chance of instakilling any vampire who is not wearing body armor.

Izchak sells scrolls and wands of light, maybe spellbooks too, at low frequencies.

Remove the possibility of “Blecch! Rotten food!” from uncursed non-corpse comestibles.

When viewing skills with #enhance, show the maximum skill caps for all listed skills.

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

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

Hallucinatory trap names for when you look at traps while hallucinating: “slime pit”, “jack-in-a-box”, “buzzsaw trap”, “spiked floor”, “axeblade trap”, “queasy board”, “revolving wall”, “uneven floor”, “anti-anti-magic field”, “ice trap”, “finger trap”.

When starting or restoring the game while hallucinating, after the “welcome to NetHack!” message, print the message “NetHack is filmed in front of a live studio audience.”

Weight the probability of Orcish Town down lower than 1/7. Possibly as a starting point, reintroduce Frontier Town as minetn-8 so that the probability will become 1/8.

Archeologists (maybe gnomes too) start the game with all valuable and worthless gems (but not gray stones) identified. If this is too powerful, perhaps they only begin the game with all worthless glass identified.

Ghosts lose their physical touch attack in favor of a reusable attack that scare-paralyzes you. Possibly, if this is unflavorful due to it just being the same ghost, change their AI to make them turn invisible after a certain amount of time being visible and not next to the player. Then they path towards you, and if you either stumble into them or they are next to you and get a move, they turn visible, paralyzing you. Since the actual action of them appearing out of nowhere would be what frightens you, see invisible would negate the effect.

Rework hard helmet mechanics so that for large objects like boulders, they only take a few points off if anything.

For most calculations that involve the depth of the Sanctum (score, level difficulty with the Amulet) use a constant 50 in place of the Sanctum depth.

You get a small Pw boost (similar to newts, or perhaps not boosting max Pw)? by eating the corpse of a spellcasting monster.

Forest rooms, which contain a scattering of trees.

Apply ‘-‘ for a YAFM: “[Your quest leader] always said you needed to apply yourself!”

YAFM for when polymorphed into a glass golem and you rub a touchstone against “-“.

Allow teleportation onto the vibrating square, since it isn’t really a trap.

Conflictless conduct: never have a monster attack another monster while influenced by conflict. Would be best if you can safely ring-test conflict, perhaps it gives some message like “You feel aggravation” or “You feel irate” when wearing it (these messages would be shared with the ring of aggravate monster so as not to be unambiguous).

When “Sting cuts through a web!”, the web is destroyed. Currently it only allows you to escape the web in 1 turn and does not destroy it.

Slaughterhouses as a Gehennom special room, filled with corpses, leashes, and knives.

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

Incorporeal monsters should be immune to mind flaying (and probably most physical) attacks, except attacks from angels.

Move angelic and demonic maledictions out of quest.txt/quest.lua; they have nothing to do with the quest. They should probably still live somewhere in the dat folder.

Add two fields to struct trap: an object, which represents the “ammo” of the trap (darts, arrows, potions of oil), and a number to represent the “level” of the trap (which can affect a lot of things, such as a to-hit bonus the trap gets, how hard it is to untrap, or what the skill was of the player when they set the trap).

Statues can come in bronze or other types of material.

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

Change rne() so that it doesn’t depend on the player’s experience level: instead it depends on the current level depth. Specifically, change its theoretical maximum from max(XL/3, 5) to max(depth/5, 5).

Ring of carrying: new chargeable ring that multiplies the weight of the player’s inventory by (1 - (0.05 * enchantment)) when worn. Stacks with a second ring. Initial charge and beatitude is set the same as any other charged ring.

Non-intrusive ways to tell new players important parts of the game, like how to use #enhance. For instance, “You feel more confident in your skills. (Use #enhance to advance this skill.)”

Leprechauns (or anything with AD_SGLD) should steal items made of gold out of the hero’s inventory.

Invoking Mjollnir allows you to cast a bolt of lightning as if from a lightning wand.

Scale monsters’ hit dice bonuses based on their size. In order to reduce the high amount of variance monster HP currently has, monster HP is now computed by this formula: (HD)d4 + HD\*2\*(size), where size is 0 for MZ_TINY, 1 for MZ_SMALL, and so on.

If you press Escape while being grabbed by a monster, at a time when you could normally enter input (so not in the middle of messages or in a prompt), you get the message that says “You cannot escape from the [monster]!”

If the player sits on a throne after being crowned, even in non-royal polyforms, they get the royalty message.

Merge dart and arrow traps into “missile” traps, that fire a random sort of missile. Also, make such traps store their ammo in the trap to be fired one by one or released when untrapped, not to be created one by one when triggering, as described in #768.

Special room that is lined (not filled) with statues of you, and contains no monsters, items, traps, or anything else interesting. All doors in contain traps that will make them lock behind you. Intended only to make the game more creepy.

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

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

Make the Castle barracks have second doors that open onto the courtyard.

Ogresmasher doesn’t need bonuses versus ogres, or confer beneficial properties. It is simply an oversized sledgehammer with such terrible crushing power that it splatters anything it’s swung at. On top of modest damage bonuses, it has chances to instakill sufficiently small monsters, and may inflict negative status effects on large monsters like stunning or slowness (or bleeding, if that is implemented). Probably better if war hammers are made into two-handed weapons.

New msgtype intended to be even stronger than msgtype:stop, perhaps called msgtype:paranoid. Requires the user to type “yes” before continuing.

Note: A patch has since been created for msgtype:alert, which forces you to hit tab before continuing.

If you end the game by ascending, you get a fixed baseline score instead of one based on the maximum dungeon level reached. Complementary YASI: this fixed score is zero, so that true zero-point ascensions are possible.

Add a message for a monster you can see that polymorphs via a polymorph trap (or, come to think of it, any source, like the player zapping it at them).

When killed by a monster that brings you back as something else (zombie, vampire, green slime), you might not die; you may continue playing in that form with permanent intrinsic unchanging. This might make it actually beneficial to get killed by a vampire, so the chance of continuing can’t be 100%, or else it can only work in a limited set of mostly-uncontrollable circumstances (like maybe a vampire’s or zombie’s bite takes you down to exactly -1 health). Green slime death is probably okay to stay at a 100% chance, though. Also needs some thought for how the unchanging squares with being a vampire and wanting to #monster into different forms. Perhaps intrinsic unchanging, unlike extrinsic, allows a monster to change into its normal alternate forms, but nothing else. Some other downsides should possibly be present too, like you don’t get your normal amount of HP and are stuck with the amount given by your new form.

The game should ask to confirm when you try to throw something that is not intended to be thrown (for example, if you unwielded your bow and are now trying to throw arrows).

Sitting on a trap will trigger the trap while ignoring any magic resistance you have, so that you don’t have to disrobe.

If the hero has see invisible while ascending, swap the line “An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance…” out for some other YAFM. Perhaps even something as subtle as “A visible choir”.

If you ascend with your alignment mismatching your align0 (meaning you changed alignment at some point), your game-end reason is recorded as “ascended in dishonor”.

The game should allow you to reread a spellbook and relearn the spell whenever you want. The prompt should be “You know [spell] quite well already. Read the book anyway? (yn)”

Any gaze attack which is prevented by blindness (one which is visual in nature) is prevented by hallucination, or at least the effects are reduced or mitigated. Possibly archons’ blinding gaze should be exempted from this, with the hallucinatory message being “The power of the Aurora overwhelms you!”