Rangers break wands on their knee rather than raising it high over their head, because that’s what they’re used to doing with firewood.

Shock resistance turns ‘!’ at the end of in-game messages into ‘.’.

If you enter a room containing open pits of lava, print a message “It is hot in here.” If hallucinating, follow this up with “…but it’s a dry heat!”

Monsters that attack your displaced image may “miss wildly and stumble forwards” to move into the spot they thought you were standing in, symmetrically with how the player does for displaced monsters.

When a magic trap tames monsters, it should give a message beyond “You feel charismatic” - the scroll of taming “neighborhood is friendlier” message probably works fine here.

If you chat to a straw golem, it will say a random strawman argument, e.g. “If the priests give two bits to every beggar, nobody will want to work anymore.” or “The straw golem completely misrepresents your argument.”

Even if they have a headache, foocubi should interact with rings of adornment (the typical way; succubi take it and incubi put it on your finger). When they have a headache, they will do this “petulantly”.

Divine speech by Offler (the Tourist chaotic god) should contain lisping on all ‘s’ sounds.

If you have telepathy, you should hear the quest leader’s telepathic summons message more clearly than its current garbled state (perhaps “m..ic transporter”), and if you have extrinsic telepathy, you should hear it with perfect clarity.

Hallucinatory alternative to the typical you’re-about-to-die messages: “You hear the fat lady warming up.”

If you use #force when standing next to a closed door that you don’t know to be unlocked, the game will ask if you want to force the lock. If you say yes, you try to; if the door is actually unlocked, you’ll get a message indicating that and “You decide not to force the issue.” If it’s locked, you try to force the door with your weapon, which could involve prying with a bladed weapon (opens the door quietly and faster than kicking, but higher chance of breaking the weapon than forcing a container would) or bashing with a blunt weapon (much the same as kicking).

Eating a mummy corpse that gives deadly illness uses a different message than other too-old corpses, about it being contaminated with toxic embalming fluids.

Polymorphed monsters appear as “hazy [monster]” in messages, to indicate to the player they will time out and go back to their normal form eventually.

When you stethoscope or probe monsters that have names, they are referred to as “[Name] the [species]”, e.g. “Status of Fluffy the large dog:”

In variants that have element-specific mages, the message for a sacrificed corpse disappearing is different if you are playing as one:

• Ice Mage: “The corpse is swept away in a blast of frost!”
• Acid Mage: “The corpse dissolves into thin air!”
• Fire Mages either use a standard burst of flame, or a message suggesting more powerful flame.

The message for getting engulfed should distinguish between monsters that swallow you whole / have solid bodies versus ones that aren’t. For these monsters it should print “The purple worm swallows you whole!” instead of “engulfs you!”

When you use a magic whistle, if you have more than a certain number (3 or so) pets teleporting to your side, condense it into a single message saying “Your pets appear around you.”

When spells are forgotten or retention is damaged when you suffer amnesia, the game prints a message informing you of such, akin to “You forget some of your training” for skills.

In-game achievements, especially role unlocks, should produce a clear message to the player.

If an artifact produces any kind of message which clearly identifies it, it should be automatically identified as such in the discoveries list as if it had been formally identified. (In practice, the artifact will be clearly named, as well, so this just saves the trouble of having to officially discover it.)

Healers, who can see monster injury status, should see the injured status of a monster when it is healed from any source. E.g. instead of “The foo looks better” print “The bruised foo looks better.”

If a monster kills your pet and then you personally kill that monster, you get a message about avenging the pet’s death.

If a pet drowns while not in view, the game gives a special message: “You have a sinking feeling for a moment, then it passes.”

There should be more variety in the Wizard’s dialogue after he resurrects or levelports to you, rather than the same old “So thou thought thou couldst kill me fool” line every time.

If you kill a pet while on the Astral Plane (or the Plane of Air for that matter), you hear the rumble of “nearby” thunder, not “distant”.

In variants that print messages such as “Foo’s [armor piece] deflects your attack”, extend this system to monsters that have relevant defensive body parts even if they’re not wearing armor. Do this by crediting them with an appropriate amount of fake AC when determining what string to use for “[armor piece]”. Then players that miss monsters instead get messages about the monster’s natural armor preventing them from doing any damage.

The inspiration for this is EvilHack’s giant turtle, whose AC of -8 prompted many inexplicable “miss” messages for such a large and slow creature.

As a Peter Pan reference, produce “You hear a faint ticking noise” occasionally and prior to the normal output when stethoscoping a crocodile. Alternatively, produce this noise very rarely when a crocodile is anywhere on the level or near the player. Possibly only if the crocodile’s monster ID number matches a rare condition, like being a multiple of 100.

When the game calls for a message to be shown based on its string id in the quest.lua data file, it also supports running a function that tests whether the hero is blind and/or deaf and returns different string messages accordingly. (E.g. a lot of quest messages describe the surroundings, which doesn’t make sense if you’re blind.)

When the player is Weak or Fainting and uses the eat command when they have nothing to eat, the game searches through any carried containers to see if they have any food stored away in them, and if so give them a hint to check those containers.

It’s intended as a parallel to the “Perhaps you have some gold stashed away?” hint given when attempting to pay in a shop with insufficient money but money stashed in containers.

When hallucinating, pass all messages through a thesaurizing routine, replacing most words with an offbeat synonym, before printing them.

More flavorful messages that get printed when you make a critical hit. Suggested ones include “You cut off foo’s arm!”, “You plunge your sword into the heart of foo!” “You cut off the head of foo!”, “You bash foo’s skull into pieces with your weapon!”

There may be some trickiness in implementing these, as most messages assume something about either the player’s weapon or the monster’s body.

When hallucinating and pushing a boulder, the word “boulder” should be replaced in the message with a random object. Possibly this should be extended to any message using xname() to format an object.

Add YAFMs:

• Combat messages produced when you attack a hallucinogen-distorted fog cloud are replaced by “You attack thick air.”
• When you try to engrave when engulfed by a dust vortex: “You try to write in the dust, but it won’t stand still!”
• When you get out of an air elemental (that you didn’t kill) while hallucinating: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
• When you attempt to move into a Mordor orc with the m prefix: “You fail to simply walk into the Mordor orc.”
• When a sasquatch is blinded by a camera flash: “Unfortunately, that picture’s probably going to come out blurry.”

Deathly illness should produce warning messages at various points as it ticks down towards fatality, similar to how most other timed instadeaths work. This would, among other benefits, allow players to set those messages as MSGTYPE=stop.

Eating a eucalyptus leaf always produces the message “You’re having a hard time getting it down” regardless of how satiated you are.

Every time a line is printed containing two adjacent spaces, the message is broken into two separate plines so that the (probably separate) statements can be broken up by the windowport better.

Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it’s impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).

When you would shatter an enemy’s weapon with a two-handed weapon, and the enemy’s weapon is a bow, replace the shattering message with one about cutting/snapping the bow string. If it’s not a bow, but it’s made out of a non-brittle material such as metal, change it to “Foo’s weapon is sundered from the force of your blow!”

An option that changes all the game’s messages to their hallucinatory counterparts, without requiring the player to be hallucinating, and without affecting the symbols displayed on the map. Messages that mention monsters turn them into fake hallucinatory monsters, but farlook will represent them accurately.

Augment struct mkroom with a short string (perhaps 3 or 8 characters). The purpose of this string is to store a unique identifier for non-special types of room, in particular different themed room types. This can then be used later in the game (e.g. for printing an entry message in certain themed rooms) without interfering with the actual room types as far as level generation is concerned.

This uses a string identifier mainly because that makes it straightforward to initialize the string in Lua, versus a numeric constant the name of which would not be exposed to Lua.

If a spear trap is adjacent to a wall, its associated messages refer to the spears shooting out of the wall.

When a cursed unicorn horn makes you nauseous and about to start vomiting, print a message “You feel nauseous.”

In variants that implement flavorful miss messages (“Your [armor] deflects the gecko’s attack”, etc), your T-shirt and body armor are not eligible to appear in those messages if there are other pieces of armor covering them.

Your skill practice points gradually decrease with time on their own. They will decrease slowly enough that if you are using a weapon infrequently but regularly, you won’t notice anything, but if you go many thousands of turns without using a skill, you may need to retrain and bring it back up to speed. There should either be a message when your skill falls a level due to this decrease, or when you try to start using the skill again only to discover that your skill has decreased.

Decapitation is not protected by an amulet of life saving, since the amulet just falls off your neck. Alternatively, keep the life saving, but give a special message about the amulet crumbling to dust as it falls off your neck.

If you enter the temple of a god who is angry at you, all monsters on the level become awakened and aggravated. This should print a more menacing message than the standard “forbidding feeling” one. (Note that a proper implementation of this requires that gods’ anger levels be tracked separately for each god.)

If teleportation fails because there is a trap or monster on the destination square, and there is an adjacent free square, you get placed on that square, possibly with a message explaining why you didn’t end up exactly where you wanted.

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.

When you pick items up and they stack with something in your inventory, somehow express how many are now in the stack, so the player doesn’t need to check their inventory constantly to see how many missiles they recovered.

Assuming an implementation in which Gehennom starts to get destroyed after you remove the Amulet: When you kill the high priest of Moloch, he gives you a multiline death message calling you a fool and saying you don’t know what you have done, and maybe hinting a little bit at why Hell is about to go to hell.

Give a warning message when temporary speed is about to wear off.

Make the Oracle consultation prompts more obvious as to what they’re getting. “Dost thou wish to hear the latest dungeon gossip?” / “Then dost thou desire a serious piece of advice?” Also, it should ask the player even if they have no money, and tell them that they don’t have enough after the prompts are shown.

When you first pick up the Amulet of Yendor, you get another screen-overwriting message similar to what happens in the quest and at the beginning of the game, directing you to travel back up the dungeon and give it to your god.

Give a message when a wand of secret door detection reveals something.

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

New exclamations for peaceful monsters getting mad at the player when they attack another peaceful: “Hey!” “Stop that!” “Get [him/her]!” “Oy!” “Jerk!” “Try me instead!” If hallucinating, add “Dude! Not cool!” to this list.

Donating more than 100 gold to a priest but still less than the required threshold to actually get anything causes the priest to say something gracious, rather than “Cheapskate”.

If scare monster is not formally known, change “The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up” to use the called name or label, e.g. “The scroll labeled NR 9 turns to dust as you pick it up”.

If the verbose option is off, replace “A mysterious force prevents [monster] from teleporting!” with “[monster] shudders briefly.”

Add a message for when your pet falls down a trap door and you don’t see it happen.

When starting or resuming the game while hallucinating and during full moon, replace “You are lucky! Full moon tonight.” with “You’re on the moon tonight!”

For TDTTOE, you only receive a “telepathic” message from your quest leader if you actually have telepathy. Otherwise, you merely “sense” the message.

When you fail to polymorph and get the “new man/woman” message, prior to this print a message that makes it clear that the polymorph fails. You don’t get this message when you deliberately try to polymorph into your own race.

Fix the “Farewell” ending message to say “turns” instead of “moves”, since it’s more accurate.

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 game prints a message “You escape the dungeon, never to return again.” when you escape the dungeon, instead of just going straight to DYWYPI.

Level teleporters’ message “You are momentarily blinded by a flash of light” should be changed or removed because it is the same message as the more dangerous magic trap effect, and it doesn’t actually cause blinding.

When a monster teleports away, show a message “The foo disappears!” Possibly, if you also see where they teleported to, show another message, or just print “The foo teleports!” instead of printing a disappearance message.

Negative messages are never punctuated with ! and favor … but may still use just a period. (Example: “You feel attractive…” for gaining intrinsic aggravate monster in FIQhack, the existing “You feel attractive!” sounds like you gained Charisma.)

Add a message for when create monster/create familiar/summon nasties fails to summon anything (may happen in extinctionist games).

There should be a message from when you pacify (not tame) a monster by throwing food at it. “[monster] seems pacified by your gesture”; possibly something about you getting the monster’s order wrong if you’re hallucinating.

Remove the odd feeling messages from magic traps. Instead move them to a new trap, a “foresight trap”, which gives you a vision of something to come. Once triggered, the trap vanishes. Effects can be:

• “You hear a far-off song: .A.EF” - give part or all of the passtune
• “You have a vision of [something]” - reveal something about the dungeon structure, like “stronghold far below”
• “A shiver runs down your spine!” - create a level-appropriate “scary” monster somewhere on the level, like a ghost or other undead
• “You smell charred flesh.” - create a level-appropriate monster with a fire attack somewhere on the level
• “You hear distant howling.” - create a level-appropriate werefoo on a level above or below

Flavor the spell of protection’s messages differently if you are a Priest.

When you put on cursed gear or worn gear becomes cursed, it gives you a message that it welds to the appropriate body part. When becoming uncursed, it gives you a message that it is no longer welded.

If you are not fully healed by a potion of full healing, it prints some other message than “You feel completely healed”, like “You feel vastly better” or “You feel much, much better.”

When you equip a ring of hunger or conflict (or regeneration), you get a message about feeling hungrier.

When dipping an oilskin sack in water, give a unique message “The water runs off the [bag/oilskin sack], leaving it dry.”, which unambiguously identifies the oilskin sack.

Rubbing iron on a flint stone gives the message “Sparks fly from the stone”.

When a monster is about to wake up from sleeping or unfreeze from paralysis and you can see it, give a message to that effect.

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

When you wish for an artifact and it arrives with an angry person, that person gets an appearance message, or at least a single line of dialogue.

When either you or a creature is brought below 10% HP while wearing an amulet of life saving, it “begins to glimmer”. Note that something should be done to prevent this message from appearing in rapid succession if the wearer heals back up around 10%. Also, ideally, something should be done to prevent the player identifying the amulet of life saving by hurting themselves deliberately until under 10% HP.

Different death texts for if the quest nemesis is paralyzed or sleeping when they die.

Candles and lamps “burn brightly” when blessed and just “start burning”/”is now on” when uncursed. Lanterns don’t change their messages. Note though that this makes it trivial to tell when a potential magic lamp is blessed.

If you stand on a pile of objects that are all the same class, replace the “objects” in the message “There are several objects here” with the name of that class. E.g. “There are several weapons here”. Also do this even more specifically if they’re all the same object type: “There are several daggers here”.

When you forget a spell, give the player a message “You have forgotten the ‘foo’ spell.” Also give warnings when you reach 10% and 1% memory.

After a priest gives you two bits for an ale a certain number of times, they say “wow maybe I should not enable your alcohol addiction” and stop giving you more.

If you escape the dungeon, a short blurb prints describing your post-dungeon career. This factors in your material wealth (gold, gems, and other things you escaped with), deity anger (they will be mad at you for abandoning the mission regardless, but if already angry before your escape you will not live long outside the dungeon), and alignment record (bad alignment could cause you to get spurned by your peers), along with possibly more factors, such as if you escaped with a fake Amulet.

When applying a mirror at yourself, give different messages depending on your race, gender, and charisma.

When a monster wields Vorpal Blade out of your sight, you hear “a distant snicker-snack”.

Make the Wizard of Yendor’s corpse always taste terrible.

Fix flavor of steam vortex messages. “You’re being boiled alive!” and “Mmm, a sauna” if fire resistant. If you aren’t carrying a towel, “You wish you had brought your towel to the sauna”.

Give a different message for when you injure your legs by kicking. Possibly as subtle as “Ouch! That really hurts!”, but could be more explicit like “Ouch! You injured your leg!”

All instances of “mysterious force” are changed to “normal force” when you’re hallucinating.

When you throw ammo without the proper launcher, the game makes it clear that you’re doing it wrong, e.g. “You clumsily throw the arrow”. This also abuses Wisdom.

The game opening text for certain roles is changed from “It is written in the Book of [deity]:”

• Caveman: “It is painted in the Sacred Caves of [deity]”
• Valkyrie: “It is sung in the Sagas of [deity]”
• Wizard: “It is inscribed in the Tomes of [deity]”
• Barbarian: “It is carved on the Stone Tablets of [deity]”
• Archeologist: “It is written in the ancient Scrolls of [deity]”
• Priest: “It is taught in the Temple of [deity]”

Message for when a nymph finishes stealing something from you: “The [nymph] giggles and vanishes.”

Message for when a pet (that you can see) gains a level.

Barbarians feel angry (not sad) for a moment when a pet dies.

Quest leaders verbalize their confusion at the player’s change of gender if the player has changed from their original gender.

Cavemen, Barbarians, and orcish players don’t get the message “An urge to take a bath overwhelms you” from fountains.

Saving saves the previous N messages, so that one can find out what happened recently upon returning to a game after a long break.

The appendage (“foreclaw”) for a paper golem should be “forescroll” or “endpapers” or something.

Dreaming about more than just noises that are really happening: stuff like fantasy dreams where you dream that you ascend to the status of Demigoddess, etc.

Different game ending messages than “You die…”. Pull in some from other games: “WASTED”, “YOU DIED”, “FATALITY”, “Game Over”, “Your bones are scraped clean by the desolate wind, your Vault will now surely die”, “Haha noob”

If a pet moves over a square with multiple cursed items, it moves “very reluctantly”.

Change the message “This food tastes okay.” for “palatable” food to “This food tastes gamey.”

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

More angelic maledictions:

• “Weep, for [your god] has abandoned you!”
• “Your unholy soul shall be [cleansed/purged]!” (cleansed if coaligned, purged otherwise)
• “[Tremble/Cower], mortal!”
• “Kneel, or thou shalt be knelt.”
• “Bow before me!”
• “You viper!”
• “Repent, sinner!”

Special message when a self-concealing pet “reluctantly hides under” a cursed item instead of stepping over it. Or maybe pets which hide under objects will never hide under cursed objects.

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.)”

When you attempt to interact with (or possibly explicitly search) a door or container, you get “There [are no traps / is a trap] on this [door / container].” which guarantees that there is not or is a trap, rather than an ambiguous “You find no traps”.

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).

Remove the [yn] prompt for both looting and untrapping. Also maybe streamline the “You carefully open the box… –More–”

Add a message for when the player first satisfies both conditions of having teleportitis and being able to teleport at will.

If someone throws a potion of sleeping at you and you die while asleep, the death should not say “while sleeping off a magical draught”.

The Norn and Valkyrie quest friendlies have different messages if you talk to them after having been changed into a man.

When you ascend, you receive an elaborate role-specific message with your quest leader congratulating you (if they are alive).

Change the message for gaining intrinsic shock resistance to be “Your current health feels amplified!”

Change the impossible() message (in NetHack 3.x and variants) so that it doesn’t imply the user should quit the program (thus destroying their save file).

NetHack4 impossible() should not imply that the save file is corrupted, and the distinction between impossible() and panic() should be less blurry.