Solve the problem of pets wasting their hard-trained apport by picking up and dropping objects randomly all over the dungeon, by triggering them only to use it when the hero plays any instrument (or maybe any non-magical instrument). Bonus points if the player can train the pet by playing an arbitrary sequence of notes (chosen by the player) on tonal instruments.

If you have a dented pot, you can pour a potion into it and have a pet drink the potion.

Keep a counter on each shopkeeper representing the number of times a pet has picked up a shop-owned item in their shop (or a shop-owned item inside containers they are carrying). Every time this increments, use it as an increasing chance that the shopkeeper will become aggressive towards pets picking up their wares, with messages like “Kabalebo shouts “Hey! Drop that!” at Fluffy. Fluffy drops [item].” Once they are past that point, you can’t use pets to take their items anymore.

The point on the counter at which the shopkeeper stops playing nice should be roughly some fraction of the area of the shop, to strike a balance between large shopkeepers being more lenient and not allowing you to clean out all the tiny shops in Minetown. A rumor could be added for this: “They say that mom-and-pop stores have lower tolerance for thieves.”

Unspecified whether the counter should increment when a non-pet picks up an item in the shop. Probably not, since this is a fairly rare case.

You can apply an amulet to a pet to put it on that pet, assuming it has a neck.

Add a way to show nearby unseen pets and possibly also peacefuls. Using a warning-like system, they render as green 1-5 (pets) and blue 1-5 (peacefuls) using the same scale as warning does.

Initial idea was to tie this to intrinsic warning or when wearing a blessed ring of warning, but this has flavor problems since warning exists to alert you to threats, which pets and peacefuls aren’t. Plus, a lot of roles get intrinsic warning anyway, and rings don’t generally change behavior based on beatitude. It might be better off coming from some other source.

A new take on a Bard role, generally themed around leading a party of other adventurers through the dungeon, with some other additional ideas:

• The bard and healer cannot both be focused around petmongering, so one of them would have to change. Most likely the healer, as the bard’s traditional abilities are only good on pets.
• Instead of the standard little dog or kitten, the bard starts with a “party” of 3-4 player monsters, who are randomly chosen from other roles.
  • This would make the primary strategy focused on having the party do the fighting for you, letting them level up, providing them with weapons and equipment, and not letting them die.
  • Healers and archeologists, and possibly tourists, don’t make very good additions to the party, and so should perhaps be ineligible.
  • Party roles could be randomly chosen from distinct sets of “strong melee fighter” (Bar or Cav or Kni or Val), “ranged combat” (Ran or Rog or Sam or possibly Tou), and “spellcaster/cleric” (possibly Hea or Mon or Pri or Wiz). These could also just be hardcoded.
  • The party will not start with the full starting inventory of their respective roles. They will generally have the same weapons and armor, but will probably not have any of the scrolls, rings, wands they normally start with, and starting spellbooks should be either eliminated or unrandomized. In other words, you shouldn’t be incentivized to slaughter your allies for their stuff.
• Healer strategy should shift away from petmongering - the easiest way to do this is change the protection formula in such a way that the protection racket doesn’t exist; so that the player isn’t incentivized to keep XL as low as possible until they can buy protection.
• Difficult for Healers to find a new niche. (Avoidance of combat is an option, but dtsund’s Class Overhaul Proposal calls for Archeologists to fill that niche). Perhaps something that focuses on pacifying monsters by healing them, but this has issues: you shouldn’t be able to ‘‘tame’’ by healing since that turns Healers back in the direction of acquiring lots of pets, and most monsters start at full HP and don’t need any healing.
• Bards (and probably all players) should be able to equip their pets by #looting them, or a similar mechanism. (This would also apply to mounts.) Intelligent monsters will prefer player-given items above all others and will never willingly replace them for other gear. Possibly make this behavior dependent on options, because some players may want their pets to be pragmatic in their gear choices.
• Player monster pets should perhaps not be able to detect curses.
• Songbooks, + class items which contain a song that the bard can learn.
  • Balancing the songbook generation rate against spellbooks might be tricky, because although bards can still cast spells and other roles can play songs, each is not very likely to have that much use for the other set of books. Hardcoding different probabilities based on whether the character is a bard or not doesn’t seem very clean.
  • Possibly the bard should be able to discover songs by trial and error, although simple brute forcing is definitely not the way to do it. Maybe all spellbooks start identified.
  • The bard could need to practice the song by using the songbook in order to restore “song memory”. Song memory does not work quite like spell memory, it works essentially like direct success rate. There might be some mandatory delay between practices, meaning you can’t take an unlearned song and practice it up to 100% immediately. Or there could be a possible failure of practice, maybe a dexterity penalty (“Dumb move! You strain your fingers.”) to serve to prevent practice-spam. Playing a song would serve to
  • Songbooks do not eventually go blank, and can be used for practice indefinitely.
  • Or to keep it realistic with learning actual songs, you need to have the songbook on hand early on when you want to play it, but as you play it more and gain practice, you can eventually play the song without it anymore.
• The bard should possibly be able to sing some of their songs without requiring an instrument.

See also: Bard implementations.

Charm monster is generally considered too powerful and too low-level, and should probably be nerfed. Ideas:

• It only works if you’re not wearing any armor. (This is apparently how D&D does it.) Alternatively, its chance of successfully charming is reduced the more armor you’re wearing.
• Make it more reliable than it is now, but it always fails if you have other pets. (You can then only have one pet at a time without using scrolls of taming.)
• It only tames one monster at a time. (Make it a directional beam with a maximum range of 1.)
• It only pacifies monsters, and can’t be used to tame an always-hostile monster.
• Make it do what the temporary pet code in the Bard patch does: the monster remains tame for a fairly short amount of time and then reverts to whatever it was originally.
• Split into three spells: pacify monster (peaceful for charisma*2 turns), charm monster (tame for Charisma*2 turns), and dominate monster (tame permanently or for a long time).
• It only works on monsters, and doesn’t work on intelligent beings.
• It can’t directly tame a hostile monster; it can only pacify it. Peaceful monsters can then be tamed by subsequent casts, but attempting to tame a peaceful intelligent monster may anger it instead. The pacification step is dependent only on monster MR, but the taming depends on the player’s level relative to the target. The scroll of taming should remain comparatively powerful.
• Scale with skill: unskilled attempts to pacify one adjacent monster, basic to pacify all adjacent, skilled to tame one adjacent, and expert to tame all adjacent. All of these are subject to normal monster MR checks.
• Whatever nerfs do get applied, they should ensure that the scroll of taming is more powerful and reliable than the spell.

Killing a mindless pet does not incur any penalties to alignment record or Luck.

Some type of monster that lifesaves you when you die, instead dying itself. This might be a new monster or not, probably something angelic (but not an Angel since you can get one on Astral).

After a pet removes a shop-owned item from a shop 5 times, the shopkeeper stops permitting pets in the shop.

A tinning kit for pets, or some other way to create tins that are not designed to be eaten by the player but instead opened with an adjacent pet that will always eat whatever it is in the tin, so you can give them resistances in a controlled manner.

When you look at a pet’s inventory via the #loot command and it is wearing armor, its AC is shown.

Cursed bags of tricks create tame monsters instead of peaceful or hostile. This is a “bad effect” since you cannot use them for sacrificing.

A magic leash, which gives your pets enough speed to always stay by your side so that can move at your regular rate across a floor without constantly getting ahead of it and having to stop to wait for it.

There should be a way to remove confusion from pets. One simple way to accomplish this would be giving you a way to directly feed a lizard corpse to your pet, by making pets prioritize eating a lizard corpse when confused. Though this would not work for herbivorous or inediate pets.

There should be a way to tell what the acquired resistances of a monster are. This could be by zapping a wand of probing at it, by breaking a potion of enlightenment on it, feedback gained from a stethoscope, or (less likely) a new spell exclusively for pet diagnostics.

Note that it may not be considered “fair” for any of these methods to work on pets, but not work to tell the player’s resistances when they do it to themselves.

Some mechanism, maybe a new object that you can place on the ground or a spell you can cast, that drives peaceful and tame monsters several spaces away from you.

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”.

Chatting to a pet that is carrying an item picked up off the floor will command them to drop the item. The odds of them obeying depend on their tameness and apport.

The “falconry gloves” random glove appearance has some side benefit involving training pet falcons (or possibly all birds) to attack your foes.

A pokeball item that can be thrown at injured or status-inflicted monsters to capture them, after which they turn into pets.

Add a shadow monster, which is always next to you if you are on a lit square, including in walls (via limited phasing that allows it to be on wall spaces adjoining a walkable space but not on spaces not next to a walkable space). It is forced to the opposite side of you from nearby light sources. If you’re in a dark area, it will wander away, but it will immediately return to your side when you reenter a lit area.

If you feel worried about your pet or sad for a moment over their death while sleeping, you wake up immediately.

If you attempt to push a boulder onto a space where a pet is, it will automatically move out of the way if there is an available space to move to. If not, it stays there and the boulder can’t be pushed. This may or may not cost the pet a move.

Artifact ring of warning that, in addition to providing warning, has some of the properties from UnNetHack’s Clarent. When worn, it shows all pets on the level, wherever they are, and can be invoked to increase tameness of all pets in line of sight.

When the player does something that decreases the tameness of a pet, the amount of decrease should be doubled if the pet is intelligent and “weakly” cross-aligned (either the pet or the player is neutral and the other isn’t), and tripled if the pet is intelligent and “strongly” cross-aligned (the pet or player is lawful; the other is chaotic).

Unicorns always count as “intelligent” for these purposes (they’re not intelligent, but fundamentally understand alignment).

Scroll of recall: a scroll that works like a magic whistle but with more varied effects.

• Uncursed: works identically to a magic whistle, summoning pets on the level to your side.
• Blessed: summons pets from anywhere in the dungeon to your side.
• Cursed: summons hostiles to your side (unclear if this is from anywhere in the dungeon or just the current level).
• Confused: summons objects to your side.

Add some way to direct a pet to carry an item indefinitely. Most types of pets would not be able to pick anything else up while carrying the directed item.

Kicking towards a pet causes it to move in a random direction and produces the message “You push Foo aside with your foot.” Not specified what this should do for pets that are too large to move aside, or if the pet has nowhere to go.

Magic collar, an amulet without a randomized appearance, which you can apply to a pet to make it wear it, assuming it has a neck. The pet then becomes visible to you at all times while it’s on your level (similar to seeing it with telepathy) and possibly tracked in #overview if it’s not on your level. Farlooking a pet wearing a magic collar shows HP and other additional information as if you had used a stethoscope on it.

Not specified what effects there would be, if any, if the player wears the magic collar.

If you displace a tame or peaceful cat onto watery terrain such as a sink or fountain (or shallow water, if implemented) it automatically attacks you, though it doesn’t actually go hostile; it’s a one-off reaction to getting wet.

If you kill a pet whose species has a zombie counterpart, a zombie of that pet may appear later to try and kill you.

Assuming an implementation that lets monsters wear rings and lets you pick and choose what your pet equips: You can have your pets wear an amulet of unchanging to make them immune from being polymorphed or shapeshifting; possibly the rings of sustain ability could protect from both as well, and having them wear protection from shape changers could be used to prevent them from shapeshifting, if they are a shapeshifter.

Non-chaotic Priests get punished for having demon pets. The penalty is applied upon taming it and periodically from being on the same level as it, so that you can avoid penalties by abandoning it somewhere. (Internally, it should be applied when a tame demon moves; this means if you have multiple demon pets, the penalties stack up faster.)

If you are sufficiently skilled at a ranged weapon you are using (perhaps only Expert, possibly Skilled some of the time), you can shoot at non-tame monsters behind your pets and the ranged attack will pass through your pets’ squares silently without hitting them. (If there is no apparent non-tame monster behind the pets, it could either be assumed that you’re trying to hit the pets so the attack would hit them, or more generously it would just continue to pass through them.)

Gently nerf the ability of pets to steal from shops, so that a player with a stack of meatballs or a magic whistle can’t clear out an entire shop. Suggested ideas:

• Make apport less easily exploitable, requiring more in-depth training than just feeding your pet after it drops items next to you.
• Track the total amount of value lost to a shop by a pet moving items out of it. Once this value exceeds some threshold, the shopkeeper intervenes, either by turning hostile if you continue letting your pet steal after a warning, or attacking the pet.
• Track items that have been stolen from a shop (probably by marking them with the monster ID of the shopkeeper). You can’t resell stolen items; the shopkeeper won’t offer any money for them, instead they will grin and say “Thank you for returning my stolen [item]”, taking ownership of the item. However, this doesn’t solve the problem where you really do want most of the shop’s inventory for yourself.

If possible, work in a “pet-ty theft” YAFM somehow.

Show basic summaries of any pets with you when your game ends. Things such as their inventory, age, basic stats, whether they were a starting pet, etc. This is primarily so that it carries over into the dumplog.

Add the turn a pet was created into the edog struct, so the game can measure how long and loyal of a relationship you have with it. Pets that stay tame for a long time get some combat buffs such as a damage boost or more hit points. They are also more likely to come back tame if killed and resurrected.

Note that if a pet is momentarily untamed and then retamed, it resets the “turn it became a pet” counter.

Add “choose” as a pettype option, which prompts you to select from the available pets during character creation.

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

When blind and holding a leash with a pet on it, you can see the pet.

Gods can grant you (unique?) pets as a sacrifice gift, or possibly a prayer boon. Example here was Sleipnir for valkyries. If it’s a steed, it will always be saddled.

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.

Applying a blessed whistle (either type) will unparalyze pets in range.

Assuming that some limit has been implemented on the number of pets you can have at one time: New amulet that allows you to have more pets than you normally can.

Pets are not stealthy by default, and wake up sleeping monsters just like the player does.

Demon and undead pets move reluctantly over blessed items.

A mechanism for checking the health of your steed that isn’t as specialized as a stethoscope. Possibly chatting downward at it gives you a clue.

If the player drops a leash that’s in use or gets teleported away or dies, etc, the pet starts dragging the leash visibly on the map like a player drags an iron chain.

Dogs are buffed to be better fighting than cats as a starting pet, but lose their ability to curse detect.

When you have a slower pet leashed, slow down _ travel by resting whenever you would move far enough from the pet to pull on the leash.

Muzzles that can be put on pets so they stop eating food off the floor. Uncursed ones block their eating 90% of the time; blessed 100%; and cursed ones weld to the pet’s face and prevent it from eating anything until it starves or the curse is removed. May also decrease tameness when put on the pet.

Bird pets are better at combat than mammals, but can carry much less due to weighing less.

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

When you use stairs, not only do adjacent pets follow you, but any pets adjacent to adjacent pets, and so on, also follow you.

Pets don’t go feral if you are both in Sokoban, even on different levels.

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.

Artifact bullwhip that grants extra damage against tigers and other animals, and grants better passive pet-control effects.

Pets get a speed increase of (Cha + 6).

Tame monsters continue to hold grudges against each other, unless the master’s Charisma is high enough.

Add more non-magical ways to get pets that are better than what your starting pets can level into. Such as pet stores with figurines, or being able to tame watchmen by paying them money, or by healing a monster at low HP.

Add spell of summon pets, a level 2 or 3 matter spell that duplicates the effects of a magic whistle. The name needs work.

Mind flayers seek out your pets to eat their brains and turn them into thralls, which makes them effectively a pet of the mind flayer instead.

Add a dogcatcher, who will come and impound your pet if it misbehaves (stealing from shops, killing Minetown citizens) and you don’t get it leashed before a certain amount of time has passed.

Stethoscopes and probing on a pet shows when that pet is satiated.

Limit the amount of tamed monsters you can have at once.

Instead of pushing pets out of the way as they do other monsters, the Riders can trample over pets, instakilling them.

Pets anywhere on the Astral Plane always go with you when you ascend, regardless of whether they’re adjacent or leashed to you.

Applying a stethoscope tells the target’s gender, and the hunger status of pets.