This is the documentation for a patch for Nethack 3.4.1, the classic roguelike timesink that’s been in development for nearly 15 years, and still has ASCII graphics. That means all the development time has gone into gameplay, and as a result, it’s probably the best game there is.

Download the patch here

A while ago Rob Ellwood suggested some nice YANIs on rec.games.roguelike.nethack, amongst which was the idea that fire and cold resistance should be mutually exclusive. Nasty! I love it! So here it is.

This patch makes fire and cold resistance intrinsics mutually exclusive. This means you can only have one or the other! For example, if you gain fire resistance from eating a corpse, you lose it when you gain cold resistance from eating another corpse, and vice versa. Intrinsics from level gains are not affected. There are some exceptions:

• It is possible for some classes to have both at the same time, since they acquire one intrinsic (Priests), or the other (Valkyries) or both (Monks) naturally as a consequence of level gains.
• Crowning turns fire into cold, and cold into fire, if you have one of them. If you have neither, you get both! I hope this captures their contrary nature and still keeps crowning a Good Thing.

Other implications are:

• ‘Extrinsic’ intrinsics are not affected, so you can still wear rings and armour to get the corresponding resistances.
• This makes rings of fire and cold resistance useful, and makes you think about which rings to wear later on in the game.
• If you have natural fire resistance, and non-natural cold resistance, then get fire resistance from a corpse, you’ll lose cold resistance, and vice versa.
• You’ll still most likely want fire resistance for Gehennom, so watch out for ice devils and Asmodeus!
• For most classes, the only way to get both is to be crowned when having neither. However, getting to the point of crowning without getting either is tricky, since once you get one, you will forever toggle between them, never losing both, unless a gremlin steals one, but this is rather dangerous as you might lose other intrinsics.

This patch undoubtedly makes the game harder, especially in the late stage, which I believe is a good thing. Monsters with cold attacks are currently rather useless, the classic example being Asmodeus, who is trivially easy to beat if you have cold resistance, which practically everyone does by then.

If anyone spots a bug, please tell me.

In Tim Cahill’s lazily entertaining (but rather formulaic) collection of short travel stories, Hold the Enlightenment, there is a passage that reads as follows:

In 1997, a British racing team, driving a car powered by a pair of jets, broke both the sound barrier and the world land-speed record - 763,053 miles per hour - on the playa.

Wow, that’s fast!

I’m still testing, so here’s summore filler.

The Filmworks, Manchester’s vast cavern of cinema, had this sysopsis of The Matrix on their website:

To save the world of the future, a software computer expert in modern-day America is brought into contact with a mysterious character called Morpheus, the inhabitant of a universe some 2000 years in the future. The software expert, now re-christened Neo, agrees to be fitted with technology enabling him to be updated continually with endless amounts of knowledge, so that he can eventually do battle with the Matrix, a power field run by sinister computer-like forces, that controls a new ‘virtual’ real world. Matrix has been described as Blade Runner for the computer literate and in many ways the stunning visuals of the film compare to it’s predecessor in originality but here the use of wire stunts, computer animation and balletic martial arts takes the sci-fi action film to a new dimension.

That couldn’t have been much worse.

Well lookie what we have here:

Age 10 years and over

Since I’m moving house in a few weeks time, I thought I’d cut down on the amount of junk we have to take by using up this old chemistry set. Since the only chemistry I remember is the production of Evil Concoctions, that’s what we did. Tools required:

• Glass mixing bowl
• Lots of chemicals
• Rubber gloves
• Safety goggles. Pity we didn’t have any.

Cobalt Chloride, Tartaric Acid, Manganese Sulphate… what more could a 10 year old want?

At some point in the distant past, I’d actually used this set, so not all the ingredient bottles were full. Most of the remaining ones were boring black and white powders which just sat in the bowl as we tipped them in. There were some interesting purples and reds along the way, but the colour of the goop was dominted by the pot of charcoal.

Corrosive you say?

There was a roll of shiny copper. Perhaps it was meant for an electroplating experiment, or some other educational use. We dumped it in with the rest.

It actually didn’t smell

After adding a chemical I don’t remember the name of, the mixture started bubbling. Probably making hydrogen gas. Or chlorine gas. We’d added some water to act as a solvent, lest the poweders just sit there in a pile and be boring.

Solids

Above, you can see a pair of tongs lifting some filter paper filled with a solid gunk that formed at the bottom. In the bowl is the unrolled copper and some blobs of wax we found in an old rotting jar. There’s tons of this putrescent clutter in the far reaches of the garden. I suppose it’s one of the reasons we’re moving.

Do not exhume within 1.7×10^11 years

When the set was completely consumed, and safe to be dumped in the regular rubbish bin, we still had to get rid of the bowl of chemicals. Rather than flush it down the toilet or wash it down the sink, and risk polluting the sewage system, we dug a hole in a barren area and buried it, polluting that instead. To prevent wild animals licking the ground and turning into some kind of, oh, I don’t know, monster, we entombed it forever by carefully placing a tile above the filled in pit.

We washed the remaining dregs out of the bowl and left it soaking in another concoction, this time of bleach and detergent. Did we learn anything from this experiment? Why of course! We mastered the science of the elements! Didn’t you read the box?