NetHack4 Philosophy

I played nethack a lot in the 90’s when I was in college. The farthest I got was the plane of air. Despite never beating it I consider it to be one of my favorite games. I’m glad to see design goals are still in the same spirit. Perhaps I should pick it up again now that my patience has leveled up.

Plane of Air is pretty darn far! Those Air Elementals can be brutal.

Still, it's impressive you made it that far, and it's rough you made it so close without actually ascending!

You did much better than me. I always starved to death, or I died of poison trying not to starve to death.

This is a well known indication of a beginner: experienced players apparently never die this way - but I have no idea what they do different or even ideas of what else to try and so I gave up. There was a massive wealth of options (even in the 1990s) and I always wanted to get back into it, but until I come up with a path forward it always feels like I'll never get far so what is the point...

I've only beat the game by playing it in the debugger. I'm not sure if anyone has really beat it honestly.

There's so many Dumb Ways to Die in the game.

I always played with cheats on just so I could try all the characters and see all their quests and stuff.

Amazing the Ascension speed record is like 49 minutes.

Now now, it's that the game is full of ways to have YASD, Yet Another Stupid Death.

I ascended a couple of times and don't remember ever losing on the planes. But I had read spoilers, and over-prepared on any run where I got as far as the end of the main dungeon.

It absolutely has been done, many times by many people.

My experience is 30 years old so take this with a grain of salt.

I rushed goblin mines on every character. If I hit a bunch of food in town then the run was on. Store food you can’t carry every few levels. You only need to carry enough food to reach one of your stashes.

You learn good/bad food by watching pet. If your pet wants to eat it then you are good.

I have no idea how people manage vegetarian or foodless runs.

I have also played for decades. I have beat it multiple times, but never on my PC. The only places I have beat it were on my (Apple) phone and on my (Android) tablet. Something about the UI difference subtly impacts my playstyle.

Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)

You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust your pet, because there are some foods that are good for pets but not for @.

One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack told me it's dog food.

Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or elf though.

And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or because it was close and yours died a few turns before theirs.