nethack - tnnt - post TNNT2023 thoughts
After participating in TNNT2023, some thoughts.
1st is: Always use a _blessed_ scroll of genocide, never a non-blessed scroll. I should have used a blessed scroll of genocide on disenchanters. It's my guess that a monster of the disenchater family, that wasn't genocided by the non-blessed scroll, is who killed off my Adventurer during attempt six of TNNT2023.
Next, playing TNNT2023 with a full-screen sized terminal and ssh, has given me confidence to abandon playing regular nethack at home via xnethack, and instead play all the time for now on, as full-screen terminal play, without any prettify-er like xnethack.
"Slow is fast" strategy of only going to dungeon levels where (LVL < Adventurer's XL) works! Given more days of gameplay, and the time to play when not working, might have been able to get to the vibrating square more "safely."
A contributing factor to the attempt six death, I think, was that the Adventurer was only XL20 when going down way past (LVL < Adventurer's XL), like going to LVL25+ when just XL20, etc. Felt pressured to "break my rule" due to November running out of days for gameplay.
Change boulder character to '0' during gameplay
The default boulder character for my debian stable version of nethack, is a back-tick '`'. When attempting sokoban, I kept making mistakes and locking-up boulders, causing my sokoban attempt to fail.
TNNT has a boulder character of '0', so to change the default for a game session of nethack, do:
#options > boulder > "Set boulder to what?" > type in a zero, then .
The game immediately changes the boulder shape and returns you back to normal game session.
Change boulder character to '0' as a persistent setting over many games
In the home directory of the user you use to play nethack, create a hidden text configuration file.
The filename should be ".nethackrc" == > ~/.nethackrc
For having the nethack boulder always be a zero '0' add the following into the .nethackrc file:
OPTIONS=boulder:0
Then save the file. Now the game should persistently use zero for a boulder when playing.
Use "M" to have the adventurer travel
EDIT 2023-12-16 Learned something new! Was staring at my printed-out "Nethack Keyboard Commands" sheet that I have posted above my Debian workstation, and was looking through all the commands possible that it lists.
During lseth's youtube videos about navigating the dungeon, I had assumed that perhaps it was edited that his Adventurer did "zips" around the dungeon, as until today, I have always had my Adventurer move one square at a time with the lower-case "m" command.
But today, I did noticed I had never tried upper-case "M" move/travel command.
Wow, wish I had realized to use it years ago. "M" move/travel has the Adventurer move in amounts of 5 to 10squares. It also navigates turns, so if the Adventurer has a "tunnel" to navigate with a 90degree bend, using M will have the Adventurer do the turn, for the total of 5 to 10 squares or so.
It's wonderful. Again, embarrassed I hadn't tried it years ago (ah, the humility).
#invoke on the Orb Of Fate to level transport away from nasties when in Gehennom
EDIT 2024-01-16 The Orb Of Fate, if #invoke is done on it, will move the Adventurer to another level (level transport). Try to remember to use it, if in Gehennom and get swarmed by nasties or confronted by strong demons, like Orcus.