Nethack is one of the original "roguelikes," back when that meant a text-console game based on `rogue`. It's an RPG where your character kills monsters, picks up loot, and descends into the dungeon. If you die, that's it -- you can't just load a save; you have to start all over. It's legendarily unforgiving.
In Nethack, most (all?) roles start with a pet, e.g. a puppy or a kitten. In the early game, your pet is often stronger than you; it follows you, fights monsters, etc. It's useful in many ways beyond fighting: it won't walk over a cursed item, it can "fetch" items from stores without angering the proprietor, and so on. Your pet gains experience and levels up (puppy -> dog -> large dog), and after a certain point you're prompted to give your pet a name.
The message "You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes" is displayed when your pet dies while out of sight. It's pretty difficult to keep your pet alive all through the endgame, so much like any real-life pet owner, there will come a time where you have to say goodbye, one way or the other.
Oh, sure: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Save_scumming I wrote "nhsave" and "nhload" scripts when I was a kid and didn't know you weren't supposed to do this ("they didn't include a save/load function? how dumb").
Edit: If you really want this, you can always enter explore mode (e.g. with `nethack -X`), which makes death optional. It doesn't make the rest of the game any easier, though.
Nethack is notoriously unfair with the player, and not a really winnable game. The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move. If I think that the game was cheating, I act accordingly.
The other option is the exploring mode (X), when you can't be killed, but I find that is boring.
Oh it is a winnable game, I ascended several times after reading a lot of detailed spoilers. You just need a lot of strategy (and spoilers) or an early wand of wishing. Preferably both.
Neutral Wizard
blessed PYEC, blessed Orb of Fate, blessed magic marker, +3 blessed greased SDSM, BoH, +3 fireproof speedboots, +3 greased fireproof cloak of magic resistance, write out +ID, ?charging, get your Magicbane or better Greyswandir, etc.
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this yeti corpse? stop eating?"
No
> "You choke on your food and die after 20200 moves"
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this dragon corpse? stop eating?"
Hum... yes?
"You choke on your food and die after 40678789 moves"
Well, this is simply ridiculous.
In the last 20 years playing nethack, consulting the oracle, reading the wiki, and learning, I reached gehennon... once. This is like the 30% of the game or so. Don't even
reached a quest. After a while, solving sokoban and gnome mines by the 800 time is just... meh; Wesnoth is better.
The game would greatly benefit of something like: You lose 70 of your 71 points just descending the stairs into a bones level and become stressed, unable to move and surrounded by enemies. This is your last point, do you want to try something?
If that's what is killing you every time, then get a blessed tinning kit and stop eating random corpses like that. Or at least wear an amulet of magical breathing while you eat.
Or if you want to be really fun, polymorph into a Xorn or whatever and eat a few amulets of magical breathing to gain it as an intrinsic.
Generally just go through your death list and find what is killing you then look at how to avoid that. Eating random corpses late game is pretty much always a mistake, you should have normal food to rely on in your bag of holding and a blessed tinning kit from the mines for intrinsic granting corpses.
Yes, there are a ton of ways to die. Part of making an ascension kit is checking them off one by one. You can see that my wizard would have reflection, MR, grease to avoid mindflayers and drowning monsters (though blessed ?geno on LhV; makes life much easier), etc. Naturally I'd use that blessed magic marker to write every spellbook, the PYEC can recharge all the things and I take half damage. If I get Greswandir from sacrificing, I can get up to basic proficiency, otherwise I'd best stick with magicbane which is easy to get.
Get your levels up, your stats up, your resists covered and it's mostly just a slog at the end because turns take forever when 30 monsters want a piece of you.
Wizard just has perhaps the easiest endgame, but that part tends to be easy enough with any class for a well-spoiled player. Wizards have a relatively hard early game.
Um, it's quite winnable. It's much easier to win once you've been thoroughly spoiled (either via investing a large amount of playtime or reading spoilers), but it's quite possible to Ascend (win) through extensive preparation and brute force. The number of truly unavoidable, single-move deaths, particularly in the mid-to-late game is a very tiny part of the whole gamespace (as witnessed by the many, many players who win without anything more than knowledge of the game). And wearing an Amulet of Life Protection will save you from most of those.
Veteran players (at least, back when there was Usenet), would regularly refer to Yet Another Stupid Death (YASD), called such not because it was unavoidable, but because it was avoidable if the player had not made an easily avoidable mistake.
It’s totally winnable! The player almost always has a chance to avoid death. Deaths are usually due to missing knowledge or laziness/impatience. The knowledge is really really hard to gain without wikis, and I absolutely wouldn’t have ascended without wikis, but reading them added another layer of fun for me.
Huh? I've ascended quite a few times, and I am soo far from being the best player.
It's totally winnable. It's your job as a player to avoid getting into situations where you don't have 'a single defensive move'.
(It's not the best game ever, nor is it the most fair game ever. True. But almost all games of Nethack are winnable, if you are careful enough and learned enough about the game.)
If ascended a tourist and a healer and an archaeologist and quite a few of the easier classes, too.
> The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move.
Technically true, but there are always moves you could have done prior to avoid being in that situation. Part of the game is knowing what protections you need to have before advancing deeper into the dungeon.
Had a hunter with a blue crab named Seafood in World of Warcraft for years.
He was somewhat famous on the server at the time. Eventually got rid of him because he had no benefits compared to other pets. No logical reason to keep him.
Huge regret. I grieved for that damn crab for months. Finally stopped playing that class all together.
As a fellow WoWer, I always opted for aesthetics, writ large, over optimization. I get that folks seek out competition, either vs environment or other players. But adhering to a personal aesthetic Code is another option.
See also, I suppose, conduct runs in many roguelikes.
Pets also feature strongly in the late game. Two of the best items in the game are a scroll of taming (converts nearby monsters to pets) and a magic whistle (summons your pets). Eventually there's no point in fighting yourself; blow your whistle and let your pet dragon army clear the room.
I love the family dragon army! But why bother using taming scrolls when you can polymorph control yourself into a dragon (taking off your armor first!) and then sitting to make eggs where they are actual family! Blood may be thicker than water, but dragon scales even thicker than blood!
Purple worms also make magnificent pets. Genning up a fleet of pet purple worms and teleporting them away can make life a lot easier on the Astral Plane.
Eh, depends on what class you have. Pets are a bit of a hassle to get up and down the stairs. If you do enough damage yourself, it's usually less annoying to do the fighting yourself.
What's worse, your pet can die while you're blind and you attack it without realising who it is. Thankfully this will only happen once in the game. You learn the lesson afterwards. Hopefully.
I remember the first time I played, my dog walked into a trap and died within the first 10 moves. It can avoid cursed items but was clearly helpless against my cursed gamer "skills".
It blew me away how much attachment I had for what essentially amounted to a letter on a screen controlled by algorithms. I wrote a blog post about it 10 years ago:
Are three still text based roguelikes being made? For me these were one of the most endearing features of the games back in the day. I was a big ADOM fan and it captured my imagination in an almost book like way because everything in the world was rendered only symbolically.
ADOM had a fancy re-release on Steam recently! It just showed up in my Steam queue.
Check out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Feels like a much more modern Nethack, with convenience features (`o` autoexplore, `tab` autofight, etc.) and less of a focus on one-and-done intrinsic immunities in favor of tradeoffs ("this armor comes with cold resistance but vulnerability to fire").
For more of an "explore the world" feeling, Caves of Qud is on Steam and has a ton of depth.
Dwarf Fortress has Adventurer mode, which, although less developed than the more famous Fortress mode, is still really deep, under slow but active development, and has the unique value prop that you can build a fortress, leave it on autopilot, create an adventurer, go visit the same fortress, chat with the locals, maybe go kill some monsters in the caverns. You can retire an adventurer, switch back to fort mode, see your old character become one of your citizens, and so on.
I had a go at adventure mode, but I must admit I found it hard to create a narrative for myself. It was fun wandering around and hearing what monks thought life was a bout, but I wasn't quite sure where the adventure was.
Hidden gems like this were one of the great things about Everything2. For those who aren't familiar with it, E2 is structured vaguely like an encyclopedia, only instead of being a shared Wiki any user can write a whole separate article. Sometimes this was helpful for learning -- having three different explanations of what a tensor[1] is, for example. Sometimes it gave a mix of informational and personal content, such as the page on Mother's Day[2], which has one article on the history of the holiday and two about the authors' attempts to cope with it despite losing or never having had a good relationship with their mothers. (Plus a summary of a Futurama episode by that name, because E2 was like that.)
It also had an accidentally-fun feature in its hyperlinking system. Hyperlinks were intended to be used to be used for words that had their own articles, but you could link to any article, and when you hovered your mouse over the link the name of the target article would pop up. This could be used to make the closest thing I've seen to an English equivalent of Japanese furigana puns. I'm having trouble finding a good example right now, sadly.
My uncle was the one to introduce me to everything2 back when I must have been around 12 years old, by linking me to one of his writeups. I never created an account there, but was immediately pulled in by its curious mix of geeky information and beautiful writing. I voraciously read it throughout my teen years and am convinced it helped expand my vocabulary, and also probably reinforced my habit of aimlessly exploring information repositories (e.g., Wikipedia rabbit holes). I still sometimes return to it to be mildly amused at seeing present-day content presented in the same antiquated frontend that I don't think has changed much in 20+ years, because why mess with perfection?
I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.
> I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.
I came across the site when I read Daniel Rutter’s Dan’s Data(1) pre-blog blog in the early-2000s when I was devouring everything about Palm devices as a geeky teenager. Dan had a tendency to link terms and phrases to sites that discussed what he meant in detail. Everything2 was his go-to for a lot of references and it soon became mine. Before a certain point, I think I was looking stuff up on E2 before looking on Wikipedia.
A few years later, I found my group of “wholehearted geeky but well-masking” friends in university. A couple of them also read Everything2, and the discovery of this site was one of those subconscious things that nudged us closer together.
I hope this site stays up forever, and I am disappointed it does not often come up in search results for random topics.
Of note, E2 has indeed had a small change in the last decade, and that was the main interface colour going from Burnt Orange to Purple.
The other great feature were 'nodeshells' (that is, links to pages that did not yet exist). These could act as writing prompts, or just as a way to 'comment' on other nodes (pages).
Weirdly, one of the ones I liked (by adding it to my homepage) was 'AT fields cannot be penetrated spiritually fallacy' was around 20 years ago. Just this year I finally watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, and finally understood what it meant :)
I never heard of Everything2. Regretfully because it seems great. I see it has new articles and Wikipedia lists it as active though everybody here refers to it in the past tense. Why is that?
Well, it was originally very experimental and a Slashdot project -- short short stories, diary entries, poems, opinions, film reviews, whatever goes. Then someone got the bright idea that the place should be factual, and there was a big push for it to be real and grounded and not so artsy.
Then Wikipedia came along and ate. their. lunch.
The experimental folks already lit off for greener pastures, and others had been driven off by "XP Pack Rape," a practice as charming as its name, wherein a user would be targeted and just sort of ... de-karma'd or whatever you would have it.
Between those forces and the decline of Slashdot, well ...
Thanks for making me aware of the existence of furigana. Unique corners of language are a pet interest of mine and that was a fun rabbit hole to go down.
Everything2 is one of those things that inspired near obsession for me when it was a going thing. I am glad you can still look at it, but it's a little like going to the World's Fair site in New York City. You get the impression this was pretty cool once, but that its time came and went.
> My own death, of course, which I learnt will come when I least expect it, when everything is going right for once - that when no threats are apparent and I feel I can relax a little, it will be then that I choke over a tin of spinach, or mistake a blue e for a blue o, or a pink h for a pink h.
Just recently my wife developed a sudden and very aggressive infection. She's healthy and it totally came out of left field. Then it spread to me. It was definitely humbling. I don't believe in living in fear, but it's funny how everything can change in an instant.
I have to commend the title though:
> You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes
Coming to understand the ephemeral nature of emotions is what finally allowed me deal with them. They're still real, but they always pass, no matter how strong they seem in the moment.
Grief is an enormously complicated emotional state that cannot be pithily summed up like that sentence. It's just a quote from a game.
In my experience, it doesn't pass, as in disappear. Instead, the fact of the loss slowly becomes a new fact of your reality. The newness of it will pass. The rawness of the pain will fade - most of the time. There will always be things that bring the person right back sitting next to you. But you begin to re-make your life.
If you continue to struggle and haven't already done so, I can recommend talking with a counselor (I hate the word therapist). Sometimes we just need to unload, but don't want to unload on/burden the other people in our life. Grief can be isolating in this way.
I feel the same way - at least once a week I think to myself, I should tell my mom about something her grandchildren did, and then I remember she's not here any more.
Death usually is not that sudden. Only 20%-25% of deaths are surprising and occur 24 hours or less according the Nuland's "How We Die" and other studies. The other 75% are slower processes giving us plenty of time to contemplate death, make peace or anger.
A somewhat interesting short essay about grief, inspired by the game of Nethack. The title comes from a message that appears in the game in certain situations.
I remember everything2 which was sort of a forerunner of wikipedia, and better in some ways. The contributor community was much less obnoxious. I'm glad it is still around. It's been ages since I looked at it.
> The title comes from a message that appears in the game in certain situations.
As I recall this message appears when your pet dies but you weren't able to see it happen. It's definitely a sad feeling when you are a weak character with a strong pet doing most of the fighting.
"You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes"
A poetic, bittersweet line. In a way, the sadness is the "good" part, when you feel the most longing for what's been lost. The real loss is forgetting.
Yeah, I know it's tacky to reference an MCU show, but Wandavision's defining line was
"what is grief but love persevering?"
which kind of implies the sad inverse -- that once we pick ourselves up and carry on, it necessarily means that the love isn't persevering quite so hard.
I have little to nothing to contribute as usual, but I feel compelled to come out of the woodwork to state that I, for one, am stoked to see E2 appearing on HN in currentyear.
I feel obliged to note that for some people, with some lost, it never quite passes. Or, it returns regularly. Or all those losses accumulate.
I don't necessarily mean with me, but there is research to suggest this is true in general. Also, after having reached a certain stage of life, and of experiences, and witnessing others, I think it can be true.
I have only lost people who where peripheral in life but for me it's feels like the world just becomes emptier. It's an odd feeling considering I hadn't interacted with some of these people in years.
Enough trauma and lose and eventually you stop feeling much of anything. It's weird when something happens that Intellectually you understand that should or once did make you sad, happy, etc; but you feel nothing at all.
Yes, sure! And they still develop their engine, eCore, which has a fantastic architecture (e.g. it allows to develop Everything2 directly from browser when you go to "developer mode" — creating new nodetypes, page templates, rendering logic etc).
Off-topic, but is anyone else having deja vu? I remember this comment appearing under a post about everything2 a few weeks ago. Even the children of the comment above are reminiscent.
Nethack taught me a lot of things, including to not to pick up a cockatrice corpse without gloves on. Also: Don't throw it above your head without wearing a helmet. Don't slip down a hidden pit of spikes, and fall on it. Don't step on a landmine and drop it on yourself without wearing boots. Don't get hypnotized by a wizard, have him pick it up, and then touch you with it.
Have you had any second opinions? It sounds like your evaluator has given up on you, perhaps you shouldn't give up on you and find someone else who hasn't to help you.
This was the initial evaluation, but it is the English name used in Germany for dysthymia, which is long-term persistent depression, and has a low rate of remission (indeed they actually class remission as "has been given the mechanisms to cope with the illness" in the literature). Very few people recover from it, they just learn to live with it
The actual diagnosis was double depression, which is dysthymia ("permanent depression") + major depression (acute depression)
> You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes
The main point from the writing fits right along with what I consider the main point of mindfulness and meditation practice.
Everything that arises, also passes away.
Highly suggest people try out the practice through guided intro courses. There are tons of benefits, but even just realizing and witnessing how all types thoughts, feelings, emotions that come up will go away is alone worth the time.
This is not said enough, but mindfulness practice is also not for everyone. If you're feeling a lot of negative emotions do not persist and persevere past it
It's been a long time since I've played Nethack. I believe the first time I was exposed to it was after installing my first Linux distribution. I forget which one it was (could have been Slackware or Mandriva?), but I do remember the stack of diskettes that contained the full distro.
That was beautifully written. I've never played Nethack, but I have spent countless hours playing ADOM, in all its text mode glory. These games managed to be so much deeper with so few resources available to them than most modern games.
But I just can't make heads or tails _at all_ about what exactly this website is. Someone's blog? Collective input? No obvious "About" section? What am I missing?
I used to read that site daily. It's a lot of great writing. One contributor was a guy who'd regularly go to Antarctica for months at a time, it was amazing reading his nicely written pieces about the experience.
One of the greatest websites of all time (I was the technical lead there for a couple of years 20 years ago.)
It was originally designed as a more general wiki (the name is a pun of C2 ) and then evolved into a a quasi-literary, quasi-blog thing, with thousands of contributors.
Its key features were a supremely easy way to create links between articles ("nodes") as well as empty links ("nodeshells") for others to fill in, encouraging sprawl but also connectivity; a rich voting and reward system, chat and messages, bookmarks, lists - if we had all had a half a brain, we could've pivoted to Medium or Substack no problem.
learned about the game from "the website is down" vid like 10+ years ago. UnNetHack version felt best. ain't pro but eventually did manage to ascend with an elven wizard
Nethack is one of the original "roguelikes," back when that meant a text-console game based on `rogue`. It's an RPG where your character kills monsters, picks up loot, and descends into the dungeon. If you die, that's it -- you can't just load a save; you have to start all over. It's legendarily unforgiving.
In Nethack, most (all?) roles start with a pet, e.g. a puppy or a kitten. In the early game, your pet is often stronger than you; it follows you, fights monsters, etc. It's useful in many ways beyond fighting: it won't walk over a cursed item, it can "fetch" items from stores without angering the proprietor, and so on. Your pet gains experience and levels up (puppy -> dog -> large dog), and after a certain point you're prompted to give your pet a name.
The message "You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes" is displayed when your pet dies while out of sight. It's pretty difficult to keep your pet alive all through the endgame, so much like any real-life pet owner, there will come a time where you have to say goodbye, one way or the other.