Nethack Game System: PC Cheat Category: Hint Game Company: Unknown Game Category: Unknown Hint, Cheat, Walkthrough: A Guide to the Mazes of Menace Eric S. Raymond (Extensively edited and expanded for 3.0 by Mike Threepoint) Thyrsus Enterprises Malvern, PA 19355 1. Introduction You have just finished your years as a student at the local adventurer's guild. After much practice and sweat you have fi- nally completed your training and are ready to embark upon a perilous adventure. To prove your worthiness, the local guild- masters have sent you into the Mazes of Menace. Your quest is to return with the Amulet of Yendor. According to legend, the gods will grant immortality to the one who recovers this artifact; true or not, its recovery will bring honor and full guild member- ship (not to mention the attentions of certain wealthy wizards). Your abilities and strengths for dealing with the hazards of adventure will vary with your background and training. Archeologists understand dungeons pretty well; this enables them to move quickly and sneak up on dungeon nasties. They start equipped with proper tools for a scientific expedition. Barbarians are warriors out of the hinterland, hardened to battle. They begin their quests with naught but uncommon strength, a trusty hauberk, and a great two-handed sword. Cavemen and Cavewomen start with exceptional strength and neolithic weapons. Elves are agile, quick, and sensitive; very little of what goes on will escape an Elf. The quality of Elven craftsmanship often gives them an advantage in arms and armor. Healers are wise in medicine and the apothecary. They know the herbs and simples that can restore vitality, ease pain, anesthetize, and neutralize poisons; and with their instruments, they can divine a being's state of health or sickness. Their medical practice earns them quite reasonable amounts of money, which they enter the dungeon with. Knights are distinguished from the common skirmisher by their devotion to the ideals of chivalry and by the surpassing excellence of their armor. Priests and Priestesses are clerics militant, crusaders ad- vancing the cause of righteousness with arms, armor, and arts thaumaturgic. Their ability to commune with deities via prayer occasionally extricates them from peril-but can also put them in it. Rogues are agile and stealthy thieves, who carry daggers, lock picks, and poisons to put on darts. Samurai are the elite warriors of feudal Nippon. They are lightly armored and quick, and wear the dai-sho, two swords of the deadliest keenness. Tourists start out with lots of gold (suitable for shopping with), a credit card, lots of food, some maps, and an expensive camera. Most monsters don't like being photographed. Valkyries are hardy warrior women. Their upbringing in the harsh Northlands makes them strong and inures them to extremes of cold, and instills in them stealth and cunning. Wizards start out with a fair selection of magical goodies and a particular affinity for dweomercraft. You set out for the dungeon and after several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the en- trance to the Mazes of Menace. It is late at night, so you make camp at the entrance and spend the night sleeping under the open skies. In the morning, you gather your gear, eat what may be your last meal outside, and enter the dungeon. 2. What is going on here? You have just begun a game of NetHack. Your goal is to grab as much treasure as you can, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and escape the Mazes of Menace alive. On the screen is kept a map of where you have been and what you have seen on the current dungeon level; as you explore more of the level, it appears on the screen in front of you. When NetHack's ancestor rogue first appeared, its screen orientation was almost unique among computer fantasy games. Since then, screen orientation has become the norm rather than the exception; NetHack continues this fine tradition. Unlike text adventure games that input commands in pseudo-English sen- tences and explain the results in words, NetHack commands are all one or two keystrokes and the results are displayed graphically on the screen. A minimum screen size of 24 lines by 80 columns is recommended; if the screen is larger, only a 21x80 section will be used for the map. NetHack generates a new dungeon every time you play it; even the authors still find it an entertaining and exciting game despite having won several times. 3. What do all those things on the screen mean? In order to understand what is going on in NetHack, first you must understand what NetHack is doing with the screen. The NetHack screen replaces the ``You see...'' descriptions of text adventure games. Figure 1 is a sample of what a NetHack screen might look like. The bat bites! ------ |....| ---------- |.<..|####...@...$.| |....-# |...B....+ |....| |.d......| ------ -------|-- Player the Rambler St:12 Dx:7 Co:18 In:11 Wi:9 Ch:15 Neutral Dlvl:1 G:0 HP:9(12) Pw:3(3) AC:10 Xp:1/19 T:257 Weak Figure 1 3.1. The status lines (bottom) The bottom two lines of the screen contain several cryptic pieces of information describing your current status. If either status line becomes longer than the width of the screen, you might not see all of it. Here are explanations of what the vari- ous status items mean (though your configuration may not have all the status items listed below): Rank Your character's name and professional ranking (based on the experience level, see below). Strength A measure of your character's strength, one of your six basic attributes. Your attributes can range from 3 to 18 inclusive (occasionally you may get super-strengths of the form 18/xx). The higher your strength, the stronger you are. Strength affects how successfully you perform physical tasks and how much damage you do in combat. Dexterity Dexterity affects your chances to hit in combat, to avoid traps, and do other tasks requiring agility or manipulation of objects. Constitution Constitution affects your ability to withstand injury and other strains on your stamina. Intelligence Intelligence affects your ability to cast spells. Wisdom Wisdom comes from your religious affairs. It affects your magical energy. Charisma Charisma affects how certain creatures react toward you. In particular, it can affect the prices shopkeepers offer you. Alignment Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic. Basically, Lawful is good and Chaotic is evil. Your alignment influences how other mon- sters react toward you. Dungeon Level How deep you have gone into the dungeon. It starts at one and increases as you go deeper into the dungeon. The Amulet of Yendor is reputed to be somewhere beneath the twentieth level. Gold