NetHack/Trivia

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Trivia about NetHack includes:

• Ascended Fanon/Official Fan-Submitted Content: Ideas from patches and variants - generally known as YANIs (Yet Another New Idea) - frequently find their way into the vanilla game, with the Monk from SLASH'EM being one of the most notable examples. YANIs designed to be cruel or difficulty-increasing in some manner are generally called EPIs (Evil Patch Ideas).
  • Another notable example includes the Wizard Patch for the 3.2.0 series, which completely revamped the Vancian Magic system into one using Magic Points, and changed the Wizard from a subpar fighter-style role to the supreme caster among playable roles; the patch proved popular enough to be merged into the original version of SLASH (being the Extended Magic that made it SLASH'EM) and eventually the vanilla game itself as of version 3.3.0.
  • Other examples include the blessed scroll of fire giving the player a one-time targetable attack, and the oilskin sack auto-identifying if water slides off it. There's more than a few lists of YANIs maintained on GitHub and on the wiki itself. The Bilious Patch Database on alt.org also hosts many patches based on YANIs.
• Author Existence Failure: Founding DevTeam member Izchak Miller passed away in 1994; the 3.2 series was dedicated to his memory, and he was memorialized by a special game-end tombstone, which has been available as a compile-time option in every version of the game since then. 3.2 also added added a Minetown shopkeeper named Izchak, who has unique dialogue compared to the others, and always generates runs a lighting shop.
  • Players consider it very poor form to mistreat this particular shopkeeper, despite the extent to which his co-workers are maligned by everyone; often, he is even spared by extinctionists!
• Development Hell: Version 3.4.3 was released in December 2003. The next version, 3.6.0? Finally released... in December 2015. Before that, the largest such gap was three years between the release of 3.2.2 and 3.2.3/3.3.0; for a time, the community at large believed any future releases after 3.4.3 to be Vaporware, which spawned NetHack 4 and a few other variants. Thankfully, newer versions have come far quicker in comparison since then, though the variant scene is still quite active.
• Fan Nickname: And they're about as creative as you can get. Also overlaps with Fun with Acronyms in at least a few cases.
  • "Foo" is a loanword from hacker jargon, used to refer to a group of similar monsters (e.g. "foocubus" refers to succubi and incubui, while "footrice" means cockatrices and chickatrices).
  • On the note of footrices, their corpses are often referred to as "rubber chickens".
  • The Wizard of Yendor is affectionately called "Rodney". Rodney is also used as the name of the chat bot in the #Nethack channel on freenode.irc.
  • Prior to 3.6.1, "Vladsbane" was a Weapon of X-Slaying parody name given to whatever Improvised Weapon(s) the player used to Cherry Tap then-Anticlimax Boss Vlad the Impaler with. Likewise with "Puddingbane", which is a negatively-enchanted weapon deliberately used in pudding farming.
  • The insect class of monsters (represented by a) is often given the name "Team Ant", specifically the giant ants and soldier ants; ants often appear in swarms and can decimate player characters, placing them among the most common killers. Any report of a player dying to an ant is often met with "Go team ant!"
  • The term "grand tour" refers to players being forced to scout out the entirety of the Astral Plane for their god's altar.
• Port Overdosed: See for yourself. The Dev Team also makes the code publicly available, which encourages porting.
• The Wiki Rule: NetHackWiki and Wikihack.
• Word of God:
  • There is an old FAQ from rec.games.roguelike.nethack which has several sections dedicated to explaining various aspects of the game (appropriately called spoilers) as gleaned from the code, along with guidelines for posting etiquette on the newsgroup (which still tends to apply on newer discussion sites such as Reddit).

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