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• Ascended Fanon/Official Fan-Submitted Content: Generally known as YANIs (Yet Another New Idea). Ideas from patches and variants frequently find their way into the vanilla game, with the Monk being one of the most notable examples; 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. YANIs designed to be cruel or difficulty-increasing in some manner are generally called EPIs (Evil Patch Ideas).
  • 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 is still available as a compile-time option in every version of the game since then. 3.2 also added added a shopkeeper named Izchak, who has unique dialogue compared to the others and always runs a lighting shop if he is generated in Minetown. 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 has spawned NetHack 4 and a few other variants. Thankfully, newer versions have come far quicker in comparison since then.
• Fan Nickname: And they're about as creative as you can get.
  • "Foo" is a loanword from hacker jargon, used in referring 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.
  • 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!"
• Port Overdosed: See for yourself.
• The Wiki Rule: NetHackWiki and Wikihack.
• Word of God:
  • NetHack is one of the earliest examples of a game's code being available to the public for examination, which enables "source diving" to get answers to questions about the deepest workings of the game; there are further illuminating facts about the game and its characters buried within the code itself, e.g. the revelation that the player character is War, one of the Four Horsemen.
  • 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 site such as Reddit).

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