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• Breather Boss: Croesus is actually a pretty tough melee fighter and fast to boot, but is much easier compared to the quest nemeses and other bosses, and can easily be dispatched through various 'standard' methods.
• Broken Base: The major arguments in fandom so far have been:
  • Should the game be played using the graphical tile-sets or the original ASCII format?
  • Is it a legitimate tactic to exploit programming quirks which allow such things as "pudding farming" (see below)?
  • The changes to the protective ward "Elbereth" in 3.6.0 were also a significant Base Breaker, to the point that 3.6.1 walked a few of them back.
• Demonic Spiders: There's at least two or three at any point:
  • On early levels, you have to deal with floating eyes which paralyze you, gas spores which do obscene damage by exploding when they die, and killer bees that can poison and instakill you. Floating eyes can be avoided, and killer bees respect Elbereth, but may The Lady help you when your overleveled pet decides to start attacking that gas spore adjacent to you...
  • On early-middling levels, you have to deal with monstrous ants, including soldier ants -- the most common enemy-based cause of death in the game (accounting for 1.75% of all deaths on nethack.alt.org). Go team ant!
  • On the middling levels, you have the infamous cockatrices and many enemies who can swallow you and kill you, including lurkers and purple worms (which can also be encountered on the earlier levels).
  • Then you must contend with demon lords and princes, and should you actually survive them and get the Amulet of Yendor, you must face the continually-resurrecting sorcerer known as the Wizard of Yendor, who will harass and pursue you as far as he possibly can until the Astral Plane, where you instead fight the consistently respawning Riders of the Apocalypse: Death, Pestilence, and Famine. You're War.
• Excuse Plot: There is an amulet in this dungeon. You need to find it, then return it to your god. Go. The details and quest branch vary with each class, but ultimately the basic plot progression is the same.
• Fridge Horror: There are lots of "used armor" shops scattered throughout the dungeons. Sometimes these shops contain cursed armor, which can't be removed, except by uncursing it or if the original owner dies wearing it. The horror comes when you realize where the shopkeeper gets his inventory.
  • And if you die in a shop, the game flat-out tells you that the shopkeeper takes all your possessions. If you somehow directly steal from the shop (e.g. teleporting out with unpaid items, digging out...), the shop owner will chase you. When you die, guess who comes for the loot?
• Game Breaker: A very controversial thing to do in Nethack pre-3.6.0 is "pudding farming", causing an enemy that splits into two whenever you attack it to split multiple times to abuse the game's prayer and sacrifice systems, as well as farm items. The joke goes that the DevTeam implemented an immediate and savage punishment for pudding farmers. It's called pudding farming. Also, nearly anything you'd accomplish with pudding farming won't help you as much on the Astral Plane.
  • In a similar vein, players can repeatedly kill the Wizard of Yendor; as he reincarnates an infinite number of times, but gives full points for each kill, hitting the max score is trivial with the proper setup. Subverted in that in Nethack, it's generally considered a sign of skill to ascend with a lower score rather than a higher one (e.g. by doing a Pacifist Run).
• Genius Bonus: Many things in Nethack, including some of its Shout-Outs, are very subtle, while others are more surprisingly (and distressingly) logical; the phrase 'NetHack is not real life" was coined in response to common suggestions for new idea that suggest
  • An enemy named the "quantum mechanic" sometimes carries a box that it drops upon death. Inside the box is a cat named Schrodinger's Cat, which has a 50/50 chance of being either alive or dead. If you examine the game's source code, you will learn that the state of the cat is not determined until you open the box.
  • Some fantasy items benefit you if you know the myths without even having read a spoiler: unicorn horns heal many Standard Status Effects, clay golems can be destroyed by erasing their writing, and amethysts (which literally means "not drunk") convert potions of booze to uncursed fruit juice if you dip them.
  • Since the game has strong Unix origins, there's also plenty of jokes only a Unix/Linux geek would understand.

Core dumped.

• Goddamned Bats: Nymphs, floating eyes, actual bats, and leprechauns, to name but a few.
• Scrappy Level: Gehennom is actually 20 to 24 consecutive Scrappy Levels. One of the many additions SLASH'EM makes is breaking up the monotony of Gehennom with more "special" levels, while Sporkhack completely revamps Gehennom by (a) giving the local Mooks some ability to actually threaten the player (b) getting rid of the mazes in favour of caves (with lava behind the cave walls).
• "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Using any movement key configuration other than HJKLYUBN (or maybe numpad) used to be considered Serious Business, but isn't harped on as much nowadays.
• That One Boss: Master Kaen (the Monk quest nemesis) and Demogorgon both qualify, as does the Wizard of Yendor, due to his propensity for coming back with more hit points and a higher caster level than before.

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