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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 right next 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 Wizard of Yendor. The continually-resurrecting sorcerer 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 quite widely with each class, but ultimately the basic plot progression is the same- essentially by design, given the amount of randomized features. As reliance on a fixed script would ultimately hinder things, this allows the player to organically "develop" their own story simply by playing through the game.
• 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. If or when you die after, 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. While it does render the game ridiculously easy, it also turns the whole affair into a tedious slog - and nearly anything you'd accomplish with pudding farming won't help you as much on the Astral Plane. The joke goes that the DevTeam let this go unsolved for so long because they'd already implemented an immediate and savage punishment for pudding farmers. It's called pudding farming.
  • 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 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 items and mechanics in-game act more "realistically".
  • 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).
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Trollsbane is considered the weakest of the sacrifice gift artifacts by far, especially by the standards of the other "Banes" - weapons that deal double damage to specific types of monsters.
    • Trolls can be especially troublesome, but outside of perhaps throne rooms and the Barbarian quest, an average player is not likely to run into comparatively many trolls to begin with. Furthermore, the base item is a morning star, which the player won't have much incentive to train where other artifact base weapons like long swords are much more available. Finally, Trollsbane can prevent corpses from reviving, but that function can also be fulfilled through other means (e.g. having a carnivorous pet eat the corpse).
  • Among quest artifacts, The Heart of Ahriman is considered one of the weakest - not because it doesn't offer anything worthwhile, but because what it does offer will likely be painfully redundant to a quest-ready Barbarian.
    • The base item, a luckstone, is useful but can be found far earlier, with one guaranteed at the end of the Gnomish Mines; it also grants stealth when carried, but Barbarians gain intrinsic stealth at level 15, and every quest requires the player to be at least level 14 to proceed. That said, the Heart still does have unambiguous benefits - it is an intelligent artifact, meaning that it can resist the "curse items" monster spell 4/5 of the time. (And no one wants to carry around a cursed luckstone!) It can also be invoked for levitation - while there are multiple sources potentially available by the time you get the artifact, its levitation uniquely extends to any steeds you're riding as well.
  • Many weapons in the game end up underused, but slings in particular are considered junky for even most starting characters - as such, they are only used as a last resort alternative to not having any form of ranged attack at all, due to rocks (the most basic form of sling ammo) being plentiful and easy to gather.
• "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 Optional Boss 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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