xNetHack

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xNetHack is a variant of NetHack, specifically the 3.7.0 development version, developed by IRC user aosdict (aka Phol ende wodan and copperwater).

Its main goals are:

1. Fix game balance issues.
2. Eliminate tedious and frustrating parts of the game.
3. Make uninteresting things more diverse, unique, and varied.
4. Experiment with new ideas from the community.

As stated by the game's wiki page, it is not intended to be a "kitchen-sink variant"—the main focus is on enhancing and deepening the existing systems in the game, only adding new objects, monsters, and roles where deemed appropriate (which so far is mostly when vanilla NetHack does the same in development). Being a variant of the latest version of NetHack, xNetHack regularly merges in their latest commits—it also draws inspiration from many other variants and patches: SpliceHack, EvilHack, NetHack Fourk, GruntHack, SliceHack, and various patches from the 3.4.3 era.

xNetHack's source code can be found here on Github for those looking to compile. Only support for Linux exists currently, though at least one person has managed to build it on a Mac. The latest version (6.0-dev) is available to play in-browser on the Hardfought public server (US server, EU server and AU server), and you can also play via SSH to nethack@hardfought.org, nethack@eu.hardfought.org or nethack@au.hardfought.org. The Hardfought web terminal also supports the tiles version of xNetHack, and it is the recommended method if you want to play with tiles (select "xNetHack" tileset and "square" font). Full changelogs for each version can be found on the game's NetHack wiki article.

A list of the developer's future plans can be viewed on Hardfought's local Etherpad.

Tropes used in XNetHack include:

• Ability Required to Proceed:
  • The experience level threshold for the Quest is lowered from 14 to 10, making the quest easier to access without as much reliance on leveling.
• Anti-Frustration Features: One of the primary focuses of xNetHack is to introduce a lot of these - many, many improvements have been made from the vanilla game.
  • Orcish Town is considered a Scrappy Level variant of Minetown in the vanilla game - in xNetHack, it's still mostly hostile and challenging, but Izchak is still alive and in his shop, while all the armor, weapons, spellbooks, and other shop loot normally found in Frontier Town is lying around on the ground for free, making it more worthwhile (or at least less likely a player who gets Orctown will Rage Quit).
  • The artifact wishing formula is changed so that only the number of artifact wishes previously made affects your odds of receiving one from said wish. While this makes the odds harsher as only your first artifact wish is guaranteed, this also prevents artifacts generated by other means (bones, sacrifice gifts, #naming, and random generation) from fouling your chances.
  • The experience level threshold for the Quest is lowered from 14 to 10, with players expected to be able to appraise their own readiness; this is done to reduce the need for wraith hunting or hunting down/alchemizing potions of gain level.
  • Poison instadeaths are no longer a problem for you (or other monsters).
  • The mysterious force is completely removed.
  • The #terrain command will work regardless of any impairing Standard Status Effects you may be suffering.
  • Martial arts always adds its skill bonuses to damage, instead of the vanilla 25% chance of not applying to a given hit.
  • Spellbooks can be reread at any time to refresh your knowledge of its given spell, with a prompt to make sure appearing if you have more than 2000 turns left of memory.
  • Wielding something made of a material that harms your character while wearing gloves will not damage them, as well as wearing body armor made of such material while wearing a shirt.
    • If playing as an elf, your starting inventory of elven weapons and any other iron items will be copper instead of Cold Iron. Additionally, some items' base materials have been tweaked to make certain artifacts not hate elves.
  • Minesflayers (mind flayers that generated out-of-depth in the Gnomish Mines due to monster creation rules) are no longer as hassle, since they are now U (aberrations), not h (humanoids). Among other things, this allows dwarven players to safely kill them with a read scroll of genocide.
  • Similarly, elves now occupy the Q glpyh (which stands for Quendi), making them safe to genocide for non-elven players; quantum mechanics and genetic engineers are now considered aberrations (U) instead.
  • Chameleons and other Voluntary Shapeshifters that roll "random monster" for their next form when shapeshifting at random will no longer turn into out-of-difficulty forms. Sandestins or doppelgangers that roll "nasty" or "player monster" can still do so regardless of difficulty (at which point you may have other problems if you encounter either of them).
  • If starting a misconfigured game whose version doesn't match the version of the save you're trying to load, it asks if you want to delete the save rather than automatically deleting it.
  • Loadstones, which more or less exist as "gotcha" items, are removed completely.
  • Hitting Escape or an arrow key at the wish prompt, or failing to enter a valid wish 5 times, will not result in you receiving a random item; this is primarily for those who want to preserve wishless conduct.
  • Polymorphing a container with items inside will cause its contents to spill out onto the ground unchanged, rather than destroying them outright.
  • Sokoban level flipping from 3.7 is removed due to being massively unpopular for several reasons.
  • Using the #loot command in the direction of an adjacent pet lets you exchange items with it without having to drop them on the floor first.
  • Dropping a container on an altar identifies the beatitude of its non-nested contents as well.
  • Pets no longer attack gas spores if you are adjacent to one, thus removing the risk that they kill you by accident.
  • When #applying a crystal ball, entering an invalid character will simply prompt you again rather than wasting that charge.
  • Applying an unlocking tool to a door will not give an "[Un]lock it?" prompt unless you have autounlocking active.
• Back Stab: Rogues retain this ability, and get their backstab bonus on a wider variety of other monsters with Standard Status Effects besides those that are fleeing.
• Baleful Polymorph:
  • Subverted with shapeshifter corpses - pets will no longer automatically eat them unless they're starving or other on the verge of untaming.
  • Genetic engineers are monsters similar to quantum mechanics that were introduced in SLASH'EM and are set to appear in the release version of NetHack 3.7.0 (and thus imported into xNetHack). They have a pair of attacks that may polymorph you if they hit (likely into something that can't wear most armor) unless you have magic resistance or polymorph control.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Demon lords and princes now may demand upwards of 25k zorkmids regardless of what you're carrying, though you may be able to successfully shortchange them based on your Charisma.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: A lot of fundamental changes were made from the base game that's very likely to trip up players taking what was changed for granted.
  • Several monster and monster class letters are changed up: in particular, mind flayers are U (aberrations), not h (humanoids), and elves now occupy the Q glpyh (which stands for Quendi) instead of @, which is very important for those looking to read scrolls of genocide. Ghosts are also moved to the W glyph with wraiths.
  • Unicorn horns no longer restore lost ability points, which doubles as a buff to the potion and spell of restore ability that were formerly made redundant. While UnNetHack was the first to implement this balance change, xNetHack was the first of the post-3.6 variants to do so - in either case, it was popular enough to make it into the in-development version of vanilla!
  • Dragon-scaled armor replaces dragon scale mail, which among other things means that a wish for dragon scale mail will give a player the corresponding scales instead—it also means that reading a scroll of enchant armor while only wearing those scales now turns you into a dragon.
  • There is no spell of identify - the spell was considered a Game Breaker in vanilla NetHack, since a player could barricade themselves up with some food and slowly but surely identify every single item on hand with no need for scrolls (outside of unfortunate bouts with amnesia). However, scrolls of identify are much more reliable in return, and the number of identifications they give depends entirely on their beatitude.
  • Map flipping in the Sokoban branch was removed to avert this for those levels.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The dev isn't much fond of what they believe to be instances of this in vanilla NetHack, and one of their express goals is to avert this.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: The silver-hating code is altered to apply to any group of monster types for any specific material in the game, since xNetHack adapts the object materials patch from GruntHack.
  • Player characters that hate a given material are still capable of handling an object made of it, though it will still damage them; due to a vanilla bug, the player is always capable of picking up such an object with no bad effects. Monsters will also not wear objects made of a material they hate.
  • Cold Iron: All elves, nymphs and lesser demons (with the exception of their undead forms) hate all forms of iron. Player elves benefit from the Anti-Frustration Features described above.
  • Silver Bullet: Silver itself operates the same as in vanilla, dealing d20 bonus damage to silver-haters and being Harmful to Touch for silver-hating player characters.
  • Fungi and monsters that use disease or decay attacks (e.g. Pestilence) hate copper due to it being antibacterial.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Mindflayers, who are moved to the aberration class.
  • More strongly apparent with quantum mechanics and genetic engineers. Both were already described as humanoid in their original code (vanilla NetHack and SLASH'EM respectively), but not counted as human for purposes of cannibalism (though they are poisonous to eat).
• Pet Interface:
  • Using the #loot command towards an adjacent pet allows you to exchange items; selecting gear they have equipped makes them unequip it so you can then take it from them (usually to replace with something better).
• Self-Imposed Challenge: xNetHack formally tracks the usual ones from vanilla NetHack in addition to several new ones:
  • Artifactless conduct: Never touch an artifact aside from the invocation items (which are informally called "artifacts" but do not count as such, and are required to win the game anyway).
  • One-Man Army: Petless conduct requires that you not tame monsters for the entire game, and requires your options to be configured so that you do not start with a pet. If you enter the Astral Plane having followed petless conduct up until then, no guardian angel will be sent.
  • Never scare an enemy with impunity: i.e., never cause a monster to flee by standing on a square that prevents it from attacking you. Scrolls of scare monster, Elbereth, and being in a coaligned temple (not counting the one in the Astral Plane) all count as this - to break the conduct, you must actually be next to a hostile monster, and it must turn to flee.
  • Permanent hallucination: Clear the game with the hallucination status effect.
  • Permanent deafness: As above, but for deafness.
  • Survivor: Promoted to a "full" conduct from the vanilla game and recorded in the xlogfile.
  • Celibate Hero: Never lay with a foocubus.
  • Conflictless: Never generate conflict.
  • Illiterate conduct: Changed so that it is no longer broken by naming an artifact.
  • Bonesless conduct: Complete the game without any bones files. (This is broken only by loading bones, not by simply starting the game with the 'bones' option set to true.)
• Spiders Are Scary: And they now spin webs while moving!
• Underground Monkey: Played With. No changes are made to existing examples from vanilla, but glyphs are recolored so that no two monsters share the same default glyph. Players can also configure the color of whichever monster species they wish by editing the configuration file, or using the in-game options (which reverts back to configured settings after a save and restore).
• Unwinnable/Unwinnable by Insanity/Unwinnable by Mistake:
  • Quest expulsion is no longer permanent, averting this from the vanilla game; you will be exiled instead, but the portal will remain open, and the quest leader will be angered if you return.
  • You will also be able to enter the quest if your leader dies... but if they die somehow, even if not at your hands, then you become terminally unlucky, with your Luck always timing out to -4 and bad luck never timing out at all (while good luck always times out. This also robs you of the alignment bonus from killing the quest nemesis.
• Useless Item:
  • Averted with the potion of restore ability, due to unicorn horns being nerfed so that they no longer restore stats (which made the potion semi-redundant). Also, as mentioned above the already-useful scrolls of identify were made more useful to compensate for not being made redundant by its removed spell counterpart.
• Useless Useful Spell:
  • Averted with the spell of restore ability; like the potion, unicorn horns being nerfed so that they no longer restore stats makes both it and the spell far more viable.
• Weakened by the Light: Gremlins retain their weakness to light, and hitting a peaceful gremlin with light will now turn it hostile.
• Weapon of Choice: Several races now get a guaranteed minimum level for certain branches of their skill tree - orcs can always reach Skilled in scimitar, dwarves can always reach Skilled in pick-axe, gnomes can always reach Basic in club and crossbow, and elves can always reach Basic in enchantment spells.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Many sources of such are removed for the player's benefit - you'll still have to contend with others, though.