Nethack (new version) Tips and Hints

[MattyBoy]

STRATEGY HINTS
The following hints that shouldn't spoil it too much.
- Beginners should find Valkyrie the easiest, or maybe Samurai or Wizard (although young wizards have to be wary of hard-hitters).
- You are what you eat.
- Trying on lots of pieces of armour is dull, but effective.
- Speed is essential for surviving fights.
- Stethoscope can be used to learn what it is that makes your pet stronger.
- Well fed pets are more friendly (and "chatty") and can help you save money in shops.
- Exercise is important if you want to grow tougher and wiser.
- Monsters that I most want to meet are inc/succubuses, nurses and wraiths - but nothing beats meeting my first unicorn.
- Corpses, tools and chains can be wielded as weapons.
- Praying and sacrificing are essential
- Unidentified items are more dangerous if they are cursed.
- Sometimes you will choose to blind yourself to see better, open your arms to thieves, pull your pets into traps, take off all your clothes and throw down your weapons, eat food that even your pets wouldn't consider or fight without your best weapon.
- You cannot win until you know you carry ways of ensuring escape or immunity from any monster in the game.
- If you are outmatched you can buy yourself time by
1) running (or transporting yourself) away, or
2) surrounding yourself with friends, pets, nervous shopkeepers or weak enemies (only kill the strongest ones), or
3) resting within a vortex


SETUP AND PLAY HINTS
I like ASCII best, because it lets you recognise the different monster types faster than any other interface.

I include the following settings in my defaults.nh file:
# don't want to pick up loadstones or lots of crap armour
OPTIONS=noautopickup
# I'm a touch-typist (and vi user), so I use this and type "j" for down "k" for up, "h/l" for left/right and "b/y/n/u" for diagonal moves".
OPTIONS=nonumber_pad
OPTIONS=hilite_pet,IBMGraphics

#You can just click on a square with the (mouse) cursor to go anywhere on the map (or use "_")
#You can also use "JKHLBYNU" for going as far as you can in a direction.
#You can also type in a number before a command to save you typing that command more than once.


SPOILERS!
Beyond that, you could save yourself heaps of trial and error by cheatingly reading spoilers to get all the details of the game mechanics, but in some ways that is cheating, so you might not want to do that. My view is that the game is so difficult/complicated that occasionally reading all the spoilers just makes it more fascinating. If you want spoilers go to:
Spoilers - Latest Version,
Excellent Spoilers (for older version),
more old spoilers

Without the spoilers, extreme persistence and care could eventually get you to the bottom of Gehennom, but then you really must read the spoilers to find out all the hoops you must jump through to win from there.


WARNING: Don't read the next few hints if you really must work out everything for yourself.
- Praying to your god is a last resort that you must learn to use. Praying and sacrificing at altars is potentially very useful, too.
- Spellcasters like to wear magician's robes
- Tinning kits save you from getting full
- Let your pets kill the easiest monsters
- Sometimes you will choose to read while confused, zap your pets, sacrifice at the wrong altar, wish for dragon's skin, eat your rings, engrave with wands, kick sinks and stones, dilute your potions and spill them on your scrolls.
- Sometimes you will do everything within your power to leave your gravest enemy alive!

[Alexander's Horse]

good job

[MattyBoy]

Thanks, I will keep editting it to improve it as I think of things.

__
Vel^H^H^H er MattyBoy.

[MattyBoy]

My main complaint about Nethack is that shops are absolutely useless, since they don´t identify the stuff for you ... That´s just stupid. This game needs to start you in a town, where you can buy useful stuff, and you should know what the shops are selling.

The prices give you a hint as to what the items are. You need to develop means of identifying items - that is a key skill in the game. I don't know about "stupid", but I agree that each shop is little more than a denser source of items than is generally available in the rest of the game.

[MattyBoy]

4.) Always pay in the shop.

I'm not sure about that. You can try some things out without buying them, or you can avoid paying and, at best, you can sometimes leave a shop empty and the shopkeeper with no remaining gold.

6.) BE CAREFUL !

Your strongest character will always die within half an hour of play if you disregard this rule.

7.) Kick things to break the locks.

...only if you are willing to "hear a muffled shatter".

8.) Secret doors/passages are everywhere. Use search a lot.

Agreed, although digging can be quicker than searching.

9.) The kitten bites. The kitten bites. You are dead.

There is an easy way to placate the kitten.
In this regard, a pet kitten is better than a pet Dragon or Titan.

[MattyBoy]

Speaking of Nethack- has anyone else noticed you can't #enhance skills if they happen to be on the second page? Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I can't even look at the second page of skills if I have a skill to #enhance on that page.

pressing the space bar should get you to the next page.

Tell me about it. The best plan seems to be to play safe untill you can identify potions, weapons etc, and to always attack with the bow/other ranged weapon if you can. I still can't get deeper than the 9th level, though, so I'm missing something.

9th level sounds like you are doing an awful lot right. I agree with you about ranged weapons and don't find that using that approach leaves you any weaker going forward.

So, what character types have you been trying?