User:R0twang/Guide - Revision history

R0twang: /* 2. Pick Some Good Music */

2017-07-26T03:14:49Z

‎2. Pick Some Good Music

R0twang: /* You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? */

2016-04-12T14:46:33Z

‎You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right?

R0twang: /* You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? */

2016-04-12T14:45:40Z

‎You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right?

R0twang: /* You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? */

2016-04-12T02:05:15Z

‎You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right?

R0twang: /* Move Around A Bit */

2016-04-12T01:53:55Z

‎Move Around A Bit

R0twang: /* You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? */

2016-04-12T01:41:32Z

‎You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right?

R0twang: /* Kill Some Stuff */

2016-04-12T01:41:11Z

‎Kill Some Stuff

R0twang: /* = You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? */

2016-04-12T01:28:12Z

‎= You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right?

R0twang: /* R0twang's True Beginner's Guide to NetHack */

2016-04-12T01:26:53Z

‎R0twang's True Beginner's Guide to NetHack

R0twang: R0twang moved page User:R0twang to User:R0twang/Guide: Don't want to offend the natives.

2012-12-09T16:20:59Z

R0twang moved page User:R0twang to User:R0twang/Guide: Don't want to offend the natives.

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 == 2. Pick Some Good Music ==
-One of the great things about NetHack is that there is no sound. This is a your opportunity for to really develop an awesome sophisticated music collection, because you are about to start wasting so many hours of your life playing such a stupid game. Find some good stuff, and crank it up! It will help keep you relaxed when you die as a result of hitting a floating eyeball while typing too fast for the 12th time in a row. Personally I highly recommend checking out Bathory's Viking Metal albums. You probably haven't heard them, and they are a piece of genious work that just rocks well with slaying in a dungeon.
+One of the great things about NetHack is that there is no sound. This is a your opportunity for to really develop an awesome sophisticated music collection, because you are about to start wasting so many hours of your life playing such a stupid game. Find some good stuff, and crank it up! It will help keep you relaxed when you die as a result of hitting a floating eyeball while typing too fast for the 12th time in a row. Personally I highly recommend checking out Bathory's Viking Metal albums. You probably haven't heard them, and they are a piece of genius work that just rocks well with slaying in a dungeon.
 == 3. Explore Mode is Stupid ==

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 The most fundamental thing being "turns". Every time you move your @ sign you are using a turn. For each turn you use, your pet gets to move one turn, and any monsters on the level get to move one turn. You can press '.' to just do nothing with your turn. By the time you finish a game of Nethack (if you ever do) you will have used hundreds of thousands of turns probably.
-Sounds simple, right? It isn't. There's also "speed". Say there's another monster in the room. For every turn you take, that monster moves 3 spaces, it has 3 turns for every 1 of yours. That's because that monster has a lot more speed than you. (Oh, maybe I should also say that in D&D world a "monster" is pretty much everything that isn't you and your pet.) At some point in the game you will REALLY want to get your speed up so that YOU get to move a bunch of moves for every move the monster has. This is a critical way to keep from dying. You don't have to read the spoilers about speed right now, but if you get anywhere with your character, you should remember to read up on speed:
+Sounds simple, right? It isn't. There's also "speed". Say there's another monster in the room. For every turn you take, that monster moves 3 spaces, it has 3 turns for every 1 of yours. That's because that monster has a much faster speed than you. (Oh, maybe I should also say that in D&D world a "monster" is pretty much everything that isn't you and your pet.) At some point in the game you will REALLY want to get your speed up so that YOU get to move a bunch of moves for every move the monster has. Not being slow is a critical way to keep from dying. You don't have to read the spoilers about speed right now, but if you get anywhere with your character, you should remember to read up on speed at some point:
 https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Speed

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 The most fundamental thing being "turns". Every time you move your @ sign you are using a turn. For each turn you use, your pet gets to move one turn, and any monsters on the level get to move one turn. You can press '.' to just do nothing with your turn. By the time you finish a game of Nethack (if you ever do) you will have used hundreds of thousands of turns probably.
-Sounds simple, right? It isn't. There's also "speed". Say there's another monster in the room. For every turn you take, that monster moves 3 spaces. That's because that monster has a lot more speed than you. (Oh, maybe I should also say that in D&D world a "monster" is pretty much everything that isn't you and your pet.) At some point in the game you will REALLY want to get your speed up so that YOU get to move a bunch of moves for every move the monster has. This is a critical way to keep from dying. You don't have to read the spoilers about speed right now, but if you get anywhere with your character, you should remember to read up on speed:
+Sounds simple, right? It isn't. There's also "speed". Say there's another monster in the room. For every turn you take, that monster moves 3 spaces, it has 3 turns for every 1 of yours. That's because that monster has a lot more speed than you. (Oh, maybe I should also say that in D&D world a "monster" is pretty much everything that isn't you and your pet.) At some point in the game you will REALLY want to get your speed up so that YOU get to move a bunch of moves for every move the monster has. This is a critical way to keep from dying. You don't have to read the spoilers about speed right now, but if you get anywhere with your character, you should remember to read up on speed:
 https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Speed

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 === You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===
-Turns
+Oh wait. No we can't. Because first we have to talk about all the things the dev team just assumes you know because you played so much Dungeons & Dragons. You did, spend years rolling dice on the tabletop before you tried your hand at Nethack didn't you? Oh, you didn't? Neither did I. Turns out Nethack is more or less entirely based on the D&D system, which is insanely confusing if you don't know anything about it. I did not. It took a long time, and a lot of reading about OTHER games to figure out how Nethack's most basic stats worked. Because, you know, the dev team thinks of everything, like detailed instructions on how the game actually WORKS. Or not.
 Armor
 Weapons
 monsters
 AC

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 If you can't get it just start pressing each of the keys: h, j, k, l, y, u, b, n. You'll see your @ sign move in all the different cardinal directions. It's annoying at first, but really, it will help you out a lot later. As a bonus, those are the same directional keys used in the text editor vim. (I once said to a friend "the nice thing about learning Nethack is now I can use the hjkl directionals in vim too!" He replied "Yeah, that's true. I hardly ever die in vim anymore!") Nice huh? You learn one arcane piece of ancient software, and you are well on your way to a second one to boot! Someday I'll have to write a beginner's guide to vim too.
-So now you're moving! Awesome. Look at you go, @ sign. The dungeon is randomly generated. That's the best part of Nethack - it's never the same game twice. Except for the parts that are. You'll have to play for a while to figure out what's random and what's not, but it's pretty nicely different every time you play. You'll start in a room with your pet.
+So now you're moving! Awesome. Look at you go, @ sign. The dungeon is randomly generated. That's the best part of Nethack - it's never the same game twice. Except for the parts that are. You'll have to play for a while to figure out what's random and what's not, but it's pretty nicely different every time you play. You'll start in a room with your pet. Maybe you'll see a brown 'd'. Nice! probably a jackal. Walk towards it. Stand next to it. Now walk INTO it. Ah! instead of walking you hit the jackal with your weapon. Cool huh? You only know that because the message at the top of the screen told you so. Whack the jackal a couple of more times and it should die. It will turn into a % sign. This is food. Move on top of the food and the message will tell you you are standing on a jackal corpse. Press e to eat it. In Nethack you pretty much want to eat everything. This is how you get "intrinsics" which are characteristics that make you invulnerable to things monsters that attack with cold, fire, electricity, poison, and a bunch of other nasty ways to die.
 === You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:41, 12 April 2016
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	=== You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===		=== You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===
		+	Turns
		+	Armor
		+	Weapons
		+	monsters
		+	AC
		+	HP

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 You are the @ sign, your pet is a cat (f) or a dog (d).
-=== Kill Some Stuff ===
+=== Move Around A Bit ===
-Ok, finally, you can start moving around.
+Ok, finally, you can start moving around. You can use arrow keys to move around, but it's worth the effort to learn to steer using hjkl. You're eventually going to be using like just about every goddamn key on the keyboard to control Nethack, so being able to use hjkl to steer your @ sign around will make you a much faster Nethack typer eventually. I always thought of it that way: in order to play Nethack, you first need to learn to TYPE Nethack. It's like some kind of other whole wacko Dvorak keyboard, and it is centered on the hjkl directional keys.
 === You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:28, 12 April 2016
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	Ok, finally, you can start moving around.		Ok, finally, you can start moving around.

−	=== You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ==	+	=== You Played A Lot of Dungeons & Dragons, Right? ===

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 = R0twang's True Beginner's Guide to NetHack =
 == 1. Play Something Else Instead ==
 Ok. So the first rule to enjoying NetHack? Don't start playing it. Seriously. NetHack sucks. I was a happy person before I started playing this game. You know what is a good game? Diablo. Go play that instead. Or maybe that's too simple and you seriously need overwhelming complexity in your life? Then Dwarf Fortress is for you! It's way prettier, way more sophisticated, and way more satisfying than NetHack. Go play that. (I'm kind of an open-source purist, and that kept me from Dwarf Fortress years ago. Don't make that mistake. The guys who develop Dwarf Fortress live in their mom's basement and work for donations. They are way more purist than you ever will be, even if they keep the code to themselves.)
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 == 5. The Dev Team Most Certainly Does NOT Think of Everything ==
-This is the biggest crap of them all. You hear it repeated over and over again online about NetHack. It is not true in any way. Much more accurate would be: "The Dev Team Thinks of Every Possible Stupid Reference to the HitchHiker's Guide To the Galaxy." That would be a true statement. Does the Dev Team think of anything that makes any sense whatsoever by some random person who might start playing NetHack? No, not at all.
+This is the biggest crap of them all. You hear it repeated over and over again online about NetHack. It is not true in any way. Much more accurate would be: "The Dev Team Thinks of Every Possible Stupid Reference to the HitchHiker's Guide To the Galaxy." That would be a true statement. Does the Dev Team think of anything that makes any sense whatsoever by some random person who might start playing Nethack? No, not at all.
 For instance, you have to eat in NetHack. Constantly. It's really _really_ annoying. Your character will get hungry every 5 minutes you are playing. And you can eat the corpse of all sorts of monsters. You just gobbled down a whole goddamn tiger raw, and 5 minutes later you are hungry again. And then you pass out, and a newt comes along and kills you. OK, so we'll give the Dev Team that one: you get hungry a lot. Heck, I get hungry a lot in real life! (I'm not eating whole tigers, but whatever.) But do you ever get thirsty? No. Never. In fact, drinking _anything_ in NetHack is generally a bad idea. Do _not_ drink potions (when you are getting started.) Do _not_ ever _ever_ drink out of a fountain. Holy crap is that a bad idea. Do not drink from sinks. Do not drink from any water feature you might find in the dungeon. You _can_ drink. Just don't. It's not like you'll ever get thirsty. You would think the Dev Team would give a beginning player some kind of hint about this, but they do not. Also, no, you cannot dip your towel in the fountain and use it as a whip. You know why? Because that would not be a stupid reference to HHGTTG or Monty-Python or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and so the Dev Team did not think of it. Also, don't eat tripe. Sure, tripe soup is delicious in real life. In NetHack it will probably kill you. The tripe is for your pets. I don't know how you are supposed to know that without reading the spoilers, but there it is. And you can't really train your pets, so don't keep throwing them tripe because you think they might learn a new trick. And just because the game keeps telling you that the corpses you eat are disgusting, don't take that as a sign you shouldn't eat them, you should. There's no way to cook your food. Cooking is something humans have been doing for 400,000 years, and is arguably the thing that _makes_ us human, but (while there is occasionally cooked food in the game in tins) you can't cook any food you find - because the Dev Team didn't think of that. You can #chat with other characters in the game, but they don't really say anything of note. Dialog isn't really part of the game. That drives a good friend of mine crazy, but I just chalk it up to another one of those things the Dev Team doesn't think of/can't be bothered with.
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 You are the @ sign, your pet is a cat (f) or a dog (d).
-=== What Your Pet is Good For ===
+=== Kill Some Stuff ===

← Older revision	Revision as of 16:20, 9 December 2012
(No difference)