The November NetHack Tournament

The November NetHack Tournament, abbreviated as TNNT, is a NetHack tournament that takes place during the month of November. It has been run every November since 2018. Its main page can be found at https://tnnt.org/.

Unlike Junethack, which takes a broader focus on multiple NetHack variants, TNNT focuses primarily on the vanilla game, while still being open and accommodating to all skill levels.

Like Junethack, TNNT is played on public servers, allowing players on those servers to reuse their existing accounts. Currently the three Hardfought servers are the only ones on which TNNT is available to be played. Likewise, TNNT supports clans, allowing a group of players to coordinate and pool their accomplishments in a competition for the highest-scoring clan.

Chatting about the tournament happens in the #tnnt channel on the Libera IRC network. A bot in the channel announces player deaths and game events during the tournament.

Scoring

The tournament is currently 'scored' solely by tracking ascensions, trophies, and achievements earned by players and clans.

As of 2023, there are 325 "achievements" available, each of which is earned within one game by doing some specific task. Some of them commemorate regular milestones in game progression, some require going a little bit out of your way to accomplish, and others only happen in contrived scenarios that would almost never happen normally and require setup.

For full details, see the tournament rules page.

History

Prior to 2021, TNNT offered very in-depth scoring. At the core, ascensions were worth 50 points each, which could be boosted by conducts, speedrunning, and streaks. Individual and clan trophies earned also contributed points to scoring.

Gameplay differences

TNNT is not purely NetHack 3.6.7; there are a few changes to the game that will gradually continue to expand in future years, but the game will still remain the same as vanilla at its core. Fundamental game mechanics will stay the same - weapons and armor stats and properties, roles and races, spells and their effects and levels, monster abilities and behavior, so on and so forth. The changes that players will see and experience are in the way of optional custom content and/or branch levels added to the game, without changing the mechanics or usability of existing content.

2018

For 2018, the new gameplay content added is a "swap chest", which allows players to exchange a limited amount of items between games that other players can use, as well as a small purely optional branch-level quest that involves a few members of the DevTeam.

2019

For 2019, another optional quest was added: the deathmatch, which challenges you to fight a player monster representing a previously ascended character, for a reward of a single object of your choice from their final inventory.

The following official conducts were also added:

• Survivor, never having your life saved using an amulet of life saving.
• Swap-chestless, never removing an object from a swap chest. Placing objects in is not restricted.
• Never allowed the quest nemesis to die
• Never allowed Vlad to die
• Never allowed the Wizard to die
• Never allowed a high priest to die
• Never allowed a Rider to die
• Artifactless: never touching an artifact.
• Petless, activated by setting OPTIONS=pettype:none and never having a pet. If you reach the Astral Plane with this conduct intact and would receive a guardian Angel, it will not be tamed.
• Permanent deafness, activated by setting OPTIONS=deaf, and makes the character permanently deaf. This can make the quest challenging to complete if the leader starts roaming, as you cannot chat to them. It's not impossible, however: the quest leader will still speak to you if you corner them in a corridor or other spot where they have nowhere to move, or if you throw the quest artifact to them. Similarly, the dev team's quest is never unwinnable, as you can complete it by throwing the scrolls to Mike Stephenson. A permadeaf character cannot chat with priests, but can buy, sell, and price-identify objects in shops.
• Permanent hallucination, activated by setting OPTIONS=hallucinating, and makes the character permanently hallucinating. Wielding Grayswandir ends your hallucination and breaks the conduct.

Helpful tips

Convenience features

The #achievements command allows you to look at achievements that you have or have not earned yet in this game.

The #tnntstats command allows you to check the progress of achievements that require doing things multiple times or doing a set of different things.

The #snacks command allows you to see types of food you have and have not eaten yet this game, for the achievements that rely on eating a lot of types of food.

The #species command allows you to view all of the eligible monster species you have killed or not killed, for achievements that rely on what types of monsters have been killed.

The #conduct command is not new, but it does show TNNT-specific conducts.

Swap chest

The swap chest will refuse to accept certain items. For convenience, a general list of its rules is:

• No invocation items or the Amulet of Yendor (they can't be confined in such trappings anyway.) No fake Amulets of Yendor either.
• No artifacts.

• All non-cursed rings.

• All wands, except:
  • No wands of wishing.
  • No wands of nothing.
  • No wands that have zero charges.

• All non-cursed amulets, except:
  • No amulets of strangulation.
  • No amulets of restful sleep.

• All magical potions, and holy and unholy water. (Non-magical potions like fruit juice and regular water are rejected.)

• All tools, except:
  • No magic lamps.
  • No containers containing other items.
  • No expensive cameras, tinning kits, and magic markers with 10 or fewer charges.
  • No other chargeable tools that have zero charges.
  • Most non-magical tools. (Currently allowed non-magical tools are bugles, oilskin sacks, cameras, tinning kits, and stethoscopes.)

• All non-cursed weapons, except:
  • No non-silver weapons that are less than +3.

• All non-cursed armor, except:
  • No dunce caps, fumble boots, or gauntlets of fumbling.
  • No non-magical, non-dragon-scale armor that is less than +3.

• All non-cursed spellbooks, except:
  • No spellbooks of blank paper or novels.
  • No spellbooks which have less than two "study charges" left in them (one read away from becoming too faint to read anymore).

• All magical scrolls, except:
  • No scrolls of amnesia or punishment.

• Tins of spinach, lumps of royal jelly, and sprigs of wolfsbane. No other food is accepted.

• No gold.
• No gems.
• Nothing from any other object classes (boulders, statues, iron chains).

History

In 2016 and prior years going all the way back to the early 2000s, the /dev/null/nethack tournament was run each November. However, in 2017, after the release of NetHack 3.6.0, the devnull organizer krystal announced that the tournament would be shutting down permanently. Several players coordinated with the hardfought server admins to quickly put together a one-off tribute tournament, which was held in November 2017; but the expectation was that in subsequent years some new tournament would be developed to take its place, which ended up becoming TNNT.

TNNT is not trying to reproduce the system or unique challenges offered by devnull, and has instead been designed from the ground up.