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 competition with other clans.

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.

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.

2023

For 2023, a robotfindskitten special level was added. Minor changes include an upgrade in the base version from Nethack 3.6.6 to Nethack 3.6.7; a new message whenever a character earns an achievement (controllable by a configuration option); and a change to the distribution of swap chest objects across servers: objects are more likely to stay on the server where they were donated.

TNNT commands

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

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

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

TNNT options

Options for general use

realtime is a compound option with value disabled, play_time, or wallclock_time, with a default value of wallclock_time. This option is not in vanilla Nethack. When this option is set to disabled, no time is shown. When this option is set to play_time, the status bar shows the time the player has been playing, excluding time that the game was saved and not being played. When this option is set to wallclock_time, the status bar shows the time since the game was started, including time that the game was saved and not being played.

realtime_format is a compound option with value seconds, condensed, fixed units, or units, with a default value of units. This option is not in vanilla Nethack.

tnnt_notify is a binary option, default true. This option is specific to TNNT. When this option is set, the game shows a message each time you earn an achievement.

Options for specific achievements

blind is a binary option, default false. This option comes from vanilla Nethack. The player must set this option in their configuration file before starting the game in order to play for the receive-the-quest zen (permablind) achievement.

bones is a binary option, default true. This option comes from vanilla Nethack. The player may set this option to false in their configuration file before starting the game to help play for the receive-the-quest bonesless achievement, although it is possible to earn this achievement without changing this option.

deaf is a binary option, default false. This option is not in vanilla Nethack. The player must set this option in their configuration file before starting the game in order to play for the receive-the-quest permadeaf achievement.

hallucinating is a binary option, default false. This option is not in vanilla Nethack. The player must set this option in their configuration file before starting the game in order to play for the receive-the-quest permahallu achievement.

mail is a binary option, default true. This option comes from vanilla Nethack. This option must be enabled in order to play for the receive-mail achievement.

nudist is a binary option, default false. This option comes from vanilla Nethack. The player must set this option in their configuration file before starting the game in order to play for the receive-the-quest nudist achievement.

pettype is a compound option. This option comes from vanilla Nethack. The player must set this to pettype:none in their configuration file before starting the game in order to play for the receive-the-quest petless achievement.

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).

Scoring

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

As of October 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 happen only in contrived scenarios that require varying amounts of 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.

History

TNNT statistics

	Players	Ascending Players	Achievements	Notable Features
2018	165	60	196	swap chest, devteam
2019	206	83	250	deathmatch
2020	272	115	250	-
2021	281	88	287	-
2022	335	102	323	-
2023 (beta)	-	-	325	robotfindskitten

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.