User:R0twang/Guide

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. There's nothing more pure than that, even if they keep the code to themselves.)

You read all those raving idiots on the internet talking about how NetHack is the greatest game ever created? You saw MoMA has it on their list of games being acquired for their permanent collection? You still want to play? I'm telling you, forget it. NetHack is soul-destroyingly heart-breakingly cruel. You know what game you can't win but somehow remain satisfying to play? Dwarf Fortress. You know what game you can win, but even if you do it is really a pretty big letdown? NetHack.

You still want to play? Because you read some propaganda about how Nethack is an incredibly old game still under development? Don't believe anything you read about NetHack, there are more legends about NetHack than Bigfoot. Most of them have about the same amount of truth. One last reason to go start reading the quick-start guide to Dwarf Fortress right now: because you make mistakes typing. Dwarf Fortress doesn't care. NetHack does. One slip of the finger in NetHack, one character out of place, one y when you meant n (which are, of course, also directional keys,) and that's it, your character you put weeks of playing into is dead. And there are no second chances in NetHack.

Dwarf Fortress rewards creativity and sophistication. NetHack punishes people who take chances, and rewards people who cringe in corners and type very very slowly and accurately. Think about that next time you are reading some zealot's post about how NetHack is the greatest game of all time.

If you read all this warning, and you still want to play, I intend to write here a true beginner's guide to NetHack. Not like the crappy beginner's guides you see out there that leave some sense of mystery to the game. Forget those. NetHack is so stupid that even if you can get past _all_ the mystery, you will still die over and over and over again, in ever more excrutiating ways. I'm no elite player, I've ascended a few characters, and come so _so_ painfully close a few more times. I suffered through this crap for years, and the point of this page is to save you that. I warned you, you are still going, then read on! And try to save yourself.

2. Pick Some Good Music

One of the great things about NetHack is that there is no sound. This is a great opportunity for you 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.

3. Explore Mode is Stupid

One thing other beginner's guides will tell you is to make liberal use of explore mode, which is supposed to be like a cheat mode where you can choose to come back to life after you die. That's crap. Explore mode is useless. Just having the ability to not die doesn't prevent you from getting into a situation where your character just dies over and over and over again, and there's nothing you can do about it but quit. I suffered this fate a half-dozen times before I realized how stupid explore mode is. Save yourself the trouble, just die like normal and start over again. Try not to have too many regrets.

4. Read the Spoilers!

This is the single most important piece of advice for a beginner NetHacker. They call them "spoilers" but they really aren't. They are just a guide to how to play the game that happens to be online and written by piles of different people. Don't think you need to be a purist like I did at first and not read them because some idiot in a forum online said that spoilers are kind of like cheating and you should be able to figure out the game from the context in the game. This too is total crap. After dying in the stupidest ways possible dozens of times a buddy of mine told me to just read the spoilers and (after a few days of reading them) the game finally started to not suck. Get it? "Spoiler" is the wrong word because it has some kind of negative association that goes along with cliffhanger movies. Nethack is not a cliffhanger movie, it is a pile of random crap that makes no sense until you have a guide to explain it to you. Just remember this: Spoilers = Nethack-not-sucking-so-much. There's _no_ shame in reading "spoilers." How do you know that? Because even after you have read every spoiler you can find repeatedly, even after you have memorized every stupid joke and indiosyncracy in NetHack, even after you have become a codediver and you go deep in there to try to tease out how some dumb Monty-Python reference works, you are still going to die. Over and over and over again. There _are_ some unsporting exploits you can take advantage of to win in NetHack. Spoilers are not one of them. Spoilers are just the crap that the dev team should have included somewhere in the game anyway, but for your inconvenience, do not. Which brings me to:

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.

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 goddamn tiger 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. 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. 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.

As you play you'll find a thousand other things that you wish the Dev Team had actually thought of. But I'm going to take you on a walkthrough of the game so it isn't just a totally frustrating experience of trying to tease out what dumb obscure nerd-reference the Dev Team used as a fundamental principle for the game. I'm going to try to show you how to get a character going that _might_ have a shot at living long enough to reach the phase of the game where a careless typo probably won't kill you (and therefore the game becomes far less annoying and frustrating.)

(Walkthrough to come...)