The November NetHack Tournament

The November NetHack Tournament, abbreviated as TNNT, is a NetHack tournament that takes place during the month of November. 2018 is the inaugural year of the tournament, and it is planned to continue running in subsequent years. Its main page can be found at https://www.hardfought.org/tnnt/.

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.

Scoring

Because of its vanilla focus, TNNT offers very in-depth scoring. At the core, ascensions are worth 50 points each, which can be boosted by conducts, speedrunning, and streaks. There are also numerous individual and clan trophies which can be earned for more points.

There are also nearly 200 "achievements", 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 may require some setup.

For full scoring details, see the tournament rules page.

Gameplay differences

TNNT is not purely NetHack 3.6.2; 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.

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.

Helpful tips

Convenience features

There are a couple achievements that revolve around you eating many types of food. To help you keep track of which foods you have and have not eaten, an extended command #snacks is provided, which displays this information.

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 nothing.
  • No non-wishing wands that have zero charges. (0:0 or 1:0 wands of wishing are accepted.)

• 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 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 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.