User:Tomsod/YANIs and patches

I have several clever ideas on how to improve NetHack (don't we all?) and aim to make them into actual patches over time. Might as well use this wiki for remembrance of the former and promotion of the latter.

Wand of make invisible can turn doors into secret doors

Only works on closed doors, doesn't work on Astral plane. Shop doors will reappear after a while.

Makes the wand significantly less useless (currently you only need one charge per game).

In terms of balance, the wand becomes about as useful as a wand of locking: while a secret door is giant-proof, you need to actually close the door first, so it's not strictly superior.

Surprisingly, wands of locking actually already have similar behavior in vanilla, but only on the Rogue level (for the lack of locked doors there).

I have written a patch for it (against 3.6.1), but it turns out secret doors can only imitate straight wall segments. If you dig out a room corner, make a door there, and turn it secret, there will be visual glitches (except on default symset)! It's not easily fixable, unfortunately.

Also there's a minor 3.6.1 shop bug that combined with this patch can allow you to break down the shop door without being fined. It's easy to fix, but I defer this right to devs for now. I will post a fix for it later, with authorship depending on their decision.

EDIT: DevTeam has fixed the bug. You can get their fix here; patch 3.6.1 with it, then with my patch, and just ignore rejects. Alternatively, here's a combined fix + patch against 3.6.1 that shouldn't cause errors.

You can sacrifice junk artifacts to reduce artifact counter

Because people love leaving bones with their Demonbanes in my game just as I'm about to wish for the Eye.

dNetHack actually implemented a similar idea with their Unknown God priests. With how many artifacts that variant has, it does seem even more necessary!

Of course, you cannot sacrifice artifacts that were gifted to you! That would be rude. Any other artifact acts like a high-value sacrifice, and after disappearing no longer counts as generated for wishing and gifting purposes (but cannot be generated again).

Here's the patch (3.6.1). I didn't notice any bugs.

A command to eat one turn's worth of food

Probably #bite or something. I have read recommendations to save K-rations into endgame because their not immobilizing you for several turns is apparently a major strategic advantage. Well, what logically forbids your hero from eating just a half of their lembas wafer when time is at a premium? You can even already do that, just not purposefully.

The only downside with this idea is balance: it removes the only flaw of a lembas wafer, making it into the uberfood.

Also, lizard corpses become multiple-use with this command. Neat.

Luggage (from Discworld)

Yes, it has already been proposed before, but I intend to write an actual patch. Coding-wise, it should be my most ambitious one (for this game, that is).

Anyway, the Luggage appears as an artifact chest when it is gifted to you. As soon as you touch it, it transforms into a tame unique monster. It has the resistances of a golem, high MR, the digesting attack of a purple worm (but probably lower base level), and you can #loot it to store items inside. There are downsides, though:

• Unlike the books, the space inside the chest is not dimensionally packed or whatever. That means storing wands of cancellation is safe, but the Luggage can become encumbered.
  • The basic mechanics are as for a strong player, slowing down at 1000 weight units, and collapsing at 3000.
    • You can chat to it to reveal its level of encumbrance.
  • The engulfing attack is much rarer with many items inside the Luggage (too little space), and at (say) 2000+ weight doesn't occur at all.
    • That means you have to choose between using it as a pet or as a container.
  • At 3000+ not only the Luggage stops moving, it also stops responding to a magic whistle, so you can't really use it as a teleportable main stash (unless your main stash is really small).
• The items inside Luggage are technically its inventory, but behave more like as being inside a proper chest:
  • Luggage won't pick up or drop anything on its own.
  • Items are protected from elemental damage.
    • But not from nymphs! (Probably.)
  • Monsters attacking Luggage in melee (especially with kicks) can damage fragile items (like with kicking chests).
• Luggage is very loyal, and will not go wild due to neglect or abuse.
  • Relatedly, it is inediate despite the digestion attack.
• When killed normally, Luggage will leave behind its item form with its inventory inside.
  • It can be revived with undead turning, I guess.
  • It will or course always revive tame.
• The loyalty is not transferable, and bones Luggage will always be hostile and non-tamable.
  • It will transform into ordinary chest on death.
• Its letter is probably 'm'.
• As an artifact, it really should be unaligned, but 'unaligned' has a different meaning for monsters, so let it be neutral.

So it's really more gimmicky than useful: you can't store potions or orbs in it because they can break, you can't store wands because nymphs may use them against you... actually, there's a lot of items nymphs can use, so I may make the Luggage nymph-proof after all. At least, it should be useful as a pet. Not sure if I want it to be more useful as a pet than as a container, though.

Scroll of epitaph

When read, you are prompted for a message that is then engraved on the up stairs, to be hopefully read by your successor. Beatitude affects quality of message (burned/carved/written in dust). Blessed scrolls may also read themselves when you die. Confused reading creates a headstone.

While mostly useful on public servers, you can possibly engrave Elbereth with it? It's mostly for improving your bones, though.

EDIT: and I wrote the patch. The scroll shares the 50 zm price slot with the scroll of light, so it's easy to ID in the early game when you're most likely to leave bones. Also sometimes generates on top of graves. When you die, have a chance to leave bones, and have at least one blessed scroll of epitaph in open inventory, there's a 50% chance of it reading itself for the usual effect. Non-blessed scrolls miswrite some letters, so Elbereth is not guaranteed. The scroll correctly chooses the upstair, downstair, portal or ladder that leads towards DL 1. There seem to be no bugs.

EDIT2: fixed some incorrect code, updated the link.

A 'moneyless' conduct for variants with shop services

Because services provide conduct-proof ways to do many important things, including enchanging/charging (illiterate), holy/unholy water (atheist), formal ID (zen/illiterate) etc. Also there are some very cheap tricks, like horn of plenty + credit cloning + tool shop -> infinite potions and food.

Not sure about the name. Maybe 'commie'? There must be a word for 'a person who deliberately avoids using money', I just don't know it.

For completeness, this conduct should also track regular buying/selling, donation to priests, paying to foocubi, bribes, vault guards and Oracle. Feels restrictive enough to qualify for a proper conduct.

EDIT: or I could throw out selling to shops and call it 'frugal'! Makes much more sense and doesn't really change anything important gamewise.

Monks should get a unique spell when crowned

Restore ability is quite useless and everyone acknowledges that. Similarly to getting an unique (artifact) weapon for other roles, Monks could get a unique (not randomly generated) spell that is otherwise only obtainable through wishing.

I think that restore ability was chosen because it's the highest-level spell of Monks' highest-proficiency spell school. So, enter new spell: rejuvenation. Healing level 7 (or 6?), non-directional (self only), mostly duplicates full healing, except for max HP increase (of course), and heal amount is level-dependent (say, XLd10). At skilled restores drained levels, like blessed potion. Also restores attributes (we've come full circle!) and cures wounded legs. Not too cheesy, I hope?

This should both provide reasons for Monks to be crowned and to advance healing spells beyond basic.

Or maybe it doesn't have to be unique, just rare? Wizards get their finger of death after all and nobody's complaining.

EDIT: or if it is too OP, I could make it give temporary regeneration instead. Possibly improved regeneration, since at high levels PCs tend to recover ~3 HP/turn on their own and plain regeneration (0.67 HP/turn) becomes no big deal.

EDIT2: another spell idea: iron skin, which gives half physical damage and some natural AC (not cumulative with body armor) for several hundred turns. It does feel very Monk-y, although it probably doesn't fit into the Healing school, which invalidates some of the above arguments. Perhaps "stone skin"? There is the "stone to flesh" Healing spell, after all. "Stone form"? (And make it give petrification resistance as well!) Something to think about, for sure.

The spell of Voodoo

This isn't really my idea, but I sort of want to code it. Voodoo was proposed as part of Fyr's Pirate YANI, and while b (gelatinous cube called SLASH'EM Extended) did implement that role, I believe Amy had never coded the voodoo part. Well, I wanna try!

Making it a special ability of a single role out of like 100 is a bit wasteful, so let it be a spell, available to all, that Korsairs simply start with. Since figurines are rare, Korsairs (and a select few other roles/races) will also get a mold technique that attempts to create a figurine of a monster you have seen before. Bonus for having killed or maybe eaten, large bonus for taking a picture or polymorphing into one. A good roll gives you a blessed figurine, partial failure gives you a cursed one; critical failure gives either nothing or a figurine of some blob.

To bind the figurine, wield it and cast the spell at an appropriate monster. The monster may or may not resist; perhaps at high skill levels the spell has a high chance to ignore MR. Voodoo seems somewhat gimmicky overall, and the MR piercing should make it sufficiently useful.

One effect I do not want to replicate is insta-taming by applying the figurine: it seems a bit OP (you get a pet AND you remove an enemy, all ignoring MR); instead applying will 'stick a pin' in it, doing damage. In fact, 'selfmade' figurines should have some penalty when used for pet-creating purposes, because balance.

Perhaps sticking a pin or kicking will have a BUC-dependent chance to shatter the figurine, to prevent pinning the monster to death too easily.

Cone of cold should not explode at Skilled

What are 'explosions of cold' anyway? Cold things don't explode! You have named this spell a cone, you should stick to it:

....... ...///
../---- ..///.
.@----- .|//..
..\---- .@-...
....... ......

The diagonal one looks slightly malformed, but such is life. The wide ray will not bounce (it would be difficult to implement) and will deal less than d6 damage, but higher than the current d1 on skilled. Perhaps d3 or d4. Hit monsters will not decrease the ray's range as much; perhaps not at all, but then the ray must be made shorter in general. Otherwise, it's just three rays of cold animated in parallel.

Overall, it's similar to the sigil of discharge, but that one imitates a wide ray by creating continuous explosions, and I certainly do not want to go that route!

On a side note, the variants that have other elemental spells also could benefit from giving them some flavor: explosions of lightning or poison don't make much sense either. Skilled lightning could act like chain lightning, changing direction on each hit to target other (non-immune?) monsters; poison spell can very easily be made to imitate stinking cloud.

Guiding candle

Heavily inspired by the "lamp of detect unseen" idea from here, except it's a candle.

Basically, it's an enchanted wax candle that continuously casts detect unseen in its light radius, detecting traps and doors and illuminating invisible monsters (so you can actually see them). Of course, since it's just a wax candle, it has a light radius of 2, lasts only 400 turns, and cannot be recharged -- the original (chargeable) lamp idea seemed a bit OP to me (traps, by nature, shouldn't be too easy to evade).

So, if you find one in Izchak's shop, it can help when dealing with the odd invisible enemy, or to avoid polymorph traps and trap doors, but it won't change your game like a magic lamp might, thus it needn't be so rare. Later in game it can, perhaps, substitute for a confused scroll of gold detection, but should probably be polypiled instead.

(And now I wonder why I feel compelled to only create marginally useful items. Whatever. It's fun.)

Note to self: think up some BUC effects other than the usual flickering.

Spell of summon familiar

Because the current create familiar is a 6th-level spell that summons kitties. It needs rework.

Create familiar is not, strictly speaking, a completely useless spell: while it's essentially a combination of create monster and charm monster, the 'charming' part ignores monster MR, so it's not reducible. Still, to get a decent pet that is hard to tame otherwise (perhaps a ki-rin or an Archon), one pretty much has to fill up entire level with pets, which are then abandoned. I find that distasteful.

The idea is to bring the spell closer to its D&D origins, where you would summon just one creature ever (until it died, anyway), but it would be magically linked to you and would provide various benefits above that of a regular pet.

So, on the first cast the spell would roll a monster that is co-aligned to you (a common theme in D&D familiar mechanics) and is not too low-level -- so, hopefully no kitties (or lichens). Having the monster be at or above your level would be ideal, but since non-unique monsters only go up to level 25, it's not practical. So, perhaps above half your level with a bias towards higher levels still. The spell may possibly still fail, e.g. by casting it as a lawful in Gehennom, where no lawfuls can spawn, but that's reasonable. Also, some filter on monster type might be sensible, since having a dwarf familiar feels improper. (Or a blue jelly.)

Anyway, the summoned familiar would be linked to you -- which, in practical terms, makes you warned of it and gives you some rough status info on farlook (wounded, confused, paralysed/asleep, etc.). More importantly, further castings of the spell would summon the familiar to you (and perhaps re-tame it if necessary), like a magic whistle, but across levels. Useful enough already? As a guy who regularly hauls rocks around just so his pets wouldn't scatter them all around the level, I dare say yes. (One possible caveat: a long-neglected familiar is summoned and immediately dies from hunger. Need to consider that somehow.)

But, you say, that's still more or less a 'summon random pet' spell, so what's stopping me from summoning and brutally slaughtering multiple unfit familiars until I get my Archon? Well, some D&D editions had various penalties for allowing your familiar to die (up to a save-or-die effect), so I don't even have to invent anything! I think a penalty to Con and maximum HP seems fair enough in NetHack reality.

And check this out: this spell improves on Skilled, becoming a 'summon specific pet' spell, so you can still get your Archon -- without any animal abuse, even! (Or, more likely, a ki-rin, looking at who can cast Skilled clerical spells.) It still can fail if the monster cannot (or is unlikely to) be generated randomly -- you, in essence, are 'calling' for a monster that must already live in this dungeon. (I'll need to tweak the probabilities so that summoning rare monsters won't be too easy -- but, in optimal conditions, still practical.)

Lastly, the above death penalty necessitates some improvement to weak familiars' survivability. That is also present in D&D -- I believe the familiars got boosted HP in some editions, among other things. Need to think what will it be, specifically.

Overall, the idea is to shift the spell from 'a horde of kittens' to 'just one, but powerful, companion', and the implementation seems to fit? I have some doubts over whether the Skilled version is too OP and/or abusable, but many spells improve dramatically on that skill level, so it's not that odd. Also it's a 6th-level spell. Polymorph is a 6th-level spell, and it's probably the most abusable spell in the game! Might still want to do something about the starting inventory, or else it will be a Sunsword-conjuring spell.