Yet Another New Idea

YANI is short for Yet Another New Idea, and is commonly used in the RGRN and IRC communities for NetHack to suggest new ideas to be incorporated into the game.

Description

Very, very few, if any, YANIs ever get included in the official game, unless a working patch had been provided with the YANI, in which case the chance of official incorporation is raised to slim. In variants, however, incorporation of YANIs is more common; several variants even make it a goal to implement popular YANIs.

"The artifacts need to be rebalanced" is a common one - see Artifact YANIs for details.

The NetHack Ideas Archive is a repository of YANIs posted on IRC, organized by variant, author and tags. NetHackWiki also partly acts as a repository for editors' YANIs; See Category:YANI for a list of these pages.

Examples of YANIs in vanilla NetHack

While a number of YANIs were incorporated into vanilla after first being implemented in a variant, there have been a few recent ones that were incorporated directly:

• Sometime in 2017, it was suggested on IRC that the blessed scroll of fire be made targetable within a certain radius, just like the scroll of stinking cloud is. This was later added into the next vanilla release, 3.6.1.

• In 2018, Alex Smith asked on IRC for an idea for a small, easily implementable feature. Several suggestions were made; the one that was ultimately added to 3.6.1 was water sliding off of oilskin sacks and auto-identifying them in the process.

The following information pertains to an upcoming version (3.7.0). If this version is now released, please verify that it is still accurate, then update the page to incorporate this information.

• One periodically suggested idea was for the amulet of restful sleep to confer some useful property while asleep, usually greater healing so as to make the "restful" part of the name meaningful. In 2020, Paxed implemented this, in the form of a hungerless regeneration that stacks with ordinary regeneration while asleep with restful sleep.

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows:

"Other YANIs later incorporated in the game? Beginning with NetHack 3.6.1, several of these ideas have been implemented: Demonbane blocks demon gating while wielded; Dragonbane confers reflection while wielded; Trollsbane prevents trolls from reviving while wielded; Ogresmasher grants 25 constitution while wielded; and Cleaver hits up to three adjacent enemies in an arc."

Examples of YANIs in Variants

UnNetHack

• Disintegrator: The idea appeared on RGRN. 5 days later in the same thread, Nicholas Webb published a patch for this monster; it was also used in the biodiversity patch. 6 years later, bhaak included this monster in UnNetHack.
• Autounlock on containers: The YANI appeared and was unimplemented for almost a year, but once a patch was produced, it was applied to UnNetHack on the same day.

YASI

The abbreviation YASI, which stands for Yet Another Silly Idea, is sometimes used when the idea in question is impractical, ridiculous, or pointless. There is some amount of overlap between YASIs and Evil Patch Ideas, though most YASIs are not intended to be evil.

Small matter of programming

Small matter of programming (SMOP) might be a way of saying that a feature would be trivial to write, but can more often be an ironic way of saying that a YANI might be a good mechanic in theory, but would be a headache to code. Examples of such YANIs include:

• Hallucination gradually fades back to normal vision as the player recovers (implemented in GruntHack).
• Woodchucks can pick up and throw wood golems.
• Mariliths can wield six weapons and wear six rings. Ettins can wear two helmets, two amulets, and so forth.
• Rays and projectiles can be fired at an arbitrary target square, not just vertically, horizontally and diagonally.

External links

• L's Patches that incorporate many YANI's

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