Talk:NetHack units

Hi Nodey. This page is great :-) IMHO, it's quite suitable for moving into the main namespace. --Jayt 20:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Haha, this is excellent. :) However, the part that starts with "A human walks at approximately 5 km/hour." should be adjusted for the fact that the hero doesn't move on every turn. He may also fight, chat, quaff, read, or whatever. For example, in my five ascensions the average number of creatures vanquished has been 3455. --ZeroOne 04:15, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

• I feel compelled to point out that that number is only being used to measure the distance of a tile as a distance the hero can move in one turn. -- SGrunt 13:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Ah, yes, of course. I thought that it was based on the 50000-ascension assumption, sorry.

But I actually fail to see how "Ceilings should be about [10.4 m] high as well, seeing that going up and down stairs take a similar amount of time." Climbing stairs definitely takes more time than walking straight ahead, so in 7.5 seconds you'd not climb 10.4 meters if that's how fast you walk. For a 45-degree slope (stairs), 10.4 meters of walk would equal 7.37 meters of rise (a^2 + b^2 = c^2; c=10.4; a=b). --ZeroOne 17:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Note that most tend to slow down when climbing stairs. I wasn't feeling up to measuring empirically how much people slow down on stairs, then averaging them, and all that. -- Nodey 13:40, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

According to D&D rules, one square of space is about 10 meters, so I would say the calculations are pretty accurate. D&D has simplified rules when it comes to turns, however. 6 seconds is one turn which makes 10 turns one minute. --MadDawg2552 20:13, 22 October 2006

Now that I read this article again and also the comments further down, I have to disagree with my previous statement. --MadDawg2552 14:56, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

What's the point? This is useless. 69.11.189.85 01:20, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Useless because it doesn't help you beat the game? We might write off half the information in this wiki on that basis. Certainly the encyclopedia information on all the monsters is also useless, but it's also fun and informative. That's part of the point of this wiki. --Mogri 18:07, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

From where is the value 400 Cal/h obtained? Walking @ 3mph = 280 Cal/h. Brisk walk @ 3mph = 300 Cal/h. Very brisk walk @ 4mph w/155pd = 281 Cal/h. -- Dez 16:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Just some short reactions

First, of course I think these kinds of exercises are fun, but I think the tone of the article is dangerously close to asserting that it has proved a set of facts about game scales.

To offer some reactions, you start by assuming a rationing rate of three food rations/day for a 2000 Cal/day diet. These are big assumptions and can not be considered "safe;" there is no reason to prefer them to two, one, or four rations/day. The closest real-world referents are C rations and K rations, objects that actually existed in our world and were designed to provide 3200-3600 Cal/day in three meals (and a "ration" in US Miltary usage would have been the three meals together). We can, in fact, mess around in the table of comestibles and come up with wildly different figures based on equally reasonable assumptions--a food ration provides the nutrition of eight candy bars, as one starting point, leading one rather more towards the conclusion that a "ration" is food for one day. And the extrapolations you make seem palatable in some regards (dragons can wriggle down a 30 foot wide corridor), and untenable in others (a mob of orcs must move down that 30-foot corridor in single file and at 34-foot intervals).

But most telling, I think, is that you ignore the source material: the Dungeons & Dragons game, which offers different timescales for different kinds of actions. When exploring the dungeon, characters do so in ten-minute increments called "turns," but, when entering combat, the scale shifts to ten second "rounds"--and sometimes, it is even necessary to sub-divide these into ten one-second "segments." There is no real effort to make turns consistent with rounds in terms of how far you can move, how much you can do, etc.--"combat time" is simply more active, with characters running about at top speed, and "exploration time" includes other activities such as mapping, catching one's breath, peering around corners, etc. Plainly, both kinds of time are embodied in the concept of a NetHack "turn," and we have to reconcile ourselves to the notion that the length of such a turn is fluid, and driven partly by what one is doing in it...even though the game will let you, for instance, tin a corpse while in the heat of combat. Also, there is a very obvious--almost mandatory--scale for the game map, and that is the scale of dungeon maps from time immemorial (well, okay, from the 1970's): 10 feet to the square. Any calculation that deviates from that, or possibly from the much less common 5 feet to the square, must give us pause.

So that's my two zorkmids.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Ckbryant (talk • contribs) 11 February 2008

NetHack weight

From the average weight of an apple/orange, I have concluded that one unit of weight in NetHack is approximately 95 grams (oranges and apples are both weight 2). Therefore, the Amulet of Yendor, at 20 weight units, weighs in at around 4.3 pounds, which is a bit heavy, and the player can carry about 610 pounds of weight before becoming overburdened. Anyone care to extrapolate? Fredil Yupigo 22:54, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Quite right! Or consider that character with 18 CON will starve to death 1560 turns after a really big meal (just becoming satiated at nutrition = 1000). So we'd expect about 500 turns to equal 1 week of "game time." --Ckbryant 16:36, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Plane of Water

The article said that "The Plane of Water contains about 170.1 million liters (430 million gallons) of water". I wonder if I'm missing something here? A dungeon level is 78*20 squares wide and each square is stated as being 1130.3 m^3 in volume. That would yield about 1.8 billion liters. Anyway, while I was at it, I decided to give a more realistic guess about the dungeon ceiling height. Then, see the updated water amount calculation for yourself. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 00:30, 2 March 2009 (UTC)