User:Bluescreenofdeath/FAQ
This page attempts to give answers to some of the questions that keep coming up among SLEX players.
Q: What's up with this huge amount of playable roles and races? I can't be bothered to learn what all of them do!
A: You can always just play a dwarvish valkyrie or other combo that you know from vanilla. Playtesting the new roles and races is more fun of course, but the choice really is up to the player.
Q: What are "hybrid races" and why does the game keep asking me whether I want to use them?
A: Essentially, it allows your character to be of several races at once. All the eligible hybrid races have significant impact on how the game plays, so they can actually be considered "special modes". However, for e.g. determining whether a corpse counts as cannibalism when you eat it, your main race is the only one that is considered.
Q: What, you said on the races page that mazewalkers have a digestion melee attack but I picked mazewalker as a hybrid race and cannot digest monsters, what gives?
A: If a race-specific effect would be strictly beneficial to the player, it is granted only when that race is your main race, otherwise everyone would be that particular hybrid race to make the game easier. Hybrid races are not meant to make the game easier.
Q: Help! What does item X do?
A: Get familiar with in-game item descriptions. Open your inventory with i and then select the corresponding letter of an item to see its description. This will display several pages of information telling you stuff about the item. If the item's base type is not identified, it will say "Unfortunately you don't know more about it. You will learn more if you identify this item.", in which case the full information will be hidden until the item is identified.
Q: Why doesn't SLEX have feature X from Nethack 3.6?
A: Because it's based on SLASH'EM and therefore ultimately the 3.4 line of Nethack. I consider 3.6 and onward to be beyond terrible; every once in a blue moon it adds something that is actually good, in which case I cherry-pick the feature in question for inclusion in SLEX, but most of 3.6's gameplay changes are utterly repulsive to me. Don't expect me to implement that stuff.
Q: Why doesn't feature X work like it does in Unnethack (or dnethack or <insert variant name here>)?
A: Because SLEX isn't Unnethack, duh :P And it's not dnethack or any other variant either. When I steal features from other variants, I reserve the right to make changes to them so as to ensure they actually fit into the general theme of SLEX.
Q: Why are some of the items in my inventory prefixed with * or ! glyphs?
A: These are reminders that the item is made of certain materials. * and ^ are glass and obsidian, respectively; these items will break if thrown or dropped from a height. And ! means the item is made of ether, which contaminates you by being in inventory; actually equipping such an item contaminates you faster. It's also possible to turn on the "materialglyph" option that will show a prefix for every item material, to make it easier to tell at a glance what material an item is made of.
Q: What is this "contamination" thing and how do I fix it/what happens if I don't fix it?
A: Contamination can come from monster attacks, traps, items made of ether, being in the gamma caves branch and more; get contaminated enough and your wisdom will be reduced over time, with an instadeath if it goes below 3. It can be cured by successfully praying on a coaligned altar, reading a noncursed scroll of remove curse or zapping the wand of remove curse; amnesia can also help in a pinch but has negative side effects. Chatting to a nurse may offer a service that lets you cure the contamination too.
Q: What is sanity and why is it bad if it goes up? That's counter-intuitive!
A: You start the game with a sanity of 0, which can also be displayed on the bottom status line if you turn on the showsanity option. The higher it is, the more likely you get hit by a random bad effect whenever your sanity increases. This is because your character may get subjected to things not meant for mortal eyes, and thereby slowly realize that the world actually is an atrocious place, so sanity makes the character capable of viewing the terrible things that have been there all the time, kind of like in the Cthulhu mythos. At a sanity value of 900, monsters start randomly appearing as other monsters and may also be referred to by random monster names, kind of like hallucination. If sanity goes over 9000, every time your sanity increases will also paralyze you for a few turns. And at 90000+ sanity, every sanity increase will cause particularly bad random effects.
Q: Err... my interface just kinda glitched out in some way. How do I fix that?
A: You may have triggered a nasty trap, those are traps that don't give a message and don't reveal themselves when triggered. Their effects last a while and only a switcher can fix them ahead of time, but switchers are very rare and may require a wish. There are also pieces of equipment and gray stones that mimic nastytrap effects though; if you end up with one of those, you need to remove the item in question to stop the effect.
Q: This nasty trap screws over my interface too much and lasts too long, can you reduce its duration and/or remove that type of trap from the game?
A: No, it works as intended. Waiting out nastytrap effects is usually not recommended, especially not if you stay in the general vicinity of where you encountered the trap as you may trigger it again after it timed out.
Q: I played for about 200k turns and the game told me that there is an ascension turn limit, that's surely a joke? Do I lose the game if I let that timer run out?
A: It's not a joke, and if the turn counter exceeds that value, random bad things start happening. They become more frequent the more a player exceeds the turn limit, to gradually reduce the odds that the player manages to ascend. Better hurry up and don't camp altars for an eternity :P
