Nethack

[mneme]

1 5033862 mneme-Wiz-Elf-Fem-Cha, ascended to demigoddess-hood 167 [246]


This run (elven female wizard) saw me finding a 3 charge wand of wishing in the mines, which sped me to a good ascension shot.

Unfortunately, my plan of enchanting a stack of daggers to throw at Death went by the wayside when I forgot to pick up a stack of daggers before I entered the endgame. (Oops). Also, while the first three elemental planes went smoothly, some monster was callous enough (I ask you?) to die on top of the portal in Water, so I wandered around for a few turns and entered the astral plane without my remaining Archon (mental note: next time, pack a leash. Just in case.) But full up on power points, which was nice, and with a pile of useless (not enough turns to care) spellbooks, and a level 26 Silver Dragon steed, Moonlight

On a quick (well, not that quick) Detect Monsters, I saw Death to the left, Pestilence up, and Famine to the right. My last (and only Astral) run saw me killed by Pestilence, and I wasn't equipped to take out Death cheaply (see above), so I headed right. Unfortunately, Death had his own ideas, and followed me.

I kept moving to the right, FoDing Famine three times and getting cornered by Death once (and killing him). As I entered the outer temple, I panicked -- in the fight with Death, Moonlight had been killed, and I hadn't noticed. But I stayed on-message, reaching the inner chamber undamaged, if burdened, wizard locked the door (knew that spel was good for something!) to keep out the nasties, and checked the altar...Chaotic. Apparently Death was warning me off of the -bad- altars.

No copy-paste, but here are hand-copied intrinsics:

You were the Glory of Arioch
You were piously aligned
You were fire resistant
You were cold resistant
...sleep, disintegration, shock, poison, magic-protected.
Saw invisible
Telepathic
Warned
Infravision
Sensing the present of monsters
Invisible to others
Stealthy
Teleport
Teleport control
+3 bonus to hit
Slower digestion
Protected
Polymorph control
Very fast
Reflection
Life saved (3 amulets of life saving -- and that's after Demogorgon used one up!)
Extremely lucky
Extra luck
Good luck did not time out
You survived after being killed once.

Vanquished creatures (highlights):

Demogorgon
Asmodeus
Baalzebub
Orcus
Yeenoghu
Jubilex
The Wizard of Yendor (6 times)
Death
Famine (twice)
A high priest
2 mastodons
Medusa
Croesus
3 Archons
7 iron golems
2 master liches
4 ki-rin
11 storm giants
A titan
...
3698 creatures vanquished

12 creatures genocided (;, flayers, L)

8 wishes, did not wish for any artifacts.

You went to your reward with 5033862 points.
Magicbane
Frost Brand
The Eye of the Aethiopica
22 rubies
18 emeralds
17 agate stones
17 jade stones
17 amethis stones
13 diamonds
13 turquise stones
13 topaz stones
13 jasper stones
12 dilithium chrystals
11 aquamarine stones
11 garnet stones
10 sapphires
10 opals
10 flourite stones
7 citrine stones
7 obsidian stones
6 amber stones
5 jacinth stones
5 jet stones
1 black opal
1 chrystoberyl stone
3 amulets of life saving
And 783 pieces of gold, after 82936 moves.
You were level 30 with a maximum of 246 hit points when you ascended.

Comments

[jl8e]

Congrats.

Time to set up a cross-compiler for your box, so you can play Angband.

[mneme]

Not really a bad idea.

Thanks!

[marcmagus]

Woohoo, congrats.

[mneme]

Thanks! It's been a long time in coming.

[mneme]

I posted more in rec.games.roguelike.nethack, so I figured I would
drop it here:

I've been playing Nethack since 1990 or 1991. Nevertheless, this was my first
ascension; the only other times I've made it to the Endgame, I died of
starvation in the plane of Water (with no easy way to find the portal) in
3.1, and a few weeks ago, after a very promising game where I found a wand of
wishing in the Mines, I got killed off by Pestilence (twice) not realizing I
could just FoD him.

This one started off quite auspiciously -- with finding -another- fresh Wand
of Wishing in the early Gnomish Mines. Yum. Wished up SDSM and a blessed
Amulet of Life Saving. Mine Town was...interesting, as there were not one,
but two Zombie Mnemes running around with Cloaks of Magic Resistance (what
I get for always playing Wizards). I fled after running my power down finding
out they were resistant the hard way and that I wasn't going to be able to
beat them up.

After Sokoban and the first non-Mine Town Altar (on level 12!), I figured I
could take out the zombies safely, and got a nice haul from the double-bones
file. I also found another bones file or two on the way to the Quest.
After taking on the Mines, I did a bit of sacrificing and polypiling, trained
up my riding skill, made a silver dragon baby (via ring of polymorph combined
with silver dragon mail; lost my first shirt this way too, but I got another
12 or so via polypiling), levelled up my baby (didn't know the kids don't have
reflection -- almost killed him that way), enchanted Frost Bane to +7 and MB
to +2, and figured it was time to play.

I took out the Castle (with a timely genocide ';'), got its wand of wishing
(I got 15 wishes this game and even wishing for trivialities like a saddle and
lenses, I still had 7 at the end of the game), and started scouting Gehenom.

Most of the demon lords (I wasn't keeping money in my inventory) were no big
sweat -- Jubilex died to a single Cone of Cold; Baalzebub took, like, two.

Orcus, though, was annoying -- as he summoned up Demogorgon, who proceeded to
make me sick and knock off my Amulet of Life Saving before I could say "go".
I panicked, and dropped a point blank CoC (which I'd been avoiding previously
because I'd forgotten that Silver Dragons have cold resistance as well as
reflection -- Best Steed Ever), getting the nasties to back off, then gated
up to Sokoban to heal, don another AOLS, and prep. By the time I returned,
I'd double-checked that Silver Dragons have cold resitance, so 2 more cones
took out Demogorgon, and another one finished up Orcus after I'd finished
cheering. This time, I scouted all the way down to Vlad's, then ported
out and prepped some more.

Then I went down, finished off Vlad's, mostly with CoC or Cancellation
(no Stormbringer, so I had to avoid closing), then scouted all the way
to the bottom and found the square, leaving four rocks and a chain there so
I wouldn't have to scour my eyes trying to find a chain (a + with a chain in
the center is ever so much more visible).

[mneme]

The rest of my usenet writeup:


A bit more prep, and some play in Sokoban with Nurses, then I realized that
my usual home base -- where the only free altar, on level 12, was -- was also
where Fort Luddos was (this was when I got Detect Treasure). Who knew? I
cleared Luddos and cast polymorph a lot on the stacks the guards left, making
way more shirts than I needed.

I had a few false starts here as I kept entering Rodney's tower only to
realize I was forgetting an essential spell -- but the net result was that
I was only the middle of my spell cycle (a lot of my spells were running
on the same timing, which was nice) in the endgame.

It was now time to finish things -- I ported down to Vlads', took out the
Wizard's Tower, FoDing Rodney, did the ritual and cleared out Moloch's
Chamber (had to Charm Monsters once when I was surrounded by annoying nasties
and didn't want my steed to die), then went all the way back up, finding
the hard way that there was one demon lord I hadn't encountered on the way
down: Asmodeus. Fortunately, while he's annoying (cold resistance, so no
point blank CoCs), his attacks are wimpy, so after a long slow walk to the
stairs, I fireballed him, chased him up a few stairs, and finished him off.

After a fairly quick walk out of Gehenna, I did what prep I needed (I was
feeling paranoid, and packed most of my library, though I never needed it),
then went up through the top staircase, forgetting only one thing: a pile
of daggers for Death (oops).

[cattitude.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! I see you picked one of the harder classes for a first ascension.

A half-dozen fully-charged wands of teleportation (for them, not for you) go a long way towards making the Astral Plane survivable.

[mneme]

-Is- it that much harder than the easier classes? It seems like they all have their advantages.

Good point about wands of teleportation (and Teleport Away, which I did do a few times in the Astral, though I keep forgetting you can do that on no-teleport levels). I'd guess you can't do a pacifist ascension practically without that trick.

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

NetHack has clearly changed a LOT since the last time I played it!

Yes, I suspect you'll like Angband. There are lots of variants, read the FAQs before getting addicted...

[mneme]

Probably, yeah -- 3.3 and later, 3.4 did a lot toward differentiating the classes -- making Wizards more wizardly, monks more monk-ly, etc. When did you last play? 3.1? I had a lot of re-learning to do when I started playing regularly again with 3.3 (and later, 3.4).

I'd likely start with core Angband, if for no reason that jlighton is maintaining it.

[jl8e]

A lot of variants? There were only about 40. In 2002.