u/AndrewUndershaft

A couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to get into classic Roguelikes, and looked up which ones were popular. I tried Tales of Majeyal, Coves of Qud and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. But none of them fully clicked with me in the short time I played them.

Then I remembered Nethack and decided to give it a proper try, after playing it very shortly 20 years ago, and this time, I got fully immersed. What I really loved were the identify mechanics, the survival elements, the great replayability and the high level of surprising complexity and interactivity.

Now that I know that I really like the genre, I'm wondering if the other games I tried are as good as Nethack and I just didn't stick with them long enough. Which classic Roguelikes are on Nethack's level or beyond?

My large dog stepped on a polymorph trap, turned into a white dragon, and later ate a stalker corpse. I picked up a saddle and now I'm riding an invisible dragon, which I can't see yet, except when blinding myself with my towel.

As cool as that sounds, there are several drawbacks.

The dragon is slow and moving takes more turns now. I have to dismount to pick up loot. The dragon's ice breath sometimes bursts enemies' potions. Even dismounted it's a bit bothersome, because I have to wear the towel or keep bumping (and striking) my invisible mount. I know I'll eventually get see invisible, but that might take a while.

At the moment, I'd rather ditch the dragon on another dungeon level for a wile, but I know they'll turn wild pretty quickly.

So what is the best move here? Invest effort in the dragon or go solo because of the drawbacks? And will my character learn to pick up stuff while riding once I move beyond basic skill level? Because the constant dismounting is annoying.

With Eccalibur not being an option, I don't see any way to prevent level loss, except for switching to ranged. There doesn't even seem to be a means to restore lost levels. Any suggestions?

I have lost 5 points of Dex since starting my current run, and cannot really see why. I have looked up Dex abuse on the Wiki, but none of the reasons seem to apply.

I'm not wearing boots or gloves of fumbling. I am occasionally satiated, but not *that* often. I am often burdened, but hardly ever strained, and never more.

I play a Barbarian and am constantly fighting, so there should be a lot of exercise.

The recent Dex loss occured while digging a tunnel, burdnened but not satiated.

Any idea what could be the cause of the Dex loss?

I'm in mining town and standing inside the general store, right next to the shopkeeper.

When I drop anything to the floor, the shopkeeper won't make an offer, no matter what I try to sell. Scrolls, food, armor, rings - it just lies there, waiting to be picked up again, but no price is offered.

The shopkeeper is not hostile and I can buy stuff from him. But no selling.

What could be the reason?

I've been playing with a Barbarian character around 20 times now, and I've always started with a kitten, except for the very first time, when it was a dog named Idefix.

On the Wiki it says that the Barbarian pet should be random, but if so, dogs seem to be *very* unlikely, because it has been an unbroken line of cats for many sessions now. Might this be a bug?

Edit: Local installation of NetHack 5.0, pettype set to random in the options.

(I wrote a similar post yesterday, but had described it wrong)

I play a locally installed version of NetHack 5.0 on a Windows 11 PC.

The cursor keeps blinking (or rather pulsing) behind the player character and when looking around, despite the fact that I have turned blinking off in the keyboard control panel (and also deactivated blinking in the accessability options to be on the safe side). When I open a regular terminal window, the cursor remains clear and constant according to the settings, but in NetHack, it keeps flickering out for a split second, in the rhythm of a fast heartbeat.

I can find nothing in the Terminal config settings or the game options to turn it off.

Any idea how I could fix that?

I just found a scroll, which is already identified as "a scroll of remove curse".

The strange thing is that I have never identified the scroll type before, and it is not listed among my discoveries.

Is this a regular feature, a bug, or have I stumbled across some strange object mimicry?

The cursor will blink erratically when I play my local copy of NetHack 5.0, following an irregular beat.

When I set cursor blink rate to the lowest level in the keyboard control panel, the cursor will still not remain constant but blink out very quickly in short intervals. This only happens in the NetHack window, a regular empty terminal window will have the cursor behave according to the set value.

Any idea how to fix this? Cheers!

I'm playing version 5.0 locally (NetHack.exe). So far, I have been unable to get the look I'd prefer.

I've changed the font type and font size in Windows Power Shell, so the game area is now sized more to my liking, but I'm still not completely satisfied.

I've seen pictures of the curses interface, and it seems to offer dynamic windows resizing and free placement of the status and message windows, but I can't seem to get it to run.

I've added "OPTIONS=windowtype:curses" to .nethackrc, but I haven't noticed any effect.

Any pointers would be appreciated. Cheers!