u/CrashGordon94

Since my last time I decided my next run would be a Weaponless Vegan Monk because I was curious to try it. And I decided to ramp up the difficulty too. I chose Neutral alignment because I wanted to do some Sacrifice cheese, though it didn't quite work out how I planned because some stuff seemingly got patched without the GnollHack wiki getting updated before I brought it up. Ended up tacking on some more Conducts as I went along since they seemed simple enough to do. I also never used a Shield or Suit all game because of the penalties.

Things weren't going quite to plan at the start but got smoother as I went. Got a bit burned out or decision-paralysed at the Castle and took an extended break. As soon as I got back on it, I was blazing through though!

Made a lot more use of magic this time, mostly for utility stuff. Still not FULLY got the hang of the system.

Shoplifted for the first time, walked out of an Orcus Town store while Orcus himself seemed to be fighting me and I was absolutely swarmed and nearly died. Thankfully I managed to heal and squeeze past to the stairs (and when it was time to go back up, I chugged a Cursed Potion of Gain Level to skip that floor).

Also had an over-enchantment incident due to misunderstanding the Enchant Weapon scroll, thankfully my irreplaceable Gauntlets only got set to +0 rather than exploding and it was simple enough to bring them back up.

If you want my thoughts on the Conducts I ended up doing:

• Vegan: Honestly the hardest part was missing out on some useful Intrinsics from corpses (like Teleportitis/Teleport Control from Tengus and Disintegration Resistance from Black Dragons), I was never really worried that much about hunger. Even then, I got most of the things I needed.

• Weaponless: The revamped Monk & Martial Arts plus weapon-gauntlets made this a breeze, appreciated the warning when I was about to pick-axe an enemy too. Can see how this would be painful on Vanilla.

• Genocideless: Early on I did a bunch of Reverse Genociding (particularly Unicorns for Sacrifice), ended up committing to this later on. Got an achievement for killing an Arch-Lich because of it (never faced one before, I would Blessed Genocide L before ever seeing one). Things went fine but I think I'd generally prefer to take out some problematic groups.

• Polypileless/Polyselfless: Came naturally.

• Artifact Wishless: Came naturally for this playthrough. By the time I got a wish the odds were bad and I had other things that took priority anyway. In general I'd only do Artifact Wishes in GnollHack if I got a really early wish and there was one that my character would really like.

• Conflictless: Not sure if this counts. Had some scrolls but didn't usse them. Made some of the rooms with LOTS of enemies (e.g. Wizard's Tower, Moloch's Sanctum and Astral Plane) a little more tedious and scary but I managed.

• Bonesless: This was just the luck of the draw, but I'll take the creit, heh.

Since the last win, I found the website for the umps, so HTML dump for those interested!

Next up I have some characters waiting on the next difficulty up (Lawful Human Valkyrie and Lawful Dwarf Caveman) as a result of a brief "alt-itis" mood, so hopefully 'll have another post or even a double-feature soon!

Hey, I'm a noob here, currently playing through GnollHack and working my way up through the difficulties but eventually I do want to branch out to trying vanilla and other variants. In fact, I'm interested in trying out public servers too for the "full experience"!

The thing is I don't think I can handle playing in ASCII/text mode, at least not yet, I'll try to keep an open mind but I'm certainly not there yet. So with that in mind, I have two questions:

1. which variants have tilesets available? I know SLASH'EM does, dNetHack apparently used to but doesn't anymore (?), don't really know of any others.

2. Which servers support playing with tiles?

Any info is appreciated, thanks in advance!

P.S. VI-keys are also a hard pass for me (and I have no interest in learning that ever) but I think everything should support numpad anyway?

So I chose GnollHack on Steam for my entrypoint to NetHack stuff and been thoroughly enjoying it so far!

It might not be a very prestigious first Ascension, since I was playing o an easier-than-normal difficulty (GnollHack has 7, I'm playing on the lowest while the one that's meant to be vanilla-equivalent is the third highest ._. ) and lucked out finding my own bones twice (once in Minetown when I was playing Valk and the priest killed me after converting the Altar, then another from a YASD near the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom where I literally choked on an extremely good run from trying to eat a corpse). Even still had help from the GnollHack Discord at points.

Can say that as slow as I was playing for most of it, I cranked out the journey from the Amulet to the Astral Plane pretty fast. My Altar was the last one I found there but I didn't get too much grief there.

Full dump if you wanna see: https://pastebin.com/HrpmH3gj

Now with that done, I'll be trying higher difficulties and maybe even other game versions (I feel like I should give vanilla a proper go at some point for one)!

I'm a noob playing a variant (GnollHack) on an easier-than-vanilla difficulty but I'm curious to hear about this from people playing any version or variant.

I haven't played enough runs to really decide but I lean towards trying to clear Sokoban before going through the Mines, thinking that I don't really need fancy stats or gear to push boulders and which prize I find there (and any other gear) could help determine my game plan from there. But maybe it depends on your characters.

What do you guys do first?

View Poll

It s a silly question but it had me wondering.

If there were robots in Nethack or a Variant, what letter/symbol would they be 8n ASCII mode? I'm guessing it might be ' like Golems because that's the closest thing I can think of but I'm not sure.

Said "monster" because I figured if you were playing as a robot you would still be an @

I had an issue with my Discord account where I got mistakenly flagged as a spammer and my account was disabled.

I got it back but it seems I was banned from the server linked here (probably because of this) and I'm not sure who to contact about it. Any help would be appreciated.