Originally posted to /r/nethack.
NetHack 3.6.1: YAFAP on my first time past the Castle. Orcish Barbarian, no intrinsic protection, killed Demogorgon
This was the same run I posted about a couple times here recently. It felt like the game was fighting me every step of the way in this run.
- I got Orcish Town in Minetown.
- A werewolf put on the amulet of reflection in Sokoban.
- I screwed up the Medusa fight and she teleported away—I ultimately found her on dungeon level 1 during the ascension run! I don’t even know how she got up there.
- There were no priests I could chat to in the entire game: no temples generated in the main dungeon, Orcish Town doesn’t have a priest, and my pet minotaur immediately murdered the guaranteed priest in the Valley of the Dead before I could get to him.
- The only artifact I ever got was the stupidly-heavy, two-handed, pet-whacking, Yeenoghu-angering Cleaver. I used a pair of ordinary silver sabers for all of Gehennom and the ascension run.
- Orcus wouldn’t let me stand on an up staircase and ended up summoning Demogorgon.
- I fell in the guaranteed spiked pit and instapetrified myself while slapping monsters with a chickatrice corpse in Rodney’s zoo. Fortunately, I had an abundant collection of amulets of life saving.
- I never found a can of grease and lost most of my scrolls and potions to the Plane of Water rather than wishing for an oilskin sack.
- On Astral, I had to try all three altars to find the correct one, dying twice in the process.
But I made it. Dumplog here.
p.s. Does anyone know a way to get dumplog files in the Android version? They’re supposed to be a built-in feature in 3.6.1, but I can’t figure out how to get them. For this run I ended up taking screenshots of the DYWYPI screens, OCRing them, and then tediously reassembling the resulting text. (Hence why I didn’t include most of the monsters killed—I have the screenshots, but it’s a ludicrously long list. It’s easy to forget just how many different creatures there are in NetHack.)
vnroguelike writes…
Wow, well done!
Definitely sounds like a tough one to beat. I’m curious:
- Did you use the wiki much, or just past knowledge (accumulated through many deaths)?
- Was your max HP 132 the one you got into Astral or is it an effect of the Riders? If the former, are you crazy? ;-) That’s super low…
- Well done on playing only ~58K turns, that’s impressive. I gather not much altar camping / polypiling / nurse dancing etc?
My reply…
- Wiki, wiki, wiki, wiki. I’ve been playing NetHack on and off since (checks filesystem timestamps) at least
20072011, using the wiki from the beginning, and it took me until now to ascend. :-) - The Riders definitely didn’t help. My HP entering Astral was 169.
- I did all 3 of altar camping, polypiling, and (a little bit of) nurse dancing. Not only that, but my main altar for most of the run was the one all the way back in Orcish Town, and I spent a lot of time hauling stuff to and from my stash there. I was fortunate that a lot of staircases were generated near to each other, but otherwise I can’t say a particular reason why my turn count would be low. I guess I’m just efficient? My “altar camping” used mainly bags of tricks and scrolls/wands of create monster, so I wasn’t just wandering around waiting for monsters to show up to sacrifice.
I guess I should mention that there were a few lucky things in this run. I found a bag of holding early, just lying on the floor in the Mines past Orcish Town. I found a cloak of magic resistance just lying on the floor in the dungeon around level 10-15 or so. And of course I got reflection rather than another redundant bag of holding in Sokoban.
Edit: FYI, I actually finished this game on the 20th. It took me 10 days to get around to ripping the screenshots and posting.
I’m currently working on an orcish wizard run that seems pretty ascendable. I’ve got reflection, speed boots, +4 gauntlets of dexterity, Magicbane, a luckstone, and a ring of conflict. My biggest problem at this point is that I have no way of getting back from Medusa if I dig down. Let me know if you have any ideas other than using my wand of cold and hoping that’s enough, or wandering around hoping to find a ring or boots. The wiki suggests scrolls of earth, which I guess is an option but seems like it must require absurd amounts of precision.
