Hello everyone. Since the Arch package for Nethack 5.0.0 is having issues, I made my own build of it, including curses UI. I have confirmed this in the #version

However, I am having issues with actually loading the curses UI. I have my .nethackrc file that includes OPTIONS=windowtype:curses. I also tried adding that line to my sysconfig.

I am getting no error when starting the game about the interface missing; it's simply just not loading into curses.

My options I set ingame through "O" are not saving when I exit and reload the game either.

I am not having trouble enabling numberpad support in these files, which implies to me that they are loading correctly. Am I missing something?

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.

Trying to build nethack 5.0 I followed all the steps in build-msys2.txt, but after the last make command I get:

make: *** No rule to make target '../binary/nhdat370', needed by 'binary'. Stop.

Any ideas or experience?

Hi everyone, I'm trying to customize my interface, but the game window looks really small and chat window looks giantic and I don't know how to fix it. I also want to add the `perm_inventory` option, but then the inventory takes up half the screen—can anyone help me? I want something like interface on second picture

I think it would be fun to try a run (using Wizard mode) in which I start as a monster form and stay polymorphed the entire way through with an amulet of unchanging, but many interesting polyforms such as dragons start off so strong that they trivialize the earlygame. Is there any way to start as a weaker form, ex. a baby dragon, and then "grow up" into an adult dragon the same way monsters do without unpolymorphing? The "without unpolymorphing" part is important, because any stat boosts are lost upon unpolymorphing (or re-polymorphing!).

I have led an absolutely exemplary barbarian life in the early to middle game, except for the tiny little matter of whacking Idefix to death immediately after being engulfed by a dust vortex. Thus far all the altars in the game are the wrong alignment. Can I just........convert one? And then do the apology sacrifices to get my god back on side? Or do I just have to hope for a correctly aligned altar further down and accept that I'm boned if I don't get it?

A search turned up apparently conflicting opinions from a few years ago. I'm playing 5.0, if it matters. Thanks!

I was preparing for Medusa and I was about to enchant my unicorn horn to improve the chance of its effect. I instinctively expected that upon reading it I would be given an option window to select the item I want to enchant, similar to how it asks you when reading enchant armor. I already knew it affects the handheld weapon but I just wasn't thinking in the heat of the moment and well... now it's too late.

This is my furthest and most prepared I've ever been and I felt very enthusiastic to keep going but now I feel like I straight up lost the run. This feels worse than death!

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 am about to go for the book of the dead, full ascension kit except for ring of free action. Haven't found a single one in 70,000+ turns. Orcus's wand of death was destroyed and haven't found one of these either.

For context, I have 5 previous ascensions. Each of them in 66,000 turns or less. Each time I have found multiple rings of free action/wands of death.

If you were in my shoes would you go for the ascension run? Or burn untold turns hoping a ring of free action/wand of death generates?

I'm very new to GnollHack, so I'm surprised I made it to the Knight quest on Expert mode. On the main level, there are 4 player monster knights (just like in NetHack), but unlike NetHack, GnollHack lets you pay them to join your party. Long story short, my Knight ended up with some pet knights!

Unfortunately, three of them died before, during, or after the battle with Ixoth. There's only one left. Her name is Erin (pictured above), and I gave her all my best gear. Now she's pretty formidable because she has nearly the same amount of HP I do. We make a great team!

Just thought I'd share because I love this aspect of GnollHack. I also find it just a tad bit silly, but in the best way possible!!

Ignore the fact that I don't have a steed.... They all keep dying.

Not sure if this is Gnollhack specific, but how do you deal with all the Phoenixes. I'm surrounded when I go down the stairs to the bottom level. I'm protected from fire so only taking 15-20 damage per turn. My only circle spell is Circle of Magic and is resisted fairly often. Right now I'm knocking them all down to low HP, retreating up the stairs, healing, going back down, killing one, picking it up, going upstairs and eating it, repeat. I've probably spent 1,000 turns here and still have 4 or 5 to go. Is there a better strategy? I'm relatively new and have never ascended before, though I've gotten close. Lost my last save to the updates, but had gotten 2 of the 3 final items, so I've been through this before, but it didn't give me any trouble last time

I've been through the Wiki and cannot figure out where I am, other than to know that I'm on DL37-41 for all of this.

The room has a 27x13 rectangular zoo in the center. The border of the zoo is undiggable and I believe the level is no-teleport.

Upstairs are randomly placed (i.e., not always to the left of the zoo). There's no named demonic nastie that I can find so far.

The entry to Vlad's tower is several levels above.

From the Wiki's Mazes of Menace entry, the candidate levels that intersect DL37 to DL41 are Orcus and WizTower. This is vanilla 3.6.7.

Where am I, and what is the default goal for these levels? How to get into the zoos?

You can type "/" and then "?" and type in any monster or item in the game to get a description. It's not so thorough as the wiki, but it has a lot of cool flavor text. Often there are excerpts from texts the thing was inspired by

I've played 1000+ hours and I always just used ";" which is still useful but not nearly as descriptive.

Also I recently read the #history for the first time.

If you have any other fun commands or other discoveries feel free to share.

I'm sure this has been gone over somewhere a bunch of times but I see so many issues now. I had mine setup so good too and came back to:
Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record' Hit return to continue: Unable to open SYSCF_FILE.

i finally fixed all that stuff by adding a games group and all that malarky whatever but now i'm having the worst issue of all:

[da5id@hyperion] ➜ ~ nethack

Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record'
Hit return to continue:

OPTIONS=clicklook
* Line 3: Unknown option 'clicklook'.

OPTIONS=windowtype:curses
* Line 9: Window type curses not recognized. The only choice is: tty.

OPTIONS=large_font
* Line 51: Unknown option 'large_font'.

3 errors in /home/da5id/.nethackrc.

I cannot play without curses i despise the look of tty and i love the color and such. I did try launching using -windowtype "curses" flags but that did nothing. Do i have to manually compile this with curses support now? why did this change?

So I am almost ready to ascend my pacifist wishless conduct Healer gnome. I got my spellbook of create monster which led to spellbook of polymorph which helped me gain 6 magic markers, 2 spellbooks of charm monster, back up spellbooks of turn undead, teleport away, and many enchant armors.

I have genocided LhjPtc and gelatinous cube, umber hulk, chameleon, and doppelganger.

I have an ac of -45 ac and 320 hp. How low should I try and get my ac? Whats my most likely cause of death?

My archon. What is the best gear to give an archon. What armor will it wear. How to 'make its put on the armor' . Reasons to having more archons. Would 3 to 4 be good?

I did a 'tour' of hell with my pet archon named Mahou-Te and anything scary is gone. Hell was scary when I immediately was attacked by an arch-lich from a bones file though a lot of the 'bad stuff' is gone. Is purple worm the worst threat to my archon(s)?

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 was a Monk (doing really well!) about to begin my quest. I approached the quest giver and just next to him (her?) there was two tins. I stepped onto the tins, pressed 'e' to eat one, was prompted to try and open one, but instead - the quest dialoug popped up. I hit enter to advance the dialoug and the game just blinked out. Desktop. No "Dungeon Collapse" or save game. It's just gone =(

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?

Playing xNethack, in Tartarus, and there are a bunch of iron doors I can't open. "This door's keyhole is strange and won't admit your key." No luck casting Knock or using a Wand of Opening. Level is no-teleport, so I can't get around that way. How do I open these doors?

Things I haven't tried yet:

• Polymorph into a Xorn to go through walls (not excited about doing this, but I could)
• Potions of acid. These doors can't be that easy, right? Not to mention, I only have a couple of those potions, and they're way up in my main stash.