NetHack/Newbie Mistakes: Difference between revisions

This page reviews some common mistakes by new players and describes how to avoid them.

Once your character dies, you should start a new character in a new game.

* If your computer crashes, NetHack will not save your game, but it will keep information about the dungeon and your character that NetHack saves during games. NetHack's "recover" command can restore such crashed games, usually to the last point where you changed dungeon levels.

When you start a new character, some parts of the starting statistics and inventory will be random. In traditional tabletop roleplaying games, these random parts were determined by dice, thus we call this rolling a new character.

It is possible to reroll, even on multiuser machines, and also on public users that have explore mode disabled. However, rerolling is an ineffective way to learn the game. The ability to keep weak characters alive and to make do with the equipment you find is an important part of being a skilled NetHacker. This is not Angband, where you start in a town that can give you identified supplies as long as you have money; in NetHack you have to be able to handle playing the game when you lack certain items or your stats are low.

Many new players, in not savescumming or rerolling, will deliberately play in a risky manner during the early game. These players do not lose much if their beginning player dies. For example, some players might drink from fountains hoping for a grateful water demon to grant them a wish, even though there is an 80% chance that any water demon they get will be hostile and will kill them. This is not as bad as savescumming or rerolling, but many NetHackers still frown upon it; they feel that you should try your best to ascend each character. Also, when you play this way you miss out on the valuable experience of struggling to keep a marginally viable character alive for as long as possible.

Some monsters are '''peaceful'''. If you look at them (with the '''[;]''' command, for example), the description will include the word "peaceful", for example a "peaceful dwarf lord". If you try to attack a peaceful monster in melee, you will be asked to confirm your attempt to attack: the best answer is '''[n]''' for no.

(If you ever play the variant called SLASH'EM, note that your gods will still blame you if you cast a spell of flame sphere or freeze sphere and the resulting sphere attacks a peaceful monster, even if you polymorph the sphere into another monster. See [http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/slashem/pets.html Eva Myers' spoiler on tame monsters in NetHack and Slash'EM].)

The NetHack Guidebook does not describe the effects of the #pray command, and some newbies feel that they "ought" to pray on a regular basis in order to keep in touch with their god.  In fact, prayer in NetHack is always pestering the gods for help, never praising or thanking them. Hence your god does not mind in the least if you never pray, but does object if you pray too often. Once you get a negative response to a prayer, you will almost always be unable to pray until you have placated the angry deity with a suitable sacrifice.

If your god is very satisfied with you, your god might give you a reward, which is another form of help. If it is not an emergency, then first sacrifice a corpse on your god's altar to determine whether it is safe to pray. "You have a hopeful feeling" means that it is not safe and you should sacrifice more corpses or wait more game turns. "You have a feeling of reconciliation" means that it is now safe to pray. If there is no bad message, than it was already safe to pray and remains so.

Most corpses are safe to eat when fresh, though some are poisonous (see the section on Food later in this guide to learn what is good and bad). Old corpses, though, will make you fatally ill (and have no nutritional value either). There are a few ways to cure this deadly food poisoning, but it's best to avoid it, by not eating anything that you did not kill yourself or see die. Never eat zombies or mummies; they are created by magically animating an old and rotting corpse, and such undead corpses are never safe to eat.

Should you eat an old corpse, it causes '''food poisoning''', and "FoodPois" will appear on the status line. (This is a different form of poison than if you eat a poisonous corpse, such as a kobold corpse.) This is an emergency. Since almost nothing else will work, you might need to #pray, but if you have a way to cure sickness (with the spell or potion, or by '''[a]'''pplying an uncursed or blessed unicorn horn), then use it. Once you have food poisoning, immediately try to cure it, because you only have a few turns to live, and that unicorn horn might not function the first few times.

If you eat while satiated, there is a risk of choking over your food and immediately dying.  Eating once you have reached the point of satiety at which the game tells you "you're having a hard time getting all of it down" is particularly dangerous. Experienced players may be able to tell when they can safely eat despite being satiated, but it is safest for novices not to try it. So, if you want that resistance from a monster corpse, but you are satiated, you might choke and die if you try to eat it. The wearing of an amulet of magical breathing will eliminate the risk of choking, and a tinning kit or an ice box will keep food fresh for later.

(As long as you are not satiated when you start eating, you should always be permitted to finish your meal. However, owing to a bug this may not apply if you save the game in the middle of a meal. At least one character has died from this.)