From: throop@cs.utexas.edu (David R. Throop) Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack Subject: Survival tips (*SPOILERS*) for Tourists and other weak characters Date: 17 Nov 1999 13:08:28 -0600 > My favorite class in Nethack is the Tourist, but unfortunately this one > also seems to be the most challenging one to play. Is there anything I > can do to increase their odds of survival, especially at lower levels? These are general survival tips, but they especially hold for the Tourist and other weak characters. 1) Descend VERY SLOWLY. Don't go past dgn lev 3 until you're a 5th level character, at least. (Exception: (15), below.) 2) Work those muscles. Spend LOTS of time pushing boulders back and forth, getting your strength up. 3) Every single piece of armour you find - check it for cursedness, then try it on if uncursed. It's worth trying on 20 pairs of shoes to find the one that has the +1 enchantment. It's worth lugging a bunch of worthless looking armour back 4 levels to get to an altar so you can check it's status. 4) Every piece of armour or weapon that you don't want - get it out of play. Put it in a chest, or sell it, or take it up to a level you've pretty much finished. 5) As soon as you find a wand, figure it out. First #Engrave 'foo' in the dust with your fingers. Then use the wand to add the E-Word to the engraving. If you don't get a message, #name the wand something like Marble-NoMsg. If the wand was fire or digging -well, how handy to have a safe square on a level. It's important to engrave foo first, so that you can ID (at least partially) cancellation, teleport, invisible and polymorph. Test 'no message' wands by lining up a spare lizard corpse, a unlocked box and a closed door, then getting an easy monster in the line of fire. This will ID open / wizard lock / undead turning / probing (and hiddenDoor, if you're lucky.) Similarly, try on every ring as soon as you've shown that it's uncursed. Don't leave it on if you can't immediately tell, though. I don't like dropping duplicate rings down sinks, though. 6) There is a drawback to the camera - blinded monsters can't see the E-Word and don't respect it. 7) If you're using the camera against a hoard (of orcs, bees, whatever), #Name each creature as you blind it. That way you can tell, before you spend a turn blinding a creature, if you've already blinded it. 8) If you've got an altar, and there's no other unicorn around, it's worth killing a co-aligned unicorn to get the horn. You can sacrifice to get your piety back. The horn is so enormously useful. Once you've got it, eat every corpse in sight (avoiding choking, of course.) The horn will reverse the effects of any poison (or even taintedness.) And several of the poison corpses can give you poison resistance. Kill unicorns using speed, if you can get it, or conflict, or pets, or wands that bounce. As soon as you get a unicorn horn, #name each unidentified potion something like 'blue clears'. Then #dip the horn in. If it doesn't clear, #name it 'blue noclear'. (Exception: smoky potions.) If it turns another color, name it 'fruit juice'. You may waste a !oil this way - if your best weapon is rusty you can #dip it in first. 9) Run away. Especially in the mines, hang out near the staircase for a long time, til your sure most of the hostiles are dispatched. If the geometry of the level is keeping the hostiles from getting to you, just venture out far enough to get them headed towards you, then run back and fight them at the stairs. 10) Every time you pray at an altar (water prayers, etc), be carrying all the interesting cursed stuff - cursed =?"!+ plus any cursed armor that might be a special class, like levitation boots. Every once in a while the gods uncurse your whole pack. 11) NEVER NEVER drink an unidentified potion or read an unidentified scroll. You should have at least dropped it in a shop to see what the base cost is, and have a pretty good idea. (Exception: blessed smoky potions, and blessed potions that have been tested with a Unicorn horn.) HARDLY EVER read a scroll unless it's blessed. Save your enchant armour/ enchant weapon / remove curse / identify until you can bless them. (Exception: ?destroy armour, when confused.) REALLY REALLY study the pricelists in the spoilers, esp the one for scrolls. Once you understand these, and the way shopkeepers pay and price things, you can pretty much ID the four most important scrolls for your game (enchant armour/ enchant weapon / remove curse / identify), bless them ASAP, and use them. If after you've narrowed down a scroll to one of ?EA ?EW ?RC, play it safe. Bless it (see 16.) Pick up all the cursed stuff you can hold (stowing other stuff in a chest, to keep your burdening down. Good to do this in a locked room.) Remove all armour except the piece you most want to bless. Hold your best weapon in your hands. Read the scroll. If you're in the mines, and you're set up to read your blessed scrolls, and you're reasonably buff, it's probably worth going to the bottom of the mines and getting the luckstone and building up your luck (with sacrifice or gems to unicorns) before reading the scrolls. Pickup EVERYTHING unidentified that's possibly interesting (dropping or stowing the other stuff to make room in your pack) before reading blessed ?ID. 12) Never pay directly for anything in a shop. Drop the money on the floor, then pay with your credit. Orcs, dwarves, ogres etc will pick up the money in the shop, and you can kill them (and get the money back) after luring them out. 13) Don't convert the mine altar unless you have speed, or have already dispatched the priest (conflict, pet, /Death.) 14) Shortly after you find an altar, lug a chest close to it, so that you have a safe place to stow all that stuff that you're dropping on the altar. It's very annoying to have a horde of orcs materialize and then put on all the best armour that you've found. Large boxes and sacks do in a pinch, but gelatenous cubes DO eat them. I usually bring several chests and #name them 'scrolls potions spellbooks', or 'rings wands' or 'armour weapons' so that I can sort my finds. 15) As soon as you discover a down staircase, go down it and come right back up. That way, if you fall through a trap door to the next level, you'll know which way to go to get back to the upstairs. 16) As soon as you have an aligned altar, getting holy water is among your highest priorities. Use (8) above to convert bad potions into water. There's also a neat trick with amythists and booze - amythists are always purple, and the Gnome kings cellar has a lot of booze. Gather useless / nearly useless potions together and journey to #dip them in fountains. If you have a /Cancel, use it. 17) In general, being willing to do boring, tedious things in order to build up your game, rather than just plunging ahead to explore. Build up strength, test armour, hang around altars waiting for something sacrificable to show up, test the shop price of unknown items, lug unknown items back many levels to test them. For example, suppose you're at DL 8 and you find an unidentified ring, and you're petless, and the only altar you've seen is in gnometown. You should immediately go all the way back up to the mine entrance and then all the way down to mine town, drop the ring on the altar, and try it on (someplace safe) if it's uncursed. 18) If you've never had an ascension - use all the angles. Ascensions without using wishes, the E-Word, polypiling, wraith luring, nurse and succubus dancing are nice to brag on. But the game is hard enough for a beginner, even using every trick in the book. And if you're using these tricks, use them early. Don't wait til you're down to 3 hitpoints with your god pissed off at you. Happy hacking David Throop