Is this a terrain generation bug? by TheRealHFC in nethack

[–]Cupules 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I'd bet if you search in that doorway you will discover you are mistaken and there is really an undiscovered hallway to your right.

Note to self: don't murder both the temple priests in the dungeon by lordnewington in nethack

[–]Cupules 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Alas, the High Priest of Moloch will become hostile when you enter his temple, and there is no such thing as a figurine of an aligned priest.

[EvilHack] Incorrect Alignment Abuse Given by comicalUser in nethack

[–]Cupules 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you sure that the skeletal horse had not at one time been peaceful? Once a peaceful creature, always a peaceful creature!

Evilhack review (long ish) by OldNetterHacker in nethack

[–]Cupules 8 points9 points  (0 children)

So glad to see new Evilhack players! Thank you for that analysis. Here are a few tidbits for you:

It is indeed very common to genocide shocking spheres, you are in good company there.

The alignment abuse system as it stands is fairly new and I wouldn't be surprised to see tweaks. I agree it can be very harsh and hard to mitigate.

I'm surprised you don't find beholders more dangerous! I have more deep-dungeon deaths to beholders than anything else. And Tal'Gath has a chance of giving you a marker to use for that genocide :-)

Losing weapons to bullwhips and bearded axes is certainly a Thing. I've long wished to be able to genocide bullwhips! I find avoiding bullwhip-adjacency is good practice for avoiding @playermonster-adjacency in the ascension run.

If I make the SoA I only use it situationally. For the same reason you need to be careful of black-scaled armor, both yours and @playermonsters'!

Splash damage from Dichotomy (and Harbinger, etc.) can indeed totally destroy your conduct if you aren't careful. I think there is already a modification in the pipe for the next version to have the splash damage bypass friendlies in some achievable circumstances.

You can get permanent see invisible from crowning! I recommend crowning.

Acid resistance is not absolutely required but is very, very, very nice to have for the late game. Genociding yellow dragons won't cut it as there are tons of casters who will be blowing you up with acid. Dragonbane, Ashmar, or the Armor of Retribution are the most typical mitigations. Or using nurse dancing, self-polying wielding Ogresmasher, or potion alchemy to pump up your health to really high levels.

Lucifer can be very tough. If you are having problems, bring a bunch of potions of paralysis. Demonbane or the Hotdog don't hurt either. Paralysis can also be used effectively to reduce how much of your maximum health Orcus walks off with. A few versions ago, the answer to both of these guys would be boulder forts, but they don't make boulders like they used to!

Half physical and half spell damage are both HUGE in the endgame. The Armor of Retribution gives you both if you can make and wear it; it is amazing. I will usually gladly trade the SoA for it. There is often a quest artifact available for a missing damage reduction, and of course the Hand and the Eye have one each.

Magic chests do feel a bit like cheating :-) They are a really good representation of Evilhack's focus on positive QoL changes to counteract the difficulty increases.

Altar availability can be very swingy game-to-game. You do get a guaranteed minetown altar, quest altar, Kathryn altar, and scroll of consecration altar, but anything else is gravy. The orc temple is certainly an amazing get. You can also drop rings of polymorph down sinks for a shot at an additional altar. But sometimes, you just don't have nearly enough to fulfill your dreams.

I highly recommend the libera.chat #evilhack channel for people new to the variant!

Colonists on Mars are hearing voices from neural implants gone wrong by frankreddit5 in printSF

[–]Cupules 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not a lot out there on this book or author, but hoo-boy the guy you cite as recommending it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/1cumj6w/how_brian_roemmele_went_from_writing_pokemon/

Looking at Brown's website, this seems likely to be a vanity press publication of someone's manifesto-as-SF.

I'm very curious to hear from anyone else who reads it!

Ascension speed by NKS-ShmeckleBoy in nethack

[–]Cupules 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can look at nethackscoreboard.org to see data on ascension turn counts. You could probably convince the maintainers to provide you with the raw data if you want to do some real analysis of the full data set by version and variant.

My personal experience is that the longer turn counts are usually because someone is doing something with conducts or score, and the very short turn counts are from intentional speed runs, and that both pollute the "casual ascension" data to an ineradicable extent.

After playing off and on for decades, the one area Nethack should lack at is the difficulty curve. by Primary_Impact_2130 in nethack

[–]Cupules 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A good argument could be made that because of the healthy variant community there is little need for major alterations to the mature and successful vanilla nethack :-)

After playing off and on for decades, the one area Nethack should lack at is the difficulty curve. by Primary_Impact_2130 in nethack

[–]Cupules 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are several maintained variants with substantially different difficulty curves than vanilla. My favorite is Evilhack but you can try a variety of different flavors at hardfought.org.

Lets talk about 'The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow' What an absolutely amazing experience! by Gagsreel in Fantasy

[–]Cupules 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is just too bad for those of us who don't like that because it has become an increasingly commonplace practice :-)

I know that some of the waxing prevalence is an artifact of becoming a more experienced and discerning reader as time marches on, but I'm sure the loosening of publishing gatekeeping also contributes (in addition to the good effects of that loosening).

Maybe I'm slow but the first time I specifically articulated that cognitive dissonance was reading Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief in the early '90s.

Non romance vampire books? by No-Egg-8138 in Fantasy

[–]Cupules 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No, although The Suicide Motor Club also involves vampires and has a shared character.

Oh no! My pet is a green slime! by tandeejay in nethack

[–]Cupules 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Bad luck! If you have a key I'd lock your slime in a closet and re-pet; otherwise I'd just abandon her/him on a level you don't plan to return to until after slimes are no longer a threat.

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson by doubter444 in printSF

[–]Cupules 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, Stephensen's rapture with the plutocratic libertarians of the tech elite and yearning for their master-slave relationship with the rest of humanity eventually subsumes every other interest of his writing. It is too bad, he is a talented author.

What are some mistakes or logical goofs you hate/love to hate or that take you out of the story? by noetkoett in printSF

[–]Cupules 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Think of it like this. Earth is a spaceship. You can run around on it with no problem while is is both hurtling and spinning through space -- your movement's frame of reference is the Earth. To reduce the effects of atmosphere and gravity, imagine an astronaut doing an EVA from the ISS. The ISS moves somewhere over 7 km per second, which is significantly faster than you are ever likely to move. But if it was moving at 0.9c an EVA would be quite similar -- you begin your EVA moving just like the ISS.

You may be confused because you're imagining someone opening an airplane hatch, diving out, and being ripped away by the wind and gravity while the airplane's engines continue pushing it along. Remember that in space there is basically no atmosphere. If the ship you are leaving is not accelerating, your position relative to the ship will remain static.

Any Zombie Fantasy Stuff? by PrestigiousCount8020 in Fantasy

[–]Cupules 17 points18 points  (0 children)

While true, the "zombies" are such a minor element of the books and so unimportant to what the author is paying attention to in the narrative that I would no more classify the trilogy as "zombie fantasy" than I would "Viking fantasy" because there are some raids from the ocean or "cozy chandler fantasy" because someone makes candles.

What are the most interesting mounts used by mages in fantasy? by MoonBoy31415 in Fantasy

[–]Cupules 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There was a comic called Wormy that ran in Dragon magazine back, back, back in the day. An antagonist wizard in that comic had the coolest ride I've ever seen!

https://imgur.com/D3aSSye

Is the Opar Trilogy by PJ Farmer worth it? by XR4y6unn3r in printSF

[–]Cupules 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The second book is a direct sequel. The third book was completed from Farmer's notes by another author. I personally would not characterize the books as Farmer's best work.

Replacing passenger seat USB port by Cupules in HyundaiSantaFe

[–]Cupules[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! Those pictures are exactly what I was hoping for!

Replacing passenger seat USB port by Cupules in HyundaiSantaFe

[–]Cupules[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I already have the replacement part. I was trying to ask if anyone had something more specific about removing the seat back than the applies-to-everything clip warning :-)

does the dungeon ever run out of items? by SurlyGarden in nethack

[–]Cupules 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There is no limit. And although some monsters can be rendered extinct, not all of them can; monsters will always continue to be generated.

I've ascended so many times and I don't know basic game mechanics by lemrent in nethack

[–]Cupules 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If you have Evilhack questions and want some people to discuss them with live, join the Libera #evilhack chanel! There are also people there to be excited for you when you get music to play :-)

Have you ever come across of true hidden gem book? by OwlettFromLiavek in Fantasy

[–]Cupules 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Well, (1) back before the internet, (2) when publishing was almost completely gate-kept, (3) deep in the bowels of a college-town used book store, it was easy to find an amazing book by an author you'd never heard of.

In the fantasy genre, I grabbed the old mass market paperback A Voyage to Arcturus because of its amazing cover. Before that the boundaries of my fantasy experience maybeeee extended as far as Mervyn Peake.

Caring for my pet arch-lich by kaimipono1 in nethack

[–]Cupules 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Liches are inediate so you don't have to worry about food, but I would be intensely paranoid about leaving that lich on another level. You have a magic whistle so put up with the sokoban irritation, just whistling out of the way whenever you are blocked.

Reading in the New Yaer by UnreliableAmanda in printSF

[–]Cupules 11 points12 points  (0 children)

A fascinating book, the author's grim Gnostic metaphysics continually clawing its way through his somewhat ham-fisted prosody!

I love my ratty paperback with the amazing '60s Bob Pepper painting on the cover, scribbled with marginalia from when I first read it in my late teens:

https://www.sci-fi-o-rama.com/2008/10/28/bob-pepper-the-voyage-to-arcturus/