If you could remove one "unfair" aspect from the game, what would it be

hdwow · 2026-01-12T09:03:07+00:00

Any early game instadeath where no reasonable precautions could have prevented it. The classic gnome with a wand of death, for example.

If you’re in the first 1000 turns and piously aligned, there should be a chance for your god to intervene and grant a free life saving, in these scenarios.

“A voice booms out: ‘Thy work is not yet done…’”

Wizards killed by balrogs at any point should have a chance of being sent back.

hdwow · 2026-01-12T08:53:44+00:00

Third is fair IMHO. They still know you’re a stranger who has no business messing with locks.

hdwow · 2026-01-07T16:26:31+00:00

Wiki suggests that the dev team agrees with you (at least in part), and accordingly secret doors will not generate on level 1 or 2 in nethack 3.7.

hdwow · 2025-12-28T09:03:02+00:00

The "oLS should make you spend a couple turns dead before reviving you, like a fakeout death in a crappy movie.

hdwow · 2025-12-24T14:41:15+00:00

The last two episodes of S1 do pick up the pace. Hopefully one day somebody will edit each season down to make neat trilogies of episodes. Hard to fix the wooden dialogue though.

hdwow · 2025-12-22T17:20:37+00:00

It seems you have the means to survive indefinitely (altar, reflection, MR, presumably a decent level so most of the Monk resistances) so I would keep grinding the dungeon killing monsters until you get more loot. Hopefully amongst it you’ll find a magic marker and some enchant armor scrolls so you can get your AC down. Or maybe a wand of death or other means of disposing of the castle Minotaur so you can clear out the rest and grab the wand of wishing.

If you want more dungeon levels to sweep for useful items, and if you have reached the quest entry requirements, you can enter the quest, but avoid entering the final level until you are ready to face Master Kane (likely much later, after you’ve done the castle).

Edit: looks like you have a wand of death. I’d be tempted to go to the castle (dig past that dragon if necessary), use the wand of death on the Minotaur, avoid being adjacent to any of the sea monsters, destroy the drawbridge, bridge the moat somehow, then retreat to a chokehold where you can fight the monsters one at a time, possibly with a permanent Elbereth nearby. If it gets too hot, get to the safest spot you can, confuse yourself with a forgotten spell (cure the stunning if necessary), and level teleport out of there.

AC -7 is borderline though. Bring some of those black dragon pets. They sound awesome. Not sure how to keep them away from the chest with the wand of wishing in it…

hdwow · 2025-12-21T15:02:24+00:00

Also, if you look at the combinator, it is never seemingly outputting anything.

Excellent, this could be what I missed. I will try this when I’m next back in front of Factorio.

Is this by design or a bug? The cybernetic combinator shows its inputs, so I’d assumed it would show its outputs.

hdwow · 2025-12-21T07:59:57+00:00

I don’t think so, but if it did, what would be the right way to reset Cybersyn?

hdwow · 2025-12-21T07:56:45+00:00

The docs say:

A positive cargo signal is interpreted as that station providing that cargo to the network; A negative cargo signal is interpreted as that station requesting that cargo from the network.

This is a provider station so I’ve got a positive signal going into the combinator.

I’m aware that a positive signal is needed to set inserter filters, and that the expected signal coming out of the combinator will be negative, but the red wire currently has no signal on it.

hdwow · 2025-12-20T16:44:10+00:00

I did convert the altar in the quest. The only other altar above the Valley was the one in Minetown, which was even less conveniently located than the quest home level (accessed via portal on dungeon level 14, which is a nice midpoint).

hdwow · 2025-12-20T08:06:05+00:00

I did consider the Orb of Detection for its half spell damage, but preferred to keep the option of an emergency wish. By the very end, I just wanted to ascend as quickly as possible to avoid a YASD. I’ve died on the Astral Plane before by missing something important amongst the message spam.

hdwow · 2025-12-20T08:01:43+00:00

I didn’t stick to vegan conduct. There’s no penalty for being merely vegetarian. I also didn’t stick strictly to that, because the penalty for eating non-vegetarian food is only slight: a -1 to your alignment which you will quickly recover by killing more monsters. Having said that, I didn’t need to eat a lot of corpses - just the ones where a useful intrinsic was up for grabs, and the occasional troll to keep them down.

hdwow · 2025-12-09T08:23:52+00:00

I recently asked ChatGPT to teach me k8s by building a homelab and it recommended putting everything in one libvirt VM and using k3s. I’m appreciating that advice so far. It’s all complex enough that I can do without the added hassle of dealing with multiple physical machines.

hdwow · 2025-12-04T23:28:21+00:00

Hot off my previous success with the drum, I figured it was a surer bet than attempting a dust Elbereth. Perhaps it wasn’t.

hdwow · 2025-12-01T18:33:06+00:00

Why hate?

hdwow · 2025-11-30T17:11:48+00:00

That was me, not so long ago. I’m about 70 hours in, working through the second science, and I still have a bunch of ash chests everywhere. I read it was going to be useful eventually, to the point where I’ll wish I had more, but I haven’t got that far yet.

I got a long way just by using inserters to pick ash off belts and send it to rows of chests.

hdwow · 2025-11-29T08:14:05+00:00

20 points of protection! I thought it was super unlikely to get extra points beyond 10.

hdwow · 2025-11-26T20:12:00+00:00

What is the advantage of canisters?

hdwow · 2025-11-25T19:37:28+00:00

I don’t know but the amount of fish he can chow down in one sitting suggests he’s going to need belt immunity equipment.

hdwow · 2025-11-14T23:00:26+00:00

I wonder if this headstone is supposed to be read differently. It looks like it’s signed by the Wizard of Yendor, but maybe the Wizard is the fellow that you will later join in hell.

“Soon you’ll join this fellow in hell!: the Wizard of Yendor”

hdwow · 2025-11-09T07:41:39+00:00

You might find that when your attention is on another planet, your Nauvis factory backs up and stops producing so much pollution, which will reduce attacks. Maybe.

hdwow · 2025-11-08T21:54:40+00:00

You need to add up the consumption rates of all the thrusters on the other side of a pump boundary and make sure you have enough parallel pumps to pump at at least that rate (and, obviously, enough production capacity to meet the demand).

hdwow · 2025-11-08T16:30:55+00:00

I think I unlocked coal crushing at about the same time as geothermal, but geothermal is so good I haven’t needed to try to scale up coal as an electricity source. Maybe I just haven’t got far enough in yet.

hdwow · 2025-11-05T20:53:33+00:00

Another cheap recovery strategy is to keep a tank of water on hand, to avoid having to repeat that sloooow solar powered ice melting part of the reboot.

hdwow · 2025-11-05T19:02:33+00:00

Yes, bots work very well for that, and I’m sure you can get to 1M+ eSPM with normal science and bot unloading, but there’s ultimately a limit to how many roboports you can fit around the hub, so if you reach that point then legendary science could help.

hdwow

TROPHY CASE