cursed scroll of teleport and use it to get all the way down to the Castle, skipping the entire early- and mid-game. (This isn't quite a sequence break because I'm pretty sure it's deliberate that you can do that.)
Since they did code two exceptions, stopping you at the Valley of the Dead and the Vibrating Square level, it's very sure that straight-to-Castle should be possible.
You have watched some of maud's (and nht's) ttyrecs on nethack.alt.org, right? The ones finishing in the 2100-2400 range? Should be instructive in some tactics.
Indeed, I even aided slightly in the routeplanning for nht's run. Arguably, it's even more instructive than maud's, due to getting pretty much every item it wanted much like a TAS would, although we're all indebted to maud for developing (and possibly inventing, I'm not sure) the polyself strategy in the first place.
Incidentally, I thought of a reason to want to get hit over not- "hits!" and "hits." are both shorter than "misses." This will, in combat-heavy situations, potentially lead to times where you can avoid a more-prompt.
On the flip side, you can probably avoid any and all more-prompts by playing with very large terminal size, and being hit or missed presumably affects RNG usage by whether damage is calculated. (I have not looked at the source for this, so this last is mere conjecture.)
Terminal size is fixed on DOS; and going for purely gametime as a goal means that an extra --More-- won't be the end of the world (in fact, I manipulated a "just misses" in my WIP, creating an extra --More--, because it looks sloppy to get hit by an enemy that you could dodge).
Restful sleep would not be the most efficient way to not-act during turns, either. Cursory examination looks like bouncing sleep rays (wands/spell) is best with maximum potential of 300 turns. (Properly figuring out the Wis<12 duration of floating eyes would be good, as well as sleep-wand explosions,)
Polyselfing into a blue jelly with unchanging can manage turns continuously until you starve to death. (The issue there is getting out of the state again; you need to get a nymph to steal the amulet.)
So, dwangoAC and I have been working on a WIP (with Ilari checking for sync problems), and this is our current situation:
St:7 Dx:16 Co:3 In:19 Wi:12 Ch:4 Neutral
Dlvl:26 $:0 HP:2222(8763) Pw:2625(3101) AC:10 Exp:2 T:159
We're at the Valley, and have just done a glitch to raise our max HP and Pw high enough to, hopefully, last the game. (If anyone thinks that these stats aren't high enough, we can go further; it would be good to know that now if that's the case.) We have the Castle wand, which has one charge remaining (the first two were used to gain items to perform the glitch with), and a scroll of charging to recharge it with; and now it's not obvious what to do next.
One possible plan: I could try to gain experience levels now; the Valley is full of wraiths, after all. I'd be raising them with a mixture of wraith eating, and "failed" polymorph en route to the wraiths (bringing the max HP and Pw a bit higher); however, I'm in the central section of the Valley, quite a way from any of the graveyards, so I fear this might be rather slow and boring. Level gain is useful because we'll want enough extrinsic speed to last the game soon (partly, because we want expert jumping, and casting haste self trains jumping), and we therefore want to get good at spellcasting; also, we need to gain to level 14 anyway to unlock the Quest.
Alternatively, we could wish for 5 cursed scrolls of teleportation, and just go wherever we like, pretty much (we can go anywhere but the Sanctum, Quest beyond Home:1, and Planes). One problem is the matter of having only two ring fingers, and with a ring of polycontrol and a cursed ring of polymorphitis worn at the moment, we'd need to take one off, which looks a bit sloppy; ideally, we'd eat those at some point, along with our unworn ring of telecontrol. (The Valley is not really a particularly good place to eat food which is definitely cursed; but on the other hand, we have distance to cover if we stay there. Telecontrol can also be achieved by gaining level to level 15, a good reason to stay on the Valley to level rather than go elsewhere immediately.) There's also the issue of where to go; we have glitches and sequence breaks to set up, but there's also the normal requirements of the game to think about. It's far from obvious what should come next.
So I'm asking for help. Does anyone here have ideas for where I should go, and what I should do, next, and more importantly, why?
Pudding farm for death drops and mass polymorph? Or does anything from the 'Summon Nasties' spell have death drops? If you want to be hardcore about it. ;)
Maybe buff the six cardinal stats?
Wish for 5 blessed smoky potions. Use those to wish for potions of gain level and/or attributes, more smoky potions and (un)holy water.
EDIT:and speed boots, and whatever else you want. You can get about a hundred wishes out of that loop, which should be more than enough to meet all your material needs.
As far as itinerary goes, the next stop should be Vlad while leaving those piles of cursed potions of gain level you'll need on the ascension run, simply because it gives you chances to manipulate items on the way down.
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
not really infinite because only 120 Djinni can be born before they become extinct.
It seems like there was a reason not to increase the prayer timeout too high anyway.
Speaking of Genocide, are you going to be killing every thing in the final areas so they won't get in the way.
120 wishes should be plenty, though, especially since you can wish for the maximum possible quantity and enchantment every time and manipulate it to work, plus guaranteed quest artifacts.
I think there where plans to pray to get unstuck from a wall in the endgame so if that's sill planed only a handful of wishes can be done, or at least require lots of sacrifices
Here's a WIP from a few days ago: http://sonic.net/~ac/tas/nethack_tas.mkv (note that that account, dwangoAC's, has a relatively small download cap, so don't download it unless you're interested in it); that encode, by Ilari, has actually been slowed down to make it easier to watch, but it's still hard to see what's going on. (Feel free to ask if there's anything there you don't understand; I need to know what to explain in more detail in the submit message.)
What we've done since, is to teleport to a shop on dungeon level 16 to pick up a magic lamp (used for a spellbook of detect monster, to make it possible to watch what's happening later on when we're in air-E form), to eat rings (we now have intrinsic controlled polymorphitis and teleportitis; TC was from a tengu, because the ring isn't edible this game), and to start practicing divination; nothing particularly amazing. (We've just oneshotted the shopkeeper; we're planning to teleport his corpse over to a coaligned altar on the level and sacrifice it to mollify our god.)
We have several sources of wishes available, incidentally, some of which are infinitely self-sustaining; the simplest is likely just using a fountain, but you might be surprised by some of the others we plan to use later...
Raiding vaults and levelling back down to 1 so you can racket somewhere might be one thing to do. Then eating some rings of protection?
Get some of the remaining intrinsics. Magic Breathing and Telepathy seem like the important ones. (The main use for Magic Breathing being not-caring about gorging yourself.)
Polymorphing some nondirectional wands (with max 15 charges manipulated) into death wands would be potentially useful, particularly for breaking them (240 damage to living nondemons, area).
ais523 wrote:
What we've done since, is to teleport to a shop on dungeon level 16 to pick up a magic lamp (used for a spellbook of detect monster,
Is that actually faster than manipulating the book to drop? After all, the only useful things you cannot get without wishing are other quest-arts. And only polymorph and wish stuff is what you can't polypile beyond that.
Speaking of, Eyes of the Overworld might be a good idea, though Detect Monsters will be more useful once you hit that. Slotless MR - though I guess you don't actually want that, since you'll be jumping into polytraps and levelporters!
What's the inventory look like now anyway?
Are rings of protection edible this game?
Does confused PYEC-invocation charge you up like the scroll would?
lessee..29*135 = 3915. Might want to boost your Pw some more? Probably not, since the Amulet is unlikely to worst-case every Jumping.
Fountains are not infinite wish engines hmm, the wiki does not mention whether it respects extinction of water demons, and I'm not familiar enough with the code to check.
Entertainment
Are wands of wishing edible this game?
Cleaning out Ludios in your spare time could boost entertainment value. While expert attack spells would probably be fastest, disintegration-breath would probably be a better, more-accessible alternative. (Manipulating the dragons to do it themselves?)
Raiding vaults and levelling back down to 1 so you can racket somewhere might be one thing to do. Then eating some rings of protection?
Get some of the remaining intrinsics. Magic Breathing and Telepathy seem like the important ones. (The main use for Magic Breathing being not-caring about gorging yourself.)
This is a speedrun, and a TAS, thus no real reason to eat (speedrun: not losing much nutrition over time; TAS: don't really need intrinisics other than the ones we already have). Also, magical breathing is redundant two different ways: we can always polymorph into something with it if we need to overeat or go underwater (and have, in fact, walked along the bottom of the Castle moat in the part of the WIP already done), and you have a 5% chance of surviving overeating even without it, which can easily be manipulated to occur. Telepathy is redundant to the better monster detection, which I'm actively training so as to be able to leave it on constantly (it's far from necessary for the actual TAS, but allows people to see what's going on rather than to have to watch blind, which isn't particularly entertaining). I might get clairvoyance for the same reason.
Polymorphing some nondirectional wands (with max 15 charges manipulated) into death wands would be potentially useful, particularly for breaking them (240 damage to living nondemons, area).
We can just use black dragon breath if we need to oneshot things before T:2000. Afterwards, there are exactly two monsters we have to kill (together with somehow evading Rodney on the plane of Earth, which may involve killing him, although I hope it won't come to that), and we need to find the very fastest way to do that. Most likely, it's to get a monster to kill them so as not to waste one of our precious turns.
ais523 wrote:
What we've done since, is to teleport to a shop on dungeon level 16 to pick up a magic lamp (used for a spellbook of detect monster,
Is that actually faster than manipulating the book to drop? After all, the only useful things you cannot get without wishing are other quest-arts. And only polymorph and wish stuff is what you can't polypile beyond that.
Manipulating a single rare item requires either the generation of an entire level to get a shop (and levels are in limited supply), or doing it as a deathdrop, which would require several seconds of waiting to get the drop, possibly even minutes. I'm trying to mix up the methods we use to obtain items for entertainment purposes; finding all the items we need in shops, wishing for them all, deathdropping them all, etc would be equally boring. (I'm also mixing up wish sources somewhat.) In terms of pure turncount, wishing or writing is by far the fastest way to get anything, in general. (I plan to write some spellbooks; I have a marker and some blank spellbooks in our stash on dlvl 16. But I need to fix luck first, as it would take boringly long to manipulate the write working otherwise.)
Speaking of, Eyes of the Overworld might be a good idea, though Detect Monsters will be more useful once you hit that. Slotless MR - though I guess you don't actually want that, since you'll be jumping into polytraps and levelporters!
The Eyes are necessary for speed, allowing blind polyforms (such as air elemental form) to see, and thus to jump. I have the spell of detect monster already, for entertainment reasons (the turns spent practicing it are pre-2000 and so don't cost anything, and it makes it possible to see what's actually going on); additionally, in times when I need to wait a turn no matter what, I can use the turn to practice spellcasting, so several casts of detect monsters have thus far been used to waste time. I'll do something similar with haste self later on.
What's the inventory look like now anyway?
Are rings of protection edible this game?
I dropped my entire inventory on dlvl 16, apart from the cursed scrolls of teleport. So my inventory is 4 cursed scrolls of teleport, that's it. I plan to clear Gehennom like that, because completing the last dungeon before the endgame with no useful inventory is obviously absurd. As for rings of protection, I'm not sure; you seem to be fixated on AC, which is relatively irrelevant in a TAS (as we have enough HP to survive anything in natural form, and can pick high-AC polyforms in cases where combat is actually necessary; a much smaller part of the game than you might imagine...)
Does confused PYEC-invocation charge you up like the scroll would?
No, it doesn't. There is another source of a full Pw refill in the game, though (one of the unlikely results of magic traps), which is likely more fun to watch than confused charging. Not that we really need a Pw refill anyway...
lessee..29*135 = 3915. Might want to boost your Pw some more? Probably not, since the Amulet is unlikely to worst-case every Jumping.
I suspect we have easily enough Pw.
Fountains are not infinite wish engines hmm, the wiki does not mention whether it respects extinction of water demons, and I'm not familiar enough with the code to check.
It both contributes to and respects extinction, so yes, fountains are limited to 120 wishes total. I assure you, though, we have no shortage of infinite wish engines should we actually need them. And anyway, 120 wishes is quite a lot; I can't even think of uses for that many wishes.
Entertainment
Are wands of wishing edible this game?
Cleaning out Ludios in your spare time could boost entertainment value. While expert attack spells would probably be fastest, disintegration-breath would probably be a better, more-accessible alternative. (Manipulating the dragons to do it themselves?)
Wands of wishing are (platinum, as a xorn or rock mole), but eating one would be kind-of awkward (xorn is really awkward form to TAS in for several reasons, and rock moles have negligible carry capacity). Also, everyone seems to have different opinions about entertainment. I don't think doing optional quests "just for the sake of it" because there's time to do them before T:2000 is a particularly interesting idea, nor is being wasteful just because we can. Besides, both of those are entirely possible with normal play; neither really shows off the power of a superplay. What I'm mostly doing for entertainment are things that are a) obviously useful in speedrunning, even if they aren't strictly necessary in this speedrun, and b) impossible in regular play; some things like this I've done already are getting thousands of HP and Pw without farming or life saving, doing a random level teleport directly onto a blessed magic lamp, and killing a shopkeeper at experience level 3 (done so that I could sacrifice his corpse to fix god anger), although the last of those is possible in realtime too if you prepare correctly.
The fastest way to do Ludios, incidentally, is probably the safe_teleds glitch, unless it doesn't work on that level (I haven't checked). I imagine I could reach the treasure room in less than 10 turns, although clearing out the room itself would take a while. Gold is also almost worthless when you can deal with the shopkeepers as efficiently as a TAS can; there is a rather spectacular glitch with it, though, which I need to get around adding to the game resources page sometime (I agreed with its discoverer that I'd keep it secret until it was fixed on the major servers and in the major tournaments, although it is fixed now). The idea is that you can use an infinite-gold glitch (known for ages, and thought to be useless) to overflow your gold counter and gain negative gold, which then reduces the weight of your inventory, effectively leading to an infinite carry capacity glitch. Under such circumstances, clearing out Ludios would probably even be counterproductive...
I'm surprised that NetHack doesn't handle a negative-weight purse by causing your backpack to float away from you. I guess the dev team doesn't think of everything. ;)
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Well, driving Water Demons/Djinn extinct would be kind of entertaining...
Back to speedrun tactics, is it possible to manipulate a monster holding the Amulet into using a cursed scroll of teleportation as an escape item? Or for that matter, is it possible to kick/manipulate one into a level teleport trap?
EDIT:Anecdotal evidence from the Wiki suggests that it is. Hence we should manipulate the high priest of Moloch into spawning with a scroll and levelporting into a deathtrap at the VoTD stairs, then have a hasted demon prince or nymph waiting with a scroll in the castle.
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
Kill or make extinct some unlikely monsters, like djinns, skeletons, player roles.
http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/extinctionist-faq.html
The method listed for killing as many mail daemons as possible is especially ingenious. Could it be improved through manipulation of monsters?
Bring an item to a ridiculous positive or negative enchantment level.
Solve sokoban in a ridiculously rule-breaking way. Maybe arrange the boulders into letters/smiley faces then cheat your way through?
Can you get engulfed by an air elemental and have it bring you places at high speeds? Would it ever be useful to get an extra movement around?
Ring/amulet devouring fest?
Get some ludicrous number of useful pets, flood a level with them?
Get so much AC that it rolls over and becomes negative?
Get surrounded by (insert big nasties here) and not die?
It's a pity the aim is as fast as possible, else you could have fun with taming/removing the corpses of the riders for good.
Grappling hook! All the cool kids on the block have one. Also magical instruments and royal jelly.
*throw a party in the castle(lots of thrown/shattered booze)
*set up an arena and have the named demons fight for your amusement
*play a game of american football with two teams of giants
*epic battle with Vlad killing him with 1hp left (alternatively, kill him as a grid bug)
*demolish minetown with a drum of earthquake
*polymorph into a black pudding and farm yourself
*assemble an army of Schroedinger's Cats
*map the dungeon while hallucinating
Well, driving Water Demons/Djinn extinct would be kind of entertaining...
Back to speedrun tactics, is it possible to manipulate a monster holding the Amulet into using a cursed scroll of teleportation as an escape item? Or for that matter, is it possible to kick/manipulate one into a level teleport trap?
It is possible to manipulate them into doing that, but unfortunately it doesn't help, because the Amulet blocks the level teleportation for monsters just as it does for players. (Otherwise, people would do it even outside TASes, because the manipulation in question is not massively difficult.)
Kill or make extinct some unlikely monsters, like djinns, skeletons, player roles.
http://www.steelypips.org/nethack/extinctionist-faq.html
The method listed for killing as many mail daemons as possible is especially ingenious. Could it be improved through manipulation of monsters?
Bring an item to a ridiculous positive or negative enchantment level.
Solve sokoban in a ridiculously rule-breaking way. Maybe arrange the boulders into letters/smiley faces then cheat your way through?
Can you get engulfed by an air elemental and have it bring you places at high speeds? Would it ever be useful to get an extra movement around?
Ring/amulet devouring fest?
Get some ludicrous number of useful pets, flood a level with them?
Get so much AC that it rolls over and becomes negative?
Get surrounded by (insert big nasties here) and not die?
It's a pity the aim is as fast as possible, else you could have fun with taming/removing the corpses of the riders for good.
Grappling hook! All the cool kids on the block have one. Also magical instruments and royal jelly.
Amusingly, we're planning to do (or have done) some of those. We've had a ring-eating fest already, for instance (which has pretty much lead to me to refuse to use xorn form in this run ever again...), it turned out that hurtle-cancelling doesn't work (I misread the source) so we may have to move while engulfed by a hasted air elemental to do Air (as jumping and throwing iron balls don't work there either), and we need to flood Rodney's with monsters for the enexto glitch, and they may as well be pets if you think that would be funnier. Also, we have enough HP at this point to habitually survive just about anything but an instadeath, and instadeaths can be manipulated away.
there are an infinite number of completely arbitrary things you can do
survive a Wide-angle disintegration beam
polymorph into a woodchuck and kill 120 Wood golems
Hallucinate and become blind and confused
get an Ice box and fill it full of potions of booze
get a silly number of nested bags of holding
collect a bunch of dilithium crystals or just go for max score
I think the key here is to pick things that would fit nicely in the goals section of the submission, ie
goes for high score
hunts a wumpus
colors an F
that kind of thing
I cannot watch this video, which video codec do I need ?
Why can't you watch it? What are you trying to watch it with, and in what way doesn't it work? This seems to be normal h264 in a matroska container. If you can't watch this, you should have trouble with most of the published movies. It workes fine here in mplayer. VLC can probably handle it fine too. With these, you don't need to worry about codecs.
