Between ais523 and myself we've determined that the very first thing to do with the seed we're testing (1447373582) is to immediately teleport to the > (down staircase) and subsequently create a Dlvl 2 that contains a ring shop. This is non-trivial but there are a few interesting things about the seed we found that make it easier.
First, the seed 1447373582 (Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:13:02 GMT) was chosen because it starts at the hardest possible difficulty level the game offers - 13 minutes after midnight on a new moon on Friday the 13th. The above seed was found with the expect script at
http://pastey.net/142883 which was used to find a seed that started as a Wizard / Elf / Male character with wizard1 at level 36, fakewiz1 at level 43, and sanctum at level 45 and edible rings of polymorph and polymorph control (the ring of teleport control is not edible but the ring of conflict is). This seed also starts with a Dlvl that starts with the character next to a wall and has the down stairs > next to a wall meaning we can wallwalk for luck manipulation purposes and even starts with a scroll of teleport and a potion of object detection - this seed is ideal for what we want to do.
The first step in the run is to luck manipulate reading the scroll of teleport into landing us on the > stairs. The second step is to manipulate the generation of the second level to contain a ring shop - we'll test this by taking advantage of the potion of object detection we started with to detect a bunch of = characters (rings).
After discussions in IRC ais523 and I have decided to use Python and
Pexpect as this gives us a better way to manage luck manipulation than using pure expect scripts.
Update: I've created a Python script which uses pexpect. It starts with the aforementioned seed and characteristics and presses 2 on the numpad various times before attempting to teleport and go down the stairs. If it can't go down the stairs it gives up, quits the game, restarts, and tries again by pressing down / 2 even more times to advance the RNG. The script worked beautifully - it takes walking into the wall 408 times to generate a teleport directly onto the downstairs > icon. The next step is to luck manipulate the layout of Dlvl:2 by walking into the wall next to the > before going down the stairs. The only point here is that as we get further into the game each luck manipulation attempt will become longer. It currently takes approximately 2 seconds per attempt but this will grow. It also takes a LOT of pexpect code to progress through the game. I'm hoping something else can be done to introduce "savestates" external to NetHack into this process so we don't have to always start from the beginning but we can work with the current system if we have to.
With that said, next up is ringshop hunting. I hope they have one in pearl.
A.C.
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