Note: At the time of the submission of this run, it was just barely still April 1st in a few islands in the pacific. Please enjoy what follows.
NetHack "Fastest Realtime"
- Really does complete NetHack, the right way
- Does so faster than any human has accomplished to date
- Partially breaks the submission form, the emulator, and several other things
- Contains speed and entertainment trade-offs
- Includes the efforts of many people spanning a timeframe of more than half a decade, including ais523, dwangoAC, Ilari, and recently ChrisS67
- Contains known potential improvements, albeit ones that will potentially take time on the scale listed above to implement
- Requires a *lot* of explaining
How to watch this run
Because jpc-rr is far too slow and a video encode is far too fast, the best way to watch this run is to download Jettyplay from
http://nethack4.org/projects/jettyplay/ and play back the ttyrec file [dead link removed] - this allows you to go forward and backward and keep up with what's going on in the turn-by-turn description below. Finally, here are two different video encodes:
Thanks to the capabilities of Jettyplay, there is now a (mostly watchable, but slow at 4 fps) encode up:
If speed is your thing, enjoy the full 60 fps compressed (i.e. inaccurately timed) version:
First off, this specific submission is partly a prank on ais523 for April 1st, who did not know about this run being submitted. I (dwangoAC) have granted him extra edit privileges in case he decides to nuke the submission off the face of the earth.
To explain why I submitted this, take a look at
http://nethack4.org/pastebin/2015-turn-plan.txt which is the original ascension plan that ais523 created in 2010 when I started helping him by creating the
nethack-tas-tools "emulator" project (which wraps KVM virtual machines with rerecording constructs such as savestates and scripting which produces files that Ilari is capable of converting for jpc-rr, but I digress). Within the last week, ais523 created
http://nethack4.org/pastebin/new-2003-turn-plan.txt (from
Forum/Posts/431348) based on recently discovered changes which completely uproot many of the things we have been working on for the last 5+ years.
I had been mourning the loss of some of the work we had done that I knew we would have to delete when I had an epiphany - speed TAS NetHack and finish the run by April 1st, with a goal of creating a run that beats vanilla NetHack 3.4.3 in the lowest turncount and in the shortest time of any existing records. This turned out to be harder than anticipated, but the end result is quite impressive given the constraints we placed on ourselves. The fastest human records are around an hour long or more as noted at
http://www.codehappy.net/nethacktheatre/fastgames.htm and this run will likely be less than 10 minutes. (I say likely because the timing in the submitted file is incorrect.) The focus was on conserving keystrokes, so rather than investing in heavy luck manipulation the focus was on the fastest realtime by not pressing more buttons than needed. Despite this, this run ascends in only 2,071 turns, faster than the current unassisted turncount of 2,130 as described at
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Speed_ascension and elsewhere.
This is long enough it may break the submission system. This text is taken from the extremely detailed turn-by-turn document written by ais523 and dwangoAC which can be found at:
http://nethack4.org/pastebin/turnbyturn.txt
Before the first turn there is some setup we need to do to get an
optimal start. One of the most important variables for the run is the
date and time that the computer's clock is set to upon loading
NetHack; this is what controls the initial RNG seed, and several
elements essential to getting the fastest possible time are decided
right at the start of the game before we have any chance to manipulate
the RNG. NetHack is also pretty unusual in that the date and time are
what determine the difficulty level, with some days being luckier or
unluckier than others.
In order to allow us to "play on the hardest difficulty", Ilari
searched for maximally unlucky days; it turns out that there have been
none at all since the release of NetHack 3.4.3, so we picked the first
one that will occur, Friday 13 November 2015. In addition to being a
Friday 13, there will also be a new moon on that day, making the game
even harder (although Friday 13 has a much stronger effect than the
phase of the moon). (Amusingly, this dependence on the moon phase can
cause desyncs on occasion; this is likely the only TAS that will have
been desynced by running a script on a full moon by mistake.) The
time chosen (by dwangoAC, who wrote the luck manipulation bots, and
who did most of the early luck manipulation while ais523 got up to
speed with how to use them) was 00:13:02; playing just after midnight
leaves undead at their most dangerous, and the minutes and seconds are
chosen for luck manipulation purposes. This means that there's a hard
limit of 46 minutes 58 seconds for the run, because at 1am, the game
would become slightly less difficult as undead damage reverted to
normal, so we would no longer be playing at highest difficulty. The
seed value was 1447373582 which maps to Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:13:02 GMT.
We were looking for several things in our luck manipulation. The most
obvious is the depth of the dungeon; the length of the game is
slightly randomized, and leaving it as short as possible is obviously
helpful. The seed we chose leaves it at the minimum possible depth of
45 levels. We also controlled the location of some of the special
levels to increase the gain from sequence breaks; in particular, the
portal to the Wizard of Yendor's Tower (with that seed, on level 43)
was manipulated to be as far as possible from the tower itself (which
occupies levels 36 to 38 inclusive with that seed). In addition to
the dungeon layout, we also manipulated the materials of which some
rings were made. Eating rings is the only way to get certain
properties intrinsically, saving on ring slots, but not all rings are
edible in any given game, and it's random which are which. We needed
to ensure that, at least, polymorph and polymorph control were edible.
Character selection was also important (in fact, we originally messed
up and had to hex in a different character; this required redoing the
first level of the run, but luckily it synched after that, which says
something about NetHack's incredible sync-stability). We chose to
play as a Wizard due to the possibility of eventually learning to cast
a four-square jumping spell, something which no other class has the
magical ability to manage. Playing neutral is required to be able to
use certain artifacts, most importantly the Eyes of the Overworld,
which enable even blind monsters to see. This is vital because the
fastest polymorph form in the game is blind, and yet vision is
required at several points which means the Eyes are needed to avoid
having to change into a suboptimal form on occasion. Race and gender
are less important; we play as a gnome for entertainment purposes
(they can see warm-blooded monsters in the dark, thus giving a better
clue as to what's going on towards the start of the run), and although
we specified an explicit gender (male) for luck manipulation purposes,
being female would have worked just as well, as gender is almost
cosmetic in NetHack. (Not to mention that we end up changing gender
frequently during the run itself for various reasons.)
Our starting inventory wasn't massively important as we can always get
more items later, but we end up using much of it anyway. For
reference, it contains a quarterstaff and cloak of magic resistance
(as always for a wizard), scrolls of gold detection, teleportation,
and light, spellbooks of force bolt and scare monster, potions of
enlightenment, object detection, and extra healing, rings of free
action and teleportation, and a wand of striking. The most important
for our purposes are the scroll of teleportation and potion of object
detection; the scroll is used for a sequence break (one which was
placed there deliberately by the game's developers, but nonetheless
not the normal course of things), and although we never actually drink
the potion, it was invaluable in luck manipulation early on (when
manipulating for particular items, we could see if we succeeded by
drinking the potion, then loadstating to revert the turn it spent;
this was considerably easier than memory watching would have been).
We also change some options at the start of the game. These are
chosen for four main reasons. First, some options are required for
the fastest speed through the game, most notably the autopickup
options (autopickup and pickup_types), which tell our character what
they should and shouldn't pick up as they move (saving turns picking
up and/or dropping items manually). Incidentally, we had to adjust
these options several times after the run was underway to hex in
different things to pick up, such as statues. Next, we turn off the
mail option in order to avoid desyncs (it causes the RNG to depend to
a small extent on the number of keystrokes typed; not by enough for it
to be at all efficient for luck manipulation, but by enough to make it
very hard to hex in corrections for past mistakes with the option on).
Some options were also changed (or kept at their original values) to
streamline the controls to allow us to reduce the amount of input
required: confirm prayconfirm cmdassist autodig number_pad. (This is
a large difference between a TAS and an unassisted run already; no
sane player turns off confirm in an unassisted run, because it's so
useful for catching typos.) Finally, some option values were chosen
in order to make the game look visually better and to remove
time-consuming animations: IBMgraphics color sparkle timed_delay
runmode. (Whether IBMgraphics or DECgraphics looks better is a
typical flamewar subject among NetHack fans, but luckily DECgraphics
doesn't work on the DOS version, making the choice obvious.) Options
we didn't care about were just left at their defaults. Most options
can be changed without affecting luck, meaning that DECgraphics can be
optionally used as part of a ttyrec of the Linux execution of the run.
Turns 1-13
At the very start of the game, there's not much we can do to speed up
our play as we have basically no resources (although some of the
equipment in our starting inventory could be used here, we have better
use for it later). Thus, we demonstrate the most obvious use for TAS
tools in a roguelike game by walking directly to the stairs to the
next level via the shortest route. The lichen (green F) touches us,
but fails to grab hold of us, while our pet kitten roams the level
picking up items. (We leave the kitten, a white f, behind: it would
only slow us down, and it would take far too much manipulation to keep
it alive with the strategy we're using. The kitten does survive the
TAS, though, making it one of the few starting pets in NetHack to
escape with its life.) We ignore all the items in view which we don't
care about, which as it happens is all of them.
Turns 14-16
This is the first break from a typical NetHack strategy, as we decide
to pray to our god for help; this takes 3 turns, taking us through to
turn 17. Because it's only turn 14 (waiting until turn 300, or 100 if
we were actually in trouble, would be required in order for the prayer
to have any chance of success), and because it's Friday 13 (which
prevents prayer until at least one point of good luck is gained to
cancel out its bad luck, arguably the most dangerous effect from
difficulty in NetHack), the prayer fails quite drastically, with our
god Thoth getting justifiably angry with us. His response is to send
a curse at our inventory, although due to the first real luck
manipulation of the game, it only affects the scroll of teleport.
Cursed scrolls of teleport teleport vertically rather than
horizontally, making it possible to skip levels and thus go through
the game in an unusual sequence; however, with our current equipment,
it would skip only about one or two levels, so it isn't worth using
yet.
Turn 17
This is the first really major luck manipulation of the game. The
largest source of useful items in the game is upon level generation,
especially on levels high in the dungeon which often contain shops.
Most pressing for us is to generate a particular set of rings, to
enable the polymorph-self strategy used in all the fastest gametime
speedruns (whether tool-assisted or not), so we manipulate a huge
ring shop that contains all the rings we need (together with a large
number that we don't, as it happens) as we go downstairs. Luck
manipulation is typically done by walking into a wall, incidentally,
which we can do up to 750 times a second, and advances the RNG with,
generally, no other effects (the random number is generated for the
purpose of eroding engravings on the current square, but typically
there aren't any); we explicitly try to stay next to walls throughout
the TAS for this reason.
Turn 18
We end up in our first real combat of the game as we go down the
stairs; we're next to a newt (the yellow colon), and apparently the
only exit to the room is to the east, beyond the newt, and apparently
without enough space to run around it without taking a hit. Although
we could beat the newt easily, we have no need to, and so we
demonstrate here how a TAS can avoid combat much more perfectly than
an unassisted game can. We start off by exploiting the fact that
monsters cannot move on the turn they are generated (a consequence of
the game's speed system) to move next to a wall (and in the direction
we want to go anyway).
Turn 19
The newt is now able to move, but we're now next to a wall and so able
to manipulate. The door in the east wall actually goes in the wrong
direction, but it turns out that there's a secret door in this room
(something trivial to verify in a TAS; we routinely looked for secret
doors by savestating, going into debug mode, then loadstating again).
The guaranteed starting spell for a Wizard, "force bolt", destroys
doors, so we use it to destroy the secret door to avoid having to
first locate it and then open it, wasting time. The newt attacks us,
but just misses; an incredibly lucky result (if you try this in
realtime, you'll find that a newt nearly always hits a starting
wizard, although for a negligible amount of damage).
Turns 20-34
Leaving the newt behind (as we can outrun it), we simply continue
along the corridor via the shortest path. Nothing particularly
interesting here.
Turn 35
A grid bug blocks our path, so we show off the Wizard's melee combat
ability by oneshotting it with our quarterstaff (which takes a small
amount of luck manipulation, but not a lot; grid bugs are really weak,
and a quarterstaff isn't ridiculously bad as weapons go). This is
actually the only time in the entire game where we simply hit an enemy
with a stick to kill it, and only possible because we're still facing
very early-game monsters.
Turns 36-59
More simple and boring walking to the shop via the shortest path.
This is still interesting due to how quickly it goes in realtime,
though, managing some incredibly fast movement speeds due to the game
accepting input several times a frame; also, this is one of your last
real chances to see us walking around, as we'll have faster means of
movement soon.
Turn 60
We couldn't just walk diagonally into the shop because you need to
line up with a doorway that still has an open door in order to walk
through it (another reason we destroyed the secret door altogether
earlier, rather than just opening it and walking through). So this
turn is spent moving next to the doorway so we can walk through.
Turn 61
Finally, we've entered the shop; it's a shame it was generated this
far from the stairs, but it was necessary to get the rings we needed
in a reasonable amount of realtime (and no gametime is lost from our
final time due to the turn 2000 barrier). We're greeted by Juyn, who
is apparently a jeweler, and who wants to sell us rings and gems.
Shopkeepers are some of the most dangerous monsters in NetHack; to
beat one this early unassisted would be basically impossible (it can
be done via a combination of AI abuses and getting incredibly lucky,
but even then requires a weapon capable of damaging the shopkeeper
quickly, which we don't have). Still, with no gold, we aren't exactly
going to be able to afford anything here.
Turns 62-63
Note that we're toggling autopickup as we walk about the shop. We
know exactly which rings here are valuable to us, and which are
worthless; the @ command that changes autopickup settings is used to
instruct our character in advance of stepping onto a square whether he
should pick up the item on that square or not. Thus, we save turns
in the shop that would otherwise be needed to look at the items
available and pick up the ones we wanted.
Turns 64-66
Time to go shopping! Although we can't afford any of the rings in
this shop (being completely broke), the shopkeeper will at least let
us try them on. We pick up a silver, sapphire, and shiny ring, each
of which is incredibly expensive for an early-game character. The
silver ring is a ring of polymorph, the sapphire ring a ring of
teleport control, and the shiny ring a ring of polymorph control.
Turn 67
We put on the ring of teleport control. This lets us choose the
destination of random teleports; although in a TAS you would expect us
to be able to manipulate the destinations anyway, and we can to some
extent, there are a large number of possibilities for a typical
vertical teleport that have no chance of happening unless controlled,
so the teleport control is absolutely vital for our strategy to work
(as well as having the pleasant side effect of making luck
manipulation much simpler).
Turn 68
OK, so this is where we leave the usual sequence of the game behind
forever. It's intentional that you can use a cursed scroll of
teleport to skip levels (although because you have to do them anyway
right at the end of the game during the escape sequence, most players
prefer to clear them out in advance), but our destination is level 26,
far too deep for a typical level 1 character with almost no useful
equipment to survive. This is actually the deepest it's possible to
get with a single scroll from level 2, but we're actually aiming for
dungeon level 25, the Castle, with its wand of wishing. The Castle is
considered something of a threshold in a typical non-speedrun game, in
that if you can reach the Castle, the wishes you will be granted there
are normally enough to win the game. The reason we go via dungeon
level 26 is that we want to raid the Castle from below, to allow us to
escape it more easily after grabbing the wand; so instead of going
there directly, we go to the level below so we can approach it from
behind.
There's a bunch of manipulation going on here, incidentally; although
we're going to leave level 26 almost immediately, it's still important
to have it arranged as we want it for later on, with levels being
generated the first time you visit them. Thus, as well as
manipulating a landing near the stairs, we also manipulate a
favourable level layout, even though it won't become relevant until
later.
Our dramatic exit from the shop, of course, gets the shopkeeper angry
at us, and we have a nice little bunch of messages explaining what's
going on. Our theft of 1200 zorkmids of merchandise summons the
police, the Keystone Kops, to chase us down; but fortunately, they're
all stuck up on dungeon level 2 looking for a player who's since
sequence-broken all the way to the Valley of the Dead. Who knows,
maybe we'll turn up later and see how they're getting on looking for
us.
Turns 69-70
We can hardly see any of the Valley as we arrive; we just get an
ominous message about the awful smells and sounds of this place.
Don't worry, you'll get to see more of it later; in fact, we come back
here several times in the TAS for various reasons. What is notable,
though, is that we landed right next to the stairs (and better, right
next to a wall); after a swift bit of luck manipulation, we walk to
the stairs, and up them, to the Castle.
Turns 71-73
The Castle looks pretty uninspiring at first glance; we're actually in
a small maze of corridors behind it. (The stairs up from the Valley
are one-way; they can be used upwards, but not downwards, so we're
currently trapped in this maze.) Out of the three rings we stole, the
ring of teleport control's been used already to sequence-break all the
way down here, but we stole another two as well; it's time to put them
to use. We spend one turn removing the original ring to free up ring
fingers, then put on the rings of polymorph control and polymorph (in
that order). The ring of polymorph is the #1 most important item for
a TAS of NetHack, for several reasons. What it does is to every now
and then (at a 1% chance per turn) polymorph the player into a
monster; polymorph control makes it possible to choose which monster
to polymorph into (rather than spend several minutes or even hours of
realtime luck-manipulating getting the right one by chance, especially
on top of the 1% chance that a polymorph happens at all). Obviously,
quite a bit of manipulation was needed to make the ring trigger
immediately.
The ability to become a monster is hugely useful for several different
purposes; pretty much anything you might want to do, some monster will
be good at it. Thus, the ring of polymorph effectively substitutes
for hundreds of different other items. Better still, there are some
monster forms that have abilities that can't be replicated any other
way. The other massive reason to use a polymorph-based strategy is
that the stats of a monster form are effectively fixed; this makes
them weaker than a typically overpowered player late-game (although
still strong enough to win even unassisted), but much stronger earlier
on, and the fact that we're still only experience level 1 is thus
strongly mitigated; this is pretty much the only reason we can survive
this deep in the game. This first form we use, the xorn, is one that
we will return to several times during the TAS (although TASing in
xorn form is really annoying, to the point that an effective
collective groan went up whenever we had to use it again). Its major
ability is that it can walk through most walls as if they aren't
there, being a monster who lives its entire life swimming through
rock. Over the next few turns, we're going to abuse this property to
sequence-break the Castle quite badly.
Polymorphing into a xorn has one other immediate effect that may seem
irrelevant or even negative, but becomes important later. Xorns are
too large to fit in a typical magical cloak, so our cloak of magic
resistance, which previously protected us from not only magic, but
also a wide range of monster special attacks, broke during the
polymorph. This was entirely deliberate; generally speaking, if we
get hit by a special attack, it's because we want to be, and we'll be
taking quite a lot of deliberate hits over the course of the TAS in
order to abuse various side-effects of them; having near-perfect
resistance from them would have required a huge amount of manipulation
just to get monsters to hit us, which would have been ironic to say
the least.
(Incidentally, we also became female at this point; the gender change
is permanent, and an occupational hazard of repeatedly polymorphing.
Our gender changes back and forth repeatedly this TAS, and is
irrelevant anyway, so we're going to stop mentioning it.)
Turn 74
With perfect luck, this turn wouldn't actually be needed, but we were
faced with large amounts of "RNG jitter". A quick explanation:
NetHack's RNG works by always returning a fixed sequence of numbers
(where it starts depends on the initial date and time, and the
sequence is really stupidly long, around 31*2^31*(2^31-1) =
142962266504677031936 or approximately 2^66.95 elements), and all
luck manipulation does is determine which element in the sequence
is used to determine random events in the game. Of course, different
numbers have different meanings in different contexts, so it's not as
if there are "good random numbers" or "bad random numbers" to use in
different places; we just try to find a nearby location in the
sequence that gives favourable luck. (What walking into walls does is
use numbers in the sequence for engraving erosion, which is a
side-effect that is basically irrelevant to us.)
The RNG jitter issue happens when the number of random numbers
consumed by something is itself random, as happens quite a bit in
NetHack, especially on very crowded levels like the Valley or Castle,
and double especially when generating them for the first time. As
anyone who studies randomness knows, using an RNG to advance itself
actually makes it less random (rather than more random as some
programmers seem to think), because several positions in the sequence
will probably end up jumping to the same position, effectively making
the two seeds identical. RNG jitter can get very bad sometimes, with
20, 30, or even 50 different seeds generating essentially the same
level; this severely dilutes the effectiveness of luck manipulation.
As a result, we had to choose what we would manipulate on the Castle
level and what we wouldn't, and settled for getting merely near to the
best possible location in the maze, rather than at that location. In
this case, we'd want to be at the left edge of the small maze over the
right, but settled for being a space away from that edge, in order to
get more favourable randomness elsewhere in the level; thus, this turn
is spent moving to where we'd like to have arrived. As noted, the
goal choice is to complete the game in the fewest number of in-game
turns, but the 2,000 turn limit boundary means that we have the
flexibility to (ab)use those extra turns like this every once in a
while. We strive to use every turn in the most entertaining and
efficient way possible despite this freedom, however.
Turn 76
First off, one of you (the only one who actually read this far and is
still paying attention) is probably asking "Hey, what happened to turn
75?". This demonstrates the first drawback of xorn form (hey, there
had to be tradeoffs somewhere…); xorns are rather slow, and skip a
turn every now and then for this reason. (They aren't nearly as bad
in this respect as some forms we use later, but unlike what we do
later on in those forms, we aren't abusing the speed system yet,
because it would take too much realtime and is anyway unnecessary
here.)
This turn also shows another nasty disadvantage of xorn form.
Remember that we're doing nearly all our luck manipulation by walking
into walls? Well, xorns exist for the purpose of walking through
walls, and so obviously walking into them would actually succeed,
rather than fail and advance the RNG. Thus, this next section doesn't
get perfect luck like in some other places in the TAS, because
manipulation via non-turn-consuming means would take a huge amount of
realtime (we could exploit an artifact naming glitch at this point to
advance the RNG, but it takes ages). Some amount of manipulation is
necessary, though, and it's easiest here to simply manipulate via the
route we take; however, some aspects of the route cannot easily be
changed, and what we do here is actually to wait a turn in order to
get more favourable randomness and AI behaviour over the next several
turns. (In particular, we're manipulating a nearby shark to go in the
wrong direction; we'd be bitten to death by the shark if we didn't
wait now, but as it is, with its AI manipulated to go the wrong way we
never even see the shark.)
Turn 77
A quick demonstration of a xorn's ability to walk through walls. Who
needs to solve mazes when you can just slip through the side wall and
escape that way?
Turns 78, 80-82
Here's another advantage of being in monster form. Typically
speaking, moving along the bottom of a moat causes a character to
drown, but xorns, used as they are to living inside solid rock, don't
actually need to breathe. Thus, we can drop harmlessly to the bottom
of the Castle moat. It takes us four actions (five turns due to being
forced to skip turn 79) to move along the moat to the particular
location we want to phase through the Castle wall. (We're going round
this way to avoid dangerous wildlife in the moat, which would
otherwise join in while we tried to attack the soldiers inside the
castle through the wall.) There's also a side-effect to this that
would ruin most games, but again we're using deliberately; our
scrolls, spellbooks and potions end up being "blanked" by all the
water damage, with the ink running off the scrolls and spellbooks and
leaving them as blank paper, and the potions likewise diluting into
pure water. Surprisingly, they're actually more useful this way;
blank paper to write on tends to be at a premium during speedruns.
Turn 84
(Turn 83 was lost to xorn slowness, as is every fourth turn in xorn
form. We'll stop noting this from now on.) This is an example of why
being underwater can be a bad idea; we end up unable to move this turn
due to turbulence in a moat (and unable to manipulate it away due to
being a xorn). (This may seem a little implausible, but
water in NetHack tends to be incredibly dangerous, with hard-hitting
sharks, eels that can instakill the character, and electric eels that
can destroy rings and wands. With that amount of dangerous wildlife
around, a little turbulence doesn't really surprise me.)
Turn 85
We finally manage to clamber out of the water and through the wall of
the castle, where we're faced with a couple of soldiers. This is
almost certainly the easiest direction to raid the Castle from; the
rest of the castle is much, much worse. The Yendorian Army seems to
be equal-opportunities, with a female soldier swinging her sword at us
and missing (both the soldiers guarding this tower happen to be girls,
for some reason); unfortunately, she doesn't have the sense to run.
Turns 86, 88-89
The combat against the first of the two soldiers. (The other one is
in range, but not doing a whole lot.) Notice what's happening to our
HP bar; we sit there and take damage rather than trying to dodge around
the soldier. We're also a whole lot more effective in melee combat than
we were in natural form (grid bugs notwithstanding); we start off with
our quarterstaff in any given turn, but also get to attack with some
of our other hands, and also bite, doing quite a lot more than the
staff alone would. The damage taken would have been hard to
manipulate away, but anyway is, surprisingly, wanted. While
polymorphed, damage, rather than killing you, forces you out of
monster form when you accumulate enough; this is by far the easiest
way to stop being a xorn, as the 1% chance of spontaneously
polymorphing into something else can be hard to manipulate. We also
get a level-up for killing an enemy that's massively more powerful
than you'd typically expect to fight at experience level 1.
Turns 90, 92
The combat against the other soldier. This one went rather better;
not because of the level-up, simply due to luck. As we wanted, we
ended up low on health, but not completely out of it; and got another
level-up as a result. Ironically, we'd be better off at a lower level
here, but not by much, and it ends up not really mattering.
Turn 93
Here is the reason we killed the soldiers. (At least the first one
had to die due to standing on this square.) The word "Elbereth" has
quite some significance in NetHack, and we use it later on ourselves;
when you see it in the game naturally, especially burnt into the
ground, it's a big clue that there's an important item on the square
(although it very occasionally turns up at random). This is the chest
that contains the Castle wand, that the soldiers were guarding; there
are a huge number of other guards, too, but we sequence-broke past
them all, making this one of the fastest ways to get the wand (it
would normally take well over 100 turns to fight through the Castle
itself, let alone the whole game up to that point.) The other
"several objects" are the dead soldier's equipment. Autopickup is off
for this, because we don't care about the chest the wand is in, just
the wand itself which is a platinum wand.
Turn 94
Just being able to open the chest and take the wand out is somewhat
anti-climactic; also flukishly lucky, and well worth arriving a square
further from the chest than we'd have wanted to. Typically speaking,
it'd be locked or trapped; quite possibly both. (And it's not unheard
of for the chest to contain a trap which destroys the wand…)
Turns 96-98, 100-101
In order to avoid most of the rest of the guards here in the Castle,
we take a shortcut through a gem storeroom on our way back out; there
are guards outside the door to the storeroom (a secret door to its
west), but none inside the room itself. However, one of the guards in
the Castle is itself a Xorn, which catches up with us on the way out
by phasing through the walls itself and does the last few points of
damage needed to force us back into gnomish form, while failing to
hurt us any further. (This was actually a pretty sensible strategy
for the castle guards; xorns are almost impossible to chase due to
their crazy movement properties, so it would make sense to set another
xorn after them.) We end up embedded in a wall as we unpolymorph, but
can still move out of it; this is pretty useful as it gives us a wall
to luck-manipulate with, even though we're going to exit the Castle on
our next step.
Turn 102
Here's our exit to the Castle. The storerooms have a bunch of
trapdoors outside that lead to the Valley; why bother spending
soldiers and ammunition on killing an enemy when you can just drop
them directly to the gateway to ? A little luck-manipulation is
used here to land in the right part of the Valley (comfortably near to
a vampire, who we're going to use soon to trigger a glitch), although
it's impossible to land too far away from the stairs, so our choice of
destinations is limited.
Turn 103
Time to start using that wand of wishing we went through so much
effort to get. Generally speaking, when you're as unlucky as we are
(starting on Friday 13 is bad enough, but annoying your god makes
things much worse), wands of wishing tend to malfunction quite badly,
and in fact a lot of luck manipulation is needed to make the wand work
at all. And our wish? "4 dark". Although not nearly as broken as
Family Feud for NES's text parser, NetHack's wish text parser allows
for some pretty weird input at times; in this case, we went for the
minimalist option of a surprisingly short wish, and the game rewards
us with something dark, in this case a set of dark potions. These
happen to be potions of full healing in this game, which will be used
soon to set up a glitch; and not only did the game give us the wish in
the first place (unlikely), it also gave us all four potions we
requested (also unlikely), and blessed them for us (also unlikely).
As you can imagine, this turn took quite a lot of manipulation.
Turns 104-106
This is the start of the setup for an infinite max HP and max Pw
glitch. (Pw in NetHack is vaguely like MP in other games, and is
spent to use magical effects like spells and monster special magical
attacks, and regenerates over time.) One of the prerequisites for the
glitch to work is that our max HP and max Pw need to be considerably
higher than average for our stats, class, and experience level; here,
we use 3 of the 4 the blessed potions of full healing for an
overhealing effect, where healing via potion if at max HP already
increases your max HP slightly. In the case of a blessed potion of
full healing, the highest-possible quality of healing potion, the
increase is 8 points, and takes us up to 48 max HP, twice the value we
originally had, and noticeably above average for our stats.
Meanwhile, the time we spend drinking the potions allows a vampire
(red V) to catch up with us (and also a ghost, but ghosts in NetHack
are very defensive, taking hardly any damage from attacks but doing
hardly any either, and so it can be safely ignored).
Turns 107-108
This is the start of the glitch proper, which relies on the fact that
the formula for max HP and max Pw gain from gaining a level from stat
randomisation due to failed polymorph is different from the formula
for max HP and max Pw loss from level drain. What happens is that the
vampire's level-drain attack reduces our max HP and max Pw by a fixed
amount, so we still have 39 of our max HP remaining even though we
were just drained from level 3 to level 1, hugely above average for
our stats at that level. Our max Pw is not high enough to benefit
from the glitch; but as the glitch involves deliberately taking
damage, we first use the glitch to increase our max HP enough to be
able to set up the glitch for Pw as well; basically, partially
applying the glitch in order to be able to apply it completely.
Turns 109-110
Here's the other half of the glitch. We spend two turns running away
from the vampire in order to get our polymorphitis from the ring
(which we haven't taken off since we used it to become a xorn) to
trigger (the RNG jitter here is sufficiently bad that doing it in just
one turn would have required so much walking into walls that there'd
be a long pause in realtime). When asked what to polymorph into, we
say "gnome"; because we're a gnome already anyway, our stats are
randomized as a result, and due to luck manipulation, our level
increases to 2, approximately doubling our max HP. This interaction
of losing a fixed amount of max HP, then gaining a proportion,
exponentially quickly increases our max HP to amounts that we want.
Turn 111
We take another hit in order to get drained back down to level 1; we
now have 68 max HP, as opposed to the 39 max HP we had last time we
were at level 1. Unfortunately, we only have 3 current HP left; this
is a typical issue with glitches that require you to take damage to
work. Unlike in a regular game, though, in a TAS there's no urgent
need to heal up instantly; as we only take hits when we want to, we're
in no actual danger of dying.
Turns 112-116
We continue to run away from the vampire to get polymorphitis to
trigger, and end back up at experience level 2. Our route through the
level at the moment is actually quite complicated; it might look like
we're just running around aimlessly until we get the glitch to
trigger, but we're actually trying to manipulate the movement of other
monsters in the level to not interfere with the glitch. By far the
biggest influence on enemy monster movement is your own movement,
although a random factor is sometimes involved as well.
Turn 117
So as to be able to continue taking damage to do the glitch without
death, we drink the remaining potion of full healing to get back up to
full HP (plus 8 to max HP, as some of the 400 points of healing it
provided were wasted, the trigger for the overhealing effect). As
we'd taken level drain in the past, the potion also restored one of
our drained levels as a side-effect; this was slightly undesirable (in
that it needs to be drained again to continue the glitch), but not a
massive problem. Note that due to the difficulty level, this glitch
requires taking much more damage than we normally would; within an
hour after midnight, damage from undead, including the vampire, is
doubled.
Turn 118
Now that our HP is high enough that we're not in danger of death from
taking damage to perform the glitch, we prepare to do the glitch
properly, with both a max HP and max Pw boost. Therefore, we need to
increase our max Pw to substantially above average values, so we use
the wand of wishing to wish for "4 gain energy potions" (a very mild
parser abuse as the item is actually called "potions of gain energy";
the "of" reversal can be used on all non-artifact items, and is
intended for things like "speed boots" vs "boots of speed" where it
may be hard for the player to remember which way round the item is).
Not only does the wish work, and grant us all 4 potions we requested,
but they even come out blessed; with our large amounts of negative
luck, this is rather unlikely and takes substantial manipulation.
Therefore, we unfortunately couldn't get the vampire to drain us on
the same turn as we'd have wanted, but it isn't a major issue.
Turn 119
Here's where we use our other starting spell, "slow monster", to slow
down the vampire. (Vampires actually have a pretty good chance to
resist it, but we manipulated it to affect this one.) The vampire
responds by draining us back to level 2. Slowing the vampire like
this allows us to run round it and back the way it came without
getting blocked in by a huge number of monsters at once (the Valley is
swarming with monsters, even though it might not have looked like it
so far); most undead are rather slow, and with the (comparatively
fast) vampire slowed to a comparable speed to a zombie, we can herd
the undead and manipulate their AIs more easily.
Turns 120-121
We start going round the vampire, back the way we came. Turn 120
moves round it; turn 121 stays in the same position so that the
vampire can catch up with us and drain a level. We're now back to
level 1, but with 135 max HP this time.
Turns 122-125
These turns are spent running round the pack of monsters that was
chasing us; we avoid a kobold zombie (brown Z), and encounter a ghost
(who will be used to manipulate the vampire's movement path, as two
monsters can't occupy the same square). Ghosts are rather hard to
see, incidentally; the trick is that adjacent squares, which normally
show . if nothing is there or a wall or monster symbol, are replaced
by blank space if there's a ghost on the square.
Turns 126-127
We drink the first two potions of gain energy, getting unusually high
max Pw gain from each of them (towards the top of the range). Note
how the zombie catches up with us, but due to being very slow-moving,
cannot hit us; as a result of the ghost and zombie blocking the way,
the vampire is forced to go a bit of a longer way round.
Turns 128-130
Here's the third potion of gain energy, preceded by running away in
order to get the monsters to stay behind us rather than surrounding
us. There's a vampire bat nearby (out of sight), which also needs to
be manipulated to not turn up (they deal decent damage, but move
randomly, so unlike other monsters can be manipulated to go the wrong
way very easily). Because we aren't next to a wall when we drink the
potion, we can't easily manipulate the Pw gain from it directly; the
gain was actually manipulated in advance on turn 128 when we were.
Turns 131-132
And here's the final potion of gain energy, again running away in
order to keep the crowd of monsters behind us. Our max Pw is now high
enough that doing the polyself glitch will increase it as well as our
max HP (previously, it was decreasing slightly).
Turn 133
After a lot of luck manipulation (to control the next few turns, as we
won't be next to a wall for one of them), we step to the left, and
autopickup a scroll labeled YUM YUM as we do so. This is actually a
scroll of charging, which we can use to refill our wand of wishing
(such wands can be recharged only once, for 3 wishes (before charge) +
3 wishes (after charge) + 1 wish ("wresting" a charge from an empty
wand), a total of 7). This was all the more surprising to us because
we didn't actually manipulate the scroll to spawn, it was just there
by chance. Although in a TAS you can manipulate away bad luck or
cause good luck, you aren't also manipulating away any good luck you'd
have got naturally; on top of the luck you make yourself there are
also nice bonuses like this to discover that save us from having to
come up with another method to recharge the wand.
Turns 134-136
Nothing particularly special here, just more uses of the polyself
glitch. We cut across the corridor and then move back towards the
vampire in order to help keep the mob of enemies behind us rather than
getting surrounded although there are new enemies turning up, a human
zombie (white Z) and kobold mummy (brown M). Along the way, we take
another failed polyself and a level drain to almost double our max Hp
and Pw again. Our new max HP of 255 is a little above the average for
a typical character upon completing the entire game.
Turns 137-140
More repeats of the polyself glitch, this time moving along the south
wall and manipulating an extra-large level gain from the polyself to
level 3, rather than level 2, almost tripling our stats rather than
almost doubling them. (Due to the RNG jitter here, we weren't aiming
for a doubling or tripling in particular, but just any boost that we
could get reasonably quickly.) Other results from a failed polyself
include a stat randomization while staying at the same level (useless
for performing the glitch), and a level and stat reduction (which, at
level 1, is fatal, making this glitch a dangerous one to try
unassisted although it can be done via the use of a huge number of
amulets of life saving which are NetHack's equivalent of extra lives).
Turns 141-142
We move diagonally back towards the crowd and take another level-drain
from the vampire; our HP is now high enough that we can effectively
ignore hits from everything else, as they don't do significant damage
compared to the amount of HP we have, and care about the vampire only
because of the level drain effect. This strategy of moving
horizontally away and then running diagonally back, incidentally,
helps to avoid an even larger crowd chasing us because it leaves
monsters less certain as to our position and also reduces the chance
of guessing it correctly, although some enemies have infravision and
are able to see our body heat through the darkness anyway and chase us
regardless (just like we can see the vampire at range, because gnomes
also have infravision).
Turn 143
Despite being almost surrounded, we can actually afford to just wait a
turn here, and do so; this exploits the fact that undead are generally
slow (vampires aren't, but we slowed it ourselves), and this turn we
happen to get a free turn against all of them but the vampire, who
courteously level-drains us down to 1, allowing us to perform the
glitch again. (The glitch works best at level 1 because the max HP
and max Pw gain is approximately equal to the ratio between the old
and new levels; so going from 1 to 2 would double the maximum, whereas
going from, say, 10 to 11 would only increase it by around 10
percent.)
Turns 144-146
These turns demonstrate just how almost surrounded we were, ending up
confined to the north edge of this wide corridor due to a whole row of
monsters below us. We nevertheless can move just about fast enough to
slip past the west end of the row, because the ghost at the end of the
row moves very slowly, and out into the middle of the corridor, where
we failed-polyself to level 3 again (thanks to manipulation on earlier
turns). The vampire also manages to push through the crowd to end up
only one space away from us.
Turns 147-153
Again, we manipulate the vampire to level-drain us twice, this time
over at the south end of the corridor, first moving back the way we
came then forwards again, then cross back up to the north end and
trigger a polyself. This movement pattern causes some of the monsters
chasing us to think we're going east and move in the wrong direction,
or at least stay where they are, whilst allowing the vampire (who's
slightly faster than most of the other monsters despite being slowed)
to come towards us.
Turns 154-158
Our final iteration of the polyself glitch, running back to be drained
then away to polymorph, takes us up to 2222 current / 8763 max HP and
2625 current / 3101 max Pw, values high enough to be pretty much
impractical to reach without use of a glitch (whether the polyself
glitch as used here, or the much slower pudding farming method which
is used occasionally in unassisted games that aim to show off with
high statistics rather than speed). Because we no longer have a need
to manipulate the vampire to stay ahead of the other monsters
involved, we simply run away in a straight line in order to trigger
polyself, to leave the crowd as far as possible behind us. The blue !
is a potion, but we ignore it because it's worthless to us.
Turn 159
We use the third of our wishes, emptying the wand of wishing. Our
wish here is for "5 blessed scrolls of teleportation". NetHack
players might have been wondering why we didn't just specify "blessed"
in previous wishes rather than manipulating them to give blessed items
at random; the reason is shown here, in that requesting blessed items
has no chance to work when you're as unlucky as we are, instead
causing the items to be automatically cursed. Of course, cursed
scrolls of teleportation are what we actually wanted, as they're our
only real means of moving around the dungeon, with walking from stairs
to stairs being far too slow. Also of note is that wishing for a
quantity of 5 is rarely attempted in normal runs due to the low
success rate of 1 out of 6 although this ratio is trivial to overcome
with luck manipulation abuse.
Turn 160
Before leaving the Valley, we recharge our wand of wishing using the
scroll of charging we randomly picked up. This one happens to be
merely uncursed (NetHack's description of an item which isn't blessed,
but isn't cursed either), rather than blessed like is normally used to
recharge a wand of wishing, so a small amount of manipulation is
required to ensure that it really does fully recharge the wand so
we get the maximum possible number of wishes out of it.
Turns 161-162
Several monsters in NetHack can follow the player when they change
levels (imagine them sharing in your teleport by touching you just as
it takes place, or something like that). Of the monsters near us, the
vampire can, but the vampire bat can't; so since we can outrun the
slowed vampire, we simply do so, leaving us alone and ready to leave
the Valley without being chased. (Don't worry, Valley of the Dead
fans, if indeed there are any reading this: we come back here several
times later.)
Turn 163
As we're no longer wearing the ring of teleport control, when we read
one of the cursed scrolls of teleportation we just wished for, we end
up on a random level. A huge amount of manipulation (several hours of
work by a luck manipulation bot, together with trying out various
possibilities it found by hand) went into this turn to make sure we
landed somewhere useful; we land on dungeon level 16, a normal
randomly-generated level (as opposed to a "special level" like the
Castle or Valley which has its own generation rules). This level will
serve a bit like a home base for us; this particular level layout for
level 16 was manipulated to contain useful terrain, useful items,
useful monsters, and to be almost free of RNG jitter (it's almost
empty of monsters, and what monsters are there mostly have non-jittery
AIs).
Where we landed on the level was incredibly lucky, though; we
manipulated for the level itself, but not for a particular location on
it. As it happens, we landed right on top of a magic lamp, in a shop;
such lamps contain djinn, and upon releasing them they have a chance
to give you a wish. Complicating things is the shopkeeper;
shopkeepers are some of the most dangerous monsters in NetHack when
they get angry, and will fight to the death to protect their shops
from thieves. They also charge for pretty much everything, so it's
not surprising that they'd charge for releasing a djinni. Autopickup
was set before even arriving on the level so that we'd pick up the
lamp upon arrival.
Turn 164
Right next to the magic lamp is another extremely useful item, a magic
marker. These things are almost better than multiple wishes, in that
they can be used to write on blank spells or spellbooks in order to
make them into magical scrolls or spellbooks, letting us equip
ourselves quite easily; this one also happens to have a lot of ink
remaining (although the game won't tell us that yet). The shopkeeper
attempts to charge us for the marker, although as always, shopkeepers
allow you to examine merchandise before paying for it, something which
can be exploited quite heavily in both a TAS and a regular game.
Turn 165
We rub the magic lamp in order to release the djinni (unwielding our
quarterstaff as a side effect, because we need to hold the lamp in one
hand to rub it with the other; we never use the quarterstaff again).
The shopkeeper rather amusingly tries to charge us for using the lamp,
and won't let us out of the shop until we pay for it. The djinni
offers us a wish in return for releasing him (presumably he doesn't
like being trapped in a lamp and then charged for); we ask him for a
"very dull spellbook", a little in-joke, because we're going to end up
using the spell from the resulting spellbook a lot in order to level
up our divination skills. (This is another parser abuse; you can
write "very" in front of pretty much arbitrary items and the game
won't complain.) The djinni gives us a dull spellbook of detect
monsters in return for his freedom, then vanishes, never to be seen
again. The weight of the spellbook burdens us (we have rather low
Strength and Constitution), slowing down our actions slightly, but in
a peaceful area like this it isn't a major problem.
Turns 166-169
Reading spellbooks takes quite some time in-game; inside a shop, with
the shopkeeper guarding the door (primarily to prevent you leaving,
but it works just as well to prevent anything else entering), is a
very safe place to do so in an unassisted run; in a TAS, you have a
broader range of safe locations due to the ability to manipulate luck,
but if you're in a shop already, why bother looking for anywhere else?
Reading the book to learn the detect monsters spell takes four turns,
relatively fast compared to most spells. The learning of the spell is
slowed marginally due to being burdened, but dropping items to avoid
burden, then needing to pick them up afterwards, would waste more time
than it saves.
It's worth a quick explanation as to why we learnt a divination spell,
something which would seem mostly useless in a TAS. We actually don't
need detect monsters to complete the game at all, nor to make things
faster; however, later in the game, having a constant detect monsters
effect up is more or less the only way that people watching the TAS
would be able to follow what was going on. Thus, this would be a
speed-entertainment tradeoff in most cases. However, the T:2000
barrier means that we can actually spend the time it takes to practice
divination casting enough to reach skilled divination (for a level 1
spell like detect monsters, 80 casts), and not lose any time overall;
and yet allow people watching to see exactly what happens later in
the game.
Turn 170
Ugh, the dreaded xorn form, again. Although a huge pain to TAS in,
there are several reasons to use xorn form unrelated to its ability to
walk through walls. This turn demonstrates the first: the physical
size and strength of a xorn means it can carry heavier items without
being burdened, and although the gnome was struggling with a backpack
of spellbooks, the xorn has no such issues.
Turn 172
(Xorn slowness made us skip turn 171, and will continue to make us
skip every fourth turn while in xorn form.) Here's another use of
xorn form. As a monster that swims through rock, it isn't surprising
that a xorn would have an unusual diet; and as it happens, xorns are
capable of eating metal. The ring of polymorph on our finger happens
to be cursed (not really a major issue, it just prevents removal of
the ring); we eat it off our own finger (well, claw), and its effect
is manipulated to spread throughout our body (a 1 in 3 chance),
meaning we now have its polymorphitis effect permanently, freeing up
the ring finger for other purposes. Because the ring is cursed, the
silver is rotten; this would typically have bad side-effects but
we manipulated them away.
Turns 173-174
We need luck manipulation for the next few turns but xorns walk
straight through walls and thus cannot walk into them for luck
manipulation purposes. So what we do instead, here, is to change the
order in which we do things; we want to practice detect monsters up to
skilled, and so by casting detect monsters whenever we'd get
unfavourable luck for whatever we actually want to do, we can wait
until a turn on which we get favourable luck for the luck-requiring
parts, and yet still get something accomplished in the meantime.
The result of the spell itself also shows the paucity of monsters on
this level; there are two hidden mimics (brown m) pretending to be
items, which we don't need to worry about as they don't jitter the RNG
while hidden; ourself, a xorn (brown X); the shopkeeper (white @); and
a tengu (cyan i), a sort of minor demon, which becomes important
later.
Turns 176-177
We eat two more of our rings. First is the ring of polymorph control,
which we've been using to keep the ring of polymorph in check all TAS
already; second is the ring of teleportation that was in our starting
inventory, and that so far we haven't used. Teleportitis (granted by
the ring of teleportation we just ate) plus teleport control (which we
do not yet have) is a similar combo to polymorphitis plus polymorph
control; every turn from now on, we have a 1 in 100 chance of
polymorphing into a creature of our choice (as before), but also now a
1 in 85 chance of teleporting onto a square of our choice. This
basically puts an end to any walking around dungeons that might
happen, apart from the very many levels which ban horizontal teleports
(most of the special levels), where teleportitis does nothing at all.
Still, the ability to teleport horizontally will come in useful on
occasion, such as on this level, an ordinary level without any
teleport restrictions.
Turns 178, 180-182, 184-186, 188
More casting of detect monsters for luck manipulation purposes. The
tengu has teleportitis itself, and demonstrates what effect it
normally has in an unassisted game by bouncing around the level to
some extent (compare its position on successive casts of the spell);
teleportitis is considered incredibly annoying by most NetHack
players, but in a TAS it can be manipulated away (or caused to happen)
when necessary, meaning we don't have to act like the tengu
demonstrates here. The tengu finishes up by landing right in the
shop, just next to us.
Turns 189-190
One nice thing about being in xorn form is that it doesn't really
matter what weapon you're wielding, as you have a mouth and lots of
spare hands. We demonstrate this here by bashing the tengu to death
with our lamp in only two turns; of course, it isn't the lamp itself
that's doing most of the damage, but our bite and remaining hands.
(It was just faster to do it this way than to waste time unwielding
the lamp, now an ordinary oil lamp because the djinni has left). We
also get a level up from the tengu, an enemy typically too difficult
to fight at experience level 2; levels are welcome rather than
unwelcome from now on, as we've already done the polyself glitch, and
they improve our spell failure chances (which will be important later,
as we need to get the chance of casting various hard-to-cast spells
above 0%), and reaching at least level 14 is required to complete the
game.
Turns 192-194, 196-198, 200-213
We step onto the tengu corpse (instructing our character not to pick
it up), and cast some more detect monsters for luck manipulation.
Finally, we eat the corpse, and Yad the shopkeeper, being a complete
moneygrubber like NetHack shopkeepers are, rather hilariously tries to
charge us for its corpse (hey, it landed in the shop when we killed
it…). As tengu are rather large, it takes a lot of turns to finish
eating the corpse (which aren't affected by xorn slowness). One of
the less likely results from eating a tengu corpse but the one
everyone typically actually wants is teleport control, which we got
here; if you're wondering why we didn't just eat the ring, it's that
teleport control rings aren't made of metal with this game seed and
thus xorns can't digest them (and nor can anything else, as it
happens). Finally, we move back to where we were, again for luck
manipulation.
Turn 214
Unpolymorphing from xorn form is always a tricky issue, as we can't
easily manipulate the 1% chance of polymorphitis triggering without a
sufficiently solid wall to walk against. In this case, we do
something really quite dramatic. Remember the wand of striking in our
starting inventory? These wands are quite hilarious (they attack by
flying through the air and physically beating up whatever they target,
a pity that the game doesn't animate that onscreen…), but exactly
duplicate the "force bolt" spell that we already have, and so we have
no real use for the wand. However, a xorn is easily strong enough to
snap the wand in two, causing all the magical energy in it to be
released at once, and that's what we do here. First, there's a small
explosion which has several effects: it hits the shopkeeper, doing
only slight damage (as he resists it); it hits a nearby small mimic
pretending to be an item (worrying it into switching back into its
natural form, ready for combat); and it hits us, doing minimal damage.
The resulting pieces of the wand, however, fly into the surrounding
region and start beating things up. One piece hits Yad, again doing
slight damage; another misses the mimic, and finally the wand is laid
to rest.
Obviously, the surrounding monsters are going to reply to this on
their turn. The shopkeeper uses a wand of magic missile against us,
hitting us on both the main attack and the rebound; and the small
mimic does enough damage to unpolymorph us. (We actually manipulated
the enemies into doing a lot of damage here; typically, they wouldn't
do quite enough to unpolymorph us.)
Turn 215
We don't get to move this turn due to the speed penalty of being
burdened, but the shopkeeper does. Twice. (We told you they were
dangerous; that's one of the reasons why.) He continues pelting us
with the wand of magic missile, but the damage is pretty minimal
compared to our insane number of hitpoints.
Turn 216
After a huge amount of luck manipulation, we drop our entire
inventory, apart from the scrolls of teleport. There are three main
reasons to do this: first, it prevents us being burdened, letting us
do this fight more efficiently (the least major reason); second, we
want to transport one very heavy object soon, and need to free up
inventory weight to do so; third, we're going to do two of the game's
mandatory sidequests, one of which is pretty difficult, without any
inventory but the scrolls because going around the game without
inventory is generally considered suicidal; it's a case of picking a
particular route for entertainment reasons.
One other thing to note here; normally, we allow the game to display
messages to show what's going on, but in this case we skipped them (by
pressing escape) because it's just a lot of "You drop the item. Yad
seems uninterested." (If you were a shopkeeper, wouldn't you be
uninterested in buying items if someone had released a djinni you were
trying to sell, and then tried to blow you up?)
Once the dropping is over (and Yad shoots a couple of magic missile
bolts at us), polymorphitis triggers (this is what all the luck
manipulation at the start of the turn was for). We choose to become a
master mind flayer (purple h), who has one of the most powerful
attacks in the game, as a demonstration of how a TAS can deal with a
shopkeeper at pretty much any stage of the game. (This tactic would
have worked just as well up on dungeon level 2; it's just that we had
no reason to kill the shopkeeper there.)
Turn 217
After a bit of manipulation to do above-average damage, we punch Yad,
then attach our tentacles to his head and start eating his brain. We
hit every time (which is sort-of unlikely at -4 luck against a
shopkeeper), and oneshot him (raising our experience to level 4 in the
process). As the shopkeeper is human, and always starts out peaceful,
the game considers this murder, and reduces our luck further to -6 as
a penalty, meaning we're now sufficiently unlucky that most sources of
wishing have no chance of working at all. (That -6 is -1 from Friday
13, -2 from murder, and -3 from trying to pray too early back near the
start of the game.)
Turn 218
Our next aim is to make amends to our god for all our bad behaviour
over the previous turns. Angry gods are generally quite hard to
please, demanding the sacrifice of a single very poweful monster to
make amends (rather than several sacrifices of anything like they
usually do, which is typically easier to come across). Luckily, we
happen to have a shopkeeper corpse handy; unluckily, they're very
heavy. So as we step onto the corpse, we spontaneously polymorph into
a red dragon (red D), a form sufficiently strong to carry the corpse.
(Dragons are some of the strongest monsters in the game, not only
having the maximum possible natural Strength, but also being
incredibly large physically. As for why we picked red, it's because
not only do they have the second most powerful breath but several of
the monsters we're going to encounter soon are vulnerable to fire, the
element with which red dragons are associated.)
Turn 219
We pick up the shopkeeper corpse, which is sufficiently heavy that
even a dragon struggles with it slightly, becoming burdened. (There
are several other burden statuses as well as unburdened and burdened:
stressed, strained, overtaxed, and overloaded. Nearly all other
polyforms would be doing much worse on that scale; for instance, the
master mind flayer isn't strong enough to pick up the corpse at all.)
The small mimic hits us, doing a tiny amount of damage, but we don't
particularly care; what we manipulated this turn was for our
newly-obtained teleportitis to trigger, letting us go to a square of
our choice. We pick a square well out of view, that "just happens" to
have an altar to Thoth on it (of course, we knew it was there already,
and had in fact manipulated for the level to create one back when it
first generated).
Although we're not aiming for a perfect realtime duration in this run
preferring entertainment instead, that's no reason to waste time when
we can help it, and thus a cursor movement trick is used at this point
(and at every teleportitis prompt from now on). Normally, to move the
cursor to an altar, you can just press underscore to mean altar
(they're drawn as underscores onscreen), but that obviously doesn't
work if the character doesn't know the altar is there. Instead, we
exploit an interesting feature; we're playing using the number_pad
controls where 12346789 are used to move around (and the main
keyboard numbers work just as well for this as the actual numeric
keypad; such a control scheme is really confusing, but we had to get
used to it for making the TAS partly due to using keyboards without
numeric keypads on them), but the game has a second control scheme
that we aren't using where hjklyubn are used to move (which is more
suited towards laptops and simialr systems). A little-known feature
of NetHack is that at direction prompts when using numpad controls
you can use the letter-based controls to move 8 squares at a time,
even though they normally do something entirely different when using
numpad controls. This lets us move the cursor to the altar square
much more quickly than would typically be possible.
Turn 220
Time to go mollify Thoth. We sacrifice the shopkeeper corpse on the
altar and he forgives us for all our past misdeeds, resetting the
god's mood to its default and setting our luck up to +0 (note that
the Friday 13 penalty was wiped out along with the penalty for
violating a neutral code of conduct; I'm not sure if this is a glitch
or not, but it's definitely useful). Thanks to a lot of manipulation
this turn, teleportitis immediately triggers again and we choose to
teleport into an apparently uninteresting room. (We use the cursor
movement trick we used last turn, and actually overshoot the room in
order to reduce the number of keypresses needed altogether, and thus
the amount of processing time and thus lag; it's faster for the
distance we teleport to move beyond and then back than it would be to
not overshoot.)
Turn 221
Here we demonstrate why we went to this room in particular; there's a
level teleport trap here, and using it helps to save on cursed scrolls
of teleportation. Our actual intended destination is in Gehennom
(also known as ), in the deepest depths of the dungeon; however,
we can't go past the Valley on the way down in just one level
teleport. (It works rather like the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros
3; you can warp to the Valley from anywhere but in order to warp past
it you need to be there already.) We manipulate our arrival point
within the Valley to be on the south path, but not so far along it
that we take damage upon arrival.
Turns 223-224
(Like xorns, dragons are slower than normal so we skipped turn 222 due
to our slowness and continue skipping every fourth turn while we
remain in dragon form.) As we have to go via the Valley anyway, we
may as well exploit it while we're here. The next portion of the TAS
is dedicated to gaining experience levels while en route to our next
destination; we're going to start off by killing several of the undead
here. We start off next to a different vampire from the one we were
exploiting for the polyself glitch earlier and demonstrate one of the
abilities of a red dragon by breathing fire at it twice (while
dodging the bounce of our own breath weapon against the wall, although
it wouldn't do any damage to us even if it hit). This takes us up to
experience level 5.
Turns 225, 227-229
We continue along the south path in the Valley (which is actually a
dead end as it happens but we're aiming for the large mass of
monsters at the end of it in order to gain more levels). We ignore a
dwarf zombie along the route (red Z; it really isn't very threatening)
and the corpses (variously-coloured % signs strewn around for flavour
reasons), and breathe fire once into the darkness, and again at the
vampire who comes into view, two-shotting it and gaining experience
level 6. This was one of the hardest luck manipulations in the TAS,
and for relatively little gain at that; it's just that being
suboptimal is frustrating. (The vampire in question had 59 hitpoints,
and will always regenerate 1 between attacks, thus 60 damage is needed
to two-shot it. The fire breath attack of a red dragon does damage
equal to the total of six 6-sided dice to a vampire; and so on
average, we need to roll at least 5 on each of those twelve dice. A
special tool was used for this, showing the results of die rolls into
the future, scanning for runs with a high average by eye; because the
RNG sequence is fixed and all that luck manipulation does is choose
which location in the sequence is used for which random event, we
could aim for those particular combinations of dice via repeated
wallwalking once we knew where they'd be in the sequence.)
Turns 231-233, 235-237, 239
As the ghost nearby would take too long to kill, and the zombie is
worthless, we just fly round them and onwards along the corridor. We
blast fire into the distance in order to wound a vampire bat that's
blocking the way, then walk up to it, and bite it and claw it to
finish it off. (Like xorns, dragons get multiple melee attacks in a
turn, although unlike xorns, none are with a weapon.) The vampire bat
takes us up to experience level 7; it might look like we're getting
these levels really easily, but it's because we're fighting monsters
massively powerful compared to our own level, and thus we get a huge
amount of bonus experience. (It isn't possible to gain more than one
level per kill, by the way, which is why we're going up one level at a
time.)
Turns 240-259 (skipping every fourth turn)
Nothing much happens within these turns; we just continue flying along
the corridor. The valley is a no-horizontal-teleport level, so we
can't just teleport to where we're aiming, but rather have to fly
there by hand. Eventually, we end up next to a gray W and a wraith,
which is the reason we came here in the first place; the area around
us is swarming with the things, and eating a wraith corpse causes an
instant level gain, being one of the easiest ways to gain levels when
we're already at a high enough level that we can't easily gain levels
from normal combat.
Incidentally, here we encounter one of the very few visual differences
between the unhacked, official NetHack game itself that the run plays,
and the hacked version that syncs against it that was used to create
the run. In the hacked Linux version, wraiths are blue instead of
gray. (This was a side effect of using a different codepath to draw
the screen, due to using a different operating system with different
rules for console color code specification.) Thus, people watching us
make the TAS live will have seen a slightly different color scheme
here from the run itself.
Turn 260
One of the big problems with trying to play in this "graveyard" area
of the Valley is that there are a lot of monsters, some of which we
care about (wraiths), some of which are weak, get in the way, and
don't even give useful experience (most of the zombies and mummies),
and some of which are hard to kill and interfere with our attempts to
round up wraiths (ghosts, demons). Thus, our first action upon
arriving here is to fire a bolt of fire into the crowd, destroying two
weak monsters and waking some other monsters in the region. The
adjacent wraith responds by touching us, but the touch does not do
much (it can drain levels, but we manipulated it so it didn't.)
Turn 261
An eventful turn, this one. We walk north into the graveyard area
proper, and are instantly greeted with a warning. Typically, you get
"Run away! Run away!" upon entering a graveyard during the hour after
midnight, the period in which undead do double damage, in order to
remind you that you probably did something quite stupid; however,
dragons don't run but fly, and so the game does a rather amusing
substitution of verb. Then, a nearby wraith decides to drink its
cursed potion of invisibility; such potions do turn their drinker
invisible, but also alert all their enemies to their current location,
so we get to see where the wraith was when it drank the potion. (This
is not particularly useful in a TAS, as we know where it was anyway;
as we don't have see invisible, this will actually be more confusing
than useful, as although we knew its position when making the run it
won't come up on the screen when replaying it. We'll try to point out
where it went when it's relevant.) Then, we take a couple of weak
attacks; then, teleportitis triggers (but does nothing as it's a
no-teleport level), then, polymorphitis triggers, and we choose to
become a quantum mechanic, a monster form we haven't used so far.
Quantum mechanics (cyan Q) are a bit weird as they're relatively weak
in most respects, and don't do much damage. They're pretty much
completely based on silly physics jokes; upon hitting things they make
their position uncertain, upon being eaten they make their consumer's
speed uncertain, and enemy quantum mechanics sometimes carry a box
which contain a cat that might be either alive or dead (and, of
course, the state of the cat isn't determined until you open the box).
The on-hit effect is the reason we turned into quantum mechanic form
here; several of the monsters around here would take too long to kill,
but all that we care about is getting them out of the way, so we can
use the uncertainty attack to send them to a different part of the
level.
Turns 263-265
Here's the uncertainty attack in action. In order to start
surrounding ourselves with wraiths, we send away a ghost, a vampire,
and a human zombie (white Z) to other parts of the level. We now have
two wraiths adjacent rather than one.
Turn 266
We finish off our quantum mechanic usage by sending away the other
human zombie (the order in which we attacked them was very relevant
as we were manipulating the AI, via luck manipulation and via actions,
to send wraiths near us and other monsters further away); and
polymorph back into a master mind flayer in order to continue our
combat against the surrounding enemies in a form better suited for it.
Unfortunately, we also ended up getting level-drained in the process;
due to all the RNG jitter around here, it was impossible to get
perfect luck for this turn. It's irrelevant anyway, though; if you
are only drained one level, your next kill will immediately regain
that level, as you're drained to 1 experience point below the amount
needed to level up. Thus, it ends up making no difference in the long
run.
Turn 267
Ghosts might be incredibly defensive and hard to kill in NetHack, but
it seems that they nonetheless have edible brains, so we oneshot this
one via the good old brain consumption method. (Mind flayers can see
invisible, so the invisible wraith shows up onscreen.) Manipulation
was used here, and over the next several turns, to mostly avoid level
drains from the wraiths in question, although avoiding damage
altogether would have been nearly impossible. Killing the ghost
regains us level 7.
Turn 268
Killing wraiths in the Valley and getting them to leave corpses is not
an easy task; not only are there a lot of enemies that need to be
manipulated to not level-drain you in the process, but they only have
a very small chance (around 6%) of actually leaving a corpse here
(it's higher on most levels, but as it happens all the wraith-killing
this run is done on levels with the lowest chance). Nonetheless, we
aren't surrounded yet, so we have time to kill the wraith,
manipulating it to leave a corpse, and manage to avoid being
level-drained in the process.
Turn 269
Although we're not going to actually eat the wraith corpse yet (we'll
eat it somewhere quieter, although we have to eat it relatively soon
to avoid it spoiling), we nonetheless need to pick it up so we can
take it somewhere less crowded. The version of autopickup used in the
official version of NetHack only lets you distinguish between item
classes, so at first it might seem impossible to autopickup the wraith
corpse without also picking up the elf corpse that happens to be on
the same square. However, we use a trick with burden levels; you're
warned if you try to pick up something too heavy for you to easily
carry, and we exploit the fact that the warning happens between the
pickup of the two corpses to cancel one pickup whilst allowing the
other to occur, ending up with just the item we want. At the same
time, the AI manipulation finally reaches the conclusion we want, with
five wraiths and no other monsters adjacent.
Turn 270
The next issue is how to get the wraiths out of here so we can kill
and eat them in peace. Although there are five wraiths visible, one
is actually asleep; so we kick it in order to wake it up, so it's
alert enough to chase it from level to level. (This does only minimal
damage to it.) The combined damage of the wraiths, now all alert and
trying to kill us, is enough to send us back to our natural form, but
we manage to take no leveldrain even from five draining attacks.
Turn 271
This is one of the more disappointing turns in the TAS, due to our
inability to get anything near what perfect luck would be. One of the
good things we can say about it is that we didn't take any level
drain, and that we safely managed to transport all five wraiths to
dungeon level 36 via a cursed scroll of teleportation (we can go below
the Valley now, as our teleport started from it already). The amount
of RNG jitter here was enormous; only about eight or nine different
versions of dungeon level 36 were generated in the first hundred
seeds, and so in the end we settled for something good enough, if
hardly optimal.
Anyway, as to why we're here. Although this level also only has
around a 6% chance of wraiths leaving a corpse, it has a maze layout
(as do most levels below the Valley), meaning that only a couple of
wraiths can get at us at a time, and also that they have limited
places to run (and if they run, monsters can't get between us and them
as it's just corridor in the way). In fact, multiple wraiths ended up
on the other side of a wall in a more or less completely different
part of the maze; this is good for avoiding attacks from them while we
hunt them down to kill and eat them, but bad for actually finding
them, and the reason I'm so disappointed is that one of the wraiths
ends up too far away to reasonably hunt down, meaning that we only get
to kill and eat four of them over the next few turns.
Turn 272
It's time for us to use Elbereth ourselves, to scare the wraiths into
running away so that we can kill them one at a time. Quickly
scribbling it in the dust with our fingers, like we do here, has a 72%
chance of working, and scares most sorts of adjacent enemies into
running away and being incapable of attacking in melee. (The history
of Elbereth is an interesting one, incidentally; for years it was a
cheat code, kept a closely guarded secret by NetHack developers, but
word of it leaked out (as is inevitable with an open source game), and
it became such an integral part of gameplay over the years that the
developers relented and placed a note about it in the manual.
Nowadays it's just another tool in the toolbox, if a rather clunky
one, and many players feel it's rather overpowered; in an unassisted
game, it's at its most broken when it's repeatedly spammed, but
ironically, in a TAS its only real use is to manipulate monster AI,
like we do here.)
We also trigger polymorphitis this turn (this level is also
no-teleport but we can polymorph just fine) and become a jabberwock
(orange J), another new form. Jabberwocks are just a pure combat
form, with nothing much to distinguish them but a powerful melee
attack; playing as a jabberwock here allows us to oneshot wraiths
pretty much guaranteed allowing us to focus our efforts on making
them leave corpses.
Turns 273-280
We start off our wraith-hunting with the two nearby wraiths, killing
each of them (going to experience level 8 after killing the first) and
immediately autopickuping their corpses as we move onto their square.
The third wraith manages to get a few squares away in the process but
is almost as easy to hunt down and kill as the first two; we turn into
a xorn as we step onto its corpse so that we can phase through the
wall to chase the next wraith. This bit went as well as could be
hoped; unfortunately, the time spent doing this allowed the other two
wraiths to get away to some extent.
Turns 281-282
Here's a nice example of randomly occurring luck (rather than
manipulated luck) in TASes; we phase through the wall separating us
from the fourth wraith, and immediately polymorph back into a
jabberwock on the other side due to happening to hit that 1% chance at
just the right moment saving us from worrying about how we were going
to unpolymorph this time.
The other interesting thing to note here is that unlike other times we
became a xorn we didn't skip any turns (normally, the turns skipped
in xorn form start with the second). The reason for this is NetHack's
version of subpixel carryover in the form of movement energy carryover;
the game remembers what fraction of a turn you had remaining when you
polymorph and applies its effect to whatever new form you choose.
The last time we were in a slower-than-normal form it was the red
dragon and it skipped turn 262, the last turn before turning into a
normal-speed monster once more. Thus, the skipped turn next time we
become a slow monster comes later than it would normally. This can be
abused, but it's mostly only useful to abuse it on enemy monsters than
on the player ourself because later on past T:2000, when we're going
for as many actions per turn as possible, there's a much better abuse
we can use.
Turns 283-285
Here, we're hunting down the fourth wraith. This one's invisible but
we know where it is anyway. In order to get the first hit on it we
let it come to us on the final turn rather than us coming to it so
after taking two steps towards it, we spend a turn practicing our
monster detection in order to not waste the turn.
This is a good time to talk about the level we're on, too. Rather
than just being an ordinary maze level this level also contains the
Wizard of Yendor's Tower, a squarish space in the middle of the level
surrounded by impenetrable walls. This is the final level of a
sidequest; the game lets you see the outside of the level early to
taunt you but there's meant to be no way to enter the centre of the
level to actually fight the Wizard of Yendor (that purple @ in the
middle of the level, nicknamed "Rodney") without doing a lot more of
the game and entering the tower via a magic portal much deeper in the
dungeon.
Another important feature to note of the monsters on this level is
that although the fourth wraith is very near, the fifth wraith has
mostly escaped, and we don't put in the turns and extra uses of xorn
form to chase it now; it would just take too long for too little gain.
Thus, we settle with getting enough wraith corpses to reach level 13
for now; there's plenty of time before we need to become level 14,
after all. There are two other enemies around here that become
relevant; the bright cyan D nearby is a silver dragon who we end up in
combat with soon and the other purple @ (not in the centre), an
Elvenking who chases us through the next several turns and almost
ends up catching us.
Turn 286
Although it's pretty obvious that the invisible wraith moved next to
us last turn the character doesn't know that, so merely stepping on
its square wouldn't attack it. Instead, we use the F command to
attack a square regardless if there seems to be a monster there and
oneshot the invisible wraith. (The game says "it" rather than "the
invisible wraith"; NetHack uses pronouns to refer to monsters you
can't see to keep up the suspense about what they actually are.)
Turn 287
Manipulating the wraith to drop a corpse last turn also made it
death-drop something else, a tin. There's no possible autopickup
abuse we can use in order to pick up the wraith corpse but not the tin
(they both fall into the category of "comestibles" or edible items,
and the wraith corpse has no weight so we can't use a carry capacity
abuse), so we simply take the tin as well. (Incidentally, the tin
happens to contain elf meat, an excellent source of sleep resistance,
but that's a resistance we don't really need at the moment.)
Turns 288-290
Now that we've collected all the wraith corpses we're going to get we
continue with the reason we picked this level in particular to lure
the wraiths to: sequence-breaking the Wizard of Yendor sidequest (this
has nothing to do with the wraiths but saves on level teleports to
get from wherever we would have been to here). Actually solving the
maze would take far too long and be very boring (as even though we
know the shortest path it's still quite a long one), so we do what
we've been doing all TAS and turn into xorn form so as to be able to
simply walk through the walls. These turns are also spent manipulating
the silver dragon's AI from out of sight to go easy on us when we walk
past it.
Turn 291
Yep, that's a silver dragon going easy on us. At least we survived
the attack without being forced out of xorn form; this might look like
one of the worse results we could have got, but it's actually one of
the better ones.
Turns 293-309, skipping every fourth turn
These turns are simply spent phasing through the walls of the maze to
reach the right position to do the Rodney sequence-break. There are
several positions from which the sequence break in question can be
done; three of them are actually in the accessible area of the
corridor (meaning that it isn't just an off-by-one error, but an
off-by-two error!), but the nearest is actually this one which is
weirdly embedded in the wall and so can only be reached in xorn form.
Turns 310-311, 313-315
We now have five wraith corpses on us, one carried from the Valley and
the other four freshly killed; the first was obtained on turn 268, so
we have to eat them relatively soon to avoid them spoiling. (Exactly
how quickly corpses spoil is random to some extent; although we didn't
need it, we actually used a trick here to make the corpses last
longer, as instead of taking the age of the oldest corpse in a stack,
the game takes the average age, and so the set of corpses collectively
would spoil later than the first corpse would spoil alone.) This is
as good a time to eat them as any, so we eat them now. As we finish
eating the fifth corpse, getting us up to level 13, we polymorphitis
back into a master mind flayer; strangely, we're selecting it not for
its powerful melee attack, but for its very weak and almost useless
ranged attack, as it's that attack that's needed to perform the
sequence break in question. (If you're wondering about how we
manipulated the polymorph in xorn form, remember that Rodney's tower
is surrounded by impenetrable walls which not even xorns can walk
through; walking against these unphasable walls lets us wallwalk in
xorn form just like a gnome walking into an ordinary wall.) Right at
the end, the Elvenking comes into view; we managed to finish eating
just in time to avoid getting into combat with it.
Turn 317
Time to actually do the Rodney's Tower sequence break. (Strictly
speaking, we don't need to do this one as we'd have time to do this
sidequest the normal way but it's still more interesting to see a
quest sequence-broken past than done normally.) The way this works
is by exploiting a cheating AI; even though this level is
no-teleport, Rodney has a teleport-regardless-of-anything ability.
Thus, although we can't teleport over to meet him, he can teleport out
to meet us; the issue is trying to persuade him to do so.
The walls around here, which are basically impenetrable, prevent us
using any of the usual methods to damage Rodney at range or to make
enough noise to wake him, or anything like that. However, the mind
flayer's mind blast attack is a weak attack which randomly targets all
targets in a radius, and does not respect the usual barrier that
unphaseable walls provide. Although it only does tiny amounts of
damage even a tiny amount of damage is enough to wake Rodney up to
make him come out and chase us for revenge.
This sequence break is a really annoying one to get right; due to the
huge number of monsters near Rodney, the chance of hitting the right
one is quite remote and the mind blast attack often doesn't hit
anyone at all. Additionally, there's no visible indication that it's
worked either; hitting Rodney with the attack just refers to him as
"it" just like it would refer to all the other out-of-sight monsters.
Thus, we went to quite a lot of effort writing a patch to the game
that effectively memory-watches boss HPs, mostly simply so that we
could determine whether this sequence-break worked on any particular
RNG seed.
Therefore, it was incredibly ironic when it worked on the first try.
Although this turn gives no visual indication that Rodney actually
woke up as a result, he did indeed wake up from the mind blast we did
on this turn; he never acts immediately upon waking, though (he'll
start to act on the next turn). Amazingly, despite the low chance of
it working, this glitch is regularly done in unassisted gametime
speedruns via the simple method of trying it repeatedly until it
works (because there's no penalty for failure), although it can take
several tens of tries before anything happens.
Turn 318
Now Rodney is awake, the next issue is to get him to actually use his
ability to teleport out of his tower even though that isn't allowed on
this level. Unlike most monsters, Rodney's AI is very complex with a
huge number of possible actions; and rather than depending mostly on
our own actions, it depends mostly on a random factor. This makes him
a real pain to fight unassisted (at least, unless you exploit his
weakness to instadeath weapons), but unexpectedly easy to control in a
TAS. A bit of luck manipulation on this turn caused him to teleport
over to us and attack immediately (rather than buffing himself or
healing up, some of the other possibilities), and also summon a winged
gremlin at us (which we ignore as we're about to leave the level
anyway, and it doesn't follow).
The other thing to note on this turn is the hilarious fate of the
Elvenking. We knew that bear trap was there all along, but the
Elvenking didn't, so we stopped it chasing us (it has quite a powerful
attack) by letting it stumble into the trap. (It does get itself
disentangled eventually, but we're long gone by then.)
Turn 319
We're done with dungeon level 36 for the time being so it's time to
go fight the next boss (and kill Rodney along the way). This is
actually a reverse-sidequest-order run; the Quest, normally the first
mandatory sidequest, has to be done last of all in order to get a
perfect turncount and we did Rodney, normally the last of those three
quests, first. (Upon dying, Rodney harasses the player for the rest
of the game, hurling spells from afar and even respawning on occasion;
this is dangerous in a normal game but harmless or even beneficial in
a TAS, as his effects can be manipulated away when unwanted, and
manipulated to occur if they happen to be useful for whatever reason.)
Our destination is dungeon level 34, which coincidentally happens to
be the level of a minor boss (which is mostly annoying because it ends
up being no-teleport for that reason; we never actually meet the boss
on the TAS); we're here not because of that, but because it also
contains the entrance to Vlad's Tower, which unlike Rodney's is not
embedded in the main dungeon, but off to one side, and thus has to be
entered the normal way. Although Rodney follows us, his AI decides to
spend the turn healing, so he's waiting on the stairs to level 33, a
couple of squares from where we land.
This is another level with a suboptimal layout, by the way; we're very
physically near to both sets of upstairs on the level, but the ones we
want to go up via are on the other side of a wall. Again, we settled
for this because the level generation had huge RNG jitter causing most
of the levels that were generated through luck manipulation to be
identical; most of the levels down here in Gehennom are like that,
both due to the way the maze generator works and because they have a
lot more monsters than regular dungeon levels do.
Turn 320
It takes over half a second of walking into a wall to manipulate it
(ouch jitter…), but we manage to polymorph after walking just one
square and Rodney teleports over to us in the process. We're using
another new polymorph form, the black dragon; this is mostly similar
to the red dragon but instead of the fire breath we now have a
disintegration breath weapon that instakills enemies. (We didn't use
this in the Valley, incidentally, because disintegrating wraiths would
have been counterproductive due to not leaving a corpse behind so we
settled for the second-most-powerful dragon form there.) As usual,
Rodney does a couple of attacks after teleporting; first punching us
(doing damage that is completely irrelevant as we immediately
polymorph afterwards and reset the damage-to-unpolymorph counter),
then casting "aggravate monster", one of his least threatening spells
(it alerts other monsters on the level to your location, but we won't
be here long).
Turn 321
"The Wizard of Yendor is disintegrated!" Easiest boss kill ever.
The design of Rodney is pretty interesting; he's relatively tough to
kill in regular combat, but weak to instant-death weapons, which
encourages you to use your death charges against him (and indeed,
people mostly do save them for that purpose). However, he keeps
respawning after death (although in a TAS, we can manipulate him to
respawn no more than once, which is the absolute minimum), and so
often you eventually have to settle for killing him the other way.
And yet, there are monsters later in the game that are arguably better
targets for instant-death attacks than Rodney is, so it's an
interesting tradeoff when to use them. In this TAS, we can ignore the
issue completely; black dragon breath costs just 20 Pw to use which
is normally a lot (and a limiting factor on black dragon abuse in an
unassisted game, as Pw can take ages to regenerate), but we certainly
aren't short of Pw at the moment.
Turn 322-327
Annoyingly, although the stairs are incredibly close as the crow
flies they're a very long away following the maze from where we are,
so we pretty much have no other option than to use xorn form again to
reach them. Doubly annoyingly, this level has a lot of RNG jitter,
and it took us an entire six turns before we could manipulate
polymorphitising into a xorn in a reasonable length of time, which we
spent walking back and forth. In the process, we pick up the "papyrus
spellbook" (the Book of the Dead), the reward for beating Rodney, and
one of only a few items absolutely required to win the game. (We
won't have much use for it for many turns, though.)
Turns 329-331
Now we're in xorn form again, it's just a short walk through the wall
and up the stairs to Vlad's Tower. This level has a mostly fixed
layout, such that there isn't anything all that useful to manipulate
here; we tried several different seeds to see if there was anything
worth manipulating, but it turned out there wasn't (at least not
within the reasonably accessible seeds) so we just took the first one
available to spare the trouble of manipulating in xorn form.
Turns 333-335
Normally, to do the first level of Vlad's you have to walk all the
way over to the other side of the level and back again. In xorn form,
we don't care about that, and just walk directly to the ladder up to
the next level (32).
These turns also show off yet another special property of xorn form.
Something is breathing fire at us from the east (we're not entirely
sure whether it's the red dragon or the red naga which are both over
there; we'd need to write a complicated memory watch script to find
out, which isn't worth it as it doesn't matter at all), but being made
mostly of rock, a little heat doesn't harm us at all. Elemental
resistance tends to be absolute in NetHack; it can be gained
intrinsically just like we have intrinsic controlled polymorphitis and
controlled teleportitis, but as long as we can keep polymorphing,
there isn't really a need.
Turns 337-339
We go up to the second level of Vlad's Tower and continue our plan of
just phasing around the intended route to avoid fighting anything.
(We do take some damage from a hound pup along the way, useful as
we use combat damage to turn back into regular form once we've reached
our destination.) The place we end up at the end of turn 339 (as turn
341 starts) is actually out of bounds, although it's hard to see on
this run; why fight past monsters when you can just go round? (As for
how we managed to get out of bounds here, it's just a trivial
oversight; the NetHack developers forgot to mark the bounds of the
level as unphaseable for xorns. It's not exploitable in any way other
than to come back in bounds on the other side of a monster; the game
simply doesn't let you move past the normal valid range of
coordinates on the outer border.)
Turns 341-343, 345-347, 349
The rest of the second floor of Vlad's Tower is extremely uneventful,
just more phasing through walls at a weird angle. It should be noted
that moving diagonally around the edge of the level like we did there
is the same distance as going in a straight line; diagonal movement is
just as fast as straight movement in NetHack, meaning that there are
many possible shortest routes from one square to a square some
distance north, west, south, or east of it.
Turns 350-351, 353-355
Vlad's Tower is three floors high, and so we enter the third floor
(31) and walk straight through the wall to the throne Vlad sits on.
He wakes up and deals damage to us, unpolymorphing us just as we reach
the throne, which is exactly what we wanted; we don't even take damage
to our regular health bar. Vlad (a purple V) has the same
teleport-anywhere ability that Rodney has, but it ends up working
against him here, letting us reach the throne and leaving him forced
to wait next to it.
Turns 357-358
There are many possible uses for a throne. The one we use here is the
approximately 1.7% chance that sitting on a throne will grant a wish,
and that the throne will remain afterwards to allow more wishes to be
made on it. (Running out of wishes is not really an issue in a TAS;
thrones allow unlimited numbers of wishes to be farmed with perfect
luck manipulation. And they aren't even the only unlimited source of
wishes.) We use this throne to wish for artifacts; the Eyes of the
Overworld on turn 357, the Orb of Fate on turn 358.
Both of these artifacts aren't too happy about being wished for (they
like neutral players, but not wizards), but after blasting us and
doing a bit of damage, they settle down for their new lives in our
inventories. The Eyes are vital to save turns later on in the game;
although they have several different abilities, the one that we care
about is the ability to cure all forms of blindness, important because
later on we'll be using polymorph forms which have no eyes. (Being an
artifact, it's powerful enough to overcome even such an apparently
final obstacle to sight as eyelessness.) The Orb is less necessary,
but we have two main reasons to wish for it; one is that it has a
level teleport power that saves on cursed scrolls of teleport, and the
other is that it halves all damage take from any source, meaning that
it takes twice as much damage to unpolymorph us. It also levels the
playing field against Vlad, with its damage halving cancelling out the
damage doubling from the difficulty level (Vlad, being a vampire, is
undead).
Turns 359-419
As is mentioned earlier, we need to do a lot of skill grinding on the
detect monsters spell in order to be able to keep it up constantly,
and doing so would normally be very boring, so what better time to do
it than the middle of a boss fight? Hopefully, instead of becoming
more and more boring as time goes on like grinding normally does, this
becomes more and more ridiculous instead. Vlad is famous for being
incredibly weak, almost a joke boss; he isn't actually weak on an
absolute scale, but he's much weaker than you'd expect a boss to be in
his place in the game (it's said that the most dangerous thing he can
do to you is to read a cursed scroll of teleport, forcing you to
figure out where he ran to and chase him down). Thus, here's a little
demonstration to demonstrate what he's actually like: we cast 61 of
the 80 casts of detect monsters required to exercise it up to the
"skilled" level right now in combat with Vlad, to see how much damage
is taken. (We do use a little luck manipulation in order to avoid him
level-draining us, and a little more to manipulate enemy AIs to
prevent any other monsters joining the fight, but this is otherwise a
completely fair fight, with our orb of fate cancelling out the
midnight damage bonus.) Other things to note during the fight are the
"you feel vaguely nervous" at the end of turn 373 (start of turn 374),
which is Rodney trying to cast a spell from beyond the grave, but
failing; the trapper (green t) spawning but not doing anything (as
it's hiding waiting for us to stumble into it, and we aren't going to
as we know where it is); and the orcish shaman (bright blue o) taking
one look at us tanking a major boss's attacks and running away (we
manipulated this, but it's still pretty funny, and exactly what you
would expect an orc to do in that situation).
During our skill training, we took a little under 900 points of
damage, which would be enough to kill any normal character. On the
other hand, we had no armour and weren't attacking; most players would
have had a lot of defense against Vlad's attacks, reducing his combat
damage to effectively zero, by the time they reached this point (as
well as immunity or resistance to his level-drain attack, simulated
here by manipulating it to fail). Therefore, the obvious conclusion
is that if you're prepared enough to survive everything else around
here you're almost certainly prepared enough to trivially beat Vlad,
even if he isn't that weak in an absolute sense.
Turn 420
It's not entirely clear if we're being cruel or kind to Vlad this run.
On the one hand, we didn't just outright kill him like some players
do, or kill him in a hideously embarrassing fashion to demonstrate how
weak he is like most players do; but on the other side, we must be
making him feel pretty impotent. After tanking nearly 900 points of
damage, we just sit on his throne again, and miraculously are healed
up to full health! (The 1.7% chance of this happening with the throne
surviving is the same as the chance of getting a wish with the throne
surviving, incidentally.) Getting to full health when you have as
much max HP as we do is kind-of tricky, with potions of full healing
only healing 400 hitpoints; doing it this way was likely simplest.
Turn 421
Of course, one issue with people typically killing Vlad in some
hilariously embarrassing fashion is that most of the ways to do that
have already been done unassisted, so replicating one of them in a
TAS would not be particularly impressive or entertaining. Instead,
as we do the 80th cast of detect monsters (we cast it 18 times
before entering Vlad's, and 62 times inside), we polymorphitis into
a succubus. Instead of killing the boss and getting the mandatory
item he guards that way, we're going to leave Vlad alive and get the
Candelabrum a different way.
Turn 422
This is us technically defeating Vlad (or, at least, getting the
Candelabrum of Invocation, the reward for beating him and an item
required to defeat the game). In case you aren't watching with frame
advance, here's the text for this turn: "You smile at Vlad the Impaler
seductively. You steal: I - a candelabrum (no candles attached).
You hit Vlad the Impaler. You hit Vlad the Impaler. Vlad the Impaler
hits! Vlad the Impaler bites!". Yep, we just flirted the MacGuffin
off him. Given that there are no sufficiently embarrassing ways to
kill him, we'll just leave him now. He survives the entire TAS, which
is kind of unusual for bosses in any game (and particularly unusual
for Vlad in NetHack.)
Turn 423
It's time to leave Vlad's, but first we need to take steps to ensure
he doesn't chase us or leaving him alive will have been pointless.
Thus, we scrawl an Elbereth on the floor in blood, a fittingly
gruesome way for a demon like a succubus to write it. This scares
Vlad into not wanting to follow when we level teleport away next turn.
Turn 424
Before leaving Vlad's we first go into the skills menu and specify
that we do in fact want to enhance divination spells. Future castings
of "detect monsters" will now, instead of just giving us a snapshot of
enemy monster locations, give us a continuous effect for several turns
letting us see monsters; we'll put this up whenever it would be useful
to follow what's going on for your viewing entertainment.
Once that's done (which takes no in-game time) we return to level 16
via invoking the Orb of Fate's level teleport power (which also
returns us to gnomish form). Unfortunately, it would take too much
manipulation to land exactly on the square in level 16 where we want
to be, and manipulate the Orb of Fate to have a low invoke timeout
(letting it recharge sooner, enabling us to be able to use it again in
the near future), at the same time; the invoke timeout is more
important, so we end up at the wrong end of the shop.
Turn 425
This turn, we return to our stash on dungeon level 16 (using
teleportitis) and pick up all the items there. Together with the
invocation artifacts (Book of the Dead and Candelabrum of Invocation)
and other artifacts (Orb of Fate and Eyes of the Overworld) we're
carrying the weight is enough to make us stressed, which would double
the time it takes us to do all actions (or to be more precise, halve
the amount of movement energy we got per turn, which comes to much the
same thing). (The Orb of Fate is so heavy that it is frequently
referred to as the Orb of Weight.) In order to fix this, we
polymorphitis into a titan (purple H) in the same turn; this form was
chosen because it was strong and large (immediately fixing the carry
capacity issue), and humanoid; being in a form with actual fingers
allows us to use the magic marker to write scrolls and spellbooks. It
is also faster than our regular form, being able to take one and a
half actions per turn (to be more precise, it alternates between
one-action and two-action turns, based on the amount of remaining
movement energy, as always); however, our temporary stressedness
reduces our movement energy reservoir (equivalent to having a bad
subpixel), preventing this action boost kicking in for a bit.
Turn 426
In order that we can perform very time-consuming actions in peace
(without being constantly interrupted by monsters), we need to kill
the mimic adjacent to us. (There is actually a second mimic on the
level, but its AI is set to hide and attempt an ambush rather than to
attack, and we don't do anything that might cause it to come out of
hiding, so it's irrelevant.) Therefore, we simply use our basic
attack spell, force bolt, to attack the mimic, manipulating it to miss
in response.
Turn 427
One hit of a force bolt isn't enough to kill a small mimic at this
depth in the dungeon, so we attack it again to finish it off. A
moderate amount of luck manipulation was needed here to get a high
damage roll; two hits would not typically be enough either.
Turn 428 (action 1/2)
Now we don't have to fear interference by the mimic, we can start on
the next part of our strategy: obtaining the spells we will need for
the rest of the game. There are several methods of obtaining
spellbooks; one of the simplest methods is to use the magic marker
that we found in the shop in order to write on the blank spellbooks we
have in our inventory. (These are our starting spellbooks; we washed
the ink off their pages as a side effect of walking along the bottom
of the Castle moat, which we set up all the way back at turn 82.) The
first spellbook we write is "charm monster" (unfortunately, the magic
marker parser has no amusing abuses), a spell which has a chance (that
can be luck-manipulated to always work) of turning enemies permanently
tame, causing them to fight on our side for the rest of the game or
until angered. This is actually one of the most powerful spells in
the game, especially in combination with TAS tools, and we make use of
it to avoid or trivialise combat at points later on; however, the only
reason we actually need it is that the ally AI does some things the
enemy AI doesn't, allowing us to manipulate monsters in ways necessary
for a glitch later on.
Turn 428 (action 2/2)
(Unlike earlier, where we lost turns due to slow polyforms, the fast
polyform we are in allows us to perform multiple actions in a turn,
sometimes. The number of actions in a turn is determined at the start
of the turn, based on a number of factors, but at the moment it
strictly alternates between 1-action and 2-action turns.)
On the other blank spellbook, we write the "jumping" spell. When
fully trained up, this spell gives us the ability to jump up to four
squares orthogonally; although useful to cross moats and similar
situations, its use in a TAS is as a very fast form of horizontal
movement, in situations where teleportation does not work. (The
timing properties of jumps are a little unusual; they cost one action
plus the remainder of the turn, and thus are only worth using on the
last action of a turn, a limitation that is mostly irrelevant now but
will become very important later on when we become fast enough to take
four actions per turn.) Incidentally, this sort of spellbook writing
is far from guaranteed to work, especially given our neutral luck, but
luck manipulation allows us to guarantee that we always write the
right magic words in the book on the first attempt.
Turns 429-434 (action 1/2)
We read the spellbook of charm monster that we just wrote. (Somehow,
writing the words then reading them again are what's necessary to
actually end up learning the spell…) Reading spellbooks can take a
long time, especially high-level ones, and being in a fast polymorph
form does not reduce the time. We make good use of the forced delay,
though, as while we read the Orb of Fate has time to recharge, meaning
that it will be ready for another level teleportation when we need it.
Turns 434 (action 2/2)-437
We read the other spellbook, the spellbook of jumping, and learn that
spell too. The Orb of Fate is anyway still not fully recharged, so no
real time is wasted by the time-consuming action.
Turn 438 (action 1/2)
We want to write and read one more spellbook while here, because it
will be needed in the near future (so it can't be left until later),
and because we need to wait for the Orb to recharge anyway. However,
we have no more blank spellbooks, so we need to wash the ink off one
in order to be able to write in it again. This is an opportunity to
use the otherwise useless potions we had at the start of the game (the
potion of object detection was important to own as it made the TASing
process easier, but useless in terms of actually using it ingame);
back around turn 82, we let the potions dilute in the Castle moat (at
the same time as sneaking into the Castle, and washing the ink off
scrolls and spellbooks), and we can use the water that ended up in the
potion bottle to wash the ink off a spellbook by hand. Although
spells in NetHack are not memorised forever, they last for twenty
thousand turns, and we'll have won by then. Thus, all our existing
spellbooks are now only useful for their paper, not for their spells;
and we wash the spellbook of charm monster (an arbitrary choice) clean
by hand, by dipping it into one of the diluted potions.
Turn 438 (action 2/2)
Time to write the last of the spellbooks that we obtain via writing.
(Magic markers have limited ink; although there's still plenty left in
this marker, even a relatively full marker struggles to write
high-level spells, and so it's most efficient to write low-level
spells with the marker and gain the high-level spells we need via
other means.) This time, we write the "stone to flesh" spell, a
utility spell which finds a range of interesting uses throughout the
run. The main reason we're writing it is because it's a necessary
part of a glitch (the gold duplication glitch) that we need to pull
off soon, using its ability to turn statues into the creatures they
represent; but its ability to convert ordinary rock into generic meat
also comes in handy later.
Turn 439
This turn is spent moving onto the square where the shopkeeper died;
although shopkeepers tend not to have too many possessions that aren't
already on sale, some of his personal items will come in useful later
on the run.
Turn 440 (action 1)
We actually pick up the items we wanted. One minor gain is a skeleton
key; the shopkeeper had one of these in order to chase shoplifters who
locked doors behind them in an attempt to foil pursuit, but we can use
it ourselves to open locked containers if necessary (and later on, it
will become necessary; there are other methods to open locked
containers, but they all have drawbacks, and as we're picking up items
on this square anyway we may as well pick up the key as it doesn't add
anything to the time taken). More importantly, though, we swipe the
contents of the cash register, picking up 1960 gold pieces that the
shopkeeper would have used to pay us for items we sold him. Although
gold would seem useless to us (given our typical treatment of
shopkeepers so far…), it's a necessary component of the gold
duplication glitch, which as you will see has ramifications far beyond
mere infinite wealth.
Turn 440 (action 2)
We wait an action to allow polymorphitis to kick in, as we need to be
in a different polymorph form to prepare for the next part of the run.
(It couldn't be triggered last action, as it only happens on turn
boundaries; thus, waiting a turn lets us polymorph at the transition
to turn 441.) Our new polymorph form, the stone golem, is one that is
rarely used, due to its very slow speed (skipping every second turn),
but has three properties we require for the next section: a strength
and carry capacity equal to that of the titan (we're still carrying an
amount of junk that would burden or even stress any normal character);
hands, allowing us to hold items; and most importantly, a body made of
stone. We're going to be slinging around very powerful petrification
weapons in the near future, which need precautions to be taken to
avoid falling to the same petrification effect ourselves; and being
made of stone already is a foolproof defense against being turned to
stone, meaning that we can ignore the normal balancing effects of
petrify-on-touch weapons. (More normally, gloves would be used, but
we'd need to waste the time to find or wish for them, and put them on,
as well as needing to use a polymorph form which not only had hands,
but human-shaped hands, so that the gloves would fit.)
Note that it may get a little hard to track the location of the
character while we stay in stone golem form; the symbol for a stone
golem is a grey apostrophe, which rather blends in with all the grey
dots around. Sorry; there's not much we could do about that.
Turn 441-446
We spend these turns reading the "stone to flesh" spellbook; the Orb
of Fate recharges as we read it. There's actually a "mistake" at this
point in the run: I was under the impression that slow polymorph forms
read spellbooks as fast as our natural form, but I was wrong, thus
wasting a small amount of time. It ends up making no difference in
the long run, because we have to wait for the Quest to open anyway,
but looks bad. (We aren't redoing the run because of this, though.)
Turn 448
Now the Orb of Fate has recharged, we use it to visit a previously
unvisited level: level 6, the Oracle level. (Coincidentally, many of
the levels that are important to this run seem to have numbers ending
in 6…) This is (when taking a normal route!) the first "special level"
in the game, which has a fixed or semi-fixed rather than random
layout; its main purpose is as a source of spoilers for unspoiled
players (the Oracle can be paid money in exchange for advice), and as
a marker that indicates the location of the Sokoban branch (which is
always entered from the level below the Oracle level). However, we
don't care about either of those things (as they just give information
that we either know anyway or can discover with memory watch), and
instead use this level because it has very skewed probabilities for
certain things we want. (It should also be noted that the difficulty
of getting exactly what we wanted combined with busy schedules caused
a multiple month delay in the making of this TAS at this point in the
run.)
As usual, the entire level is generated when we visit it; although it
does not become relevant for a while, we need to manipulate certain
things the instant we arrive on the level, because there is no chance
to change them later. In this case, we're taking advantage of the
unusually high chance of spellbooks on this level; it contains eight
guaranteed statues, each of which has a moderately good chance of
containing a random spellbook. This particular item set took quite a
while to manipulate, because one of the spellbooks (polymorph) that
was manipulated here is both incredibly costly to write, and very
rare; another spellbook we need, haste self, also generates on the
level at the same time, saving us the trouble of writing it (although
we have enough marker charges left that we could write it if we needed
to). Due to their current confinement inside statues, though, neither
spellbook will be visible for a while. (Just to add to the confusion,
we now have floor as grey dot, the player as a grey apostrophe, and
the statues as grey backquotes; you'll need good eyes to be able to
follow this bit unless you watch with a lot of slowdown.)
A lot more manipuation was needed to get the rare spellbook we needed
than it might seem from the luck-manipulation-caused delay before we
turn up here; what actually happened is that we worked out what RNG
seed we needed at this point here first, then designed some of the
actions on previous turns around it, to spread the delay needed over
several turns. (Thus, the long delays for luck manipulation happened
on previous turns instead.) This is nicer aesthetically, but the real
reason to do it was to be able to more easily "hex in" changes to
mistakes we might make (although an ordinary editor is enough to
change the input files we were using, so "hexing" is a bit of a
misnomer here).
Turn 450
So, given that the spellbooks needed later are trapped inside statues,
what should we do with them? The obvious answer might be to break the
statue (which we can trivially do with our force bolt spell), but
given that we're in a hugely strong polymorph form at the moment, it's
simpler to just autopickup the statue (a rather large statue of a
plains centaur) and take it with us, so we do that. (This is also
useful because we have a use for the statue itself later in the run…)
Note that the adjacent mummy does not attack us; although we are slow,
so are mummies, and it simply didn't get an action in all this time.
Turn 452
In addition to teleportitis making us sometimes teleport at random, we
can also now use it to teleport deliberately (a perk of being a
high-level wizard, although other classes get it too at even higher
levels). On this turn, we demonstrate the ability; it costs us some
Pw (irrelevant given the infinite maxhp/maxpw bug), and some nutrition
(relevant because we don't have infinite amounts of that, although we
can use polyself to reset our nutrition levels if necessary; it'd just
be awkward as we'd have to drop everything to change into our natural
form to do the reset). The blue open-braces are fountains, and four
are guaranteed on the Oracle level; although the statues on this level
are the reason we came here at all, the fountains are the reason we
came here now, rather than some other time. They're also next to the
Oracle, a light blue at sign, who is completely irrelevant to the run
(except that she gets in the way of both us and monsters); we're about
to do some crazy things, but the Oracle will just sit there and watch
the madness unfold. She does, however, give us a nice greeting as we
teleport into her room.
Turn 454
Now is the start of a tricky luck-manipulation sequence involved with
the infinite gold glitch. This turn took quite a bit of manipulation
in order to get the least likely (and normally, most beneficial) of
all results from drinking from a fountain; our attempt to drink
releases a water demon, but instead of attacking us like demons
normally do, she's sufficiently grateful that she decides to grant us
a wish instead. (For some reason, I always find it hilarious when
incidental monsters turn out to be randomly female; most computer
games don't have touches like that…) We're back using the abusable
wish parser again, and we go for some eye-of-newt style grammar,
wishing for a "corpse of cockatrice", and a dead cockatrice turns up
in our inventory as a result.
Cockatrices are one of the most deadly creatures in NetHack, having a
remarkably high number of different ways to kill someone. (I don't
have an exhaustive list to hand, although such lists do exist; I think
there are over thirty ways.) The general rule is that touching a
cockatrice (dead or alive) with bare skin is enough to instantly cause
creatures to turn to stone, something that we can exploit by picking
up the dead cockatrice (or "rubber chicken" as it's nicknamed by
NetHack players, given that a cockatrice is physically very like a
chicken except for the bizarre petrification property), and hitting
enemies with it. Our stony body protects us from the effects
ourselves, so we can use the corpse, one of the most powerful weapons
in the game, with abandon. The reason we get the corpse, though, is
not for its combat effects, but as a component of the infinite gold
glitch.
Turn 456
Wow, this turn needed a lot of luck manipulation. (There were over
500 rerecords, mostly automated, on this turn alone.) We now have
almost all the components for the gold duplication glitch: the gold
itself to duplicate, a method of turning monsters to stone (cockatrice
corpse), a method of turning monsters back from stone (stone to flesh
spell), and a method of manipulating monster AI (charm monster spell).
(A lot of experimentation in a testrun concluded that the default
enemy AI, rather than the ally AI, would not perform the actions we
wanted no matter what happened, so some method of AI manipulation was
needed.) However, one last component is needed for the glitch; a
monster that's capable of carrying the gold in question, and that has
something about it that requires the game to save information about
the monster's previous life in its corpse or statue. (The glitch
itself works by exploiting a bug in the routine for saving the
monster's stats in its remains, which is why the extra data is needed;
we don't actually care about what the extra data in question is, but
it needs to be there so that the buggy codepath is used.)
If we just wanted a few thousands of gold pieces, or maybe tens of
thousands of gold pieces, we could use pretty much any monster with
the right sort of carry capacity. However, we're performing the
glitch not to get moderate amounts of useless gold, but rather to
overflow the gold counter, and so we need something with truly amazing
carry capacity. There is one class of monsters in the game which
actually have infinite carry capacity: nymphs. (It's unclear whether
this is deliberate, or a bug; it's worth noting that players in nymph
form don't get infinite carry capacity, so there's at least a weird
asymmetry there.) As a result, we need to obtain a nymph as the last
component in the glitch, and conveniently, another of the results from
drinking from a fountain is that a water nymph (blue n) is attracted.
Although water nymphs are quite likely to turn up when drinking from a
fountain (a 1 in 30 chance), the nymph would typically immediately
follow that up by stealing one of our items and teleporting away (the
Oracle level is not a no-teleport level). Rather than waste time
trying to hunt her down (nontrivial even with TAS tools due to the way
the speed system works, and which would anyway look sloppy), we
manipulate the nymph to miss with her theft attack on the turn she is
summoned; I think that's a 1 in 20 chance, although I'm not entirely
sure (it's kind-of hard to calculate enemy hit chances, but the number
of rerecords is consistent with that). The "pretends to be friendly"
is the standard miss message for a nymph's theft attack.
Turn 458
Now we have all the components needed for the glitch, it's time to
start with the glitch itself. We start off by charming the nymph,
accomplishing three objectives at once: it stops her attacking us (and
therefore stops her teleporting away), marks the nymph as containing
information that must be stored in her corpse (because corpses of
former allies give different results when sacrificed at altars than
monsters that were never charmed), and changes her AI to one that
performs a wider range of actions. In particular, we care that the AI
is now capable of dropping items, and the nymph obligingly
demonstrates by instantly dropping her looking glass.
Turn 460
The next bit of manipulation is less unlikely than some of the results
on previous turns, but was a lot more fiddly, as it could not be
easily automated; although there are still bursts of walking into
walls in the next section of actions, that only has a limited effect
on monster AI, which is one of the major things that needed
manipulating in order to do the glitch. (The Wizard of Yendor is
rather easy to defeat in a TAS for the same reason he's a pain in a
real game: his AI is random. Most monsters, the nymph included, have
an AI that depends much more strongly on player actions than on random
factors.) Thus, for tens of turns from now on, all our actions that
are not directly part of the glitch are seemingly random behaviour
that was designed to manipulate the monster AI into doing what we
needed. On this turn, for instance, it might seem more useful to
throw our gold onto an empty square, allowing the nymph to pick it up;
but it turned out to be faster overall to drop it on our own square,
letting the nymph pick it up the turn after instead.
Turn 462
More actions to manipulate monster AI. This time, we stepped
diagonally around the Oracle (who was presumably either curious as to
what on earth we were doing, or had used her oracular powers to see it
coming in advance…). The nymph responded by stepping onto the money
(meaning that she's just done a full circle of the Oracle, something
that I wouldn't have expected would be the easiest way to manipulate
her to end up with the cash, but it turned out that it was).
Turn 464
An important turn where both our character and the nymph prepare for
the glitch. Our character wields the cockatrice corpse, ready to turn
things into stone; the nymph picks up the gold (one stack of 1960 gold
pieces), as it needs to be in her inventory for the glitch to work.
(Note that this action would probably count as "incredibly stupid" or
worse if TAS tools were not involved; the transformation into a stone
golem lasts a random number of turns, and might end at any time due to
failed polymorphitis, and so until we get rid of the corpse again we
have a chance of losing our polymorph and instantly turning to stone.
This lead to quite a lot of deaths during the making of the TAS, but
hey, that's what savestates are for, right?)
Turn 466
Step two of the glitch: we hit the nymph with the cockatrice corpse
(using the force-fight command in order to attack an ally) and turn
her to stone. I'm sure the nymph herself didn't mind (I mean, she's
been magically charmed, she has to approve of everything we do,
right?) but the rumble of distant thunder indicates that our god
Thoth, at least, rather dislikes our mistreatment of an ally. (The
punishment we get for acting like this (reduced alignment record,
reduced in-game luck stat) is an unfortunate side-effect of the
glitch, and becomes a nuisance later on, but there's no getting around
it, as all the other methods we tried to perform the glitch failed at
the AI manipulation stage.)
Turn 468
Step three of the glitch: we use our stone to flesh spell to turn the
statue back into a nymph again. (Fortunately, the way the timings
work for unpetrifying a nymph, rather than attracting one through
fountain quaffing, is that we get the next action, rather than her,
afterwards; this prevents her stealing things and teleporting away,
because if you attack and kill a tamed or charmed ally they end up no
longer tame when resurrected.)
Turn 470
We cast our charm monster spell again, to manipulate the nymph's AI,
and she follows up with step four of the glitch: dropping the stack of
1960 gold pieces, and dropping another stack of 1960 gold pieces. We
just successfully duplicated the stack of gold! (In a way, it's a
pity that the glitch only works with stacks of gold, but it does; it
relies on the fact that the same stack is stored both as an object in
the monster's inventory, and as a number (representing gold ownership)
in the monster's stats, and whilst the game would normally only use
one or the other, it gets commands in the wrong order and ends up
storing it both ways in the statue, with both stacks becoming real
upon unpetrification.) The two dropped stacks of gold combine,
leading to a stack of 3920 gold pieces on the ground.
Turn 472
So now that we have a larger stack of gold, we merely continue by
repeatedly duplicating it. Due to the various things we need to do to
manipulate the monster AI (this turn, we're standing still and not
doing anything), the glitch unfortunately can't simply be repeated by
repeating the same actions, although the general idea remains the
same.
Turn 474
After the nymph picks up 3920 gold pieces, turning the nymph back to
stone is, at least, pretty standard and requires no manipulation.
Turn 476
Unpetrifying the nymph, however, does. One of our problems is that
the success rate on our stone to flesh spell isn't too good (our
character has no training in healing magic, and will have to learn on
the job), so we have to manipulate it to work. Also important is for
the nymph to behave correctly in the next few turns, which requires
getting the RNG in the right sort of state in advance. Finally, we
aren't alone on the level; the red numbers you may have seen moving
around represent monsters detected by the Orb of Fate (an effect less
strong than the detect monsters spell we learnt, and which doesn't
show monsters it deems too weak to be a threat at all, but active
constantly), and their behaviour needs to be manipulated too. As you
can see, immediately upon unpetrifying the nymph, a pair of coyotes
(brown d) turn up, although they are just about out of attack range.
Turn 478
Due to our manipulation last turn, the nearer coyote is in range of
the charm monster spell (which is area-effect), in addition to the
nymph. Thus, casting the spell this turn not only has the usual
effects on the nymph's AI, but also charms the nearer coyote,
preventing it attacking us, and indirectly attacking the further one
as well. This means that we can get away with offensive, defensive,
and glitch-advancing uses of one spell all in the same turn, a useful
method of saving actions in a polymorph form as slow as this one.
(Just leaving the coyotes to attack would have been a bad idea; they
could deal enough damage to cause a depolymorph quite quickly, and
while wielding the cockatrice corpse, a depolymorph would mean
instadeath.) While the fight happens (and unfortunately, the hostile
coyote does get in a hit on us), the nymph obligingly drops two stacks
of 3920 gold pieces, so we now have a stack of 7840 gold on the
ground.
Turn 480
More multitasking, and more manipulation of lots of things
simultaneously. We hit the hostile coyote with the cockatrice corpse
(hey, if we're wielding a weapon this powerful, may as well use it,
right?) and trigger random teleportitis, which we use to move just one
square. Meanwhile the tame coyote moves up to box in the nymph (she
was showing something of a tendency to run away rather than pick up
the gold otherwise), and the nymph picks up the gold.
Turns 482-486
Continuing with repeats of the glitch; we stone, unstone, charm, and
the nymph drops two stacks of 7840 gold, so the new stack is 15680
gold large.
Turn 488
It took quite a lot of experimentation to find an action that would
manipulate the AI suitably this turn. In the end, it turned out that
teleporting into the doorway of the Oracle's room worked, and made the
nymph pick up the gold and move adjacent to us. Meanwhile, that mummy
we saw when we entered the level has finally ambled far enough round
the level that we can actually see it.
Turn 490
Surprisingly, we actually needed some manipulation here to prevent the
coyote standing on the nymph statue (which prevents unpetrifying it
having the right effect), the first time in this sequence that the
petrification turn has needed to be manipulated. (The mummy wisely
decides to run away…)
Turns 492-494
Unpetrify, charm, again. Luckily, walking into walls was enough to
manipulate these two turns the way we needed them.
Turn 496
This turn, however, needed something really bizarre to work properly.
We step away from the nymph, to get her to pick up the gold; then
teleportitis triggers and we teleport to the square in the other
direction instead, manipulating the nymph to not drop the gold and to
be unable to run to a square where we couldn't petrify her.
Autopickup was turned off in order to avoid picking up the coyote
statue (we're very near our burden limit at the moment, and it would
have sent us over the top, making us even slower).
Turn 498
More standard turning things to stone; meanwhile, a rothe (brown q)
turns up to join in the fun. (Hopefully, the various combat going on
during the glitch helps to vary things up a bit and make it less
repetitive; in non-TAS runs that used this glitch, it would typically
be done in a no-teleport area with no other monsters and the nymph in
a confined area to prevent her running away, but that's not only a lot
more boring, but makes it much harder to find crazy actions with which
to manipulate her to do her thing quickly.)
Turn 500
Although avoiding depolymorph is important, we can survive a turn
(indeed, around three turns, or more with luck manipulation) against a
rothe, so we unpetrify the nymph as normal and just ignore the rothe,
taking a hit so that we can incidentally charm it in the blast of a
charm monster spell next turn. Meanwhile, a second rothe comes into
view.
Turn 502
We cast charm monster, manipulating both a fight between the two
rothes (I hope they weren't brothers or something, that would be
tragic…) and the nymph to both drop two stacks of gold and pick up
the combined stack within the same one of our turns (we're in such a
slow polymorph form that she's getting more turns than we are).
However, this leaves the nymph out of range of our cockatrice corpse;
it doesn't actually lose any time, though, as otherwise we'd have to
wait for the nymph to pick up the money, rather than to make her wait
for us to get into petrification range.
Turn 504
We move into range of the nymph. The rothe fight continues, but we
can no longer see what's happening because walls get in the way, so we
merely hear the combat continue.
Turn 506
More standard petrification of the nymph. However, the rothe moves up
towards the nymph; this was hard to avoid, and ends up benefiting us
eventually, but makes life harder over the next couple of turns.
Turn 508
This is why the rothe being near is an issue; the charmed rothe, and
the hostile-for-two-turns nymph, are obviously hostile to each other,
and so fight as soon as the nymph is unpetrified again. We clearly
don't want the nymph to die; but we also don't want her to steal
anything from the rothe, as it would make her teleport away. Luckily,
the rothe doesn't have any items at the moment, so her steal attacks
fail, and it doesn't do enough damage to kill her either.
Turn 510
Recharming the nymph again; she now drops two stacks of 62720 gold
pieces. (The great thing about doubling-up glitches like this is the
exponential growth; overflowing a counter would take far too long
otherwise.) Meanwhile, the hostile rothe runs up to us, ready to
attack, but doesn't quite reach us before our turn.
Turns 512-516
As if there weren't enough statues around here already, we use our
turn to turn the hostile rothe to stone, while the nymph picks up the
gold again. Then we follow the normal routine of stone, unstone,
manipulating the charmed rothe to not get in the way.
Turns 518-534
We've now cast enough stone-to-flesh spells that we get a chance to
train our healing spell ability; we take it, in order to reduce the
fail chance for the spell to zero. (This is mostly just to make luck
manipulation easier and less frustrating, and it doesn't take any
in-game time.) Then we continue as before: charm the nymph into
dropping gold, manipulate her into picking it up again (this time by
stepping away from her), petrify her, unpetrify her. (At this point,
in a slight change to the routine, we trigger teleportitis and
teleport next to her, as she would otherwise be out of range for the
charm monster spell.) Then the routine continues, with us performing
random-looking movements interspersed with stoning, unstoning, and
charming (catching yet another hostile rothe in the area of effect to
prevent it being a problem); at the end of turn 534, the nymph has
picked up a stack of just over a million gold pieces, and another
monster turns up (the mummy that was following us earlier, a gray M,
which turns out to be an orc mummy).
Turns 536-540
A million gold pieces might be a huge amount by both real-life
standards, and compared to a typical NetHack game, but it's not enough
to overflow the gold counter, so we continue with the same routine,
ignoring the orc mummy for now: stone, unstone, charm, moving into
position when necessary. The orc mummy gets several hits in (reducing
us to less than half health) but eventually ends up getting caught in
the radius of a charm effect, and drops some money itself (a pitiful
19 gold pieces, compared to the millions that the nymph dropped).
Turns 542-572
The next cycle of the glitch requires unusual actions again; this
time, we swap places with the orc mummy, which is apparently what was
needed to manipulate the nymph into picking up the gold. Then stone,
choose not to change polymorph form when polymorphitis randomly
triggers (this extends the duration of our polymorph, so that we can
get the glitch finished without randomly instadying), unstone (which
happens to catch the statue of a coyote in the same beam, but it gets
finished off by the charmed monsters almost instantly), charm, move
into position, stone, unstone (and one of the rothes decides, rather
cutely, that maybe it should fetch that 19 gold for me), charm (and
watch a fourth rothe turn up and start fighting the charmed rothes),
teleport past the Oracle (oh, the weird actions needed to manipulate
monster AIs), stone, unstone, charm, charm again (to manipulate AI),
stone, unstone, charm. After a while, there's only so much that can
be said about the glitch…
Turn 574
This turn was a bit of a break from the norm just because the
manipulation was unusually difficult; we got the nymph to pick up the
gold using nothing but walking into walls, but it took a surprisingly
large number of manipulations. The nymph now has 32112640 gold
pieces.
Turns 576-598
More standard gold duplication: stone, unstone, charm, teleportitis to
manipulate AI, wait one turn for the nymph to pick gold up again, step
towards the nymph, stone, unstone, charm, wait for the nymph to pick
up gold, stone, unstone, charm…
Turn 600
This turn was another one that require a lot of manipulation; it
seemed that doing it before stoning the nymph helped get a good random
behaviour sequence when she was unstoned again. More interestingly,
though, this was turn 600, significant because some things in the game
happen on 600-turn timers, either every 600 turns, or first on turn
600 and then randomly after that. In this case, two things happened:
we regained a point of luck (not visible to the character, but luck
penalties time out at the rate of 1 point per 600 turns, changing on
multiples of 600), and we gained a point of Wisdom (which is visible
and produced a message), due to the "exercise timer". The way this
works is that the game tracks which of your actions are likely to
increase and decrease your stats, and every so often changes your
stats according to whether you've been exercising or abusing them. In
our case, we just got a Wisdom boost; this has very minor positive
effects, but is mostly irrelevant (and in fact, our abilities are
pretty much irrelevant overall, which is why we didn't manipulate the
exercise timer).
Turns 602-610
More continuing with the same old glitch: stone, unstone, charm, wait
a turn for AI manipulation, stone again. At this point, the game does
a check to see what the Wizard of Yendor will do from beyond the
grave (this cannot be manipulated away, and its timing is set when we
kill the Wizard). However, we can manipulate what the event is, and
we manipulate it to a neutral result (in fact, the only neutral
result, with all the others generally being bad except for a TAS):
"You feel vaguely nervous.", which simply causes the Wizard of
Yendor to do nothing this time, and just set the timing for his next
reappearance.
Turns 612-628
With Rodney safely out of the way, we can continue the glitch.
Unstone, charm (and the nymph drops over a billion gold pieces, but
even that isn't enough for us!), wait one turn to manipulate AI, stone
again, polymorphitis into a stone golem again to refresh the polymorph
timeout, unstone, charm (nymph drops over 2 billion gold pieces), wait
a turn for AI manipulation, stone nymph, unstone nymph.
Turn 630
Finally, we've reached the end of our huge, long, repetitive, AI
manipulating glitch session. At this point, for the pattern to
continue, the nymph should drop just over 4 billion gold pieces if we
charm her. However, gold is stored in a 32-bit signed integer, which
just goes up to a little over 2 billion (but higher than our just over
2 billion value used for the gold); so as soon as the nymph drops the
gold, we get an overflow. Instead of charming the nymph, we just kill
her with our force bolt spell, which has the same effect of making her
drop her gold. The two stacks of over 2 billion gold drop on the
ground, and combine to form a stack of -184549376 gold pieces. (We
also trigger teleportitis on the same turn to move over to the
negative gold more quickly.)
Turn 632
After we've gone to all that trouble to produce negative gold, we pick
it up, in order to enjoy its strange properties. The major useful
property for a TAS (or indeed, an unassisted run) is the weight of the
gold; a negative quantity of gold has negative weight. The result is
that once the gold is in our wallet, the negative weight of the wallet
cancels out the weight of anything else we might want to carry,
effectively leading to infinite carry capacity (there's a separate
limit of 52 items in open inventory, but if we needed to circumvent
that we could do so using containers). From now on, we don't need to
worry about the strength or carry capacity of the polymorph forms we
change into; we can just use the amazing properties of antigold to
sweep the problem under the carpet, meaning that we have a much wider
range of forms to choose from in the future (many polymorph forms are
unusable in normal play due to their tiny carry capacities).
Of course, this sort of glitch often comes with bizarre side-effects.
The most obvious one in the case of this glitch in particular is that
the stack of antigold cannot be split; we have to move the entire
stack at at time, and cannot adjust its size in any way (except by
picking up regular gold to cancel out the antigold). Luckily, this
isn't much of a problem. The antigold also reacts strangely to a
variety of other commands, generally in negative ways; but we don't
care about that, as we can just leave it in inventory. Finally, it
prevents us doing anything that might require us to own a positive
amount of gold, but that isn't much of an issue anyway, as most such
actions aren't useful to the run (there's one that would be, absolving
alignment, but it can't be done before turn 5000, and if we spent that
long we wouldn't even beat the unassisted record).
Turn 634
(Around this time we changed the platform we were using for
virtualization from VirtualBox to KVM which significantly improved the
restore time between luck manipulation attempts (moving to a faster
computer shortly after the switch didn't hurt either). This proved to
be especially helpful in the next two sections which required a
significant amount of luck manipulation in order to trigger things
like teleporting, polymorphing, and attack damage levels.)
Now that we can carry anything we like we immediately abuse it by
picking up every remaining statue on the level. We trigger a teleport
to land in the upper-right corner, immediately picking up a statue of
a mountain centaur.
Turns 636(1/1)-637(2/2)
Between turns at the end of turn 635 (start of turn 636), we
manipulate a polymorph to trigger. Our stone golem form has served us
well but it's time to switch to something a bit faster so we become a
queen bee (purple a). This form isn't used frequently due to its
incredibly poor carry capacity (generally insufficient to carry even a
single item, as might be expected of a bee), but with the power of
antigold, carrying several full-size statues is no problem.
Polymorphing into a queen bee causes us to drop our weapon because we
no longer have any hands, making us let go of the cockatrice corpse
we've been (ab)using just before it has a chance to turn us to stone.
NetHack's speed system is slightly confused by polymorphs;
polymorphitis triggering doesn't actually affect the actions per turn
count until the turn after. Thus, we get one action on turn 636, as
would be correct for a stone golem (because we got no actions on turn
635). Now that we're a queen bee, though, we get two actions on every
turn from turn 637 onwards. (We abbreviate the actions-inside-turn
count from now on, because many of the turns will have multiple
actions and it would be wordy to write it out every time.) It's not
far to the next statue so we fly down and to the left and pick up a
statue of a plains centaur.
Turn 638(1/2)-638(2/2)
We fly down a couple of spaces to trigger teleportitis and hop to the
upper-left corner of the room to grab a statue of a forest centaur.
Turns 639(1/2)-639(2/2)
A large amount of luck manipulation gets us a teleportitis teleport on
the edge of the turn (as always, teleportitis only happens at the end
of a turn), so we had to wait to skip the first action of turn 639.
This nets us a statue of a mountain centaur.
Turns 640(1/2)-642(1/2)
Rather than forcing a teleport through Ctrl+T (which uses nutrition)
or manipulating a teleport through wallwalking (which proved to
require an unusually large number of wallwalks), we instead simply
fly to the next statue, which is a plains centaur.
Turns 642(2/2)-643(2/2)
Teleportitis gets us to another plains centaur to the right of the
room the oracle is in. Again, it proves hard to manipulate on this
level (which is rather prone to RNG jitter), and thus the end of turn
643 had to be used rather than 642 in order to avoid a massive luck
manipulation delay, with the movements in between serving to advance
the RNG the right distance.
Turns 644(1/2)-644(2/2)
After some manipulation, we wait another two actions to trigger
teleportitis; it triggers at the end of turn 644, and we finally pick
up the last statue, a forest centaur.
Turn 645(1/2)
It's now time to fix our alignment, which at this point is somewhere
near -325 (an astronomically, unrealistically bad alignment) as well
as our luck (-7; the lower cap is -10, but there's a +3 bonus to our
luck provided by the Orb of Fate that's unaffected by caps). This is
a side effect of the infinite carry capacity glitch; turning a charmed
monster (such as the nymph) to stone carries a 15-point alignment
penalty, as well as a 1-point luck penalty. There are a number of
ways to fix bad alignment but most of them are incredibly
time-consuming (and more than likely boring). One way to raise
alignment is to kill monsters; each kill gives us a few points of
positive alignment (typically around 5 per kill) to help us dig our
way out of the hole we're in. No RPG would be complete without a bit
of grinding, but with that said, this is a TAS of an RPG, so if
there's going to be grinding we might as well make it a one-sided
slaughter-fest.
There aren't nearly enough monsters on the Oracle level for our
purposes, so the next matter of business is levelporting somewhere
else. We would ordinarily use the Orb to levelport, but this is not
currently possible due to our horrible alignment (with negative
alignment, none of our current artifacts will obey us). We have two
cursed scrolls of teleport left so we read one now and choose to
levelport to level 25, which may look familiar. We're back at the
Castle, but this time, because we arrived from above, we're at the
front entrance in a little maze on the left.
Turn 645(2/2)
One of the rothes we charmed happened to follow us from the oracle
level, but we'll essentially ignore it completely, as we've had a
habit of doing with charmed monsters lately. We displace it (swapping
places with it) to get closer to a minotaur that happens to be
wandering around in the left maze area.
Turn 646(1/2)
A minotaur is a very powerful monster but we go slightly out of our
way to prove a point – don't mess with a queen bee that has the
ability to dispense deadly poison. Bees in NetHack have three
attacks: regular sting, poisoned sting, and deadly poisoned sting, and
which one is used is random. With a little bit of manipulation, our
first attack stings the minotaur, the sting turns out to be poisoned,
and in fact our poison turns out to be deadly, killing any
non-poison-resistant enemy (such as the minotaur) outright. This is a
very unlikely result, making it another reason why queen bee form is
bad for regular play, but the ability to manipulate it makes it very
powerful in a TAS.
It's worth noting that deadly poison is more famous for working
against the player, rather than in favour, being a common cause of
early near-unavoidable deaths if the Random Number Generator is
feeling particularly cruel that day. The attack we saw here (which is
used by some other things too, such as spiked pits) is a major reason
why poison resistance is considered one of the most vital resistances
in NetHack. (In a TAS, though, it isn't needed, as anything that
would poison us can simply be manipulated away.)
Turns 646(2/2)-650(2/2)
Unlike the Oracle level, the Castle is a no-teleport level, so we have
to walk (or in our case, fly) wherever we go. We deftly buzz past our
rothe and head toward the entrance to the Castle.
Turn 651(1/2)
We meet an Aleax and immediately run into a conundrum – an Aleax has
various resistances, and specifically, has resistance to poison. This
negates our ability to perform a oneshot kill (or even damage it
significantly), so instead we completely ignore it by flying over the
castle moat (which we can do in bee form). We manipulate the Aleax to
change weapons rather than attack, and we also manipulate a giant eel
that was hidden under the water in the moat to miss us twice (for the
first attack we cannot see it, so we just get "It misses.", for the
second attack it has surfaced so we get "The giant eel brushes against
your rear limb."). Note that we could not have afforded a hit from
the eel, as they have a two-turn instadeath attack that would have
been hard to escape except via immediate level teleport or polyself.
Turns 651(1/2)-653(1/2)
After leaving the Aleax and the eel behind (we easily outspeed them
both), we approach the Castle's drawbridge. Typically, speedrunners
would use a musical instrument to play a game of Mastermind against
the drawbridge (which consumes no in-game time), eventually causing it
to open, but we have no musical instrument, and anyway no usable hands
to play it with (musical instruments are typically not designed to be
played by bees). Instead, we just hit it with a force bolt (ever a
useful spell against inanimate objects), causing the drawbridge to
fall into the moat.
Turn 653(2/2)
As we fly toward the drawbridge and into the courtyard, a mysterious
force prevents us from teleporting (the usual message obtained upon
attempts to teleport on a no-teleport level); this was an
un-manipulated triggering of teleportitis, but it has no effect here,
so we can simply ignore it.
Turns 654(1/2)-655(1/2)
Just inside the castle's courtyard, we meet our first of many
soldiers. We happen to be next to a wall so manipulating an instant
kill is trivial. NetHack queen bees can apparently kill more than
once just as well as their real-life counterparts.
Turns 655(2/2)-658(2/2)
We make a beeline across the courtyard (pun intended) and enter a
narrow corridor that leads to the throne room.
Turns 659(1/2)-661(2/2)
As we enter the corridor a number of thrown projectiles miss us
(thanks to luck manipulation), all thrown by enemies we cannot see. A
number of monsters are referred to as "it" as we fly through this
section and are shown on the screen as red numbers such as 1 and 2 (a
consequence of the Orb of Fate's "warning" feature, which locates
nearby monsters and assigns numbers to them according to how dangerous
they are). The full magnitude of how many monsters are nearby should
be more apparent now, but we'll worry about the monsters on the other
side of the wall later. For now, we barrel down the corridor directly
into a soldier who we quickly take out.
Turns 662(1/2)-663(2/2)
A common theme on this level is that we completely ignore corpses and
anything a monster may have been holding before turning green and
immediately keeling over; there are a huge number of items dropped on
this level, but they are typically standard soldier equipment, which
is not useful to a run heavily based around polyself, and which would
clog up our 52 inventory slots if we picked it up (although of course
the weight is irrelevant). We fly over the corpse we just created and
run smack-dab into a gnome mummy. As with the Aleax the gnome mummy
is resistant to poison attacks (being undead), but being in a
corridor, we can't just fly around it like we did before; instead, our
options are to repeatedly sting the gnome mummy with our normal attack
(which would take a very long time), or to ignore the problem by yet
again employing charm monster (which is possibly the most broken spell
in the game, although some we use later arguably compete). Walking to
the right displaces our new pet gnome mummy, and we proceed down the
corridor to meet our next fate.
Turns 664(1/2)-665(2/2)
After oneshotting a couple of soldiers (and manipulating a miss by
another) we approach a xorn that's embedded in the wall (remember the
xorn we came across hundreds of turns earlier, back when we were a
xorn as well?). The xorn may be able to phase through walls, but our
deadly poison quickly creates a xorn corpse in the wall. (It would be
possible to free it from the wall if it were useful for anything, but
there's no reason to bother.)
Turns 666(1/2)-666(2/2)
After taking out another soldier we meet yet another poison-resistant
monster, in the form of a dwarf mummy. Instead of taming it like we
did with the gnome mummy, we instead wait one action to allow turn 666
to end, manipulating a polymorph at the turn boundary. We turn into a
jabberwock (orange J), as the next few enemies on the level are all
poison resistant. Being a Jabberwock isn't as fast as a queen bee
(it's the same speed as our natural, gnomish form), but it's great at
destroying monsters regardless of poison resistance, with probably the
most powerful standard melee attack in the game (it hits four times
per action, for huge damage each time).
Turns 667(1/2)-667(2/2)
We take out the dwarf mummy in one action's worth of attacks, then
move onto the next monster. Note that we got two actions this turn
despite being in a one-action-per-turn form, again exploiting the
turn's delay between a polymorph and its effects on the speed system.
Turn 668
The (guaranteed) liches in the Castle are generally some of the most
dangerous monsters there (knowing a variety of spells, sometimes
including annoying spells like item cursing or armour destruction, and
possibly even instadeaths if the player was at a high enough level
when the level was generated). However, the huge attack power of a
jabberwock makes it look as trivial as many of the other enemies
around here.
Turns 669-670
After the lich, the next monster, the human zombie, is rather easier
in general, but we still manipulate monsters to miss us (or in one
case, hit each other by mistake and miss us that way).
Turn 671
We start hitting a literate lieutenant, triggering a polymorph back
into a queen bee at the turn boundary so we have more actions per turn
to work with. Meanwhile, the lieutenant reads a scroll labeled THARR,
which happens to be a scroll of create monster (and a glass piercer
appears behind the lieutenant as a result); this is not a problem for
us at all, because the created monster just gives us even more things
to kill on our killing spree.
Turns 672(1/1)-673(2/2)
We're easily able to finish off the lieutenant, and the glass piercer
he summons; it apparently also has an adverse reaction when stung with
poison. Meanwhile, the game tells us that the monsters have become
"aware of your presence"; this is actually a result of an offscreen
demilich casting the "aggravate" spell (which locates enemies, even
outside LOS, and causes them to broadcast their location to
surrounding monsters). The result is beneficial to us, as it causes
monsters to tend to come to us rather than us having to chase them.
(Again, notice the wonky actions-in-turn count caused by the
polymorph.)
Turn 674(1/2)-675(2/2)
As we enter the opulent throne room, we meet a disenchanter; it took
an unusually high amount of manipulation, but the disenchanter was
eventually poisoned, followed by a hapless soldier trapped in the
action. At this point it is possible to see a large number of
monsters on either side of the throne room but we'll leave the ones by
the throne itself alone for now. We take some damage from a human
zombie (we ignore it, as we cannot oneshot it and it would waste time
to change form to eliminate it that way, and making it miss proved far
too time-consuming to manipulate in addition to the oneshots), so
instead we turn our focus on a hapless rust monster. These guaranteed
equipment-damaging monsters are very annoying to most NetHack players,
but we avoid any problems with them not merely by killing them
quickly, but by not having any equipment in the first place.
Turn 676(1/2)
We're currently blocked by a purple "4"; this is a demilich, by far
the most powerful monster on the level, as it has a dangerous
repertoire of spells (including the invisibility spell that prevents
us seeing what it is). It's impossible to walk diagonally out of a
door in NetHack; however, we have the "jump" spell memorised from
earlier, so we simply jump diagonally through the doorway to the space
the rust monster had been in (the range is somewhat limited at the
moment due to our lack of practice in escape spells). We still can't
see the demilich, but it uses its weak melee attack to cover us in
frost causing some minor damage, and also casts a spell, making
"monsters appear from nowhere!", giving us even more enemies to kill
for alignment. It must be a rough crowd.
Note that the "jump" spell ends the turn when used; thus, we lose our
second action in turn 676 and go straight to turn 677. This was
deliberate as jumping later in the turn resulted in less favorable
monster movement that kept blocking the square we were jumping to.
Turns 677(1/2)-677(2/2)
It's our turn to do some damage, so we take out the rock troll that
had just been summoned; but we're immediately clobbered by everything
from the demilich's frost attack, to a gnome mummy. This puts us near
to unpolymorph range; we want to change forms anyway, given all the
poison-immune undead nearby, but not unpolymorphing means we get to
carry the two actions per turn over to turn 678. To waste an action
to manipulate a polymorph, we sting the gnome mummy, doing irrelevant
damage but manipulating the random numbers the right way (on a very
jittery level like the Castle, different actions can have a wildly
different impact on the number of wallwalks required to manipulate
something), and polymorph into a jabberwock at the turn boundary.
Turns 678(1/2)-682
Whilst being pummeled from all sides we take out an earth elemental, a
gnome mummy, an "it" we can't see (the demilich, which is spamming
both a regular melee attack and its frost attack), a human zombie, and
a guardian naga hatchling. The amount of damage we take through this
is basically impossible to manipulate away given the cramped
circumstances and huge number of monsters around us, so instead we
manipulate a new polymorph to happen just as the old one wears off
through excessive damage. (We take a small amount of damage in our
gnomish form as this happens, taking us from our max of 8,799 HP to
8,788, an obviously irrelevant injury.) At the end of turn 682, we
turn back into a much faster queen bee, now that the nearby poison-
resistant enemies are gone.
Turn 683(1/1)-684(1/2)
We use our deadly sting to finish off a soldier, and a baluchitherium,
while still taking damage from nearby enemies.
Turns 684(2/2)-685(2/2)
At this point there are still a fair number of enemies that can't be
seen by the viewer, as well as several unidentified enemies; although
taking out monsters "blind" can be impressive, the next portion,
clearing out the barracks, is probably easier to watch with all the
monsters revealed. Thus, we cast our "detect monsters" spell to show
just how much is still left on the level, and to allow the viewers to
watch the next section with full information as to what is happening.
(It was a good time to cast the spell for luck manipulation purposes
as well.) The spell also turns up two adjacent invisible stalkers, and
we quickly ensure that they can stalk us no more. Meanwhile, the
other xorn on this level demonstrates that it's not just players who
can eat rings. Whatever it was planning to do with it probably isn't
nearly as insane as what we've been doing…
Turns 686(1/2)-686(2/2)
The xorn who just ate a ring, despite being out in the open instead of
being embedded in the wall, is just as vulnerable to our deadly poison
as the first one. (It seems we never will get to find out what it was
planning with that ring after all. We can only hope it wasn't
speedrunning…) There's an ettin nearby which meets a similar fate,
leaving this part of the throne room mostly empty, save for an air
elemental that we intentionally leave alone, as it will come in useful
later.
Turns 687(1/2)-688(1/2)
We employ our force bolt spell to blast open the door to a narrow room
that serves as a barracks and is chock full of soldiers, lieutenants,
and various other officers. We're in queen bee form with 12 health as
we step into the threshold of the room and enter the military barracks
which triggers melee and ranged attacks from every soldier that thinks
they can hit us with something. We manipulate them all to miss us,
although several attacks hit the soldiers themselves in the confusion
(and to add to the fun, one of the soliders has a wand of sleep, which
would probably mean near-certain unpolymorph for us if it hit as we
have no sleep resistance).
Turns 688(2/2)-701(1/2)
There are 12 soldiers, 1 lieutenant, 4 sergeants, and one captain in
the upper barracks. To say that what happens here is a slaughter is
an understatement. Knives and daggers are thrown, sleep rays ricochet
around the barracks, short swords are thrust, and military personnel
of all caliber are mown down by a crazed queen bee on a mission of
alignment improvement; throughout the fight, we manipulate every
single attack against us to miss. Some highlights are using a force
bolt at turn 690(1/2) and 694(1/2) to manipulate soldier positions and
damage multiple soldiers at once, a bubbly potion thrown on the enemy
turn at the end of 694(1/2) which we don't bother to name (because we
know what every item in the game is anyway via memory watch; it's an
uncursed potion of paralysis), and the fact that we essentially just
keep going left in a straight line without slowing down.
Turn 701(2/2)
We're now standing knee-deep (rather deeper, in fact, given how short
a bee's legs are) in a pile of 18 corpses (strewn about the barracks)
still with 12 health and a lot of blood on our stinger; but there's
another barracks to clear out. Our alignment is at -135, much better
than it was, but still a long way off from +0 where we need it to be.
Turns 702(1/2)-706(1/2)
The trip to the lower barracks is relatively uneventful, although at
turn 704(1/2) we ignore a poison resistant guardian naga hatchling,
and at turn 705(1/2) we fly one step away from the wall to avoid being
attacked by the air elemental which we want to keep alive for now.
Turn 706(2/2)
As with the other barracks door we use a force bolt to get it out of
the way. Unlike the other barracks, we throw caution to the wind and
allow ourselves to be surrounded by soldiers, just to mix things up a
bit; instead of going for a flawless clearance like we did with the
first barracks, we instead show just how easily we can survive even
hopeless-looking situations like being completely boxed in by
monsters.
Turn 707(1/2)
Also as with the last barracks entrance there is a lot of action as
soon as we step into the doorway. We take some damage at various
points while going through the second barracks, including here.
Turns 707(2/2)-709(1/2)
We exact our revenge for our recent wound by flying into the corner
and commencing a familiar slaughter.
Turn 709(2/2)
We want to be truly surrounded so we opt to jump to the empty space
down and two spaces to our left. This jump might seem implausible,
especially for a bee; given that we're doing it via spellcasting,
"it's magic" seems like a plausible enough explanation, except that
nonmagical jumping sources would allow the same effect.
Turns 710(1/2)-723(2/2)
Now that we're in the thick of things we return to our modus operandi,
which is to say we poison everything in sight. Interesting moments in
this segment include unpolymorphing at turn 711(1/2) and
re-polymorphing into a bee at the end of turn 711 (this causes us to
lose one action on turn 712 as a result of polymorph time system
delay, although this was an acceptable trade-off as it allowed for
better monster manipulation), re-casting detect monsters at turn
719(1/2), and the lack of the soldiers doing anything interesting
(which is to say, anything that the soldiers did that impeded us has
been manipulated away). After clearing out the second barracks, our
alignment is now at -30.
Turns 724(1/2)-728(2/2)
We now follow the lower wall and avoid a couple of boulders that are
thrown at us before reaching and defeating the thrower, a stone giant,
followed by a rock troll who happens to be holding a cream pie for
reasons known only to him. (This item is key to one of the most
powerful glitches in NetHack, an arbitrary memory corruption glitch,
which is not used in this run because it can trivialize basically the
entire game, making nearly all this strategy redundant. We may make a
glitched run that abuses it at some point, but it's hard to work out
the best way to use it.)
Turns 729(1/2)-734(2/2)
Our next target is a troll, then a diagonal jaunt up and to the
right-most wall where we off an ogre, then another diagonal flight up
and to the left to poison another ogre. We step next to a wall to
manipulate a deadly poison attack against a rock troll and last but
not least we sting an ogre lord on turn 734(2/2). (It should be noted
that in all cases where we've wandered away from the wall the luck
manipulation happened a couple of turns ahead of time while we were
still within range of a wall; luck manipulation is theoretically
possible when not adjacent to a wall, but it looks a lot uglier and is
much more timeconsuming in realtime, making it not worthwhile if at
all avoidable.)
Turn 735(1/2)-735(2/2)
Dispatching the ogre lord was the last kill we needed, setting our
alignment exactly back to 0. This means that we now regain the
ability to use the Orb of Fate to levelport, although our luck is
still -7 (-10 with a +3 bump from the orb). The easiest way to reset
our luck is to make a sacrifice to our god, so we turn on autopickup
and step onto a square with a stone giant corpse, picking up a scroll
of light and a scroll of create monster in the process, followed by
walking back next to a wall to allow for easier luck manipulation.
Turn 736(1/2)
We invoke the Orb of Fate which returns us to gnomish form and allows
us to levelport back to our base at level 16. We manipulated a low
Orb of Fate cooldown timeout of 17 here.
Turn 736(2/2)
Now that we're back at a level with an altar, we're faced with a bit
of a dilemma – normally, sacrificing at an altar only regains 1 point
of luck, and we're down many more than that. We solve the conundrum
by praying, manipulating "You feel that Thoth is displeased" after
all of 13 wallwalks (we were struck by lightning, punished, and
otherwise abused with all of the other results we tried); as a result,
Thoth ends up angry with us (an independent axis from alignment and
luck). The amusing side effect of this is that when we mollify him
next turn, we regain all our luck back at once rather than just one
point; it seems unlikely that this was intended as a strategy, but it
is likely too risky to use in a non-TAS game anyway.
Prayer takes some time to take effect. Normally you're protected from
monsters during this time, but with a non-responsive god (in this case
due to negative luck), we're helpless and vulnerable. It doesn't
matter in this case because there are no hostile monsters near anyway.
Turns 739-740
We use Ctrl+T to teleport to the altar and offer the stone giant,
which is enough to mollify our god and reset our luck to 0 with an
additional +3 bonus from the orb. After a massive slaughter we have
finally reversed the effects acquired while gaining the infinite carry
capacity glitch and we're ready to move on.
Turns 741-743
We drop all the statues we picked up almost 100 turns ago, then break
them all with force bolt (which continues to be useful for its ability
to break pretty much any inanimate object that can be broken), and
pick up the 433 rocks the statues broke into, as well as the
spellbooks that were in the statue. We're doing this now because the
spellbooks will come in useful soon; the large amount of manipulation
on this turn was so that the statues would produce a particularly
large number of rocks. (We'll need a very large number of rocks much
later on; 433 is not nearly enough, but it's a start.)
Turn 744
We put on the Eyes of the Overworld for the first time. These have the
following effects: resistance to several magical effects even when
merely carried (this is in general a negative for us, because many of
these effects would be useful); ability to see three spaces through
walls when worn (neutral because we can see things via memory watch,
but helps for entertainment because it makes it easier to see what's
going on); immunity to all forms of blindness when worn (essential to
saving time later on, when we use blind polymorph forms but
nonetheless need to see, and the reason we wished for them in the
first place); immunity to being stunned due to the gaze of Archons
when worn (incredibly tangential, but amusingly, actually becomes
relevant at one point). Additionally, they can be invoked to view
your own stats, but that would be a huge waste of time when we can see
them via savestating, entering debug mode, checking them, and
loadstating again.
However, we didn't put them on now for any of these reasons. Instead,
we exploit the fact that they happen to be (very heavily and
specifically enchanted) lenses, which means that we can use them to
read spellbooks faster. We could have used ordinary lenses for this,
but we had the Eyes handy, so they're more convenient.
Note that we can only use the Eyes at all because we've just fixed our
alignment; they require 2 out of 3 of being a monk, being neutral,
having nonnegative alignment to use. Because we don't satisfy all 3
conditions (we aren't a monk), they do some damage to us when we put
them on.
Turn 745
Having improved our spell-learning ability with the Eyes, we follow up
by obtaining an item with which to improve our spell-casting ability;
we wish for a "blessed robe of a master assassin". This is another
parser abuse; there's no such item as a "robe of a master assassin",
but the game can parse "<item> of <monster name>", as in "tin of blue
jelly", and as such accepts the wish. (The Master Assassin is a boss
who would be fought by certain other characters, but does not appear
if you play as a wizard.)
Turn 746
We wear the (actually perfectly ordinary) robe we just wished for.
Robes reduce spell failure rates when worn; this is used later on, not
only to make luck manipulation easier, but also because it brings the
failure rate for some spells below 100% (thus making it possible
rather than impossible to cast them).
Turns 747-753
We learn the "haste self" spell. We won't use it for a while, but we
wanted the Orb of Fate timeout to have time to run down, and that
spell takes just the right length of time to learn to let us use the
Orb again.
Turn 754
After a huge amount of manipulation, we use the Orb of Fate to
levelport to level 3. We haven't been here before, so this generates
a new level. The Orb's timeout ends up at a mediocre 66, but we were
manipulating something rather more important on this turn: this level
contains a particularly large potion shop. The main reason we need
potions is to, much later on, escape Gehennom and the Dungeons as
quickly as possible after picking up the Amulet of Yendor; a cursed
potion of gain level, in a terrible pun, gains you a dungeon level on
the way up (rather than a character level), and works (75% of the time
due to holding the Amulet) regardless of the properties of the level.
Because there's no faster way to travel, we need a source of gain
level potions; and because there are various ways to transmute potions
into other potions, we need a large supply of potions generally to
transform into them.
Because so much manipulation was required just to generate the level
we wanted, we cannot manipulate a couple of other things we'd like; we
don't end up inside the shop itself (in fact it isn't visible from our
arrival point), and we don't trigger teleportitis to teleport there.
Turn 755
"Hello, wizard! Welcome to Sablja's liquor emporium!" We control-T
teleport into the shop. As a 6 by 8 shop, it has 6 times 7 or 42
squares which sell items, and all but 2 of them are potions (the other
two are mimics, one pretending successfully to be a potion, the other
one whose disguise isn't nearly as good).
Turn 756
We read the scroll of create monster we picked up back in the Castle
(a stone giant was planning to use it against us, but never got the
chance, and we picked it up while picking up the corpse). Here's
where we get to use it; some manipulation causes the scroll to create
a hostile gelatinous cube (cyan 'b'). Gelatinous cubes are quite
strange among monsters; not only do living cubes paralyze on touch
(whether you touching them, or them touching you), but they also
absorb items that they walk over. While organic materials get
digested, gelatinous cubes cannot digest glass, so any potions it
passes over will end up stuck in its body. Our strategy, therefore,
is to speed up the raiding of the shop via allowing the cube to gather
potions at the same time we are, halving the time it will take.
Turn 757
We teleport manually to the northeast corner of the shop (away from
the cube). This not only starts to pick up the potions, but also
helps manipulate the cube's movements. We couldn't trigger
teleportitis last turn because it would be hard to manipulate at the
same time as manipulating the created monster; and doing it manually
lets us cause polymorphitis at the turn boundary. We also end up
feeling hungry because of the nutrition spent in the manual
teleport…
Turns 758-765
…but we don't stay hungry for long! We specify our natural form,
"gnome", leading to another stat randomization, and get two benefits
from it. One benfit is a gain in level (giving us intrinsic warning –
which is redundant to the Orb of Fate's warning ability – and also
increasing our max HP to over ten thousand, a truly staggering health
total). The other is that it resets our nutrition level to midway,
fixing our hunger and allowing us to do more manual teleports in the
turns ahead.
The turn itself is spent starting to read our spellbook of polymorph.
We're reasonably safe inside the shop, with Sablja guarding the
entrance (because we owe him money). While we read, the gelatinous
cube moves towards us, engulfing 4 potions; our character
automatically stops reading when it gets near enough.
Turn 766
We manually teleport to the next corner of the shop, going round
anti-clockwise; the gelatinous cube moves diagonally and engulfs
another potion. We also pick up the potion in the corner while we're
at it. (Because the gelatinous cube has a very strong tendency to
move towards us and will move diagonally if necessary to keep moving
towards us, there's no way to manipulate it to pick up the items in
the far corners of the shop short of digging, so it's easiest to
simply pick up those corner potions ourselves.)
Turns 767-790
We continue to read the spellbook of polymorph; it takes a long time
to memorize, but we're making good use of the turns by getting the
gelatinous cube to multitask for us. While we're busy reading, we
spontaneously teleport around – twice – and eventually end with
another polyself to natural form when the cube catches up with us.
This stretch of book-reading went better than could be hoped, really;
it required very little manipulation (none on turn 767 itself) to get
a result as good as this, although it isn't quite perfect (the cube
misses a couple of potions we'd want it to get).
Turn 791
We start picking up some potions by hand alongside the cube. Although
it might look like the cube could attack us from there (which would
paralyze us and make us lose a lot of time), it's rather slower than
we are even in our natural form, so we can run round it due to gaining
a turn over it just now.
Turns 792-800
We pick up potions alongside the cube (which moves one space for every
two we get). This is mostly just a case of finding a pattern that
both moves us over as many potions as possible, and misses ones that
the cube can pick up behind us. (The white potion four spaces north of
the closing square bracket, which is a badly-hidden mimic, is also a
mimic.) For some added amusement, look at Sablja's compliments to us
as we pick up the potions, ranging from "esteemed" up to "most
renowned and sacred"; he presumably thinks he's going to get a lot of
money from us. He's going to be rather disappointed…
Turn 801
Having no adjacent potions, we teleport up to one of the few remaining
potions, encouraging the cube to go visit them as well.
Turns 802-803
We've almost finished learning to polymorph things; just a few pages
left in the spellbook to read, and a couple of turns left to read
them. At the end of turn 803, before the cube even reaches a potion,
we finish memorizing the spell.
Turns 804-805
Only three potions left to pick up now, too (the white one is a
mimic). We pick up two of them as the cube picks up one, again using
our superior speed to run round it.
Turn 806
We drop all the potions we picked up; for ease of transport, we want
to give them all to the cube. We use Escape to skip the many boring
messages about potions getting dropped, so the message about the cube
touching us (and failing to do anything further, like paralyzing us;
the paralysis attack was luck-manipulated to have no effect) is
skipped.
Turn 807
We walk next to the wall. This is both so that the cube can step onto
and engulf the potions we just dropped, and because we're about to
manipulate an unlikely event on the next turn.
Turn 808
Time to start off with the polymorph spell we just learned. The spell
is a very high level – level 6 – meaning that even as an experienced
level 17 wizard, we're going to have immense trouble casting it, due
to having no skill with matter spells. This is why we're wearing the
robe, which brings its failure rate from 100% down to 91%. Later on
we need to be casting it without access to the robe, so while we're
waiting for the cube to pick up the potions (which also happens on
this turn), we cast the spell at a wall, just for the practice. (The
spell has no effect, because walls cannot be polymorphed.)
Turn 809
More polymorph casting. Again, this is for the practice, but this
time it's also for another purpose too; we cast the spell at the cube,
and it changes from being a gelatinous cube with a huge number of
potions engulfed in its body, to an elf mummy with a huge number of
potions in its backpack. The reasoning behind this is that gelatinous
cubes are acidic, and as such immune to being turned to stone, and we
want to petrify it in the next few turns.
Turn 810
More polymorph practice. This time, just for variety, we cast it at
the ceiling rather than a wall. Naturally, this has no interesting
effect apart from the spell practice.
Turn 811
And one more cast, this time at ourself. The fourth cast of a level 6
spell is enough practice to be able to bring our matter skill up to
basic, although we don't do that immediately because there's no need
to. We choose to turn into a cockatrice; earlier on we used a
cockatrice corpse to turn monsters into stone, this time we're going
to do it directly. The elf mummy, being particularly mindless,
decides to attack us anyway, and turns into stone as soon as it
touches us. Meanwhile, our robe falls onto the floor, because as a
cockatrice we're too small for it to fit.
Turn 813
[Cockatrices are sufficiently slow that we had to skip turn 812.]
We still need the robe, so (after rather more luck manipulation than
is usually necessary – we were particularly unlucky on this turn) we
pick it back up off the floor. (Cockatrices also have a very low
carry capacity, but the antigold is sorting out that problem for us.)
With a manipulated spontaneous polymorph, we turn into a wood nymph,
a polymorph form useful because it has a theft attack, just like a
succubus or incubus. (All three types of nymph are essentially
identical for this purpose, so we picked the one with the shortest
name to make the realtime marginally faster.)
As a note about the making of this run, we didn't continue past this
point for many months, because we'd reached the end of our route plan
up to that point. Instead, we spent our time exhaustively testing a
wide range of endgame possibilities; we greatly improved our emulation
platform in that time as well. As such, the run only continued when
we'd finally decided what we wanted to do and what sort of setup would
be needed in order to speed up the ascension run post-turn-2000. We
also were willing to do things that were much more unlikely and hard
to manipulate past this point, because we had the technology in place
to manipluate it for us.
Turn 815
(We were still in cockatrice form on turn 814, so had to skip that one
too.)
On this turn, we simply pick up the statue full of potions. We don't
need the potions now, and they'd take up most of our 52 inventory
slots if we left them all in separate slots, so carrying them around
inside the statue is the most sensible option. (Containers are often
used in NetHack to save on inventory slots in this fashion. However,
it's very rare to use a statue for this purpose; they're heavy, and
you cannot put items in them once they've been created, nor remove
them without smashing or reanimating the statue.) At the start of the
next turn, a manipulated teleport takes us to the shop entrance.
Turn 816
We close the door of the shop. Amazingly, this requires some luck
manipulation to do; our character isn't particularly strong, nymphs
aren't particularly large, and the door is bulky and prone to
sticking. The reason we do this is that open doors aren't targetable
by most spells (locking-based spells being the exception); the game
assumes that casting a spell at an open doorway is intended to cast
the spell through the doorway, rather than to hit the door. While
this might be intended by most players in most cases, we genuinely
want to hit the door, and so have to waste a turn closing it so that
we can target it.
Turn 817
Were you were trying to guess what we were targeting the door with?
It's our old favourite inanimate-object-destroying-spell, force bolt!
Destroying the shop door is a little random-seeming and apparently
illogical, but it has to do with how the game handles peaceful
monsters (like Sablja). The game gives alignment penalties for
attacking peaceful monsters; in most cases, this doesn't matter, but
we happen to be on 0 alignment exactly, and the Orb of Fate won't work
from negative alignment. In order to pull off a glitch much, much
later in the game (over a thousand turns from now), we need an angry
shopkeeper on dungeon level 1 (specifically, we need the combination
of monster flags "follow across levels" and "speed > 24", and this is
the easiest way we discovered to achieve that); we want to use Sablja
for this, but peaceful shopkeepers won't follow through vertical
teleports, so we need Sablja angry at us first. Teleporting out of
the shop would work eventually, but Sablja would give us some time to
pay first (at least if we were still nearby); and so, the most
time-efficient way to anger him without losing alignment is to destroy
part of his shop, in this case the door.
Sablja's reaction is the intended "How dare you destroy my door!"
(normally shopkeepers give you a chance to pay for the door, but we
can't afford to do that by several hundred million zorkmids), followed
up by attacking us with his wand of striking. (It ends up harmlessly
bouncing off us, due to the Eyes of the Overworld in our inventory
granting us protection from purely magical attacks.)
Turn 818
Now that Sablja is angry, we can attack him without alignment
penalties (even though he was peaceful once). A nymph's attack is a
theft attack that triggers twice per action. The item we need to
steal is Sablja's wand of striking; but stealing from monsters always
steals the item that was most recently added to their inventory first.
Sablja hasn't picked up any items since he was generated, so the items
we steal depend on the details of the monster generation algorithm; in
this case, the first item we steal will always be his scroll of create
monster, and the wand of striking the second. As such, we manipulate
such that we will steal both the scroll and the wand in the same turn.
(The scroll is far from useless, as it happens; even though we're
forced to pick it up, we'll make good use of it later on.) A couple
of seductive smiles (both of which are somewhat unlikely to work,
incidentally), and Sablja hands over his magical items. Then he comes
to his senses again, and hits us four times, draining our nymph-form
hitpoints and making us return to gnomish form. Angry shopkeepers do
not mess around.
Turn 819
After quickly stopping to put skill points into matter (we'll be
polymorphing things again soon), we drop the wand of striking we just
stole; again, this is to make it a targetable object (items in
inventory cannot be targeted by most spells, but items on the floor
can). Sablja hits us twice in response. (If you're wondering about
how Sablja's action timing works: he alternates between acting once
per turn and twice per turn, and can hit us twice per action.)
Turn 820
We never got a chance to put our robe back on; however, with our newly
skilled-up matter school, we can still just about cast polymorph (it's
currently at 90% fail). We need a large number of manipulations both
to make polymorph cast successfully, and to control what the wand
polymorphs into; our intrinsic polymorph control lets us choose our
own polymorph form, but doesn't let us control the polymorphs of other
things.
Turn 821
We pick the polymorphed wand back up again. It's now a zinc wand; our
character doesn't know what the wand is, but TAS tools (specifically,
memory watch) give us that information (we manipulated it to be a wand
of speed monster, which we're going to need shortly).
Turn 822
With the largest amount of manipulation we've needed so far in the run
(around a second in realtime), we drag Sablja up to dungeon level 1
with us. (The Orb of Fate's timeout has just ended; it was 66 when we
arrived on the level all the way back on turn 758, and we've spent 68
turns on the level.) Because there are a bunch of items we haven't
paid for (a huge stack of potions, and a door), this summons the
Keystone Kops, just like it did on dungeon level 2, but just like we
did there, they're left behind on dungeon level 3, too far away to be
relevant (monsters in NetHack cannot leave a level except at two
times: the same time that the player leaves it, or on their own turn;
and monsters don't get turns when there isn't a player on the level).
The manipulation itself was required to land next to a wall at the
same time as keeping the Orb of Fate's timeout low; we'll be needing
it again soon, and the manipulation gave us a particularly low timeout
of 19. (Lower values become ever harder to manipulate; the
distribution of timeouts is utterly bizarre and as such hard to
describe, but it's particularly biased against unusually low values.)
Turns 823-824
At this point, we have to take some care with the random numbers we
line up, because a timeout expires at the turn boundary between 824
and 825. The Wizard of Yendor's harrassment is going to continue for
the rest of the game, given that we've disturbed him.
We manipulate the Wizard into cursing the Book of the Dead (the result
we were hoping for; its blessed/cursed status affects what it does
when read); at the same time, he also curses the Candelabrum of
Invocation (something we could not reasonably manipulate away, but
which will have no effect until much later, by which time we'll easily
be able to fix curse-related issues), and sets the timeout to a
reasonable value of 226 turns.
We're not entirely taking a break from our manipulation of Sablja,
either. Our turns are spent practicing polymorph (randomizing our own
stats in a mostly inconsequential way; we gain two points of Charisma,
one of Dexterity, and lose one of Strength), and wearing the robe,
both actions which improve our polymorphing ability.
Turn 825
Our time spent on dungeon level 1 is going to be heavily about
manipulating movement energy values (basically much the same thing as
manipulating subpixels in a platformer). Sablja has speed 18; as each
action costs 12 movement energy, this is why he alternates between 1
and 2 actions per turn (and likewise, his movement energy reservoir at
the start of the turn is alternating between 18 and 24).
Sablja's movement energy reservoir started at 18 at the start of this
turn. We spend a heavily manipulated turn polymorphing him into a
raven, one of the faster monsters in the game (ravens have a natural
speed of 20); we need Sablja's speed to exceed 24 (for reasons that
will be explained soon), and a high natural speed is needed because
there are limits to how much we can artificially boost speed. The
raven took the least manipulation out of the suitable polyforms.
Sablja spends 12 points with his action (bringing him down to 6), then
gains 20 at the turn boundary, and is now at 26 movement points.
Turn 826
We start to read our cursed Book of the Dead. Reading the Book takes
two actions, but we get knocked out of it after just one by Sablja's
attack. In the process, we manipulate teleportitis to trigger, and
move to a convenient distance from Sablja (who will catch up to us
over the next few turns).
When making this turn, I seem to have been under the impression that
spending one action reading the Book now would save one action later.
It doesn't work out like that, though, so this was probably just a
mistake, if a minor one (the time lost now will make no difference, as
we have to wait for the Quest to open anyway).
Sablja is now at 22 movement points.
Turn 827
We use our wand of wishing to wish for a blessed figurine of an
archon. Amusingly, we're on dungeon level 1, and this is a relatively
common wish to make on dungeon level 1; an archon is typically
considered the best monster in the game to use as an ally, and a
blessed figurine has an 80% chance of turning into an allied monster
when activated. Thus, this is considered standard strategy in
pacifist play, which relies almost entirely on allied monsters to kill
enemy monsters. We're not going to use it for its normal intended
purpose, though.
Sablja is now at 30 movement points.
Turns 828-829
We read the Book of the Dead, completing the read this time. Because
the Book is cursed, it summons undead; in this case, three zombies.
We need it to summon monsters who will follow us between levels; the
zombies' purpose will be to take up space on the Plane of Earth much
later in the game.
Sablja is now at 22 movement points.
Turn 830
We use our blessed archon figurine. However, instead of hitting the
80% chance of an allied archon, we manipulate the 10% chance of a
hostile archon. We're now surrounded by five monsters: three zombies,
the hostile archon, and Sablja the raven (who has only just caught up
to our new location, completing the set). The idea will be that, much
later in the game, we'll drag all five of these monsters to the Plane
of Earth with us (each of which will follow us between level changes;
most are of species who naturally follow, ravens don't follow but
shopkeepers do regardless of species, which is why we needed to
polymorh Sablja rather than using a natural raven). Monsters only
follow if they're adjacent, so we need them to surround a particular
point on the map so that they can all be adjacent to us at once.
Sablja is now at 30 movement points, and the archon at 16 movement
points.
Turns 831-832
Although our plan is to get monsters to follow us to the Plane of
Earth much later in the game, five is actually too many. Thus, we
need to kill or transform one of the monsters surrounding us. Sablja
the raven, and the Archon, both have important roles of their own to
play, so we need to leave them alone; the obvious monster to eliminate
is one of the zombies.
Although we could kill a zombie, we need to waste 2 turns to get all
the movement energies to line up. So we spend the time practicing
polymorph on a zombie. Two turns' worth of polymorphing changes it
into a red mold, a monster that will not follow and will have no
influence on the rest of the run.
Sablja is now at 22 movement points, and the archon at 24 movement
points.
Turns 833-834
We now get to put our zinc wand of speed monster to use. We spend two
actions, zapping first the archon, and then Sablja. This increases
the archon's speed from 16 to 22, and Sablja's from 20 to 27.
(In case you're wondering why we don't just zap ourself and get a ton
of free actions, this is a tradeoff we made in order to keep the run
entertaining; because we have to wait for the Quest to unlock anyway,
we decided to not worry about action economy until near the end of the
run when it was necessary. It makes more sense to use up most of our
time preparing for the Quest unlock, then go straight to the Quest,
than it does to finish all our preparation early and then have to
waste a bunch of time all at once.)
Sablja is now at 33 movement points, and the archon at 32 movement
points.
Turn 835
This is a pretty critical turn, at which our dungeon level 1 setup
comes together. We spend it casting detect monsters; this is for the
benefit of viewers, to allow them to see what is happening. At the
turn boundary, we manipulate a teleport, and teleport to the far end
of the level (any square not adjacent to a monster would do; I chose
this one).
At this point, all our movement point manipulation has finally paid
dividends. Sablja acted twice last turn (33-12*2 = 9 points left),
and gained 27 at turn boundary; Sablja thus has 9+27 = 36 movement
points. In other words, Sablja is about to get a three-action turn
(something that's very rare in NetHack in general, and almost unheard
of among monsters that follow from level to level). This is important
because it means that Sablja will still have two actions left after
following us to the Plane of Earth.
Meanwhile, the archon acted twice last turn (32-12*2 = 8 points left),
and so at speed 22, now has 30 movement points left, meaning it's
about to get a two-action turn. This means the archon will get to act
once after following us to the Plane of Earth. One possible action
for a hostile archon is to summon monsters; the four following
monsters, plus the archon summons, will eventually give us exactly the
number of monsters on Earth we need, with no cost of our own time (all
the monster creation happens on monster turns).
Turn 836
Of course, we're not spending turn 836 on the Plane of Earth, so all
this movement point manipulation might seem pointless. However, it's
time to introduce a speed technique known as "monster charging".
Newly created monsters (including monsters on newly created levels)
normally have 0 movement points, so they won't act until the turn
after you arrive on a level. However, if you leave a level, the
current number of movement points for each monster will be saved, and
those movement points will start to be spent the instant you arrive on
it. Thus, if we leave the level right now, and never come back to it
until the action before entering the Plane of Earth, the monsters will
get to spend most of their actions there (one will be spent here on
level 1 immediately after we arrive, but that's unavoidable).
We can think of these monsters as being "overcharged", because they're
going to get many more actions than normal; a shopkeeper normally
alternates betwen one and two actions per turn, three is far too many.
Charging up the monsters, as seen over the preceding turns, requires
both increasing their speed, and manipulating how many movement points
they have on which turn (a concept that I think of as "movement
phase", after the meaning of the word "phase" in signal processing).
I'd love it if charged-up monsters were surrounded by little lightning
bolt animations, but alas, NetHack's graphics is not up to the job.
Needing to leave the level right now, we have few choices for what we
can do with the turn. Digging through the floor is a traditional
method, but both dungeon levels 2 and 3 are in something of a mess due
to our utter disregard for the normal use of shops. We can't teleport
out with the Orb of Fate because it's still on cooldown (and will be
for another 6 turns). Therefore, we leave using our last remaining
cursed scroll of teleportation, and aim for the previously ungenerated
level 7, spending a huge amount of manipulation to generate a
particularly helpful level. (Why 7? Because the dungeon graph – which
levels connect to which levels – is determined right at the start of
the game, meaning that level 7 is predetermined to contain the branch
to Sokoban.)
Turns 837-838
Over the next few turns, we're going to perform a tricky series of
teleports. One of the squares we need to be standing on currently
contains a door, which isn't normally a valid teleport destination.
One possibility would be to teleport next to the door, open it, then
move to that square (perhaps via turn boundary teleportitis), but that
would be reasonably mundane and is much the same thing as we've been
doing all through the run so far.
There's another option open to us, however: we can polymorph into
something small enough to fit underneath a door, while dropping all
our items (because otherwise the equipment wouldn't fit underneath the
door). For the sake of variety, this is what we do. We need to
unequip and drop all our equipment; we remove the Eyes of the
Overworld manually, and the robe via turn boundary polymorph into a
yellow light (which is amorphous and thus can squeeze under a door),
then drop everything but the antigold and use the turn boundary to
teleport onto a shop door (although it's impossible to see this on the
map right now because yellow lights have no eyes; it'll be visible in
future turns). The shopkeeper, Llanwrst, greets us.
Turn 839
We spend two keystrokes throwing away random numbers by walking into
walls; note that as the walls were previously unseen, they become
visible as a result of walking into them (and so I manipulated on two
different walls to make this more obvious). For people who are
surprised that walking into walls has side effects, this might help
explain why such a major TAS trick as wallwalking ended up being
possible (the action can't be cancelled altogether, it has to be
aborted instead).
We attempt to open inventory, to show off a message that many players
may not have seen ("Not carrying anything except gold"), and also to
clarify what the situation is right now. (Yellow lights have zero
carrying capacity; the only reason we can carry the gold is because it
has negative weight.)
We drop the stack of negative gold underneath the door, and use turn
boundary polymorphitis to show off an amusing programming oversight;
we can change into arbitrary monster forms while still underneath the
door, and nothing bad happens to either us or the door. We need to
pick a form with hands and a nonzero carry capacity (the reason we
changed form in the same place; note that right now, we have no hands
and no carry capacity because we dropped our negative-weight item), so
I chose the largest one available, "storm giant", to make fitting
under the door more amusing.
Turn 840
Now it's time to go shopping. We're only moving two squares to the
first item we want to buy, so it's possible to jump rather than
teleporting. The first item we're buying is a wand of wishing we
manipulated to generate on this level.
Turn 841
The next item we'll buy is a wand of teleportation. (Actually, we're
going to use it even before it's been purchased – something
shopkeepers are OK with so long as you eventually pay – but we're
planning to use it outside the shop too.) It's adjacent, so we can
just walk to it. (With as many movement options as we have available,
it's quite rare for walking to be the best one; we last did it back on
turn 807. Walking and running make up the bulk of most "normal"
NetHack play, though. Note that running isn't normally any faster
than walking (it simply saves on keystrokes by repeatedly walking
until something happens), so it's even less useful in a TAS than
walking is.)
Our character is unfamiliar with wands of teleportation (they haven't
been relevant at any point of the run so far), so it shows up with its
unidentified appearance, which this game is "jeweled wand". As usual,
while making this TAS, we could use TAS tools to determine what items
had what appearances. Memory watch would have worked, but there's an
easier way; by this point, we'd implemented a tool, "Santa mode", that
lets us force NetHack games into debug mode without needing to quit
and resart them, so we could savestate, use Santa mode and the in-game
debug commands to determine the appearance of a wand of teleportation,
then loadstate again to revert the game back to exactly the state it
was in before we entered debug mode. Thus, we get the ability to see
what effect a debug command would have on the game if it were legal,
without actually being able to use debug commands to affect the game,
and the run itself never enters debug mode at any point (which would
invalidate the whole point of the TAS).
Turn 842
And this turn shows off the power of luck manipulation in a TAS in a
clearly visible way. On turn 836 (when this level was generated), we
manipulated not just one wand of wishing in the shop, but two. The
odds of this are pretty low: a wand shop can't be any larger than 20
squares, and each item in such a shop has about a 1 in 222 chance of
being a wand of wishing, so the odds of this happening even given that
such a shop generates are approximately (19*20/2) in (222*222), or
around 0.4% (this formula is approximate, but should be accurate
enough given how much larger 222 is than 1). The shop itself has a
3/7 chance of generating (given a suitable room), and has a 3% chance
of being a wand shop, giving total odds of two wands of wishing on a
level of 0.005% (actually rather worse, because there might not be a
suitable room, and it might be smaller than 20 squares). Technically,
the wands could generate outside a shop, but that's even more
unlikely. In other words, don't expect this to happen in your own
games.
We walk to the wand of wishing, and manipulate a teleport at turn
boundary, moving just a few squares (to the other end of the shop).
It should be clear by now that our character has absolutely no trouble
defeating or otherwise dealing with a shopkeeper if they want to.
Instead, though, we're going to show off a more peaceful way to go
shopping.
Turn 843
Time to show off some simple, if absurd, economics. Any items that
are moved inside a shop, apart from the player dropping them there
intentionally, are considered to belong to the shopkeeper (the
shopkeeper will pay you for them if he can tell that you are
responsible for them being added to the shop's stock, and they're
something that that shopkeeper wants). We use the unpaid wand of
teleport to teleport our stack of negative gold from underneath the
door into the shop as a whole, meaning that the shopkeeper now owns
it. (You can't influence where teleported items end up in NetHack
normally; we used luck manipulation for the purpose.)
Turn 844
First, we change our options; specifically, we need to place more
items on autopickup. We place gold on autopickup so that we can pick
up the negative gold without losing time; also armor and gems, because
we'll be needing those later on in the run and it's convenient to do
it now while the option menu's open.
Then, we manually teleport onto the negative stack of gold.
Shopkeepers normally charge you for gold you pick up in their shops,
but if you have enough store credit, they'll just reduce your store
credit instead (this is an exploit fix to prevent people repeatedly
dropping and picking up the same stack of gold to overflow their debt,
leaving themself with a large amount of credit, because dropping gold
adds to your credit). Our credit of 0 zorkmids is sufficiently large
to cover our purchase of -1073741824 zorkmids. We pick up a pair of
old gloves while we're here (they happened to be on the same square,
and we need autopickup for armour turned on because we're picking up
our robe on the same turn), and trigger teleportitis at the turn
boundary, teleporting to the items we dropped when we entered.
Teleporting out of a shop with unpaid items normally gets you in
trouble, but your store credit can cover for them (in fact, the normal
way to shop with teleportitis is to drop gold first and pick up the
item second). So, as we leave, the shopkeeper cancels our credit to
cover the debt (a little extreme considering the difference in
magnitude), and we pick up all our old items, with the shopkeeper
being entirely happy with the situation.
This sort of thing is why economists normally refuse to consider
negative numbers.
Turn 845
We had to remove the Eyes of the Overworld for the raid on the shop,
but there's no reason not to wear them right now (and their ability to
see through walls is one that we like to keep up when possible because
it makes the run easier to follow), so we put them back on
immediately, and then teleportitis to our next destination, the stairs
to Sokoban. Our character doesn't know where they are, but thanks to
memory watch, we do.
Turn 846
We walk up the stairs into Sokoban. A small amount of manipulation is
used to ensure a good layout.
The "Sokoban" branch is a NetHack-physics recreation of the famous
crate-pushing puzzle game. The rules here are slightly different from
elsewhere in NetHack: many diagonal moves involving boulders are
prohibited, traps can't be escaped, and a wide range of actions
(actions considered to be "cheating at Sokoban") will reduce your
in-game Luck score (much the same way as the difficulty adjustment for
playing on Friday 13 does). As in Sokoban, the goal is to push the
boulders onto particular squares so that you can go to the next level.
Most importantly, though, teleportation doesn't work in Sokoban (you
just remain in place), and the walls are particularly solid and can't
be bypassed by any of the usual means. Additionally, jumping is one
of the actions that causes a Luck score penalty. Therefore, most of
our movement options are disabled, making walking less of a bad idea
than normal.
Turns 847-848
The first two moves of the puzzle solution: we walk towards the
nearest boulder.
Turn 849
And this is the first hint that we aren't planning to solve the puzzle
the normal way. We bring out everyone's favourite inanimate object
destroyer, the force bolt spell, and outright destroy one of the
boulders.
You aren't supposed to do that, and so we incur a Luck penalty
(without even a message; many players consider this to be unfair for
unspoiled players).
Turn 850
(TODO: Explain what boulders look like on the map. I don't know
whether they're 0 or ` with the settings we have.)
So if we aren't solving the puzzle, why are we here? This is the first
hint for what we're planning to do instead. Sokoban is full of
boulders, and we need plenty of rocks later in the run. So the idea
is to raid Sokoban as a ready source of rock. Last turn, we
manipulated the boulder to shatter into an unusually large number of
usable rocks. This turn we walk over to them and pick them up.
Turns 851-852
Same idea as before. Smash a boulder, manipulate a bunch of rocks
from it, then pick up the rocks.
Turn 853
We move further along the puzzle by jumping. There's a penalty for
doing so, but as this is a TAS, we don't care. (It wouldn't have been
particularly useful earlier in the level; we'd have got stuck on
corners.) We've now incurred 3 points of luck penalties.
Turn 854
(TODO: Perhaps we could merge this use of the options menu with the
previous one.)
And now for a technique that blew the mind of at least one NetHack
player when I explained it to them. We open the options menu, and
change the "packorder" option. This rarely used option is typically
considered entirely cosmetic; it changes the order in which items are
sorted in inventory. (We also turn the "confirm" option on at the
same time, because we'll be needing it on soon and it'll save going
into the options menu repeatedly; it won't have any effect right now.)
So why is it useful to change it in a TAS? There are two reasons.
The immediately important one, though, is to help with luck
manipulation. We'll be polymorphing items very soon, and the game
generates random numbers for each item to determine what it changes
into. With a normal understanding of statistics, it doesn't matter
what order the game checks the items in during polymorph, because the
situation is symmetrical; it's just as likely for your dice to roll an
X then a Y as they are to roll a Y then an X. With a TAS, though, we
can check to see which result happens with less manipulation, and then
change the sequence in which items are stored in memory (using the
packorder option) so that the right random numbers hit the right
items. (The other reason won't become clear until later.)
With the items rearranged in memory, we can drop the items we're
planning to polymorph: two rocks and an unlabelled (i.e. blank)
scroll.
Turns 855-856
And now, we polymorph the items, and pick up the resulting items. The
odds of this turn working out were very low: we're trying to polymorph
two item stacks at once, each into a particular new item stack (rocks
to valuable gems, and blank scroll to scroll of identify).
Polymorphing a useless item into a useful one has reduced odds of
working, and because we aren't wearing our robe right now, the
polymorph spell only has 10% odds of working at all.
On top of all that, we only have limited room for manipulation. We've
been watching the sequence of random numbers coming up for a while,
and reasonably soon in the RNG sequence is a very rare sequence of
numbers that we have a particular purpose in mind for. We need to be
mostly done with the raid on Sokoban by then (for reasons that will
become clear later), so we only have a limited supply of random
numbers left. (In fact, we only just had enough RNG headroom to get
this to work; if we'd needed even two more seeds for this
manipulation, we'd have had to rearrange the next several turns to get
all the random numbers affecting the right turns. I'd pretty much
given up getting this strategy to work, but the second-last attempt
was a nice surprise.)
Turn 857
We use our newly-polymorphed scroll of identify (it's unidentified
itself, being given only a randomly generated level, but as usual that
doesn't stop us), using it to identify our newly-polymorphed gems (and
discovering them to be jacinths). Although while making the run, we
knew what the gems were through memory watch, our character didn't
know what they were. Giving up a known-valuable gem is considered to
be more of a sacrifice by the game than giving up an unidentified gem
is (by a factor of 2.5, for the purpose with which we use the gems,
meaning we only need two gems and not 5).
Turn 858
This turn shows another way in which our Sokoban strategy deviates
from normal play. We still have the wand of teleport that we used to
teleport the antigold into the shop, so we can teleport around other
items. In this case, we teleport the boulder to our south (although
there's no immediate visual effect; this seems to be a graphical
glitch in the game, because it goes away if I insert a "redraw"
command). We can't see the square it ended up from where we're
standing, but it's in the row of four pits (blue ^) near the bottom of
the screen.
Turn 859
Just because the main reason we're here is to pick up rocks, that
doesn't mean that we can't do other things too. This is a convenient
time to pick up a pearl ring that generated on the ground (which was
manipulated to generate along with the level), via jumping to its
square. The ring is a ring of conflict, a magical effect that we'll
need much later.
Turns 860-861
A couple more jumps later (bringing our total luck penalty to 6), we
arrive next to the row of pits. The Eyes of the Overworld can see
through boulders the same way they see through walls, so we can now
see that that boulder we teleported has filled one of the four pits at
the bottom of the map.
Turn 862
We push another boulder into a pit. (This particular boulder and pit
generate right next to each other, presumably as a tutorial to let
players know how Sokoban works mechanically.)
Turns 863-864
We teleport another boulder, this time the one to our north, and land
it in the corridor to our west. Unlike the first one, it doesn't land
in a pit; however, because it's right next to a pit, we can just push
it in as we walk along the corridor. Then we move along to the next
square.
Turn 865
This is another point at which we temporarily pause what we're doing
to do something else. This time, we're using the scroll of create
monster (that we stole from Sablja so that his wand of striking would
become a valid steal). We manipulate it to produce a gray unicorn,
which will be important later in the run for multiple reasons.
Turn 866
And here's the first reason. Throwing gems to unicorns adjusts your
luck; if the unicorn shares your alignment (here, we have a neutral
unicorn and a neutral character), the adjustment is always a boost.
If your character knows the gem's identity for certain, this gives the
largest possible boost (+5, cancelling out most of the luck penalties
we've incurred so far).
Unicorns are programmed to try to avoid lining up with you and to
teleport away if you throw a gem at them. The "no teleporting"
restriction in Sokoban affects monsters as well as the player, though,
so the unicorn can't do much to escape other than running (it moves
twice as fast as we do). Interestingly, restrictions against
teleporting don't affect items, and don't affect cases where a player
teleports a monster (if we zapped the wand of teleport at the unicorn,
it'd teleport despite the restrictions).
Turn 867
We teleport another boulder into a pit. This time, it's the boulder
to our north-east, and the more distant remaining pit of what was
originally the group of four.
Turn 868
We push the boulder that we teleported here earlier into the last
remaining pit. Now we can reach the bottom-left corner of the Sokoban
level.
Turn 869
We jump over to that corner. It's now possible to see that there are
two scrolls here. These are scrolls of earth, which generate boulders
when used. The intended use is to fix mistakes made solving Sokoban,
but the main reason we want them is to generate boulders which can be
broken into rocks. (We won't be using them for this purpose
immediately; we won't need the rocks we're collecting until much
later, and breaking boulders is better done outside Sokoban due to
luck penalties.)
Turns 870-876
We spend three moves and four jumps backtracking out of Sokoban; we
now have most of what we came for. We're back up to 6 points of Luck
penalties for "cheating" here. (Strangely, although we've been
cheating like mad with our wand of teleport, the penalties given have
mostly been for fast movement, which doesn't even help solve the
puzzle.)
Turn 877
We push a boulder northwards, thus blocking the unicorn against a
wall. We didn't even have to manipulate the unicorn to move it back
towards the entrance of the level (things just work out really well
sometimes). In its current location, the unicorn can't escape our
line of fire; there are no squares within two spaces of its position
that aren't adjacent to us. It thus decides to stay put instead (and
will do as long as we don't move and it's still trying to escape from
us); this is actually the result of an AI bug that I discovered in
February 2015, which causes the square to our northeast to act as if
it's more favoured for the unicorn than the square to our southeast
due to incorrect handling of ties between squares in the monster AI
code.
Turn 878
We throw the other jacinth stone to the unicorn, thus cancelling out
another 5 points of Luck penalty (putting us back to -1; because we
were at +0 before entering Sokoban, and -1 is where your Luck starts
on Friday 13, we're now back to the same Luck status as at the start
of the game).
Turn 879
It's now time to show off another luck manipulation technique. So
far, when we wanted to discard random numbers, we've nearly always
been walking into walls; in situations where there were no available
wall, we've been doing things in a different order so that different
random numbers hit different actions (e.g. when we were practicing the
detect monster spell while in xorn form). Right now, though, we're
just a few seeds before a sequence of random numbers that give us a
very low-probability event, and we don't have an adjacent wall (and we
can't use the boulder like a wall because giants are large enough to
step over boulders).
The solution is to repeatedly declare attacks on the gray unicorn,
then cancel them. We turned on the "confirm" option, meaning that
we'll be given a chance to cancel an attack on a peaceful monster; and
declaring the attack uses up an RNG seed the same way that walking
into a wall does. Thus, we need only declare and cancel attacks on
the unicorn 11 times (the number of seeds we needed to waste), and the
RNG is in exactly the right place for us, taking no further in-game
time. (Wallwalking manipulation is better than attack-cancel
manipulation because it's much faster in realtime and usually has no
visible effect; but when you don't have a wall, you don't have a
wall.)
We'd been keeping an eye on this RNG location for literally months, at
this point, planning things so that we'd have a spare turn (we do) and
a sufficiently high Luck score (-1 is enough) when the RNG sequence in
question came up. When planning for very highly unlikely events, you
can't manipulate them just by walking into walls; it'd take several
minutes of nothing apparently happening, which tends to bore viewers
and makes for a bad run. Instead, the only real option is to work out
when in the RNG sequence the event will happen, and plan your route
around it.
As for what the unlikely event is? Well, we have plenty of wands of
wishing at this point, so we zap one of them. Our wish is for an
empty chest (I decided to name it Bob, in honour of an infamous
missile tank from Metroid Fusion). The wish parser recognises "empty"
only for tins, not for chests, and so despite the apparent wording of
the wish, the chest comes with contents. In particular, among its
contents is another wand of wishing. In other words, we've managed to
violate the fundamental law of wish conservation in fiction, by
successfully wishing for more wishes. (And this would completely
break the game, were it not for the fact that we've already completely
broken the game). The odds of this happening are not at all good (the
wand of wishing has to be generated completely at random, which is a
0.03% chance for each item in the chest), and they're not helped by
the fact that generating contents for a chest has notable amounts of
RNG jitter (meaning that generating a wand of wishing in a chest takes
longer to manipulate than its probability would suggest).
There's no need to actually open up the chest to look at the wand
right now (we have plenty of wands of wishing in main inventory).
Part of the reason I named the chest is to make it easier to recognise
it as the same chest when we finally use it.
Turn 880
Although the unicorn has served an important purpose for us by
boosting our Luck score (the previous turn wouldn't have worked with a
much lower Luck score, because low Luck causes wands of wishing to
fail), that doesn't mean its job is done yet. We'll be using the
unicorn later on in the run, too. In order to navigate it out of
Sokoban, we'll need it to follow us down the stairs, and because
unicorns don't naturally use stairs, we charm it so that it follows
us. It refunds our jacinths in the process; we'll be able to use them
later on to boost Luck again (although the unicorn would need to be
untamed first).
Also of note is the wood golem (brown apostrophe) in the middle top
area of the level (near the greater-than sign that represents the
stairs down). It moves to the west, apparently inexplicably (given
the monster AI, it should be seeking us out by following our tracks,
and it was adjacent to a square we've been on recently enough that the
tracks are still fresh). The reason for its behaviour is due to an
incorrect optimization in the monster tracking code, whose main effect
is to make monsters move in an apparently unpredictable way (it's
technically predictable and deterministic, but sufficiently complex
that predicting it is a pain) that's manipulated based on the precise
details of your own movements. It's a good thing that the golem's
moving westbound; otherwise, it would get in our way.
Turns 881-882
We move around a little to manipulate the unicorn's movement. The pet
AI is different from the hostile monster AI; in particular, it has a
rather larger random factor, so luck-manipulating it is rather easier.
We take the opportunity to pick up the jacinths while we're here. The
unicorn picks up a cream pie (this is irrelevant to the run, but
mildly amusing, so once it had happened I saw no reason to manipulate
it out).
Turns 883-884
Despite all the excitement with chests and wishes and unicorns, it's
important not to lose sight of the reason we came here. We smash
another boulder and loot the resulting rocks (as usual, the boulder's
luck-manipulated to produce an unusually large number of usable
rocks).
Turns 885-888
This is just leaving Sokoban via the most direct available path
(including one jump). The unicorn has no trouble keeping up, although
it needs a minor amount of manipulation to persuade it to actually do
so.
-_-_-_
Things from this point forward require far more documentation which will happen over time. Beyond turn 888 (the last turn documented in the link above), a new face appears; whereas all turns prior to 888 were done by ais523 and dwangoAC, a NetHack master by the name of ChrisS67 manned the controls for the remainder of the run, technically completing more of the run by turncount in less than 6 hours than ais523 and dwangoAC had in about 6 years of work.
As a brief summary of turns past 888, we prepare an ascension kit, fix alignment, luck, and a few other things, blast through the quest in 3 turns, and manage to completely destroy the planes. More some other time when it isn't 4:00 AM.
Sync notes
Potential improvements
Look no further than the aforementioned
http://nethack4.org/pastebin/new-2003-turn-plan.txt plan for a very detailed path forward to complete the game in far fewer turns than this one does (although it is very likely that a low turncount run will be longer from a realtime perspective due to the extra input required for the extreme luck manipulation that will be used). I have no illusions that this run is perfect; in fact, it is glaringly obvious that the first ~900 turns are very different than the remaining turns in style and goal, but I believe I am justified in saying that any run that literally takes almost 6 years to complete "perfectly" should get at least some leeway in judging. To phrase this another way, my hope is that this run *can* be accepted, but is eventually obsoleted by the 2,003 turn run that we hope to complete within the next couple of years. There is substantial precedent for this on the site that I feel warrants this viewpoint but I will stoicly understand if a judge decides otherwise.
Thanks
First, Ilari deserves extensive credit for his work in making jpc-rr capable of handling spamming keyboard inputs as fast as this run is capable of. The speed TAS work was a concerted effort by a number of #nethack IRC folks in addition to ChrisS67, including stenno and Adeon. In the final movie, only input from ais523, dwangoAC, and ChrisS67 made it into the run, but over the life of this run being developed there were countless others that deserve to be thanked. Finally, thank you to everyone's patience as this task has trudged along, and for everyone who supported me along the way. I never would have learned Python to the level of skill I have now had it not been for so many sessions of help I received, and for that I'm thankful. I'll save the rest of the glurge for the "lowest in-game turncount" run, but seriously all, thanks!
Noxxa: All things considered, I do have to say this is a pretty optimized run. It achieves the goal of spending ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TASing the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime rather well. The first part of the run is particularly well optimized for its goal. The second part is not bad either, considering it still fulfills its goal of having been done in six hours, and its occasional choices of actions (including wishing for a pony just to never use it, among many other things) still fit the goal of focusing mostly but not
entirely on realtime.
So, all in all, this is a pretty optimized run, it has a fair amount of playaround to keep things interesting, and it would be perfect if it were not for a slight little problem. That problem being that "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" is not exactly doing hot as a category.
Reasons for why this is the case are not definitive yet, but some factors that are speculated to be involved include the facts that this is an incredibly arbitrary category, and is only really a mask for the fact that the run's goal switched completely midway through the run, ending up with a run that's far from optimal in both real time and game time; and the speed-TASing segment, while a good attempt, was a visibly rushed effort with a lot of routing errors and mistakes and many instances where it could be better optimized for real time efforts, let alone game time.
So yeah, rejecting because "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" turned out not to be a particularly good category. Better luck with your next, hopefully less arbitrary run!
