During my last blog post about Roguelikes, I mentioned how overwhelmed I was by the sheer amount of stuff there was in Nethack. 3 days ago I decided enough was enough, and finally dipped my toes into that murky, fathomless depth.
Just in time for Junethack!
What's Junethack?
As the name implies, it's an annual Nethack tournament run in June, started in 2011. You play Nethack and its variants for a whole month and try (your best) to gain a few trophies, as well as setting some records here and there.
At the time of writing there are 182 players across 11 servers. Each server holds different Nethack variants so feel free to try them all out.
Why am I participating?
The simplicity of ssh-ing into a server and play from any terminal emulator makes it so that I can use Termux from my phone, plug in my Logitech K400 and play from there on the floor if I feel like it. More importantly however, this competition has just the right amount of motivation I need to finally get into this game, having played a few roguelikes before
... and boy have I died a lot
I did learn a lot of lessons from my 32 games played if you're asking. These includes:
- Eating corpses ASAP to not die from hunger
- Pressing 's' multiple times to search for a door
- Turn 4 deaths are normal as well for new players if you're unlucky
- Nymphs from fountains WILL yoink your shit and cause you to search the whole floor for them
- Kiting enemies so they fling weapons into each other is very convenient (gnome level)
The first bullet was the biggest takeaway from my games, even though it's a gamble if the corpse is rotten and I die 4 turns later from Food Poisoning. If I have to make a graph of all games finished across variants, it would look like this:
That 3,000+ turns you see there was from Slash'EM Extended and was quite the outlier since it's the only game I played of the variant and maybe I was lucky. If we don't count that, then all my games had been 1,000 turns before I inevitably croaked.
Afterwords
This game is addicting and the community is amazing, thanks to the game's maturity. There's something about it that drags me in and I think it's the absolute unknown elements plus the joy of figuring things out on my own (I'm not going to look at the wiki every time I die). Watching the others play the game is also fun, and even though I might get spoiled, I only look at their playing habits and absorb them for my next playthroughs.
Current Ascensions: 0
Here's a .gif for your entertainment:
Miscellaneous
There's another thing that I wanted to try out, and that is recording my terminal sessions and uploading it here on the blog. So far asciinema seemed pretty okay and is the most convenient. However, embedding it onto the page is a steaming piece of shit, only because Notion doesn't show embedded .casts. I have to manually edit the .html files every day and that's fine, but I want to make things a little bit more efficient.