From the release notes: "Parchment and vellum are made from animal skin so change material composition and color for spellbooks with those descriptions from paper to leather; eating those books now breaks vegetarian conduct" (emphasis mine)
There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.
Caves of Qud[1] is an amazing continuation of the NetHack/DF tradition in a modern game: incredible depth and attention to detail not only in it's mechanics and rules, but also in it's coherent worldbuilding and dialogue. It's also got a really great interface and cool, ZX Spectrum like graphics. The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).
Caves of Qud is still in active development, and available on Steam. If you do get it, make sure to go into the menus and enable the experimental UI if you want to see how awesome a Roguelike interface could be if it used graphics.
Also, if you're like me disable Permadeath in the debug menu, the first village you start at is the only non-procedurally-generated village in the game, so if I you don't want to retraverse it over and over, you need savegames.
Play Truekin. They're the best "meta" class; mutants are essentially hardcore mode. Truekins have higher base stats and won't aggro Templar when encountering them. I play with the same Ibul Praetorian build (code "AGOPPOHG11") exclusively, which I think is the easiest base class of the truekin classes. I named it Roland, after the Borderlands char. :3 (Ironically, though, I never use Deploy Turret; it's not that good outside of killholes.)
(As IRL) I only got as far as I have because this build is so inherently great: you start with great gear, a sweet desert rifle, you got blocking and sword skills for when the enemy closes in, and I take a focus on tinkering, which is one the most interesting gameplay aspects and quite powerful if you're smart/lucky (find good schematics and can afford them).
Red Rock and the Rust Wells should be a breeze with it. On other classes, they can be nightmarish.
Also, another tip: there's a convenient shortcut to Red Rock somewhere in Joppa. ;3 (I didn't discover this until embarrassingly recently.)
This is hands down the best way to play CoQ. And it really speaks a lot to the depth of the game that you can play the whole thing hopping from mind-controlled character to mind-controlled character and the gameplay just adapts...
I find Caves of Qud to be an especially good foreground for music. (Or background?) Its character of visuals and storytelling is somehow both strongly stylized and sparse. Serves as blank slate but also stimulates. Music resonates especially well with it I find. Impact of both game and music are multiplied.
Agreed! I was going to mention the music but I know some people hate it so I figured mentioning it wouldn't really strengthen my case (:. Personally I think the very unique, heavily stylized art and music (especially the latter) add so much to the game. Plus, the dialog is actually really embedded in the world.
I find that games that have that amazing intricacy are often passion projects by one developer or a very small team and have been in development for a long time, often decades. Besides NetHack and Dwarf Fortress, I would highly recommend Factorio to anyone with an interest in any kind of engineering and Aurora 4x to anyone who played Stellaris or other space 4x but wants an insane amount of complexity
Love those games too. Rimworld is the latest in my opinion. All the fun of Factorio and Dwarf Fortress plus a fairly good UI and space faring feel. Wasted/played too many hours. Make sure to use mods too. On steam.
Personally, I could never get into rimworld because I didn't know what to do. Never /really/ got into DF either, but despite the awful UI it seemed much more like something that could really suck you in, that was really engrossing and fun to play.
I'm going to mention "Oxygen not included" which I believe is by the same people as "Don't Starve". Power, gas and liquid flow has to be regulated across your entire base and it always eventually gets out of hand a bit like Dwarf Fortress. Either you run out of oxygen or are drowning in CO2 or Natural Gas, or your power sources are consumed before you can harness another one and everything grinds to a halt.
> In Nethack, I’ve polymorphed myself into a cockatrice, layed cockatrice eggs, polymorphed back, picked them up (with gloves on) and used them as hand grenades of petrification.
> And to complete the chain of "the dev team thinks of everything": There's a luck penalty for breaking eggs you laid.
> The number of ways you can solve any specific problem is just ridiculous. I also love that a lot of them are pun based. (i.e., to make a quick escape you could drink a cursed potion of gain level, which will cause you to float up through the ceiling to the previous dungeon level instead of increasing your experience level, or removing cursed levitation boots by floating over a sink - which causes you to sink to the ground).
Nethack was the first large C codebase I ever got familiar with / tinkered with, and honestly I think it did some damage.
I mean it's great for what it is -- an organic codebase that evolved over decades (so there's a lot of performance/memory optimizations that make the code somewhat less clear like a lot of bitwise operations) and targeted a dizzying array of platforms (so there's a million #ifdefs that you have to climb through, many of them nested) and also compilers (so there's a legacy of really short file and function names that decrease clarity as well).
The attention to details is truly inspiring. But as a codebase, it's a mess.
On the other hand, Brogue [0]'s code is very clear and enjoyable to read.
Succubus/incubus seduction might result in loss of levitation which in turn could drop the hero onto a trap that transports him/her elsewhere; seduction was proceeding as if nothing unusual had happened
That's just crazy! Wear ring/boots of levitation over a teleport trap and let the succubus remove them for you. Who does this?! Love it.
I used to love playing NetHack and ascended multiple times. Sometimes I wish DCSS hadn't ruined NetHack's UX for me. I'd love to see NetHack reimagined with a friendly UI on-par with DCSS and other modern roguelikes.
I'm in the same boat (although I never managed to ascend in nethack). DCSS is really a great game with stellar design and UX. I think the problems with NH go beyond the UX, it's the whole balance and progression that's clunky. In particular a lot of very important mechanics are very difficult to figure out without reading spoilers. Simply figuring out what cursed items do and how to get rid of the curse is rather complicated. Meanwhile in DCSS it's extremely simplified, IMO for the best.
If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).
DCSS suffers from the "Star Trek hallway" problem. In ST:TNG, many episodes feature officers striding through hallways determinedly while not advancing the plot at all.
Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways.
Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect.
But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).
DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much.
When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.).
An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.
Nethack, among other games, has inspired my try at the dungeon crawler RPG that I work on during my free-time. But, I must admit, the code's not very good...
Nethack 4 is explicitly not an official successor project, and in fact the developer of NH4 has joined the original Nethack dev team to port interface improvements.
If they weren't dumb, either there'd have to be great care taken to make sure dumb != harder, or I'm not sure how people would win. There are better players than me, but I'm not terrible, and especially since Elbereth got nerfed (then thankfully only semi-nerfed), I'd bet I'm getting out of the early game an average of only 1 in 5 times (and ascending only half of those).
It's not as if I want them to be smarter and harder, but levels like The Castle are simply a pile of completely different and unrelated monsters with a single objective: to destroy you!
But I don't know what a different implementation would look like.
It was developed by multiple people "hacking" on it over the "net", back when "the net" was far from being ubiquitous, and so using it for collaborative software development was still special.
Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
Sorry about that. I was much more sure about the "net" part than the "hack" part, but then the wiki kind of seemed to confirm my guess about why the original "Hack" was called as such: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
Haven’t played in awhile, but have been trying to ascend for over 12 years at this point. Best game ever, imo. Should really try again sometimes. The android app is really good but the IPhone one sucks, tempted to switch back to android for that reason alone..
I personally think the android ports of nethack and unnethack are probably the gold standard for what porting an old roguleike to touch ui should be.
Everything about them is extrememly intuitive. The movement works perfectly and the context bar and quick popup keyboard make playing almost quicker than on pc for me. Plus, there's the whole, nethack in your pocket bonus.
I've tried ports of angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead for android and found angband and DCSS to be totally unplayable. CDDA was playable, but kind of clunky and awkward and not very fun in the end.
Highly recommend anyone into roguelikes give the android port of nethack a go.
I've been playing Cataclysm DDA on Android for last two years. It's clunky and awkward, but for me it's still the best game on platform. It's the only mobile game that managed to keep me hooked for months.
One thing that's even better than the desktop version is the amount of immersion. You play out this character's life in post-apocalyptic world. You get to make choices for him: what items to collect and leave, what to craft and cook, what to eat and drink to get necessary vitamins & minerals, how to dresses for each season, how to recover from injuries and sticky situations, how to maintain and upgrade a vehicle, how to learn skills necessary to survive... and it's a turn-based simulation. When you are interrupted by RL, you just put the app to background and forget about it for hours or days. Then you start the game again and your character is still where he was, waiting for your choice on what to do next. It's incredible to be able to have something like this in your pocket. A simplistic but still immersive simulation of reality where you can lead a second life.
As a bonus you get to pick up basic knowledge on wide range of topics, from item descriptions and craft recipes - chemistry, medicine, farming, ancient and modern weaponry, car mechanics, survival in the wild...
One word of advice - turn off all enemies when you are starting out, and focus on interacting with the game and its rich world.
How easy is it to learn/remember what all the keys do? I've tried nethack a few times, and had a very... Dwarf-Fortress like experience, in that I had no idea how to accomplish anything via the opaque UI.
I'm not sure how long exactly. I played with the wiki open for a fair bit. The help in nethack is pretty descriptive for keys. You end up remembering the ones you use the most pretty quickly. Some of the more obscure ones I forget.
Something about the complexity of the controls is part of the charm for me though. Suddenly you remember you can do something you totally forgot about and it changes the way you play the game. Or you reach some kind of understanding about one of the mechanics that just makes it part of your play style.
I've played a lot of different roguelikes, nethack and its variants are some of the few I still get that feeling of discovery from, despite playing it for years, scouring spoilers and even looking at parts of the source for fun.
It's easier than learning vim, that's for sure. Try following the guide from the wiki at first. [0] After a while you'll be navigating the UI subconsciously. Don't be fooled by this though, the game itself is quite unforgiving if you don't know the mechanics and aren't thinking ahead.
I think pathos fit the bill better, even if it's a simplified nethack, precisely because a popup keyboard is not a central part of the gameplay experience
I've got pathos, I could be wrong but I think it was designed for mobile originally wasn't it and only based on nethack's rules not a port of the original?
I was referring more to roguelikes originally designed for keyboards and adapted to touch ui rather than ones designed around it from the beginning.
Just for a game with the complexity of nethack, that expects a full keyboard full of controls(with modifier keys), originally designed around a bare terminal, they found a particularly efficient and intuitive(for me at least) solution, especially compared to other ports i've played.
I once made it to Sokoban.. didn't get through it. Been playing on-and-off since 1996. Sometimes I wonder if I live my gaming life as a warning to others.
There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.