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copperwater edited this page May 27, 2023 · 2 revisions

This list is for features that were marked for potential inclusion at one point, but then second thoughts were had about including them in xNetHack.

The main reason for this is because it's easy to think an idea is cool and throw it on the list when reviewing the idea, and only later come back with the context of whether it's appropriate for the variant. Thus, there are a number of ideas here which would be fine in a kitchen-sink variant or even vanilla, but don't really belong in xNetHack.

  • fourk rename little dog to puppy (a9b2127)
  • L's Spell of Clairvoyance patch: can be centered anywhere on the level
  • alignment quests? chaotic -> mission, kill lawful boss; lawful -> mission, kill chaotic boss; neutral -> both bosses are fighting and you have to stop it
  • Grunt's Engulfing Suffocation Attack (but make sure to fix tele bug!)
    • Implemented once and then reverted for the time being.
    • luxidream points out that if water elementals get this they can drag the player to their doom on the Plane of Water, forcing you to wear MB.
    • When this is revisited, consider changing the system not to require an active suffocation attack: instead make the engulf deal no damage, and you become strangled simply by being inside certain types of enemy
    • Revisiting with an eye towards reintroducing water E suffocation attack (not necessarily gelcubes): that's what makes the plane of water dangerous, yo
  • Ring of clairvoyance patch (bilious 346) (SAVEBREAK)
  • evilhack dragonbane gauntlets
  • evilhack/grunthack dragon engulfing
  • nethack:TNG artifact that is a red dragon scale mail and can be invoked for dragonbreath
    • Would have to be a set of red dragon scales, post dtsund-DSM
  • evilhack gold dragon (91977c1) (SAVEBREAK)
  • Golems can't be healed by healing spells.
    • booted back onto the list, is the flavor-only justification really strong enough for a pure gameplay nerf?
  • Dwarves don't dig walls either anywhere on the Minetown level, or within the town area
    • It can lead to some interesting situations to have them dig up the town. Not necessarily a bad thing.
  • splicehack teetotal conduct (08976fb) SAVEBREAK
    • Currently, drinking booze has extremely marginal benefits at best, so it's not entirely clear that this conduct would be meaningful.
  • evilhack better feedback for monster figurine use (bf2622c)
    • xnethack doesn't allow monsters to use figurines, probably because it deprives the player of useful loot for the sake of monsters being able to, effectively, proc a single monster generation at will.
  • fourk tie starting alignment record to player alignment (dddb927)
  • fourk make general stores guaranteed in minetown
    • contradicts vanilla's philosophy regarding orctown and guaranteed stuff is boring
  • fourk consolidate stone giant into giant (3101f4f)
    • for some reason deleting vanilla monsters is highly unpopular...
  • fourk apply names to bigroom variants (2417e31)
    • not much xnh stuff focuses on big room, and no multiple developers means it's unlikely this would mean much
  • fourk make asmo OR baalz and yeen OR dispater lairs (26b145b)
    • might be nice to have more demon lair levels
  • fourk make max alignment 100 and min -100
  • fourk monsters that can find targets via scent (840acd8, 1aca983)
    • I'd ideally want this to be symmetric and that seems like way too much work
  • fourk conducts:
    • unihorn-less (50544ff)
    • invisibleless? (7cdeea1)
    • fountainless, sinkless, magical-potion-less? (1932425)
    • reflectionless? (bbc5a00)
    • ultimately, ones that can be broken by random use/wear-testing won't make it in. then again I did this already with conflictless
  • fourk make magic mapping not show up regular ROOM tiles (f8ceeb7)
    • problem: levels that have room tiles right next to rock
  • evilhack monster jumping and waterwalking (0baf593)
    • no monsters will be able to do these by default. they would only be able to by wearing the right boots in rare cases. is it worth it?
  • evilhack/splicehack nightmare (eh 0085e96) (SAVEBREAK)
    • dark knights aren't planned, so nightmares have less of a point.
  • #1997: When a crysknife leaves your inventory, it starts a timer with 10-50 turns. The timer is canceled if it reenters your inventory. If the timer times out on an unfixed crysknife, it reverts to a worm tooth; if a fixed one times out, it loses one point of enchantment and restarts the timer, or if it's at +0 it reverts to a worm tooth.
    • very complicated. and do we REALLY wanna mess with timers?
  • wand of nothing base cost should go up to a higher tier since it's more useful now
  • fourk gnomes can't wear body armor (7dabb4c)
  • Jafet DYWYPISI? patch (fourk commit 0079b15, 3ad8dde)
    • this is a lot of formatty code that will probably cause a lot of vanilla merge conflicts. not a priority
  • fourk new bigrooms from bingehack (???) (5b01d91)
    • bigrooms are passe and themed rooms are the new hot thing
  • fourk more castles (2934f43, 5cc8c76)
  • fourk jitterbug commit message (reasoning, not the jitterbug itself) (early game could do with a speedy but weak monster)
    • however, iffy on this - the early game monster assortment is fairly diverse already, and it's the rest of the game that needs niches filled.
  • fourk tweak throne vanish probs (880fba7)
  • fourk benches
    • probably needs additional tweaks (see todo.txt). Too unsure about them in their current form allowing basically on-level stair dancing.
  • make Dragonbane the first sacrifice gift for Kni (iffy)
  • fourk garden of temptation and Khortown (4ec5059, d15c635, 8f78831)
    • this wasn't designed for xnethack, so it doesn't really fit into my model of the desired dungeon layout. If I did do the Garden of Temptation as a Gehennom level, it would probably want to grab Malcanthet from Splice.
  • paxed's Gem Power patch (bilious 10)
    • thinking of going a different direction with gems: charged gems that can transfer charges.
    • This was filed as 'wait on that coming up first', but there are currently no plans for either idea.
  • show exact nutrition in ^X screen
    • Not everything you can eat in the game has a perfectly known nutrition value (tins of spinach come to mind).
    • The argument against that is that you have a good idea of how your stomach feels.
  • fourk/fiq auto ID of weapon enchantment on hit (78bddba)
    • problematic with stacks of thrown weapons (1750c38)
    • the thrown weapon bit is refactor-heavy, a bunch of the hmon functions need a new argument.
  • fourk mjollnir never lands at enemy feet (6115d31)
    • considered this, and I think it's a fair drawback of the weapon, especially after playing through splice with gungnir.
  • fourk blessed boosts light range (blessed lamp is rad 4, blessed candle rad 3, etc) (ee5d22b)
    • rad 4 is a lot
  • fourk give humans a potion of oil to start (d8987a9)
    • The humans that you usually end up fighting are soldiers, and they come in large groups. It'd be uncommon to obtain a shopkeeper's or priest's potion of oil. Meanwhile if 1/13 of soldiers get oil, the player suddenly gains a lot more oil that they don't really need. Oil can't be diluted down for water in xnh, but it can still be polypiled. Maybe it should be given to a small fraction of gnomes?
  • unnethack make confused gold detect show a random obj class
    • while this makes sense by itself, it wrecks planes strategy
  • unnethack autoexplore (9d6579, 2139d8, 36c906, 7961d0, 92300, f66cc)
    • vanilla has psuedo-autoexplore via _x. so an unnethack-style implementation is deferred for now to see if vanilla expands on it
  • unnethack wand of nothing + gain ability = random wand (262b2)
    • needs to break polyless, and implementation can be better (mkobj WAND_CLASS psuedo obj then set type of obj), this will also fix wand of wishing being possible
    • my own comment on bilious: incentivizes dipping every wand into every potion in the hope of the right combo
  • unnethack tou gets free id of everything for sale in a shop (e7ad4)
    • I'm not sure tourists need more buffs, and this is somewhat inconsistent flavor-wise with them being ignorant of dungeon stuff
  • unnethack kobold/elf grudge (3491e8)
    • not enough flavor backing this up, most players don't expect elves to hate kobolds
  • look at clarent patch (bilious 278) - un preserves the embedding in stone behavior for excal instead
    • meh. we don't need more artifact swords really, the embedding in stone and digging is entirely for flavor and isn't worth the added complexity, not a ton of mythological backing, and is rather too powerful. Still, its pet effects of showing pets when invoked and increasing tameness are interesting for a possible other artifact more amenable to a pet friendly role like healer.
  • unnethack no Pw gain for leveling tourists (c221d)
    • pretty sharp nerf without much else to justify it
  • unnethack make 1% of oracle monster gen special cased (6b1eb, c27ff, 00cf6)
    • un's implementation relies on its system for special cased monster gen rules which xnh lacks; this would be either difficult or inflexible to do without porting over that system.
  • whetstone patch (bilious 34)
    • Does this really add a ton to the game? Fixing rusted weapons and restoring them to +0 is not really relevant past the early game, and putting a time penalty and restriction to water on it doesn't help either.
  • Autobag option which can be configured to automatically insert certain items (maybe just object classes) into your primary container.
    • Original idea was to do this in 1 turn, but... no. Maybe using the m command before , will prevent the insertion into container.
    • This is a somewhat popular request, but there isn't enough consensus on how it should behave
  • Some "new stuff" that doesn't have anything against it really, but is against xnh's practice of adding minimal new stuff, and the benefits of this particular new stuff are not clearly worth adding new stuff:
    • Everything here is SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE
    • boots of free action (Red kangaroo) (SAVEBREAK)
    • Helm of teleport control (Red kangaroo) (SAVEBREAK)
    • Swimsuit that grants swimming when worn (Red kangaroo) (SAVEBREAK)
    • Malcolm Ryan lenses patch (bilious 82; on archive.org)
      • lense types: searching, see invisible, accuracy, warning, infravision, darkness
      • lenses of sight are a little better than see invis: that plus revealing cloaked mimics
    • Malcolm Ryan mirror of entrapment patch (bilious 90; on archive.org)
    • ring of hallucination (Red kangaroo)
    • Fossils discoverable buried randomly in rock. Are brown ROCK_CLASS objects rather than gem types. Archeologists get bonuses for finding or retrieving them. (SAVEBREAK, and new tile)
    • Ring of clarity which prevents confusion
      • This may be surprisingly non-trivial.
    • 90% cursed ring of hallucination
      • May have unforeseen wrinkles with extrinsic hallucination
    • ring of light, chargeable, light in radius equal to enchantment. negative creats darkness radius.
      • radius of darkness is EXTREMELY non-trivial
    • Amulet versus teleportation: blocks teleportation for just you if cursed, blocks in a radius of 1 or 2 around you if uncursed/blessed. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • Ring that keeps you at 1 HP if you would go below it, but explodes in the process. Procs before "You die...", so not like life saving. Doesn't affect non-HP-based deaths.
      • This would require some unification of 'u.uhp -= X' code as there are several code paths which don't go through losehp
    • spell of recall ammo: a spell that magically fetches anything that'd be picked up by pickup_thrown. Should scale with skill: probably by radius but perhaps by max weight or quantity. Invoking the Longbow should also do this. Not too happy with how it requires one to be a spellcaster.
    • unnethack rings of gain int/wis/dex (ee9dde4)
    • #1864: Dowsing rod: chargeable magical tool that when applied tells you the total value of all gold and gems on the level that isn't being carried by the player (but not their locations), and whether there are any artifacts on the level that are not carried by the player.
    • #1870: Boots of earthquake: when you stomp the ground with them (by kicking downward), an earthquake happens. However, this spends 1 point of enchantment on the boots (not going below 0; if they are 0 or less then no earthquake happens.)
    • #1871: Gloves of fortune, which unlike SporkHack cause killed monsters to drop d10 gold pieces that didn't previously exist, and rarely a gem.
    • #3856: Siren, a straightforward implementation of the ones in mythology. If you are within a certain range, you automatically move towards them at the end of your turn. You are protected if you are blind AND deaf AND not telepathic (telepathy overrides the protection of being blind and deaf, and in fact makes the pull even worse due to its heightened awareness).
    • #3864: Ring of clarity, which makes you immune to confusion when wearing it. If you happen to eat it, it will cure any temporary confusion you have.
    • #3875: Ring of quick change, which decreases the amount of time needed to put on and take off gear. This could be a chargeable ring, which makes the decrease proportional to its enchantment (and a negatively charged ring making gear changes take more time). If implemented as non-chargeable, gear changes would most likely take a constant 1 or 0 turns. One side effect of wearing this is that nymphs that charm you into taking off armor get fewer or no turns to make additional thefts while you are disrobing
    • .#4190: Red light, a red y that has an explosion attack that causes paralysis. This is a reference to red lights in real life making you stop.
    • #4191: Angering peaceful monsters by casting an innocuous spell like light is very annoying, so split the spell up into a "light area" spell, which does not damage anything unless it's a highly light-sensitive monster like a gremlin, and a "light blast" or "flash" attack spell, which may or may not light the area permanently and is designed to blind monsters.
  • delete elvenhelm_materials, have them just use leather_materials
    • But elven helms made of copper/wood make more sense than being made of plastic or cloth...
  • fourk force peacefuls in sokoban to generate hostile (ead3094)
    • weird interaction with peaceful unicorns. could add them as an exception. also, don't want to use M2_NASTY; instead use is_nasty
    • limbo'd because there's no flavor basis and I don't want to deal with carving out special cases
  • With lower skill in twoweapon, you have a lower chance of even trying to attack with the offhand weapon. If you don't, you aren't charged the to-hit penalty for twoweaponing.
    • This doesn't seem like a great thing; it could be frustrating to want to hit with two weapons but your character doesn't listen
  • System shock loses 10% of current and total maxHP, and can no longer kill outright. Maybe randomize that 10% a bit.
    • not enough of an obvious problem to fix here?
  • Remove gold from zoos; instead put in some other benefit that makes more flavor sense with zoos, perhaps regarding taming.
    • Not a high priority in any case, but there don't seem to be any good ideas for the replacement for gold.
  • Allow teleporting of dungeon features like sinks, headstones, and fountains. Only by hitting with downward teleport beam. No altars.
    • meh
  • Add 'charmed' field to struct dog, which tracks a charm effect. Counts down until it untames (or is implemented as a turn # on which it'll untame)
    • If pulled out of limbo at some point, this should come with making taming easier, since it is a pretty huge nerf to taming.
  • dnh library rooms with books embedded in the walls
    • only very small rooms
    • need to be able to directional #loot books out of a library wall (and no other cases)
    • This is of questionable value; handing the player several free spellbooks with no cost is not a great idea
  • fourk don't allow hitting self with mjollnir (252af63)
    • This was a very tough decision, but ultimately mjollnir has a lot of buffs already, with one drawback of being two-handed. Allowing it to bash enemies at range infinitely with no drawbacks is too good, and makes for less interesting strategic decisions.
  • aligned priests swap 1-2 spellbooks for an equal number of holy waters (unholy if moloch)
    • Practically guaranteeing holy water (and definitely guaranteeing unholy) doesn't sound like that great an idea.
  • sleep spell only sleeps up to (your XL in HD) of monsters
    • This seems like it could be tough to implement properly.
  • fuzz sacrifice difficulties
  • blow up wand of cancellation / second boh but leave boh that things are getting placed into intact
    • At the moment, vanilla's bohsplosion behavior is suitable.
  • ring of conflict chargeable radius, wearing two rings of conflict stacks the effects (and hunger)
  • give monsters their own XP counters rather than 1 XP per kill
    • Doesn't really have a feature attached that would be worth doing.
  • polearm autoattack from 2 squares away (while wielded, towards hostile monster only, works for diagonals if Expert, doesn't happen if m-prefixed)
  • fourk jewelry and containerless conducts (50544ff)
    • Not sure if anyone is really going to attempt these.
  • some way to use a ring of hunger to instantly drain hunger (invoke? maybe just takes a chunk when put on? though that is abusable)
    • Too easily abusable.
  • unnethack/DOD litmus patch (id acid with lichen corpse) (2d458, f48cc)
    • this seems like you'd want to dip lichen in everything in case it's acid, which isn't good gameplay. but maybe it's marginal enough that only the most neurotic of players would obsess over it
  • chameleons only turn into monsters that currently exist on the level
    • this would probably make them fairly boring. they'd mostly become popcorn
  • soldiers have effective buffs to AC, to-hit, and damage when adjacent to other soldiers (not sure how complex that formula should be, also don't want to encourage chokepointing)
    • This seems like it would directly encourage chokepointing and divide-and-conquer tactics, which are already the way to fight soldiers. the proper fix is for soldier AI to not allow them to get divided.
  • there should be another item granting extrinsic see invisible
    • The scarcity and need to use up a ring slot is probably BUSO
  • H monsters can "swim" in deep water spaces adjacent to walkable terrain; they still will sink in water not adjacent to any walkable spaces.
    • seems like a SMOP
  • god tries to get a HoOA off your head while on the astral plane (evilhack 0401bf272, but envisioned implementation is if you just put one on in Astral, they smite it off your head with 50% probability; otherwise your new god blocks them)
    • Not certain that "ascended in dishonor" isn't doing its job just fine
  • autocursing armor always generates cursed
    • seems like it removes a bit of extra depth in the game. if you are sure anything that's curse tested is safe to wear, then that's more boring. it remains a little interesting if you can find a noncursed helm in the shop and still be taking a risk by wearing it.
  • port FIQHack zombie revival not happening much unless there's an alive zombie in the area
    • With recent zombie changes, this may not be needed so much now.
  • add a M3_TELWITHU flag; monsters that have it (quantum mechanics, some devils) will teleport along with you if you teleport while next to them and they are hostile. (Not levelport; just teleport.)
  • make Vorpal Blade do extremely high crits instead of decapitation (it now "goes snicker-snack" when it does so)
  • #685: Metal wands and rings never explode due to shock damage.
  • #678: If you have teleport control, quantum mechanics' attacks toggle your speed instead of giving you a free controlled teleport.
  • #859: Float stone, a gray stone which has negative weight. Non-stacking, and rare. If you get enough float stones to more than cancel out your own weight and the weight of any possessions you're carrying, you levitate. Possibly doesn't work when put into containers. May gain positive weight when cursed, or greater negative weight when blessed.
    • probably bug prone but fun! but too bug prone for too little benefit
  • #880: Make most if not all rings chargeable:
    • Hunger / slow digestion: (this is elsewhere in the backlog)
    • Stealth works in a radius / makes monsters have to roll higher to detect you.
    • Warning increases or decreases its regular radius.
    • Aggravate monster works in a radius, or affects monsters' rolls for being aggravated.
    • Invisibility / see invisible: work in a radius, possibly.
    • Searching: radius or have it affect your chance of finding something
    • Polymorph / teleportation: affect the frequency at which it triggers
    • Conflict: radius or affect monster rolls
    • Most other rings that confer binary trinsics like teleport control or free action or sustain ability are difficult to make chargeable.
    • A lot of these don't work well so long as other things can confer the trinsic.
  • #910: Confused genocide doesn't kill you; instead it genocides something close to what you named, like the opposite case of a monster letter.
  • #921: Attempting to wear armor while already wearing armor in that slot will prompt you to remove it.
    • nice but probably a smop. lots of cases, like what if I try to wear a shirt while already wearing a cloak and suit, etc
  • #931: Using a stethoscope on a monster requires that you succeed in making a to-hit roll against it. Otherwise, it doesn't work.
    • sounds smopy and I'm not sure stethoscopes really need a nerf that bad
  • #955: Pets cannot move and eat in 1 action. Also, pets eating food off the ground merely makes it partly eaten, rather than completely destroying it.
    • #1535: Pets eat corpses incrementally, not all at once, and you can interrupt their eating by moving them off the corpse (e.g. swapping places). The corpse becomes progressively partly eaten as they eat it. Interrupting their eating deducts tameness points from them equal to how many they would have gained if they had been allowed to finish eating normally.
    • Since you can keep your pet fed to avoid it from eating corpses you want, I'm not sure this is really needed anymore.
  • #960: Dreaming about more than just noises that are really happening: stuff like fantasy dreams where you dream that you ascend to the status of Demigoddess, etc. Implement this as a 1/3000 chance per turn of a random dream.
  • #966: A digging ray shot into amorphous engulfers (such as green slimes) splits them instead of reducing their HP to 1. This automatically makes you not engulfed anymore. (Does not change the effect on things like purple worms. Has no effect on unsolid engulfers like vortices and air elementals.)
  • #969: Vomiting on an altar should offend its god, as should digging on it.
    • See if this is easy to implement; if hard, don't bother.
  • #974: Wands of striking and digging tools deal double damage to all stony monsters like earth elementals, clay golems, stone golems, xorns, and gargoyles.
  • #995: Rangers can chat to certain animalistic monsters to calm them and make them peaceful (but not tame). Possibly generalize this into a skill that can be achieved by Cavemen, Monks and Tourists too.
    • I can't see a faithful way to do this that doesn't involve a lot of complexity (like adding a "partially peaceful" field).
  • #1012: Leprechauns steal credit cards as well as money.
    • This doesn't really mesh well anymore since doubling down on them stealing gold things
  • #1234: Seduction (possibly for nymphs as well as foocubi) may not work if the seducer is invisible.
  • #1271: When an egg gets very, very old, it cracks and releases a small stinking cloud. If it happens to be carried by the player, the cloud centers on the player. When it is close to rotten, the player can throw it and it will release the stinking cloud wherever it shatters. (The chance of it releasing a stinking cloud increases with age, asymptotically towards 100% the older the egg is). Attempting to eat an old rotten egg will create the stinking cloud on the player's square.
  • #1327: Remove fainting and direct starvation as a game mechanic.
    • In its place, just permanently and repeatedly decrement the hero's Strength or Constitution while they are in the Starving range (when nutrition ≤ 0) until the hero dies from stat loss.
    • The reduction happens when you hit -N nutrition, and it gets reset to 0 when this happens.
    • Permanent reduction is done by reducing the current ''and highest-reached'' values of the stat by 1, so restore ability won't restore its full previous value.
    • Since Fainting was pretty lethal already, the interval between losing points should be pretty short.
    • When you eat something, before adding the nutrition from the food, your nutrition resets to 0.
    • Sustain ability prevents stat loss but makes you faint instead.
  • #1386: When alchemizing with diluted potions, half of the amount dipped will bubble or steam off as water, wasting those potions entirely (e.g. 6 diluted healings + gain energy = 3 diluted extra healings).
  • #1387: You can dip a potion into a sink to pour water into it from the tap, diluting it and causing runoff which subjects you to vapor effects (hopefully identifying it). For simplicity, the 1/30 chance of a random potion coming out of the sink (as well as all other sink effects) should probably be ignored here.
    • makes it practically consequence free to get water. maybe sinks can become 'dry'?
    • Potion id in sinks doesn't need a buff. This basically allows you to identify all potions with little drawback.
  • #1519: Candles and lamps "burn brightly" when blessed and just "start burning"/"is now on" when uncursed. Lanterns don't change their messages. Note though that this makes it trivial to tell when a potential magic lamp is blessed.
  • #1525: Define a new set of ability score maximums which represents the highest the score can reach via exercise. These caps are always equal to or higher than the existing maximums, which represent the highest a stat can be increased to through potions of gain ability or other stat-boosting effects. In some cases, the exercise maximum should stay the same and the non-exercise maximum may need to be decreased.
    • It's an open question on whether restore ability should be able to restore points to their exercise-only maximums, or just up to the gain-ability maximums.
  • Remove secret passages from the game; they don't add much of relevance and it's harder to find ways to make them relevant.
    • Largely this is true; they are slated to be removed everywhere except where specified in special levels. The problem is that these special levels use them in decent ways.
  • #1598: An artifact T-shirt that provides free action when worn, but only if no armor is worn over it.
  • #1607: Placing bag-of-holding-explosion-causing items into a bag of holding blows up the item that is trying to be placed inside, but does not harm the bag itself. If the item causing the explosion is a second bag of holding, its contents end up inside the outer bag.
    • BoHsplosion is already nice enough.
  • #1634: Dementors, W monsters that have some sort of blinding, despair-inducing attack. Lawful aligned. If you become completely incapacitated by one, they suck out your soul for an instadeath. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
  • #1702: MZ_GIGANTIC monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on at least one pair of opposite sides in any direction (like a doorway, with walls on opposite sides). MZ_HUGE monsters cannot enter any space that has nonwalkable terrain on 2 (or maybe 3) pairs of opposite sides (like a corridor).
  • #1763: When werecreatures summon help, the help appears at random locations on the level, out of sight if possible, not around the player.
    • Lycanthrope difficulty is being adjusted based partly on the fact that their vanilla behavior remains a threat and you can't just whack them to death before help arrives.
  • Perhaps all king-type monsters should be able to displace other monsters.
  • #1800: When a monster picks up an item owned by a shop, its base price is deducted from any gold they're carrying and gets transferred to the shopkeeper. If they're short on cash, they don't have to make up the difference at all.
    • What is really the benefit of this?
  • #1855: Bodkin arrows that have heavyshot (from DynaHack): instead of multishooting, they deal double or triple damage depending on how many you would have multishot otherwise.
  • #1924: The scroll of teleportation now levelports when blessed and limits your possible teleport destinations to a small radius when cursed. Confused teleport gives you a single controlled horizontal teleport.
    • not sure if I want to swap the blessed and cursed behaviors of this, it may be too jarring
  • #1980: Dipping a spellbook in a potion of gain level turns it into a spellbook of some spell that is one level higher. You only get "Interesting..." if you try this on a level 7 book. Not determined whether this should count as polymorphing an object to break polypileless conduct. (inclined to say that no, it doesn't break polypileless)
    • This just seems weird, honestly. Morphing an object but not polypiling it, and raises the question of using gain level to "upgrade" all other sorts of gear.
  • #1993: Give a YAFM when you gain very fast speed from any source while hallucinating: "Gotta go fast!"
  • #784: Temporary hit points and Pw: your maximum goes above its normal bounds for some time, before returning to normal. If your normal maximum changes for some reason, the temporary maximum changes by the same amount. There are two proposals for how the effect should end:
    • The entire effect is timed, and once it ends the temporary buffer vanishes. If your HP would go below 1 as a result of this, you could either die or have it set to 1, depending on implementation.
    • The temporary buffer drains away at the rate of 1 point per turn (or whatever rate, could be slower), and the effect naturally ends once it's gone. this would allow it to be mainly implemented as uhpmax.
    • interesting but needs a source first (prayer boon?)
    • This seems like a good idea in search of a problem; there isn't any other thing in the game or planned idea for which temp HP would be a good use
  • #2162: New shop type "thrift shop". Contains items priced at a steep discount but which aren't very useful on their own. Examples include negatively enchanted or eroded (not necessarily cursed) weapons and armor, blank scrolls, magical tools with zero or one charges left.
  • #2172: Vaults on deeper levels may generate with four gold golems instead of four gold piles. Or both.
  • #2251: Holes always drop you exactly one level (though trapdoors may still go farther).
  • #2258: Container trap that teleports the container randomly.
  • #2272: Sokoban is a one-level branch that strings together a bunch of different puzzles that must each be defeated in turn, all eventually leading to the treasure zoo. Obviously, the pits must be changed to holes that drop you on the level with the Sokoban stairs.
  • #2285: The natural spawn rate of monsters on Astral (and perhaps the other Planes) is zero.
    • It makes sense, but I think in most games it won't affect much.
  • #2322: When the player is prompted to rename an object or a level that already has a name and submits an empty string, ask the player for confirmation to remove that name entirely: "Remove old name? [yn] (n)"
    • This doesn't have any player support that I know of and is kinda annoying when you actually want to remove a name.
  • #2324: When standing on a (not known untrapped) container and using the search command, prompt the player to check for traps on the container. Search normally if they say no.
    • No known player support
  • #2325: Anything the player touches or has seen the description of is added to the discoveries list with a blank type name (it hasn't been named yet, but will be accessible on the list so the player knows they've seen it and can call it from the list at a later point). Specifically, this should trigger whenever an object internally sets dknown to true.
    • No known player support
  • #2374: An option to disable Japanese item naming.
    • No known player support
  • #2391: Watchmen that you chat to on the Tourist quest give special dialogue themed to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch.
    • Need to come up with dialogue, and is possibly obsoleted by or folded into Tou quest overhaul.
  • #2427: When you fall asleep, you take d3 damage from falling to the floor. Message for this: "You tumble to the floor".
  • #2452: Monsters only give experience points when they are at least a few levels below your own level (i.e. you can't level up from level 12 to 14 by killing only newts and grid bugs with any amount of grinding). To compensate, the cutoffs for experience level are brought closer together.
    • No evidence that grinding weak monsters is a particular problem. XL cutoffs are already revised.
    • #2477: Disable multishot if the player is shooting point-blank.
  • #2487: When you kick a door that is closed but not locked, it can just crash open and become an open door instead of breaking. This is only if you kick it in one specific direction, deterministic based on its coordinates. Diagonal kicks can count as kicking in that specific direction, but kicking perpendicular or opposite will result in the door breaking like usual. If you kick open a shop door like this and don't destroy it, the shopkeeper yells at you a bit but doesn't demand money.
    • This is a lot of complication for very little benefit.
  • #2499: It gets increasingly hard (maybe even exponentially hard) to raise a stat through exercise as the stat approaches its racial maximum.
  • #2513: If you are not deaf, non-stealthy monsters that you can't see (because they're out of sight or invisible) occasionally show up as an I when they move. Blindness has no effect, except indirectly that adjacent spaces also count as out of sight.
  • #2517: Gnomes can loot statues without destroying them.
  • #2587: If you tell a vault guard that your name is Croesus, and you are wearing gold armor, they might lead you out of the vault without forcing you to drop any gold. The chance of this outcome increases for each piece of gold armor you are wearing.
    • This is not a bad idea, but it would be tricky to implement bug-free and perhaps not worth it.
  • #2627: Engraving with a blade made of softer metals such as gold or silver should dull it faster than an iron blade.
    • This is a fine idea but I contorted the engraving code into such a state that touching it to implement this is probably unwise
  • Writing desk furniture: makes copying scrolls you already possess easier. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • One possible avenue is to guarantee minimum ink cost if you have the scroll in inventory.
    • Where will this go in special levels? Anaraxis' lair probably, probably somewhere in Rogue quest and Tou quest, a fair amount of home levels actually
    • Will it need a themed room or special room?
  • #2661: Bows should be two-handed, as they require both hands to use properly. You're already not allowed to twoweapon with them, but it shouldn't really be possible to wear a shield and fire a bow at the same time either, except maybe a small shield. Possibly classify them as hand-and-a-half weapons, in variants that have those
  • #2694: When you fail to read a spellbook, increment its read counter. The chance of a book crumbling to dust is no longer a flat 1/3; a never-read book will never crumble, and the chance increases the more times the book is read.
    • seems unnecessary; spellbook read rules have already been revised
  • #2727: When you pick items up and they stack with something in your inventory, somehow express how many are now in the stack, so the player doesn't need to check their inventory constantly to see how many missiles they recovered.
  • #2746: One possible failure effect for reading a spellbook (or writing it, if it's possible to fail at writing a book) is for the spell to force itself into your head. Your spell retention is internally -1, a special value that means you can cast the spell, but only once, and then you immediately forget it.
    • probably too complicated and not worth it.
  • #2763: Put a cap on the number of weapons in a stack that can be enchanted by a single enchant weapon scroll. Maybe 20 for ammunition and 5 or 7 for other stacking weapons like daggers. It's odd that you can multiply the total amount of enchantment points you're getting just by wielding a larger number of weapons.
  • #2817: Assuming the fruit type of a tree has been made deterministic rather than random when kicked: farlooking a tree will describe what kind of tree it is, e.g. "apple tree", "banana tree". Fruit trees you have already kicked are described as "bare", e.g. "bare apple tree". Trees that never had any fruit, if implemented, are "maple tree" or "oak tree" or something.
    • needs deterministic trees first, which are not currently a priority
  • #2848: Pets will never pick up large, bulky containers, like large boxes, chests and ice boxes. For one, picking up a heavy bulky object is unrealistic for many humanoid pets; for another, usually when pets pick up large containers they are doing something annoying like moving around a stash container.
    • ... but a segment of players LIKES having their pets able to carry these (and steal from shops with it)
  • refactor to remove uhitinc and udaminc, turning them into functions - they just check rings
    • very low priority if happening at all - currently players like eating these for intrinsic boosts
  • dnethack beast mastery skill - trained by watching your pet attack something (specifically, for each turn on which you observe a pet attack something; multiple pets attacking in one turn only trains by 1), Basic and above levels give them permanent AC and damage boosts (SAVEBREAK)
  • #2957: When an undead turning beam is zapped over the corpse of an undead monster that's set to revive, the corpse is either destroyed outright or the revive timer is canceled so it won't revive. (In this second scenario, zapping the corpse again with no revive timer set on it could resurrect it like normal.
  • #2993: Piercing weapons never generate as gold, because gold is a terrible material for maintaining a sharp point. Either that, or using a gold piercing weapon to attack things regularly decreases its enchantment.
  • #3054: An #alarm command that allows you to set an alarm for X turns in the future or on turn Y, at which point the game will print a reminder for you that requires a --More-- by default.
  • #3165: Give a special message when you fail to tame a dragon as a knight (for whom it's impossible to tame dragons under any circumstances).
    • not this actual idea, but the evilhack bit that kni can't tame D. otoh, knights are great for dragon riding so maybe not...
  • #767: Rogues can build and set traps, more types of traps than just plain pits and land mines and bear traps. Traps may consume some types of items to be set, like a sleeping gas trap will consume potions of sleeping. This should probably not be totally reversible through untrapping. Intended so the player can pick their battles and set up traps in an advantageous position.
    • Needs more designing, but not hot on the idea anyway
  • #761: Remove the extra healing, cure blindness, and cure sickness books. The healing spell scales in the amount it heals with skill level. At skilled it also cures blindness, and at expert it cures both blindness and sickness. (SAVEBREAK)
  • #770: Merge crossbow and bow skills so that gnomish rangers don't get hurt by the lack of ammunition.
  • #863: Better ghost scaling in general. Ghosts should have a wide range of strength levels, and should be capable of posing problems even to late game characters. The more ghosts you summon by repeatedly entering a haunted temple, the stronger they get.
  • #878: Dipping a ring of polymorph control into a potion of polymorph allows you to control the ring it turns into (not its enchantment though, if the ring is enchantable).
  • #997: Wood nymphs, or players polymorphed into wood nymphs, can walk through trees as if they weren't there.
  • #1216: Ranged attacks get an accuracy bonus if you rested the previous turn.
  • #1565: When a Priest is gifted an artifact weapon, they are unrestricted in its skill up to Skilled.
  • #1582: Excalibur starts out much weaker than it currently does, but you can perform further feats to enhance its power and give it more abilities as the game progresses. Such feats include: slaying a dragon, returning to King Arthur having finished the Knight quest, getting crowned as a lawful, re-dipping it into a fountain at a high experience level.
  • #1617: A cursed bag of tricks can be applied at monsters to eat them up, which will add one charge to the bag. (The existing behavior of applying a cursed bag of tricks producing a monster like normal is suppressed.)
  • #1713: Foocubi can be pacified or tamed by throwing a ring of adornment at them.
  • #1759: Vampires can only regenerate while standing on top of a gravestone or in a graveyard. (Ideally, they could only regenerate in a coffin, but nethack lacks those.)
  • #1764: Djinni released from bottles and water demons released from fountains don't care about beatitude or depth for giving a wish; instead they will give the hero a wish if the hero is intimidating enough. "Intimidation" is based on stats like Charisma and XL, and the chance of successfully intimidating them increases as they do. Djinni from lamps are not affected by these rules.
  • #1767: When a vampire is killed in shapeshifted form and reincarnates in its normal form, it comes back at half health. Due to this, vampire AI sometimes chooses to stay in normal form at full health.
  • #1835: Add "candelabrum" as a new randomly generated tool. It can hold 3 candles and gives a light radius of 2 with one candle, 3 with two candles, and 4 with three candles. Its material is brass. The Candelabrum of Invocation's unidentified description is now "ornate candelabrum". (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
  • #1837: Potion of training: gives you a temporary multiplier to your experience point gains (lasts for the next N monsters, not the next N turns). Might also give you a temporary multiplier to skill training point gains. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
  • #1872: A magical whistle that instead of warping pets summons a temporary ally who disappears after a while.
  • #1891: Because you pass beyond the mortal realm when you exit the Dungeons with the Amulet, life saving does not work in the Planes, at all, even for monsters. (In wizard mode you can still choose to die of course.)
  • #1895: Invoking the Staff of Aesculapius allows you to select a direction. If you pick a direction with an adjacent monster, the monster will get the healing effect instead of you. If you aim at yourself or a direction with no monster, the healing effect applies to you as normal.
  • #1945: Wearing an oilskin cloak can sometimes prevent theft attacks by nymphs, monkeys and leprechauns.
    • The reason this is in limbo is that the logical next step is "why doesn't any greased cloak do this", and then theft might be too trivialized.
  • #1950: Buckled boots take less time to put on than other boots, since they are easier to attach to your feet.
  • #1998: Amulets of change shuffle your stats the same as polymorphing into your own race, without risk of a system shock. Possibly, the stat-shuffling process should be a bit more limited primarily to attributes; it probably shouldn't affect experience level (and thus HP, Pw, or skills), reset your nutrition, or cure most illnesses like a self-polymorph would.
  • #2030: Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of a type it normally "cures" will do nothing if the potion is cursed.
  • #2036: Generalize cockatrice-egg mechanics to all eggs: eggs of acidic monsters will be acidic, eggs of poisonous monsters will be poisonous. Possibly even have a (reduced) chance of getting intrinsics from a monster egg.
  • #2046: Level 1 divination spell "waypoint", which reveals the location of all stairs/ladders (but no other spaces) on the level. Does not work if the level is unmappable.
  • #2049: A spell that provides see invisible (but the potion should be objectively better than it by at least an order of magnitude). could this be folded into detect unseen?
  • #2057: Spell of blindness (possibly also available as a wand), which blinds monsters.
    • Camera already provides this; a wand isn't really needed and a spell certainly isn't. Maaaaaybe there is room for a melee range blind spell in player monster spellcasting merge.
  • #2067: The base Pw cost for a spell is specified per-spell, and only correlates with spell level rather than being tied to it, which allows for interesting things like low-level spells that are easy to cast but expensive.
    • xnh already obscures spell pw costs, so this basically amounts to tuneable spell costs, which is probably not needed
  • #2072: Move the spell of light to the clerical school.
  • #2116: New artifact The Captain's Hook, artifact grappling hook that never fails to do what you want it to do and has zero chance of hooking yourself, regardless of skill. Deals double damage to crocodiles.
  • #2123: Artifacts whose base item type isn't chargeable can be charged; this will clear or reduce any invoke timeout remaining. (This creates weirdness for chargeable artis)
  • #2134: Mud terrain, brown }. It can be walked on, but if you stand in one spot for long enough you will start sinking into the mud. You will be able to pull free if you are only a little stuck, but once you get more stuck you cannot, and if you cannot extricate yourself somehow you will eventually sink below the surface and suffocate. This might best be implemented with a new "mud pit" trap, which gets created by standing on mud for too long and works similarly to a regular pit in that you are held in the same place by it for a while as you try to move out. Except a mud pit allows you to sink down and suffocate. It could go in swamp rooms, and tag special levels?
  • #2151: Put engravings outside or nearby inaccessible closets so that you know that something's there.
  • #2163: New special room "lich hall". Contains one difficulty-appropriate or somewhat-out-of-difficulty lich, generated asleep with difficulty-appropriate undead. One or two statues generate along the walls, and there are several spellbooks on the floor or in chests. Within the hall, the lich can summon more undead.
  • #2179: Monster lairs (antholes, cockatrice nests, etc) are not filled wall-to-wall with monsters.
  • #2181: You can wish for time. This decreases the turn count a bit, or alternatively gives you a large amount of movement points so that time effectively stops for everyone else besides you for a while (like what SpliceHack's scroll of time does).
  • #2198: When you try and fail to wear a helm of opposite alignment in the quest branch, you only lose all your protection if you had it identified as a helm of opposite alignment.
    • as long as there are no other negative helms, this means you can just wear-test any helm in the quest
  • #2215: Add clerical spellcasters that are more dangerous than shamans but less threatening than priests.
  • #2216: When you are crowned, your character gains a literal ethereal crown above their head that causes hostile monsters of (significantly) lower level than you to have to pass a resistance check upon seeing you or else flee.
  • #2228: Praying while standing on a throne, assuming you're in good standing with your god, causes the god to have an increased chance of crowning you. Possibly, they always crown you if they decide to grant a boon and you are in good enough standing to be eligible for crowning.
  • #2373: Add a message for when your pet falls down a trap door and you don't see it happen.
  • #2472: You must have at least one free hand to zap a wand. Otherwise the game won't let you.
  • #2492: Wielding a one-handed weapon with nothing in the offhand will double the damage bonus from Strength (but not weapon damage or other bonuses).
  • #2528: Pushing a boulder costs d3 or d4 nutrition, in order to balance out its easy source of Str exercise. However, something would probably need to be done to compensate in Sokoban (maybe put even more food there?)
  • #2540: Different roles have different speeds for putting on armor, because they have varying amounts of practice with it. In particular, combat-heavy roles such as Barbarians, Valkyries and Samurai should continue to use the existing armor delays, whereas roles like Archeologists and Tourists should take longer to wear armor pieces.
  • #2542: Some mechanic for Valkyries that involves escorting the spirits/ghosts of those who die in battle. One take on this idea: you can chat to ghosts to tame them, and then they will follow you around as pets do. Then you can release their spirits by praying on an aligned altar. Doing this successfully gives you some sort of reward. However, hostile monsters will attack the ghosts you are escorting without provocation, making this not trivially easy.
  • #2544: Certain roles have a small set of monsters that they can tame through non-magical means (such as Valkyries and winter wolves).
    • This needs a lot more candidates to be a viable idea.
  • #2546: A trap or monster (or possibly change sleeping gas traps or homunculi to this) that causes "sleeping poison": it starts a very short intrinsic restful sleep timeout, so you don't fall asleep immediately but have a little time to react.
    • Currently sleeping does not work this way.
  • #2549: An alternate ending triggered by invoking a ring of conflict when within sight of all three Riders. You then take up your true identity as War and the other Riders congratulate you. Possibly tie this into the "break the Amulet" ending, in which case this would massively power you up but not end the game until some other condition had been met.
  • #2589: Rogues start with a stack of knives instead of daggers, but their dagger skill cap isn't changed; if a Rogue wants to use daggers, they have to go find some themselves rather than beginning the game with them.
  • #2611: Priest characters can sacrifice gold at a coaligned altar for identical benefits as they would get from donating to a priest. The altar does not have to be attended.
  • #2634: Rename the wand of secret door detection to just "wand of detection". It detects other things besides secret doors.
    • it seems like a sensible change in a vacuum but no one actually wants it and it will just complicate code merges
  • #2635: Polypiling can't create matter out of nothing. If an item is trying to polymorph into a heavier item, it must absorb the mass from other objects in the pile, destroying them. Note that if polypiling a stack of same-weight objects (potions, or scrolls), none of the candidate items will be heavier, so this will never trigger.
  • jonadab idea: dragonbane causes 100% scale drop when wielded, or at least increased odds
    • Rejected as juice isn't worth the squeeze. make_corpse lacks the context for determining if the monster was killed with dragonbane and augmenting struct monst and adding globals just isn't worth it.
  • splicehack whirlwind trap (aa9839a) (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • Yoinked out of 3.7 for vanilla-adjacency reasons. Too much too fast. Also, player feedback on this one seems more negative than I originally thought.
  • #2647: Add a new sort of body armor that makes a compromise between studded leather and crystal plate mail - less AC than crystal plate mail, but more than studded leather (so around 5 AC), weighs more than studded leather but less than crystal plate mail (so around 300-350 aum), and doesn't hinder spellcasting at all. Possibly, "crystal scale mail". (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • Possibly crystal plate mail's base AC will have to be boosted, or its weight lowered, in order to avoid this new armor being just better (as it stands, a gain of about 2 AC in exchange for about 100 extra weight is something most players won't take).
  • #2677: Some method by which you can capture a djinni into a smoky potion or oil lamp (which in the latter case makes it a magic lamp). It should be non-trivial or somehow costly to do (the original idea just suggested applying the object in their direction, which is abusable). If feasible, the djinni should be angry and disinclined to grant a wish when it's released.
    • Also, the game doesn't track whether a given smoky potion contains a djinni (it would mess with stacking), so this would be tricky to implement internally for smoky potions.
  • #2667: The spell of protection, rather than giving you a golden haze, gives you a "spectral shield". It weighs nothing, and automatically equips into your shield slot if your offhand is free. It provides around 3 or 4 AC, and this does not degrade over time. However, the shield is temporary and will dissipate in a hundred or so turns.
    • If the shield is unequipped but kept in your inventory, it hovers around you and tries to block things on its own, but it only provides about 1 or 2 AC in this form. If it leaves your inventory for any reason, it dissipates. Casting protection again while you are already carrying a spectral shield resets its dissipation timer; it doesn't give you a second one.
    • The shield has a price of 0, so you can't sell it.
  • #2692: A potion or spell of searching: it doesn't give you the regular searching intrinsic, but rather it detects any traps you move adjacent to with a 100% chance (regular searching isn't guaranteed to find these, and this effect won't find other things that searching is able to find). (SAVEBREAK)
    • Alternatively, just make it give you temporary intrinsic searching as currently implemented, but make it so that timing-out intrinsic searching (available only from this) is guaranteed to find everything.
  • #2717: Glowstick: a tool that can be applied to make it emit light in a radius of 2. It lasts a few thousand turns before dying (reducing to radius 1 light when near the end of its life), but cannot be turned off like a candle or lamp can. (SAVEBREAK)
  • #2716: Oil lamps hit by water damage lose some of their oil on account of the water flushing some of it out, reducing the amount of turns of light they have left.
    • meh, sounds like it could cause light related bugs if it is completely extinguished by it
  • #2755: Make it so that dying in a polyform carries a severe, possibly permanent penalty, such as losing some Constitution, maximum HP, or forcing you to a low percentage of current HP regardless of what you had when you first polymorphed.
    • This should not be addressed unless polymorph in general is fixed so the player can't be stuck in a bad form where their first priority is to escape it at all costs. I don't see a solution to that coming anytime soon.
  • #2852: Add lamias, which are very similar to nagas, but have hands and consequently can use items.
    • Probably an entire set of lamias is too much, but perhaps one or maybe two additions to the N class would work.
  • slicehack gauntlets (ceb7a54) (SAVEBREAK)
  • Spawn an angry awake wood nymph somewhere on the level if you cut too many trees. (SAVEBREAK - needs additions to struct level)
  • #2328: When blind and holding a leash with a pet on it, you can see the pet.
  • #2858: A new type of pudding or slime (though possibly a j or b monster) that has a high speed and good attack and splits whenever it takes damage. Its entire strategy is based on surrounding you with lots of clones that all have the same high attack as the original. Has a high monster difficulty; possibly, their attack stats and difficulty should be high enough that they will usually not show up until Gehennom. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • This is unintentionally quite similar to Brogue's fearsome pink jelly.
  • fourk stinking sphere (stinking spore?) which releases a stinking cloud when killed and exploding (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
  • Arkenstone patch? (SAVEBREAK)
    • main difficulty might be handling an object which is perpetually emitting light but not burning
    • maybe this could wait until after implementing intrinsic light, though the stone really ought to emit light regardless of whether hero is carrying it
    • planned Apple of Discord probably obsoletes the idea of an artifact that grants conflict when carried
  • Generalization of sliming to other monsters (probably other colors of slimes which can appear at different points of the game (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE))
  • Corrosion attacks should cause completelycorrodes() monsters to instadie (this doesn't exist yet)
    • This is too low priority for even the low priority bucket.
  • #2874: Cursed two-handed weapons only weld to one hand at a time, allowing you to do things with the other hand. The only way to have no free hands at all is to wear a cursed shield and wield a cursed weapon.
  • #3006: Wandering peddler, an always-peaceful, randomly-generated monster that aimlessly wanders the dungeon. (Possibly, these could be implemented as shopkeepers that are detached from any shop, but that may be too complicated.) Chatting to them causes them to try to sell you items from their inventory, which they generate with several of. The items are mostly those eligible to generate in a general store, but with certain weight and possibly cost caps. Killing them either doesn't drop their items, or it does but carries the normal drawbacks of murder and having to overcome a shopkeeper-quality monster.
    • In order to prevent farming items off them through create monster, these might have a low extinction cap of 20 or so.
  • #3008: Ghosts, shades, and any other incorporeal monsters can't wear armor or wield weapons. (With a possible exception if it's cursed.)
    • only relevant if adding spectres or something else incorporeal but also corporeal. but even then, isn't a main point of spectres, at least evilhack ones, to use gear?
  • #3011: Do away with all non-randomized object descriptions (things like "high boots" for jackboots).
  • #3016: Replace Cavemen's quest artifact with scales from the Chromatic Dragon (their quest then becomes "kill the dragon that is terrorizing our people" instead of "fetch the artifact from the dragon who stole it"). The scales only drop when she is killed, rather than her being generated with them (thus, they can't be stolen). The scales could either be implemented simply as a base item akin to chromatic scales in UnNetHack which provide a cocktail of resistances, or as an artifact. If implemented as a non-artifact, the Caveman role will have no associated quest artifact.
    • The scales should NOT be enchantable into scale mail. The pile of resistances is good enough.
    • this might interact catastrophically with dtsund-DSM
  • #3079: New special room "cursed graveyard". Its initial generation is the same as a regular graveyard. The difference is that it generates undead monsters (possibly just Z class) on open spaces in the graveyard (with messages like "A zombie claws out of the ground!") at a much higher frequency than normal, so long as there is still a gravestone existing within the graveyard. When all gravestones in the graveyard are destroyed, the room converts to a normal graveyard and undead stop spawning.
    • Gravestone texts in a cursed graveyard don't draw from the regular pool of gallows-humor messages. They instead use a separate pool of ominous, vengeful, and threatening messages.
    • Regular gravestone-destroying penalties do not apply if the gravestone being destroyed is in a cursed graveyard.
    • Priests can destroy a headstone in a cursed graveyard by #turning while standing on it.
    • gehennom special room?
  • #3080: Leprechauns have a tiny chance, less than 1%, of dropping a credit card on death (or generating with one). Such a card will always be a "Yendorian Express - Gold Card" or "Shamrock Card" when read. They also are capable of stealing any credit card that says either of these things.
  • #3084: Cut the length of Sokoban in half by excising the two middle levels. It is now a two-level branch consisting of a small, easy first puzzle level, followed by a tougher level with a zoo and prize.
  • #3093: New minor artifact, a weapon with either no or minimal bonuses, but which acts as a curse lightning rod rather like Magicbane: a curse items effect will hit only it and cause it to become cursed, unless it is already cursed in which case the curse items effect happens normally. Invoking it removes the curse from itself. (NEW ARTIFACT)
    • might be too crappy for anyone to bother with
  • #3189: Wizard mode command #wizforget, which unidentifies all carried items to the greatest extent possible. not sure if I've ever needed this
  • #3174: A 'spoilers' option that toggles on certain interface features that assume a player is spoiled. Defaults to off. An example of such a feature is FIQHack's automatic identification of a wand of teleportation when the player makes an engraving vanish with it and has already identified the other wands that do so.
    • mainly so that other stuff that directly assumes a spoiled player can be implemented. bhaak strenuously argues against this.
  • #3232: Archons block teleportation on any level they're on like demon lords do, because they're otherwise too easy to avoid.
  • #2888: Traps track the turn on which they were created in the trap struct. This is used to determine the age of a web; creatures will tear through an older web more easily, and with less strength, than a young one. [Too minor to consider right now.]
  • #3292: Reaching Skilled in polearms allows you to use them in melee with no penalty. (also look into kicking Wizards' polearm skill cap down)
  • #3338: New option 'spoilers' or 'spoiled'. When on, the game is free to enable a bunch of quality-of-life enhancements that spoil various parts of the game, such as auto-identifying wands based on their messages and sorting items into price tiers from price identification. Defaults to off. [bhaak has strong objections to this]
  • #3365: Anthill: a dungeon feature found exclusively in antholes that acts as a monster spawner for ants. The ants produced will all be the same type as the anthole is, and ants will not spawn out of it when there are already a certain number of ants in the area. Eventually it stops spawning ants (perhaps with a system where it rolls every time it creates a new ant and if it fails the roll it increments an internal counter; the higher the counter gets the lower the chance of spawning more ants), or the player can prematurely destroy it by digging it. To compensate for the extra ants spawned, antholes could no longer be packed full of ants. (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
  • #3383: When you are inside a tended shop, that shopkeeper's sell prices of items in your open inventory are displayed along with the item names.
  • #3400: Turn the wand of cold Asmodeus has into a special souped up artifact wand of cold, perhaps one that can cast cone of cold when zapped and does not lose charges if Asmodeus is the one zapping it.
  • #3412: Reduce the spell level of magic mapping, but also reduce its utility: instead of mapping the entire level at once, you choose a point to center your divination on and a circular or square area, with a radius dependent on your divination skill, gets mapped. After this change, it might be similar enough to clairvoyance to be merged with that spell (the difference with clairvoyance is that it currently always centers on the player; perhaps the new merged spell could instead scale with skill by having a fixed mapping area, but the distance you can target it at increases with skill level.) This does not change the scroll of magic mapping behavior, which still maps the whole level. [luxidream stresses that this kills many speedrunning strategies]
  • #3421: All of the healing potions heal a slightly variable fraction of your max HP, with some reasonable minimums and maximums, in order to keep healing and extra healing relevant beyond the early game. Proposed quantities are: Healing: 8/6/4 HP minimum, 10-20% of max HP, 100 HP maximum Extra healing: 16/12/8 minimum, 20-30% of max HP, 160 HP maximum Full healing: 100% of max HP, 400 HP maximum
  • #3434: Artifact bow that acts like an infinity bow in Minecraft: if you have bow-compatible ammo in your quiver, it shoots a phantom copy of that ammo (never multishotting) without using up the real ammo. When this phantom missile hits the floor, it disappears.
  • #3440: The Wizard tracks how many times you have blundered into unseen traps, engraved Elbereth, been lifesaved, and had your god fix your HP, and he mixes insults about embarrassing amounts of these into his taunts.
  • #3443: Dipping Frost Brand into water potions (or possibly any freezing-eligible potion, which is most of them) should freeze and shatter the potion. Likewise for Fire Brand, which should boil potions and ignite (but not explode) oil it's dipped into.
  • #3465: Invoking the Tsurugi of Muramasa causes a fear effect similar to reading scare monsters and gives a temporary effect equivalent to increase damage (possibly only on hits made with the Tsurugi, possibly with any weapon). It was also pointed out that triggering a temporary effect by invoking could get tedious. Another suggestion was to give it some sort of passive fear-causing effect when wielded (in addition to the one-time scare when invoking it).
  • #3470: The ring of warning, and only that, should indicate the exact amount of turns you have left to live when afflicted by a timed instadeath such as sliming, stoning, or strangulation. (And drowning and other forms of suffocation in variants that have that.) This feedback is conveyed by the ring vibrating that number of times, e.g. "Your [ring] vibrates twice." Possibly it should only happen when the amount of turns to live is low because it doesn't make that much sense for it to vibrate 20 times in one turn and have the hero count that accurately.
  • #3496: Wishing for a "mystery box" gives a large box containing 4 (or however many is balanced) completely random items. (Using just a regular mkobj() call; it won't generate items which are not normally generatable because this is likely to cause bugs.)
  • #3527: Unicorns are more likely to generate peaceful if you are celibate and have not yet dallied with a foocubus in your game. (Since coaligned unicorns are peaceful anyway, this would affect cross-aligned ones only.)
  • #3638: New artifact The Stage Magician's Gloves: some form of gloves, possibly special-cased to appear white. They allow you to use wands like a stethoscope, with one free zap per turn, and also confer magic resistance when worn. When invoked, if you are wearing a non-cursed hat or helm, you pull a random item or small or tiny monster out of your hat. If not wearing a hat you get YAFM.
  • #3642: Weapons no longer stick to your hand when cursed, because that just makes the game less fun and strongly discourages experimenting with random weapons lying around (there are good weapons out there, but the risk of either ending up with a bad welded weapon, having to spend resources to get it unstuck, or spending identification resources on making sure it's safe) means no one will give them a try. Instead, replace that behavior with a variety of other effects:
    • The weapon occasionally turns on you when you try to attack with it, hitting you instead.
    • The weapon occasionally deals an extra 1d8 shock damage to you and your opponent when it hits, possibly breaking rings.
    • The weapon wakes up any sleeping monster you get near. Doesn't actually identify as cursed until it wakes something up.
  • None of these are intended to be immediately obvious. While they are like object properties, they don't necessarily have to be implemented like those: the curse behavior of a weapon could be deterministically computed from its object id hash.
  • #3646: A level 5 or 6 "mass healing" spell, which basically casts extra healing on yourself and all tame creatures within a certain radius.
  • #3668: The player is able to do some sort of ritual that involves sacrificing 25,000 gold pieces to open a portal to Fort Ludios if one has not already been generated. Possibly this would have to be done in a vault. If a naturally generated portal does already exist, the gold is still expended but the attempt to make another one fails.
  • #3672: Dowsing rod, an item that you can engrave the name of an item on. Assuming the engraved name is a real object, it glows when one of those objects is on the same level as you, getting brighter the closer you are to it. (It doesn't actually emit light on the map.) xnethack should get this not as an item, but the effect is interesting
  • #3695: The wand of magic missile should scale somehow, but explicitly not with wand skill, which may not even exist in a given implementation. Instead, its baseline damage remains 2d6, but your magical stats such as maximum Pw or skill in attack spells can increase its damage output.
  • #3715: If you get a stack of 10 (or 5) identical scrolls that correspond to an existing spellbook, there is some ritual available which will let you convert them into the spellbook, possibly dropping them on an altar and praying. [provided some mechanism can be thought up for this]
  • dnh thing: demon lords have chests with loot, but if you pay them off and try to open the chest they come back enraged
  • #3728: Jousting happens automatically when moving directly at a monster while riding and wielding a jousting weapon. You don't have to be next to it to initiate the attack (and indeed, jousting will not happen if you start your turn next to the monster). [this is cool but I don't think the time is there to rewrite how jousting works]
  • #3770: In the context of restoring the tension and strategizing created by encountering a mind flayer, which used to be a lot higher when their amnesia caused forgetting maps and discoveries: The psychic blast of a mind flayer may make you hallucinate, to create short-term tension, and possibly create long-term strategic tension by counting as Intelligence abuse. However, since mind blasts are a lot less avoidable and harder to strategize around than getting into melee with a mind flayer, it may be better to add these as additional things they can do in melee (but probably not Intelligence abuse, since they already directly drain Intelligence points).
  • #3777: Vow of poverty as a conduct. It is broken by ever having money in inventory (with a roleplay option similar to nudist that prevents you from generating with any money).
  • #3807: Make lycanthropic transformations non-instantaneous: you start to get messages 5-10 (or however many) turns before the transformation happens. For instance, "Your body itches all over." This serves as a reminder if the player forgot or didn't notice they had lycanthropy, and provides an opportunity for the player to remove armor to avoid it breaking.
  • #3814: When an artifact wish fails due to the artifact already existing, communicate this clearly to the player, and then let them use the wish for something else.
  • #3845: After killing certain type(s) of monsters (such as the monarch of a throne room), a timer may start that spawns an avenging posse of related monsters nearby.
  • #3865: When an item-using monster rises from the dead, it automatically picks up any useful items on its square.
  • #3882: Items generated in or sold to shops are marked as being property of that shop, and when you buy it properly, this marking is cleared. When you attempt to sell an item to a shop that is currently marked as the shop's property (meaning it was not properly paid for), the shopkeeper just confiscates it without paying. This prevents you from directly or indirectly stealing the same item over and over again and getting paid for it every time. [nice to have! not sure if worth the time.]
  • #3926: Dragonbane starts off as just a weapon with a damage bonus versus dragons, but it gains properties corresponding to every type of adult dragon you have killed with it. So when you kill a red dragon with it, it now gives you fire resistance and/or does fire damage, then you kill a black dragon and it now gives you fire and disintegration resistance and/or does fire and disintegration damage, and so on. This doesn't have to be Dragonbane, the concept of an artifact that powers up by killing different monsters could apply to something else, but Dragonbane is a good example since dragons have a big diversity of obvious properties and resistances. To keep it from becoming overpowered, it could stack up to 2 or 3 properties from the last 2 or 3 unique types of dragons killed so long as neither property is something powerful like reflection or magic resistance (which would clear all other properties).
  • #3937: Differentiate spellcasting greatly for the different types of spellcasters:
    • Intelligence casters have a spellbook limited by their level, where higher level spells take up more space.
    • Specifically, they can store up to (10 + XL) levels of spells.
    • Higher skill in a spell's school provides a discount: 1 level for Basic, 2 for Skilled, and 3 for Expert.
    • So for instance, a level 5 character has 15 spell levels available. If they know force bolt and are Unskilled in attack spells, that takes up 1 level. If they know cancellation and are Skilled in matter spells, that takes up 5 levels (7 - 2 because they are Skilled).
    • When they learn a new spell that cannot fit into their existing spell list, they are prompted to forget known spells until they have enough space, or decline to learn the new spell (which still uses up a read charge on the book).
    • Wisdom casters always have all the spells they have learned available so long as they haven't forgotten them, but are strictly limited in whether they can cast a spell of a given level by their skill in its spell school.
    • If Restricted in a spell school they can only cast spells of up to level 1. If Unskilled, up to 2. Basic, 3; Skilled, 5; and Expert, 7.
    • Charisma casters (which only exist in a couple variants) always have all spells available to cast, but can never cast spells twice in a row; there is always a cooldown of (5 - skill) * 2 * spell level. (Skill ranges from 0 at Restricted to 4 at Expert.)
  • [percentage based intrinsics] #3943: In variants with percentage-based intrinsics, see invisible is no longer a binary attribute. Eating invisible stalkers now gives you various percentages of the intrinsic. While extrinsic see invisible still works like it does now, allowing you to see any invisible monster in line of sight, intrinsic see invisible shows you invisible monsters in line of sight within a certain radius from you. The radius increases with the percentage, possibly the square root of the percentage (so 64% see invisible is a radius of 8, and 100% is a radius of 10 - note that 100% still is less powerful than extrinsic see invisible's unlimited range).
  • #3955: Make scroll label length (or, more complicated, its number of syllables) roughly correlate to its cost. The correlation could be fuzzed a bit, so MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT is probably a 300 zorkmid scroll, but is certainly no less than 200, and NR 9 is probably something really cheap, but might be 100 zorkmid.
  • #4004: The number of turns you can remember a spell is directly dependent on your Intelligence, and possibly Wisdom (at the time of reading the book). The default 20000 turns is a baseline for maybe 12 Int and 12 Wis; more of those means you get more turns when you learn the spell or refresh your memory, and less of those means you get fewer turns.
  • #4005: Arcane monster spell that reduces your memory of a single spell by a few thousand turns.
  • #4016: Non-coaligned priests require more money in donations than coaligned priests do to get the same benefits.
  • #4021: A non-magical book like a novel that describes how to do the invocation.
  • #4043: Add a way to show nearby unseen pets and possibly also peacefuls. Using a warning-like system, they render as green 1-5 (pets) and blue 1-5 (peacefuls) using the same scale as warning does. Initial idea was to tie this to intrinsic warning or when wearing a blessed ring of warning, but this has flavor problems since warning exists to alert you to threats, which pets and peacefuls aren't. Plus, a lot of roles get intrinsic warning anyway, and rings don't generally change behavior based on beatitude. It might be better off coming from some other source.
  • #4115: In order to penalize situations where the hero is partly or mostly surrounded without implemeting a complex flanking system: Every monster attack that incurs damage reduction due to subzero AC makes your effective AC worse by the amount of reduced damage for the duration of that turn. This means that a crowd of monsters hitting you all at once will whittle down your defense and do some damage rather than damage reduction being in full force for each individual attack.
  • #4124: New artifact Gauntlets of Throwing: unspecified base type, adds +1 to the multishot cap for thrown missiles only (not ammo fired from a launcher). When multishooting, only one actual item is thrown; the rest are temporary summoned copies of the one thrown with the same stats, which vanish after their flight is complete. (SAVEBREAK: NEW ARTIFACT)
  • #4125: Parrying Dagger, an artifact dagger which when wielded may automatically counterattack an incoming melee weapon attack, deflecting it so it doesn't hit and making an attack with itself that does sneak attack damage. [idea of parrying and riposting as a fighting style is interesting even if not this arti]
  • Khor's Orc Temple Mines' End (fourk commit f11585b, 15d4a32, 2663067, e6ed683) (evilhack commit bda15ccb) (SAVEBREAK: NEW LEVEL)
  • [Blocked by a partial intrinsics implementation] evilhack/sporkhack telepathy radius (88f9c8e)
    • Specifically, this implementation is based on partial intrinsics. Other telepathy ideas like "range equal to your Int" conflict with this.
  • [Blocked by decreased corpse nutrition] fourk decrease corpse drop odds over time (2d48b2e) and death drops? (a9ff216)
    • do decreased corpse nutrition first; see what that does. Note that it won't address sacfesting though.
  • Ideas cut from the Gehennom overhaul, currently in limbo because they weren't really needed for the Gehennom overhaul (and may well have been too much of an increase in difficulty). These were never necessarily committed to.
    • high-level late-game undead (shades gen in graveyards, spectres, other high level Z)
    • #809: More harassment effects: the chance of respawning the Wizard is a fixed 1/7 and the rest of the effects are equal probability. Multiple non-duplicate effects may happen at the same time. Put under G overhaul because some of these may work better as "Gehennom is collapsing" effects.
      • Unchanged: curse items, summon nasties, vaguely nervous, aggravate monsters
      • Darken much of the level, and extinguish or destroy light sources. Maybe also blind the player.
      • Drop boulders around the upstairs, or iron bars.
      • Spawn pools centered on the player, with sea monsters in them.
      • Spawn lava around the level, not under the player.
      • Create a hole or pit under the player.
      • Create a stinking cloud centered on the player.
      • If you are carrying the Amulet, it teleports to a random square on your level or the level below.
      • If you are carrying the Amulet, it (and possibly any fake Amulets) becomes heavier. This either lasts until the next harassment triggers, or is permanent but the total amount of weight added to the amulet has some sort of cap on it. This is interesting primarily because it targets carry cap, which is a valuable end-game resource.
      • A variety of powerful player debuffs such as dealing half damage, taking double damage, blocking HP or Pw regeneration, super hunger, etc.
    • #4150: Shorten Gehennom drastically, paring it down to a few mandatory levels (the Valley, the Wizard's Tower (containing Vlad's Tower entrance), the vibrating square level containing the fake Wizard's Tower to portal into the real one) with no demon lord lairs and no filler. In exchange, once you start escaping the Sanctum with the Amulet, any level you reenter for the first time gets partly overwritten with Gehennom elements -- rivers of lava, twisted mazes, and in particular, the demon lords. However, enough areas of the map will be left in their original states so that it remains recognizable. In particular this is aimed at making sure any stash you have made may not survive the process. [consider aspects of this]
    • #4173: Cave-in trap, which appears deep in the dungeon and/or in Gehennom. It causes the ceiling to collapse all around the target, turning the spaces into stone terrain, burying the target (potentially starting suffocating timers) and dumping a few boulders and rocks in the vicinity. It works somewhat like GruntHack cave-ins on the Plane of Earth, but in trap form. Moloch speaks when you leave the Sanctum level (or even leave the temple) in a com_pager: A voice deep as the blankness of space shakes the walls around you. "Thou art an impertinent fool, [rank]. I shall see thou crushed beneath this entire edifice before thou canst escape with thy prize. Let the stones shake and crumble; let the fires rise and consume; let the air be scorched and darkness consume all... \n A tremor passes through the floor, and quickly builds into a powerful rumbling. A dull red glow seems to permeate the air. Then Gehennom starts to collapse.
    • #2572: When you kill the high priest of Moloch, he gives you a multiline death message calling you a fool and saying you don't know what you have done, and maybe hinting a little bit at why Hell is about to go to hell.

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