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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Fans of nethack and other roguelikes should try Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS).[1]

You can play or watch games in progress by:

  ssh joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org

Use the password "joshua".

It's also available as a standalone program you can run on your own machine.

DCSS has some made some great innovations, such as fantastic use of color and auto-explore, tons of really unique gods and races, it's scriptable(!) in Lua, the list goes on and on...

[1] - http://crawl.develz.org/

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To extend that: their work on the webtiles implementation is wonderful. I bounce between webtiles and console.

Here's a screenshot of me at the moment: http://i.imgur.com/mZXTnh1.png

There are a bunch of available servers:

* Sydney, Australia: http://crawl.project357.org

* Arizona, USA: http://crawl.akrasiac.org

* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.berotato.org

* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.s-z.org

* Paris, France: http://crawl.xtahua.com

* Falkenstein, Germany: http://crawl.lantea.net

* Seoul, Korea: http://webzook.net

* Tokyo, Japan: http://lazy-life.ddo.jp

And of course you can watch others playing on webtiles, too.

Nice list! Should be akrasiac instead of akrasia, though. :)

I played NetHack in the console, but I always play Crawl in webtiles. The tiles themselves are beautiful and the minimap is very, VERY useful.

Something I really enjoy about DCSS is the community aspect that goes on in ##crawl on freenode. First, lots of help from smart players. Second, the bots announce milestones like unique mob deaths, entering branches, wins, deaths, etc. You can query the bots for help, too, useful for things like querying a monster's stats, and a million other things.

Essentially what you can get from: https://lookupdb.guy.ht/#term/death%20yak

Here's the query syntax for Sequell (a bot): https://github.com/crawl/sequell/blob/master/docs/listgame.m...

And just to add to the link dump, here's a list of user defined commands for the bots: https://loom.shalott.org/userdef.html

They have a tournament a few times a year, with every release. You build teams (or play on a team by yourself) and accumulate points a variety of ways. Banners are earned, and it is all logged.

http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.17/overview.html

The IRC thing is such a nice enhancement that I wrote a relay bot for it (kind of a meta-bot): https://github.com/neckro/OCTOTROG

I'm part of a small sub-community of players, and we use it to filter the announcements so we only see the players we care about, run queries on the Crawl bots without disrupting ##crawl, etc.

(edit: oh hi grimgrin, didn't notice it was you :)

You should also try out Brogue! (https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/)

Brogue is shorter and tighter than DCSS. If I had my way, we'd cut down crawl to 27 levels. In Brogue the maps are smaller, the food clock is more punishing, enemies tend to be more distinct from one another. I've joked that every time we need new content for crawl, we just steal it from Brogue.

Edit: Please use this key when connecting to crawl servers -- http://crawl.akrasiac.org/cao_key

Some server admins have disabled password login.

Brogue is beautiful, but DCSS plays in a terminal. Also, the number of races/background/god combination in DCSS is simply incredible.

Brogue runs in terminal / curses with `brogue --term`. It's not _as_ pretty (or garishly colorful), but it runs fine.

> the number of races/background/god combination in DCSS is simply incredible

Brogue reifies the concepts of "class", "god", "race" etc etc into the object system. Every character starts out exactly the same, and you choose your 'build' based somewhat off what you find in the dungeon. You don't learn spells, you pick up staves/wands/charms.

Additionally, it tries very, very hard to never let you grind your character. (As bhickey mentioned, ) the food clock is punishing, and the dungeon is less same-y. Yes, DCSS has branches that differentiate parts of the dungeon pretty successfully, but within a single branch (except for the set levels at the end), they're on the boring side.

When I first started playing DCSS, most of my roguelike experience was with Nethack, so I thought the interface was amazing (stashes! auto-explore! waypoints!), but now I kind of think they're crutches.

In fairness, I think the DCSS developers agree with you. Branches are for the most part getting shorter (extended excepted). Lair is still pretty long, but I'd rather it was made more varied than just shorter. Hall of Blades is now in Elf, and Elf is only 3 deep. Crypt's only three deep. Depths is actually pretty varied anyway. The main rune branches are all four deep.

Still rock hard though.

> Still rock hard though.

I mean, Octopod Transmuter is not... easy... but all the long major roguelikes (ADOM, Nethack, DCSS, ToME) are basically games of patience. They're repeatably doable if you learn all the rules and are careful. Speedruns are harder, of course.

Whereas even if you're completely spoiled and have achieved a perfect score in the past, Brogue is still difficult because every decision matters and you can't take your time. If you don't plan the most efficient way to explore each level then you starve, and if you miss or waste a key resource then you die because you aren't powerful enough. I still love Crawl but I strongly second the recommendation to give Brogue a whirl.

If you ever want to increase the difficulty of a roguelike, you could always adopt a conduct[1], like "foodless", "atheist", "pacifist", "illiterate", etc.

[1] - https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Conduct

One cool thing about crawl is building conducts into "banners" during their tournaments: http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.17/banners.html

I've done SpEn (3), MiFi (3 & 15), DDEE (3), but I still find the game incredibly hard. I've been playing MfIE and getting wiped out repeatedly before even collecting a rune. And that's _still_ an easy combination.

Brogue does sound interesting though. But perhaps beyond my skill level.

I loved it when they removed experience points.

I loved it when they removed mountain dwarfs.

That made it so hard but then again I wasn't microing as much

Try Pixel Dungeon (or Shattered Pixel) on Android. I started with Pixel Dungeon, but now I prefer Shattered Pixel.

Careful when SSHing into an untrusted host. They can find your public key(s) that way and maybe identify who you are on GitHub.

What are some good ways to protect against that?

My first thought is to create an entry in my ~/.ssh/config with an entry for the untrusted host I'm going to ssh in to, using the "IdentityFile" keyword to point to some bogus/misleading identity file. How does that sound?

A simple solution would be to create a dummy account and use that for sshing into untrusted hosts.

I wonder if you can turn off automatic use of public keys for "*", and then enable it in .ssh/config on an as-needed basis.

Totally possible, I do this. Also I have a different key per host (using %h in IdentityFile)

Do you use pass-phrases with your per-host keys? I wanted to do this, but was unable to make it manageable. ssh-agent will only try so many keys before moving on.

No, I don't use key pass-phrases.

Just use a different key for github than for everything else. You can specify this in your ssh config using the IdentityFile directive.

In your .ssh/config file:

    Host *
    # Do not send pubkey to each and any host
    PubkeyAuthentication no
    # Use Agent
    IdentitiesOnly       yes

Then override 'PubkeyAuthentication' to yes for each known server you want to connect to.

I don't understand, why is that a bad thing? Maybe it might be an issue if you're trying to do something anonymously (but at that point, you shouldn't be using your regular machine anyway).

It's not, it's a "public" key.

It's not a problem from security perspective. It is a problem from privacy perspective.

Privacy is security.

"Security is the degree of resistance to, or protection from, harm."

"Privacy: a secret matter."

"Privacy: freedom from unauthorized intrusion."

"Privacy: the quality or state of being apart from company or observation."

So you see, privacy IS security.

I can't tell if you forgot /s?

> It's not, it's a "public" key

Not just any public key, it's your public key. It identifies you.

It's rather unexpected. Browsers carry so much baggage that you need a private mode, I wouldn't have expected something like ssh to have this sort of problem before I read about how it exposes your keys.

I could be more worried about a modified sshd, that triggers different code paths in the client than the expected ones.

If your identity is that sensitive keep a standard public key that is used by default, but for services where you might want your identity to not be linked to other accounts/places/activities have a separate key for each and specified where to use it in you SSH config (or by naming with the -i parameter on each ssh call).

Why would that be a problem?

You can play on WebTiles via your browser too at http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/ and a few other servers.

To extend on that, from what I have heard, fans of DCSS should check out Desktop Dungeons (I liked the original, which is free, but the new version is also worth checking out).

Desktop Dungeons is pretty great, and a lot of people refer to it as a roguelike, but it's just not a roguelike. It's a puzzle/resource-management game. >:/

"resource-management game" aka Roguelikes. Heh. It does more strongly resemble puzzles though. For anyone that hasn't played, the gameplay resembles a single level of a roguelike with stationary enemies. The difficulty is in progressing through enemies to gain XP as efficiently as possible so you can take on the level boss. Everything is a resource. Even fog of war, once you discover a tile it restores health and mana.

Wow, that's amazing. Good stuff!

I'd watch a twitch plays nethack

Even with democracy, that would probably be rather short.

/r/roguelikes

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