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Comment by MaupitiBlue | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been trying to reach the amulet for 30 years.

I’ve been playing since 1987 with the IBM PC version called Hack. My friend’s floppy disk got damaged so he couldn’t use a scroll of identify because it crashed the game, but he was still able to finish the game without it. For Hack all you needed to do was find the Amulet of Yendor under a boulder and bring it to the top.

I’ve never ascended on Nethack though despite all my time invested. I’m probably playing it wrong but I don’t care it’s still fun as hell.

That sounds closer to Rogue than Nethack.

No it was called Hack. This is around 1985 or 1986.

I played on and off for over a decade before deciding I was going to ascend. If you spend some time on the wiki and learn all the little tricks hidden in the game, it’s not too hard to win. There are a few common strategies to get through the middle game where most people die. Gehennom is fairly repetitive and you will be powerful enough by that point in the game and familiar enough with your character to not botch it every time.

Keep going, bro. It took me 12 years.

I try to explain my friends how fiendishly hard NetHack is but they always say stuff like 'Well I've won in Dark Souls so I know about hard games'. It's not even in the same league imho.

Here's how I describe it:

It's like dark souls if there were way more monsters and items with interactions that can one shot you if you aren't knowledgeable and careful, but you don't know what they do right away, and when you die you have to start from the beginning with a totally different level layout, starting loadout and pickup RNG, AND you forget what all the items do.

It took me about 20 years of casual play, then another couple months of fairly obsessive play. It's effectively impossible without spoilers.

I know folks who consider NetHack to be a Unix tutorial. It teaches hjkl to acclimatize one to vi. And people who win the game are those who have read the source (or, these days, the wiki) enough to grok the game. And once you grok the source enough to win, you might even find a bug. And since you've alienated your meatbag "friends" and replaced them with the NetHack fandom, you'll be encouraged to report & patch the bugs.

But yeah... I've seen some fake amulets, but I've never gotten the real one...

Well, now you know what to do:

    Find non-magic fountain next to a wall (manually)
    90 wishes. Eyes to phase-jump through walls. 60 c!oGL. ~+100 MB
    Genocide LcPUn (due to lazy bot code ;))
    Tele Vlad, phase-jump tower, get candelabrum.
    h-strats to provoke Rodney (who is not allowed to return by RNG)
    Wait for quest
    Level-tele to jumping distance from quest leader (save realtime over landing next to).
    Go to end
    Land jumping distance from square
    Phase-jump to priest
    c!oGL to top (Mysterious force not allowed. Lovely.)
    Hallu for RNG manip without walls (just press space)
    Force portals relatively close on Earth, Air, Fire.
    Ascend.

You and me both. :(

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