the tales of rooihirado

21. Burned to death by a bunch of bloats on floor 4. They were blocking the only way forward, and I had no range; when I went in to melee, they released flammable gas that was ignited by the nearby lava. Wonder if I could’ve run past them all. Bosses defeated: Big Jack (floor 3). Also, I defeated 60+ enemies with a single sword but did NOT unlock warrior. Rude?? Maybe adds don’t count (most of my kills were from a big beehive on floor 1).

22. Killed by the Doomed Swordsman (floor 3). Kinda embarrassing. Was just checking out a side floor, saw a magic ring and put it on, and it turned out to be a cursed ring of Greed +2. Then the Doomed Swordsman showed up and continuously slowed me too much to evade his attacks or fight properly. In retrospect, the play would’ve been to get naked and run for the exit.

23. Killed by a pair of hulking rats on floor 3. Two large enemies at once is bad news because one can cover for the other one while he’s on weapon cooldown.

24. Killed by one of The Fury’s harpies on floor 7. This run went a lot further than I thought it would (I used a lot of resources early due to being bad at combat), but I was well and truly out by the time I encountered The Fury. The green harpy poisons you.

25. Burned to death on floor 4. This one was impressive. The first door of the level was barred, openable by hitting a sphere (i.e. one way). When I stepped through, I was in a large cavern and vents started releasing flammable gas from three different directions. Trying to race through the gas before I choked, I encountered several flamethrower turrets and, well, that was it.

26. Fell to my death. Reached The Middle Catacombs Ablaze (floor 6), which was a nightmare of flammable gas vents, lava, and flame-spewing turrets, and also a dead end. With 4 HP, I limped back up to floor 4, the branch floor, featuring a bunch of chasms and no way to reach any other stairs down. Tried jumping down a chasm with a rope and reached the same dead-end floor 5 as before. Tried jumping down a different chasm and died. My theory: there was a jumping/flight item on floor 6 that I missed, probably past that one room full of turrets that I didn’t have HP to explore.

27. Killed by a pack of goblins on floor 3. I’m really bad at this game’s combat system and not sure how to improve. For a single large/slow enemy, you wait for them to swing, then run in and hit them while they’re on cooldown. But what about multiple smaller enemies with shields?

===

things I learned:

• Pick battles more carefully; not every enemy needs to be fought.
• Green enemies are venomous. This includes green harpies and white (green) rats. If you hit an enemy and their blood is green, that also indicates they are venomous. (Exception: Green lizards are just green because they’re lizards. The blood tells true.)
• If running through an area filled with flammable gas, avoid turrets; they will probably be flame turrets. (I think this is a feature of the level design rather than coincidence.)
• If being strength drained by an enemy, you may need to de-equip items to avoid encumbrance.

===

28. Killed by a boggard (frog dude) on floor 6. He was immune to most, but not all, of my attacks. Retrospective: Maybe he was immune to ice, making my short sword of frost +1 ineffective, while my (nonmagical) dagger still worked. Should’ve switched weapons. (Also, this may have been why the Wicked Witch (floor 5 boss) was immune to most attacks? I chalked it up to a witch thing and ran.)

29. Killed by a creep/boggard duo on floor 14. BREAKTHROUGH RUN: I discovered stealth is incredible. I defeated a trio of ogres on floor 7(?) I had no business defeating by hiding in shadows, getting a sneak attack, then running away and re-hiding. I progressed until floor 13, where I found myself stuck behind a barred door in a two-room complex, where one room was full of poison gas and the other room was patrolled by giant worms (they are blind and operate off smell, so stealth is useless). I used a scroll of descend to get to 14, and found myself in a small room with a creep and a boggard, and that was it. Sadly I got almost no gold (19).

30. Killed by the Goblin Shaman on floor 6. This one was my fault—I saw him in a room behind a teleport and decided to engage.

31. Killed by a giant worm on floor 4. I couldn’t find the exit (I just missed it on the map LMAO) so I was digging everywhere, hoping to find a secret room, and instead found a giant worm. I had tons of healing on hand but it did 17 damage in a single hit. RIP. Bosses defeated: Goblin Butcher (floor 2)

32. Killed by a trio of orcs on floor 7. Should’ve been more proactive about testing out scrolls and potions (turns out I had a couple of scrolls of identify and potions of life).

===

most important thing I learned: Be proactive about IDing scrolls and potions.

• Rule of thumb: Scrolls are fairly chill (there are few bad ones, and they are not too bad). Feel free to try them out in a safe area. Potions are incredibly unchill and you should never drink a potion unless you know the effect is positive.
• General procedure:
• Wait until you have a few enchanted items you might like to use if their effects are good. Then start spamming scrolls. Your hope is to hit a scroll of detect magic, which will tag every item in your inventory as being positively or negatively enchanted.
• Then you can equip all the positive gear and drink positive potions to ID them. (This will waste some potions, but it’s worth it to ID potions of strength/life asap.)
• After that, keep using any unidentified scrolls you get.
• Note: You can buy scrolls of detect magic in the starting shop, though they’re above my single-run cash intake. I can buy one sometimes.
• On opinion and belief: I think that if you throw an unidentified potion at an enemy and it says “no effect,” that means it was a positive potion. I’ve only tried this once so it could be bad intel.

===

33. Killed by the Troll Matriarch and her three bullyboys at The Sheltered Glades of the Strong (level 6). Unfortunate placement: They spawned next to the entrance room, a tiny room with no door and only one exit. There was always one troll bodyblocking the exit, so I couldn’t run past, and I had no scrolls of descend. Bosses defeated: Ant Queen (floor 3).

• Early in the run, I forged a longsword of stunning +1 (and later gained the strength to one-hand it). Defeated 101 enemies with it and did NOT unlock the warrior class. Is this achievement broken?? (or do longswords not count… I double-checked it was swingable…)
• Trying to avoid the Troll Matriarch, I explored a different dungeon branch and found Sophie’s Sanctum (floor 8). That was neat (got Sophie’s blessing, a full heal, and various magical items) but unfortunately the blessing had expired by the time I got back up to the hub floor (4) and back down to the trolls.

34. Killed on floor 11 by activating multiple floor traps in quick succession that summoned phantom blades. Encountered the Heartless Ogre on floor 8. Not sure how to beat him. I found his heart but could not figure out how to destroy it. Tried off-handing it and using it as a shield (the idea was that his enchantments prevented others from harming it, but would not apply to himself). That didn’t work. Also tried putting it in the stove and offering it to Density, to no avail. I left. In retrospect, the journal entries were hinting at fire—could I have burned it? (not in the stove tho)

35. BIG RUN: Killed by the Guardian of Yendor on floor 8. Got the amulet by defeating The Red Dragon in The Epic Bottom (floor 12) (all credit to my +4 staff of triple missile). Then I made it up four floors before the Guardian attacked. He seems like serious business. He took 0 or 1 damage from my +4 scimitar and 10 damage from an explosion potion.

• ngl I almost noped out of fighting The Red Dragon because I had no idea he was going to drop the amulet. I was just like, dead-end floor and there’s a dragon, time to return to the hub floor. But then I was like “would be pretty cool to go out fighting a dragon” and here we are.
• I pored over the amulet description because I thought it might be a fake. Who finds the Amulet of Yendor on floor 12. “I didn’t know it was such a baby game,” said HGR. “Do you know how many levels there are in Nethack?”
• Even if the Guardian hadn’t shown up, getting home could’ve been dicey. I had no healing. Floor 8 was crawling with undead, and I didn’t know where the stairs up was, since I had gotten there via a scroll of descend on a dead-end floor 7. I also had multiple entirely unexplored floors above me.

===

things I learned:

• Don’t skip whole floors. At minimum, always map a path from staircase to staircase.
• Magic staves are fantastic. They don’t auto recharge, so use them sparingly (e.g., bosses, enemies with contact damage, venomous enemies).
• Enchanted weapons given by the gods are NOT always good. (I made an offering to Grievous and got an enchanted dagger in return. It was a cursed dagger of alarm. Rude.)
• Never melee a vampire. They steal your weapons on contact and do NOT drop them when they die.

things I don’t know:

• How does one align with a god? I found a potion that only works on those aligned with Sophie. Also, Sophie is said to punish trespassers in her sanctum, but she liked me and blessed me. Maybe because I was wearing a necklace of Sophie?
• Should I be fighting or fleeing from the Guardian of Yendor? (Eight floors is a long way to run with him taking potshots the whole way…)
• When does he show up? Is it time-based or floor-based? Should I be prepping an arena??
• Do invisibility potions work on him?

===

36.  Killed by poison on floor 5. Embarrassing. I wasted a ton of healing resources fighting the Jabberling Chief and his minions on floor 2 because I thought they were blocking the way forward (they were not) and they would drop good loot (they did not; all I got was an unenchanted longsword). What specifically killed me was one of those cultists whose body dissolves into a half dozen venomous rats when they die. In retrospect, I should have backed the hell up and thrown a potion of explosion.

37.  Killed by a wraith in The Grandglades of Hell (floor 10). I entered the floor with 8 HP and no healing, so it’s not shocking. I could possibly have beaten that encounter by playing better (I had a wand of stunning and potions of incineration), but would not have beaten the dragon. (Based on journal entries, there was a dragon on the floor, although I don’t know if it was THE dragon.)

38.  Killed by a duo of spiky worms in The Hollow Nest of the Great Burrowers (floor 7). Another case of small combat mistakes adding up. My main weapons were a morningstar and an obsidian axe, and I kept screwing up the timing (I typically use swords). No ranged weaponry that run. Bosses killed: The Ant Queen (floor 5). Obtained an obsidian axe that could kill walkers permanently. Get wrecked, assholes. Predictably, every level after that was full of walkers.

39.  Burned to death by a mechanical spider on The Caldera of Molten Lava (floor 11). I had recently popped a fire immunity potion, but did not notice when the buff expired, so I walked face-first into the flame OOPS. It’s interesting how runs are themed. Early on, I found a fire immunity potion with a note saying “This is a fire immunity potion.” Then we got a slew of lava levels with invincible flame-spewing spider mechs.

40.  Killed by The Gigantic White Rodent and a fish on level 3. The less said about that run, the better. One thing I don’t understand: When you step off land into the water, is there a visual way to tell which edges will let you back onto the land and which won’t?

41.  Killed by a star spawn on floor 7. I feel like we’re backsliding here. The theme of this run was narrow tunnels with spiky pulsating walls, and I lost absurd amounts of health to the walls (I never got caught in a rising wall, I just kept bumping into walls like a doofus).

42.  Killed on floor 10 by a turret firing magic missiles in a marshy area filled with Myst while also fleeing from a hulking ratman. It was a lot. In retrospect, I had a scroll of descend I should’ve used.

• Even better strat: I should have preemptively thrown a potion of corrosion at the turret.
• Sadness: I died carrying two unidentified potions of life. (I had no way to ID them; I only found one scroll of detect magic all run, and I used it before I got the potions.)
• I was stuck for a long time on floor 7, a four-way hub floor with the way to go locked behind a triforce door. I still have never assembled the full triforce. I got one triangle by defeating Terros (earth elemental boss) on floor 8, then spent a lot of resources trying to find the others before just praying my way through it. (Density had my back. He did charge 12 gold to open the door though.)

===

things I learned:

• How to deal with poison gas rooms: Throw in a lit torch. This will ignite the gas, turning it into harmless steam. For rooms with poison gas vents, this will continuously neutralize the gas until the torch burns out.
• STOP. PUT AWAY YOUR STACK OF TORCHES BEFORE ENTERING THE ROOM.
• Love doing the thing where you steal the gargoyles’ treasure (causing the door to auto-bar behind you), unbar the door (thus awakening the gargoyles), sprint out the door, and re-bar it from the other side. seeya suckers
• Tips for water areas:
• If you need light, use a bottled sprite. (Swimming will extinguish your torch.)
• When visibility is low (e.g. dark or misty areas), it can be hard to visually distinguish shallows from deeps. But it’s always clear on the minimap. Use it liberally. Pausing is free. Additionally, shallows extending in a certain direction is often a hint as to where the next landmass is.
• Answer to the question posed in run #40: You can step onto land from shallow water, but not from deep water.
• “Pausing is free” is great advice in many situations. Take a sec to think. Got a wand of stunning? Smoke bomb? Potion of invisibility? Potion of explosion/incineration? Unidentified maleficent potion? Scroll of descend? Scroll of teleportation? Even if you are just fleeing, taking a sec to mentally map out the route is useful (unless you are fleeing into unknown territory, in which case godspeed).