[Hackbraten]

I've been playing on and off for 15 years, sometimes daily for months on end. The deepest I managed to go is level 11, and as soon as I enter the Big Room, I die. In fact, I went past level 8 for the first time this year. I've read all of the NetHack wiki back and forth. I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing wrong or how to improve.

I'm 46 now, and if I continue that pace, I'll be dead before I even reach the bottom, let alone ascend.

[andwaal]

Been pkaying on and off since I was 12, 38 today.. Good times. Quick tip is to play valkyrie, dip sword for excalibur, rub any lamps and wish for sdsm, and you should be good.

Also check out DCSS, amazing game, been playing for soon 40 years.

[Hackbraten]

I've had them all. I’ve had wands of wishing, I die. I’ve worn blessed greased amazing technicolor Valenciaga +9001 silver patent leather dragon 2x HiDPIscale mail, I die. I step in a fucking trap, I get surrounded by a dozen killer bees, I die. Soldier ant, I die.

[chongli]

Good players can kill soldier ants with almost nothing, just some rocks or darts or daggers. There’s a bit of tactics to learn but the essential step is to stop bumping into enemies and learn to fight at range, use Elbereth to keep them at a distance, use doors and corridors to limit their angles of approach.

Once you learn how to kill a fast enemy (like a soldier ant) without letting it fight you in melee, you become unstoppable for the first 1/3rd of the game or so. You discover that you don’t need the best armour in the game right away, you don’t even need more than a half-decent weapon, you just need to maintain your supplies of ranged weapons (and wands).

Stepping in traps can also be avoided with the knowledge that (with 2 special exceptions) traps only generate in rooms, not corridors. Traps can be safely searched for from adjacent spaces and once discovered remain visible permanently.

I should also point out that the two enemies you mentioned that killed you have one thing in common: poisonous sting attacks. Poison has been nerfed in the latest version (5.0) and poison resistance can be acquired in game. Furthermore, some characters actually start the game with poison resistance for free!

[andwaal]

Haha amazing times, just have to go at it again, and again and again.

[alex_young]

I think I got my hands on Hack when I was 8, so I've been doing the same for, uh, 39 years. Damn. At least I was learning VI keys unintentionally, so it was somewhat educational. :)

[ForOldHack]

Been on and off playing since I was 19, 63 today. Always good times. I had it in my autoexec.bat, so when I got home, and turned on my machine, I was ready to play. Always abused polymorphic traps. Sorry to see them go.

[jeffcoat]

We can only guess about what's going wrong for you specifically . But I like guessing:

(extremely mild spoilers:)

- A core skill for Nethack is understanding how much danger you're in at any particular moment. Your comment about soldier ants below tells me you've made good progress here. But you need to recognize when you're in danger and how long you have to deal with that problem before you'll react appropriately.

- Nethack's dungeon isn't linear, it branches. (Think of the gnomish mines here, but there are other examples deeper.) When you're getting in over your head in one branch, go back up the stairs and switch to another one.

- When you're in immediate danger, Stop. Look through your inventory, consider your options. Think especially about wands, think about ways to write Elbereth, think about scrolls. Think about ways to use diagonal movement to your advantage to get to an escape, or a more defensible position. You have all the time in the world to think. There may not be a solution, but I've died more than a few times with more than one thing in my inventory that could have saved me.

- You need to be able to identify some things without waiting for a scroll of identify to fall into your lap. Price is the easiest way to identify the scroll of identify itself. It's also straightforward to learn to identify most useful wands: with spoilers or by experimenting. Engraving with the wand will often give you more information than zapping it. A lot of your early I'm In Danger toolkit will come from wands you've identified this way.

Good luck, have fun.

(Intermediate player, a few dozen ascensions 20 years ago.)

[bonzini]

Elbereth always seemed like a cheat... Never understood the point of it. I got to the quest without it, but not deeper.

[chongli]

It's not a cheat. It's explained in the game's manual (the Official Guidebook [1], just search for Engrave).

It's been nerfed since 3.6.X as well. Now it can no longer be used for fighting, only escape, and attempting to fight while standing on it will make you "feel like a hypocrite" and deduct 5 from your alignment score.

[1] https://www.nethack.org/v500/Guidebook.html#toc_4

[bonzini]

I know it's not, but I don't understand why it has to exist.

[chongli]

There are a million other wacky things in the game. Nothing about Elbereth seems out of place or unbalanced (since it’s been nerfed anyway).

They added the ability to apply your money to flip a coin in this version! Why does that need to exist? Because they thought of it!

[Hackbraten]

Thank you for the tips, much appreciated!

[vintermann]

One thing which I don't know if you've noticed (and I don't consider this a spoiler) but Nethack has level scaling. If you get levels too fast, faster than you get better gear, enemies outscale you. In my (admittedly very dated) experience a lot of the difficulty was striking that balance between exploring too quickly and lingering too long.

[Hackbraten]

Thanks. Are you referring to the dungeon level (depth) or the experience level?

[bhaak]

Dungeon level depth, mostly.

This being NetHack, an answer is often not as straight forward as it could be. Most of the time the level difficulty is proportional to how deep you are into the dungeon but there are levels where your experience level factors in as well.

[vintermann]

If so, it's changed. Back when I played, spawning of random monsters (i.e. almost all of them) was based on simply dungeon level + experience level.

[anthk]

13 in Slashem with the Doppleganger monk. HInt: there's the #technique feature, just type down

      #tech

ingame and say hello to Dragon Ball like attacks kicking everyone's asses.