Hack 1.01: Won!

My final anchor save was at the start of level 25.

Level 25

• $10,234, AC -5, Str 18/98, Exp 13
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +5 splint mail, +3 shield, 30 +0 arrows
• Ring of poison resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of digging, 2 wands of fire
  
• Potion of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation, potion of object detection
  
• 2 scrolls of remove curse, scroll of genocide
• 12 food rations

 

Attempt 1:

Finally - I killed a demon! Shortly after this feat, a trapdoor dumped me down to level 26, where my luck didn't quite repeat itself - a xan pricked me, forcing me to juggle around my inventory to be combat effective again, and as I did this, two demons spawned on either side of me. I beat them - barely - and the xan, presumably laughing its thorax off, pricked me again and finished me off.

Attempt 2:

A solo demon went down without too much trouble yet again. I decided to press my luck and keep descending without saving or exploring the levels.

On level 26, I found a wand that turned out to be a wand of polymorph! I struggled to find the exit, and wasted a bunch of wand of digging charges looking for it. But eventually I found the stairs - hidden underneath a small pile of gems that I couldn't lift.

On level 27, the maze, I drank my potion of object detection.

Up in the right-hand corner - an amulet! Could it be?

Monster detection showed what I was in for:

No demons - yet anyway.

Sadly, my wand of digging only had one charge, so I had to explore the majority of the maze before finding the amulet. There's a lot of stuff in here too - some of the stuff that occurred:

• A scroll of enchant armor vaporized my already over-enchanted splint mail. Thankfully, I found some more splint mail soon after, but still, this was a blow.
• A scroll of enchant weapon finally upgraded my sword a bit.
  
• I found a wand of sleep, though for the time being I used my wand of fire to deal with the tougher monsters.
• A nymph stole my ring of +2 damage.
  
• Multiple teleport traps took me in weird directions and I am pretty sure I skipped some of the maze this way. One boulder got teleported this way too.
• I discovered that with my ring of poison resistance, I could eat poisonous corpses.

 

Eventually, I made my way to the amulet's location.

 

 

Well, damn. What do I do? Polymorphing the boulder didn't work, and I was out of digging charges. Nothing I tried worked, not even stripping down, dropping everything and squeezing through, which the wiki said works in Nethack. So I quit and reloaded back to level 25.

Attempt 3:

The random maze generator was on my side as I quickly descended to the maze on level 27.

Seeing dragons with my potion of monster detection, I genocided them right away, and dealt with a handful of weak monsters as I mapped out enough maze to get to the amulet, and also picked up a normal helmet along the way. Sure enough, it was underneath a boulder again.

This time I was prepared with a mostly full wand of digging. I moved around to the north, dug south, and pushed.

Yes! Except - immediately after taking it, a boulder fell on my head.

Great, but what if I hadn't found one at the last moment?

I made my way back to the surface, using the rest of the charges on the wand of digging to create shortcuts as much as possible - why take chances now? I didn't stop to fight, I didn't bother picking up any valuables from my stash - I just kept going. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened as I climbed up the 27 staircases to freedom.

Nor after it, really.

 

GAB rating: Above average. This already feels a lot more like a Nethack prototype than Fenlason's Hack, which was basically Rogue with more stuff in it, though the seeds of Nethack's persistent levels and complex gameplay were already planted. Where I reached the end of Fenlason's Hack feeling like I saw just about everything, I finished Brouwer's feeling like I could keep playing for months and still not discover all of its depths.

But Brouwers' Hack, at least at this version, feels unfair. Granted, Rogue wasn't fair, but Rogue was simple enough that you could play fairly quickly and get enjoyment out of launching a new game and seeing how deep you can get before you die. Hack is slower, more complex, and you really don't want to die and start over, which makes it all the more frustrating when you do and feel like there wasn't anything you could have done about it.

Maybe I'm the one being unfair. After all, I openly savescummed - perhaps I just never learned to play properly. Maybe if you don't have that crutch, you learn how to get out of jams or avoid them altogether. That's how Nethack is supposed to work, as I understand it. But Brouwer's Hack just feels disinclined to give you things - I didn't even find a store until I was 19 levels deep - and then you die because you didn't have stuff. Starvation was a big problem early on, putting you at the mercy of the dungeon generator's willingness to spawn edible food and/or nutritious corpses, and throughout the whole run it really felt like so many of Hack's monsters can only be out-muscled or beaten/evaded with very specific magic toys, and if the game spawns something you aren't equipped to fight or flee from, you die. Starvation wasn't nearly as big a problem in Fenlason's where you can buy food, and although combat was unforgiving, Fenlason's Hack was far more generous with strength-boosting and level-boosting opportunities and magic tricks, and magic seemed more effective in general as well (e.g. scrolls of confusion actually worked).

Interestingly, there are a number of features in Fenlason's Hack that did not make their way to Hack 1.01. I should re-iterate that what I played, "hack121," is not completely authentic; Fenlason's original is lost, and we just have it on NetHack Wiki's word that the "hack121" DOS port, which may have been compiled as late as 2001, is as close as we'll get.

• A shop at the beginning of the game where you can buy starting gear, including cheap food. If nothing else, this greatly eases the initial problem of hunger.
• Torches and lanterns, which you must keep lit with oil and tinderboxes or be effectively blind, as in Moria.
• Mirror items for defeating cockatrices
• Cross items, though I never found out their purpose
  
• Commands to view items in the room, to query your weight carried/limit, and hunger levels.
• Magic detection of monsters/gold/objects persists. In Hack 1.01 the effect goes away as soon as you make a move.
• Multi-use scrolls.
  
• Rooms painted in strange, mood-affecting colors. I could not figure out what gameplay purpose they serve.
• Rooms with flammable gas traps and rooms with crushing wall traps.
  
• A whole assortment of monsters that I never saw any equivalent of in Hack 1.01, like pickpockets, ghosts, floor fiends, guards, arguses, and energars.
• Non-permanent strength-draining effects
• An endgame where guards infinispawn after you collect the magic orb until you escape the dungeon or die.

 

Brouwer's Hack has too many new features to list, but the biggest are class selection, the pet dog, and necrophagia. But that there are so many mutually exclusive features makes me further question just how accurate hack121 is to the original. Were these features removed by Brouwer? Were they added into hack121 later? Maybe Brower's Hack was based on an incomplete build? Or maybe Kneller's DOS port is missing more than he admits? I may never know, but I think I will be revisiting Hack in the years to come.

Hack 1.01: Kick the dog

Level 20

• $6,243, AC 1, Str 18/75, Exp 11
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +3 splint mail, 31 +0 arrows
• Ring of cold resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of speed monster, wand of digging
• Magic whistle
• 2 potions of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation
  
• Scroll of remove curse
• 11 food rations
• Four unidentified scrolls

 

Attempt 1:

Almost immediately, a dragon snuck up on me while exploring a corridor.

Uh-oh. Time to use one of those unidentified scrolls!

And here we have one of the unexpected advantages of savescumming. Now, whenever I reload a saved game, I'll know I have an extremely rare scroll of genocide. I can save it for when I really need it, and until then, act knowing that I have this option. But right now, I need it, so I invoke 'D.'

The rest of the level gave me no trouble, except that the exit completely eluded me. Unable to find any secret doors, I wasted all of my wand of digging's charges trying to find the exit, to no avail. After that, I quaffed a potion of monster detection, and it revealed orcs in a part of the level I hadn't explored yet - this let me focus on where to search for hidden doors, and eventually I found it and the orc-guarded exit. I did not make a save.

On level 21, I encountered a new enemy, demons, represented by an '&' sign.

In trouble again, I read an unidentified scroll which turned my hands blue - indicating a scroll of confuse monster! But it wasn't enough to save me.

 

Attempt 2:

I killed a cockatrice, and then absentmindedly stepped on its corpse.

Attempt 3:

A dragon awaited me right at the stairs. I tried to see if I could save my scroll of genocide by using one of confusion instead. The game told me the dragon appeared confused, but its fighting ability didn't seem affected in the slightest. Needless to say, I became lunch.

Attempt 4:

Nothing particularly noteworthy happened. I found a wand of light, and some odds and ends that I couldn't carry, including an ivory ring.

Level 21

• $7,162, AC 1, Str 18/75, Exp 11
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +3 splint mail, 31 +0 arrows
• Ring of cold resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of speed monster, wand of digging, wand of light
  
• Magic whistle
• 2 potions of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation
  
• Scroll of remove curse, scroll of genocide, 2 scrolls of confuse monster
  
• 11 food rations
• An unidentified scroll

 

Attempt 1:

The dog fell into a trap door, and I followed. The dog was there, non-hostile, and so were stairs leading down, so I descended. It did not follow!

A wraith in the stairs room on level 23 gave me another level-boosting corpse. I kept exploring, descending stairs whenever they were found, and by level 27, the scenery changed.

Without IBMgraphics support, the maze is difficult to read.

The maze! Is this the end?

Well, it was the end of this run. I explored, hit some dead ends, and then demons surrounded me.

Genocide time, right? Wrong. Demons can't be genocided - the scroll prompts you to input a letter, and the '&' sign is not accepted. My scrolls of confuse monster didn't even seem to help. What good are these things anyway?

Attempt 2:

I lost the dog to another trap door, but this time I decided I didn't care. The level was easy enough, the dog seemed more of a nuisance than a help at this point, and I found enough cool stuff while exploring that it seemed worth it.

Level 22

• $7,451, AC 1, Str 18/75, Exp 12
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +3 splint mail, 31 +0 arrows
• Ring of cold resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of speed monster, wand of digging, wand of light, 2 wands of fire
  
• Magic whistle
• 2 potions of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation, potion of object detection
  
• Scroll of remove curse, scroll of genocide, scroll of confuse monster
  
• 11 food rations
• An unidentified scroll
• An unidentified ring
  

 

Attempt 1:

The dog was hostile and I had to put it down, which was actually pretty difficult and nearly got me killed. I encountered and a genocided a dragon, and discovered through use that my unidentified scroll was a self-immolating scroll of fire. Then I got overconfident and fought a purple worm at less than full health, and died.

Attempt 2:

This time the dog was not hostile... until I hit it by accident. And then I had to put it down. It carried a scroll of identification, which identified my ring as one of poison resistance - nice, but maybe not as useful as it might have been ten levels ago!

Multiple cockatrices wandered the level, but I avoided their stoning effect and took care not to step on their corpses. And I found the exit without any setbacks.

Level 23

• $8,396, AC 1, Str 18/75, Exp 12
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +3 splint mail, 31 +0 arrows
• Ring of poison resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of digging, wand of light, 2 wands of fire
  
• 2 potions of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation, potion of object detection
  
• Scroll of remove curse, scroll of genocide, scroll of confuse monster
  
• 10 food rations

 

Attempt 1:

I quaffed a potion of monster detection. Nothing but a leocrotta and a nurse, the latter of which dropped a scroll of enchant armor. Other monsters spawned in, but nothing I couldn't handle. I exhausted my wand of light but picked up a few useful things.

Level 24

• $9,046, AC 0, Str 18/75, Exp 12
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +4 splint mail, 31 +0 arrows
• Ring of poison resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of digging, 2 wands of fire
  
• Potion of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation, potion of object detection
  
• 2 scrolls of remove curse, scroll of genocide, scroll of confuse monster
  
• 10 food rations, 1 tin

 

I noticed that my scrolls of remove curse didn't stack. Why not - is one of them cursed?

Attempt 1:

I figured the monster detection and object detection should be saved for the maze, but quaffed a potion of levitation just on the off-chance that it might prevent tripping a trapdoor during its brief duration. I'm not sure what else you do with these. It basically lasted long enough to explore one dark room, where I found a scroll of teleportation and another, unidentified scroll.

I killed a cockatrice in a corridor, and an umber hulk followed, stepping over its corpse to no detriment. I killed the umber hulk too, but barely, and really should have used a scroll of confuse monster. Oh well.

A third room held a snake hiding under a potion of invisibility, which I grabbed, and as I retreated, ran into a dragon! I wanted to see if I could kill it without genocide, so I drank the potion of invisibility - it still attacked me, but missed. I hit, it hit back. I used my scroll of confuse monster, and it hit, it breathed fire on me anyway, nearly killing me. One more hit and I died.

Attempt 2:

Right in the starting room, I fell for the old bag-of-cash-placed-on-the-trap-door trick.

 

On floor 25, I had a close call with a rust monster in the dark, and after killing it a purple worm swallowed me, but I hacked my way out before it could finish digesting me. Then, in a corridor, I got sandwiched between a powerful yeti, xorn, and zruty, but I beat them all.

I found a few things clearing out level 25, at least, and then returned to level 24, where I found another scroll of enchant armor, mutually confused and was then nearly killed by an umber hulk, ate some bad tinned food, and ran into a dragon in the dark which I genocided.

Finally, this run came to an end while exploring a dark room, three monsters - an ettin, a xorn, and a nurse all showed up at once and took turns hitting me. I drank a potion of invisibility which I found earlier in the level and tried to escape, but the nurse landed a killing blow on me anyway.

Attempt 3:

Killed by a demon. The scroll of confuse monster seemed to prevent it from summoning help, but didn't hurt its battle accuracy. One demon was enough.

Attempt 4:

A 'xan' pricked both my legs in combat. This did not affect my strength, but nevertheless caused me to collapse under my load as if it had. I dropped my arrows and killed it, and on its corpse found a potion which made my legs feel "somewhat better."

The rest of the level was the usual cycle of finding stuff and killing monsters, including an umber hulk. I got hungry and ate the tin - it contained strength-boosting spinach this time! And the loot included a scroll of enchant armor too. Even more notably, I found a +3 shield - that's a significant AC boost, though by now I was definitely having trouble carrying all of my stuff.

Lastly, I killed and ate a wraith - one of the few corpses light enough to lift - for another level boost.

Stats and items:

• $10,234, AC -5, Str 18/98, Exp 13
• +2 long sword, +1 bow, +5 splint mail, +3 shield, 30 +0 arrows
• Ring of poison resistance
• Ring of +2 increase damage
  
• Wand of digging, 2 wands of fire
  
• Potion of monster detection, 2 potions of levitation, potion of object detection
  
• 2 scrolls of remove curse, scroll of genocide
• 12 food rations