Putting pudding farmers out of business

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Hello rgrn.

After a week of philosophing about writing a nethack bot in #nethack and
after zapzero patched netcat to do some nethack work I finally sat on my
lazy ass and scribbled together a perl script that interacts with
netcat, parses its input and puts something out again.
To be more precise, it's parsing for some nethack input and then gives
nethack output.

Or, to be even more precise, it does the job of pudding farming for you.
It even feeds itself when hungry. It sacrifices pudding corpses and
prays to your god. It removes scrolls of scare monster from the altar.
It stops on critical encounters, like petrification, becoming weak or dying.

Still, there are things it does not yet do. It doesn't clean up the
altar, for example. That means that you still have to wade through more
than 1000 (i.w.: one thousand) pages of stuff after twelve hours. Not to
mention more than 4000 (i.w.: four thousand) hitpoints and a naked AC of
-128.


So, if you now feel that I did something Bad (and that's Bad with a
capital B) then you are invited to deface FarmBots Wiki, call me nasty
names and ignore me.

If you think that this is a nice toy or even want to extend it to more
useful purpose you can download FarmBot, give feedback, even get write
access to the subversion repository FarmBot lives in and send me
screenshots of your botted Pudding Farm.


All this and more at:
http://scavenger.homeip.net/farmbot/

Wearing a ring of flame resistance,
Benjamin

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

It's appaling.

Very impressive though. Congrats.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack,misc.misc (More info?)

Benjamin Schieder wrote:

> http://scavenger.homeip.net/farmbot/

I haven't even gone to look yet, but that is simply
awesome.

You'd need a truck to carry all the blessed +9 elven
daggers you could acquire pudding farming that way.

You must be at least 1% of the way to a full
NetHack-o-matic, something widely considered
impossible even in concept, and if you can figure
out a near-guarantee of pudding farming, probably by
a "wipe out the Mines Town priest" strategy, that
good a set of stats _should_ suffice to carry the
PC, juggernaut style, through the rest of the
dungeon pretty mechanically, with no real strategy,
just "charge straight ahead" and a few tactics for
the special cases like Medusa and monsters who
teleport to the up-stairs.

I wouldn't use your toy myself, in my own games, I'm
one of the weirdos that find patience games _fun_,
but I might watch it just for amusement for a while,
and I will surely read your code, my rusty Perl
skills could use the reading exercise.

Well done!

[And if Damerell and the rest of the killjoys
have their way with forcing the game into their
Procrustean "play my way or don't play" bed's
confines, your name will go down beside
eis-Brian in the NetHack annals of "those who
proved their point by irrefutable example".]

Now to wait 'til the next release, and see whether
the DevTeam find the game being beatable by a 'bot
with a strategy most humans can't or won't employ,
sufficient reason to remove a fun feature to abuse
for the few, the proud, the Patience Gamers.

xanthian, in awe.

I suspect your 'bot would need source changes in
NetHack, feeding ASCII mode out the side, to play in
tiles mode, right? For me, it would be more fun to
watch that way.

[Maybe you should open a NetHack-o-matic source
page on your wiki, and see what the "programming
strictly for the glory of it" community can do
given your start? Probably, a 'bot could be
broken down into less than a hundred situational
problems to solve (he says naively), and each
given to a separate coder or team of coders, if
someone were willing to mastermind the high
level analysis part of the effort.]

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack,misc.misc (More info?)

Benjamin Schieder wrote:

> And a proper state machine in the code, somthing
> that is still lacking in the FarmBot.

Perhaps not. The game, tickled, provides almost all
the state you need, in response.

>> I wouldn't use your toy myself, in my own games,
>> I'm one of the weirdos that find patience games
>> _fun_, but I might watch it just for amusement
>> for a while, and I will surely read your code, my
>> rusty Perl skills could use the reading exercise.

> I had a farm going myself on a local game once and
> found the game pretty easy past that point. Having
> never ascended before I decided to escape that
> character in celestial disgrace.

I tend to get bored, and either YASD, or set the
game aside, once my character gets fairly buff. As a
result, playing since the game was first released,
I've never ascended, and most likely won't. It's the
early buffing up part I seem to enjoy, rarely going
more than 10 or 11 levels down before the thrill
goes away and I find ways to need to start a new PC.

>> [And if Damerell and the rest of the killjoys
>> have their way with forcing the game into
>> their Procrustean "play my way or don't play"
>> bed's confines, your name will go down beside
>> eis-Brian in the NetHack annals of "those who
>> proved their point by irrefutable example".]

> --verbose, please?

In the 2003 /dev/null tournment Brian, a member of
the eis(eit?) team, cornered Pestilence in Astral
with no room left for any other monster to move, and
with a keyboard macro pasted once per kill, ran up
the score until he rolled the 2^31 score counter
negative, then deliberately let himself be killed by
a newt. It was a triumph in proving that NetHack
high scores are meaningless as a measure of player
skill, there is no limit to how high you can take
your score beyond how many points the score counter
can hold, even for a character who doesn't ascend.

As a result, in the 2004 /dev/null tournament, robin
and cohorts, taking that lesson to heart, put in
_lots_ of other prizes than strictly
high-score-based ones. Brian had proved his point in
a way no one could deny.

Setting up a 'bot that can pudding farm until the
player character is ridiculously buff makes a very
similar point: any feature in the game that _can be_
abused without imposing an irreversable state change
(killing the Mines Town priest to get your donation
back is an abuse, but one with a state change,
preventing you doing the same thing over and over),
can be abused essentially without end, distorting
the game to some ridiculous extreme, as in the stats
you cited.

Like your 'bot, Brian's keyboard "pasted macro"
automated his chosen abuse sufficiently to make it
possible, without it his hands would probably have
fallen off at the wrists.

So the problem the DevTeam must face is whether it
is responsible for removing fun abuses that are only
problems if an automated cheat is used in a place
where comparing _player_ skills, not _'bot_ skills,
is supposed to be happening, like tournaments or
shared NetHack servers.

I don't envy them the problem, but there were lots
of players like me who loved the earlier available
abuses but saw them removed in the past, so they
have precedent on their side if they chose removal.

The problem would be that removing the ability to
abuse pudding farming will take out a lot of the
fun that adding puddings to the game was originally
supposed to provide.

[Similarly, "credit cloning" is the unintended
consequence of an earlier fix for a player with
teleportitus being yanked from the shop with
some unpaid item, shoplifting unintentionally,
by letting him/her drop money before picking up
any item, from which credit the shopkeeper would
then deduct the items price rather than declare
Kop/shopkeeper war on the vanished PC, and
letting the PC later go back and pick up the
remaining PC-owned cash from within the pile on
the shop floor. Taking out the unintended
ability to credit clone by abusing the same
allowed behaviors would need either another
rendition of the prior fix to be invented as
well, or a _very_ careful repair to the current
one. Alternately, though, the DevTeam could just
decide that credit cloning is just as legitimate
a form of shoplifting as any other, and poses
less risk of death to the shopkeepers.]

You end up with a fix driven by the mantra "first,
do no harm", turning software maintenance into a
subskill of the Healer's trade, not necessarily a
bad thing, from my "almost 44 years as a programmer"
perspective.

HTH

xanthian.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

begin quoting Benjamin Schieder <blindcoder@scavenger.homeip.net>:
>To be more precise, it's parsing for some nethack input and then gives
>nethack output.
>Or, to be even more precise, it does the job of pudding farming for you.
>So, if you now feel that I did something Bad (and that's Bad with a
>capital B)

I think you did something Good, with a capital G. Maybe now it'll get
fixed.
--
David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Thursday, February.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

begin quoting Vintermann <scallassig@mailexpire.com>:
>It's appaling.

What is? Spare us these Google contextless followups!
--
David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> Distortion Field!
Today is Second Thursday, February.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack,misc.misc (More info?)

Benjamin Schieder wrote:

> Guess I've started something that I didn't really
> intend to

Not to worry, even the most avid pudding farmer will
tell you the habit is hard on the furniture.

You need not feel upset for pointing out something
that was already well known, in a way to make the
point much more firmly: pudding farming uses game
features in a way not originally intended.

But then, finding those chances is half the fun of
NetHack, isn't it? As in your PuddingFarming page,
if the possibility in there, some of us, or someone
else somewhere in the NetHack player community, will
find a use for it.

The smart ones don't brag when they find such a
loophole, though, they just use those nitch
mechanisms to win tournaments very, very quietly.

Smart ones like, say, Marvin picking up and dropping
an item in a shop several times to see both prices
and confirm which ambiguous case it is, bypassing
the confusion intent of the sometimes 1/3rd price
boost in contravention to its software design goal.

That's just another tool, like pudding farming, that
has as its foremost requierment the patience to use
it. So, your next 'bot upgrade could be a module to
make it also a dual price ID bot! <grin> Of course,
now #start would have to take a "do-what?" parameter.

There's also room in module-want-it land for a
wand-IDing-zap 'bot, a "find the hidden door on this
level" 'bot, and my biggest module-want-it, an
"untrap chest 8 times unless warned of a trap or a
monster arrives" 'bot, to save me the obnoxious 5
keystrokes per try and frequent "where did _that_
come from" YASDs it takes to be "sufficiently sure"
a chest isn't trapped while not getting killed in
the process. Of course, I'd be almost as happy if ^A
were upgraded to capture a whole #untrap sequence
with smart baleout if the unexpected trap is found,
or if #untrap worked more like "ns", and just kept
trying every possible trap site from the PC's
location for "n" tries, or until something
interesting were found or interrupted, rather than
the current too-effortful dialogue.

xanthian, panicked with the fast upcoming huge
lifestyle change back to homelessness and into
cross-country bikeabout mode, now less than a week
away.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

> I haven't even gone to look yet, but that is simply
> awesome.
Thanks

> You must be at least 1% of the way to a full
> NetHack-o-matic, something widely considered
> impossible even in concept, and if you can figure
I don't think it's impossible. But it would include a hell of a lot work
to be done. And a proper state machine in the code, somthing that is
still lacking in the FarmBot.

> I wouldn't use your toy myself, in my own games, I'm
> one of the weirdos that find patience games _fun_,
> but I might watch it just for amusement for a while,
> and I will surely read your code, my rusty Perl
> skills could use the reading exercise.
I had a farm going myself on a local game once and found the game pretty
easy past that point. Having never ascended before I decided to escape
that character in celestial disgrace.

> [And if Damerell and the rest of the killjoys
> have their way with forcing the game into their
> Procrustean "play my way or don't play" bed's
> confines, your name will go down beside
> eis-Brian in the NetHack annals of "those who
> proved their point by irrefutable example".]
--verbose, please?

> I suspect your 'bot would need source changes in
> NetHack, feeding ASCII mode out the side, to play in
> tiles mode, right? For me, it would be more fun to
> watch that way.
No. All it needs is a way to communicate with nethack. In my case I use
dgamelaunch style game servers like nethack.alt.org.

> [Maybe you should open a NetHack-o-matic source
> page on your wiki, and see what the "programming
> strictly for the glory of it" community can do
> given your start? Probably, a 'bot could be
> broken down into less than a hundred situational
> problems to solve (he says naively), and each
> given to a separate coder or team of coders, if
> someone were willing to mastermind the high
> level analysis part of the effort.]

Anyone asking will get write access to the repository. I would be happy
if people would take that bit of 4-day-hacked-together perl code and
make something _really_ useful out of it


Greetings,
Benjamin

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

> Perhaps not. The game, tickled, provides almost all
> the state you need, in response.
Yes, but the program would need to make decisions based upon whether the
PC is hungry, low on HP, petrificating and so on. Right now the FarmBot
has the following states: praying, saccing, eating, killing,
getthe?oSMthatkeepspuddingsfromcoming. Or something alike

> [ on overflowing the score counter ]
Ah yes. I just couldn't do something with the name Brian.

> [ on credit cloning ]
There's a "fix" for this floating around. Basically, the shk would take
the money into its inventory and give it back to you by #chat'ing.
But I got your point that something will get removed if over-abused.

Guess I've started something that I didn't really intend to


Greetings,
blindy

 

[James]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

In article <1108690092.114143.229020@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> wrote:

>You need not feel upset for pointing out something
>that was already well known, in a way to make the
>point much more firmly: pudding farming uses game
>features in a way not originally intended.

So does surviving the planes

This game was intended to be impossible to win, it seems.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> begin quoting Benjamin Schieder <blindcoder@scavenger.homeip.net>:
>>Or, to be even more precise, it does the job of pudding farming for you.
>>So, if you now feel that I did something Bad (and that's Bad with a
>>capital B)
>
> I think you did something Good, with a capital G. Maybe now it'll get
> fixed.

Fixed? Why?

Remove pudding farming, and you'll just get characters with =oSD
and the Eye, casting create monster. (How do you think extinctionists
do it?)

Its nethack. You can basically live forever. You can get -127 AC.
You can get 10,000 hps. Or 10,000 mp. You can be rich beyond your
wildest dreams. Have 10 /oDeath with the PYEC. Have scary pets.
Do insane damage. Destroy the riders.

Pudding farming is pudding farming. Some people like it enough to
do it. Other players do not.

If you consider it to be Something Bad, then there are a lot of Bad
Things in nethack.

--
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is
not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead. -- RFC 1925

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack,misc.misc (More info?)

Jakob Creutzig wrote:

> [Yes, in that case you could, with clever usage of
> conflict, also produce limitless puddings, but
> that would be a painful business requiring quite
> some skill, so I wouldn't have too much problems
> with that.]

But in fact, isn't that exactly the situation now?

The mechanism for pudding farming is well known, but
technically very fussy to do well; some players will
go to incedible amounts of pre-preparations to
ensure a very precise, repeatable, almost ritual
pudding farming experience, with boulders here,
Elbereths there, pits somewhere else, scare monster
scrolls still another place; others will go totally
unstructured, just take a stand in a Temple and
whack puddings 'til their arms are ready to fall
off, dealing with exception situations on a case by
case basis.

And still others would hold their breath 'til they
died rather than endure something so completely
mindless; in fact, that seems to be the vast
majority. For most players, pudding farming even
once is one time too many.

For others, though, no matter how _close_ to
impossible you make it, if it is still possible,
they'll probably be doing it each and every game
they don't YASD first.

That, it seems to me, is purely a difference in
human personalities, and it just irritates me to
hell that those whose personalities reject pudding
farming as "fun for them", insist on rejecting it
as "fun for me" too, despite my contrary evaluation
of the merit of the practice. I like it, I like it
a lot, yet it is never, ever going to be the
mechanism of an ascension for me, because I'm nearly
stone cold guaranteed, me being me, never to ascend
at all, nor is it going to bump anyone off my
private score table but me, if I run up some huge
score with it before the inevitable YASD.

So who, exactly, takes harm from me pudding farming,
and the game being left alone to leave that possible
for me and those few others willing to do it?

> risk free

I probably failed to mention that in my last pudding
farming expedition, I had two peaceful demons to
avoid at every step as well, since my orcish
wizards, sooner or later, _always_ forgetfully
sacrifice an orc or more usually a goblin to Anhur.
And, having made that mistake, make it again, and
agian, and again. Luckily after a while that mostly
yields foocubi.

Having Juiblex and Yeehengu as your constant
audience lends pudding farming a whole new aspect of
terror, when every step can be your last. That's not
"risk free", nor is any pudding farming, since
arriving monsters can easily find you just one
ritual boring repetitive swat at a pudding too
distracted to save your own life.

IMO

xanthian.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

This is Kent Paul Dolan for forever:
> Benjamin Schieder wrote:
>
> > http://scavenger.homeip.net/farmbot/
>
> I haven't even gone to look yet, but that is simply
> awesome.
>
> You'd need a truck to carry all the blessed +9 elven
> daggers you could acquire pudding farming that way.
>
> You must be at least 1% of the way to a full
> NetHack-o-matic, something widely considered
> impossible even in concept, and if you can figure
> out a near-guarantee of pudding farming, probably by
> a "wipe out the Mines Town priest" strategy, that
> good a set of stats _should_ suffice to carry the
> PC, juggernaut style, through the rest of the
> dungeon pretty mechanically, with no real strategy,
> just "charge straight ahead" and a few tactics for
> the special cases like Medusa and monsters who
> teleport to the up-stairs.

A "NetHack-o-matic" would be interesting, but the logic would be too
complicated to be "human-readable"

[]s
--
Chaos Master®, posting from Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil - 29.55° S
/ 51.11° W / GMT-2h / 15m .

"People told me I can't dress like a fairy.
I say, I'm in a rock band and I can do what the hell I want!"
-- Amy Lee

(My e-mail address isn't read. Please reply to the group!)

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Jakob Creutzig wrote:
> Surely, unless pudding farming isn't changed, everyone
> can 'win' almost any trophy in coming tournaments using
> the script, making those void.

I don't know about that. A farmbot removes the patience aspect from the
game, but Conduct Ascensions (IMHO, the major prizes in the tournament)
aren't necessarily about patience. And Fastest Ascension is one of the
hardest 'conducts' since mere patience won't help you at all.

Sam

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> Jakob Creutzig wrote:
>
> > [Yes, in that case you could, with clever usage of
> > conflict, also produce limitless puddings, but
> > that would be a painful business requiring quite
> > some skill, so I wouldn't have too much problems
> > with that.]
>
> And still others would hold their breath 'til they
> died rather than endure something so completely
> mindless; in fact, that seems to be the vast
> majority. For most players, pudding farming even
> once is one time too many.
>

I did it and it was a hoot. It does feel like nethack abuse, so I
didn't ascend and was thereby forgiven by the gods. But just having
all those wonderful artifacts just once sort of gives you an Idea of
what it is like to be Bill Gates. Rich and guilty. Of course there is
wizmode, but that's not the same.

The appallaing thing about pudding farming is the immensity of effect
it has on the game. If Puddings extincted, i.e. didn't divide after
there were 256 of them (?) in the game, dead or alive, puddng farming
would become just another tactic like boulder pushing, pet morphing,
and snuggling up to nurses and foocubi. Hell, when I was setting up
my pudding farm level, which was a lot of work, a succubus showed up
and I got 7 (seven) levels out of her. Is that abuse or tactical
wisdom? I'm sure many would argue both sides.

--
Cheers!
Tsingi

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

"Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com> writes:

> In the 2003 /dev/null tournment Brian, a member of
> the eis(eit?) team, cornered Pestilence in Astral

eit-brad, IIRC.

--
Panu
"You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home",
Twoflower in "The Light Fantastic"

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

james wrote:

> Remember when they put the kibosh on ghouls? I expect something
> similar here. It would be very simple to just make the P's stop
> dividing after 120 are created.

I prefer the idea of reducing maxhp as well as hp during pudding split.
It seems a more "natural" way to do it.

--
Benjamin Lewis

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce. -- J. Edgar Hoover

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Jesse Meyer <meyer_spammenot_@ideaone.net> writes:

> David Damerell <damerell@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> > begin quoting Benjamin Schieder <blindcoder@scavenger.homeip.net>:
> >>Or, to be even more precise, it does the job of pudding farming for you.
> >>So, if you now feel that I did something Bad (and that's Bad with a
> >>capital B)
> >
> > I think you did something Good, with a capital G. Maybe now it'll get
> > fixed.
>
> Fixed? Why?
>
> Remove pudding farming, and you'll just get characters with =oSD
> and the Eye, casting create monster. (How do you think extinctionists
> do it?)

You first have to get the ring, the Eye and the cm spell.
Besides, this still bears some risks (arch-lich summoning
arch-lich or even nastier guys) within, unless you're already
ascension-kitted.

The objection against the farming is not that it allows arbitrary
gains, but that it does so completely riskless and without need
of even the least amount of skill or thought or luck other
than knowing how to farm and to survive until one stumbles
over a brown pudding. Which is not really that much skill
or luck needed. Remember that we're not talking about
farming twenty or two hundred puddings, but about farming
till you have anything one can get in the game.

Surely, unless pudding farming isn't changed, everyone
can 'win' almost any trophy in coming tournaments using
the script, making those void. Actually I played with the
thought of writing such a farming script myself, then
demonstrating it on the tournament (not that I would claim
to deserver the trophies, just for demonstration purposes),
but apparently I was beaten before I started ;-).

Changing it would be easy enough, I believe, by performing
the divide routine just like the multiply routine for
gremlins. [Yes, in that case you could, with clever usage
of conflict, also produce limitless puddings, but that
would be a painful business requiring quite some skill,
so I wouldn't have too much problems with that.]

Best,
Jakob

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Jakob Creutzig wrote:
> Jesse Meyer <meyer_spammenot_@ideaone.net> writes:

>> Remove pudding farming, and you'll just get characters with =oSD
>> and the Eye, casting create monster. (How do you think
>> extinctionists do it?)

> You first have to get the ring, the Eye and the cm spell.

An extinctionist's first requirement is patience. Anyone with patience
will get a ring of slow digestion, the Eye of the Aethiopica, and the
create monster spell eventually.

> Remember that we're not talking about farming twenty or two hundred
> puddings, but about farming till you have anything one can get in
> the game.

Believe me, you don't need either pudding farming or extinctionalistic
intentions for that. Patience is enough: I speak from experience. My
name is Efembe.

> Changing it would be easy enough, I believe, by performing
> the divide routine just like the multiply routine for
> gremlins. [Yes, in that case you could, with clever usage
> of conflict, also produce limitless puddings, but that
> would be a painful business requiring quite some skill,
> so I wouldn't have too much problems with that.]

A bot could probably be written for that purpose, as well...

--
Boudewijn Waijers (kroisos at home.nl).

The garden of happiness is surrounded by a wall so low only children
can look over it. - "the Orphanage of Hits", former Dutch radio show.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> Having Juiblex and Yeehengu as your constant
> audience lends pudding farming a whole new aspect of
> terror, when every step can be your last.

They'll follow you to another level, where you can ditch them. The
bottom of the mines is a favorite (anywhere below Minetown, really).

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> (killing the Mines Town priest to get your donation
> back is an abuse, but one with a state change,
> preventing you doing the same thing over and over)

I wouldn't call that an abuse. On the other hand, using poly, poly
control, and charm monster to repeatedly become a leprechaun, rob the
VoD priest, pacify, and donate again might be.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Benjamin Lewis wrote:
> james wrote:
>
> > Remember when they put the kibosh on ghouls? I expect something
> > similar here. It would be very simple to just make the P's stop
> > dividing after 120 are created.
>
> I prefer the idea of reducing maxhp as well as hp during pudding
split.
> It seems a more "natural" way to do it.
>

I sure hope I get to try farming before it's taken out of the game...

YANI - pudding growing

-- The brown pudding doubles as you hit it! --

No more dividing for pudding: once in a while, a pudding doubles its HP
instead of dividing. This would make it very hard to kill. You hit it
and once in a while it doubles. I am not sure what it would add to the
game, but I kinda like the idea of a monster that you have difficulty
getting rid of.

If you add to that an expansion of the monster - a la long worm - you
really have a problem. Giving it some kind of vulnerabilty (fire?)
would help for sure. You can burn or slash part of it - but it's all
the same monster and until you completely get rid of it it stays there.


It get rids of the farming, and create something completely different
that can be a puzzle by itself.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> The problem would be that removing the ability to abuse pudding farming
> will take out a lot of the fun that adding puddings to the game was
> originally supposed to provide.

What fun was adding puddings supposed to provide? If you play in a "normal"
sort of way, you'll probably never get more than a few splits for a given
pudding. If you modified the pudding-splitting code to reduce maxhp for
split puddings, it would still allow this, but reduce the amount of splits
possible to a finite number. There are other things you could change as
well that I don't believe would be counter to the original intent of
puddings, such as changing how the "death drop" works (e.g. have only the
"original" pudding able to create a death drop).

I don't believe that doing either of these things would remove any of the
fun that puddings were "supposed" to provide.

--
Benjamin Lewis

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of
oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate
commerce. -- J. Edgar Hoover

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

This is the quick fix to pudding farming. Put an option in the Nethack
defaults file that lets you turn on or off if you will see puddings or
not in your game. Then for things such as tournments if the one hosting
it does not wish players farming puddings they just make it so no
puddings show up in any of the Tournment games.

There you go quick fix for you. Now you don't have to mess with the
game that I have on my computer and remove features just because you
don't like them. You instead add a small feature so that way if you
share a computer with someone you can be on more equel footing... if
you want to be.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

Sammiel wrote:
> Jakob Creutzig wrote:

> I don't know about that. A farmbot removes the patience aspect from
> the game,

No. Only from farming, not from the game.

> And Fastest Ascension is one of the hardest 'conducts' since mere
> patience won't help you at all.

Fastest ascension is not "hard", it is lucky. It very much depends on
starting inventory and lucky finds. I think in the tournament, it should
really be awarded per class.

--
Boudewijn Waijers (kroisos at home.nl).

The garden of happiness is surrounded by a wall so low only children
can look over it. - "the Orphanage of Hits", former Dutch radio show.