Tag: spoilers

Ancient Roguelike Lore: 50 Ways To Leave Your Game

Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.

He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.

I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)

I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.

50 ways to leave your game
============================
by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).

There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed.
Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots
of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are
mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I
did):

a blast of acid
a blast of disintegration
a blast of fire
a blast of frost
a blast of lightning
a blast of missiles
a blast of poison gas
a blast of sleep gas
a bolt of cold
a bolt of fire
a bolt of lightning
a burst of flame
a carnivorous bag
a closing drawbridge
a cockatrice corpse
a collapsing drawbridge
a cone of cold
a contact-poisoned spellbook
a contaminated potion
a cursed throne
a death ray
a falling drawbridge
a falling object
a falling rock
a finger of death
a fireball
a genocide spell
a land mine
a magic missile
a magical explosion
a mildly contaminated potion
a potion of holy water
a potion of unholy water
a psychic blast
a residual undead turning effect
a scroll of fire
a scroll of genocide
a sleep ray
a system shock
a thrown potion
a touch of death
a tower of flame
a wand
acid
an alchemic blast
an electric chair
an electric shock
an exploding chest
an exploding crystal ball
an exploding drawbridge
an exploding item being destroyed
an exploding ring
an exploding rune
an exploding wand
an explosion
an iron ball collision
an object thrown at you
an unrefrigerated sip of juice
an unsuccessful polymorph
brainlessnes
bumping into a boulder
bumping into a door
colliding with the ceiling
contaminated water
drowning
eating a cadaver
eating a cockatrice corpse
eating a cockatrice egg
eating a poisonous corpse
eating a poisonous weapon
eating a rotten lump of royal jelly
eating an acidic corpse
eating the Medusa’s corpse
eating too rich a meal
exhaustion
falling downstairs
jumping out of a bear trap
kicking a ladder
kicking a rock
kicking a sink
kicking a throne
kicking a wall
kicking an altar
kicking something weird
kicking the drawbridge
kicking the stairs
leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
looking at the Medusa
molten lava
overexertion
sipping boiling water
sitting in lava
sitting on an iron spike
strangulation
swallowing a cockatrice whole
the wrath of
touching a cockatrice corpse
trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves

Other ways to die:

caught himself in his own tower of flame
committed suicide
crunched in the head by an iron ball
dragged downstairs by an iron ball
fell from a drawbridge
fell into a chasm
fell into a pit
fell into a pit of iron spikes
fell onto a sink
killed himself with his pick-axe
quit while already on Charon’s boat
shot himself with a death ray
squished under a boulder
starvation
teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death
unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence
using a magical horn on himself
went to heaven prematurely
zapped himself with a spell
zapped himself with a wand

That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.

All the Ways to Die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red Rescue Team

I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.

Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.

To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)

In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.

WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)

was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending)
missed a Jump Kick and wiped out.
missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out.
fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath)
fainted, covered in sludge.
fainted from a move’s recoil damage.
fainted from damage it took bouncing.
was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy.
fainted from stepping on spikes.
fainted from a bad burn.
fainted, unable to bear constriction.
fainted after the poison spread.
fainted while still being wrapped.
was felled by a curse.
was drained to nothing by Leech Seed.
fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath)
fainted while in a nightmare.
was felled by a thrown rock.
fainted from hunger.
disappeared in an explosion.
tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted.
fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted.
was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage.
was transformed into an item. (instadeath)
fainted from being knocked flying.
was felled by a Pokemon sent flying.
gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose)
was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron)
returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically)
fainted due to the weather.
failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED)
fainted from a Wonder Orb.
fainted from an item.

Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):

was transformed into a friend. (what?)
left without being befriended. (hwat?)
was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage)
was felled by a thrown item.
was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then)
went away. (so long)
was possessed. (spooky)

Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:

fainted from a debug attack.
was defeated by a powerful move.
fainted due to a trap’s damage.

Surviving the Early Game in Tears of the Kingdom

It’s rather harder to survive the early game, I found, in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that it was in Breath of the Wild. There are many more enemies, they’re stronger, your weapons are weaker, and there’s a lot more kinds of enemies. I got killed over and over in the early going, while I could engage small groups of Bokoblins pretty easily in BotW. And if you encounter a cluster of Gloom Hands while you still have only four hearts, you’ll probably want to teleport away from there if you can’t immediately climb up out of reach. (What are Gloom Hands? You’ll know them when you see them.)

I wrote up a list of tips for the early game in a MeFi thread, and I realized hey, that’s the kind of content I should be putting here! So here they are. There’s minor early gameplay spoilers here, necessarily.

There is probably little here you couldn’t get from the gaming bigsites, Kotaku and its ilk. But my belief is, if you get this information from someone small, it feels a lot more like a friend is passing along some advice they gained. And after all, the people who have the strategy guides and help articles on those sites probably had the advantage of having completed the game during the press embargo period. I assure you, I had no early access.

  • Shrines, each giving you a short puzzle to solve for an upgrade orb, are even more important here than in BotW, because the monsters are harder and you need those hearts. There’s a bunch of shrines around the new town in central Hyrule. Unlike the first game where people could dedicate their character all to stamina, I think you’ll find that hearts are more useful in the early game.
  • If you have full hearts, you will nearly always survive any hit with at least a quarter-heart left, but you have to have full hearts. If you get bodied by an unexpected attack and left with a quarter-heart, immediately eat something that brings you back up to full to regain that protection (not too hard when you only have four hearts), then get away from it.
  • BotW had an unexplained mechanic where you gained invisible “experience points” as you killed enemies, but they didn’t improve you, they improved the monsters. That’s why the easy, low-health red versions of monsters like Bokoblins and Moblins, and the slightly easier basic Lynels, became rare in BotW after awhile. As you defeated monsters, the world would upgrade foes to blue, black, and eventually silver versions (gold in the Master Mode DLC). I think it’s likely that TotK has a similar process, so by avoiding conflict while you’re weak, you also keep monsters manageable for a while longer.
  • On the other hand, the Fuse power lets you get stronger weapons a bit earlier. And bomb flowers, as attached to arrows, seem a bit stronger than the bombs from the Bomb Rune in BotW. (Certainly, it’s easier to kill yourself with them.) It’s satisfying to send a bomb flower into the middle of an enemy camp. Bomb Flowers are one of the most useful things you get out of caves (and, eventually, from exploring the Depths).
  • As I’ve noted, it’s possible to miss the Paraglider quest and make the early game much, much harder. Many shrines in particular expect you to have the Paraglider. To do the quest to get it, you have to head to Hyrule Castle at the beginning and talk to a certain NPC who’s at the end of the path after the gate.
  • To improve your armor, you have to get the Great Fairies out of their flower buds, which takes more than a cash payment in this game. It seems to be a lot easier to miss important subquests in this game. The quest you need to start upgrading your armor requires that you go to the Lucky Clover offices in north-western Hyrule, near the Rito village, and talk to Penn. (Penn is terrific, BTW.) That’ll start you getting a music group back together (it makes sense in the story), which involves some building with Ultrahand at each step, but just doing the first step opens up the first Great Fairy and lets you upgrade your armor a bit, which can be a huge aid. Note though, in addition to the ingredients, the G.F.s also charge you a bit of money for each upgrade.
  • Money is rather harder to come by. As in BotW, most of your cash comes from selling gemstones. And as in BotW, a lot of those rupees end up getting spent on meal ingredients and arrows. The problem with selling gems, though, is that you’ll eventually need them to upgrade some of your armor.
  • Getting your battery improved takes ages it seems! You need 100 crystal charges for each extra bar, not each extra battery. At first, the only way to get those is in chests of 20 in the Depths and bought 10 at a time for Zonaite in that one store in the tutorial sky area. If you want to improve your battery faster, there’s a place to exchange it faster in the Depths beneath Kakariko.
  • But I’d hold off on exploring the Depths until you’ve built your hearts and stamina up a bit. The rewards you get for exploring the Depths are (other than the Bomb Flowers you find) mostly different from those you get from exploring the overworld and sky. There don’t seem to be any shrines in the deep underground, so you won’t get hearts or stamina that way! Instead you mostly get Zonaite, which you won’t even have a use for at that stage, and some chest contents that have armor and 20x crystal charges. Also you’ll need a lot of brightbloom seeds to explore the Depths to any great degree, which you’ll find mostly in caves in the overworld. Be sure to hold onto that Zonaite though, you’ll be wanting a lot of it eventually….
  • In the Depths, you’ll find these strange frozen-in-time dark figures, each carrying a weapon. When you examine one, the figure vanishes, leaving the weapon behind. What isn’t obvious at first is these are undecayed weapons. Don’t just use them as-is though, fuse something to them to make them even stronger and more durable.
  • When you find the Abandoned Central Mine in the Depths, don’t leave it until you find the researchers had the (easy) boss fight. There’s something very important there.
  • The most useful, relative to both power and frequency with which you find them, item I’ve found to glue to your stuff is Bokoblin horns, especially those from black Bokoblins. I’ve got a ton of those, and they provide a nice strength bonus. Remember you can sort your materials by how much power they’ll give you if you fuse them to weapons, it’s a good way to see what you can use effectively without being in danger of running out of them quickly.

Roguelike Celebration Talks: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Cataclysm

We’re going to spotlight some of the talks from this year’s Roguelike Celebration over the coming weeks, which is always crammed full of wonderful talks! The first one I’m directing your hungry gaze towards is Jeremy Rose talking about his strategy guide for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

There used to be a time on the internet when nearly everyone would understand a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference.

Strategy guides for classic roguelikes are not like strategy guides for other genres of games. It is technically possible to win at NetHack without perusing spoilers, but it will probably take you a long long time. Fortunately for those with less free time, there exists the NetHack Wiki. And, since the games are randomly generated with each play, you can actually be perfectly spoiled and still find the game challenging. Although, I still think people will find playing these games without spoilers interesting and rewarding-knowing everything there is to know about NetHack makes the game seem much smaller.

I haven’t covered Cataclysm or its updated version Dark Days Ahead on @Play yet, and I really should! An interesting fact about it that comes out in the talk is that DDA may be one of the largest open source projects of all. It has had over 1,700 contributors! The mega-popular programming language Python has had around 2,000!

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Jeremy Rose presents The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Cataclysm (30 minutes)