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Killed by a typo. Let's Play Nethack! Valkyrie, Part 2

When we last left our heroine, we had just entered the Gnomish Mines.



As you can see, many levels of the Mines are dark - only the spaces directly adjacent to me are lit.

But I can actually see some monsters outside of that range. This is because dwarves have infravision, which lets them see heat (and to some extent, cold) in the dark. Warm-blooded creatures and fire/ice based monsters will show up in our vision whether they're lit or not. Humans do not have infravision; in fact, they're the only playable race that doesn't. So that's one benefit of playing a dwarven Valkyrie over a human one.

Those two Gs are gnomes, which makes sense, given that we're in the Gnomish Mines. The green i is a homunculus. The i probably stands for imp, and covers a range of minor demons.

Moving in a little bit, we discover the other benefit to playing a dwarf:



Gnomes generally spawn peaceful to dwarves. They won't attack me unless I attack them, and the game is nice enough to make sure I really want to attack them if I happen to bump into one. Of course, since I'm playing with vi-keys (using hjklyubn for movement), I may fat-finger a "y" in there somewhere while moving northwest and anger something I really didn't want to. Part of the thrill of the Nethack experience!

The homunculus is not peaceful, so I kill it. Homunculi will spawn peaceful for chaotic characters, however.



Homunculi are poisonous. Don't eat them. I reached level four from killing the thing, though!




Ah, our first trap. Traps are indicated by the ^ symbol. Rolling boulder traps can potentially be quite painful, but they're easily disarmed by moving the boulder they trigger out of line with the trap.



Monsters can set them off as well.



Cool, a box! These often have goodies inside. Let's take a look! We can use the #loot command to interact with a container on the ground.

That = is a ring. Some rings are useful, some are dangerous, and some are critical for the endgame.

The box turns out to be locked though, damn. Well, we can deal with this! The #force command will allow us to try to break the lock with our equipped weapon. Blunt weapons will bash the lock, potentially completely destroying the box and some or all of its contents. Sharp weapons will pry instead, leaving the box intact but potentially breaking the weapon.

I switch to my dagger first, just to make sure I don't break my longsword.




Our dagger survives to pry another day! (I also grabbed the ring, you might have noticed).

Now let's see what we've got here...




Whoops! Boxes can be booby-trapped, so be a little cautious. This one seems to have paralyzed me, but so briefly I recovered immediately.



Ugh, all of that for nothing. Oh well.



It's at this point I remember I have a lamp and I should use it. This increases my vision radius to 3 and will make mapping the rest of the level/finding the down staircase much faster.



Dart trap. These can be surprisingly dangerous because the darts can sometimes be poisoned. Poison in this game has a chance to instakill you if you're not poison-resistant, which most characters are not at this point. Poison deaths are very common early run-enders.



The ) below me are darts from more dart traps. The blue G is a gnome lord.

The h over on the right is a dwarf, like me! The h is for humanoid, and it covers a lot of things, including several types of dwarf, hobbits, bugbears, and the dreaded mind flayers. Dwarves generally spawn peaceful to lawful characters, dwarf or not. They're pretty common in the Gnomish Mines as well, although since I'm playing as a dwarf myself a certain percentage of them will be rerolled into something else. The same happens for gnomes if the player is a gnome - which actually makes the Mines a little safer for a dwarven character than a gnomish one.

If you are playing as a dwarf, you count as an h. Do not forget this.



There are the stairs! I also found a potion (the ! a little to the northwest of me), but I wasn't paying attention and forgot to pick it up just now. I'll have to remember it for later.



The next floor happens to be lit, so I turn off my lamp to conserve it. Oil lamps burn oil (duh), and will only last for so long before going out. You can refuel them with a potion of oil if you happen to find one.



I'm getting weak again. The one disadvantage to having all these gnomes generate peaceful is that I can't kill them and consume their delicious flesh. Or rather, I could, but I'd suffer an alignment record penalty for it, and it's a bit early in the game to risk it too much. Having negative alignment can screw me over if I need to pray for assistance later. Plus, I have plenty of food at the moment.

There's another box over there, too. Let's check it out.



Some scrolls! Cool, we'll take those along with us and try to identify them later. Read-identifying scrolls is not a good idea in Nethack.

I kill some chaff enemies like a gnome zombie and a fox and pick up another tin and some gems that may or may not be worth anything as I continue exploring.



Ooh, a wand! I'll show you how to identify those in a little bit. The green h is a hobbit, by the way.

That's it for this level. Down we go.



The next floor is dark again, so I turn my lamp back on and head out.



Better him than me. Land mines will do a chunk of damage to you and also wound your legs, which really hurts your carrying capacity, but fortunately wears off after a little while.



Well well well! That brown ( next to me is not another box, but a bag! There are four kinds of bag: sacks, bags of tricks, oilskin sacks, and bags of holding. Every kind is useful in its own way, even the sack if you can't find anything better. Your main inventory has a limited number of slots, but you can carry as many stacks of things as you want inside a bag, as long as you can lift it.

This will get ludicrous by the end of the game.

Sacks don't do anything except hold your stuff, no fuss, no muss. Bags of tricks will summon monsters if you apply them, which sounds bad but has its uses. Oilskin sacks will protect your stuff from water damage. And, of course, bags of holding are the best - uncursed ones will reduce the weight of items inside by half, and blessed ones will reduce it by 3/4. Cursed ones, on the other hand, will double the weight of things inside it, and items inside may disappear if you try to take them out. Don't let your bag of holding get cursed like I did, the first time I ascended.

You can weed out the bag of tricks from the rest by attempting to loot it - if it's a bag of tricks, it'll bite you. You could also apply it and see if a monster appears, although that's potentially more dangerous, depending on what it summons.

This bag is not a bag of tricks.



I step on a boulder trap that thankfully does nothing and encounter a new enemy. The a is for ant, although it encompasses other types of insect too, like giant beetles and killer bees. Giant ants aren't bad, but I'll be keeping an eye out for soldier ants, which are another common cause of death for early characters.

I kill the ant and reach level 5. Awesome! This means I can do something really cool, which I will proceed to completely forget about for a good long while. I also break 50 HP, which is my normal minimum threshold to hit before entering the Gnomish Mines.



I ran into another giant ant that managed to hurt me more than I'd like. Anyway, that blue j there is a blue jelly - j for jelly. They have a passive cold counterattack they'll blast you with if you try to melee them, which hurts if you don't have cold resistance. Which I forget I have, so I leave it alone. They don't really move. If you do lack cold resistance, you can potentially gain it by eating a blue jelly corpse, though. Use ranged attacks and you'll be fine.

I don't really have much in the way of ranged options right now, personally. I can chuck my one dagger at things, but that's about it. Normally I'd be swimming in darts and daggers by now, but the gnomes have been picking them up and I haven't been killing them to get their stuff.



Orc zombie dies in one hit, leaving behind an orc corpse. Undead corpses are always way too old. Don't eat them, you'll die.



I pick up a scroll, and hello there yellow d.

I use the farlook command ( ; ) to check out what kind of canine this is, because I forget.



A dingo! A bit more dangerous that the other d enemies we've seen, and I'm still down about 20 health from that run-in with the giant ant, but I'll be fine.



Uh...



NOPE, NOT FINE.

Okay, okay, I have 4 HP left, I have no idea how much HP the dingo has left, and there's always the chance I'll whiff my next attack. I should... well, okay. Whatever I choose to do, I should have done it at least a turn or two earlier. This was very stupid of me.

But I do have an option: Elbereth.





Hold my breath, and...



Hallelujah!

Elbereth is Nethack's panic button. It's the name of some Elvish goddess in Tolkien's works, or something, but the important thing is, many, many monsters will not attack you in melee if you are standing on a square with the word Elbereth written on it, and in fact will turn and flee. The most notable exceptions are all enemies that use an @ symbol (mostly humans and elves), minotaurs, and some very, very lategame enemies I won't talk about now.

This was still very dangerous for me to do, though. I used the E (engrave) command to write in the dust with my fingers, which takes less than a turn but has a significant possibility of getting botched or smudged. If I try to write "Elbereth" and it comes out "E|bereth," I'm not protected.

You can engrave with other things, some of which would be safer, but I'll get into that later.

Now, I could stand here and keep writing Elbereth over and over while I regain HP - I'd need to keep writing it because just standing on the same square will smudge the writing a little each turn. Trying to attack would smudge it even worse. Since my health is so very low, this would probably be the safest option. However, standing here long enough to regen gives plenty of time for the level to spawn more, potentially more dangerous enemies, and for them to find me.

So instead, I flee.



And luckily, the stairs are nearby.



Well, this level doesn't look like the other Gnomish Mine levels. And so I know where we are - Minetown! This level shows up at about the midpoint of the Mines, and is guaranteed to have at least one shop (and likely more) and a temple. I'm going to beeline for that temple, personally.



Here we go! Unfortunately, this temple is crossaligned - it's not lawful, like I am. If it were a lawful temple to Tyr, this space would've acted like a sanctuary - basically, the entire interior of the temple would act like a grid of Elbereth squares (only better), causing monsters to flee from me and avoid attacking.

Those Gs are gnomish wizards. They're peaceful, thankfully. The @ is the priestess who's talking to me, also peaceful. All temple priests and priestesses are peaceful, with one lategame exception. I could attack her, but I won't, because I would get wrecked right now.

The _ in the middle there is an altar. If the altar were coaligned, I could use it for several things, but even crossaligned altars are useful for one thing: B/U/C identification.



I drop all my crap on the altar. If there's a black flash when an item is dropped on an altar, it's cursed; if there's an amber flash, it's blessed. The game will helpfully tag them for you so you remember. You have to be able to see the flashes to learn the B/U/C status of an item - if you drop all your stuff while you're blind, nothing useful will happen.



Then I pick all my crap back up, a moderately annoying process. One of the quality of life improvements from some of the forks is the ability to just drop a bag on the altar and have all its contents identified, but alas, that doesn't work in vanilla.

The only blessed or cursed thing I was carrying was that ring, which is cursed. It's good to know that the rest is uncursed, though, because I know some of it's safe to mess around with. I know I can put stuff in the bag without issue, for instance.

I also notice that I haven't tried to identify that wand yet! Let's do that now.



First, I move over here and write an Elbereth in the dust with my fingers. It's good to write something first, because several wands can be identified by the ways they change existing writing. It might as well be Elbereth, because that "exercises" your Wisdom stat, which will make it go up eventually. Also, it's a bad idea to actually engrave anything into an altar, so that's why I moved over here.

Next, we try to write with the wand itself.



Well, there you go! Wands you can actually engrave with, like digging, fire, and lightning, will auto-identify before you engrave with them. Digging makes a semi-permanent engraving, which will last longer than writing in the dust but will eventually erode. Fire and lightning make permanent engravings, so they're extremely handy to have.

Other wands identify a little differently. I'll show that off when I get some other wands to try.

With that out of the way, and slightly more HP, let's check out the rest of Minetown.



A delicatessen! These shops only sell food and drink. Handy if you're running low on permafood, and also handy for identifying certain kinds of potions.

That ] there is a mimic completely failing to disguise itself.

I'm good on permafood, so I leave the delicatessen alone for now.



Those grey @ wandering around are the Minetown watch. The watch captain is hanging around somewhere - he's a green @. They're peaceful for now, but if you do certain things in front of them - like picking locks or drying up fountains - or attack them, they will all turn hostile and come after you with extreme prejudice. This is bad. Don't do that.



A general store! Ooh, and I see a yellow (. Yellow ( can be bells, oil lamps, lanterns, or magic lamps. A major reason for coming down to Minetown as early as possible is in hopes of finding a magic lamp, which has the potential to give you a wish.

...This one's just another oil lamp, though. The wand in the top right is the same kind we saw earlier that was worthless. The one in the bottom left is interesting but I don't have enough money to buy it. The armor's uninteresting. There's another mimic in the bottom right, which I kill.



Izchak's lighting store! The only guaranteed shop in the game, because you need seven candles at one point to be able to continue your quest. Of course, he's not guaranteed to have seven candles, but he usually does.

He can also sell magic lamps, and I see two yellow (!

...They're both oil lamps. Sigh.



I'm hungry and I know my tins aren't cursed, so I break them out. One contains jackal, which I eat. The other contains werejackal, which I don't eat. If you eat a were-whatever's corpse, you become a were-same whatever yourself, which is deeply annoying at best and dangerous at worst, because jackals have shitty carrying capacity, shitty stats, and will fall out of any armor you're wearing, requiring you to put it back on when you change back and potentially leaving you very vulnerable. If you die while polymorphed into something else in Nethack, you mercifully just return to your human form - but that doesn't do you a lot of good if you get stabbed to death while you're naked.



Last shop in Minetown is a hardware store! Hardware stores sell tools. There are lots of really useful tools, including the various bags, magic markers, and oh yeah, lamps again. Hey, look at that yellow (!

...It's a brass lantern. Why do you torture me, game.

There are a couple of leashes, which will keep a pet near you - handy for herding them to the stairs, which can be a frustrating exercise otherwise. There are also a couple of lockpicks. I decide to go ahead and buy one - can't kick down doors forever, after all. There's also a tin opener, which lets you open tins in one turn instead of a bunch of turns, and a tinning kit, which lets you tin the corpses of monsters yourself. There are lots of advantages to this - tinning neutralizes poison (though not any other adverse effects), keeps the corpse fresh, and reduces large corpses to a much more edible size (hey, you know how you can starve to death? Well, you can also overeat and choke and die! Yes, I have died this way.)

But tinning kits are heavy, so I'm passing for now.

You'll notice yet another mimic at the bottom, which I kill to reach level 6.

While I'm here, I see if I can identify my bag.



Oh, that's interesting. Sacks are worth almost nothing, so our bag isn't a sack. So this is either an oilskin sack or a bag of holding. The easiest way to check would be to burden ourselves with junk and then put it all in the bag to see if the load gets lighter, but there's not quite enough stuff in here to do that. Well, I'll keep it in mind! (I don't actually sell the bag, obviously).

Other than that, Minetown's kind of a bust. I don't really want to go deeper into the Mines just yet, because things can get nasty down there. I'm gonna back out and go for Sokoban.



Oh, right, you're still here. Well, let's try this again.



Much better!



On my way back, I encounter two dangerous enemies.

The e is for eye, and this one is a floating eye. They don't do much on their own, and they move very slowly, but if you attack them in melee, they retaliate with a gaze attack that paralyzes you for a long.

Long.

Long time. Plenty of time to be plinked to death by something else.

There are a few ways to deal with this, but for now, attack them from range and be careful not to accidentally run face-first into one (which can be tricky, because dark blue doesn't show up so well against the black background. Some variants remap the color to a bright green instead to help you out.) You're probably going to want to kill one eventually to eat its corpse.

The n up there is for nymph, and nymphs are assholes. They steal your shit. This can include your weapons, your armor, your wands, your everything. And then they teleport to the other side of the level so you can't kill them and get it back! Kill them from range if you need to. Otherwise, they often spawn asleep, so you can leave them sleeping, too. Just remember they're around if you plan on coming back through a level.



There's also a violet fungus here. F is for fungus, as you might have guessed. Eating a violet fungus corpse will make you hallucinate, so don't do that. Or do if you want, I guess. Once you're decently equipped, hallucination isn't too much of a danger. Beware of angering peaceful monsters because you thought they were something else, though.



I decide to use fast travel to get out of here (the _ key). The pathing isn't as sophisticated as something like DCSS's, but it gets its job done okay.

I also fast travel right past the potion on the floor above. Curses. I'll definitely pick it up next time!



Finally, we're back in the dungeon.

Next time, it's onward to Sokoban!