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Died of disappointment in Sokoban. Let's Play Nethack! Valkyrie, Part 4



We pick up where we left off, on the first floor of Sokoban!

The Sokoban branch is based on a Japanese puzzle game of the same name about pushing crates around a warehouse. You'll notice that the level is kindly mapped for us as soon as we enter - our goal is to push those boulders (the 0's) into those blue ^'s, which are pits.

Yeah, it's a block puzzle.



My new pet housecat came in with me, but wandered off behind the boulders. I immediately regret my timing in taming this thing. It's going to be getting in the way a lot.

So let's shove this boulder we're next to over to the right...



And then circle around and push it back where it was.



Don't worry, I won't show you a step-by-step of every Sokoban puzzle. They're not that difficult, and if you really can't be bothered at all, there are spoilers for how to solve each floor floating around out there. My main tip is not to make any move you can't undo unless you're absolutely sure you have to. Then it's just a matter of figuring out which boulders you need to move to reach the pits, and starting with those.

So we'll push the boulder below us down three spaces so we can get through...



Like so! The % near me is another food ration, nice! Sokoban is guaranteed to generate several food items (I think 4 stacks) on each floor, so if you're playing a character with hunger problems, it's probably a good choice to make a beeline here.



Then we go down here, and push the boulder to our left one square further left...



So we can move down one square and push that boulder to our bottom-left into the first pit.



And that's the trickiest part done; the rest is just mopping up.

While doing so, I shove a boulder up and discover some goodies underneath.



More food (the "slime molds" are a generic "fruit" item that you can give your own name in the options file if you want) and a ring! Reason number two to check out Sokoban is that each floor is also guaranteed to generate one ring and one wand. If you've explored a floor and haven't found both a ring and a wand, whatever you're missing is probably hiding under a boulder somewhere.

I keep going and fill in the bottom row of pits.



Aha! Tucked in this little alcove down here are two guaranteed scrolls of earth. Scrolls of earth will create boulders! If it's blessed, it'll create 8 boulders around you in a square. If it's uncursed, it'll create 8 boulders around you in a square and drop a 9th boulder right on your head. If it's cursed it'll just drop a boulder on your head and be done with it.

This can actually do an appreciable amount of damage for an early game character (1d20 if you're not wearing a hard helmet), so be a little wary.

Obviously, the game puts these here to help in case you fuck up the puzzles. More on that in a second. But outside of Sokoban they can be a very handy escape item - very few monsters can navigate over boulders, so it can give you a chance to rest and recover if you're getting creamed.

Once the other pits come to view I can see that a food ration and the level's wand are each stuck in one of them, so I head up to snag the food ration first.



That message about air currents is unique to Sokoban. Basically, it means you can't just levitate over the pits and skip the puzzle.

Sokoban has a lot of weird rules to keep you from cheating your way through. First of all, while on every other floor of the dungeon you can push a boulder in any direction, in Sokoban, you can only push them orthoganally. This makes it a good idea to move diagonally as much as possible here, to help keep yourself from accidentally shoving boulders you don't want to. You also can't go through diagonal gaps between boulders, or between boulders and walls. I guess they really wanted to replicate the authentic Sokoban experience, or something.

However! The game knows you might get stuck, and there are a bunch of things you are allowed to do to get unstuck. You can:



Quite a list, isn't it? But the game wants to keep you from cheating the puzzles if possible, so all of these options come with a drawback: each time you do one of the above things, you lose a point of luck.

What the hell is luck? Well, it governs a whole bunch of different things, and bad luck is... bad. Probably most significant for us right now is that praying with negative luck can cause your god to smite you, which can have effects ranging from merely angering them (and making it unsafe to pray again), to level drain, summoning a hostile monster, or, if you're really unlucky, straight-up killing you with a lightning bolt or a disintegration beam.

Thankfully, luck times out, with both positive and negative luck gradually dwindling to zero over time, so you're not fucked forever. There are other ways to affect your luck, too, but this digression has gone on long enough. Back to block puzzles!

I run into a Mordor orc as I come back for another boulder and kill it easily. Then...




Ugh, that's my cat over there. This is the reason I regret taming the cat right before Sokoban: you can't push a boulder onto a space occupied by a monster. Enemies you can just kill, but it pisses off your god to kill your pets, so we don't want to do that. Just have to deal with it.

I push the next boulder into the next pit, and then dive into the pit beyond it for the wand.



If you push a boulder into a pit with items into it here, the items are lost, so make sure you grab anything valuable first.

We snag our wand and go to engrave-test it.



A wand of slow monster! Potentially useful in the right situation, but in practice, usually junk. I doubt we'll ever use it, but we've got the inventory space, so we might as well hang onto it for now.



Heading back for another boulder, I discover the Mordor orc's buddies. I kill this first one and it drops an orcish helm and some orcish chain mail! This reminds me that I'm still not wearing any body armor, so I pick them up.



The chain mail is heavy enough that it burdens me - which means it's time to finally find out whether that bag we picked up back in the Mines is an oilskin sack or a bag of holding.

Moment of truth...




Bag of holding it is! This is great! A bag of holding isn't exactly a necessary, but it's going to be a huge quality of life improvement. Now we can effectively lug around twice as much stuff - and once we get around to blessing the bag, four times as much stuff! It'll protect our scrolls and potions and what-have-you from getting burned or exploded by enemy attacks or traps, too. Very nice!

One of the two potential "prizes" at the end of Sokoban is a bag of holding. The other is an amulet of reflection, so we'll be hoping for that one now.

Anyway, back to our armor situation. We've been lugging around a leather cloak and a pile of orcish helms, and now we've added an orcish chain mail to the mix. We haven't put any of them on yet because we aren't sure if they're cursed - but now that we have a pet, we can find out!

First we drop the armor...



And then we stand to the side and wait for our cat to walk over here...




Which it does!

Pets can sense cursed equipment, and they really don't like to walk over it. If they do walk over equipment that's cursed, you'll get a message that your pet moves "reluctantly." We get no such message here, so our orcish chain mail is safe to wear.



And our AC drops another four points to 2! Nice! We're back to burdened again because I took all that armor back out of the bag of holding, so I shove my scrolls and potions and rings and wands in to unburden us.

Our leather cloak isn't cursed either, so we throw that on too. It only provides 1 AC of protection, but every little bit helps.

Before we can test our helmets, we get company.




Grrr. Well, at least she didn't take our weapon. And...



Every level of Sokoban is a no-teleport level, so she can't poof away. This makes it much easier to beat her to death and take our stuff back.

Incidentally "no teleport" means you and most normal monsters, trying to self-teleport. You can still teleport objects (in fact, teleporting boulders around is pretty much the only way you can try to fix a Sokoban mistake without a luck penalty), and you can teleport monsters away from you with a wand of teleportation, and that sort of thing. There are also endgame enemies that completely ignore this, but their AI is different than things like nymphs and leprechauns.

Anyway, back to helmet-testing. None of them turn out to be cursed, so I try them all on just in case one turns out to have a better enchantment than the others. In fact, one of them does turn out to be a +1 orcish helm, so I keep that one and dump the rest.

Then I finish up the puzzle and head upstairs to level 2.



Oh thank god.

Sokoban has four levels, and each level has two versions. I hate the other version of level two. While this version is straightforward, easy, and quick, the other version makes it very easy to screw yourself over and requires a lot of tedious running in loops around the level to be able to push things from the right direction.

But we don't have to deal with that shit!



We can reach this point easily (picking up some food and the level's wand along the way).

Then we move the boulder that's one square down and two squares right of us one more space to the right...



And we can start shoving boulders in pits.



Like so!



If we move the boulder above us up one...



That basically frees up this whole section to plop into the pits.

Oh, by the way, all the pits above the first floor are actually holes - if you step into one, you'll fall down to the floor below. Sometimes items still generate inside them, though. If that happens, your best option is to turn on autopickup and then jump in, which will let you pick up the item without any fuss. There's also a chance you'll knock items in the hole down to the floor below with you, but autopickup is more reliable.



Now we can start pushing all the boulders from the lower left section through, too.

With some space cleared, we can push this one...



...up,



and then left through that doorway...



And then back all the way right and into a pit. We can do basically the same thing with the one to the northeast of the doorway.



Just three more left!



Push this one left first so we can push it from the north.



Then push this one to the left, and up through the doorway...



So we can push it back down and around and into the last pit.



Ta-dah! Yeah, this floor's really easy. It gives us a full five more boulders than we need, so there are a lot of ways to solve it. As a bonus, zero enemies hassled me that whole time.

And it's at this point I realize I left my cat back on the first floor, so I hurry back down to find it. Pets will slowly go wild as they spend turns on a different floor than you. It wouldn't be a huge loss, but we just got this cat! We might as well try to keep it with us at least a little longer.



Alright, there we go. That door near us is locked, but luckily we picked up that lockpick in Minetown. Opening the door, we find...



Aha, here's where all the enemies ended up (I did encounter a kobold mummy on the way back up with my cat; you can see its corpse over there on the left). Here's a rothe and a coyote (with another coyote standing just out of sight), which die quickly.



Stepping in a little, we also see a gridbug, a cave spider (s for spider!) and a red mold back in the corner. We kill the cave spider and gridbug, and then a second spider and third coyote who show up out of my blind spot to the left of the door.



And then a brown pudding! P for pudding, which also covers black puddings, gray oozes, and green slimes.

Brown puddings can't hurt you, but their attack will rot your armor. Rotting, rusting, burning, and corroding will reduce the base AC of a piece of armor or the base damage of a weapon, up to three points (but never below zero, and it doesn't affect enchantment).



They also do this. Each individual split pudding has a chance to drop an item - as do most monsters in the game, but since you can easily make a shitton of brown or black puddings by hitting them over and over with a weak weapon, this is pretty abusable. That whole process is called pudding farming, and it's very lucrative, but also extremely tedious and not remotely necessary. This isn't the optimal setup for it either. I just kill the things and move on (but not before one rots my cloak smile:



Sokoban level 3! And I brought my cat along this time. I think this is the easier version of level 3 too, but I don't hate the hard version of 3 the way I hate the hard version of 2.

First I need to trade places with my cat and give us some breathing room.



There we go. Then we can plug a couple of holes and clear some more space.



Like so!



Then I come up here and push the boulder below me down...



To here. Then I can shove the bottom left boulder up one...



Without getting stuck, because I have room to go around now. Then we can push the boulder to the right into the next hole.



And clear this one as well, pushing it right and down and right again.



And this one, which will make it easy to clear a couple more, too.



Ugh, another nymph. Smashy-smashy.



I get my shield back, and notice that the nymph dropped a potion! A smoky potion, at that. Smoky potions have a small chance of releasing a djinn when you drink them, who might grant you a wish (the probability of getting a wish is much greater if the potion is blessed).

I go ahead and name this potion "probably object detection." Nymphs are likely to be generated carrying object detection potions (mirrors, also, though this one didn't have one). There's a chance it could be something like healing instead, but if we encounter more nymphs that drop this potion, we'll know with greater certainty.

Anyway, blah blah block puzzles, etc.



I get this boulder to here and then wisely come around to check on my cat. If I had shoved the boulder in there blindly, the cat would be stuck, and to progress I'd either have to kill it (unwise), break the boulder (probably the best option except I have nothing to break it with), or go elsewhere and wait for it to go feral so I can kill it without penalty. I don't really want to do any of those things if I can help it.

Stupid cat.



Once I have that problem solved, I come back from depositing a boulder and find a yellow light! The y is for... yellow light, I guess, although there are black lights too that use the same symbol. I guess it's the best they could do since they'd already used both L's.

Yellow lights will explode and blind you, which is moderately annoying to me right now and potentially very dangerous to a squishier character or in a more dangerous situation.



As it is I just stupidly swat my cat, oops. Luckily I don't kill it. That's my cue to wait patiently for the blindness to time out.



The v is for vortex; this one's a fog cloud. All vortexes can engulf you, but the fog cloud can't do much else. It dies in one hit.



Finally. So what's accumulated over here while I've been rolling boulders around?



Only a single acid blob, apparently. Their acid will splash you when you hit them, doing some damage, but it's not a threat to us.

I grab the wand up there and decide to engrave-test it and the one I picked up from the second floor.



One is a wand of cold! This is primarily an attack wand. It's a decent ranged option while its charges last. It can also freeze water into ice so we can walk on it, although this can be pretty risky.



The other is a wand of speed monster! We could use this to give ourselves intrinsic speed if we didn't already have it. As it is, we just zap it at our cat to make it faster. It can be somewhat nice for someone who's planning on using pets a lot, but it's not very useful to us.

Alright, moment of truth! Final Sokoban floor! Which prize will we get?



Aw, damn. This is the bag of holding ending. Like I said earlier, there are two versions of each floor, and in the case of the fourth floor, each version comes with a specific prize.

It would be reasonable to just leave - or take a glance around for the ring and the wand and then leave - but for the LP's sake, I'll clear the floor.

First thing's first.



This row of 5 boulders all need to be pushed away from the southern opening. This will get the two on the ends stuck in the corners, but it's unavoidable to be able to maneuver.



There. Now we can start bringing boulders up from the second little chamber there.



Like so!

It's at this point I realize that it's just a really terrible idea to have my cat getting in the way on this level, so I take it back downstairs. I shouldn't take too long up here, and the risk of it getting stuck in that long pit corridor is really high, especially since you bring the boulders around a blind corner to reach it.

I come back up and start moving boulders, clearing most of the second boulder chamber and moving to the third.



Hmm. This boulder wasn't here before.

Yeah, that's a giant mimic. I think that two of them are guaranteed to show up on the fourth floor of Sokoban, just to be irritating.

But my character doesn't realize that, so if I just moved toward it I wouldn't attack, and it'd get the jump on me. Instead, I use the shift+F "fight" command to attack in the mimic's direction.



There it is. It's slow, but it can hit hard, and it can grab you so you can't run away.

I take a bit of a wallop, but I kill it.

Incidentally, eating a mimic corpse will turn you into a pile of gold for a while. This is annoying but not really dangerous.

More boulder-moving, ho hum.



When I get a boulder to here, this is basically my only chance to check that the pit corridor is clear. I try to remember to do it, but I'm absentminded and sometimes forget.



Found the other mimic.



This message means that there's a zoo on the level. A zoo is a room full of monsters and gold and the occasional item. The final level of Sokoban always has one; it's the room over there on the bottom right that we're trying to reach.



Damn it! This is what I get for forgetting to check.

Well, this isn't insurmountable. We can throw stuff or zap wands over the boulder at the monster, hopefully killing it.

First I throw my dagger, then a scimtar that a hobgoblin left behind up here. Both hit, but it's not enough to kill whatever it is.

Now would be a great time to use my wand of cold, actually! Too bad I have already completely forgotten I have it.

Instead I head all the way back down to the first floor, where the Mordor orcs left behind an assortment of cutlery I can throw.



There we go!

We finally finish shoving boulders in holes and can move on to the last room.



Normally, I'd engrave a permanent Elbereth in the square just north of me, so I could retreat to it if things go south. But I don't have a way to engrave Elbereth permanently yet, so I'll do without.

I do have stealth and a lockpick, though!



Enemies in zoos generate asleep. There are some awake enemies in here - ones that spawned later - and they can wake the others up sometimes if they, say, try to throw things at me and hit other monsters instead, but I should be okay.

If I'd had to kick the door down, it would've woken everything up.

As it is, I avoid attacking that grey e up there for now. It's a gas spore, which will explode when it dies, damaging everything around it and waking the place up, so I want to save it for last if possible.

Killing gas spores near your pets is a good way to kill your pet and have your god think it's your fault, by the way. Try not to do that.



Doot doot doo. The Uruk-hai (blue o's) and orc zombies (grey Z's) are awake, but that's it. I kill them first and pick through their stuff - not much of interest.

This fight can get pretty hectic if you don't have stealth, but as it is, I have no trouble at all.



And here's our bag of holding we don't need. Yay.

I got some gold out of the endeavor, I guess. An amulet of reflection sure would've been nice, though. Oh well.

I did pick up one more wand, so on the way back I test it.



Well that's not what I wrote. This is a wand of polymorph! You can get some cool stuff by zapping one of these at a pile of junk. We may try that at some point.

This is one of the reason's it's a good idea to write something with your finger before testing a wand, by the way. It wouldn't have changed the message if there was no message there to change!

Welp, that's about it. Kind of disappointing. No amulet of reflection, no exciting wands (sometimes you can find a wand of wishing in Sokoban and trivialize the entire rest of the game). Oh well.

I pick up my cat on the way down and head back to the main dungeon.



Next time, we'll dive a little deeper, and then head back to deal with some unfinished business in the Gnomish Mines. Stay tuned!