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This is where the game starts us off. Next to us is our pet little dog, up in the corner is a potion. Theres no obvious exit to the room, but we can search along the walls for a secret door soon. First off, we check our inventory.
Also, we're playing tiles (using the default tileset) because I like tiles


Most of this we are going to be ditching right away!


After unequipping and dropping our armour and other things, this is what we have. The wooden stake is basically an upgraded dagger. The stack of 5 daggers are a projectile weapon we can use. Garlic is a low-nutrition item, lembas wafers are both filling and low weight. Holy water we can #dip items into to bless them (or uncurse them if cursed), oil lamps are sorta-useful in that they give us a source of light. More importantly, there's only two types of lamps in the game, and starting with an oil lamp identifies one of them for us, so any lamps we come across that aren't oil are guarenteed to be the other type.

The {XX} next to items is their weight, if you see across the bottom of our statline the Wt:196/725 shows our current weight and max carrying capacity before becoming burdened. We're going to want to travel light.


Some searching shows us a hidden door!



As we kick down the door, we turn into a wolf. As a lycanthrope (read: were-wolf), this is something we do often. Until we have a way to control randomly turning into a wolf, we're simply going to play as a wolf for a while. They're a fairly strong early game form, and have the advantage of giving us a layer of death protection - if we die as a wolf, we turn back into a lycanthrope at half our max HP.

If you check our max carrying capacity, the suit we started with by itself would burden us, so you see why we're going to travel with what little I can get away with. Being burdened reduces our speed, being beyond burdened has other nasty effects.


DL:1 is pretty uninteresting, and we're going to want to dive pretty quickly. Since our pet little dog isn't beside me, he won't follow us downstairs. While pets are useful, he is going to get in our way by competing with us for kills (XP) and food (corpses)


DL:2 Gives us a couple coyotes and a scroll of some sort. Coyotes have amusing names attached to them when you look at them.


Scrolls have a variety of effects, we won't know what this one does until we either read it or identify it through some means. Reading scrolls that you don't know what they are can be a very, very bad idea.


A short jaunt gives us the downstairs, which I take a quick peek down.


The Gnomish Mines! The Mines are special series of levels accessed from a second set of downstairs somewhere on DL:2-5, so we got this at pretty much the earliest possible time. The Mines are filled with gnomes, dwarves, traps, and other things.


A quick look around gives us a level from killing a dwarf and the downstairs to explore further, but for now we're going to keep exploring the main dungeon. We'll be back to the Mines soon, though. There's a special level on Mines:3-4 we're going to want to get to sooner rather than later


Nutrition is the main enemy of early game lycanthropes. Here we are, fainting before turn 600. Basically, how nutrition works:
- You lose one point nutrition every turn, as a base
- You lose one point every 20 turns for every ring or amulet you wear (you can wear one amulet and up to two rings)
- You can lose nutrition through other means, such as spellcasting or attacking
- Of note to lycanthropes: You lose one nutrition every two turns for non-artifact regeneration. Lycanthropes start with intrinsic regeneration, which regens at least a point of HP every turn but gives us a 50% increase in how much food we need compared to other starting characters.

This is a big reason we ditched our dog, we need to eat more or less every corpse we come across and it would try to beat us to them. Thisis also why lycanthropes are a hard mode class -- we can equip pretty much nothing and have very little inventory space, as well as going through nutrition more than any other race (although vampires are comparable on the nutrition front).


I eat the garlic we started with and a couple corpes I find, but its not really enough. So downwards we go for more food.


DL:3 gives us a quick downstairs but nothing more to kill and/or eat.


A short walk from there gives us our first store! It a hardware store! Look at the size of it
At the very minimum, theres a magic marker and several bags which are of interest. Along the way, I eat one of our lembas wafers to be not hungry, because we might be here a while.


Bags have a base weight of {15}. There's four different types of bags; the one we want is a bag of holding, which reduces the weight of whats in it. So this bag of {17} means theres something in it, but until we can look into it (wolfs don't have hands and can't apply bags) we don't know what it is. If its an item that weighs more than {2}, its holding!


This {18} bag is less interesting because rings weigh {3} (there's very few items that weigh {2}) but otherwise the above applies


One of the bags costs only 2 zorkmids, so I know for sure its a basic sack. I #name it as a sack, any other sacks i come across will be named the same thing. None of the other bags in this shop show as sacks, so I know they're one of the other types.


Lycanthropes have access to the #youpoly command, which triggers self-polymorph. For us, that will only ever switch us between wolf/lycanthrope form


I check this bag, and it has a scroll in it! Since scrolls weigh {5} and this bag only weighs {18}, its for sure holding! I don't have enough cash to buy the scroll and bag, but I can ditch the scroll and have just enough for the bag.


I #name the bag holding then #adjust it to the letter "s", so I can access it by pressings "a","s", mostly out of tradition. Bags of holding change the weight of whatevers in it, based on blessed/uncursed/cursed (or BUC) status. Blessed it modifies it by 1/4, uncursed 1/2, cursed 2x.


I shove most of my inventory into the bag to save on weight, and take note of this magic marker on the way out. Magic markers can be used on blank scrolls/spellbooks to write new ones, but we're pretty early in the game for this to be useful. I'll be sure to pick this up later though.


I also [a]pply the whistle, for kicks. There's two types of whistles: Tin (useless, produce a high sound) and Magic (teleports any pets to be near you, produces a strange sound). This one is tin, so I #name it as such and drop it.


Exploring the rest of the level, I kill a cave spider and eat its corpse. Doing so gives me the "especially healthy" line, this means I gain intrinsic poison resistance - very useful! In wolf form I have poison resistance but NOT in lycanthrope form, so this is very good to have. Poison can potentially instakill characters if you get unlucky!


Heading down further, I run into one of the funnier traps in the game. Bear traps prevent you from moving for a time. (The funniest traps are land mines, which are just so out of place in the setting. Walking along and KABLAMMO! Land mine gotcha!)


"You hear the chime of the cash register" is a level feeling that means there's a shop somewhere on the level.


Its a small food shop and mostly not of interest to us. The rations would be nice, we don't have the cash to buy them right now.


We hit level 4 exploring the rest of the level. The dungeon feature on the east there is a sink, they have a couple uses such as identifying rings and producing succubi/puddings if you kick them.


I descend and get a message that "You hear the sounds of civilization", meaning we've entered our first SLASH'EM special level. The Mall can show up on DL:5-6, but only has a 75% chance of appearing in a game. It has a bunch of shops in it, as you would expect


We also find our first baby dragon! Baby dragons have a lower base level than vanilla Nethack (and adult dragons a higher base level) so we start encountering them pretty early.


Even baby dragons can hit pretty hard, but thanks to our intrinsic regeneration we can simply run away for a few turns to heal the damage it does. I'm using this a bunch in the early game because almost all of the enemies that regenerate are much deeper than this, so we can outheal anything while they can't heal the damage we do to them.


Consumables (including corpses) have a chance to be rotten, which gives a few turns of blind/confusion. Its little enough that its not a big worry. It is seperate from illness, corpses that have "aged" (50 turns past after being generated) will give you a deadly illness istead. Don't eat old corpses!

(This doesn't actually apply to us because Undead Slayers start with intrinsic Sickness-resistance and can eat old corpses safely )



First shop: an armour shop! There's no armour we can wear in wolf form, so its mostly a note for later.


Muggers are a special monster which as far as I know only show up in the Mall in SLASH'EM. They're not that tough, but notably are humans (@) and ignore Elbereth (which we'll get into later)


Further exploring gives us a general store, bookstore, and lighting shop. The two lamps in the lighting shop are of particular note.


Also, potions!


The monster just ahead of us is a gas spore. They have no attacks, but explode when killed, damaging anything in the 8 squares besides them. In wolf form, we can throw daggers, so I use our stack of daggers we started with to take it out without being hurt. Now, lets check out what we came for





Not only is this lamp unidentified (and we already id'd the other type of lamp, the oil one we started with) but the cost means only one thing: Magic lamp! And, if you see the price of the one beside it, the lamp beside it is also a magic lamp!

NEXT TIME: Update #2