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copperwater edited this page May 28, 2023 · 2 revisions

This list is for ideas that are promising but need some more time in the oven. They may not end up seriously considered until more quick and high priority stuff gets implemented. Treat it as below low priority. If something from this list becomes more important, it should get its design issues sorted out and be bumped into a higher priority list.

  • grunthack/splicehack/evilhack intelligent pet patch (5a95ce3, 611bcd8) (bilious 259)
    • These implementations are all different (and bits and pieces have already been implemented in xnh/vanilla); needs significant refining into a concrete list of features.
  • Give the choice of a prize in Sokoban
    • What needs more thought: what should the prizes be?
      • Bag and reflection should stick around.
      • The third option is traditionally cloak of magic resistance, but jonadab has proposed ring of poly control.
      • Maybe have multiple possibilities from the different object classes like evilhack does?
      • Or just don't add a third prize at all; just allow the player to spend a potion of object detection to get the choice of whichever they want.
    • See unnethack commit 4ab0063 for implementation.
    • also see evilhack sokoban end revamp (3 different prizes generate; can tell object class by using object detection) (0c9c9ba, 7c47995, 21bf24f)
  • Special case polypiling so that blank scrolls and spellbooks only flip back and forth, and water only becomes water
    • note luxidream feedback that this makes polypiling more tedious, not discouraged
  • When a monster would start bashing you in melee with a launcher, make them unwield it silently.
    • This item should get merged with the similar grunt change under consideration.
  • Malcolm Ryan "Animal Handling v1.0" - chat to animals to pacify them. Unlike original patch, don't make a separate skill for this. (bilious 144)
  • L's Terrain Patch (SAVEBREAK)
    • should prompt a flurry of special level changes
    • see fourk commit 4f1fe92 which implements the puddle terrain, and 24f3f5d
      • also contains a new minetown which fourk has additional commits on (5fd8b4c)
  • other muse stuff from splicehack (e.g. 5ce8fde - but see github comments on this)
  • evilhack/sporkhack slow status effect (91977c1) (SAVEBREAK)
    • run out of bits in status_update() long field after Panic is added. will need to refactor to uint64_t in multiple windowports
  • undefer vampire mages (SAVEBREAK)
    • Where are there random V generated? Vlad's, for one, which is probably fine; graveyards
  • evilhack/sporkhack racial armor bonuses to AC (but remove elven enchantability to +7)
    • as I noted to K2, the player's only real option for getting racial armor is to kill or arrange the deaths of same-race monsters. Flavor-wise this only really makes sense for orcs. I'm not deciding that it's a bad thing, but it would be best if the player had some other way to acquire same-race gear.
  • evilhack add an elven spellcasting monster (1c4d866, b4a8187, 3de39ce) (SAVEBREAK)
    • Once monster spellcasting is added, all elves should be able to cast some basic and enchantment spells, but this idea still applies in the form of making one elf who is a primary caster
  • locusts that eat food rather than give disease (SAVEBREAK, NEW TILE)
    • maybe reach into bags and spill out food items beneath the hero, and also give the locust the ability to eat food out from under hero's feet or give disease if no food is available (see march 7 2019 YANI)
    • #1811: Locusts can eat food off the ground, and they create more of themselves when they do, proportional to the nutrition consumed.
    • also see spl/evilhack? implementation
  • evilhack pickaxe skill affects digging speed (733953e)
    • allowing 1-turn digs is a little silly
    • also see fourk 51d20f
  • evilhack nerf unskilled weapon usage (b990749)
  • evilhack add "accurate" flag and apply it to monsters (4cfa1aa)
    • do monsters NEED an inherent +5 to-hit bonus? And if they do, do they need a M3 flag for it?
    • versus an implementation that just throws special cases and results into a function similar to current hitbon()
  • evilhack/L monster ring patch (5880eed)
    • May want to port this only partially, and/or consider how it might interact with mextrinsics.
    • (Its mon_prop function is nice but would DEFINITELY have to be reimagined to work with mintrinsics; also I might want to refactor monster properties in general before adding rings to the mix.)
  • fourk make wishing for cross-aligned artifacts less likely (0e08bdb)
    • owned artifact patch is probably more fun, but no reason why there can't be both (NOTE: owned artifacts patch is considered blocked by other things)
  • evilhack/sporkhack healing spellcasters (e158bd7)
    • While sensible, this makes them a lot more annoying, particularly if they get more bang for their buck out of a healing spell at higher level.
  • evilhack spear trap: fairly damaging, causes wounded legs, nonremovable unlike bear trap (c0daba9)
  • evilhack strongly force priests not to use edged weapons (e698a96)
  • jonadab proposal auto-name sokoban levels in overview once visited
    • auto-name, or auto-annotate? player may want to use their own annotations, but perhaps overwriting the existing ones is fine
  • fourk livelog sokoban zoo entry and wishing for a totally random object (e4c2a62, 3f7f19b, ad0870d)
    • analysis needed: will this need to break saves?
  • fourk remove some wisdom exercising sources (fa98ac6)
    • convert to a certain type of exp gain that can only be triggered once? or multiple times with diminishing returns for non-farmable ones
      • would require a TNNT-like system of tracking these (SAVEBREAK)
      • some might be possible without TNNTesque system if the xp gain is small enough that you'd be better off fighting a few monsters, though avoid making it truly independently farmable
  • fourk damage reduction nerf (0485cf9)
    • should definitely exercise DRY with computation of monster's to-hit
    • this will make the game significantly harder. consider carefully
  • fourk remove choking in exchange for bloatedness and slowing (f24409a)
    • use caution: do not want to make it trivial to cheese past famine with this, or go forever without eating.
    • Probably a custom implementation should make bloating happen when oversatiated, and make the speed penalties sharper (put hard cap much closer to 2000 than 5000).
  • slicehack consider being surrounded a trouble (2537ed0)
    • Probably needs a new formula entirely.
  • [stealth]
    • adjustment: combat by a stealthy monster does not make noise, but retaliation by (presumably non-stealthy) monster does, allowing you to stealth kill your way through a room but only if you don't let anyone fight back. maybe fold into idea for stealth skill where Stealth boosts your effective skill by 1-2. (what trains stealth? is there an existing idea for this?)
    • Revisit stealth. Lack of stealth seems to work very oddly as a small chance of waking monsters anywhere in line of sight.
      • While it's definitely true that stealth as a way to slaughter through a sleeping room of monsters is bad, it'd be nice if it had SOME benefit when faced with a lot of sleepers.
    • Reference material: fourk stealth skill and overhaul (b7242a5, 965e9c3, 7a309ea, fix 35ce78e)
  • Energy regen formula could do with a revisit.
    • 1/turn for Eregen is fine.
    • 1 every 3 turns for Wizard is fine.
    • XL and Wis are the weak factors. Average Wis of 11 is equal to the Wizard benefit. Higher Wis of 16 is almost half of Eregen.
    • Maybe the scaling factors of 3 should be dropped? +Wis% per turn, +XL% per turn?
    • When revisiting this, drop the stupid "fraction of 300" thing. Just give Wiz +33% per turn.
  • fourk gnome darkvision (6fcf164)
    • how will it interact with dark_room?
    • likely: room squares will remain dark but you will be able to see things on them perfectly well
    • this is more complex than it appears: it means monster AI needs to account for darkvision also, which the fourk commit doesn't do. then again, does vanilla AI even account for monsters not being able to see you in light/dark?
  • Maybe make spiders (and a?) able to cling to the ceiling.
    • Need to check if all clingers are treated as being on the ceiling at all times.
  • Spell formula could do with a revisit.
    • XL having a disproportionate effect compared to Int is desirable, because Int is randomly determined and barely changes, while XL steadily progresses through the game
    • It would also be desirable to avoid the convolution of calculating a % success rate that is never visible and used to inflate Pw costs. Ideally the scaling factor would be computed directly.
      • Done probably as a shk-like numerator and denominator formula, where costly things (metal armor) multiply by terms >1 and beneficial things (wielding spellbook) multiply by e.g. 1/2.
    • Feedback from K2's game also indicates that the "effective Int" thing doesn't work great, since with high Int the benefit of using a wand or robe is diminished.
  • make weapon enchantment count only for damage
    • what of the problem of launchers? enchantment affecting to-hit only on them would be silly... but it would also be silly to have enchantment on them be meaningless
  • rethink amulet of yendor draining energy away
  • unnethack nerf unskilled attacks (fd12ec3, 1569969)
    • note: this is one of un's classic unpopular nerfs
  • unnethack make heart of ahriman give displacement + eregen (37e9e9)
    • compare/fold in: fourk make heart of ahriman uncurse when invoked (dc173e4)
    • Eregen is stupid for the Bar quest gift. Look at other ahriman implementations.
    • dnethack has half spell dmg + magic resistance (also other stuff but... it's dnh overpowered), and it's a ruby. also removes curses when invoked
    • some form of cancellation could also be cool. cancels things it hits?
    • Another idea is to allow it slotless MR and half spell damage, BUT it blocks energy regen when carried. Good for Bar who never cast spells; bad for others.
    • Also possibly switch it to chaotic.
  • [additional oracle services] Oracle offering several services which you choose from a menu rather than line by line. Candidates:
    • Major and minor consultations
    • Enlightenment?
    • "Lucky numbers" - same price as a minor consultation, gives you free unlocking of next iron safe (requires that iron safes be implemented) (SAVEBREAK)
    • Identification - unnethack 3e9fa, original paxed patch bilious#19 (which makes it dependent on the cost of the objclass, not hero's level)
      • #2601: You can pay the Oracle to identify a single item for you, but this can only be done about 3-5 times per game, after which she refuses to do it any more. She says something on your last identification indicating that you can't do it any more.
    • fourk's commits: e682cbd, 8a97b02
    • #3260: If you chat to the Oracle while carrying invocation artifacts (or possibly just after you've triggered the game flags for having acquired them at some point) she offers you a special consultation which helps show an unspoiled player the next step to take to complete the game, given what you have so far.
    • #3690: Rather than having a scroll of knowledge, have the Oracle sell reverse-identification as a service. This would require some cap on the amount of times to prevent you from learning every important item, perhaps 5 or 7 plus a small random factor per game.
    • #4031: You can pay the Oracle to ask what level Fort Ludios can be reached from, if you have already visited the level containing its portal. (If not, there are technical issues with how the dungeon generates preventing her from telling you.)
    • #4092: Based on some new code in 3.7 that tracks how an artifact was generated, allow the player to ask the Oracle about the existence of an artifact. The code isn't in place for her to tell you where it actually is, but she will be able to tell you whether it generated randomly, in bones, from a gift, etc. Possible messages for some of these: [more in YANI]
  • Stat loss from abuse should not be curable. In other words, losing a point due to abuse decrements the maximum attained as well as the current.
    • Nerfing unihorn to not restore attributes has made this not worth doing for now. Revisit after further unihorn changes.
  • unnethack muddy swamps (8d065)
    • First need to consider where would be best served by having bogs. Probably not worth it just to have them randomly generate in the dungeons, so there needs to be special levels that would be well served by having them.
  • unnethack dead trees (2a6e95, d90d4)
    • Kicking a dead tree should have an additional random case of making a branch fall on you and damage you. They could also possibly have angry ravens a la EvilHack. Ideally special levels should be able to turn this off so you can have a lot of dead trees without giving the player a lot of ravens, but this shouldn't be considered a problem until shown otherwise.
    • Same as above: where can dead trees be added to make them worthwhile?
  • remove ulevel from difficulty scaling entirely
  • preadjust patch (bilious 95)
    • Should this be an autopickup exception-like system? Regexes?
  • Malcolm Ryan candles on altars (bilious 265)
    • Most common suggestion: dropping candle(s) on an altar should consume them, at least if prayer/alignment is good. Other suggestions for negative effects are to blind the player or create a tower of flame (this wouldn't be great as it'd just make the player go drop burnables). Some dark flame thing should happen for really bad standing and/or Moloch stuff.
  • healer bleeding mechanic
  • sunglasses blocking vs blinding (Red kangaroo)
    • Sunglasses that prevent blind are interesting, but ideally would have some slight downside as well (beyond the downside that they would occupy your eyewear slot and it takes 2 actions to equip something else there)
  • Lesser form of sickness, possibly called something other than illness, which blocks HP regen. Ideally, lose attributes which then get restored when the sickness ends.
  • Fount/Font of Holiness: slowly regenerating but infinite holy water well
    • Fount is probably a more straightforward word but Font literally means a vessel of holy water
    • What is the base type of item for this supposed to be? Potion of water won't work that great because it has many ways to get destroyed that'd need to be accounted for...
  • Deterministic HP: dnh-inspired HP as a direct permanent function of XL, Con, role, race, and misc bonuses (blocking several other things)
    • Consider removing randomization. Each role and race contributes a constant amount per level. Con still supplies per-character variance.
    • Investigate dnh's mechanics for this
    • Full determinism means that characters could feel less distinct.
  • Rangers have some ability to identify ammo enchantment without extra resources above a certain XL or perhaps a certain skill level.
  • Artifact "Cornucopia" whose base type is a horn of plenty
    • Invoke power is to recharge itself? Infinite food/potions considered balanced?
  • Revisit relative q difficulty. Mumakil should probably be highest.
  • Rings in sinks should identify themselves a la wands if they give an unambiguous message
    • Fiqhack commit c78f907 to produce "It must be X" messages should happen first - this should not add a new option (can get rid of it with MSGTYPE)
  • dnh-like cap on number of tamed monsters / total HD? it uses Cha/3 if I'm not mistaken
  • Rubbing a weapon on a blessed touchstone (it actually needs to be blessed, arcs and gnomes can't use it uncursed) should identify its enchantment
    • Ideally this should not be an infinitely repeatable identification.
  • make illness hit you in the natural HP regen, going negative if it's bad enough. See YANI #253
    • Rather than a timer, make some system like a scale of 0-100 with 0 being dead from illness and 100 being perfect health, and each time the illness procs it does a random hop from your current number based on the number.
    • 50 is neutral: your odds and magnitudes of going down/up are the same. At 100 you never naturally go down.
    • The scaling between and exact mechanics is somewhat dependent on how often illness procs, but here's a rough sketch:
      • On each turn, you first determine whether you're getting a positive or negative change in your number. The chance of getting a positive change is exactly equal to your current number. 5 = 5% chance of maybe going up. 80 = 80% chance of maybe going up.
      • Then your counter moves by some amount - rn2(5)? rn2(10)? - in that direction
    • Disease attacks directly hit this stat, with the damage dice corresponding to how much.
    • Also consider a similar system for zombification (FIQHack zombification is close but not randomized, and "You get a minor zombification disease" is weird)
  • consider various proposals for different god behavior on the ascension run
  • fire/frost horns grant temporary fire/cold resistance in addition to their normal effects (original YANI called for them giving temporary 2x elemental damage bonuses but that is probably too difficult to implement)
    • a difficult part of granting temporary resistance is producing a message that doesn't imply the player got it permanently
  • work to bring monster sleep mechanics more in line with player sleep
  • option to control how weight renders: no rendering, current {N}, (N aum), (N weight), heck maybe even gnollhack (N lbs)
    • This would replace current invweight boolean option with compound invweight option
  • maybe give priests some god-related role benefits
  • buff the Master Assassin by adding an assassination attack (or just adding a variety of harder-to-defend-against attacks)
  • #633: More variety in ranged unreflectable elemental attacks, as a sort-of-nerf to reflection (all ranged elemental attacks currently in the game are reflectable). For instance, have enemies shooting fire arrows at you.
  • #746: If you have divine protection and become near death from a timed instadeath or low HP, some or all of your protection may automatically convert itself into a cure: "You suddenly feel the power of [deity] surround you! You feel limber/cured/much better/etc." This should probably work for a narrow range of symptoms (probably not HP loss, possibly any major trouble), and the help delivered should be strictly worse than a prayer if possible (because having this trigger will not affect your prayer timeout).
    • It should also probably not work in Gehennom, and a key factor is that it should not be reliable, either. Possibly, also track which gods you got it from; protection from donating to crossaligned gods (especially Moloch) will trigger less often.
    • A slightly more extreme version of this idea is to make divine protection no longer grant AC at all.
    • Proposal for making it work with ublesscnt as-is: game rolls a d10 to determine "cost" of the salvation. if your ublesscnt can "pay" that, it automatically pays it; otherwise nothing happens. However, something still needs to be done so that it's not reliable with >=10 protection.
    • this might want to wait on other religion stuff? not sure; it feels weird to have this change building around the existing system of 400xlevel donations without any alterations to it
  • #930: Throwing things against walls or dropping certain metal objects produces some noise and wakes monsters.
  • #1313: Unchanging prevents you from starting to turn to stone (it already prevents starting to turn to slime), and if you are in the process of turning to either, it halts the process but does not cure it. This should be extrinsic only; unchanging from polyinit/corruption does not stop stoning.
    • How comfortable with having effectively an amulet of stoning resistance?
  • #1487: Premonition system: under various conditions (crystal balls, clairvoyance, dreaming while you sleep, the Oracle) you can receive a premonition of something that will appear later in your game (this could be almost anything: a monster, object, dungeon feature, special room, etc) which then has a very high chance of generating subsequently.
    • Long term goal. Almost certainly a SAVEBREAK.
  • #1499: Lightning spells:
    • The most common suggestion is for a level 5 attack spell that creates a lightning bolt, implemented as a simple ray. Possibly, it causes an electrical explosion on the first target it hits if cast at Skilled and Expert.
    • Alternatively, a spell of lightning bolt could be a melee range spell that deals heavy shock damage.
    • Chain lightning is a spell that forks off and hits adjacent targets in a breadth-first search (see https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/384784727774724121/627910565020565523/unknown.png) for how it might work). Possibly, the lightning bolts can only chain off at 135 or 180 degree angles (maybe 90, too). Chain lightning can still be reflected, but becomes a straight ray.
    • Lightning storm, which causes an electrical explosion centered on every monster in your line of sight (possibly with a decreasing chance of doing so as it gets further from you). Or if this is too overpowered, just strike these monsters with an individual lightning bolt that does not cause an explosion.
  • #1518: Invoking artifacts for invisibility makes you visible again if you are already permanently invisible. Also, move the Orb of Detection's invoke invisibility ability to some lesser artifact because it's a lame power for a quest artifact.
  • #1714: The proper way to make late-game elemental damage matter is to give late-game enemies elemental attacks with large enough damage to matter, which don't care about reflection.
    • This is vague. Giants and balrogs are already slated on this list but there are probably more that could be added.
    • #1715: Fleeing monsters may randomly get a few bonus movement points each turn.
  • #1984: Shuriken may degrade in enchantment when they hit monsters, but they no longer break.
  • #2015: Artifact large box Pandora's Box: it contains a ton of good loot, but opening it (or destroying it, or tipping it) alters several overarching gameplay mechanics that all make the game tougher.
  • Since it's not as straight up beneficial of an artifact as most others, perhaps it shouldn't count as a generated artifact for gifting/wishing purposes.
    • cool but needs more details. also caveat about generated artifacts won't apply in xnh because nartifact_exist isn't a thing
  • #2101: As part of artifact weapon rebalance, there should be at least one Ranger-friendly non-bladed weapon that's available through sacrifice (and therefore available pre-Quest.) Doesn't necessarily have to be a bow.
  • #2424: Some YAFMs for pythons should be added, both Monty Python references and jokes about the Python language.
  • #2454: Add the "necrotic" damage type from D&D, so that evil monsters can deal corruptive or decaylike damage without resorting to instadeath, level drain, or disintegration. Likely foldable into withering; the question is now what non-mummy monsters should use such attacks
  • #2571: Some mechanic that allows you to capture a defeated monster as a figurine (inspired by SpliceHack's cartomancer but not tied to a specific role, and also not as easy to come by, probably requiring special magic or a special tool to perform it).
  • mystery variant has gargoyles turning to statues to regenerate
  • #2793: Make magic cancellation not work with a fixed rate versus all types of attacks it works on throughout the entire game. Instead, scale a monster's ability to penetrate your magic cancellation based on its level, base level, maximum HP, or hit dice.
    • Hit dice and base level are nice if it's desirable for all monsters of the same species to have the same MC penetration, but hit dice and maximum HP are a little weird since they aren't meant as offensive stats. Maximum HP and actual monster level are nice because they can be discovered with a stethoscope.
  • #835: The maximum difficulty a monster can be generated at is independent of player experience level. Only the level difficulty (and perhaps other player-independent stats) matter. The details of how the curve of monster difficulty compared to level difficulty should look are up to debate; NetHack4's is a piecewise function that climbs slowly until level 10 and thereafter is (level difficulty - 5).
  • Nero@#nethack-variants 2021-08-21@13:17 dnethack merging room walls
  • evilhack/spork partial resistances
    • could probably do with a proposal for how exactly most of those intrinsics work partially
  • [barbarian berserking]
    • some sort of berserk mechanic for Bar (not solely triggered by low HP, it should be something you can voluntarily enter)
    • #3707: Barbarians who go into berserk mode start attacking multiple targets in an arc as if wielding Cleaver.
    • #81: You can go berserk if you see a pet die.
    • #190: No actual "berserking" phase, but Bar gets damage bonus based on how long ago they last killed a monster.
  • #3401: A spell or other magic item or ability that can be used to apply an effect to a monster that prevents them from teleporting, levelporting, or warping.
  • increase most polyforms' carrying capacity, switching away from realism to balance
  • #3743: A silence spell for either players or monsters or both. Not specified whether it would be area-of-effect or targeted at specific creatures. The main function of silence effects would be to prevent spellcasting. Not specified whether this would also affect reading scrolls (though probably not since you can "cogitate" the formula on scrolls if polymorphed into a speechless form). However, this may require defining certain existing spells as not requiring speech, because it does not seem entirely fair to take away all of someone's escape or healing spells with fairly low level magic.
  • #3874: Conceptually separate breath weapons from rays, making them not trivially reflectable. Make it possible to suffer reduced effects from a breath weapon, with the size of a worn shield a factor in that reduction.
  • game needs more dangerous sources of acid
  • [Blocked by monster AI improvements] #2827: Remove covetous warping entirely. However, a change like this would need to take into account that it makes the vast majority of boss fights a lot easier and more boring in that they would tend to consist just of the hero and boss standing next to each other hitting each other until the boss dies, so it would need to come with some improvements to boss fights, such as more interesting tactical AI where they will disengage momentarily and multiple forms (i.e. you "kill" it and then it becomes stronger before finally being defeated).
  • #3018: Add more sources of nausea, particularly in the late game, because it's an underutilized debuff that only really is relevant early. Proposed sources:
    • Certain types of demons or the presence of certain demon lords such as Baalzebub or Juiblex.
    • When you are hit with a disease attack but for some reason don't get deathly sick, or are already deathly sick.
    • Stepping over a rotting corpse.
    • Hezrou.
    • Some smallish chance every turn you are in a cockatrice nest.
    • Most of these increased sources of nausea should be subjected to some sort of (low-chance) Constitution saving throw so that characters with better Constitution have an advantage.

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