NerfHack

Welcome, traveler, to NerfHack!

NerfHack is the followup to Hack'EM, which was a modernized SLASH'EM based on EvilHack.

NerfHack starts fresh from NetHack 3.7.0 WIP and aims to accomplish a couple concise goals:

NerfHack is intended to be a more difficult variant than Vanilla NetHack. By pulling changes from many variants and fine-tuning various exploitable aspects of the game, we have uncovered many pain-points to smooth out the difficulty curve. The general idea has been to nerf strategies commonly employed by seasoned players with the goal of making the game more interesting. It's not all nerfs either, many small buffs have been added to items, roles, and races to even the playing field.

General guidelines:

1) Introduce new threats 2) Create resource scarcity for the player 3) Nullify many tried-and-true exploits 4) Introduce quality-of-life features 5) Make it easy to variant-hop

• The player should be able to easily transition from Vanilla NetHack to NerfHack. We hope players don't have to think too much about the changes. Most of the mechanics are designed to be understood intuitively based on game feedback.
• Don't require the player to memorize or lookup large tables of information (ex: forging recipes, tinker mechanics, object materials, object properties, gem alchemy, potion fermentation, etc, etc, etc)
• Don't change anything major in the interface or functionality.
• Don't introduce any new #extended commands (other than wiz-mode tools)
• Don't change any monster letters

There are definitely some changes that the player should know about, however, we will leave it up to the individual to decide what those are. The thrill of discovery should not be spoiled.

For a complete list of changes, please visit the changelog repo: https://github.com/elunna/nerfhack-changelog