Rules

Rules

One cog, alone, at the top of a dungeon it has never seen. It has a dagger, a food ration, a suit of leather armour and sixteen hit points. Rats, jackals, kobolds, gnomes and worse are down there; so is gold, so is food, so is the Oracle, and so — on every level — is a staircase down. It gets hungrier every turn. It has one life: nothing in this game restores, resurrects or reloads.

The board

Every level is 48 columns x 18 rows. (0, 0) is the north-west corner and the whole border ring is solid rock.

Items: $ gold, % food, ! potion, ) weapon, [ armour. The cog is @. Monsters are letters.

The cog

hp / maxHp (start 16 / 16), ac (lower is better, ac = 9 - armourBonus, so 7 in the starting leather), xlevel (start 1), xpPoints, gold, nutrition (start 900), a position, a depth, an inventory of at most 26 stacks lettered a … z, and a status set drawn from {confused, paralysed, stuck, trapped}.

Starting inventory, identical every episode: a a dagger (wielded, damage die 4, hit bonus +1); b a food ration (800 nutrition); c leather armour (worn, bonus 2).

Hunger. nutrition falls by 1 every tick. Satiated > 1000; Not Hungry 150 … 1000; Hungry 50 … 149; Weak 1 … 49; Fainting <= 0. While Weak or Fainting the cog does not regenerate, takes -2 to hit and cannot kick. At nutrition <= -200 it dies of starvation. 900 nutrition plus the starting ration covers 1 700 of the episode's 2 200 ticks, so a cog that wants its whole clock must find and eat food at least once more.

Regeneration. hp += 1 every twelve ticks, while hp < maxHp and hunger is better than Weak.

Experience. A kill awards the species' xp value. xlevel is 1 + the number of thresholds passed in [20, 40, 80, 160, 320, 640, 1280]. On each level-up, maxHp and hp both gain 1 + rnd(8).

Combat

1. To hit. The attacker hits iff d20 + attackBonus + defenderAc >= 15. The cog's attackBonus is xlevel + weaponHitBonus - (2 if Weak or worse); a monster's is its species level; defenderAc is the defender's armour class (lower is better; unarmoured 9, plate 3).
2. Damage. 1 + rnd(die). The cog's die is its wielded weapon's (unarmed 2); a monster's is its species die.
3. Death. hp <= 0 ends the run immediately.
4. The floating eye. A melee attack on e — hit or miss — paralyses the cog for 12 ticks. Walk around it. It never moves.
5. The lichen. An F that hits sets stuck for 3 ticks: the cog may attack and act, but a move away from it fails.
6. The cog attacks by moving into a monster. There are no ranged attacks, no spells and no wands.

The monsters

Speed is movement points per 12 ticks: a monster acts on tick t exactly (t * speed) div 12 - ((t - 1) * speed) div 12 times.

Monster AI, first matching rule: attack the cog if 8-adjacent; else, if the cog is within 10 cells and on the same room-or-corridor component, step to the 8-neighbour that minimises Chebyshev distance (ties in the fixed order e, se, s, sw, w, nw, n, ne; a grid bug is restricted to e, s, w, n); else wander. A monster never enters lava, never opens a door and never steps onto the cog.

Items

• Gold $ — pickup adds it to gold.
• Food % — food ration (800), tripe ration (200), apple (50).
• Potions ! — healing (hp += 1 + rnd(8)), extra healing (hp += 2 + rnd(8), maxHp += 1), confusion (10 ticks: every move goes in a random direction), sleeping (paralysed 10 ticks). Appearances are a seeded permutation of pink, ruby, milky, smoky, cloudy, dark: a potion reads "a smoky potion" until one of that appearance has been quaffed.
• Weapons ) — dagger (die 4, +1), short sword (6, 0), mace (6, +1), long sword (8, 0).
• Armour [ — leather (2), ring mail (3), plate mail (6).

Traps

(depth + 1) div 2 per level, hidden until triggered or found: arrow trap (1 + rnd(6) damage), dart trap (1 + rnd(3)), pit (1 + rnd(3) and trapped for 3 ticks), teleport trap. A triggered trap is discovered forever, renders ^ and never fires again. search reveals every undiscovered trap and secret door 8-adjacent to the cog on the third search executed next to it — deterministic, so a level can never be permanently unsolvable.

Visibility

if the cog stands on a floor cell belonging to a LIT room:
    visible = every floor cell of that room, plus its wall ring and its doors
else:
    visible = the cog's own cell and its 8 neighbours

Terrain is remembered forever. Items are remembered where they were last seen and cleared when the cell is visible and the item is gone. Monsters are never remembered. A cell never seen renders as a space and is indistinguishable from solid rock.

Turns, ticks and the clock

• Tick = one dungeon turn = one primitive by the cog, then the monsters.
• turnTicks = 40: one command turn executes at most forty primitives.
• maxTurns = 55, so maxTicks = 2200.
• A command turn ends when its queue empties, when the cog changes level, when the run ends, or at forty ticks — whichever is first. A reply with no usable actions spends the whole forty ticks waiting, so an unusable reply always costs the clock.

Ending

A death is a healthy, complete episode. The score is the run the cog had.

The Oracle

chat with dir pointing at an 8-adjacent O. With 50 gold or more the cost is deducted, the oracle deed is earned, and the message line gives the true compass octant from the cog to > on this level. Below 50 gold: "The Oracle scowls at your empty purse." The Oracle never moves, never attacks and cannot be attacked.

The deeds

The terminal panel

The replay viewer's bottom-left panel renders exactly the text the cog receives: the 48 x 18 glyph map, the last message line and the status line. It is not a NetHack ttyrec — there is no NetHack process to record — it is this sim's own observation, drawn honestly.