Slash'EM Extended (now at v2.66)

[getter77]

File this under things none of us would've seen coming in all the best possible ways:

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Slash%27EM_Extended
http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Slash%27EM_Extended

Slash'EM Extended (which is short for Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic) is a variant of NetHack with, as its name implies, many new features. It is the spiritual successor of SLASH'EM (by Warren Cheung), based on version 0.0.7E7F2, with various additional changes since.

 Description

Slash'EM Extended can be described as SLASH'EM with some added features, such as:

    New classes
    A rearranged dungeon with a longer quest
    Many new variants of special levels (like the Sokoban levels), as well as added ones (like the Heck and Lethe levels)
    Lots of new monsters and items
    Game balance fixes to reduce tedium and farming
    Inspired by ToME, the ability to play as a lost soul by naming the player character "lostsoul" (without quotes), where the player has to escape from the Halls of "Mandos" (Medusa).

Version and platforms

Slash'EM Extended was created by Amy Bluescreenofdeath, based on SLASH'EM v0.0.7E7F2. The latest version is v50, available for Windows.

Slash'EM Extended is a variant of SLASH'EM based on SLASH'EM version 7e7f2. The object of the game is the same: to fetch the Amulet of Yendor from the bottom of the Gehennom and offer it to your god.

Compared to SLASH'EM, Slash'EM Extended contains several new roles and races for the player to choose from, several new special levels, a lot of new monsters, and other changes. The main dungeon is a bit shorter in Slash'EM Extended than in SLASH'EM but the Gehennom is longer, and the demon/devil lairs appear in a random order.

Slash'EM Extended is currently available as a Windows binary (newest version is v50 from July 14th, 2014). It can be downloaded here.

This variant is actively being developed by the one-man (actually, one-woman) dev team of User:Bluescreenofdeath.

Key features

    Applied the Jedi patch.
    Slash'EM Extended allows you to play as a Dark Jedi.
    Applied the Convict patch.

No race or alignment restrictions for the Convict in Slash'EM Extended, either.
Convicts get hungry early in the game.

    Added an all-new Warrior role, complete with gauntlet-like messages and a very hard quest.

Warrior needs food, badly!

    Added more all-new roles: Death Eater, Gangster and Pokemon.
    Added a new Alien race for player characters. This is basically "harder than hard" mode. Alien players get very little HP and mana bonuses on a level-up, start out with a big alignment and luck penalty, and a cursed lodestone in their inventory. An alien convict is practically impossible to play.
    Added more new races: Gigant, Kobolt and Ogro.
    Added the Geek role from NetHack-The Next Generation, as well as lots of items, monsters, special levels etc. from that fork.
    Added the Pirate and Noble roles from dNetHack, with some slight tweaks including a "pirate slang" bugfix by CK (thanks a lot for all the help!).
    Added even more new roles and races (version v21): added roles are Electric Mage, Transvestite, Chevalier and Courier; added races are Argonian, Gastly, Insectoid, Khajiit, Maia, Mould, Navi, Snakeman, Trollor and Ungenomold.

The Transvestite's pet in action.
A wonderfully lovely quest nemesis picking up her signature quest artifact weapon.
The same quest nemesis, not acting lovely any longer. In fact, the attack shown here can be incredibly deadly and will even get stronger the more often it hits.
A random Transvestite player monster on the Astral Plane.
A Courier player monster on the Astral Plane.
Beware of dangerous enemies hiding under items!
The Spacewars Fighter quest shows quite chaotic level design.

    Added another role and race (version v32): Zyborg role and Asgardian race are playable, and they're recommended for new players who want to get the hang of the game.
    Version v42 adds a remake of the old Elf role as a playable character class (see defunct features). They are basically a stronger version of an elven Ranger with the added benefit of also gaining the bonuses of whatever actual race they are.
    If the character's name is "lostsoul" (without the quotes), the character starts at Medusa depth instead of dungeon level 1, making the game much harder. The character starts on the upstairs, but any means of levelporting/branchporting are unusable for a lost soul. Source of this idea is ToME (Tales/Troubles of Middle Earth), a variant of Angband where the player can play as a lost soul, starting on the deepest floor of a very hard bonus dungeon.
    Player monsters are much more likely to be encountered. They're also much more dangerous, getting better equipment and more offense/defense/misc items. Other intelligent foes may also be packing more heat now.
    Looking at a monster will show its base statistics (idea from UnNetHackPlus).
    Leveling up will slightly increase the player's AC, damage output and mana regeneration rate.
    Picking up items from or dropping items on the ground no longer consumes a turn.
    Added lithivore monsters that can eat stone, glass, gems and bone. The rock mole is an example for a monster with this trait (it also keeps its metallivore trait); players may polymorph into one to eat a cursed lodestone.
    Iron balls and chains can be enchanted now, and there are stronger versions available as well but they're very rare. They all use the flail skill, and for a convict only, swinging them will train the flail skill. Rocks and gems can also be enchanted to decrease the likelihood of them disappearing when thrown; flint stones and especially loadstones will do quite some damage if fired with a sling. There is also a new wand of punishment that can have quite a lot of charges, allowing the player access to a *very* heavy iron ball indeed.
    All players start with the new appraisal technique, which will identify the positive or negative enchantment value of a wielded item. It can also be used to determine the amount of charges on a wand, magic marker or similar item.
    Applied the showborn, darkroom, showbuc and heck2 patches.
    The ghost that is created if a player leaves bones after death has been beefed up considerably. Instead of a weak ghost that only moves once per moon cycle and does a maximum of 2 points of damage, there may often be a DCSS-styled ghost instead, read: a player character monster equipped with everything the deceased player had, which is also able to use those items. Basically the ghost has powers similar to the deceased player character, so if the deceased player had a full ascension kit, the next player may have lots of trouble killing the ghost. On the other hand, if the player somehow manages to tame the ghost, they will basically have an AI-controlled player character ally that may be able to kill a lot of monsters.
    Yeenoghu is much more dangerous now; please be careful. Having magic resistance helps, and reflection might, too. All demon lords/princes and several other bosses can also randomlylevelport now, which can be especially annoying if Vlad is the one doing that. Jubilex can't be easily killed by a wand/spell of digging.
    Added a sidekick to the Sanctum High Priest of Moloch.
    The sanctum high priest's new sidekick in action.
    Monster generation will speed up after a time, similar to Sporkhack and dNetHack; the time at which spawning starts to speed up or reaches its maximum is very random, however. It's very possible for the spawn rate to start increasing at 6000 turns already, but it can also randomly take 90000 or even more; enlightenment has a small chance of telling the player when to expect an increase in monster spawns. During the ascension run, monsters always have a very high chance of spawning, and they will often spawn on the upstairs of the current level. There is also an added "group spawn" mechanic that can spawn lots of monsters of one type (e.g. lots of team ant members or lots of felines) on the current level.
    Polymorphing is a lot more fun: if the player polymorphs into a form that cannot do certain actions (opening doors, picking up items from the ground or riding a steed, for example), they can choose to try anyway, with a 33% chance of success. However, failure will result in negative effects, which may be wounded legs, paralysis, confusion, stun, blindness or hallucination. A player polymorphed into a monster will have more monster hit points if their experience level is higher, meaning a level 30 character polymorphing into a lichen won't have just a single max hit point.
    Certain spells and wands scale with the player character's level now. This applies to all forms of healing wands and spells, all forms of force bolt, and all damage-dealing ray wands (magic missile, lightning etc.). Healing potions of all kinds will also restore more hit points for a higher-level character.
    Randomly generated monsters have a 1% chance to be out of depth (example: giant mimic on dlvl2), and a 0.01% chance to be even more out of depth (example: arch-lich on dlvl2). However, very low-level monsters may still spawn even on a deep dungeon level (example: newt on Moloch's sanctum).
    Enemies with ranged weapon attacks (crossbows, shotguns etc.) have a greatly increased chance of hitting the player with their shots. Be careful.
    Doing certain bad things (shoplifting or murder, for example) will add to the player's sin counter (idea derived from dNetHack), reducing the player's max alignment. Some roles (convict for example) start with a non-zero amount of sins. It's also much harder to build up positive alignment by killing monsters.
    Changed cockatrice insta-stoning into a slow process, allowing you to use your lizard corpses. Also, eating cockatrices is possible now and may have useful results; in fact, every stoning monster has a specific effect when eaten. For example, eating the standard cockatrice can increase the player's intelligence, similar to eating a mind flayer. Some of them (like basilisks) take longer to eat than it takes for the player to turn to stone, which means eating those without stoning resistance is a bad idea.
    Added tons of new monsters, hallucinatory monster names, rumors and other types of messages.
    The master lichen is a rather dangerous monster indeed.

There are some lovely, sweet new monsters in Slash'EM Extended.

    Certain types of instakills (poison, touch of death etc.) are much more rare (but you should still try to get resistance).
    Allowed almost all types of items to be generated randomly, including bullets, dragon scale mail, athames etc. Powerful items are incredibly rare, though.
    Allowed all combinations of role/race/alignment. A lawful elven rogue is possible, you can choose to be a chaotic male orcish Valkyrie, or roll out that cookie-cutter droven Monk! Of course you can play as a lawful convict, too. :-)
    All major demons can randomly summon a demon prince (Demogorgon for example) now; the chance for non-lords/princes to summon them is very low though.
    Several new special dungeon levels including a new mall (with stronger versions of watch captains), random mazes and mines, and even a weird "plane" level with very random monster/object/terrain generation! Many existing levels also have a chance to take on a different appearance. For example, Minetown can be "Water Minetown" instead - it's exactly what it says on the tin. Hooray for flying/levitating characters.

Now all that we'd need would be some pretty, lovely water nymphs...
A weird new special level in Slash'EM Extended.
The same weird level, fully explored.
A new variant of a Gnomish Mines filler level.
There's a shopping mall in Gehennom, too!

    Lots of new special rooms can be found now. For example, a room full of umber hulks can be generated. Special rooms also have a random chance for monsters to be generated awake, and they will always start out hostile to the player.
    Standard rooms in a rooms-and-corridors level have a chance to get some more special features, e.g. trees, clouds or pools of water.
    Monsters with a kick attack can target a male player character's nuts, and monsters with a claw attack can target a female player character's breasts. This attack will deal extra damage and can give a unique death message if it kills the player. Many other types of melee attacks also have a chance of generating nasty extra effects, and there are new attack types: scratch, lash and trample, also with added extra effects. Certain quadruped monsters (elephants for example) have a trample attack now, and grown-up dragons have lash attacks.

YASD to a nurse's breast-targetting attack

    If the player character is robbed by an item-stealing monster of the other gender, they may suffer stat point loss.
    There's a random chance for most special levels to not appear in a given game. Plot-critical levels (example: the Quest) are exempt from this, but just about everything else (including minetown, sokoban's prize levels and more) has a small chance to be replaced by a standard dungeon level.
    The Quest is longer now, the upper filler level can appear more than once in a given game, and the quest portal (as well as several other branches) can be much deeper. It's entirely possible for the quest portal to be on Medusa's level or even below that.
    Gehennom filler levels can randomly be rooms-and-corridors, and yes, there can be shops on those levels, too. Finding a shop on dlvl 64 is like winning the lottery though, as it will happen extremely rarely.

It won't be this bad, but there _will_ be more dangerous sea monsters on water levels.

    The player can saddle and ride a much wider variety of creatures now (including succubi ), and it works while hallucinating, too.
    The player's knapsack can accomodate more than 52 items.
    Naming the player character "Dudley" (without quotation marks) will set the starting luck value to -13 and prevent it from changing (thanks to the Dudley's Dungeon guys for that inspiration). A player character named "Blindfox" is permanently blinded while a player character named "Hippie" is permanently hallucinating. Reading the Book of the Dead will be possible even while blind, enabling a permanently blinded character to win the game. A player character named "iwbtg" will die as soon as they take any damage, and if the character's name is "Gehenna", praying and converting altars will not work and the game will spawn dangerous monsters more often.
    Certain monsters have the new "petty" attribute, allowing them to be tamed by throwing the otherwise-useless (and hard to get) kelp fronds at them.

The Poke Ball technique "catching" a wild monster.

    Tame monsters can be left on another level for much longer without going feral, as long as they're satiated enough. There's also a higher chance for a feral pet to become peaceful rather than hostile, especially if it had a high tameness score while it was a pet.
    If the player consorts with foocubi or certain other seducing monsters, the player or monster (depending on which one is female) may become pregnant; this can generate a pet foocubus, but it may also generate a hostile one instead.
    Greatly increased carrying capacity to reduce the tedium of building stashes and inventory management. Your maximum carry capacity can exceed 1000 units, and you can raise your stats (strength, constitution etc.) beyond their normal maximum.
    Elbereth, unicorn horns and certain other "cheap" tactics are less effective. Unihorns can randomly choose to permanently not fix a lost stat point, forcing you to get it back the hard way, and they can randomly blow up and disappear when used too often. Camping on an altar and sacrificing a lot, dropping lots of items for BUC testing or doing lots of water prayers can also randomly cause the altar to disappear. Price identification of items is no longer possible. Reflection and most resistances are no longer a 100% protection to their respective attack types (but resistance still prevents instakills). Teleport/polymorph control have a 5% chance to fail. The protection racket has also been eliminated, now the player always has to donate 4001 zorkmids to a priest for protection regardless of character level. Small, whirly, amorphous or unsolid monsters may just pass through boulders, reducing the effectiveness of boulder forts. A blessed scroll of genocide only genocides monster species with a certain chance, just like it does in the Lethe patch; however, there is always at least a 10% chance of a species actually being genocided. Invoking an artifact leads to a much higher timeout. Hitting a monster with a stoning attack (e.g. throwing a cockatrice egg at it) will only stone the monster with a 25% chance. Thrown daggers, knives and spears can break, and the same is true for applied polearms. A magic cancellation of 3 only prevents attacks like drain life with a 95% chance (used to be 98%).
    Sea monsters can spawn randomly, aren't hurt by being on land, and appear much more frequently on water levels. Being drowned will also subject the player's equipment to water damage; the instadeath drowning attack has a chance to fail, but even if the player doesn't drown, being submerged by a grabbing enemy will blank, dilute and rust items. If it is lethe water, the player's items may also be disenchanted.
    Monster spawns on the Quest levels are no longer only the fixed role-specific ones; instead, there is about a 14% chance for a randomly generated monster on the Quest levels to be of the specific type. All other random spawns will just be any standard random monster.
    It's a lot harder to win at "resistance roulette" now as the chances of gaining an intrinsic have been toned down. Eating a dragon no longer guarantees that you get the intrinsic resistance associated with it.
    Enlightenment has a 10% chance to display stuff that used to be wizard mode only, e.g. the exact alignment of the player. A blessed stethoscope will always display wizard mode strings like hunger, apport or tameness of pets.
    The chance of fire/cold/rust/corrosion affecting your equipment has been toned down. You won't lose every second scroll from stepping on a fire trap once. However, fire traps can be randomly generated outside of Gehennom now, and items can actually vanish entirely if they get hit by erosion effects too often.
    Stealing from a shop is a lot more dangerous now. Instead of an army of weakling kops and maybe one or two kop sergeants, there is an actual chance to see higher-level kops including the new Kommissioner and Kchief types. The shopkeeper will also summon random Yendorian Army soldiers including a new supersoldier that can phase through walls, as well as watchmen including the new watch lieutenant who has a hallucination attack and an item-stealing attack. There's even a very low chance that shoplifting will generate a hostile arch-lich who might instakill a low-level character.

[getter77]

     

Lava and water instakills are less likely - the game will now warn you if you're about to step on lava, water or traps. That annoying interface screw where finding secret doors/passages, hitting teleport traps or getting randomly teleported by teleportitis wouldn't give any message has also been fixed. I mean, really now: who has the patience of waiting after every "s" keypress to see whether a secret door came into existence? Now the game will pause with a --More-- prompt when the search command finds something.
    The player will get a confirmation dialog when trying to step on water or lava.
    The chance of spell failure is capped at 90% now. This means that a low-level character who successfully reads a level 7 spellbook may actually be able to cast the spell, provided he has enough mana of course.
    Eating a tainted corpse may still grant the intrinsics associated with it.
    Using a tonal instrument to manipulate the drawbridge takes a turn now (bugfix), the drawbridge can randomly refuse to be closed, and any monster with a size of at least "big" will prevent the drawbridge from closing. Credits to Patric Mueller for these ideas.
    The shambling horror from Sporkhack/Unnethack is in the game now. Actually, there are four different types of horror that get randomly created attributes/attacks, and they're independent from each other, meaning they all have their own random values determined at the start of a game. Some of them will likely be complete "trainwreck" monsters, but with four of them, chances are that at least one such monster will be very dangerous. Again, credits to Patric Mueller and the Sporkhack devteam for this idea. There are also some pre-defined "trainwreck" monsters, meaning they always have the same (but nonetheless weird and possibly illogical) abilities in every game. And last but not least, monsters may have a "randomizer" attack that chooses any random attack type every time they attack; due to the possibility of them getting the touch of death or similar evil attack types, they will only appear late in the game.

Some monsters can use an embrace attack to prevent enemies from fleeing.

    Trying to walk on a square occupied by a boulder will now allow the player to choose whether they want to "squeeze" onto the square (if they were able to do so to begin with). This prevents the player from suffering nasty luck penalties on Sokoban through no fault of their own.
    If a technique is ready to be used again, the player will get a notification.
    A high charisma rating can ward off item-stealing monsters sometimes. If a nymph tries to charm a character into taking off their armor, and the player has (close to) 25 charisma, there's a good chance for the nymph to fail stealing anything.

New warrior role highlights:

    He's a fighter class with very weak spellcasting abilities. Starts out with a mace and a crossbow as well as a randomly generated armor. The armor can be anything from the lowly ring mail up to a random set of dragon scales. Choose for yourself whether you want to start-scum for a set of silver/gray dragon scales.
    Lots of hit points but little mana.
    Starts with a pony and riding skill, as well as lots of apples/carrots.
    Gets gauntlet-like messages when low on food or health.
    The warrior quest basically has you fighting Master Kaen on steroids. That new quest nemesis is aptly named "Archnemesis" and will TOTALLY annihilate an unprepared character. There are also a lot of random 'a' and 'n' on the warrior quest.

[getter77]

v70

Ah, at least this much apparently:

allowing certain weapons to be applied at iron bars to smash them, improving quest dialogue, fixing some of the Jedi techniques, and adding undead player monsters that may be encountered on bones levels and graveyards

.

Unsure if there was anything in the interim between v50 and v70 though

[Zireael]

One-woman team? Glad to see a fellow roguelike nerd creator!

[getter77]

Yep, the more different folk hard at it so much the better---I hope the entire lot of you eventually show up on Roguelike Radio.   

[Samildanach]

Yep, the more different folk hard at it so much the better---I hope the entire lot of you eventually show up on Roguelike Radio.   

Yes, the more the better. I think it'd be interesting to hear about the experience of working on a variant of a game as complex and respected as Nethack solo, and also how it differs to be working on a variant of a variant.

[getter77]

v86

Changelog presumably out there somewhere obvious that I'm missing, but still and in the interim at least these things:

-Added the Binder role by User:Chris.
-Version v82 adds a playable Haxor race which experiences a warped game with higher monster spawn frequency, more traps and items being generated, faster HP/Pw regeneration for both players and monsters, and much more. Basically, it's like an intensified version of the game itself.
-Version v83 adds a playable Mummy race that can chat to undead monsters for a chance to tame them. Doing so costs 500 points of nutrition and can fail based on the player's and monster's level as well as the monster's magic resistance. Mummy characters can also raise zombies and have improved results from casting summon/create undead, similar to the necromancer.
-Version v85 adds 27 new playable roles and also a playable Spirit race that can phase through walls.
-Version v86 introduces flying fish, which always try to float over water or lava and can use drowning attacks. Being drowned in lava is an instadeath unless the player is fire resistant.

[getter77]

v151   Still a mystery, but some small portion of things:

Version v108 allows players to play hybrid races, combining the effects of several playable races in one character.
Version v115 has "treasure trove" monsters, which are immobile and have no attacks; they're meant to be killed by the player for benefits. Some of them will yield corpses that can be eaten for some positive effect like obtaining an elemental resistance, others will drop a bunch of possibly useful items.

[Avagart]

What's about binaries? Only what I found is link on nethackwiki. Unfortunately version of this release isn't specified. Not ingame, not in readme, not in archive name.

In 'releases' on github only source code is available.

edit: Ouh, ok. Mentioned binary is the correct one. This is one, still the same link, and game archive is overwritten.

[getter77]

Yeah, I'm not sure why they don't just have a general, quick glance changelog page, even if just for new features in lieu of bugfixes, considering the insane amount of work already put into this in terms of descriptions outright and differing points from vanilla Nethack.

[Avagart]

Do you know if I have to report bugs on github? even if I'm not sure if it's bug? Or it's another way to contact with developer?

I encountered this and I don't know if it's intended. This room was described as 'weird room' so maybe it is as it should be, but... But what's about corridors entrances?

[getter77]

I'd guess this page is the best venue, though it would seem you've already found it in the interim.

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Bluescreenofdeath

[Avagart]

Yup. Anyway, thanks

[Ancient]

As far as I know the weird rooms with lots of lava, water, sinks, toilets, iron bars are a feature. A quite nice one. What I see on the screenshot is map-refresh disable activated - a negative effect (usually timed).

SLASH'EM Extended uses trap effects to damage user interface, as if NetHack's interface was not tricky enough to master. In my opinion this adds a little difficulty while taking away a lot of fun.

[Avagart]

You are right. But... Lack of good documentation causes lots of "it's bug or feature" wonders.