I'm just getting back into NH. I'm playing on NAO the latest version they have available.

i have a promising game. Unforuntatly twice now I have somehow accidentally said put everything in the Bag of Holding including the Wand of Cancellation.

What am I hitting to cause this and is there someway to disable that option?

Thanks in advance.

On 17.01.2024 02:18, Jist Anidiot wrote:
> I'm just getting back into NH. I'm playing on NAO the latest version
> they have available.
>
> i have a promising game. Unforuntatly twice now I have somehow
> accidentally said put everything in the Bag of Holding including the
> Wand of Cancellation.
>
> What am I hitting to cause this and is there someway to disable that
> option?

It may soothe you to hear that (after decades of playing roguelikes)
the same just happens to me in a recent Slashem game played at home.

The situation happened after I just completely killed that annoying
Guild of the Disgruntled Adventurers, with tons of items lying around.
Sadly, the last things I picked up to stash them in my bag were all
the wands. And obviously I missed that there was cancellation amongst
them.

It was even more frustrating because it had been an artifact bag of
holding with 6x carrying capacity. All collected importend things
for the late game were lost, 80% of the dungeon explored, so little
hope for sufficient ressources left to find. The most important gear
(perfect armor, amazing artifact weapons, a good amulet, two rings)
is in my inventory, so I could continue an arduous game now. But I
decided to put that game on hold. I could certainly still easily win
the game, but its just boring to Not Pass Go and restart collecting
all the necessary support items from scratch.

I don't quite understand part of your question; you are aware that a
wand of cancellation doesn't fit with bag of holdings. So in Nethack
and (most?) other variants it is at it is.

This is built-in behavior (no option), so you cannot disable it.

I usually take precaucions, giving bags of holding and those wands
well visible "names". And I'm careful when operating the dangerous
items. I put them in standard slots (the wands in 'c' then 'd', or
put them in a sack named ***cancellation*** at inventory slot 'c'.)

Once identified you cannot 'call' the wands any more in such ways;
if you could I'd more easily spotted them in that heap of hundreds
wands on the floor, which was the source mf my mishap.

Many years ago I suggested to "fix" that behavior; it would be IMO
much more sensible (to not completely frustrate players) to blow up
the (precious) bag but let their contents survive littering around.

It might be that I've seen a variant that implemented that behavior,
but don't recall for sure and certainly forgot which variant it was.
Maybe you want to look for it and switch to that Nethack variant.

Janis

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024 at 10:40:25 PM UTC-6, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 17.01.2024 02:18, Jist Anidiot wrote:
> > I'm just getting back into NH. I'm playing on NAO the latest version
> > they have available.
> >
> > i have a promising game. Unforuntatly twice now I have somehow
> > accidentally said put everything in the Bag of Holding including the
> > Wand of Cancellation.
> >
> > What am I hitting to cause this and is there someway to disable that
> > option?
> It may soothe you to hear that (after decades of playing roguelikes)
> the same just happens to me in a recent Slashem game played at home.
>
> The situation happened after I just completely killed that annoying
> Guild of the Disgruntled Adventurers, with tons of items lying around.
> Sadly, the last things I picked up to stash them in my bag were all
> the wands. And obviously I missed that there was cancellation amongst
> them.
>
> It was even more frustrating because it had been an artifact bag of
> holding with 6x carrying capacity. All collected importend things
> for the late game were lost, 80% of the dungeon explored, so little
> hope for sufficient ressources left to find. The most important gear
> (perfect armor, amazing artifact weapons, a good amulet, two rings)
> is in my inventory, so I could continue an arduous game now. But I
> decided to put that game on hold. I could certainly still easily win
> the game, but its just boring to Not Pass Go and restart collecting
> all the necessary support items from scratch.
>
> I don't quite understand part of your question; you are aware that a
> wand of cancellation doesn't fit with bag of holdings. So in Nethack
> and (most?) other variants it is at it is.
>
> This is built-in behavior (no option), so you cannot disable it.
>
> I usually take precaucions, giving bags of holding and those wands
> well visible "names". And I'm careful when operating the dangerous
> items. I put them in standard slots (the wands in 'c' then 'd', or
> put them in a sack named ***cancellation*** at inventory slot 'c'.)
>
> Once identified you cannot 'call' the wands any more in such ways;
> if you could I'd more easily spotted them in that heap of hundreds
> wands on the floor, which was the source mf my mishap.
>
> Many years ago I suggested to "fix" that behavior; it would be IMO
> much more sensible (to not completely frustrate players) to blow up
> the (precious) bag but let their contents survive littering around.
>
> It might be that I've seen a variant that implemented that behavior,
> but don't recall for sure and certainly forgot which variant it was.
> Maybe you want to look for it and switch to that Nethack variant.
>
> Janis

You are trying to rationalize exploding your bag of holding. It was last year I think that I put a bag of tricks into a bag of holding. Other than that it was the year before that I exploded any bags of holding. You have to follow a different protocol for wands than for the other things, and if you put all remember to sort out the bags of tricks. But this is preventable.

On the other hand, floating eyes menace the hallways of the Dungeons of Doom ending it for hapless barbarians who don't kill them on the first swing. Floating eyes are right behind you. If you see two floating eyes at the same time it is a sign of bad luck.

On 17.01.2024 07:01, Julian wrote:
> You are trying to rationalize exploding your bag of holding. [...]

Am I? - My intention at least was (a) to answer the question, (b) to
provide suggestions how to minimize risk, (c) to suggest alternative
implementation design, and (d) to point to (maybe) existing variants.

>
> On the other hand, floating eyes menace the hallways of the Dungeons
> of Doom ending it for hapless barbarians who don't kill them on the
> first swing. Floating eyes are right behind you. If you see two
> floating eyes at the same time it is a sign of bad luck.

IMO, a preferable design would be to adjust all effects to a sensible
degree; also (e.g.) the duration of paralyzes from floating eyes. Or
the effect of poisonous traps/arrows/etc.; it's typically still worse
enough if your HPs get reduced to 5% (or 10%); why just terminate the
game by making it by chance instant-deadly. Or the duration of the
stoning process; reducing the player's speed from turn to turn before
you turn to stone will at least make it possible to try to counter in
a sensible range of time (cf. how green slime is implemented, which is
IMO a good range) and to better notice its effect (in case where the
UI floods you with combat messages).

(This does *not* mean that zapping a wand of death at yourself should
let you survive.)

Just my 2ct.

Janis

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024 at 5:18:55 PM UTC-8, Jist Anidiot wrote:
> I'm just getting back into NH. I'm playing on NAO the latest version they have
> available.
>
> i have a promising game. Unforuntatly twice now I have somehow accidentally
> said put everything in the Bag of Holding including the Wand of Cancellation.
>
> What am I hitting to cause this and is there someway to disable that option?

At a guess, you're typing 'A' when you meant to type something
else, perhaps 'a'.

Presumably you have the menystyle option set to Full, so you first
get a menu of classes of objects to put into the container with some
filtering choices like "B - blessed" and "u - unpaid", then you get a
second menu of all the items meeting the criteria you specified in
the first one. One of the choices in the first menu is "A - autoselect
every relevant item". If you pick that all by itself, it behaves as if you
had also picked "a - every item" and then operates automatically on
all items.

3.7 (not released yet but available to play on hardfought.org) has
changed how that works. If you pick 'A' all by itself, there won't be
any relevant items for it to deal with and effectively nothing happens.
There's also a paranoid_confirmation setting for "AutoAll" that you
could set to require confirmation for menustyle:Full's 'A'.

On Wednesday, January 17, 2024 at 5:01:56 AM UTC-5, Pat Rankin wrote:
>
>
> Presumably you have the menystyle option set to Full, so you first
> get a menu of classes of objects to put into the container with some
> filtering choices like "B - blessed" and "u - unpaid", then you get a
> second menu of all the items meeting the criteria you specified in
> the first one. One of the choices in the first menu is "A - autoselect
> every relevant item". If you pick that all by itself, it behaves as if you
> had also picked "a - every item" and then operates automatically on
> all items.
>
> 3.7 (not released yet but available to play on hardfought.org) has
> changed how that works. If you pick 'A' all by itself, there won't be
> any relevant items for it to deal with and effectively nothing happens.
> There's also a paranoid_confirmation setting for "AutoAll" that you
> could set to require confirmation for menustyle:Full's 'A'.

Glad to see this behavior changing! After years of muscle memory and
doing it a specific way, it was hard to unlearn my fat fingered 'A'
keystrokes. Lost many, many bags and items due to this. It was a
curious revision. One of the major reasons I stopped playing the
new 3.6.x.

--

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

> On 17.01.2024 07:01, Julian wrote:
>> You are trying to rationalize exploding your bag of holding. [...]
>
> Am I? - My intention at least was (a) to answer the question, (b) to
> provide suggestions how to minimize risk, (c) to suggest alternative
> implementation design, and (d) to point to (maybe) existing variants.

NetHack 4 prevents you from putting a bag of holding into another bag of
holding unless they are separated by at least 2 layers of sacks. It
also makes putting in wands of cancellation and bags of tricks drain all
of the wand/bag's charges, but not destroy the bag of holding. dNetHack
and Hack'EM will not allow you to place an identified bag of holding,
bag of tricks, or wand of cancellation into an identified bag of
holding. notdNetHack completely removes bag explosion, instead simply
not allowing placing bags of holding into other containers (so you
cannot nest bags of holding). Wands of cancellation and bags of tricks
are safe to put in.

>>
>> On the other hand, floating eyes menace the hallways of the Dungeons
>> of Doom ending it for hapless barbarians who don't kill them on the
>> first swing. Floating eyes are right behind you. If you see two
>> floating eyes at the same time it is a sign of bad luck.
>
> IMO, a preferable design would be to adjust all effects to a sensible
> degree; also (e.g.) the duration of paralyzes from floating eyes.

Some variants have replaced (or at least lessened) the floating eye
passive paralysis interface screw. dNetHack (and by extension,
notdNetHack) makes paralysis from floating eyes a much more sensible
duration (2d6 turns). NetHack 4 replaces the paralysis interface screw
with simply making you unable to attack a floating eye in melee unless
you're blind (or have reflection or free action). Fourk makes attacking
a floating eye also damage you (depending on how much damage you do and
scaled by your experience level), instead of paralyzing you.

> Or the effect of poisonous traps/arrows/etc.; it's typically still
> worse enough if your HPs get reduced to 5% (or 10%); why just
> terminate the game by making it by chance instant-deadly.

NetHack 3.7 (and many variants) have removed poison instadeath, usually
replacing it with more stat drain and damage.

> Or the duration of the stoning process; reducing the player's speed
> from turn to turn before you turn to stone will at least make it
> possible to try to counter in a sensible range of time (cf. how green
> slime is implemented, which is IMO a good range) and to better notice
> its effect (in case where the UI floods you with combat messages).

Since NetHack 3.6 the Stone status has been shown in the statusline,
which makes it harder to not notice. The curses interface requires you
to use tab to scroll past the message if you trigger a msgstop, which
also helps.

>
> (This does *not* mean that zapping a wand of death at yourself should
> let you survive.)
>
> Just my 2ct.
>
> Janis