fi, en, (sv, ja, hu, yi) | avatar by https://twitter.com/udonkimuchikaki
Nethack is a very old fashioned video game, but it has an interesting mechanic: the real world date on your computer affects your character’s luck in the dungeon.
“How bad can it be?”, I thought about a decade ago, loading a new game on Friday the 13th.
I took a single step.
“Your kitten has been crushed by a boulder.”
the funny thing is i'm not sure that can even be a product of the luck stat. nethack is just Like This
so here's the thing. I knew even at the time that the first few floors have some manually coded softballs, so I assumed that a boulder trap on the first floor was the result of the luck modifier removing those safeguards. But.
The code very clearly says it does not place boulder traps on levels < 2 with no other complications. And the Friday the 13th handler is also extremely simple. But I very, very clearly remember my kitten dying graphically in the very first room and while I may not be 100% accurately remembering the death message as "crushed by a boulder" it was certainly very close to that, I remember being viscerally horrified. (I literally just quit the game on the spot, lol.) So what the hell happened to my cat?
This is a ridiculous theory, but: could it be that whatever joker compiled the package (it would have been debian or early ubuntu around the year 2006) intentionally made the game harder?
edit: the loyal discordians suggest it may have been a "falling rock" rather than a "boulder"
ah, falling rock seems likely — it only does a bit of damage but that's enough to kill a level 1 kitten
