My character is currently at XL17 (max so far), and I'm letting a wraith drain me prior to buying protection. I've completed my Quest, so no longer need to be at any particular level. Knowing that XL affects ML, I'm wondering if there's any benefit from lowering my level permanently, or if the previously achieved level dictates? Also, will DL eventually over-rule all of this? I'm wondering this because I haven't foud a genocide scroll and have terrible luck with the nasties.
When monsters are generated, is Monster Level affected by current XL or max XL acheived
nethack
Related Solutions
Nethack has secret passages (blocking corridors) and secret doors (embedded in room walls). You must find them before you can pass through them. The canonical way of discovery is searching, but it's not the only one. For example, if you're sure there's an hidden door in a certain square, you can try kicking it. If you're lucky you'll find the door, break it and gain some bonus experience points -- IIRC.
That's all good and fun, but where should you search?
Stairs always happen in rooms. Thus, you should look for "holes" in the map where a room could fit. If there are dead end corridors in that general direction you might be on the right path!
Here's a real life scenario. I marked some educated guesses with question marks to illustrate my point.
----- ------- ???????
|...| |.....| ? ?
|....###### |......# ? 3 ?
|{..| #......|# ? ?
----------- |...-#######-------# ???????
|..........#####|...| # ?
|.........| #-...| # ?
|`......<.-#####----- # ?
----------- ############## # ?
? ? #### ?
????????? ??????? #--|---?
? ? ? ? @|....|?
? 2 ? ? 1 ? #|....|?
? ? ? ? #.....|
????????? ??????? |....|
------
1 looks the most likely: a continuation of a dead end corridor. 2 is also plausible, that large area down there is so likely to have at least two rooms. 3 looks more far fetched, but it's exactly where the hidden door was.
I hope this still gives you an idea of how to make reasonable guesses when looking for secret passages.
Oh, and remember to never ever hold a key when playing Nethack. One search is hardly going to be enough, so run the search command multiple times the right, safe way: 20s (020s if you have numpad on) will search the current position for 20 times only if it is safe enough to do so. Hunger, approaching monsters and the like will abort your search, unlike holding a key does.
I have done far more experimenting with Wizard mode and save-scumming than I really ought to have.
I can say with reasonable certainty that the Dungeon branches, are determined at game start, because the CTRL-O command(in wizard mode) tells you where they are.
Level maps themselves are different if you first enter them after loading a copied save than the first time you entered them, so I believe that they are generated on first visit.
Best Answer
From the source code (makemon.c):
In plain English, monsters are generated with a difficulty between one-sixth the "zlevel", and the average of the "zlevel" and your current experience level.
"Zlevel" is a bit difficult to define. It's essentially:
Yes, reducing your experience level will make the monsters easier. However, it doesn't make them much easier: the minimum monster difficulty is unaffected, and past dungeon level 30 (the shallow part of Gehennom), depth is the dominant factor even for someone who's been power-leveling.
In the endgame, it would seem like keeping your experience level low would be a good idea: since your experience is factored in twice, the formulas give a difficulty range of 11 to 49 for a level 30 player, versus 8 to 26 for a level 1 player. However, apart from arch-liches (29) and archons (26), the most difficult randomly-generated monsters in the game are level 22.