The November Nethack Tournament

2024 ARCHIVE

Tournament FAQ

What are the basic rules of the tournament?

Use your common sense: don't hack into the game servers, don't deliberately corrupt or leak memory or otherwise try to crash or hang up the game, don't abuse the RNG, and don't be a jerk.

Anything within the normal execution of NetHack is fair game. This includes farming, scumming, abusing program bugs, reading other characters' dumplogs, viewing ttyrecs of your own or others' games, using interface enhancers like InterHack, and hanging out on IRC to see if the gray stone you picked up in Mines' End gets livelogged as the luckstone.

If you're pursuing a strategy that could result in you dying a lot of times on bones-eligible levels, such as digging for victory or fountain scumming, please make sure to set !bones in your rc file as a courtesy to other players so that you don't leave useless bones and throw away other players' interesting bones on your way down.

Can I run a bot?

Bots are prohibited. TNNT is a tournament for human players, not a competition for the best or luckiest bot. Players found to be running a bot may be summarily banned from the tournament.

Our working definition of a bot is any system that automatically evaluates game state and makes gameplay decisions. Thus, pasting macros is fine, but running a startscum script that quits the game if your inventory, stats, or surroundings do not meet certain criteria is not.

Why isn't TNNT based on NetHack 3.7 yet?

TNNT is still based on NetHack 3.6.7 because it's the current stable release of NetHack. While we would love to base it on 3.7, we are waiting for it to be officially released. Basing it on the development version would mean picking a random cut-off point in development that might have major bugs or game balance issues, and we want to minimize the risk of something like that being discovered during TNNT and having to make a choice whether to patch it or not.

Also, porting it to recent 3.7-dev would mean that a second porting effort would have to be done in the future when 3.7 does actually get released, or even every year if we end up creating the expectation that new features from the development version will be available in TNNT. It's not something we want to commit to.

What's this message/level/object I never encountered before?

TNNT contains a couple additional challenges which add a few new things to the game, so if you encounter something unfamiliar, it's probably one of those. Interacting with them is not required to win the game. However, there are a few achievements for completing these challenges.

To avoid spoiling players that are new to TNNT, the things we added to the game have been purposely omitted from this site. For those who wish to spoil themselves about all of the new game content in TNNT, please visit the TNNT entry on the NetHack Wiki .

What's a clan? How does it work?

A clan is a group of players working together to achieve goals that could be difficult for a lone player to achieve by themselves, such as multi-ascension trophies. Most statistics tracked for players are also pooled together and tracked for clans, allowing clans to compete directly against each other (but not against players). You don't have to join a clan, but it's often fun to be in one!

To create clans, invite players to your clan, and accept invitations to others' clans, please log in.

Clan size is capped at 12, and a clan is not allowed to have more than 12 pending invitations. The tournament is designed so that adding new clan members, however inexperienced, cannot hurt the clan overall (this is why we don't track a clan's overall ascension ratio, for instance).

On November 10th at 00:00 UTC, clan membership will become frozen; people can still leave or be kicked out of clans, but cannot create new clans or join new clans.

What are these "achievement" things?

Achievements are small in-game accomplishments you can collect for yourself and your clan, which vary in difficulty from pretty easy to very challenging. You can use the #achievements command during a game to view which ones are and aren't completed. The #tnntstats command is also useful for viewing progress towards certain achievements.

To see a list of all achievements and what is required to earn them, navigate to your player or clan page, or view all achievements by the number of people who achieved them.

Do I need to manually keep track of my progress towards achievements?

Nope. Several in-game extended commands are provided to let you view your progress on such things. These commands are:

What are trophies?

Various accomplishments across one or multiple games earn you trophies. To see how to earn these, go to the Trophies page.

All the trophies can also be earned collectively by a clan. If an individual earns one of these trophies on their own, their clan will also get the trophy.

What does it mean for trophies if I change gender or alignment?

For trophy purposes, the gender or alignment you ended the game with doesn't matter, only the starting one. Consequently, you can't deliberately change your alignment on a race/role/alignment combo you already played to get the game to count as a different one.

Why aren't there role trophies for Knight, Samurai, or Tourist?

There's no such thing as the Great (or Lesser) Knight, Samurai, or Tourist because only a single race and alignment combination can be played with these roles, so you would only need a single game to accomplish them. They do count towards the Great and Lesser Human trophies.

What does "Complete Mines and Soko" mean for the Lesser trophies?

For the Lesser Race/Role trophies, you must complete a game with each required character combination where you successfully pick up the luckstone from the bottom of the Mines AND pick up the prize from the end of Sokoban. That's all the game needs to qualify — it doesn't matter if the game ends in death afterwards, and you don't need to escape the dungeon with those prizes.

Why didn't I get the Lesser trophy when I got the Greater one?

Achieving a Great Race or Role does not necessarily imply that you also deserve the same Lesser Race or Role, since it is possible to ascend without completing Sokoban and/or retrieving the Mines' End luckstone. If you got the Greater without the Lesser, one of your qualifying games must not have obtained both prizes. Since both prizes are tracked as achievements, you can check in-game whether you've earned them by using #achievements. If the game is over, you can also check the summary of achievements in its dumplog.

How do streaks work?

A streak is a series of consecutive winning games by the same player. Because you can have multiple in-progress games on multiple servers, the rule is that the first game started after a win is the candidate for continuing a streak. Winning or losing non-candidate games will not affect the streak whatsoever. If you start a new game that is eligible to continue two or more streaks, it will continue the streak with the earliest overall start time.

For those familiar with DCSS tournaments, these rules are the same as theirs (except that you can play the same race/role as much as you like and it will still count towards the streak).

What's a "post-Amulet splat"?

A "post-Amulet splat" is defined as any game in which the hero possessed the Amulet of Yendor, but which did not end in an ascension. Thus, dying is not necessary for it to count as a splat.

What's a "successful swap chest donation"?

A "successful swap chest donation" is an instance of some other player removing an item you put into the swap chest. This gets credited on the scoreboard shortly after they remove the item; their game does not need to end in order for you to be credited.

What's a "Z-score"?

A Z-score is a method of ranking a player with multiple ascensions based on the diversity of the roles they play. The formula is simple: each ascension in a new role is worth 1 point, and repeated ascensions with that same role are worth progressively less points: 1/2 for the second, 1/3 for the third, and so on.

Compare two players who each ascend 13 games: the first one ascends each role once, and so gets a Z-score of 13.00. The second player, however, ascends 13 valkyries, and the diminishing returns mean they only get a Z-score of 3.18.

Why does TNNT exist? What happened to /dev/null?

The long-running /dev/null/nethack tournament was unexpectedly shut down in September 2017. When this was announced, some players from TeamSplat banded together quickly with the help of the hardfought.org server to put together a tribute tournament, which was intended to be the same as devnull but updated to 3.6.0.

The tribute tournament was never planned to run for a second year, in order to respect the wishes of the devnull organizer, krystal, to have it shut down completely and retire its name. Instead, the 2018-era TNNT organizers laid plans for a new tournament. Like the tribute, it would be based off NetHack 3.6, and would remain a primarily vanilla-like tournament, unlike other tournaments like Junethack which focus on variant play. They also decided to keep the tradition of running the tournament for the month of November, when a lot of veteran players come out of the woodwork checking to see if there's a tournament.

So is TNNT the replacement for /dev/null?

TNNT is not trying to be a replacement for devnull. Per krystal's wishes, the devnull name, tournament structure, and game changes have been retired. TNNT is a fresh start — any game changes are based on a clean vanilla nethack codebase, and the various components of the tournament were designed from scratch. It's a vanilla-adjacent NetHack tournament in November, but that's where the similarities end.

What about the devnull challenges?

As with the rest of devnull, the challenges have been permanently retired and are not implemented in TNNT. But TNNT does add some of its own challenges, including features that don't exist in any variants. It's a bit of a work in progress. We might continue to add new challenges in the future.

If you are looking for the code powering the devnull tribute challenges, to use as a patch for your own purposes, you can find the devnull tribute scoreboard repo here, and the devnull tribute game code here.

Why have multiple leaderboards instead of a unified overall score?

The first three years of TNNT did use a unified score and a single leaderboard tracking that score. It started to draw dissatisfaction, though, largely because of a number of biases in the scoring algorithm. These biases didn't have an obvious solution, because there was simply no way to put an objective score on what was ultimately a subjective measure — how impressive a player's games were.

In 2021, the TNNT website was reimplemented from the ground up, primarily to get it written in Python instead of Perl for maintainability reasons. During that rewrite, we took the opportunity to implement the multiple-leaderboard system, where one's place on each leaderboard is determined by game statistics and not a scoring algorithm (and we can show more than just the top player in each category). The response has been generally positive, with players and clans able to compete in categories they like rather than feeling like they need to choose between fun gameplay and doing what would earn them the most points.

Who are you people anyway?

The contributors to TNNT are: