robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (01/15/84)
References: OK, here are three ways to cheat at rogue 3.6: (NOTE: All these bugs were fixed in rogue 5.2.) (1) If your shell is killed while you play rogue, it attempts to save the game before exiting. (There is a chance that it will die in the process, seems to vary from site to site.) If you kill your shell just after using an unknown potion or scroll, but before naming it when rogue asks you to name it, the game will be saved after the item takes effect, but it will still be in your inventory. This trick allows using a scroll of armor improvement, or weapon improvement, and several other things, over and over. Since there is a chance of losing the game, you may wish to try this only on items found near the start of the game. I find the results of this cheat very boring... (2) You can become permanently hastened if you drink two potions of haste in quick succession. This condition allows you to handle almost anything except Umber Hulks. I think of this game as almost not cheating at all, since it gives you a chance to meet the hulks on their own terms. I played a number of permanent haste games, always being careful NOT to genocide the hulks. Eventually I played a few games with permanent haste, a two-handed sword, and good armor. My best result was to make it all the way to level 86 and out without genociding hulks. This was a very exciting game. (3) You can use the arrows that come out of arrow traps as weapons. Don't throw them! Wield them and hit. Some of these arrows have incredible enchantments like 55678,55678. Some are negatively enchanted. Numbers throughout the entire range of 32 bit integers are possible. Some of these arrows will kill anything in a single blow, making life easy, and giving you a fair chance against the hulks. By carrying these arrows out, very high scores can be attained (above 1 billion). The arrow game can be played rather randomly (take some arrows out with the amulet and see what happens) or scientifically (take just the right arrows out for a good score). The scientific approach is full of skill and cleverness, but not nearly as good as rogue without cheating. Arrows with special values can only be collected from traps when your experience level is below 10. YOu have a limited number of scrolls to identify the arrows with. Consequently you want to get lots of arrows and precheck them by using them. If you set your goal at exceeding, say, a final score of 20 million by collecting good arrows, you will need a lot of samples and scrolls, and will probably go down to about level 80 to get what you need. If you instead go for a score above 1 billion, you need a few rather special arrows to get your score (remember that several negative arrows above 1 billion, added together, will yield a positive score due to overflow.) You may find it useful, in order to hold your experience level under 10 while working a trap, to keep a pet wraith. To do this you must also be permanently hastened. When you need to lower your experience level, let the wraith hit you, then run away from it when it has done its work. Be careful not to kill it by accident! Much wraithing will gradually reduce your hitpoints, requiring you to make an interesting judgment call on how few points you can risk playing with. Arrows can be screened by trying them before identifying them. The best test is to try to hit rust monsters. To make 20 million you need a pack full of arrows that kill rust monsters in a single blow and never miss; to make above 1 billion, the easiest way is to collect arrows that never hit and identify them. Everyone has his own way to work a trap. Some traps rarely yield arrows. Some yield a lot of bad arrows. The value of arrows may depend upon what is on top of the stack (garbage above the stack?), interpreted incorrectly as floating point data. I would appreciate a description of how the arrow values are actually derived. - Toby Robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or: allegra!eosp1!robison (maybe: princeton!eosp1!robison)