from nethack to tilde
Yesterday we had a short discussion on IRC about nethack and it’s multi-user aspect.
nethack that is the classic, expansive roguelike that derived directly from the actual game rogue, only taking a short detour over a version called hack. The ‘net’ in its name is because the sources for the game were (and are still) distributed over the net.
Now nethack does not actually have a multi-user aspect in its gameplay itself. You can’t go to the procedurally generated dungeon and find the amulet of Yendor in a group. When you enter nethack you are alone.
…well, alone besides your pet that is, because every true adventurer needs a puppy or kitten at their side…
BUT it nevertheless has some multi-player aspects. There is a score board in the game which shows the scores of the characters that died (or even survived) the dungeon.
The game has permanent death, so every player only ever has one savegame, which is dutifully erased when they die.
But it also has so called bones files. These are remnants of previous games played on the same machine. They don’t necessarily spawn even in every game, but they are a part of the game nevertheless.
When a character dies on an eligible dungeon level (above 3 and not in some specific locations) there is a chance the level is saved in a bones file. According to the wiki only one such file is stored per level, and it has a 1/3 chance of being loaded in any given game.
The level in question will contain e.g. a pile of bones with the (possibly cursed) equipment of the previous character, a ghost or otherwise appropriate named monster (characters killed by vampires raise as vampires for example), named items, or engravings made by the previous character.
So while you can’t play with other people, their traces are present in the game. Even more so if you are playing the game on a mainframe or other shared system. The more people are on the system, the more chances there are for bones to be left. Meaning you will also get more chances to see traces of other people when you play the game.
And this is intentional. The original nethack was played on shared mainframe systems. Nowadays most people who install it on their system…
On debian: apt install nethack-console
… won’t have any other users interested in it. But then… public nethack servers exist to fill exactly that gap. These often include the ability of people to look at ongoing games as well.
But even if you don’t plan to play on public servers there’s an option for you: the package hearse is available in many Linux repositories. This is a program that exchanges bones files between different machines so you have more chances of encountering them on your home installation.
Which is a long way to go to come to the point: our discussion quickly derailed into: why don’t we do tilde-like system for our little ttrpg community?
tildes are public unix systems that allow people to create an account and do stuff on there, run programs, make webpages, and communicate with email, chat, or usenet.
So that’s what we have been doing.
grenzland.club was quickly established on a spare VPS and everyone interested in the chat given access.
The tilde part of the name comes from the ~ seen in the paths of user pages on those systems, like e.g. https://grenzland.club/~kyonshi which should lead you to my page there.
And yes. nethack is installed on the system already.
01.5.26
Pihole doesn’t work after a week off
I have my pihole running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to my private network. It normally is running all the time, so my router (a rather cheap TPlink thing) is using it as it’s main DNS revolver. Now what happens when you switch off the network, the pi, and everything else when you go for a holiday? Like, say, when you went to visit your family over the Christmas break and switched the homelab off, like I did two weeks ago?
Well, turns out it might not be able to reconnect, especially not when you also use the pi as your local NTP server.
…which in hindsight was a pretty stupid setup causing a problem which I should have seen coming: the pi doesn’t have a real time clock (RTC), when you switch it off it will not be able to reset the time to the actual time, then when it tries to resolve any kind of domain name all of them will have the wrong timestamp. In effect: no DNS resolution possible. Not even to the global NTP servers to synchronize the clock.
Hmm. I guess unless I set those to the actual IP address instead of a domain name.
Anyway just set the date on your pihole to the current time manually, with something like
date -s “5 JAN 2026 21:36:00”
With that it should almost immediately start resolving DNS again and your kid can watch his youtube videos without issues. Or something.
| Posted in Games, tilde | 1 Comment »