Gameplay Improvements

👉 GnollHack brings extensive gameplay updates to the NetHack formula, including a new magic system, additional item slots, and balanced mechanics.

🔮 Spellcasting & Magic System

• A new spell system — Use Mix spells (X) to prepare spells, Cast spell (Z) to cast them, and View spell (Alt-z) to view their statistics and manage them. Most spells now use material components that need to be mixed in advance. Many spell components belong to a new reagents item class.
• Over 200 new spells — Cast brand new high-level spells such as Wish, Time Stop, Disintegrate, Power Word Kill, and Black Blade of Disaster. See the Spells page for a complete list.

🎒 Equipment & Items

• Improved item and artifact system — Wield the Sword of Holy Vengeance, wear an orichalcum full plate mail, shoot with a repeating crossbow, and feel the power of Yeenoghu's triple-headed flail or the Wand of Orcus. Or attempt to find the hobbit carrying the One Ring.
• Mythic items — Non-magical weapons and armor can have mythic prefixes and suffixes attached to them, such as Stygian (gives life drain to weapons and death and drain resistance to pieces of armor) or dragon slaying (triple damage to dragons, applicable only to weapons). Legendary items have both a prefix and a suffix.
• Exceptional, elite, celestial, primordial, and infernal weapons — Exceptional weapons deal double base damage, elite weapons deal triple base damage, and celestial, primordial, and infernal weapons deal quadruple base damage. For example, an exceptional two-handed sword deals 4d6 to small creatures and 6d6 to large creatures.
• Elemental enchantments — Weapons can be enchanted to be flaming, freezing, electrified, or death-magical in order to make them more powerful. The enchantment may wear out as the weapon is used in combat.
• New wearable item slots — You can now also wear a robe over your suit of armor underneath your cloak, as well as one pair of bracers and five miscellaneous magic items, but only one of each type. There are over ten different types of miscellaneous magic items, such as ioun stones that orbit around one's head and belts that feature powerful girdles that may imbue the wearer with giant strength. Minotaurs are very keen on the new nose rings!
• All item commands accessible from inventory menu — All item commands are accessible from the inventory by selecting the item. An easy way to learn new item commands, or access ones that are behind difficult or inaccessible (such as meta on some platforms) keyboard shortcuts.
• In-game item and monster information — Gain all information about items by selecting them in the inventory (or using the Examine (Alt-x) command). Inspect monster statistics using the wand of probing.

⚔️ Combat & Skills

• Improved ranged combat — Launchers, such as bows and slings, add their damage to the fired missile. Also, changing weapons with the Swap weapons (x) command does not require a turn, and you can swap a sword and a shield for a bow.
• Improved two-weapon fighting — Use a main-gauche or a spiked shield in your left hand. Or a sword with a pair of spiked silver gauntlets, striking also with your gloved left hand. You can now also dual-wield artifacts.
• Improved skill system — Consolidated some weapon skills and increased the skill cap to Grand Master for most skills. Weapon skills also increase your chance to score a critical hit (causing double damage).

👹 Monsters & Pets

• Over a hundred new monsters — Face new creatures such as the Otyugh and the Dracolich! Fight against improved enemies such as the marilith, a demoness that can now wield 6 different weapons and constrict you to death with her snake-like body.
• Encounter system — The game can generate encounters that have any mix of monsters. The difficulty of the encounter is always kept in balance!
• Balanced all monsters — No more out-of-difficulty encounters such as a group of soldier ants or a winged gargoyle!
• Improved messaging — The game reports damage caused by an attack, monster difficulty levels, item weights, the weight summary of inventory items, encumbrance levels, as well as experience gained from kills.
• Improved chat system — You can now talk to pets and monsters. For example, you can ask peaceful monsters to join your party, angered Mine Town guards to drop the charge for a fee, a priest to heal you, and a shopkeeper to identify your unknown items. Peaceful monsters are also more personal, with many of them having proper names that you can find out if you have a discussion with them.
• Pet pathing algorithm — Pets will now return to you using the in-built travel algorithm. No more stuck pets on the other side of the map.
• New status lines — Supports up to 8 status lines, of which the last 5 show pet hit points and conditions.
• New status line items — Movement speed and score (via SCORE_ON_BOTL) now show up on the status lines.

🌟 Game Modes & Progression

• 7 Difficulty levels — Ranging from Standard to Grand Master.
• Gnoll as a new race — Gnolls can smell the freshness of food items and have race-specific starting items. The more evil members of their kin worship the demon lord Yeenoghu as their patron god. Woof! (Note: Gnomes have been removed as a playable race).