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Welcome to the SpliceHack wiki! You can find information about SpliceHack here.

The design philosophy of SpliceHack follows the following tenets:

• Accessibility: All features and changes must be clear enough that a player from vanilla NetHack can learn to play SpliceHack without undue difficulty. A fully functioning tileset must be maintained at all times, and the game should be kept as accessible as possible.
• Variety: Any object or monster added must present a unique choice, challenge, or opportunity to the player. The game should consistently present the player with interesting choices and trade-offs in order to keep them engaged.
• Dynamic features: When possible, additions should be extensible in some way, such as monster steeds, new behaviors, or object materials, so that items and monsters added in vanilla can take advantage of them.
• Interesting endgame: The endgame must be interesting and engaging. Additions that add variety to an ascension kit are highly valued. Further, at no point should the player be so well-equipped that they can win without continuing to employ careful strategy.

Suggestions, Contributions, Bug Reports, and Patches are encouraged! Just open up an issue or submit a pull request. More information about SpliceHack can be found at the NetHack Wiki page.

Balance philosophy:

• There are multiple viable endgame builts.
• No clear "one optimal choice," such as for equipment slots.
• Balance is NOT making everything equally good (see ais's article on headroom in roguelikes).
• Players enjoy having certain options that are ahead of the power curve. Balance is keeping those options under control and managing them carefully.
• Players are forced to make meaningful decisions with lasting consequences for their game.
• The player should feel that they are getting more powerful, meaning early game foes lose relevance, but they should never be able to simply breeze through all monsters freely, as occurs in late-game NetHack.

"Kitchen sink"-ness:

• Stuff that's added should keep to relatively the same anachronistic time period as NetHack and associated variants, unless it is specifically meant to be future tech.
• All of the easter eggs.
• Enough things that even longtime players can discover new things.
• Add more early game variety.