I like to do a project every fall. This year, I tied together a lot of threads I had been thinking about, and with help from Paul and Will, launched the Nethack-a-Day site.

The idea was to take one action or turn a day, and see how things played out. To keep things interesting, Paul signed up to write some creative 'flavor' text along with the game turns.

Now, exactly six months later, we've reached 200 game turns. Progress has been even slower than I imagined. Cody, our hero, has only explored five rooms, and is still on the first floor of the dungeon.

Cody's Movement Direction for the first 200 Turns

We don't have a huge following, but that's really not the point, and those who have taken an interest seem to enjoy what we're doing.

Keith Crescenzi joked that it would take a long time to finish a game. I ran the numbers. NetHackWiki calls an ascension that takes less than 20k turns a 'speed ascension', and I'd consider a typical run to fall in the 60k turns range. While I expect that over time, the turn-to-day ratio will get higher, the numbers are daunting:

Time-to-Ascend based on info from NetHackWiki (and current turn per day ratio)

This has gotten me thinking a lot more about the hardware I'm using to run the NetHack games.

I did not set the game up initially on a VM or take other steps to make it easier to continue this work for 50 years or more. It seems like NetHack savegames are not directly portable between machines; I'm going to have to do some more research into this to see what is possible.

Through these 200 turns, I've written around 4,000 words in service of the tip files, and Paul has written roughly 8,000 words of story.

So far, so good.