In b-rodrigues/nethack: Data from the Video Game NetHack

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Introduction

NetHack is a game released in 1987 that is still being played and developed today. NetHack is a roguelike game, meaning that is has procedurally generated dungeons and permadeath. If you die, you have to start over, and because the dungeons are procedurally generated, this means that you cannot learn the layout of the dungeons you're exploring or know when ennemies are going to attack or even what ennemies are going to attack. Ennemies are not the only thing that you have to be careful about; you can die from a lot of different events, as you will see in this post. Objects that you find, such as a silver ring, might be helpful in a run, but be cursed in the next run.

There are public servers where you can create an account and play the game.

The dataset

This dataset is a dump of extended log files from the alt.org public server that was generously provided to me by Pasi Kallinen. It contains 6855 rows and 22 columns:

• points: The points the player achieved on that run
• deathdnum: The dungeon number the player died on:
  • 0: The Dungeons of Doom
  • 1: Gehennom
  • 2: The Gnomish Mines
  • 3: The Quest
  • 4: Sokoban
  • 5: Fort Ludios
  • 6: Vlad's Tower
  • 7: Elemental Planes
• deathlev: The dungeon level the player died on
• maxlvl: The deepest dungeon level reached
• hp: The health points the player had when the game finished
• maxhp: The maximum health points the played had when the game finished
• deaths: The number of times the player died during the game
• deathdate: The day the game ended
• birthdate: The day the game started
• role: The role of the player
• race: The race the player
• gender: The gender the player when the game ended
• align: The alignement the player when the game ended
• name: The name of the player
• death: The reason the game ended
• turns: The number of turns taken until the game ended
• realtime: The length of the game in seconds
• starttime: Unix time of the start of the game
• endtime: Unix time of the end of the game
• gender0: The starting gender of the player
• align0: The starting alignment of the player
• dumplog: The dumplog of the run. This is a list-column, where every element of this list was obtained from reading the lines of the dumplog of the game. The dumplog is a text file that records the last events of a game

It covers games played from the 28th of April 2018 to the 05th of November 2018.

The functions included

This package contains two functions:

• clean_xlog
• get_dumplog

NetHack produces extended log (xlog) files once the game is over. These files are the source of the data. You can find xlog files on public servers, for example here \url{http://archive.fo/NM96Z}, or use the ones generated from your own games. Get dumplog gets the associated dumplog file. A dumplog is a text file that is generated at the end of the game and which contains the last events that happened in the game. This is an example of dumplog \url{http://archive.is/7awsb}.

b-rodrigues/nethack documentation built on May 13, 2019, 5:21 p.m.