Slash'EM Extended (also known as "Sadistic Levels of Endless X-Citement", or SLEX for short) is a variant of SLASH'EM based on SLASH'EM version 0.0.7E7F2. The object of the game is the same: to fetch the Amulet of Yendor from the bottom of the Gehennom and offer it to your god.

Compared to SLASH'EM, Slash'EM Extended contains several new roles and races for the player to choose from, several new special levels, a lot of new monsters, and other changes. The main dungeon is longer in Slash'EM Extended than in SLASH'EM, with the upper Dungeons of Doom being 50 levels in length followed by 50 levels of Gehennom, meaning that Moloch's Sanctum is on dungeon level 100. After claiming the Amulet of Yendor, the player also needs to complete a 100-level bonus dungeon before the actual ascension run begins, greatly increasing the length of the game. And most importantly, Slash'EM Extended is hard as hell!!!

This variant is actively being developed by the one-woman dev team of User:Bluescreenofdeath (a.k.a. Amy). (and more recently User:Elronnd, so a 2 person dev-team now) The GitHub repository shows all the individual changes applied since version v97.

It can be played online by using ssh to connect to the em.slashem.me server (homepage em.slashem.me). As of August 2017, Slash'EM Extended can also be played online at hardfought.org (USA). The IRC channel #em.slashem.me on Freenode can be used for game discussion, bug reports etc. In addition, the em.slashem.me server also offers BIGslex, which is basically the same game as regular SLEX but with huge dungeon levels. The download link for Windows is here.

The subreddit can also be used for discussion about the game.

Getting started

This section is a must read for new players. It tries to give advice on a number of topics. If you never played a NetHack variant before, especially check out the bolded parts.

Shift-O opens the options menu. The option to switch the movement keys between vi-like keys (hjkl) and the number pad is the number_pad option. Be sure to set it so that you can move around the dungeon comfortably!

The options file is called defaults.nh on Windows and ~/.slashemextendedrc on Unix; it does not necessarily exist on a fresh install

A list of hints (recommended reading for new players) that will hopefully enable new players to learn how to play without dying constantly.

FAQ (recommended reading for new players) answers some of the most common questions that players may have.

A list of Slash'EM Extended's new roles, including their key features and average difficulty rating. The Zyborg, Chevalier and Electric Mage roles are suitable for beginners, while the Convict, Bleeder and Courier are harder-than-hard roles that should be picked by experienced players only. The role selection menu does not work with the curses interface at the moment. A workaround is to start the game in tty mode, select a character, save and then change the configuration file to curses.

A list of Slash'EM Extended's new races, including their key features and average difficulty rating. The Trollor and Asgardian races are suitable for beginners, while the Ungenomold and Alien races should be picked by advanced players only.

Options, hotkeys and commands (recommended reading) shows the various new options and commands that aren't present in other variants. It is highly advised to familiarize oneself with them, since some parts of the game expect the player to use certain new commands (comparable to vanilla's #wipe command, which isn't used often but comes in handy in certain situations).

A rudimentary version history, which is incomplete but tries to give a chronological overview of the variant's features.

A list of Slash'EM Extended's new items, including information about what they do. Slash'EM Extended also has lots of new randomized appearances for scrolls, potions and other items.

A list of Slash'EM Extended's new monsters, including information about their levels, attacks and special abilities.

A list of Slash'EM Extended's new traps, including information about their effects. Some traps are classified as "nasty"; they're very dangerous, and very hard to figure out without spoilers.

Skills in Slash'EM Extended explains what the new skills do (recommended reading for players unfamiliar with the skills). There are a whole lot of new combat skills, some of which may be rather obscure to figure out without spoilers.

Techniques in Slash'EM Extended lists the various techniques available in the game.

Dungeon option templates for those who want to change the glyphs used to represent various dungeon features. Especially important if, for some reason, you don't want solid rock to be displayed as # and would rather have it be invisible like in vanilla NetHack.

Appearance aptnesses are special effects of armor-class items that depend on their randomized appearance. These are also documented in the game.

Item materials details the effects of the various item materials present in the game, including showing which erosion effects can affect them.

Monster and item egotypes shows what the different egotypes in the game mean. Egotype monsters are highlighted yellow, egotype items show as "an enchanted foo" to hint at the presence of a special property.

A list of known bugs that should be removed in future versions. Players with coding knowledge are always welcome to help fixing them to make Slash'EM Extended even more enjoyable.

Identifying rings and amulets shows the messages given when dropping rings down sinks, or dropping amulets down toilets. This can be used to identify jewelry.

A screenshot Let's Play by the creator herself, showing off a lot of this variant's features. Audience participation is encouraged by e.g. suggesting role/race combinations for Amy to play.

SlashTHEM Extended, the variant inside a variant! This explains how to activate the special playing mode, as well as detailing the differences in gameplay it entails.

The Evil Variant, a special playing mode that makes SLASH'EM Extended much harder in very unfair ways!

Friday the 13th, playing on the unlucky day also makes SLASH'EM Extended much harder, and for those who don't want to wait for that date, there's another special playing mode that also enables these difficulty elements!

Statistics

A user has suggested improving this page or section as follows: "update these stats!"

Numbers for the stat lovers: The current version of Slash'EM Extended has 26319 monster species, 5394 objects and object appearances, 1696 artifacts and 512 trap types. There is a total of 146 playable roles and 200 playable races.

Roles and Races

Allowed all combinations of role/race/alignment. A lawful elven rogue is possible, you can choose to be a chaotic male orcish Valkyrie, or roll out that cookie-cutter droven Monk! Of course you can play as a lawful convict, too. :-)

Applied the Convict patch.

No race or alignment restrictions for the Convict in Slash'EM Extended, either.

Convicts get hungry early in the game.

Applied the Jedi patch. Slash'EM Extended allows you to play as a Dark Jedi.

Added an all-new Warrior role, complete with gauntlet-like messages and a very hard quest.

Warrior needs food, badly!

The Transvestite's pet in action.

A wonderfully lovely quest nemesis picking up her signature quest artifact weapon.

The same quest nemesis, not acting lovely any longer. In fact, the attack shown here can be incredibly deadly and will even get stronger the more often it hits.

A random Transvestite player monster on the Astral Plane.

A Courier player monster on the Astral Plane.

Beware of dangerous enemies hiding under items!

Kops can hide too.

The Spacewars Fighter quest shows quite chaotic level design.

Spacewars Fighters and Haxors attacking monsters in melee will see much more varied combat messages.

Amazons get a quest with lots of trees, and a well-known heroine to join them in their fight against the nemesis.

Added another role and race (version v32): Zyborg role and Asgardian race are playable, and they're recommended for new players who want to get the hang of the game.

Version v42 adds a remake of the old Elf role as a playable character class (see defunct features). They are basically a stronger version of an elven Ranger with the added benefit of also gaining the bonuses of whatever actual race they are.

Version v54 adds playable Breton, Redguard, Imperial and Nymph races (Nymph was a suggestion by User:BellisColdwine) as well as the Bleeder, Diver, Korsair and Gladiator roles (the last three of which have been conceived by User:Fyr).

Added the Binder role by User:Chris.

Version v82 adds a playable Haxor race which experiences a warped game with higher monster spawn frequency, more traps and items being generated, faster HP/Pw regeneration for both players and monsters, and much more. Basically, it's like an intensified version of the game itself.

Version v83 adds a playable Mummy race that can chat to undead monsters for a chance of taming them. Doing so costs 500 points of nutrition and can fail based on the player's and monster's level as well as the monster's magic resistance. Mummy characters can also raise zombies and have improved results from casting summon/create undead, similar to the necromancer.

Version v85 adds 27 new playable roles and also a playable Spirit race that can phase through walls.

Version v108 allows players to play hybrid races, combining the effects of several playable races in one character.





Game Mechanics

Core Gameplay

In order to win, the player must descend down to dungeon level 100 where the Amulet of Yendor can be found, take it through the Yendorian Tower and visit three side branches, then return to Moloch's Sanctum and take the Amulet all the way from there to the Astral Plane.

Greatly increased carrying capacity to reduce the tedium of building stashes and inventory management. Your maximum carry capacity can exceed 1000 units, and you can raise your stats (strength, constitution etc.) beyond their normal maximum.

All characters start out with several new scrolls. Scrolls of healing, standard id, phase door, mana and cure will be in the starting inventory, and cannot be polymorphed, blanked or changed in any other way.

All characters start with these Techniques: Appraisal identifies the positive or negative enchantment value of a wielded item. It can also be used to determine the amount of charges on a wand, magic marker or similar item. Invoke Deity heals some hit points, as long as your alignment record is positive (don't use it with negative alignment, though). Phase Door moves you to a random nearby square (doesn't work on no-teleport levels). Panic Digging tries to dig out the eight surrounding wall tiles, but also paralyzes you for a few turns. Using it while there are hostile monsters around is not recommended; at the very least, the player should engrave a few Elbereths in advance.

The player's knapsack can accommodate more than 52 items.

Magic cancellation chance of preventing negative effects follows a different formula, and also has a skill (spirituality) to go with it.

All characters get a significant boost in the number of skill slots they have.

All skills that aren't restricted to a role can be improved to at least Expert level. Version v82 allows some skills to be taken to Master/Legendary/Wizard/Grand Master levels and makes sure those higher skill levels actually grant bonuses. More detail on skills can be found here.

Having a property both intrinsically and extrinsically works better than having only one of the two. For resistances, this generally means single resistance gives 75% chance of avoiding damage from that element and double resistance gives 95% safety. This effect also applies to detrimental properties like hunger, polymorphitis or map amnesia, meaning that having both the in- and extrinsic version of such a property makes the negative effects even worse.

Balance Changes

Elbereth, unicorn horns and certain other "cheap" tactics are less effective. Unihorns can randomly choose to permanently not fix a lost stat point, forcing you to get it back the hard way, and they can randomly blow up and disappear when used too often. Camping on an altar and sacrificing a lot, dropping lots of items for BUC testing or doing lots of water prayers can also randomly cause the altar to disappear. Price identification of items is no longer possible. Reflection and most resistances are no longer a 100% protection to their respective attack types (but resistance still prevents instakills). Teleport/polymorph control have a 5% chance of failure. The protection racket has also been eliminated, now the player always has to donate 4001 zorkmids to a priest for protection regardless of character level. Small, whirly, amorphous or unsolid monsters may just pass through boulders, reducing the effectiveness of boulder forts. A blessed scroll of genocide only genocides monster species with a certain chance, just as it does in the Lethe patch; however, there is always at least a 10% chance of a species actually being genocided. Invoking an artifact leads to a much higher timeout. Hitting a monster with a stoning attack (e.g. throwing a cockatrice egg at it) will only stone the monster with a 25% chance. Thrown daggers, knives and spears can break, and the same is true for applied polearms.

Players who stand on an active Elbereth engraving have a 1% risk per turn to be subjected to the "fear" status effect, the main effect of which is a greatly reduced to-hit rate. The effect will time out after a while, and it can also be cured with a unicorn horn. Also, standing on an active Elbereth engraving halves HP/Pw regeneration for the player.

Certain types of instakills (poison, touch of death etc.) are much more rare (but you should still try to get resistance).

Lava and water instakills are less likely - the game will now warn you if you're about to step on lava, water or traps. That annoying interface screw where finding secret doors/passages, hitting teleport traps or getting randomly teleported by teleportitis wouldn't give any message has also been fixed. I mean, really now: who has the patience of waiting after every "s" keypress to see whether a secret door came into existence? Now the game will pause with a --More-- prompt when the search command finds something. The player will get a confirmation dialog when trying to step on water or lava.

Changed cockatrice insta-stoning into a slow process, allowing you to use your lizard corpses. Also, eating cockatrices is possible now and may have useful results; in fact, every stoning monster has a specific effect when eaten. For example, eating the standard cockatrice can increase the player's intelligence, similar to eating a mind flayer. Some of them (like basilisks) take longer to eat than it takes for the player to turn to stone, which means eating those without stoning resistance is a bad idea.

It's a lot harder to win at "resistance roulette" now as the chances of gaining an intrinsic have been toned down. Eating a dragon no longer guarantees that you get the intrinsic resistance associated with it.

The chance of spell failure is capped at 90% for spells of level 1-4 now, and higher-level spells have higher cap values. This means that a low-level character who successfully reads a level 4 spellbook may actually be able to cast the spell, provided he has enough mana of course. Only level 8 spells are capped at 100%, everything else is castable in theory by attempting it often enough. Also, spell memory now affects success chances: the player is more likely to cast a well-memorized spell, so continuous attempts at casting a difficult spell might make it easier to cast.

Leveling up will slightly increase the player's AC, damage output and mana regeneration rate.

Stealing from a shop is a lot more dangerous now. Instead of an army of weakling kops and maybe one or two kop sergeants, there is an actual chance of seeing higher-level kops including the new Kommissioner and Kchief types. The shopkeeper will also summon random Yendorian Army soldiers including a new supersoldier that can phase through walls, as well as watchmen including the new watch lieutenant who has a hallucination attack and an item-stealing attack. There's even a very low chance that shoplifting will generate a hostile arch-lich who might instakill a low-level character.

Pets can no longer pick up containers that aren't empty.

Cursed items can be "heavily" or "prime" cursed, which means they resist uncursing attempts with a 66% or 90% chance, respectively. They can also be generated if an item that is already cursed gets hit by another cursing effect. While the player has at least one prime cursed item in open inventory, all the other inventory items can also randomly curse themselves!

Manipulation of item stacks can fail if the stack is too large. This includes just about any operation that changes the status of an entire stack at once, including (but not limited to): reading enchant weapon on stackable weapons, dipping scrolls of enchant weapon into holy water, items being stolen by a nymph, corrosion attacks hitting a stack of darts etc. Generally, the chance that an operation fails is proportional to the size of the stack. Potions, scrolls and food items only have a 1 in (stack size) chance of being affected, so e.g. that stack of 15 identify scrolls will resist 14 out of 15 nymph theft attempts. Daggers, knives, spears, boomerangs and javelins start resisting manipulation at a stack size of 11, while darts, shuriken and ammo start resisting at a stack size of 26. Creating holy water at an altar is special-cased: it always works no matter how many potions of water are on the altar.

Items may randomly resist being identified. This only applies to scrolls, potions, wands, rings and amulets.

Aggravate monster is much more dangerous than before: it will occasionally summon out of depth monsters around the player. The risk of that happening is reduced if the player also has stealth.

Unsuccessful prayers can have a much larger variety of harmful effects. On the other hand, there is an invoke deity technique that can be used for healing if the player's alignment record is positive.

Water is no longer considered "safe" for teleportation purposes if the player is unbreathing or swimming. This prevents items from suffering water damage if the player does a non-controlled teleport. Only players that can fly, levitate or otherwise exist on a water square without falling in may teleport onto one.

At the start of the game, the RNG will pick a type of item to totally withhold. It can randomly be any item that is possible to be generated randomly; even wishing for it will not work. It is possible (10% chance per attempt) to find out which item it is by using enlightenment.

A shield, when worn, has a chance of automatically blocking projectiles, more if the shield is blessed, less if it is cursed, and with an extra bonus if the shield is made for the player's race.

Being level-drained doesn't always cost the player an experience level. Sometimes it just chips off a fraction of the amount of experience gained.

The player may get acid and petrification resistance by eating the appropriate corpses. Unlike other resistances granted by eating corpses, these are only temporary.

It is possible to continue leveling up past XL30. The player's effective experience level will still be 30 but if enough experience is gained, max HP and Pw will improve similar to quaffing a potion of gain level.

The ghost that is created if a player leaves bones after death has been beefed up considerably. Instead of a weak ghost that only moves once per moon cycle and does a maximum of 2 points of damage, there may often be a DCSS-styled ghost instead, read: a player character monster equipped with everything the deceased player had, which is also able to use those items. Basically the ghost has powers similar to the deceased player character, so if the deceased player had a full ascension kit, the next player may have lots of trouble killing the ghost. On the other hand, if the player somehow manages to tame the ghost, they will basically have an AI-controlled player character ally that may be able to kill a lot of monsters.

Warning and telepathy no longer display every monster. Instead, warning shows about 50% of all hostile monsters in range while telepathy shows about 66% of all non-mindless monsters.

Certain spells and wands scale with the player character's level now. This applies to all forms of healing wands and spells, all forms of force bolt, and all damage-dealing ray wands (magic missile, lightning etc.). Healing potions of all kinds will also restore more hit points for a higher-level character.

Doing certain bad things (shoplifting or murder, for example) will add to the player's sin counter (idea derived from dNetHack), reducing the player's max alignment. Some roles (convict for example) start with a non-zero amount of sins. It's also much harder to build up positive alignment by killing monsters.

The chance of fire/cold/rust/corrosion affecting your equipment has been toned down. You won't lose every second scroll from stepping on a fire trap once. However, fire traps can be randomly generated outside of Gehennom now, and items can actually vanish entirely if they get hit by erosion effects too often. Artifacts get a generous saving throw but they too can be destroyed if eroded too often.

While blind, the player's items may randomly reveal their appearance.

Playing the game on Friday the 13th is much more evil, making it so that many bad things which happen with a certain chance will happen a lot more often.

Wresting an empty wand can no longer be done by engraving with it. They must be zapped instead.

Zapping a wand that's corroded or otherwise damaged can sometimes cause it to explode and possibly have the player get subjected by its effects. The chance increases the more damaged a wand is.

Eating a tainted corpse may still grant the intrinsics associated with it.

Using a tonal instrument to manipulate the drawbridge takes a turn now (bugfix), the drawbridge can randomly refuse to be closed, and any monster with a size of at least "big" will prevent the drawbridge from closing. Credits to Patric Mueller for these ideas.

A high charisma rating has a chance to ward off item-stealing monsters. If a nymph tries to charm a character into taking off their armor, and the player has (close to) 25 charisma, there's a good chance of the nymph failing to steal anything.

Enlightenment has a 10% chance of displaying stuff that used to be wizard mode only, e.g. the exact alignment of the player. A blessed stethoscope will always display wizard mode strings like hunger, apport or tameness of pets.

At the start of the game, one monster class/symbol (e.g. L or h) will be selected to become completely ungenocidable. Enlightenment may tell the player which class it is in a given game.

Hangup causes penalties including paralysis and a max HP/Pw reduction. If the player hangs up while paralyzed, the paralysis counter is saved so hangup can no longer be used to cheat a paralysis effect; saving the game normally is recommended.

Other Changes

Polymorphing is a lot more fun: if the player polymorphs into a form that cannot do certain actions (opening doors, picking up items from the ground or riding a steed, for example), they can choose to try anyway, with a 33% chance of success. However, failure will result in negative effects, which may be wounded legs, paralysis, confusion, stun, blindness or hallucination. A player polymorphed into a monster will have more monster hit points if their experience level is higher, meaning a level 30 character polymorphing into a lichen won't have just a single max hit point. Also, players can't polymorph into any monster that has a base level of at least 30, and some monster types are valid polymorph forms for monsters only so the player can't polymorph into one. Version v82 also makes it less likely for uncontrolled polymorphs to turn the player into bad forms (sessile monsters, eels etc.), so the chance of polymorphing into something useful is higher. If you're playing version v83 or higher, attributes are no longer temporary while polymorphed and can actually be exercised even while polymorphed into a monster.

Players who can use the #youpoly command at will now have a certain amount of uses, which slowly goes up as game time passes. If the player uses up all their free polymorphs they cannot #youpoly again until the counter refills.

New status afflictions 'numbness' and 'freezing' added. These conditions can be cured by a noncursed unicorn horn, prayer (not guaranteed), eating apples (cures numbness), or eating oranges (cures freezing). If the player sets themselves on fire (e.g. by a scroll of fire), the freezing condition disappears as well. A numbed player has a 10% chance of losing a turn, which effectively translates to being 10% slower overall, while a frozen player performs all actions at half speed. Engraving is also more likely to fail if the player is suffering from one of these conditions.

Amulets can be dropped down a toilet to receive a message that can be used to identify the type of amulet. This can sometimes curse or rust the amulet, or summon dangerous monsters.

New item materials: tar, silk, arcanium, secree, pourpoor, compost, inka and vivardoradorium.

Item materials have more effects than just being edible for different monsters and being susceptible or not to different types of erosion: Ether items increase the player's movement speed slightly for each piece equipped but also cause contamination. Mithril gear helps prevent stat loss and is harder to disenchant. Copper weapons deal extra damage to F-class monsters while other copper equipment can prevent sickness when worn. Platinum weapons deal extra damage to monsters with contamination attacks and other platinum gear reduces incoming contamination. Eternium items are very hard to destroy and will usually survive destroy armor, disintegration and erosion effects. Bone items are resistant to theft and item teleportation effects. Gold items are resistant to the curse items effect. Leather and especially wood is partly resistant to fire while paper will burn up much faster than before. Viva items do bonus damage to golems while inka items do more to animals. Mineral items give protection against sanity.

The player can saddle and ride a much wider variety of creatures now (including succubi :D), and it works while hallucinating, too.

Monsters and armors can have egotypes. All egotype monsters are highlighted yellow, and receive an additional attack or intrinsic; the wand of mutation can be used to add egotypes to a monster, and cancelling the monster removes them. Egotype armors show as e.g. "an enchanted leather armor", and putting them on or identifying their + in some other way reveals the nature of the enchantment. Even magical armors can have egotypes; for example, "an enchanted (of reflection) cloak of magic resistance". Using noncursed enchant armor on a piece of armor may sometimes add an egotype if it doesn't have one already.

Pets are smarter when deciding which monsters to attack; they now know if a monster possesses passive attacks that can kill them, and a pet that is on the verge of death stops attacking monsters entirely until it heals.

If a technique is ready to be used again, the player will get a notification.

Optional Difficulty Modes

The Evil Variant, a special playing mode that makes SLASH'EM Extended much harder in very unfair ways!

Friday the 13th, playing on the unlucky day also makes SLASH'EM Extended much harder, and for those who don't want to wait for that date, there's another special playing mode that also enables these difficulty elements!

If the character's name is "lostsoul" (without quotation marks), the character starts at Medusa depth instead of dungeon level 1, making the game much harder. The character starts on the upstairs, but any means of levelporting/branchporting are unusable for a lost soul. Source of this idea is ToME (Tales/Troubles of Middle Earth), a variant of Angband where the player can play as a lost soul, starting on the deepest floor of a very hard bonus dungeon.

Naming the player character "Dudley" (without quotation marks) will set the starting luck value to -13 and prevent it from changing (thanks to the Dudley's Dungeon guys for that inspiration)

A player character named "Blindfox" (without quotation marks) is permanently blinded. Reading the Book of the Dead will be possible even while blind, enabling a permanently blinded character to win the game.

A player character named "Hippie" (without quotation marks) is permanently hallucinating.

A player character named "iwbtg" (without quotation marks) will die as soon as they take any damage.

A player character named "Gehenna" (without quotation marks) will have praying and converting altars be useless, and the game will spawn dangerous monsters more often.





Dungeon Layout

New special dungeon levels, including a mall (with stronger versions of watch captains), random mazes and mines, and even a weird "plane" level with very random monster/object/terrain generation! Many existing levels also have a chance of taking on a different appearance. For example, Minetown can be "Water Minetown" instead - it's exactly what it says on the tin. Hooray for flying/levitating characters. :D

Now all that we'd need would be some pretty, lovely water nymphs...

A weird new special level in Slash'EM Extended.

The same weird level, fully explored.

A new variant of a Gnomish Mines filler level.

There's a shopping mall in Gehennom, too!

Gravestones in graveyards or barracks can have buried items, so it might be worthwhile to dig down on them.

On the Vibrating Square level, the Seven Deadly Sins appear. They are similar to the Riders: all of them revive on death, and eating their corpses is instantly fatal. There is also a boss named "Depression" on Moloch's Sanctum who has similar properties.

Version v212 greatly increased the length of the game by making the mandatory dungeons longer, and also adding new tasks that the player has to complete in order to win the game. Specifically, after getting the Bell of Opening, the player has to find a Subquest branch somewhere on the Quest and find the Bell Caves somewhere in the Subquest, otherwise the invocation ritual cannot be performed. Also, when the player claims the Amulet of Yendor, they need to find a magic portal on Moloch's sanctum that leads to the Yendorian Tower, and in that tower find the entrances to Dead Grounds, Ordered Chaos and Forging Chamber. After entering all three of them, the player will be deposited at the bottom of the Tower again and may now start making their way back up through Gehennom and the Dungeons of Doom. If Vecna, Nightmare and the Beholder have not been defeated, they will spawn in the three dungeons that branch off of the Yendorian Tower in much stronger form.

Lots of new special rooms can be found now. For example, a room full of umber hulks can be generated. Special rooms also have a random chance of monsters being generated awake, and they will always start out hostile to the player.

Standard rooms in a rooms-and-corridors level have a chance of getting some more special features, e.g. trees, clouds or pools of water.

There's a random chance of most special levels not appearing in a given game. Plot-critical levels (example: the Quest) are exempt from this, but just about everything else (including minetown, sokoban's prize levels and more) has a small chance of being replaced by a standard dungeon level.

The Quest is longer now, the upper filler level can appear more than once in a given game, and the quest portal (as well as several other branches) can be much deeper. It's entirely possible for the quest portal to be on Medusa's level or even below that.

Gehennom filler levels can randomly be rooms-and-corridors, and yes, there can be shops on those levels, too. Finding a shop on dlvl 64 is like winning the lottery though, as it will happen extremely rarely.

It won't be this bad, but there _will_ be more dangerous sea monsters on water levels.

On the other hand, this room can actually get generated. Ranged attacks or spells are advisable to clear out all those nymphs.

Another very nasty big room variant that can pose a long and arduous challenge.

Be very careful around item-stealing sea monsters. They _will_ attempt to drown you while you disrobe.

Monster generation will speed up after a time, similar to Sporkhack and dNetHack; the time at which spawning starts to speed up or reaches its maximum is very random, however. It's very possible for the spawn rate to start increasing at 6000 turns already, but it can also randomly take 90000 or even more; enlightenment has a small chance of telling the player when to expect an increase in monster spawns. During the ascension run, monsters always have a very high chance of spawning, and they will often spawn on the upstairs of the current level. There is also an added "group spawn" mechanic that can spawn lots of monsters of one type (e.g. lots of team ant members or lots of felines) on the current level.

More levels are eligible to leave bones, including Sokoban.

Traps do more damage on deeper dungeon levels, meaning arrow traps on dlvl65 aren't irrelevant anymore. Also, statue traps may be invisible. Version v83 adds over a dozen of new trap types, some of which are very nasty; having automatic searching may be much more useful now. This is even more true in version v113 or higher, which added several dozen more trap types.

As part of the dungeon growths patch, open squares can now "grow back" into solid rock. This applies to all levels the player has already visited, even the ones the player isn't currently on, but the rock created that way is always diggable, even on non-diggable levels.





Monsters

Monsters may use breath, spit and ranged weapon attacks even at point blank range. This means that meleeing a black dragon without reflection is no longer a good idea.

Added lithivore monsters that can eat stone, glass, gems and bone. The rock mole is an example for a monster with this trait (it also keeps its metallivore trait); players may polymorph into one to eat a cursed lodestone.

Yeenoghu is much more dangerous now; please be careful. Having magic resistance helps, and reflection might, too. All demon lords/princes and several other bosses can also randomlylevelport now, which can be especially annoying if Vlad is the one doing that. Jubilex can't be easily killed by a wand/spell of digging.

Added a sidekick to the Sanctum High Priest of Moloch. The sanctum high priest's new sidekick in action.

Player monsters are much more likely to be encountered. They're also much more dangerous, getting better equipment and more offense/defense/misc items. Other intelligent foes may also be packing more heat now.

Killing Izchak or allowing him to die in any way places the player at the receiving end of a wide-angle disintegration beam. If the player is a Paladin, even just attacking him may cause divine wrath. Pets no longer attack Izchak unless the player forces the issue.

Monsters can fire guns at their actual range.

Randomly generated monsters have a 1% chance of being out of depth (example: giant mimic on dlvl2), and a 0.01% chance of being even more out of depth (example: arch-lich on dlvl2). However, very low-level monsters may still spawn even on a deep dungeon level (example: newt on Moloch's sanctum).

Enemies with ranged weapon attacks (crossbows, shotguns etc.) have a greatly increased chance of hitting the player with their shots. Be careful.

The RNG now (version 1.9.8 and upward) selects a few monster traits per game that appear more frequently. Certain roles and races also see specific monster traits more often, e.g. vanilla roles will see more vanilla NetHack monsters, and some dungeon branches have a higher chance of spawning certain theme-appropriate monsters, like the Gnomish Mines spawning more random G and h.

Added tons of new monsters, hallucinatory monster names, rumors and other types of messages. The master lichen is a rather dangerous monster indeed.

There are some lovely, sweet new monsters in Slash'EM Extended.

Monsters can wish for items by quaffing certain types of potions.

Version v115 has "treasure trove" monsters, which are immobile and have no attacks; they're meant to be killed by the player for benefits. Some of them will yield corpses that can be eaten for some positive effect like obtaining an elemental resistance, others will drop a bunch of possibly useful items.

All major demons can randomly summon a demon prince (Demogorgon for example) now; the chance of non-lords/princes summoning them is very low though.

Monsters with a kick attack can target a male player character's nuts, and monsters with a claw attack can target a female player character's breasts. This attack will deal extra damage and can give a unique death message if it kills the player. Many other types of melee attacks also have a chance of generating nasty extra effects, and there are new attack types: scratch, lash and trample, also with added extra effects. Certain quadruped monsters (elephants for example) have a trample attack now, and grown-up dragons have lash attacks.

YASD to a nurse's breast-targetting attack

If the player character is robbed by an item-stealing monster of the other gender, they may suffer stat point loss. Item-stealing monsters may also levelport, which becomes more likely the more items they manage to steal from the player; if they manage to steal an artifact from the player, the stealing monster is guaranteed to gain a means of levelporting.

Monsters can snipe the player with certain gray stones, causing them to be picked up automatically regardless of the player's burden status.

Certain monsters have the new "petty" attribute, allowing them to be tamed by throwing the otherwise-useless (and hard to get) kelp fronds at them.

The Poke Ball technique "catching" a wild monster.

Tame monsters can be left on another level for much longer without going feral, as long as they're satiated enough. There's also a higher chance of a feral pet becoming peaceful rather than hostile, especially if it had a high tameness score while it was a pet.

If the player consorts with foocubi or certain other seducing monsters, the player or monster (depending on which one is female) may become pregnant; this can generate a pet foocubus, but it may also generate a hostile one instead.

Sea monsters can spawn randomly, aren't hurt by being on land, and appear much more frequently on water levels. Being drowned will also subject the player's equipment to water damage; the instadeath drowning attack has a chance of failure, but even if the player doesn't drown, being submerged by a grabbing enemy will blank, dilute and rust items. If it is lethe water, the player's items may also be disenchanted.

Version v86 introduces flying fish, which always try to float over water or lava and can use drowning attacks. Being drowned in lava is an instadeath unless the player is fire resistant.

Monster spawns on the Quest levels are no longer only the fixed role-specific ones; instead, there is about a 14% chance of a randomly generated monster on the Quest levels being of the specific type. All other random spawns will just be any standard random monster.

The shambling horror from Sporkhack/Unnethack is in the game now. Actually, there are four different types of horror that get randomly created attributes/attacks, and they're independent from each other, meaning they all have their own random values determined at the start of a game. Some of them will likely be complete "trainwreck" monsters, but with four of them, chances are that at least one such monster will be very dangerous. Again, credits to Patric Mueller and the Sporkhack devteam for this idea. There are also some pre-defined "trainwreck" monsters, meaning they always have the same (but nonetheless weird and possibly illogical) abilities in every game. And last but not least, monsters may have a "randomizer" attack that chooses any random attack type every time they attack; due to the possibility of them getting the touch of death or similar evil attack types, they will only appear late in the game.

Some monsters can use an embrace attack to prevent enemies from fleeing.

Random "shambling horror" type enemies can end up with extremely dangerous combinations, like this petrifying dude.

Another added character role revealed in action.

The late game might see the player fight some really powerful foes.

Interface and Commands

Looking at a monster will show its base statistics (idea from UnNetHackPlus).

In the inventory screen, hitting the letter key for an object will display some basic information about it.

The force extended command can be used on monsters to deal a little bit of damage. This attack doesn't miss, and a high-level character might push the monster back a square, but it costs some mana (cheaper for Jedi).

Applied the livelog, while helpless, statuscolors, hitpointbar, hilite_stairs (tweaked to also highlight staircases obscured by traps or other dungeon features) and several other interface-related patches

Applied the showborn, darkroom, showbuc and heck2 patches.

A new command, Ctrl-U (also accessible from the player command list in the menu) allows the player to remove all I markers (for remembered unseen monsters) on the current level.

New options for customizing the bottom status line: showmc, showmovement, showlongstats. They can be turned off on terminals that don't support 25 lines.

Trying to walk on a square occupied by a boulder will now allow the player to choose whether they want to "squeeze" onto the square (if they were able to do so to begin with). This prevents the player from suffering nasty luck penalties on Sokoban through no fault of their own. Also, the following acts couldn't actually be used to bypass anything on Sokoban and are therefore no longer counted as cheating: jumping, throwing a heavy iron ball, or throwing anything while levitating.

Items

Picking up items from or dropping items on the ground no longer consumes a turn.

Allowed almost all types of items to be generated randomly, including bullets, dragon scale mail, athames etc. Powerful items are incredibly rare, though.

Unidentified items can now merge onto (partly) identified ones, thereby identifying them as well. For example, if the player has a stack of 5 uncursed scrolls of healing and picks up another one that is also uncursed, it will merge to form a stack of 6 uncursed scrolls of healing, even if the player didn't know the BUC status of the newly picked up one. This means that identifying that large stack of uncursed +0 daggers is no longer a bad thing, because new daggers can still merge onto that stack.

Item generation will slow down after some time, using the same timeout that monster generation uses. Eventually, the chance of monsters generating death drops goes down to 15% of the base value, making it harder to obtain loot; however, the increased generation frequency of monsters might partially offset this.

Engraving with a wand of digging can engrave up to 50 characters (or 6 Elbereths) in a single turn.

There are artifacts for all item classes now, including iron chains, food, spellbooks, wands and even acid venoms. The game can also occasionally make a fake artifact.

Certain rare weapons (electric sword, steel whip, torpedo and some others) can be applied to smash the otherwise next-to-unremovable iron bars. Doing so will damage the weapon though, even if it's erodeproof, and has a 20% chance of creating an iron chain that can be picked up.

Iron balls and chains can be enchanted now, and there are stronger versions available as well but they're very rare. They all use the flail skill, and for a convict only, swinging them will train the flail skill. Rocks and gems can also be enchanted to decrease the likelihood of them disappearing when thrown; flint stones and especially loadstones will do quite some damage if fired with a sling. There is also a new wand of punishment that can have quite a lot of charges, allowing the player access to a *very* heavy iron ball indeed. ;)

Artifact weapons once again deal non-fixed bonus damage, which means that e.g. the Bat from Hell deals 1-20 extra damage per hit (in SLASH'EM it was always a flat +20 per hit). Double damage weapons like Grayswandir also only deal 1-X extra damage, with X being the amount of damage the weapon would normally do, so Grayswandir may still do double damage sometimes but will deal less bonus damage on average.

The cursed potion of gain level will transport the player one dungeon level downward if they started the ascension run, preventing the easy skipping of "annoying" levels. It can still be used on dungeon level 1 to make sure that the player doesn't accidentally use the upstairs with a fake amulet.

Using racial gear while being of the corresponding race gives damage/armor class bonuses. For this purpose, aklys and crossbow count as gnomish, slings count as a hobbit weapon.

Dragonhide shields are new shields that are like dragon scale mail, but they go in the shield slot. Wishing for e.g. "silver dragonhide shield" is possible to obtain valuable intrinsics in the shield slot.

Elven weapons and droven armor can be enchanted to +9. Droven weapons can even reach +11 without a risk of evaporating.

Bullets and other types of firearm ammo only have a 50% chance of being destroyed in a grenade explosion (16% if the bullets are blessed).

Cursed luck/healthstones cannot be dropped, and the player cannot otherwise remove them from their main inventory either (similar to loadstones).

Reading spellbooks that are out of charges is dangerous.





Magic cancellation

Magic cancellation now works differently. Here's the respective chances (percentages) of avoiding negative effects like drain life or disenchantment depending on the player's MC and spirituality skill:

MC Restricted/Unskilled Basic Skilled Expert Master Grand Master 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 33 33 33 33 33 33 2 66 66 66 66 66 66 3 75 78 81 84 87 90 4 81,25 83,5 85,75 88 90,25 92,5 5 85 86,8 88,6 90,4 92,2 94 6 87,5 89 90,5 92 93,5 95 7 89,29 90,57 91,86 93,14 94,43 95,71 8 90,63 91,75 92,88 94 95,13 96,25 9 91,67 92,67 93,67 94,67 95,67 96,67 10 92,5 93,4 94,3 95,2 96,1 97 11 93,18 94 94,81 95,64 96,45 97,27

Armor pieces have MC values from 1 to 9, and the highest single value is the player's actual MC, which can be seen on the character stats display with the showmc option. There are a few ways to get more MC, e.g. by casting magic shield or being an inka, allowing the player's MC to reach values of 10 or higher.

Ancestors and descendants

Slash'Em Extended has a successor called SlashTHEM, which stopped pulling bugfixes and features from Slash'EM Extended at version v100 though and instead decided to roll back most things to what they used to be like in SLASH'EM, and was confirmed by its developer to no longer be considered a fork of Slash'EM Extended. However, it is also possible to play "SlashTHEM Extended" by picking the Soviet race in Slash'EM Extended, which makes the game behave in a way similar to SlashTHEM.

It ought be noted that SlashTHEM, unlike everything else in this timeline, does not add stuff based on SLASH'EM Extended, but rather reverts many of its changes and makes its own all-new changes instead, some of which were then ported to SLASH'EM Extended. Based on the raw amount of new features and other changes, SLASH'EM Extended has by far the most, while SlashTHEM has "only" slightly more than regular SLASH'EM. Also, the last commit to SlashTHEM was in July 2016, after which the project became abandoned, while SLASH'EM Extended kept being actively developed.

Obtaining

Slash'EM Extended is currently being hosted at em.slashem.me (ssh slashem@slashem.me).

A windows binary is available (alternate link). The source code can be accessed on GitHub or as a zip archive.



The windows version may also run on Unix systems with Wine or other emulator tools. For UNIX systems: It should compile in Linux systems, they will probably be problems in BSDs and Macs.

Compiling on unix

Here how to compile it on most unices. If it doesn't work then go make an issue or complain on IRC.

Install what you'll need. On Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu and Linux Mint):

$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev bison flex make

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install ncurses-devel bison flex

On FreeBSD:

$ sudo pkg install ncurses bison flex gmake

You get the picture. You need ncurses, bison, flex, and GNU make.

Download the source code.

$ git clone https://github.com/SLASHEM-Extended/SLASHEM-Extended

Enter the created directory.

$ cd SLASHEM-Extended

Run the setup script.

$ sh sys/unix/setup.sh

Compile and install it.

$ make -f sys/unix/GNUmakefile && make -f sys/unix/GNUmakefile install

On FreeBSD (and probably on other BSDs too) the binary will be in `~/slex`