George Gensure (and others) has been working on some neat patches for nethack allowing for cooperative and tournament gameplay. It's called Bingesoft, named for the half-day nethack binge tournaments held by the folks I went to school with.

Being addicted to nethack, I went to test it. One of the changes included making the dungeon 10x larger (500ish levels instead of 50). This proved interesting. It was mostly a vanilla nethack install + bingesoft patches. These include a postal service and auction house.

In the game, I had finished all my normal activities (mines, sokoban, the quest) before I visit Medusa. I got to dungeon level 51 and was wondering where exactly medusa was. It was at this point I found out there would be 200 levels down. So, I used a cursed scroll of teleport (I had teleport control) to go to level 200.

Keep in mind, that the kind of monsters generated at any given level (assuming you don't have the Amulet of Yendor) are based on an average of your experience level and the current dungeon level. The average at dungeon level 50 was 30ish, and it only went up from there.

Level 200 was still the normal dungeons, except the only monsters spawning were Archons (due to reasons mentioned). Since I was lawful, they were peaceful. I managed to tame 4 of them along the way. 4 Archons vs something equals dead something. Using wands and scrolls of create monster, I ended up making them extinct. Any invocations of wands of create monster did nothing; there were no archons left! Hah.

So I level telported again down to some randomly-large number, 280. This dumped me in the valley of the dead at level 265. Remember what I said about only Archons spawming? The same was true for the bad levels below medusa about liches. Only arch-liches and master liches were spawning. My posse of Archons took care of 20-30 of them before I got bored and teleported to level 1 where I left the dungeon.

This was my first game as a knight. Fun class. My end-game stats are here.