Naturally auto-seach of thieves still would be somewhat error-prone.

And maybe trap searching could work like now but secret doors are found immediately...

I approve of this idea! FIQHack, a Nethack variant, implements this exact system, and it has saved my poor fingers thousands of keystrokes. Hitting 's' a million times isn't exactly exhilarating gameplay either =P

Vote for this feature. Too often you know the map designs well enough that you *know* the secret passage is there and still you need to mash the button.
Secret doors also very often prevent you from descending, so not being able to find them can ruin your progress. After you've searched 12 times and still not found anything... I can see how players can get stuck :P

Love this.

Good idea for secret doors, but traps should still have a chance to miss detection.

I think search could be made an alias of "ws". Execute search actions a number of times (consuming time) until you actually find the secret door.

That way, newbie players would not have to mash buttons, but perception would still have an influence (the character would spend less time looking for the secret door, decreasing chance for enemies to come, etc.)

The problem of just making search for secret doors succeed automatically without doing this is that perception becomes irrelevant, plus, you eliminate the factor of "will I be able to find the door before the enemy in the corridor gets to where I am?"

Al-K has a good point, searching should be more difficult when there are hostile monsters in view. But how to make that clear to new players?

The trick is making it obvious that if there is no one to disturb you, you search for several turns, but if there is someone then you only search once.

Alternatively, searching next to a secret door could produce a different message. 'You notice something unusual in the wall here'. Then it's just a matter of searching again til it uncovers. I don't know if this would be enough hint for a new player, though.

OR make it a question. 'You notice something unusual... Keep searching? Y/N' if Y, you'll spend the next 20 turns searching, which can be interrupted by monsters etc.

edit: This could be annoying for more experienced players where there's a lot of secret doors like minotaur maze. having to press both s and y repeatedly. Maybe make the dialog accept s for 'yes'
edit2: Maybe make secret doors in the minotaur maze always found in one search, regardless of perception etc.

Implemented as follows: Active searching now automatically finds secret doors. Detecting traps mostly works as before (probabilities have been tweaked a bit because neither good nor bad luck so far played a role in detecting traps which was an ancient oversight).

"ws" as the default didn't convinced me as even then there was a chance to not find secret doors.

But what about perception's influence on searches? Doesn't this make perception much more of a useless stat?

It's now more important for traps. So I would say that it still is very valuable.

I think it will really help the newer players, good idea.

I'll add my five cents though it might be too late.

It's really annoying to hit 's' five times with intention to find a trap next to you, step and get screwed. The fact that should you hit it 10 more times you could notice the trap is exceptionally frustrating.

I suggest changing the way 's' discoveres traps further to make it either guranteed success or guranteed failure qccording to player's luck, perception, danger level or whatever else matters. This way you'll always hit search once and know it won't give you anything additional. A message taking no turn and saying 'You have searched this place well already and won't find anything additional.' could hint new players it's not an action one would normally want to execute twice.