Basically I hook into PROMPT_COMMAND from .bashrc, force a history file update, and read the last line. So it is persistent between any terminal window user with that edit in his .bashrc is logged into, looks like i can drop into the tty as well and have it work as long as the same user is logged in, for it to work in other shells, that would have to be added to their .zshrc or whatever as well, and subshells don't seem to work at all since I can't hook into those and they don't necessarily write to history. I have looked at the learning adventure game GameShell too, but that uses a subshell and doesn't write to history, so does unfortunately not work with my script.

It absolutely does work with your bashcrawl as I have just tested, that is great news and I appreciate the post, it seems like an adventure game and my script would be practically made for each other! I'll spend some time with it and will actually add it as a suggestion to my readme file if I find that my script doesn't break anything in the game.

As for cheating, yeah, I take the same approach as the bashcrawl dev- it's made for myself as a fun way to give that occassional dopamine boost on level ups, and for others to encourage learning the terminal. If anyone wanted to cheat, they could disable "ignore duplicates" for history and sit there just mashing the same command, better yet, just manually edit the exp file, but where's the fun in that? :)