Last time I played, after many close calls, I finally got my hands on the amulet. Knowing that the journey back to daylight was likely to be at least as dangerous as the way I had come, I took a breath, saved, and set the game aside.
That was about seventeen years ago. I still have the save file. Today's announcement got me excited about the prospect of finally finishing my game, until I saw this:
> Existing saved games and bones files will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.
Drat.
Thankfully, NetHack is not one of those modern, commercial, online-only games that make it difficult to run old versions.
NetHack 5.0 changes thousands and upon thousands of things from the previous release, 3.6.7, which was 3 years ago. 17 years ago is an eternity in this game’s history. The versions may not have gone up hardly at all in that time, but the fix logs are enormous.
Adding up the line counts of the fix logs for the 3.6.X releases with 5.0, I get a total of 6814 lines. That’s bug fixes only. There’s a similarly large number of gameplay changes!
All that is to say, migrating your old save file through all of those changes would’ve been a ton of extra work to support. I know Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can migrate old save files but they have a very carefully designed system for sunsetting removed features in a way that old save files can still use them.
This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.
The story is a bit more convoluted. After the 3.4.3 release in 2003, the DevTeam stopped releasing new versions. They were still responsive when contacted by e-mail, though. But then we also didn't know how the development version looked like.
In 2014 the dev version was leaked to the community and in the following discussions with the DevTeam on how to handle this, the DevTeam got the first shoot of new devs in a while which lead to the release of 3.6.0 in 2015. This version was a polished version of the dev version, also incorporating some of the popular community patches at the time. The 3.6 branch received regular bugfix and security updates (3.6.7 was released in 2023).
Since 3.6.0 there's a mirror repository of NetHack on GitHub. So the development version that was internally numbered 3.7.0 which would become 5.0.0 was always accessible and, contrary to the 3.4.3 era, could be played anytime and was also installed on the public servers to play.
I also have a Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup with my first 3 runes around somewhere.
I'm aware I will probably lose it, but I'm also anxious to touch it. Maybe I should just get myself some good coffee tomorrow and get over with it. Biggest learning of that save is also how careful and defensive you have to play if you want to consistently get further.
DCSS has also changed so much, it's hardly the same game anymore. It's maybe a better game in many ways, but it's not the game I spent time getting to know and getting good at.
Maybe an early example of "forever games" like Minecraft which just keep getting expanded forever and move ever further from the game you knew.
As I recall from my game of many, many years ago, I got the amulet to the surface and was greeted with, “Oops, that’s the fake amulet. Go back down.” I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I played it.
I've never understood why something being so old is an excuse to spoil. Many people weren't old enough to be alive when it was last a cultural icon and may not have heard about it until this thread.
I never said being old is an excuse to spoil. My comment was solely in response to OP's comment, which specifically mentioned the fact that this is a thread about Nethack 5.0.0. The fact that we are in a thread about Nethack 5.0.0 is not relevant to the particular spoiler at hand.
Meh, imo spoilers only spoil experiences for people who take media too seriously.
When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Conversely, I have played Nethack on and off for decades, have read countless spoilers about it, yet still haven’t won and still find it interesting.
I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot.
Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?
2) If you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably avoid discussion threads about the subject, because people will often discuss their experiences in such threads
I agree Nethack is not one of those games. People always pretended it was, though. They called "spoilers" what would be called documentation in most games. No one didn't use them (the "unspoiled" win mentioned elsewhere in the thread was a stretch even if you take them at their word). It was supposed to be theoretically possible to find out core game features from e.g. random rumors, but that was completely hypothetical - I'm pretty sure at no point in Nethack's development was it ever playtested with new players.
Not just random rumours, there are multiple specific mechanisms built into the game that explain core features, which a curious player can stumble on and then deliberately mine for information.
NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.
1. It doesn't have to be for the experience of the plot to be important.
2. Fair point but with a game like nethack I'd say a majority of folks are interested in discussing the development of nethack without necessarily discussing the plot. HN has no concept of spoiler tags nor topiced threads so it's not really easy to contain the discussion per-thread.
Besides even if you don't care about spoilers, a lot of people do, regardless of your thoughts on how you personally like to experience media.
I actually tend to live a remarkably spoiler free life, but that's mostly by avoiding threads that would give spoilers on things I care about.
Like, it's fine to care about spoilers, you just can't expect a random community that doesn't even have the concept of spoiler tags to accommodate your desire. Doubly so since that desire is competing with the desire of others to discuss the topic.
I'm also not even sure where you'd draw the distinction with a game like NetHack - how do you discuss a change on how to acquire Excalibur without discussing how to acquire Excalibur, or spoiling that you can reliably acquire it?
I agree, you can't expect this community to hide spoilers about stuff. I have seen random spoilers in topics that weren't even about media (in classic HN fashion, random tangents start to talk about books or movies). Sometimes they would attempt to mark a spoiler by adding a bunch of lines of spoiler, then the reader could just collapse the comment thread.
That said, I haven't played enough nethack to even understand the spoilers so I'll probably forget about it. I'm primarily in this thread because because my dad introduced nethack to me when I was a kid, so seeing 5.0 is an incredible accomplishment and the meta discussion about it is fascinating.
I think that particular spoiler has been well known for many years, and knowing it would actually save a new player a huge waste of effort without any significant drawbacks.
> The build-time "yacc and lex"-based level compiler, the "yacc and lex"-based dungeon compiler, and the quest text file processing previously done by NetHack's "makedefs" utility, have been replaced with Lua text alternatives that are loaded and processed by the game during play.
This is very likely a good choice for multiple reasons, but it's truly the end of an era. (NetHack predates Lua, which has been around since 1993.) Lex and yacc are dead, long live lex and yacc!
Lua is not on base on most distros, that's sad. Also it stops being as portable.
By Amiga 68k platforms then. And maybe DOS.
Also, there no official Nethack i686 builds.
If I were them I'd try some micro-language from https://t3x.org as a pre-processor and bundle it.
The T3X0 language itself can do wonders and even be ported to DOS with ease.
EDIT: ok, Lua can be portable and even they got DOS ports, this is great.
Nethack embeds Lua 5.4.8, so you don't need it installed from a distribution's package manager. As long as your system can build C99* it can build Lua. And given that Nethack 5.0.0 is C99, this dependency is not reducing portability any further.
* Lua has a LUA_USE_C89 flag so it may be more portable than Nethack 5.0.0 at this point.
How much functionality/performance does one lose with this flag? Genuine question, I don't know.
If C89 and C99 were equally performant/functional, it would seem logical to just target C89 (since any C99 compiler should be able to compile C89 too). There must be some reason it's a flag.
The lua 5.4 sources are less than 1 megabyte in size and are MIT licensed. You can link against it but it's just as easy to directly compile it into your application directly.
I don't know... I played Nethack 30 years ago a lot and always felt all the graphical updates were not worth it. There's something when you can easily see the whole map in one screen. And that scary pink h appears suddenly...
Yes, you can turn it on by setting the color option in your nethackrc file with the line:
OPTIONS=color
There is also a sophisticated option for customizing the colours of in-game menus using regular expressions. You can read about that in the section on menu colours in the official Guidebook [1]. Note that the official Guidebook is considered the game’s manual and is free of spoilers. Any information you find in there is intended for all players to know before they start playing (or to reference as they go along).
Is it possible to access wizard mode on the web version? I suppose I could just clone it and run locally and implement it if not, but would be nice if it's already there to know how to trigger it.
As someone whose first introduction to dungeon crawler was Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (with tiles), thank you! I just tried the 3D version and it runs very well.
Aw yeah! I’d love to see somebody from the DevTeam talk about this, or literally anything else they might want to talk about, at the Roguelike Celebration in October (https://www.roguelike.club/), if anyone has a connection and could encourage them to consider it. It’s a super lovely community-run online event, and everyone would be thrilled. (I was a volunteer for the first few annual events, as a person who played about a zillion games of Nethack as a kid.)
Wow, what a delightful surprise! I'm a huge NetHack fan and have been waiting a long time for the official 3.7 release before switching over to it. I've been a 3.6 holdout, haha.
AFAIK, the backend has moved a lot of map generation logic (and exposure of other data) to a Lua API, which is quite exciting as something for people to play with in tooling, forks, mods, etc.
Minor spoilers below:
I heard about some great balance adjustments that help to mitigate over-reliance on a single kit, such as making certain extrinsic resistances (e.g. wearing rings) stronger than their intrinsic counterparts, which adds to the decision-making in choosing what to equip. Another change I'm really excited for is the unicorn horn no longer being usable for "restore ability", so ability-draining effects (of which there are many) are a more significant threat (they were effectively zero threat until now).
Also very cool to hear the quest is now possible to do early (despite being a Bad Idea) as that has great implications for speedrunning or "fewest turns" runs.
As an avid Spelunky player(still trying to complete the Cosmic Ocean...), I recently decided to explore some of Spelunky's roots, and set out to learn Nethack, and fell in love with the game. After a few weeks of dying repeatedly, perusing the wiki, and watching the Ascending in Nethack Overexplained series on youtube(highly recommended), I managed to ascend a valkyrie. Planning on trying a harder role soon. It's amazing how tense it can be despite the turn based nature of the game.
I do like the nerfs in this release. Making excalibur harder to get for Valkyries is a good one, as well as nerfing the unicorn horn. The run where I ascended felt a bit too easy at times. But of course valkyrie will still be by far the easiest role, I think. I bet I'll be stuck for quite a while trying to ascend anything else.
IIRC, there was always a way to filter out certain messages (or that may be an alt.org customization, but it's been a part of my config file for a while now).
My Nethack story is that in the 1990s I once got fired from a job for downloading NetHack because, I kid you not, it hit some Web log filter for the word "hack". I got dragged into a meeting with three log entries in yellow highlighter on a dot matrix printout showing the word "hack". Expalanations that it was a computer game went nowhere.
I don't think I ever legitimately completed NetHack. I think the best I did was getting to the elemental planes. Later I read about some of the strats and kit you aim for, which I think was a mistake because it kinda ruined it for me.
I'm honestly surprised this is still going on. Kudos to anyone still keeping this going. I'd kinda assumed it was forever stuck in 3.7? I see there are 3100 bugfixes and changes. I really wish there was a summary of major changes. Maybe there are none and it's just a backend revamp plus bugfixes that they bumped the major version on.
If a bag of holding explodes (e.g. due to putting a wand of cancellation in it), most of its items are scattered rather than lost
Amnesia no longer causes you to forget maps
Unicorn horns no longer restore lost attributes
Valkyrie ascensions (considered the easiest) are harder: chance to receive Excalibur when dipping a longsword in a fountain is decreased if not a knight, valkyries no longer start with a longsword, valkyrie doesn't gain Stealth until level 3
You can't displace pets into polymorph traps easily to get a super pet
For real! Valkyrie is the perfect "just bash things while only half paying attention" class. Great for when I'm playing to unwind (as opposed to playing as a challenge to myself).
I've been playing on and off for 15 years, sometimes daily for months on end. The deepest I managed to go is level 11, and as soon as I enter the Big Room, I die. In fact, I went past level 8 for the first time this year. I've read all of the NetHack wiki back and forth. I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing wrong or how to improve.
I'm 46 now, and if I continue that pace, I'll be dead before I even reach the bottom, let alone ascend.
Been pkaying on and off since I was 12, 38 today.. Good times. Quick tip is to play valkyrie, dip sword for excalibur, rub any lamps and wish for sdsm, and you should be good.
Also check out DCSS, amazing game, been playing for soon 40 years.
I've had them all. I’ve had wands of wishing, I die. I’ve worn blessed greased amazing technicolor Valenciaga +9001 silver patent leather dragon 2x HiDPIscale mail, I die. I step in a fucking trap, I get surrounded by a dozen killer bees, I die. Soldier ant, I die.
Good players can kill soldier ants with almost nothing, just some rocks or darts or daggers. There’s a bit of tactics to learn but the essential step is to stop bumping into enemies and learn to fight at range, use Elbereth to keep them at a distance, use doors and corridors to limit their angles of approach.
Once you learn how to kill a fast enemy (like a soldier ant) without letting it fight you in melee, you become unstoppable for the first 1/3rd of the game or so. You discover that you don’t need the best armour in the game right away, you don’t even need more than a half-decent weapon, you just need to maintain your supplies of ranged weapons (and wands).
Stepping in traps can also be avoided with the knowledge that (with 2 special exceptions) traps only generate in rooms, not corridors. Traps can be safely searched for from adjacent spaces and once discovered remain visible permanently.
I should also point out that the two enemies you mentioned that killed you have one thing in common: poisonous sting attacks. Poison has been nerfed in the latest version (5.0) and poison resistance can be acquired in game. Furthermore, some characters actually start the game with poison resistance for free!
I think I got my hands on Hack when I was 8, so I've been doing the same for, uh, 39 years. Damn. At least I was learning VI keys unintentionally, so it was somewhat educational. :)
Been on and off playing since I was 19, 63 today. Always good times. I had it in my autoexec.bat, so when I got home, and turned on my machine, I was ready to play. Always abused polymorphic traps. Sorry to see them go.
One thing which I don't know if you've noticed (and I don't consider this a spoiler) but Nethack has level scaling. If you get levels too fast, faster than you get better gear, enemies outscale you. In my (admittedly very dated) experience a lot of the difficulty was striking that balance between exploring too quickly and lingering too long.
This being NetHack, an answer is often not as straight forward as it could be. Most of the time the level difficulty is proportional to how deep you are into the dungeon but there are levels where your experience level factors in as well.
We can only guess about what's going wrong for you specifically . But I like guessing:
(extremely mild spoilers:)
- A core skill for Nethack is understanding how much danger you're in at any particular moment. Your comment about soldier ants below tells me you've made good progress here. But you need to recognize when you're in danger and how long you have to deal with that problem before you'll react appropriately.
- Nethack's dungeon isn't linear, it branches. (Think of the gnomish mines here, but there are other examples deeper.) When you're getting in over your head in one branch, go back up the stairs and switch to another one.
- When you're in immediate danger, Stop. Look through your inventory, consider your options. Think especially about wands, think about ways to write Elbereth, think about scrolls. Think about ways to use diagonal movement to your advantage to get to an escape, or a more defensible position. You have all the time in the world to think. There may not be a solution, but I've died more than a few times with more than one thing in my inventory that could have saved me.
- You need to be able to identify some things without waiting for a scroll of identify to fall into your lap. Price is the easiest way to identify the scroll of identify itself. It's also straightforward to learn to identify most useful wands: with spoilers or by experimenting. Engraving with the wand will often give you more information than zapping it. A lot of your early I'm In Danger toolkit will come from wands you've identified this way.
Good luck, have fun.
(Intermediate player, a few dozen ascensions 20 years ago.)
It's not a cheat. It's explained in the game's manual (the Official Guidebook [1], just search for Engrave).
It's been nerfed since 3.6.X as well. Now it can no longer be used for fighting, only escape, and attempting to fight while standing on it will make you "feel like a hypocrite" and deduct 5 from your alignment score.
I was never any good at Nethack. I think I just get impatient. I could regularly get a bit past Medusa but anything past that definitely involved save scumming. I was always a little jealous of the folks who could ascend regularly. But not jealous enough to, like, do anything about it.
Nethack's always been amazing for the feeling of "the devs thought of everything." I wonder how well that feeling holds up today.
Same. Partly it's that I always feel like I don't understand what's going on, mechanically speaking, as opposed to simpler roguelikes like Shattered Pixel Dungeon or Sil.
Or do what I did when I played this as a child: read the spoilers. Then start with Valkyrie, get the Mjollnir, wand of wishing, and a dragon scale mail as fast as possible. And a bag of holding and you get pretty far.
It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
Much as chess frustrated the great game masters like bobby fischer for being too easily "gamable" with opening books, I find that the mods for games like nethack, i.e. SLASHEM et al, make it where even if you try to spoil it, the massive amount of new content combined with the relative lack of documentation force you to git gud.
I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
I'm going to quote myself from a blog post I wrote back in 2012:
> Nethack is incredibly difficult, and near impossible to win without some knowledge. Whilst it could be argued that one could attain this knowledge through trial and error, it would take many many playthroughs to make any headway, even if you played in the invincible “Wizard” mode. Whilst I would recommend the use of spoilers if you wish to make progress in the game and discover what it has to offer, I wouldn’t suggest reading up on absolutely everything to give yourself an advantage. My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it. I still found the game incredibly challenging, as I was placed in situations that I couldn’t predict or prepare for, and I still had that thrill of discovery and amazement.
> My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it.
That is good advice. Nethack “spoilers” are more like being let in on an “in-joke” than being told the solution to a puzzle or the ending of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
> I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
You're crazy. All that does is prevent you from playing the game.
> I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself
Ehhh. I guess "enjoyable" from a masochism perspective? Nethack has a lot of very specific mechanics and hazards that aren't explained to you.
If you're just looking to explore, then by all means dive in. But if you're trying to finish the game (or even just, make something resembling meaningful progress towards doing so), you realistically probably never will without either reading guides or putting in thousands of hours wandering and dying.
To put it in perspective - many people have played the game with guides for years without ever beating it.
> make unique swallowing monsters (Juiblex) resist magical digging from inside
Oh noooooooooo... yeah that's fair.
Lots of overdue gameplay changes here, really. I was something of an expert player 20 years ago, my best ascenscion being Atheist/Genoless/Wishless with no pet to boot. It seems a lot has changed. I see fixes on this list for things that bothered me then. :)
The depth of NetHack is surprising. They have a saying - the devs thought of everything. If you can tolerate the mechanics, the emergent dungeon delving stories are interesting.
Dungeon crawling as a tourist with a camera, rubbing a lamp and it’s a magic lamp that gives you a wish, kicking a fountain and bringing out a succubus who steals your equipment and teleports away, finding a scroll of genocide and accidentally genociding yourself because you forgot you were polymorphed, robbing shopkeepers blind with your pet dog, scratching a magic word in the ground at your it feet with your sword because you’re outnumbered to scare the enemies away, looting past dead bodies with legendary gear only to find one of the unidentified amulets was a cursed amulet of strangulation and now it’s welded to you and cant be taken off. You die. Play again?
The last time I played, it was with a build that had visual tiles instead of ascii which were kinda retro fun. Hope to see a similar build on 5.0 one day.
There's been a lot of nice quality of life changes in the 3.7 builds (which has now become 5.0.0) that make going back to the older versions a bit painful.
Also some pretty major gameplay and balance changes, some of which are pretty controversial. But overall, I think that it's a big improvement, and although I don't necessarily agree with all the changes it certainly makes the mid and late game a lot more interesting and varied (not to mention dangerous) than it was in 3.6.7.
It occurs to me that procedurally generated dungeons would be amazing with LLMs. Imagine every level with the sophistication of nethack's "special" levels. I hope someone out there is working on it!
The DevTeam released nethack-3.4.3 in Dec 2003, and then pretty much went dormant for 11 years -- no new releases, no roadmap, nothing. So some time around 2013 some people not connected to the DevTeam created this project: http://nethack4.org/ . So now the DevTeam skips 4.x version numbers completely to avoid confusion.
Back when I was on undergrad I sometimes managed to get to the castle, but never very consistently. Opening NAO was one of my go to ways of dealing with spare time but I haven't played the game much since.
This is wild tho, never imagined we would get to version 5
As someone who hasn’t played for 20 years+ seems weird that they worry about spoilers in the release notes - back when I played literally the only way to learn certain game mechanics etc (eg the e-word) was to read the source code, and when you did that you found a bunch of things that were incredibly overpowered to the point of basically trivializing a lot of the game. (It’s been a long while but I seem to remember discovering very easy ways to find very powerful weapons and armour).
It seems to me that for what I was after at the time, DCSS is actually a better nethack than nethack is in that the game is more discoverable and fair and less arbitrary.
NetHack was my very first Roguelike and I ascended for the first time in 2009. I have since gone on to play many other Roguelikes, including DCSS.
I managed to win DCSS with all species, backgrounds, and gods over a period of a few years. Since then I’ve mostly lost interest in playing, and have returned to NetHack which to me feels as cozy as an old pair of slippers.
With what I know of both NetHack and DCSS, I prefer NetHack these days. DCSS is very interesting, tactically, in the early game but as you go along it becomes more and more about “keep doing the thing this character is good at” and the tactical variety vanishes. NetHack isn’t a whole lot better in that regard, but NetHack isn’t purely about tactics anyway, so it matters a lot less.
The Roguelike I most enjoy for its tactical prowess is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is far more interesting on that level. It has much more customizable characters, with talent points and a nifty scroll of upgrade system for weapons, armour, throwing weapons, wands, and rings (a system it borrowed from the game Brogue, a reimagining of the original Rogue). This character customization system is combined with a more interactive dungeon (full of traps you can trigger against monsters, spreadable water/grass/fire/poisonous gases) and a highly in-depth alchemy system that lets you recycle “junk” items into extremely useful and powerful resources.
On top of all that, SPD features a challenge difficulty system with up to 9 challenges that can be toggled independently and in combination, with the full 9 challenges presenting a worthy foe even for seasoned veterans of the game.
I started with DCSS and I played Nethack a few times. After reading some of the spoilers and realizing what I would have to memorize to win the game, I stopped playing it.
DCSS focused on tactical encounters which I enjoy a lot more than reading up what word to inscribe on the floor to make myself invincible or whatever.
I still enjoy the idea of Nethack, it’s very clever and incredibly deep, it’s just not for me.
It's related to Angband, not Nethack, and the content is not as easy to view these days, but the Angband Comic strip is a true clult classic in niche humor.
http://angband.calamarain.net/
Glad to hear it received a major update. Nethack on Slackware Linux was my childhood and has a special place in me. It taught me how to really use computers. Time to compile the source code again, folks.
> NOTICE: Starting March 7th, 2026 at 3pm UTC, players accessing the hdf-us server via SSH must connect to us.hardfought.org instead of just hardfought.org (ssh nethack@us.hardfought.org). Please update your configurations accordingly.
There was some bot DOS attack on hardfought, so they had to get behind cloudflare IIRC but that made having the same domain for somehow problematic.
And yes, it will be part of Junethack. 3.7 already was so it's actually just changing version numbers. :)
I've been playing this game since the mid 1980s since it was called Hack. I've only ascended twice, the last time being last year, and it required a heavy amount of cheating/saving.
I guess the rest of this weekend is already accounted for.
In the early days of NetHack, spoilers were not so widely known (the web didn't exist yet) and save scumming was more difficult* (few people had admin access on systems that could run it) compared to now.
I wonder how many players today will resist those temptations now that they're not only trivial to discover and execute, but also widely accepted in gaming culture.
I urge new players to resist spoilers and cheats for as long as they can. This game is full of wonderful details and interactions that are not at all obvious, and they make it exceptionally rewarding to progress when you do so by discovering them on your own.
Of course, my recommended approach will mean dying a lot. If you keep a journal of things you do and notice in each play-through, your eulogy will be more useful. :)
Take heart: Starting over means you're likely to encounter new things in the levels you've seen before, so it won't be boring.
...
*I don't recall why the save files seemed elusive back then. Perhaps the system on which I played put them someplace obscure that I lacked either the motivation or the knowledge to find. Or perhaps they were kept out of reach of the player by unix permissions, requiring setuid for the game to read them. Either way, I'm glad, because the challenge and mystery of playing with only what the game provided made it all the more interesting.
Nethack is pretty punishingly difficult even with spoilers, so trying to go spoilerless is not for the faint of heart. The game does try to allow spoilerless play but I'm not sure it's tremendously well designed in that regard. So I understand the appeal but I think this is advice is only good for people who want a truly difficult challenge.
Nethack runs as a setgid process that hides save files from users.
Kind of old fashioned now that almost every Unix system is a single user system. There are still public servers for those that want the temptation to be taken away from them.
As to spoilers... Everybody reads the spoilers. I doubt anyone has ever ascended spoiler-free.
A friend once showed me a post on rec.games.roguelike.nethack where someone was finally begging for a hint because they'd gone deep in the dungeon and couldn't figure out anything to do next. They couldn't find any staircases down, though they had found a weird vibrating square, and none of the many weird items they'd collected seemed to do anything to help.
This is one of the things that makes a spoiler free run hard to imagine. I think the Oracle can tell you about the ritual but geez it would take you forever to figure this stuff out
There is a story of a purported very deep spoiler-free run [1]. The person made a journal of everything the Oracle had to say (over multiple games) and was able to figure out a lot on their own as well.
The ! command. If you run as SUID anything, and the UNIX you had, had a SUID bug, then the shell command SUID as root. Scary when you were running on a "secure" version of UNIX, and it had a SUID bug.
On DOS, the ! Command, gave you access to the levels files, for which you could make a closet level.
I always started a few rounds as every role, and watched the hilarity begin with the stupid ways to kill yourself, which after a few months, were always hillariously fun to read.
Nethack is best played completely spoiled with the wiki open at all times. You'll miss the amazing interactions and stuff otherwise, and it is still challenging either way. It was basically made to be played by source divers in the days before wiki diving.
Savescumming is also just explore/wizard mode with more steps.
Play as you like. Just saying I did read spoilers as a kid when I played it and I feel I did not lose anything. I learned a lot of English and after all these years Nethack is still the most memorable game I played.
Possibly to avoid conflicts with Nethack4[0], which was a fork of the Nethack 3.x series back when development was stalled. I think the guy behind it later joined the main Nethack dev team.
Ah, trip down the memory lane... I guess I have to try to recall now how the game was played. There is a great likelihood last time was more than 25 years ago.
The goal is to enjoy the process of discovery. These days people don’t seem to have the patience for that, or the tolerance for trial and error to achieve it.
I’m not just talking about gamers, either. I have noticed a huge change with the high school students I tutor in mathematics. They have no patience for my attempts to teach them how to solve the problems, they just want the answer. Give me the answer! Now! Now! Now! Luckily they have LLMs to answer all their questions now, so only the few students who really want to learn continue to ask me questions.
I digress.
As for the issue of dying repeatedly, that’s a mindset thing. When I die in a game of NetHack, I take a bit of time to reflect on why I died (roughly proportional in time to how far into the game I was) then I start a new game and check out what I have. Most roles in NetHack have randomized statistics and a partly randomized starting inventory, with the Wizard being a notable extreme. This along with the first few floors of loot tend to be enough to draw me right in to the next game.
Some people get seriously dejected when they die in the game. I think they’ve been trained by more modern games to see death as a flaw in the game, as though they were watching a movie and it suddenly skipped back to an earlier point (or even the very beginning).
With NetHack death is a normal thing, and very frequent for new players. This is not at all atypical for the arcade games which were popular at the time of its original release in 1987. Another way to look at it is like chess: on the road to becoming a grandmaster, you can expect to lose many thousands of games. How you respond to and learn from those losses are what ultimately determine whether you reach the top of the mountain.
"Every time I sat down to play [the game] it was like walking into a dark shed full of rakes, treading on one, and getting blatted in the face... and then I'd go back into the shed, thinking maybe it was just the one rake, when blat in the face again. So I thought, I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll become psychotically in love with being rake-faced. And that's kind of what happened."
There are many many ways to die, some honorable, and a lot, so very stupid it boggles the mind. The stupid ways to die, was always a very good (spoilers warning) good read.
I used to play NetHack on my laptop when my then-girlfiend and I had to watch her baby sister and she'd like to sit and watch. One day we had to go to her birthday party, and because we were in our twenties and unenthused about going to a kid's costume party we got a roll of duct tape on the way there and put @ symbols on our shirts and made her a birthday card on printer paper rolled up with random letters written on the outside. She absolutely loved it but nobody else got it, and her friends parents thought we were fucking weirdos. We thought about bringing wine to quaff, probably better we didn't, lol.
My understanding is that UMoria is an independent, complete remake of the original Moria. NetHack on the other hand is the same project with the same codebase throughout its history. With that in mind, NetHack is a few months older than the Moria still under development today.
Not to say that this is necessarily the right way to look at it. It's not clear-cut, is what I'm saying.
This is going to seem either beyond idiotic (which it may be) or a troll (which it is not) but: is this game actually fun? Like, if you have zero nostalgia or anything, and your evaluation of it is based solely on what it is, is it something a person in their 20s would want to play? Is it fun in a different way than, say, Dwarf Fortress is fun? (Haven't played DF but I think I understand why people do.)
Nethack is what you get when you take a team of developers and have them focus on gameplay to the exclusion of all else. No graphics, music, marketing, apps, action sequences, or profit motive. Just pure gameplay, with a richness of interactions and possibilities unmatched by more polished modern games. Nethack is so well balanced that, for most players, being gifted the three most powerful items in the game from the start barely affects your winning chances.
AI researchers think NetHack is interesting [1, 2]. You should too!
NetHack is loads of fun. I have been playing since around 2008 now, have ascended 11 times, know a ton about the intricacies of the mechanics, and still find it a lot of fun.
I would say there's a small amount of nostalgia in the game for me, but nothing like the NES & SNES games I played in childhood, more than a decade before I even tried NetHack for the first time. NetHack is pure ASCII (at least that's how I play it) with no sound or music whatsoever. Most of my nostalgia for games comes from sound, music, atmosphere, and story. NetHack has a little bit of story but zero character development. Your character is just a vessel for inputting commands into the game, not a character in any dramatic sense of the word.
What makes the game so compelling, for me, is the grand challenge of figuring out what to do with the dungeon (and its contents) the game throws at me on each run. Sometimes the dungeon can be brutally unforgiving and extremely stingy with resources. Other times, it can feel ridiculously generous (only for you to make a dumb mistake and lose it all). Either way, the game is always throwing something new at you, even when you've been playing it for decades!
It's complicated. The soul of Nethack is opaque design, secrets, and emergent gameplay from mechanical interactions. In theory, the best way to play Nethack is by going in completely blind ("unspoiled"), so that you maximize the sense of discovery which is its most compelling trait. But in practice, I highly doubt that anyone in human history has ever beaten Nethack without looking up any spoilers. At some point you just get frustrated, decide enough is enough, and look up whatever spoilers are necessary to beat the game. Even getting started is rough for a beginner without spoilers, but at the same time taking a spoiler-maximalist approach is probably going to result in a pretty lackluster experience.
I'd say that, to some degree, roguelike game design has moved on, and when it comes to hilarity and sheer mechanical depth and breadth, games like Caves of Qud are probably better at evoking the feelings of Nethack without being so absolutely reliant on spoilers (which isn't to say that the game isn't still largely opaque, just that the essential parts are better-communicated). And on the flipside, anti-Nethacks like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup make it a design goal to be fun and playable even assuming a totally spoiled player, by focusing more on tactical and strategic decisions and being forthright about including all necessary information within the game itself.
"Is this fun" and "is it something a person in their 20s would want to play" are entirely different questions.
There are people who absolutely thrive doing the things NetHack rewards you for in the long term: perseverance, patience, planning, resourcefulness, risk management, strategizing, analyzing and learning systems... I feel like it has a timeless and ageless appeal to a particular kind of player and has never been quite palatable to mainstream audiences. If you like NetHack today you probably do it for the same reasons you would 30 years ago.
Last time I played, after many close calls, I finally got my hands on the amulet. Knowing that the journey back to daylight was likely to be at least as dangerous as the way I had come, I took a breath, saved, and set the game aside.
That was about seventeen years ago. I still have the save file. Today's announcement got me excited about the prospect of finally finishing my game, until I saw this:
> Existing saved games and bones files will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.
Drat.
Thankfully, NetHack is not one of those modern, commercial, online-only games that make it difficult to run old versions.
** SPOILER BELOW ** (in someone's reply to me)
Drat.
NetHack 5.0 changes thousands and upon thousands of things from the previous release, 3.6.7, which was 3 years ago. 17 years ago is an eternity in this game’s history. The versions may not have gone up hardly at all in that time, but the fix logs are enormous.
Adding up the line counts of the fix logs for the 3.6.X releases with 5.0, I get a total of 6814 lines. That’s bug fixes only. There’s a similarly large number of gameplay changes!
All that is to say, migrating your old save file through all of those changes would’ve been a ton of extra work to support. I know Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can migrate old save files but they have a very carefully designed system for sunsetting removed features in a way that old save files can still use them.
Wait, what happened to v4??
This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.
The story is a bit more convoluted. After the 3.4.3 release in 2003, the DevTeam stopped releasing new versions. They were still responsive when contacted by e-mail, though. But then we also didn't know how the development version looked like.
In 2014 the dev version was leaked to the community and in the following discussions with the DevTeam on how to handle this, the DevTeam got the first shoot of new devs in a while which lead to the release of 3.6.0 in 2015. This version was a polished version of the dev version, also incorporating some of the popular community patches at the time. The 3.6 branch received regular bugfix and security updates (3.6.7 was released in 2023).
Since 3.6.0 there's a mirror repository of NetHack on GitHub. So the development version that was internally numbered 3.7.0 which would become 5.0.0 was always accessible and, contrary to the 3.4.3 era, could be played anytime and was also installed on the public servers to play.
I also have a Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup with my first 3 runes around somewhere.
I'm aware I will probably lose it, but I'm also anxious to touch it. Maybe I should just get myself some good coffee tomorrow and get over with it. Biggest learning of that save is also how careful and defensive you have to play if you want to consistently get further.
DCSS has also changed so much, it's hardly the same game anymore. It's maybe a better game in many ways, but it's not the game I spent time getting to know and getting good at.
Maybe an early example of "forever games" like Minecraft which just keep getting expanded forever and move ever further from the game you knew.
One of the oldest photos on my phone is the screenshot from the one and only time I beat Nethack. (As a tourist BTW)
Relax. It's the fake amulet. I found it twice.
As I recall from my game of many, many years ago, I got the amulet to the surface and was greeted with, “Oops, that’s the fake amulet. Go back down.” I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I played it.
** SPOILER ABOVE **
Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?
There's only one documented instance of someone winning without spoilers. It's a 40-year-old game.
Nethack has been around since 1987, it's a little late for spoilers.
We’re in a thread about Nethack 5.0 release, I think it’s safe to say not everyone in this thread has finished the game.
OP is talking about a several decade old version of nethack, not nethack 5.0.0.
I've never understood why something being so old is an excuse to spoil. Many people weren't old enough to be alive when it was last a cultural icon and may not have heard about it until this thread.
I never said being old is an excuse to spoil. My comment was solely in response to OP's comment, which specifically mentioned the fact that this is a thread about Nethack 5.0.0. The fact that we are in a thread about Nethack 5.0.0 is not relevant to the particular spoiler at hand.
Not me! Maybe some day, but losing can be fun too.
People still play this game. Spoilers still spoil experiences for others.
Meh, imo spoilers only spoil experiences for people who take media too seriously.
When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Conversely, I have played Nethack on and off for decades, have read countless spoilers about it, yet still haven’t won and still find it interesting.
I generally agree.
But there are movies that can be spoiled because of the big plot twist.
Eg. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, to name a few (and [anime] Your Name, even the recently released Cosmic Princess Kaguya)
And then there are some movies where the plot is so obvious that you could have a LLM one-shot predict the whole thing.
That said if the movie/game/whatever is released for a couple years, I think the spoiler warnings should be optional regardless.
I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot.
Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?
1) NetHack is not one of those games
2) If you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably avoid discussion threads about the subject, because people will often discuss their experiences in such threads
I agree Nethack is not one of those games. People always pretended it was, though. They called "spoilers" what would be called documentation in most games. No one didn't use them (the "unspoiled" win mentioned elsewhere in the thread was a stretch even if you take them at their word). It was supposed to be theoretically possible to find out core game features from e.g. random rumors, but that was completely hypothetical - I'm pretty sure at no point in Nethack's development was it ever playtested with new players.
Not just random rumours, there are multiple specific mechanisms built into the game that explain core features, which a curious player can stumble on and then deliberately mine for information.
NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.
1. It doesn't have to be for the experience of the plot to be important.
2. Fair point but with a game like nethack I'd say a majority of folks are interested in discussing the development of nethack without necessarily discussing the plot. HN has no concept of spoiler tags nor topiced threads so it's not really easy to contain the discussion per-thread.
Besides even if you don't care about spoilers, a lot of people do, regardless of your thoughts on how you personally like to experience media.
I actually tend to live a remarkably spoiler free life, but that's mostly by avoiding threads that would give spoilers on things I care about.
Like, it's fine to care about spoilers, you just can't expect a random community that doesn't even have the concept of spoiler tags to accommodate your desire. Doubly so since that desire is competing with the desire of others to discuss the topic.
I'm also not even sure where you'd draw the distinction with a game like NetHack - how do you discuss a change on how to acquire Excalibur without discussing how to acquire Excalibur, or spoiling that you can reliably acquire it?
I agree, you can't expect this community to hide spoilers about stuff. I have seen random spoilers in topics that weren't even about media (in classic HN fashion, random tangents start to talk about books or movies). Sometimes they would attempt to mark a spoiler by adding a bunch of lines of spoiler, then the reader could just collapse the comment thread.
That said, I haven't played enough nethack to even understand the spoilers so I'll probably forget about it. I'm primarily in this thread because because my dad introduced nethack to me when I was a kid, so seeing 5.0 is an incredible accomplishment and the meta discussion about it is fascinating.
Agree 100%.
I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something.
I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.
Never watched, or even cared to watch, but now I'm curious! Thanks for the rec!
I disagree with your movie watching routine. A movie is more than just its plot.
In your opinion, a movie is more than just its plot. Not everyone values the elements of movies the same way.
I think that particular spoiler has been well known for many years, and knowing it would actually save a new player a huge waste of effort without any significant drawbacks.
No
> The build-time "yacc and lex"-based level compiler, the "yacc and lex"-based dungeon compiler, and the quest text file processing previously done by NetHack's "makedefs" utility, have been replaced with Lua text alternatives that are loaded and processed by the game during play.
This is very likely a good choice for multiple reasons, but it's truly the end of an era. (NetHack predates Lua, which has been around since 1993.) Lex and yacc are dead, long live lex and yacc!
Lua is not on base on most distros, that's sad. Also it stops being as portable.
By Amiga 68k platforms then. And maybe DOS.
Also, there no official Nethack i686 builds.
If I were them I'd try some micro-language from https://t3x.org as a pre-processor and bundle it. The T3X0 language itself can do wonders and even be ported to DOS with ease.
EDIT: ok, Lua can be portable and even they got DOS ports, this is great.
Nethack embeds Lua 5.4.8, so you don't need it installed from a distribution's package manager. As long as your system can build C99* it can build Lua. And given that Nethack 5.0.0 is C99, this dependency is not reducing portability any further.
* Lua has a LUA_USE_C89 flag so it may be more portable than Nethack 5.0.0 at this point.
> LUA_USE_C89
How much functionality/performance does one lose with this flag? Genuine question, I don't know.
If C89 and C99 were equally performant/functional, it would seem logical to just target C89 (since any C99 compiler should be able to compile C89 too). There must be some reason it's a flag.
I downloaded a Lua 5.4.8 source tarball and checked all the uses of LUA_USE_C89 (manually, without AI):
luaconf.h:50-655
- windows builds always use C89 (quote: "broadly, Windows is C89")
- in C99 Lua uses 'strtod' and 'sprintf' for hex number conversions. Otherwise, Lua provides its own implementation.
- no math function variants with l_ and f_ prefixes in C89
- optional lua_KContext type is not available with C89
llimits.h:79
- type definition C99: uintptr.t vs C89: size_t
llimits.h:184
- in C99 or GCC Lua has a pragma for inlining functions, otherwise it's macro'ed to nothing
lmathlib.c:176
- math_log has an additional optimization in C99
lmathlib.c:285- LUA_RAND32 define might fail to find 64-bit type (comment says it's for testing)
loslib.c:36
- `strftime()` only supports one-char options in C89
lprefix.h:14
- no _XOPEN_SOURCE with C89 (POSIX/XSI stuff) - no _LARGEFILE_SOURCE with C89 (manipulation of large files in gcc and other compilers)
both of these defines don't appear anywhere else in Lua source code
Thank you for looking through that; that's very interesting and helpful.
There are also official Amiga binaries. :)
The Amiga port was resurrected just a few weeks ago.
https://mastodon.social/@ipaschke@cyberplace.social/11625728...
Great; hope they can made further ports to m68k Macs and Ataris.
> By Amiga 68k platforms then.
https://nethack.org/v500/ports/download-amiga.html
> And maybe DOS.
https://nethack.org/v500/ports/download-msdos.html
The lua 5.4 sources are less than 1 megabyte in size and are MIT licensed. You can link against it but it's just as easy to directly compile it into your application directly.
Good, kinda like JimTCL-small then :)
> Lua is not on base on most distros, that's sad. Also it stops being as portable.
Huh? Usually programs just embed a Lua interpreter, I think. Famously light.
I can highly recommend the 3D client especially because it works almost everywhere, hope it will be updated for 5.0.0 soon
https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d
Web https://jamesiv4.github.io/nethack-3d/
I don't know... I played Nethack 30 years ago a lot and always felt all the graphical updates were not worth it. There's something when you can easily see the whole map in one screen. And that scary pink h appears suddenly...
Edit: but to be fair, I will try this 3d version.
"pink" h? There's a way to enable colours?
Yes, you can turn it on by setting the color option in your nethackrc file with the line:
There is also a sophisticated option for customizing the colours of in-game menus using regular expressions. You can read about that in the section on menu colours in the official Guidebook [1]. Note that the official Guidebook is considered the game’s manual and is free of spoilers. Any information you find in there is intended for all players to know before they start playing (or to reference as they go along).[1] https://www.nethack.org/v500/Guidebook.html#toc_9.12
> https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d
Giving me Ultima VII / VIII vibes.
Is it possible to access wizard mode on the web version? I suppose I could just clone it and run locally and implement it if not, but would be nice if it's already there to know how to trigger it.
Yes, it's supported. It's one of the "initialization" options when you start a new game.
As someone whose first introduction to dungeon crawler was Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (with tiles), thank you! I just tried the 3D version and it runs very well.
By 3D I had supposed you meant 1st person. This seems as good as the other 2D graphics mods, fine if it's your thing. I've always preferred the chars.
Thanks for sharing this. I think this might be what gets me to finally give Nethack a fair shake.
Anywhwere, with NodeJS? If I wanted a GUI, I'll use Vulture's Eye and that's it.
[dead]
Aw yeah! I’d love to see somebody from the DevTeam talk about this, or literally anything else they might want to talk about, at the Roguelike Celebration in October (https://www.roguelike.club/), if anyone has a connection and could encourage them to consider it. It’s a super lovely community-run online event, and everyone would be thrilled. (I was a volunteer for the first few annual events, as a person who played about a zillion games of Nethack as a kid.)
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Roguelike Radio[0], still putting out episodes - 3 already this year! - to see if any coverage emerges.
0: http://www.roguelikeradio.com/
I love Roguelike Celebration! Thanks for volunteering at it, and for boosting it here!
Wow, what a delightful surprise! I'm a huge NetHack fan and have been waiting a long time for the official 3.7 release before switching over to it. I've been a 3.6 holdout, haha.
AFAIK, the backend has moved a lot of map generation logic (and exposure of other data) to a Lua API, which is quite exciting as something for people to play with in tooling, forks, mods, etc.
Minor spoilers below:
I heard about some great balance adjustments that help to mitigate over-reliance on a single kit, such as making certain extrinsic resistances (e.g. wearing rings) stronger than their intrinsic counterparts, which adds to the decision-making in choosing what to equip. Another change I'm really excited for is the unicorn horn no longer being usable for "restore ability", so ability-draining effects (of which there are many) are a more significant threat (they were effectively zero threat until now).
Also very cool to hear the quest is now possible to do early (despite being a Bad Idea) as that has great implications for speedrunning or "fewest turns" runs.
Can't wait to dive in!
As an avid Spelunky player(still trying to complete the Cosmic Ocean...), I recently decided to explore some of Spelunky's roots, and set out to learn Nethack, and fell in love with the game. After a few weeks of dying repeatedly, perusing the wiki, and watching the Ascending in Nethack Overexplained series on youtube(highly recommended), I managed to ascend a valkyrie. Planning on trying a harder role soon. It's amazing how tense it can be despite the turn based nature of the game.
I do like the nerfs in this release. Making excalibur harder to get for Valkyries is a good one, as well as nerfing the unicorn horn. The run where I ascended felt a bit too easy at times. But of course valkyrie will still be by far the easiest role, I think. I bet I'll be stuck for quite a while trying to ascend anything else.
Spelunky seems in particular inspired by the slashem mod of Nethack, since there's a black market and shopkeepers with shotguns.
I've played so much Moria/Angband/Angband variants, it's funny that I never tried Nethack.
First impression: it has a tutorial, which should actually help increase the player base quite a bit.
It comes with some movement quality of life (e.g. moving into a door opens it, moving into an obviously dangerous thing requires confirmation).
If you enable the option, there's color coding of health (green -> full), burden level, and states like poisoning, which I think is new too.
You can filter out messages like "you have displaced your pet".
IIRC, there was always a way to filter out certain messages (or that may be an alt.org customization, but it's been a part of my config file for a while now).
My Nethack story is that in the 1990s I once got fired from a job for downloading NetHack because, I kid you not, it hit some Web log filter for the word "hack". I got dragged into a meeting with three log entries in yellow highlighter on a dot matrix printout showing the word "hack". Expalanations that it was a computer game went nowhere.
I don't think I ever legitimately completed NetHack. I think the best I did was getting to the elemental planes. Later I read about some of the strats and kit you aim for, which I think was a mistake because it kinda ruined it for me.
I'm honestly surprised this is still going on. Kudos to anyone still keeping this going. I'd kinda assumed it was forever stuck in 3.7? I see there are 3100 bugfixes and changes. I really wish there was a summary of major changes. Maybe there are none and it's just a backend revamp plus bugfixes that they bumped the major version on.
We always renamed the source archive "Viupdate.lib" and rename the binary 'vi' and the process manger would show that two copies of 'vi' were running.
Some notable changes in 5.0.0 (spoilers abound):
If a bag of holding explodes (e.g. due to putting a wand of cancellation in it), most of its items are scattered rather than lost
Amnesia no longer causes you to forget maps
Unicorn horns no longer restore lost attributes
Valkyrie ascensions (considered the easiest) are harder: chance to receive Excalibur when dipping a longsword in a fountain is decreased if not a knight, valkyries no longer start with a longsword, valkyrie doesn't gain Stealth until level 3
You can't displace pets into polymorph traps easily to get a super pet
You can apply $ to flip a coin
Damn they really nerfed valkyrie. I loved that class.
For real! Valkyrie is the perfect "just bash things while only half paying attention" class. Great for when I'm playing to unwind (as opposed to playing as a challenge to myself).
At least there's still Samurai.
That was my favorite class. Still remember the game where I mostly (t) threw my wakizashi (b) at enemies.
I've been playing on and off for 15 years, sometimes daily for months on end. The deepest I managed to go is level 11, and as soon as I enter the Big Room, I die. In fact, I went past level 8 for the first time this year. I've read all of the NetHack wiki back and forth. I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing wrong or how to improve.
I'm 46 now, and if I continue that pace, I'll be dead before I even reach the bottom, let alone ascend.
Been pkaying on and off since I was 12, 38 today.. Good times. Quick tip is to play valkyrie, dip sword for excalibur, rub any lamps and wish for sdsm, and you should be good.
Also check out DCSS, amazing game, been playing for soon 40 years.
I've had them all. I’ve had wands of wishing, I die. I’ve worn blessed greased amazing technicolor Valenciaga +9001 silver patent leather dragon 2x HiDPIscale mail, I die. I step in a fucking trap, I get surrounded by a dozen killer bees, I die. Soldier ant, I die.
Good players can kill soldier ants with almost nothing, just some rocks or darts or daggers. There’s a bit of tactics to learn but the essential step is to stop bumping into enemies and learn to fight at range, use Elbereth to keep them at a distance, use doors and corridors to limit their angles of approach.
Once you learn how to kill a fast enemy (like a soldier ant) without letting it fight you in melee, you become unstoppable for the first 1/3rd of the game or so. You discover that you don’t need the best armour in the game right away, you don’t even need more than a half-decent weapon, you just need to maintain your supplies of ranged weapons (and wands).
Stepping in traps can also be avoided with the knowledge that (with 2 special exceptions) traps only generate in rooms, not corridors. Traps can be safely searched for from adjacent spaces and once discovered remain visible permanently.
I should also point out that the two enemies you mentioned that killed you have one thing in common: poisonous sting attacks. Poison has been nerfed in the latest version (5.0) and poison resistance can be acquired in game. Furthermore, some characters actually start the game with poison resistance for free!
Haha amazing times, just have to go at it again, and again and again.
I think I got my hands on Hack when I was 8, so I've been doing the same for, uh, 39 years. Damn. At least I was learning VI keys unintentionally, so it was somewhat educational. :)
Been on and off playing since I was 19, 63 today. Always good times. I had it in my autoexec.bat, so when I got home, and turned on my machine, I was ready to play. Always abused polymorphic traps. Sorry to see them go.
One thing which I don't know if you've noticed (and I don't consider this a spoiler) but Nethack has level scaling. If you get levels too fast, faster than you get better gear, enemies outscale you. In my (admittedly very dated) experience a lot of the difficulty was striking that balance between exploring too quickly and lingering too long.
Thanks. Are you referring to the dungeon level (depth) or the experience level?
Dungeon level depth, mostly.
This being NetHack, an answer is often not as straight forward as it could be. Most of the time the level difficulty is proportional to how deep you are into the dungeon but there are levels where your experience level factors in as well.
If so, it's changed. Back when I played, spawning of random monsters (i.e. almost all of them) was based on simply dungeon level + experience level.
We can only guess about what's going wrong for you specifically . But I like guessing:
(extremely mild spoilers:)
- A core skill for Nethack is understanding how much danger you're in at any particular moment. Your comment about soldier ants below tells me you've made good progress here. But you need to recognize when you're in danger and how long you have to deal with that problem before you'll react appropriately.
- Nethack's dungeon isn't linear, it branches. (Think of the gnomish mines here, but there are other examples deeper.) When you're getting in over your head in one branch, go back up the stairs and switch to another one.
- When you're in immediate danger, Stop. Look through your inventory, consider your options. Think especially about wands, think about ways to write Elbereth, think about scrolls. Think about ways to use diagonal movement to your advantage to get to an escape, or a more defensible position. You have all the time in the world to think. There may not be a solution, but I've died more than a few times with more than one thing in my inventory that could have saved me.
- You need to be able to identify some things without waiting for a scroll of identify to fall into your lap. Price is the easiest way to identify the scroll of identify itself. It's also straightforward to learn to identify most useful wands: with spoilers or by experimenting. Engraving with the wand will often give you more information than zapping it. A lot of your early I'm In Danger toolkit will come from wands you've identified this way.
Good luck, have fun.
(Intermediate player, a few dozen ascensions 20 years ago.)
Elbereth always seemed like a cheat... Never understood the point of it. I got to the quest without it, but not deeper.
It's not a cheat. It's explained in the game's manual (the Official Guidebook [1], just search for Engrave).
It's been nerfed since 3.6.X as well. Now it can no longer be used for fighting, only escape, and attempting to fight while standing on it will make you "feel like a hypocrite" and deduct 5 from your alignment score.
[1] https://www.nethack.org/v500/Guidebook.html#toc_4
I know it's not, but I don't understand why it has to exist.
There are a million other wacky things in the game. Nothing about Elbereth seems out of place or unbalanced (since it’s been nerfed anyway).
They added the ability to apply your money to flip a coin in this version! Why does that need to exist? Because they thought of it!
Thank you for the tips, much appreciated!
13 in Slashem with the Doppleganger monk. HInt: there's the #technique feature, just type down
ingame and say hello to Dragon Ball like attacks kicking everyone's asses.Amazing.
I was never any good at Nethack. I think I just get impatient. I could regularly get a bit past Medusa but anything past that definitely involved save scumming. I was always a little jealous of the folks who could ascend regularly. But not jealous enough to, like, do anything about it.
Nethack's always been amazing for the feeling of "the devs thought of everything." I wonder how well that feeling holds up today.
Same. Partly it's that I always feel like I don't understand what's going on, mechanically speaking, as opposed to simpler roguelikes like Shattered Pixel Dungeon or Sil.
Or do what I did when I played this as a child: read the spoilers. Then start with Valkyrie, get the Mjollnir, wand of wishing, and a dragon scale mail as fast as possible. And a bag of holding and you get pretty far.
It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
Much as chess frustrated the great game masters like bobby fischer for being too easily "gamable" with opening books, I find that the mods for games like nethack, i.e. SLASHEM et al, make it where even if you try to spoil it, the massive amount of new content combined with the relative lack of documentation force you to git gud.
I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
I'm going to quote myself from a blog post I wrote back in 2012:
> Nethack is incredibly difficult, and near impossible to win without some knowledge. Whilst it could be argued that one could attain this knowledge through trial and error, it would take many many playthroughs to make any headway, even if you played in the invincible “Wizard” mode. Whilst I would recommend the use of spoilers if you wish to make progress in the game and discover what it has to offer, I wouldn’t suggest reading up on absolutely everything to give yourself an advantage. My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it. I still found the game incredibly challenging, as I was placed in situations that I couldn’t predict or prepare for, and I still had that thrill of discovery and amazement.
https://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/awesome-game-exper...
> My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it.
That is good advice. Nethack “spoilers” are more like being let in on an “in-joke” than being told the solution to a puzzle or the ending of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Die. Die?
> I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself, so I've never read spoilers. I'd like to know what others think.
You're crazy. All that does is prevent you from playing the game.
> I've always heard that one of the enjoyable experiences of Nethack was figuring things out for yourself
Ehhh. I guess "enjoyable" from a masochism perspective? Nethack has a lot of very specific mechanics and hazards that aren't explained to you.
If you're just looking to explore, then by all means dive in. But if you're trying to finish the game (or even just, make something resembling meaningful progress towards doing so), you realistically probably never will without either reading guides or putting in thousands of hours wandering and dying.
To put it in perspective - many people have played the game with guides for years without ever beating it.
List of changes:
https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...
> make unique swallowing monsters (Juiblex) resist magical digging from inside
Oh noooooooooo... yeah that's fair.
Lots of overdue gameplay changes here, really. I was something of an expert player 20 years ago, my best ascenscion being Atheist/Genoless/Wishless with no pet to boot. It seems a lot has changed. I see fixes on this list for things that bothered me then. :)
I played Nethack quite a bit as a teen but was never patient enough to ascend. Always YASD.
I revisited the game a few years ago & was happy to realize I had, in the meantime, grown the necessary patience. Ascending felt great.
The depth of NetHack is surprising. They have a saying - the devs thought of everything. If you can tolerate the mechanics, the emergent dungeon delving stories are interesting.
Dungeon crawling as a tourist with a camera, rubbing a lamp and it’s a magic lamp that gives you a wish, kicking a fountain and bringing out a succubus who steals your equipment and teleports away, finding a scroll of genocide and accidentally genociding yourself because you forgot you were polymorphed, robbing shopkeepers blind with your pet dog, scratching a magic word in the ground at your it feet with your sword because you’re outnumbered to scare the enemies away, looting past dead bodies with legendary gear only to find one of the unidentified amulets was a cursed amulet of strangulation and now it’s welded to you and cant be taken off. You die. Play again?
The last time I played, it was with a build that had visual tiles instead of ascii which were kinda retro fun. Hope to see a similar build on 5.0 one day.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Tileset
There's been a lot of nice quality of life changes in the 3.7 builds (which has now become 5.0.0) that make going back to the older versions a bit painful.
Also some pretty major gameplay and balance changes, some of which are pretty controversial. But overall, I think that it's a big improvement, and although I don't necessarily agree with all the changes it certainly makes the mid and late game a lot more interesting and varied (not to mention dangerous) than it was in 3.6.7.
I must... resist...
(I probably play to finish ever 5 years or so)
It occurs to me that procedurally generated dungeons would be amazing with LLMs. Imagine every level with the sophistication of nethack's "special" levels. I hope someone out there is working on it!
And here I thought I was safe from losing months to escapism like I did in the 2000s (learned to ascend with every class though!)
Anyone know why the skip over 4.x, or have any insight into how much play has changed as well as infrastructure?
The DevTeam released nethack-3.4.3 in Dec 2003, and then pretty much went dormant for 11 years -- no new releases, no roadmap, nothing. So some time around 2013 some people not connected to the DevTeam created this project: http://nethack4.org/ . So now the DevTeam skips 4.x version numbers completely to avoid confusion.
man that's super shady that they didn't rename the split if they didn't have buy in from the original devs to take over the project.
The people who worked on NetHack4 are now members of the mainline DevTeam and were heavily involved in the 5.0 release.
Nethack4 is the name of a popular fork, they probably wanted to avoid confusing people
They likely were inspired by Microsoft's innovation in skipping 4.x of DirectX.
Wow. Did not expect this when I logged in to HN today. It's 1998 all over again for me. :)
Wow! The inclusion of Lua bindings seems like a major step forward. This should make modding much more accessible.
Angband had a rework to use lua for 3.0.0 in 2002.
Then, nothing ever took advantage of it, and the lua was eventually stripped out.
Oh I missed that I the announcement. Nice!!!
Wow! Wonder how they test all the releases.
> The source release includes all the code for the above versions plus code for the systems listed below.
Back when I was on undergrad I sometimes managed to get to the castle, but never very consistently. Opening NAO was one of my go to ways of dealing with spare time but I haven't played the game much since. This is wild tho, never imagined we would get to version 5
Great! An excuse to play again.
My favourite way to play it is using `ssh nethack@nethack.alt.org`. Don't even have to install it. Though it seems it hasn't received this update yet.
ssh nethack@us.hardfought.org
It has been updated, and there are also eu/au region servers.
Oh cool!!!
I played this game a bit back in 3.4.3 times.
It's been great on long-haul flights to play on the laptop. Doesn't demand your battery.
As someone who hasn’t played for 20 years+ seems weird that they worry about spoilers in the release notes - back when I played literally the only way to learn certain game mechanics etc (eg the e-word) was to read the source code, and when you did that you found a bunch of things that were incredibly overpowered to the point of basically trivializing a lot of the game. (It’s been a long while but I seem to remember discovering very easy ways to find very powerful weapons and armour).
It seems to me that for what I was after at the time, DCSS is actually a better nethack than nethack is in that the game is more discoverable and fair and less arbitrary.
NetHack was my very first Roguelike and I ascended for the first time in 2009. I have since gone on to play many other Roguelikes, including DCSS.
I managed to win DCSS with all species, backgrounds, and gods over a period of a few years. Since then I’ve mostly lost interest in playing, and have returned to NetHack which to me feels as cozy as an old pair of slippers.
With what I know of both NetHack and DCSS, I prefer NetHack these days. DCSS is very interesting, tactically, in the early game but as you go along it becomes more and more about “keep doing the thing this character is good at” and the tactical variety vanishes. NetHack isn’t a whole lot better in that regard, but NetHack isn’t purely about tactics anyway, so it matters a lot less.
The Roguelike I most enjoy for its tactical prowess is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is far more interesting on that level. It has much more customizable characters, with talent points and a nifty scroll of upgrade system for weapons, armour, throwing weapons, wands, and rings (a system it borrowed from the game Brogue, a reimagining of the original Rogue). This character customization system is combined with a more interactive dungeon (full of traps you can trigger against monsters, spreadable water/grass/fire/poisonous gases) and a highly in-depth alchemy system that lets you recycle “junk” items into extremely useful and powerful resources.
On top of all that, SPD features a challenge difficulty system with up to 9 challenges that can be toggled independently and in combination, with the full 9 challenges presenting a worthy foe even for seasoned veterans of the game.
I started with DCSS and I played Nethack a few times. After reading some of the spoilers and realizing what I would have to memorize to win the game, I stopped playing it.
DCSS focused on tactical encounters which I enjoy a lot more than reading up what word to inscribe on the floor to make myself invincible or whatever.
I still enjoy the idea of Nethack, it’s very clever and incredibly deep, it’s just not for me.
It's related to Angband, not Nethack, and the content is not as easy to view these days, but the Angband Comic strip is a true clult classic in niche humor. http://angband.calamarain.net/
Last update was 1171 days ago.
Nethack is one of the best open source projects.
Been playing for hack since Fred Fish #7 1987. Still have never reached the amulet.
"Slow down. Think clearly." - Izchak
Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.
This comment made me feel better about my woeful track record with nethack
Glad to hear it received a major update. Nethack on Slackware Linux was my childhood and has a special place in me. It taught me how to really use computers. Time to compile the source code again, folks.
Here's a good report on a completely unspoiled playthrough which was an interesting read.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/c/wc...
Seems each NetHack release it gets harder and harder :)
But I since we are in May I would guess it will be part of junethack:
https://junethack.net/
I cannot get into hardfought.org right now, but nethack.alt seems to be available. I can see alt.org is using nethack 3.6.7
looking forward to giving v5 a try.
> NOTICE: Starting March 7th, 2026 at 3pm UTC, players accessing the hdf-us server via SSH must connect to us.hardfought.org instead of just hardfought.org (ssh nethack@us.hardfought.org). Please update your configurations accordingly.
There was some bot DOS attack on hardfought, so they had to get behind cloudflare IIRC but that made having the same domain for somehow problematic.
And yes, it will be part of Junethack. 3.7 already was so it's actually just changing version numbers. :)
I wonder if moving to Lua makes it easier to Hack/Mod? Maybe more easily create variations?
ASCII all the way. In the dim and distant past there was a game Mazigs on the ZX81, a maze monster game, using ZX81 graphics.
Perhaps using those graphics for Nethack would be interesting. I think we could remove FAST mode.
Generally with such ideas several people thought and implemented it 20 years ago.
Oh.
Mazogs is shit, not as impressive as I imagined it.
I've been playing this game since the mid 1980s since it was called Hack. I've only ascended twice, the last time being last year, and it required a heavy amount of cheating/saving.
I guess the rest of this weekend is already accounted for.
In the early days of NetHack, spoilers were not so widely known (the web didn't exist yet) and save scumming was more difficult* (few people had admin access on systems that could run it) compared to now.
I wonder how many players today will resist those temptations now that they're not only trivial to discover and execute, but also widely accepted in gaming culture.
I urge new players to resist spoilers and cheats for as long as they can. This game is full of wonderful details and interactions that are not at all obvious, and they make it exceptionally rewarding to progress when you do so by discovering them on your own.
Of course, my recommended approach will mean dying a lot. If you keep a journal of things you do and notice in each play-through, your eulogy will be more useful. :)
Take heart: Starting over means you're likely to encounter new things in the levels you've seen before, so it won't be boring.
...
*I don't recall why the save files seemed elusive back then. Perhaps the system on which I played put them someplace obscure that I lacked either the motivation or the knowledge to find. Or perhaps they were kept out of reach of the player by unix permissions, requiring setuid for the game to read them. Either way, I'm glad, because the challenge and mystery of playing with only what the game provided made it all the more interesting.
Nethack is pretty punishingly difficult even with spoilers, so trying to go spoilerless is not for the faint of heart. The game does try to allow spoilerless play but I'm not sure it's tremendously well designed in that regard. So I understand the appeal but I think this is advice is only good for people who want a truly difficult challenge.
Nethack runs as a setgid process that hides save files from users.
Kind of old fashioned now that almost every Unix system is a single user system. There are still public servers for those that want the temptation to be taken away from them.
As to spoilers... Everybody reads the spoilers. I doubt anyone has ever ascended spoiler-free.
[Possible obscure spoiler]
A friend once showed me a post on rec.games.roguelike.nethack where someone was finally begging for a hint because they'd gone deep in the dungeon and couldn't figure out anything to do next. They couldn't find any staircases down, though they had found a weird vibrating square, and none of the many weird items they'd collected seemed to do anything to help.
This is one of the things that makes a spoiler free run hard to imagine. I think the Oracle can tell you about the ritual but geez it would take you forever to figure this stuff out
There is a story of a purported very deep spoiler-free run [1]. The person made a journal of everything the Oracle had to say (over multiple games) and was able to figure out a lot on their own as well.
[1] http://nethack.gridbug.de/ellora/TheElloraSaga.pdf
The ! command. If you run as SUID anything, and the UNIX you had, had a SUID bug, then the shell command SUID as root. Scary when you were running on a "secure" version of UNIX, and it had a SUID bug.
On DOS, the ! Command, gave you access to the levels files, for which you could make a closet level.
I always started a few rounds as every role, and watched the hilarity begin with the stupid ways to kill yourself, which after a few months, were always hillariously fun to read.
Nethack is best played completely spoiled with the wiki open at all times. You'll miss the amazing interactions and stuff otherwise, and it is still challenging either way. It was basically made to be played by source divers in the days before wiki diving.
Savescumming is also just explore/wizard mode with more steps.
Play as you like. Just saying I did read spoilers as a kid when I played it and I feel I did not lose anything. I learned a lot of English and after all these years Nethack is still the most memorable game I played.
How would you compare these to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) or Tales of Majeyal (ToME).?
I play tons of both games but am having difficulty settling in nethack
What happened to version 4? Looks like last release was 3.6.7.
Possibly to avoid conflicts with Nethack4[0], which was a fork of the Nethack 3.x series back when development was stalled. I think the guy behind it later joined the main Nethack dev team.
[0] http://nethack4.org/
There is a variant named NetHack 4, they might want to avoid confusion with it.
Nethack 3.11 for Workgroups was right there ;)
Ah, trip down the memory lane... I guess I have to try to recall now how the game was played. There is a great likelihood last time was more than 25 years ago.
Never ascended but my main strategy revolved around something fixed in 3.7. Bummed me out so much that I stopped playing.
Now though. Maybe I'll go back to it
Sounds like their release strategy of renaming it to 5.0 worked for you! 3.7 really had developed a bad reputation, so they needed a clean break.
So, if I understand correctly, the goal is to enjoy dying thousands of times?
Or, to give up and read online how to play?
Or some of both?
The goal is to enjoy the process of discovery. These days people don’t seem to have the patience for that, or the tolerance for trial and error to achieve it.
I’m not just talking about gamers, either. I have noticed a huge change with the high school students I tutor in mathematics. They have no patience for my attempts to teach them how to solve the problems, they just want the answer. Give me the answer! Now! Now! Now! Luckily they have LLMs to answer all their questions now, so only the few students who really want to learn continue to ask me questions.
I digress.
As for the issue of dying repeatedly, that’s a mindset thing. When I die in a game of NetHack, I take a bit of time to reflect on why I died (roughly proportional in time to how far into the game I was) then I start a new game and check out what I have. Most roles in NetHack have randomized statistics and a partly randomized starting inventory, with the Wizard being a notable extreme. This along with the first few floors of loot tend to be enough to draw me right in to the next game.
Some people get seriously dejected when they die in the game. I think they’ve been trained by more modern games to see death as a flaw in the game, as though they were watching a movie and it suddenly skipped back to an earlier point (or even the very beginning).
With NetHack death is a normal thing, and very frequent for new players. This is not at all atypical for the arcade games which were popular at the time of its original release in 1987. Another way to look at it is like chess: on the road to becoming a grandmaster, you can expect to lose many thousands of games. How you respond to and learn from those losses are what ultimately determine whether you reach the top of the mountain.
"Every time I sat down to play [the game] it was like walking into a dark shed full of rakes, treading on one, and getting blatted in the face... and then I'd go back into the shed, thinking maybe it was just the one rake, when blat in the face again. So I thought, I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll become psychotically in love with being rake-faced. And that's kind of what happened."
Yahtzee was talking about Dark Souls, but it applies. (Vigorously NSFW, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STrYyhEwkbY )
That said, I think Nethack is best experienced with liberal and unapologetic spoiler use.
There are many many ways to die, some honorable, and a lot, so very stupid it boggles the mind. The stupid ways to die, was always a very good (spoilers warning) good read.
Die. Die better. So many clever ways to die.
I used to play NetHack on my laptop when my then-girlfiend and I had to watch her baby sister and she'd like to sit and watch. One day we had to go to her birthday party, and because we were in our twenties and unenthused about going to a kid's costume party we got a roll of duct tape on the way there and put @ symbols on our shirts and made her a birthday card on printer paper rolled up with random letters written on the outside. She absolutely loved it but nobody else got it, and her friends parents thought we were fucking weirdos. We thought about bringing wine to quaff, probably better we didn't, lol.
NetHack ... so many great memories of time sunk ;) To click or not to click, that is the question.
Only Amiga makes it possible. ;)
I still play Slashem daily, but vanilla Nethack it's a must because of Pratchett.
Can you name a game that is older than NetHack and still in active development? I can't.
Wikipedia's historical list of MUDs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MUDs ) suggests that MUD1 (1978, homepage: https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/ ) and MUD2 (1985, homepage: https://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php ) might still be active. From what I can tell their codebases are pretty light on substantial updates in recent years, but then again Nethack was at point considered abandoned for about a decade.
You forgot the forks like Slashem and the like, which were born from Nethack 3.4.3.
You don't have to look very far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(1983_video_game)
> Stable release 5.7.15 / 4 June 2021; 4 years ago
My understanding is that UMoria is an independent, complete remake of the original Moria. NetHack on the other hand is the same project with the same codebase throughout its history. With that in mind, NetHack is a few months older than the Moria still under development today.
Not to say that this is necessarily the right way to look at it. It's not clear-cut, is what I'm saying.
Waiting for VR
Waiting for AR
This is going to seem either beyond idiotic (which it may be) or a troll (which it is not) but: is this game actually fun? Like, if you have zero nostalgia or anything, and your evaluation of it is based solely on what it is, is it something a person in their 20s would want to play? Is it fun in a different way than, say, Dwarf Fortress is fun? (Haven't played DF but I think I understand why people do.)
Would really love informed takes on this.
Nethack is what you get when you take a team of developers and have them focus on gameplay to the exclusion of all else. No graphics, music, marketing, apps, action sequences, or profit motive. Just pure gameplay, with a richness of interactions and possibilities unmatched by more polished modern games. Nethack is so well balanced that, for most players, being gifted the three most powerful items in the game from the start barely affects your winning chances.
AI researchers think NetHack is interesting [1, 2]. You should too!
[1] https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/hambro22a/hambro22a.pdf
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00690
NetHack is loads of fun. I have been playing since around 2008 now, have ascended 11 times, know a ton about the intricacies of the mechanics, and still find it a lot of fun.
I would say there's a small amount of nostalgia in the game for me, but nothing like the NES & SNES games I played in childhood, more than a decade before I even tried NetHack for the first time. NetHack is pure ASCII (at least that's how I play it) with no sound or music whatsoever. Most of my nostalgia for games comes from sound, music, atmosphere, and story. NetHack has a little bit of story but zero character development. Your character is just a vessel for inputting commands into the game, not a character in any dramatic sense of the word.
What makes the game so compelling, for me, is the grand challenge of figuring out what to do with the dungeon (and its contents) the game throws at me on each run. Sometimes the dungeon can be brutally unforgiving and extremely stingy with resources. Other times, it can feel ridiculously generous (only for you to make a dumb mistake and lose it all). Either way, the game is always throwing something new at you, even when you've been playing it for decades!
It's complicated. The soul of Nethack is opaque design, secrets, and emergent gameplay from mechanical interactions. In theory, the best way to play Nethack is by going in completely blind ("unspoiled"), so that you maximize the sense of discovery which is its most compelling trait. But in practice, I highly doubt that anyone in human history has ever beaten Nethack without looking up any spoilers. At some point you just get frustrated, decide enough is enough, and look up whatever spoilers are necessary to beat the game. Even getting started is rough for a beginner without spoilers, but at the same time taking a spoiler-maximalist approach is probably going to result in a pretty lackluster experience.
I'd say that, to some degree, roguelike game design has moved on, and when it comes to hilarity and sheer mechanical depth and breadth, games like Caves of Qud are probably better at evoking the feelings of Nethack without being so absolutely reliant on spoilers (which isn't to say that the game isn't still largely opaque, just that the essential parts are better-communicated). And on the flipside, anti-Nethacks like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup make it a design goal to be fun and playable even assuming a totally spoiled player, by focusing more on tactical and strategic decisions and being forthright about including all necessary information within the game itself.
"Is this fun" and "is it something a person in their 20s would want to play" are entirely different questions.
There are people who absolutely thrive doing the things NetHack rewards you for in the long term: perseverance, patience, planning, resourcefulness, risk management, strategizing, analyzing and learning systems... I feel like it has a timeless and ageless appeal to a particular kind of player and has never been quite palatable to mainstream audiences. If you like NetHack today you probably do it for the same reasons you would 30 years ago.
Anyone else using claude code to play nethack in a tmux pane?
:)
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Ah yes, the game with punctuation moving around I have no idea what’s happening and exit.
Wax on, wax off.