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)

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!

https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d

Web https://jamesiv4.github.io/nethack-3d/

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!

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

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.

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".

I'm 46 now, and if I continue that pace, I'll be dead before I even reach the bottom, let alone ascend.

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.

https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...

I revisited the game a few years ago & was happy to realize I had, in the meantime, grown the necessary patience. Ascending felt great.

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

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. :)

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.

Anyone know why the skip over 4.x, or have any insight into how much play has changed as well as infrastructure?

(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!

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.

> The source release includes all the code for the above versions plus code for the systems listed below.

    Windows 8.x/10/11
    Linux
    macOS
    AmigaDOS
    Windows CE
    OS/2
    Unix (*BSD, System V, Solaris, HP-UX, ...)
    BeOS
    VMS

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.

Nethack is one of the best open source projects.

I play tons of both games but am having difficulty settling in nethack

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/c/wc...

It's been great on long-haul flights to play on the laptop. Doesn't demand your battery.

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.

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.

Now though. Maybe I'll go back to it

Or, to give up and read online how to play?

Or some of both?

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.

Would really love informed takes on this.

I guess the rest of this weekend is already accounted for.

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.