NetHack 5.0.0

(nethack.org)

354 points | by rsaarelm 6 hours ago

46 comments

  • foresto 5 hours 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)

    • tetha 3 hours ago
      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.

    • why_at 2 hours ago
      One of the oldest photos on my phone is the screenshot from the one and only time I beat Nethack. (As a tourist BTW)
    • technothrasher 4 hours ago
      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.
      • foresto 4 hours ago
        ** SPOILER ABOVE **

        Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?

        • BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago
          Nethack has been around since 1987, it's a little late for spoilers.
          • hsbauauvhabzb 43 minutes ago
            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.
          • foresto 1 hour ago
            People still play this game. Spoilers still spoil experiences for others.
        • wetpaws 4 hours ago
          No
  • saulpw 6 hours ago
    > 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!

    • anthk 3 hours ago
      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.

      • trynumber9 1 hour ago
        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.

      • bhaak 3 hours ago
        There are also official Amiga binaries. :)

        The Amiga port was resurrected just a few weeks ago.

        https://mastodon.social/@ipaschke@cyberplace.social/11625728...

      • 6581 2 hours ago
      • themafia 2 hours ago
        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.
      • B1FF_PSUVM 2 hours ago
        > 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.

  • haunter 6 hours ago
    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/

    • pimeys 5 hours ago
      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.

    • engeljohnb 2 hours ago
      Thanks for sharing this. I think this might be what gets me to finally give Nethack a fair shake.
    • f3408fh 3 hours ago
      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.
    • SubiculumCode 4 hours ago
      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.
    • throw0101c 2 hours ago
      > https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d

      Giving me Ultima VII / VIII vibes.

    • anthk 2 hours ago
      Anywhwere, with NodeJS? If I wanted a GUI, I'll use Vulture's Eye and that's it.
    • Der_Einzige 3 hours ago
      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.
    • foresto 48 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • big85 1 hour ago
    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

    • rirze 55 minutes ago
      Damn they really nerfed valkyrie. I loved that class.
  • dansalvato 5 hours ago
    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!

  • britta 5 hours ago
    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.)
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4 hours ago
    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.

    • SubiculumCode 1 hour ago
      I've played so much Moria/Angband/Angband variants, it's funny that I never tried Nethack.
  • zorked 5 hours ago
    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".

  • CobrastanJorji 5 hours ago
    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.

    • MarsIronPI 5 hours ago
      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.
      • pimeys 5 hours ago
        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.

        • MarsIronPI 2 hours ago
          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.
          • wavemode 1 hour ago
            > 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.

        • Der_Einzige 3 hours ago
          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.
  • SubiculumCode 1 hour ago
    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/
  • Hackbraten 3 hours ago
    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.

    • andwaal 3 hours ago
      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.

      • Hackbraten 3 hours ago
        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.
        • andwaal 3 hours ago
          Haha amazing times, just have to go at it again, and again and again.
      • alex_young 1 hour ago
        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. :)
    • jeffcoat 1 hour ago
      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.)

    • anthk 3 hours ago
      13 in Slashem with the Doppleganger monk. HInt: there's the #technique feature, just type down

            #tech
      
      ingame and say hello to Dragon Ball like attacks kicking everyone's asses.
  • robbiewxyz 5 hours ago
    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.

  • Dove 4 hours ago
    > 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. :)

  • agiacalone 5 hours ago
    Wow. Did not expect this when I logged in to HN today. It's 1998 all over again for me. :)
  • omoikane 5 hours ago
  • MattCruikshank 32 minutes ago
    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?

    • B1FF_PSUVM 4 minutes ago
      Die. Die better. So many clever ways to die.
  • wwweston 4 hours ago
    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?

    • jsn 3 hours ago
      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.
    • avd201 36 minutes ago
      Nethack4 is the name of a popular fork, they probably wanted to confusing people
    • chowells 3 hours ago
      They likely were inspired by Microsoft's innovation in skipping 4.x of DirectX.
  • 9x39 5 hours ago
    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

  • stickfigure 6 hours ago
    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!

  • entuno 4 hours ago
    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.

  • bakoo 4 hours ago
    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.

        Windows 8.x/10/11
        Linux
        macOS
        AmigaDOS
        Windows CE
        OS/2
        Unix (*BSD, System V, Solaris, HP-UX, ...)
        BeOS
        VMS
  • higon 1 hour ago
    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.
  • avd201 5 hours ago
    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
  • m000 6 hours ago
    Wow! The inclusion of Lua bindings seems like a major step forward. This should make modding much more accessible.
    • monarchwadia 5 hours ago
      Oh I missed that I the announcement. Nice!!!
  • pimeys 3 hours ago
    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...

  • foresto 4 hours ago
    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.

    • Unit327 1 hour ago
      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.

    • zorked 4 hours ago
      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.

      • Steuard 2 hours ago
        [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.

        • why_at 51 minutes ago
          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
    • rcxdude 4 hours ago
      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.
    • pimeys 4 hours ago
      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.
  • dom96 2 hours ago
    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.

    • Unit327 1 hour ago
      ssh nethack@us.hardfought.org

      It has been updated, and there are also eu/au region servers.

    • SubiculumCode 1 hour ago
      Oh cool!!!
  • oceansky 4 hours ago
    Last update was 1171 days ago.

    Nethack is one of the best open source projects.

  • zeristor 3 hours ago
    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.

    • zeristor 3 hours ago
      Oh.

      Mazogs is shit, not as impressive as I imagined it.

  • askos 4 hours ago
    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.
  • adeon 4 hours ago
    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.

  • hackeraccount 5 hours 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

  • YZF 3 hours ago
    NetHack ... so many great memories of time sunk ;) To click or not to click, that is the question.
  • Zitrax 5 hours ago
    What happened to version 4? Looks like last release was 3.6.7.
    • stryan 5 hours ago
      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/

    • rsaarelm 5 hours ago
      There is a variant named NetHack 4, they might want to avoid confusion with it.
      • bombcar 5 hours ago
        Nethack 3.11 for Workgroups was right there ;)
  • helterskelter 4 hours ago
    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.
  • jmyeet 4 hours ago
    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.

  • haakon 5 hours ago
    Can you name a game that is older than NetHack and still in active development? I can't.
  • erickhill 3 hours ago
    Only Amiga makes it possible. ;)
  • tiahura 5 hours ago
    Been playing for hack since Fred Fish #7 1987. Still have never reached the amulet.
    • mordechai9000 4 hours ago
      "Slow down. Think clearly." - Izchak

      Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.

    • frenzcan 4 hours ago
      This comment made me feel better about my woeful track record with nethack
  • blindriver 2 hours ago
    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.

  • tiahura 3 hours ago
    Anyone else using claude code to play nethack in a tmux pane?
  • foo12bar 4 hours ago
    Waiting for VR
  • anthk 3 hours ago
    I still play Slashem daily, but vanilla Nethack it's a must because of Pratchett.
  • jmclnx 4 hours ago
    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.

    • bhaak 2 hours ago
      > 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. :)

  • SilentM68 5 hours ago
    :)
  • user3939382 4 hours ago
    Ah yes, the game with punctuation moving around I have no idea what’s happening and exit.