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.
> 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!
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...
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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!
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...
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!
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.)
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.
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".
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
Wow. Did not expect this when I logged in to HN today. It's 1998 all over again for me. :)
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
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
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!
List of changes:
https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...
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.
Wow! The inclusion of Lua bindings seems like a major step forward. This should make modding much more accessible.
Oh I missed that I the announcement. Nice!!!
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 ;)
Can you name a game that is older than NetHack and still in active development? I can't.
Been playing for hack since Fred Fish #7 1987. Still have never reached the amulet.
:)