u/k2_1971 — reddlx

NetHack 5.0, first official release in almost 10½ years. Crazy right? So, a fair amount of scrambling to make it available for public online play. It's already up on NAO and Hardfought. The details:

NAO - existing 3.6.7 games are still available, make the same selection you've always made in the menu to finish out your game. Once it's over (died or ascended), your next new game and all future games will be NetHack 5.0
NAO - you can copy your 3.6.7 config over to your 5.0 config, you'll see it in the same menu where you start/resume your game
NAO - web-based services will take some time to convert over for 5.0 support. The IRC bot Rodney already announces 5.0 games, NAO scoreboard already tracks new games, and the 5.0 tileset is available to use if you play using hterm
Hardfought - existing 370-hdf games are still available, once your existing game is complete, your next new game and future vanilla NetHack games will be NetHack 500-hdf (this build includes HTML dumplogs, whereis and extrainfo data)
Hardfought - the config structure is a bit different here than NAO; your existing 370-hdf config is also your 500-hdf config. Nothing to have to copy over
Hardfought - just like with NAO, some of the web-based services will take a bit of time to sort out, but on hdf it's more relabeling than anything. The 5.0 tileset is available on hterm
NAO & Hardfought - the NetHack Scoreboard (https://nethackscoreboard.org) is already tracking the new 5.0 games on both servers

The plan moving forward: NAO and Hardfought will have some version parity for a bit. NAO has always hosted the latest official version, and as far as I know will continue to do so. Hardfought has always been keen on hosting the very latest bleeding edge development version of whatever the devteam is working on next. Once that's made available, I'll host it - 5.0 official release games will transition to it (whatever it's called) once the time comes.

What about 3.6? I've had more than a couple people ask me that already. NAO will no longer host new games for it. I stopped hosting a 36x-hdf version a long time ago, right when 3.7 dev came out, and I currently have no desire to host another vanilla version - in fact, this is notice that 343-hdf is being retired here in the next week or so (existing saves will be made available to the public if you want to compile a local version of 343-hdf and finish out your game). I'm only really interested in hosting the very latest vanilla version, and the very first version (NetHack 1.3d).

There's already discussions and debates about how 5.0 is better than 3.6, or the other way around. Ten years ago when 3.6.0 was released, I remember the community collectively losing its mind over how much they hated 3.6 and would never leave 3.4.3 - and yet here we are 10+ years later recycling the same debate but with different versions, and 3.4.3 is hardly touched. If you do not like 5.0, I would say this: give it a chance, and make your voice heard if there's a feature or method change that you don't agree with. 3.6.0 evolved into 3.6.7 over the years which everyone really enjoys, 5.0 can do the same - just give it time, and provide constructive feedback.

Happy hacking 😊