r/nethack

NetAcht is a tiny PICO-8 demake of NetHack. It compresses some of NetHack's core features into a small roguelike for PICO-8: procedural room-and-corridor dungeons, turn-based movement, monsters, traps, hunger, inventory, weapons, armour, potions, scrolls, wands, prayer, gold, levelling, and a Yendor-style objective. I always dreamed of having something like NetHack on my Game Boy-style devices, and this is a step toward that.

Controls:
- Arrow keys / d-pad: move or attack
- O / Z: interact, pick up, use stairs, pray at altars, search
- X / C: inventory
- In inventory: up/down to select, O to use, X to close

UPDATE -- Let's use Git to develop this project further: https://github.com/pminervini/netacht

Greetings all!

I've been playing nethack for a few decades now, starting in 1990 on a Sparc OEM cabinet running SunOS. I played on and off for a few years without much success, finally taking a break until I got my first mac in 2005. My first ascension was in 2006 and I've not stopped since then, following all the versions and updates along the way. I just play ASCII with colours and it's fine.

Fast forward to earlier this year when, during a few days with some extra free time, I ascended three days in a row. I couldn't escape it—I was getting a bit bored. It looked like it might be time to look at variants and see what was out there. I had previously shied away from them becuase I enjoyed the balance and overall feel of vanilla nethack, but was sad that some of my favourite patches, such as the Convict, never stuck.

I quickly found myself looking at EvilHack, with its promise of being "a much more difficult game". I downloaded, installed, and got into it quite quickly.

It delivers fully on its promise. Much more difficult is an understatement. But the difficulty is balanced out with some more fun stuff that makes it mostly worth it.

Things that I love about EvilHack:

• Map variety. I love all the new variants (Soko, mines, castles, Ludios) and sub-branches. They're unique, mostly fun, and add a lot to the game.
• The Ice Queen's Realm. This is peak nethack and I absolutely love everything about it. This is the frivolity that the game was built on and I adore that it continues.
• New monsters. By and large, I love the increased variety of monsters you see (with one (1) notable exception below).
• Balance improvements in so many areas.
  • I am less terrified of purple h's and blue R's than I used to be.
  • L's feel more manageable and less desperately in need of immediate genociding.
  • Dragons are way scarier and thats a good thing™.
  • Dexterity is hit by overeating more (I actually hate this, but agree it's a good change ^_^).
  • Resistances are a bit harder to get, and reflection is not quite the complete cure as it was before. A reasonable change (if occasionally frustrating).
  • Crystal plate mail isn't dumb any more.
  • Wand identification via engaving is streamlined. It almost feels like cheating, but I prefer it.
• Forging. It's a bit silly, but I do enjoy it.
• Materials. I maxxed out my AC in vanilla nethack at -52. I've been beyond -70 a few times in EvilHack now. That's kinda fun.
• Non-artefact gifts. These are fun and really change the dynamic of the game quite a bit.
• Gehennom. I love the new lava Gehennom. It's less tedious than the mazes and feels more like it it 'should'.
• Class and race varieties. I'm only doing human samurais right now, but I'm excited to try 'em all out eventually.

Things I don't love about EvilHack, but probably aren't that bad and more point an accusing finger at my sloppy playing style (hjkl + ESC non-stop).

• Shocking spheres. These things can bite my %@*(# %@%. Holy crap I hate them so much. It is now the immediate first thing I genocide in any game.
• Alignment abuse system. It is so, so, sooooo easy to accidentally abuse your alignment and not even realise it. It drives me batty. But it's changing the way I play and it's a new challenge. The 50k redemption pattern is pretty nuts too — it's rare that I can get more than 50k in a game and I'm deffos not wasthing super precious wishes on getting gold.
• Tal'Gath and the Hidden Dungeon. I usually just skip this as that 10d10 bite is frickin' ridiculous and figuring out the entire level blind is not my idea of a good time. Beholders and magic eyes aren't that bad that I'd waste precious magic markers on genociding them.
• The ease with which your weapons get ripped out of your hand. The number of times that the Sword of Annihilation has gotten ripped out of my hand and used against me is aggravating. Again, it speaks more to my careless hack and slash style, but ARGH. I am slowly learning to slow down and check my inventory every few moves to make sure i still have it.
• The Sword of Annihilation itself drives me nuts. I feel like the game is impossible without it, but the number of times somebody has stolen say The Hammer of the Gods, Sunsword, or Frost Brand out of my second hand only for the Sword of Annihilation to disentegrate them (and my frickin' weapon) is well into high single digits now. Argh. Argh. Argh.
• Dichotomy. I don't know if wounding friendlies hurts everybody's alignment record or just Samurais, but Dichotomy's blast attacks make it useless for Samurai characters — you're always going to hurt people with collatoral damage.
• See invisible is harder to get permanently. I frequently go all the way without see invis. What's the point of white Es any more 😄 ??

Things that are just nuts to me and my brain argues are unbalanced to varying degrees:

• Acid blasts. I can have -70 AC and 250 hit points, and after moving three tiles find myself on death's door because of repeated acid blasts. I've now started carrying around yellow dragon scales, but taking off the previous cloak and then putting that one one is slow. Yellow dragons are often #2 on my genocide list because of their danger levels as well but like Vampire or Elven mages (or somebody) keeps hitting me w the blasts and it's awful.
• Related: I am unable to figure out how to enchant non-merged dragon scales. As per above, I feel like I need various types a lot of the time but can't afford to have them at +0 the whole time.
• Lucifer. Just. Completely. Bonkers. A bit too much. OMG. I've beaten him exactly once.
• Wand of Orcus. Unless I am wearing the Gauntlets of Purity, 90% of my encounters with Orcus start with me having 250+ hit points and end with me having maybe 40 hit points. I am not sure how else to get death/drain resistance except perhaps polymorphing into a Vampire King/Queen? Earth castles don't stop it, nor does anything else I've experimented with. I haven't tried just constnatly running away from him, but yeesh, I dread Orcus now.
• Much like I feel like I'm screwed without death magic resistance, I feel like I desperately need the half physical damage from the Tsurugi of Muramasa to survive a lot of encounters (I only defeated Lucfier wielding that and drinking all the potions of full healing).
• Magic chests. These feel a bit too much like cheating to me, especially the one down in the Wizard's tower. I was fine just having my locked chest in Soko all the time.
• Altar availability. The only games that I do well on right now are the ones where I get the "good" mine's end with the cursed balrog figurine and the three altars. With the new artefact granting mechanisms, I really really really need to be sure to get Angelslayer (for SoA later), and ideally Sunsword or Grayswandir and Dragonbane. If the number of lv >= 10 (incl mine's end) isn't enough, I feel like I'm just screwed and the new restricted wishing won't save me enough to help me succeed later in the game.
• I love (love) the Bag of the Hesperides, but part of my brain no longer worries about bags like I used to because I know it's always in the same place. That feels like a crutch. Maybe it should be harder to find?
• I do think I should have to identify scrolls of identify at least once :shrug.

Overall, I absolutely love this variant. I don't know much about the authors of it yet, but I really feel an affinity to the values that seem to have gone into this variant. I'm working my way through the source code and hope to be able to start contributing patches eventually.

If vanilla nethack feels pretty straightforward to you, highly recommend this variant. It's so aggravatingly addictive.

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 😊

this ranger game started out so well. I hit floor 8 with two bags, 3 cameras, credit card, tins of spinach, 3 book shops and a general store and I haven’t even checked out the mines yet. A rat jumped on a polymorph trap on floor 8 and now there’s an invisible master Lich there who cursed half my stuff as I fled madly, abandoning my dog. No oracle yet. Should I even bother going into the mines or just give up now? I basically need a scroll of genocide to get past him right?

This is my first 5.0.0 game I'm playing, and it seems like Sokoban now includes rolling boulder traps just before the holes in the levels?

First, it seemed kind-of cool that the boulder being pushed just shoots into the hole once you reach the trap. But then after solving it, it was VERY hard to get my pets past the trap. The pets don't want to swap with me when I'm on the trap (seems like I can't displace them onto it). And they also avoid stepping on the trap really well. But the traps appear in the single width corridor, so it took for ever for them to accidentally step on the trap.

Then once I got my pet to the next level I see right away, there's another trap on the next level (same deal).

Is there some way to remove these traps? "untrap" doesn't work, and the wiki says that activating a trap without a boulder on the launch square should remove the trap, but that doesn't happen.

This is so frustrating without a magic whistle.

I'm coming back to Nethack for 5.0 and I'm wondering how I can play it with tiles online. I've tried on alt.org and it seems to have a tile selector drop-down in the upper right but that doesn't do what I want. What I would really like, ideally, is something that looks exactly like dcss (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) but is nethack. dcss has the ideal setup for my eyes (recognizable icons, no tiresome animations, looking-down-from-above grid) but its game design in the later stages is ... not good.

anyone else able to build successfully on macOS 10.15ish Intel 64bit?

docs say this permutation supported. but no binary release avail, you must build from source, and it fails

UPDATE:

I read the README and then followed the build instructions for my host & target (Mac 10.15.3 Intel 64bit) to the letter.

I do "make all".

Initially the output looks reasonable-ish, then aways in I start seeing a lot of warnings about FALLTHROUGH, culminating in an error about expected expression. Build fails with exit code 2. No exe produced.

End of build output:

cc -I../include -c -o engrave.o engrave.c engrave.c:664:9: warning: declaration does not declare anything [-Wmissing-declarations] FALLTHROUGH; ^ ../include/tradstdc.h:460:21: note: expanded from macro 'FALLTHROUGH' #define FALLTHROUGH attribute((fallthrough)) ^ engrave.c:765:9: warning: declaration does not declare anything [-Wmissing-declarations] FALLTHROUGH; ^ ../include/tradstdc.h:460:21: note: expanded from macro 'FALLTHROUGH' #define FALLTHROUGH attribute((fallthrough)) ^ 2 warnings generated. cc -I../include -c -o exper.o exper.c cc -I../include -c -o explode.o explode.c cc -I../include -c -o extralev.o extralev.c cc -I../include -c -o files.o files.c files.c:2029:9: error: expected expression FALLTHROUGH; ^ ../include/tradstdc.h:460:21: note: expanded from macro 'FALLTHROUGH' #define FALLTHROUGH attribute((fallthrough)) ^ 1 error generated. make[1]: *** [files.o] Error 1 make: *** [nethack] Error 2 ~/games/nethack/NetHack-5.0.0]

Hi, everyone!

I fell in love with this game the first time a saw it and now, after a number of failed atempts, the enchantment is faiding. Not because I'm frustrated or something, but simply because I cannot improve. At first, everything felt cryptic and mysterious and now it's just inaccessble. Right now I've reached a place in my life where I no longer have the time (or energy) to reinvent the wheel. I'm looking for someone who can teach me how to ascend.

Thank you all in advance! Hope you're having a good day!

I feel at a loss for words. How can anyone with access to the Wiki, prior experience and this weapon possibly lose??????

I had mentioned earlier that I wanted to retire 343-hdf (Hardfought servers) and only host the latest NetHack 5.0 and the very first version 1.3d. Community feedback should be a factor in the decision. Cast your vote, lemme know what you think. Poll ends Sunday evening EDT.

View Poll

I saw what there was to see, 3.4.3 is still superior.

Never engraved Elbereth, so changes are irrelevant. Also never used the castle wand, nor Vlad’s throne making the redistribution of wishes meaningless.

The changes to Gehennom did not balance the endgame. Instead it greatly sped it up (3/4 of the turns of my last ascension) feels like there is less to do. I concede that the mysterious force is less of a useless pain now.

Monster changes do not amount to much. New Q had as much to do as the old Q. New f to wail on, &s and fart clouds. The ‘e’ are very unbalanced. Shocking spheres can destroy your rings while you are rearranging inventory. If the sphere was not visible before you pressed enter, you get a nice equipment destruction surprise.

I'm coming back to the game after a hiatus of several years, and was thrilled to discover that 5.0.0 had just been released. (Slightly less thrilled when I found a unicorn horn, immediately started eating every poisonous thing in sight, only to discover horns don't heal stat reductions anymore...)

I was just wondering if there's a way to change water/lava back to the double tildes instead of brackets, and fountains to that weird candy cane shape, also instead of brackets (example below). It's just what I'm used to, and I much prefer it.

Thank you!

https://preview.redd.it/fcs20srz0uzg1.png?width=652&format=png&auto=webp&s=9406defc43c73ba55068f26ae192a6ae3a6f2dbe

According to the wiki...

>>!Item identities that you learn in the tutorial are removed from your discoveries list, but are not actually changed upon reentering the dungeon. If you are willing to go through the tutorial, this allows you to write down the real identities of the scroll of remove curse, ring of levitation, and wand of secret door detection, and any other items with randomized descriptions that appear in the branch.!<

https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Tutorial

If true, I'm not sure I like it. I don't want to have to repeat the tutorial to play optimally.

First 5.0 game and, as someone who is both paranoid and fat-fingered, I'm somewhat taken aback by the amount of lava everywhere. I have not found an amulet of flying, which I understand would make me largely able to ignore it. So I'm stuck repeatedly putting on and taking off the ring of levitation.

Some questions about the paranoid settings: am I correct that it will not let me just hit the wrong key and step off into the lava without warning me? What if I have previously seen the lava but currently have on a blindfold?

(I am of course taking for granted that I need to be levitating every time I fight monster that does knockback anywhere near lava or water. That the case?)

Levitating everywhere and then having to remove/wear the ring every time I want to see what objects are on the floor is very, very tedious. Surely there's a better way that I'm too dumb to have figured out.

In 5.0.0, the shopkeepers address me as 'hir' when I pick up unpaid items. It was 'sir' or 'lady' in 3.6. Is this a deliberately nongendered greeting (I've seen it as an objective pronoun, but not as a form of address) (even though my character's gender is set to male), a typo, or something else?