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Rendered at 00:15:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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!
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.
* Lua has a LUA_USE_C89 flag so it may be more portable than Nethack 5.0.0 at this point.
How much functionality/performance does one lose with this flag? Genuine question, I don't know.
If C89 and C99 were equally performant/functional, it would seem logical to just target C89 (since any C99 compiler should be able to compile C89 too). There must be some reason it's a flag.
luaconf.h:50-655
- windows builds always use C89 (quote: "broadly, Windows is C89")
- in C99 Lua uses 'strtod' and 'sprintf' for hex number conversions. Otherwise, Lua provides its own implementation.
- no math function variants with l_ and f_ prefixes in C89
- optional lua_KContext type is not available with C89
llimits.h:79
- type definition C99: uintptr.t vs C89: size_t
llimits.h:184
- in C99 or GCC Lua has a pragma for inlining functions, otherwise it's macro'ed to nothing
lmathlib.c:176
- math_log has an additional optimization in C99
if (base == l_mathop(2.0))
res = l_mathop(log2)(x);
else
- LUA_RAND32 define might fail to find 64-bit type (comment says it's for testing)
loslib.c:36
- `strftime()` only supports one-char options in C89
lprefix.h:14
- no _XOPEN_SOURCE with C89 (POSIX/XSI stuff) - no _LARGEFILE_SOURCE with C89 (manipulation of large files in gcc and other compilers)
both of these defines don't appear anywhere else in Lua source code
The Amiga port was resurrected just a few weeks ago.
https://mastodon.social/@ipaschke@cyberplace.social/11625728...
https://nethack.org/v500/ports/download-amiga.html
> And maybe DOS.
Huh? Usually programs just embed a Lua interpreter, I think. Famously light.
Edit: but to be fair, I will try this 3d version.
OPTIONS=color
Giving me Ultima VII / VIII vibes.
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!
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 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.
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
At least there's still Samurai.
I'm 46 now, and if I continue that pace, I'll be dead before I even reach the bottom, let alone ascend.
Also check out DCSS, amazing game, been playing for soon 40 years.
Once you learn how to kill a fast enemy (like a soldier ant) without letting it fight you in melee, you become unstoppable for the first 1/3rd of the game or so. You discover that you don’t need the best armour in the game right away, you don’t even need more than a half-decent weapon, you just need to maintain your supplies of ranged weapons (and wands).
Stepping in traps can also be avoided with the knowledge that (with 2 special exceptions) traps only generate in rooms, not corridors. Traps can be safely searched for from adjacent spaces and once discovered remain visible permanently.
I should also point out that the two enemies you mentioned that killed you have one thing in common: poisonous sting attacks. Poison has been nerfed in the latest version (5.0) and poison resistance can be acquired in game. Furthermore, some characters actually start the game with poison resistance for free!
(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.)
It's been nerfed since 3.6.X as well. Now it can no longer be used for fighting, only escape, and attempting to fight while standing on it will make you "feel like a hypocrite" and deduct 5 from your alignment score.
They added the ability to apply your money to flip a coin in this version! Why does that need to exist? Because they thought of it!
This being NetHack, an answer is often not as straight forward as it could be. Most of the time the level difficulty is proportional to how deep you are into the dungeon but there are levels where your experience level factors in as well.
#tech
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.
It's a fantastic game if you have a bit of imagination. The possibilities are endless and it's so rewarding to ascend finally.
> Nethack is incredibly difficult, and near impossible to win without some knowledge. Whilst it could be argued that one could attain this knowledge through trial and error, it would take many many playthroughs to make any headway, even if you played in the invincible “Wizard” mode. Whilst I would recommend the use of spoilers if you wish to make progress in the game and discover what it has to offer, I wouldn’t suggest reading up on absolutely everything to give yourself an advantage. My general rule of thumb was to look something up when I came across it. I still found the game incredibly challenging, as I was placed in situations that I couldn’t predict or prepare for, and I still had that thrill of discovery and amazement.
https://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/awesome-game-exper...
That is good advice. Nethack “spoilers” are more like being let in on an “in-joke” than being told the solution to a puzzle or the ending of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.
You're crazy. All that does is prevent you from playing the game.
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.
https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...
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. :)
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.
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.
(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!
Anyone know why the skip over 4.x, or have any insight into how much play has changed as well as infrastructure?
Then, nothing ever took advantage of it, and the lua was eventually stripped out.
> 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
VMSMy 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.
It has been updated, and there are also eu/au region servers.
It's been great on long-haul flights to play on the laptop. Doesn't demand your battery.
Nethack is one of the best open source projects.
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.
I managed to win DCSS with all species, backgrounds, and gods over a period of a few years. Since then I’ve mostly lost interest in playing, and have returned to NetHack which to me feels as cozy as an old pair of slippers.
With what I know of both NetHack and DCSS, I prefer NetHack these days. DCSS is very interesting, tactically, in the early game but as you go along it becomes more and more about “keep doing the thing this character is good at” and the tactical variety vanishes. NetHack isn’t a whole lot better in that regard, but NetHack isn’t purely about tactics anyway, so it matters a lot less.
The Roguelike I most enjoy for its tactical prowess is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is far more interesting on that level. It has much more customizable characters, with talent points and a nifty scroll of upgrade system for weapons, armour, throwing weapons, wands, and rings (a system it borrowed from the game Brogue, a reimagining of the original Rogue). This character customization system is combined with a more interactive dungeon (full of traps you can trigger against monsters, spreadable water/grass/fire/poisonous gases) and a highly in-depth alchemy system that lets you recycle “junk” items into extremely useful and powerful resources.
On top of all that, SPD features a challenge difficulty system with up to 9 challenges that can be toggled independently and in combination, with the full 9 challenges presenting a worthy foe even for seasoned veterans of the game.
DCSS focused on tactical encounters which I enjoy a lot more than reading up what word to inscribe on the floor to make myself invincible or whatever.
I still enjoy the idea of Nethack, it’s very clever and incredibly deep, it’s just not for me.
Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/c/wc...
But I since we are in May I would guess it will be part of junethack:
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.
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. :)
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.
Mazogs is shit, not as impressive as I imagined it.
I guess the rest of this weekend is already accounted for.
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.
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.
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.
On DOS, the ! Command, gave you access to the levels files, for which you could make a closet level.
I always started a few rounds as every role, and watched the hilarity begin with the stupid ways to kill yourself, which after a few months, were always hillariously fun to read.
Savescumming is also just explore/wizard mode with more steps.
I play tons of both games but am having difficulty settling in nethack
Now though. Maybe I'll go back to it
Or, to give up and read online how to play?
Or some of both?
I’m not just talking about gamers, either. I have noticed a huge change with the high school students I tutor in mathematics. They have no patience for my attempts to teach them how to solve the problems, they just want the answer. Give me the answer! Now! Now! Now! Luckily they have LLMs to answer all their questions now, so only the few students who really want to learn continue to ask me questions.
I digress.
As for the issue of dying repeatedly, that’s a mindset thing. When I die in a game of NetHack, I take a bit of time to reflect on why I died (roughly proportional in time to how far into the game I was) then I start a new game and check out what I have. Most roles in NetHack have randomized statistics and a partly randomized starting inventory, with the Wizard being a notable extreme. This along with the first few floors of loot tend to be enough to draw me right in to the next game.
Some people get seriously dejected when they die in the game. I think they’ve been trained by more modern games to see death as a flaw in the game, as though they were watching a movie and it suddenly skipped back to an earlier point (or even the very beginning).
With NetHack death is a normal thing, and very frequent for new players. This is not at all atypical for the arcade games which were popular at the time of its original release in 1987. Another way to look at it is like chess: on the road to becoming a grandmaster, you can expect to lose many thousands of games. How you respond to and learn from those losses are what ultimately determine whether you reach the top of the mountain.
Yahtzee was talking about Dark Souls, but it applies. (Vigorously NSFW, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STrYyhEwkbY )
That said, I think Nethack is best experienced with liberal and unapologetic spoiler use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(1983_video_game)
> Stable release 5.7.15 / 4 June 2021; 4 years ago
Not to say that this is necessarily the right way to look at it. It's not clear-cut, is what I'm saying.
Would really love informed takes on this.
AI researchers think NetHack is interesting [1, 2]. You should too!
[1] https://proceedings.mlr.press/v176/hambro22a/hambro22a.pdf
I would say there's a small amount of nostalgia in the game for me, but nothing like the NES & SNES games I played in childhood, more than a decade before I even tried NetHack for the first time. NetHack is pure ASCII (at least that's how I play it) with no sound or music whatsoever. Most of my nostalgia for games comes from sound, music, atmosphere, and story. NetHack has a little bit of story but zero character development. Your character is just a vessel for inputting commands into the game, not a character in any dramatic sense of the word.
What makes the game so compelling, for me, is the grand challenge of figuring out what to do with the dungeon (and its contents) the game throws at me on each run. Sometimes the dungeon can be brutally unforgiving and extremely stingy with resources. Other times, it can feel ridiculously generous (only for you to make a dumb mistake and lose it all). Either way, the game is always throwing something new at you, even when you've been playing it for decades!
I'd say that, to some degree, roguelike game design has moved on, and when it comes to hilarity and sheer mechanical depth and breadth, games like Caves of Qud are probably better at evoking the feelings of Nethack without being so absolutely reliant on spoilers (which isn't to say that the game isn't still largely opaque, just that the essential parts are better-communicated). And on the flipside, anti-Nethacks like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup make it a design goal to be fun and playable even assuming a totally spoiled player, by focusing more on tactical and strategic decisions and being forthright about including all necessary information within the game itself.
There are people who absolutely thrive doing the things NetHack rewards you for in the long term: perseverance, patience, planning, resourcefulness, risk management, strategizing, analyzing and learning systems... I feel like it has a timeless and ageless appeal to a particular kind of player and has never been quite palatable to mainstream audiences. If you like NetHack today you probably do it for the same reasons you would 30 years ago.
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)
NetHack 5.0 changes thousands and upon thousands of things from the previous release, 3.6.7, which was 3 years ago. 17 years ago is an eternity in this game’s history. The versions may not have gone up hardly at all in that time, but the fix logs are enormous.
Adding up the line counts of the fix logs for the 3.6.X releases with 5.0, I get a total of 6814 lines. That’s bug fixes only. There’s a similarly large number of gameplay changes!
All that is to say, migrating your old save file through all of those changes would’ve been a ton of extra work to support. I know Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can migrate old save files but they have a very carefully designed system for sunsetting removed features in a way that old save files can still use them.
In 2014 the dev version was leaked to the community and in the following discussions with the DevTeam on how to handle this, the DevTeam got the first shoot of new devs in a while which lead to the release of 3.6.0 in 2015. This version was a polished version of the dev version, also incorporating some of the popular community patches at the time. The 3.6 branch received regular bugfix and security updates (3.6.7 was released in 2023).
Since 3.6.0 there's a mirror repository of NetHack on GitHub. So the development version that was internally numbered 3.7.0 which would become 5.0.0 was always accessible and, contrary to the 3.4.3 era, could be played anytime and was also installed on the public servers to play.
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.
Maybe an early example of "forever games" like Minecraft which just keep getting expanded forever and move ever further from the game you knew.
Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?
When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with.
Conversely, I have played Nethack on and off for decades, have read countless spoilers about it, yet still haven’t won and still find it interesting.
But there are movies that can be spoiled because of the big plot twist.
Eg. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, to name a few (and [anime] Your Name, even the recently released Cosmic Princess Kaguya)
And then there are some movies where the plot is so obvious that you could have a LLM one-shot predict the whole thing.
That said if the movie/game/whatever is released for a couple years, I think the spoiler warnings should be optional regardless.
Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?
2) If you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably avoid discussion threads about the subject, because people will often discuss their experiences in such threads
NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.
2. Fair point but with a game like nethack I'd say a majority of folks are interested in discussing the development of nethack without necessarily discussing the plot. HN has no concept of spoiler tags nor topiced threads so it's not really easy to contain the discussion per-thread.
Besides even if you don't care about spoilers, a lot of people do, regardless of your thoughts on how you personally like to experience media.
Like, it's fine to care about spoilers, you just can't expect a random community that doesn't even have the concept of spoiler tags to accommodate your desire. Doubly so since that desire is competing with the desire of others to discuss the topic.
I'm also not even sure where you'd draw the distinction with a game like NetHack - how do you discuss a change on how to acquire Excalibur without discussing how to acquire Excalibur, or spoiling that you can reliably acquire it?
That said, I haven't played enough nethack to even understand the spoilers so I'll probably forget about it. I'm primarily in this thread because because my dad introduced nethack to me when I was a kid, so seeing 5.0 is an incredible accomplishment and the meta discussion about it is fascinating.
I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something.
I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.