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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 made the game all the more interesting.
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 e er ascended spoiler-free.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?
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!
https://github.com/JamesIV4/nethack-3d
Web https://jamesiv4.github.io/nethack-3d/
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 made the game 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 e er ascended spoiler-free.
(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!
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.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Tileset
https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...
Now though. Maybe I'll go back to it
[0] http://nethack4.org/
Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.