OMG. NetHack 5.0 was released on May 2nd! I downloaded it May 6th and I am currently playing my first game of it as Bob an left-handed Ranger. Read on to find out what the heck NetHack is and how Bob and I do on our decent into the Dungeons of Doom!
Historical Context
NetHack is what is called a “rogue like game”, Rogue being the first in its genre made for Unix in 1980. The general idea is that you are an adventurer that descends into a cave to retrieve an amulet. The beauty of rogue-like games is that the levels are randomly generated, so no two games are ever the same. I got my first version of it in later in the 80’s probably around 1985 for my IBM PC via mail order or BBS (I don’t remember 100% but think first via mail order then via BBS) and it probably looked something like this:
NetHack came out mid 80’s but I only discovered it in the university, probably around 1990 and have been playing ever since. Not daily, but every few years something turns me back onto it and I begin playing somewhat obsessively for a few weeks and then move on. So that is about 36 years of playing it and I have never even come close to finishing it. Obviously to hold my attention all those years you can understand dear reader that it is not a normal game but a very rich experience, especially given that most of those 36 years was playing with only the ASCII character pallet, meaning just letters to represent the immersive Dungeons of Doom. The first time I saw a “D” (dragon) I think I had to change my underwear. I think my longest run was on one of my daughter’s Nintendo DS consoles because it had two screen’s allowing the full map to always be visible on the top screen and a zoomed in map on the bottom screen.
Nethack 5.0
So I had no idea that people were still working on NetHack and the previous major release was 3.6.0 that came out back in 2015. The 4.x line was jumped over as the last version of 3.6 was 3.6.7 that was released in 2023 and then BAM on May 2nd 5.0 was released!
I downloaded the windows version and was so happy to see that the zip was only 12.7 MB:
I fired it up, choose Bob as a name and Ranger as my class and was off and running:
So I will update my progress here until this current bought of addiction runs its course!
Update May 10th, 9222 moves, playing time 4 hours, 4 minutes and 21 seconds
I have finished the Gnomish Mines for the first time in my life and retrieved a luckstone for my troubles! The real playing time is quite a bit more than the time mentioned above as I am cheating a bit in that I save everyone and awhile and then if I die (which is all the fucking time) I copy back the save file and continue again. That is the thing about NetHack, you can be on top of the world and then dead in zero comma. But I am happy! I have never made it through the Gnomish Mines!
Links, References and things that helped with this
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).