8 ms·

NetHack 3.6.2

182 points by paraiuspau 7y ago

SlyShy 7y ago
I used to love playing NetHack and ascended multiple times. Sometimes I wish DCSS hadn't ruined NetHack's UX for me. I'd love to see NetHack reimagined with a friendly UI on-par with DCSS and other modern roguelikes.
- weka 7y ago
  Nethack, among other games, has inspired my try at the dungeon crawler RPG that I work on during my free-time. But, I must admit, the code's not very good... [1] https://github.com/delaford/game https://github.com/delaford/game
- logicprog 7y ago
  There are a lot of variations of NetHack, among them the official successor project, Nethack4[1]. One of its goals is to have a better interface. [1]: http://nethack4.org/ http://nethack4.org/
  - jonchang 7y ago
    Nethack 4 is explicitly not an official successor project, and in fact the developer of NH4 has joined the original Nethack dev team to port interface improvements.
    - logicprog 7y ago
      Oh ok my bad!
- simias 7y ago
  I'm in the same boat (although I never managed to ascend in nethack). DCSS is really a great game with stellar design and UX. I think the problems with NH go beyond the UX, it's the whole balance and progression that's clunky. In particular a lot of very important mechanics are very difficult to figure out without reading spoilers. Simply figuring out what cursed items do and how to get rid of the curse is rather complicated. Meanwhile in DCSS it's extremely simplified, IMO for the best. If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).
  - philsnow 7y ago
    DCSS suffers from the "Star Trek hallway" problem. In ST:TNG, many episodes feature officers striding through hallways determinedly while not advancing the plot at all. Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways. Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect. But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).
    - athroway 7y ago
      DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much. When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.). An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.
mruts 7y ago
Haven’t played in awhile, but have been trying to ascend for over 12 years at this point. Best game ever, imo. Should really try again sometimes. The android app is really good but the IPhone one sucks, tempted to switch back to android for that reason alone..
- grawprog 7y ago
  I personally think the android ports of nethack and unnethack are probably the gold standard for what porting an old roguleike to touch ui should be. Everything about them is extrememly intuitive. The movement works perfectly and the context bar and quick popup keyboard make playing almost quicker than on pc for me. Plus, there's the whole, nethack in your pocket bonus. I've tried ports of angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead for android and found angband and DCSS to be totally unplayable. CDDA was playable, but kind of clunky and awkward and not very fun in the end. Highly recommend anyone into roguelikes give the android port of nethack a go.
  - LoSboccacc 7y ago
    > popup keyboard I think pathos fit the bill better, even if it's a simplified nethack, precisely because a popup keyboard is not a central part of the gameplay experience
    - grawprog 7y ago
      I've got pathos, I could be wrong but I think it was designed for mobile originally wasn't it and only based on nethack's rules not a port of the original? I was referring more to roguelikes originally designed for keyboards and adapted to touch ui rather than ones designed around it from the beginning. Just for a game with the complexity of nethack, that expects a full keyboard full of controls(with modifier keys), originally designed around a bare terminal, they found a particularly efficient and intuitive(for me at least) solution, especially compared to other ports i've played.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    How easy is it to learn/remember what all the keys do? I've tried nethack a few times, and had a very... Dwarf-Fortress like experience, in that I had no idea how to accomplish anything via the opaque UI.
Anchor 7y ago
From the release notes: "Parchment and vellum are made from animal skin so change material composition and color for spellbooks with those descriptions from paper to leather; eating those books now breaks vegetarian conduct" (emphasis mine) There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.
- chobobro 7y ago
  I find that games that have that amazing intricacy are often passion projects by one developer or a very small team and have been in development for a long time, often decades. Besides NetHack and Dwarf Fortress, I would highly recommend Factorio to anyone with an interest in any kind of engineering and Aurora 4x to anyone who played Stellaris or other space 4x but wants an insane amount of complexity
  - dmos62 7y ago
    Thanks! This thread is a treasure trove of recommendations.
  - logicprog 7y ago
    I would classify Stellaris itself as having an insane amount of complexity, but compared to DF, NetHack and especially Aurora 4x, it is nothing!
  - cwingrav 7y ago
    Love those games too. Rimworld is the latest in my opinion. All the fun of Factorio and Dwarf Fortress plus a fairly good UI and space faring feel. Wasted/played too many hours. Make sure to use mods too. On steam.
    - WalterGR 7y ago
      > Make sure to use mods too. Which?
haolez 7y ago
The one thing that I dislike about NetHack are the monsters' AI. They are usually really dumb and just try to swarm you to your death. Regardless, it's one of my favorite games of all time.
- wwweston 7y ago
  If they weren't dumb, either there'd have to be great care taken to make sure dumb != harder, or I'm not sure how people would win. There are better players than me, but I'm not terrible, and especially since Elbereth got nerfed (then thankfully only semi-nerfed), I'd bet I'm getting out of the early game an average of only 1 in 5 times (and ascending only half of those).
  - haolez 7y ago
    It's not as if I want them to be smarter and harder, but levels like The Castle are simply a pile of completely different and unrelated monsters with a single objective: to destroy you! But I don't know what a different implementation would look like.
hippich 7y ago
Not quite relevant, but always had the question - why fantasy-world game is called NetHack?
- anyfoo 7y ago
  It was developed by multiple people "hacking" on it over the "net", back when "the net" was far from being ubiquitous, and so using it for collaborative software development was still special. Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
  - hippich 7y ago
    Thank you!
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Correction: it wasn't that people were hacking on it, the name 'hack' referred to hacking at monsters.
    - anyfoo 7y ago
      Sorry about that. I was much more sure about the "net" part than the "hack" part, but then the wiki kind of seemed to confirm my guess about why the original "Hack" was called as such: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
- iron0013 7y ago
  I have read that, supposedly, "hacking" used to refer to exploring the tunnels underneath a college campus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_and_tunnel_hacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_and_tunnel_hacking
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
scentoni 7y ago
My current favorite roguelike is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Maj%27Eyal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Maj%27Eyal due to the rich list of available classes and a mostly useful autoexplore feature.

182 points by paraiuspau 7y ago

I used to love playing NetHack and ascended multiple times. Sometimes I wish DCSS hadn't ruined NetHack's UX for me. I'd love to see NetHack reimagined with a friendly UI on-par with DCSS and other modern roguelikes.

weka 7y ago
Nethack, among other games, has inspired my try at the dungeon crawler RPG that I work on during my free-time. But, I must admit, the code's not very good... [1] https://github.com/delaford/game https://github.com/delaford/game
logicprog 7y ago
There are a lot of variations of NetHack, among them the official successor project, Nethack4[1]. One of its goals is to have a better interface. [1]: http://nethack4.org/ http://nethack4.org/
- jonchang 7y ago
  Nethack 4 is explicitly not an official successor project, and in fact the developer of NH4 has joined the original Nethack dev team to port interface improvements.
  - logicprog 7y ago
    Oh ok my bad!
simias 7y ago
I'm in the same boat (although I never managed to ascend in nethack). DCSS is really a great game with stellar design and UX. I think the problems with NH go beyond the UX, it's the whole balance and progression that's clunky. In particular a lot of very important mechanics are very difficult to figure out without reading spoilers. Simply figuring out what cursed items do and how to get rid of the curse is rather complicated. Meanwhile in DCSS it's extremely simplified, IMO for the best. If some people reading this thread are interested in trying a roguelike for the first time I strongly suggest not going for Nethack, unless you really enjoy not understanding 90% of what's happening and dying repeatedly on the first few levels. DCSS is definitely a good entry point, I think Angband is also easier on beginners (it can be very difficult to finish it but the early game is more straightforward than NH).
- philsnow 7y ago
  DCSS suffers from the "Star Trek hallway" problem. In ST:TNG, many episodes feature officers striding through hallways determinedly while not advancing the plot at all. Similarly in DCSS the levels are so large and there's so much space between interesting bits, that you spend a fair amount of your time mindlessly pressing keys to stride through the hallways. Mind you, DCSS is much better about this than Nethack because there are things like waypoints and fast travel, loot/stash search (with ^F), etc. I'm not contesting that it's better than Nethack in this respect. But if I may say, Brogue is better about this in that there are very few 'wasted' turns: the food clock is very finely tuned so you really can't waste too much time or you'll die, levels are very compact so there's not as much exploring to do (but there's just as much tactical depth on each level, if not more, because of how the environment works in Brogue).
  - athroway 7y ago
    DCSS has been incredibly streamlined this decade with tons of quirky features being removed. You can spend most of your time playing it spamming the 'o' (auto-explore) and 'tab' (auto-engage enemies) key without missing out on much. When you're not auto-o-tabbing, i.e. when you encounter more dangerous monsters, the game rewards tedious habits such as playing very conservatively (hide and seek, kiting, climbing up/resting/climbing down/etc.). An explanation was that the dev team targets the top players first and doesn't want to allow them to find a way to suddenly cheese through the game, so they lock down on every quirk, feature or strategy that lets them do so. Problem is, the top players are really good and always find another way to cheese, so the devs play a game of cat and mouse to streamline the game further in the name of balance. Meanwhile, newbies struggle and mid-players get bored.

mruts 7y ago

Haven’t played in awhile, but have been trying to ascend for over 12 years at this point. Best game ever, imo. Should really try again sometimes. The android app is really good but the IPhone one sucks, tempted to switch back to android for that reason alone..

grawprog 7y ago
I personally think the android ports of nethack and unnethack are probably the gold standard for what porting an old roguleike to touch ui should be. Everything about them is extrememly intuitive. The movement works perfectly and the context bar and quick popup keyboard make playing almost quicker than on pc for me. Plus, there's the whole, nethack in your pocket bonus. I've tried ports of angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead for android and found angband and DCSS to be totally unplayable. CDDA was playable, but kind of clunky and awkward and not very fun in the end. Highly recommend anyone into roguelikes give the android port of nethack a go.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > popup keyboard I think pathos fit the bill better, even if it's a simplified nethack, precisely because a popup keyboard is not a central part of the gameplay experience
  - grawprog 7y ago
    I've got pathos, I could be wrong but I think it was designed for mobile originally wasn't it and only based on nethack's rules not a port of the original? I was referring more to roguelikes originally designed for keyboards and adapted to touch ui rather than ones designed around it from the beginning. Just for a game with the complexity of nethack, that expects a full keyboard full of controls(with modifier keys), originally designed around a bare terminal, they found a particularly efficient and intuitive(for me at least) solution, especially compared to other ports i've played.
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  How easy is it to learn/remember what all the keys do? I've tried nethack a few times, and had a very... Dwarf-Fortress like experience, in that I had no idea how to accomplish anything via the opaque UI.

Anchor 7y ago

From the release notes: "Parchment and vellum are made from animal skin so change material composition and color for spellbooks with those descriptions from paper to leather; eating those books now breaks vegetarian conduct" (emphasis mine) There is something heartwarming about the attention to detail in some games. NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, ... I wish more games would be made with this mindset. Many modern games seem to overemphasize the "gaming" aspect, and sometimes forget the "playing" with all its joyful intricacies.

chobobro 7y ago
I find that games that have that amazing intricacy are often passion projects by one developer or a very small team and have been in development for a long time, often decades. Besides NetHack and Dwarf Fortress, I would highly recommend Factorio to anyone with an interest in any kind of engineering and Aurora 4x to anyone who played Stellaris or other space 4x but wants an insane amount of complexity
- dmos62 7y ago
  Thanks! This thread is a treasure trove of recommendations.
- logicprog 7y ago
  I would classify Stellaris itself as having an insane amount of complexity, but compared to DF, NetHack and especially Aurora 4x, it is nothing!
- cwingrav 7y ago
  Love those games too. Rimworld is the latest in my opinion. All the fun of Factorio and Dwarf Fortress plus a fairly good UI and space faring feel. Wasted/played too many hours. Make sure to use mods too. On steam.
  - WalterGR 7y ago
    > Make sure to use mods too. Which?

haolez 7y ago

The one thing that I dislike about NetHack are the monsters' AI. They are usually really dumb and just try to swarm you to your death. Regardless, it's one of my favorite games of all time.

wwweston 7y ago
If they weren't dumb, either there'd have to be great care taken to make sure dumb != harder, or I'm not sure how people would win. There are better players than me, but I'm not terrible, and especially since Elbereth got nerfed (then thankfully only semi-nerfed), I'd bet I'm getting out of the early game an average of only 1 in 5 times (and ascending only half of those).
- haolez 7y ago
  It's not as if I want them to be smarter and harder, but levels like The Castle are simply a pile of completely different and unrelated monsters with a single objective: to destroy you! But I don't know what a different implementation would look like.

hippich 7y ago

Not quite relevant, but always had the question - why fantasy-world game is called NetHack?

anyfoo 7y ago
It was developed by multiple people "hacking" on it over the "net", back when "the net" was far from being ubiquitous, and so using it for collaborative software development was still special. Before "nethack", there was "hack", but I don't know much about that, except that it was a clone of "rogue", the original "rogue-like". There is some history here: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack
- hippich 7y ago
  Thank you!
- earenndil 7y ago
  Correction: it wasn't that people were hacking on it, the name 'hack' referred to hacking at monsters.
  - anyfoo 7y ago
    Sorry about that. I was much more sure about the "net" part than the "hack" part, but then the wiki kind of seemed to confirm my guess about why the original "Hack" was called as such: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Hack But rereading it now, it just seems like someone looked up the word "hack" after the fact, and your explanation makes more sense.
iron0013 7y ago
I have read that, supposedly, "hacking" used to refer to exploring the tunnels underneath a college campus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_and_tunnel_hacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_and_tunnel_hacking
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

scentoni 7y ago

My current favorite roguelike is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Maj%27Eyal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Maj%27Eyal due to the rich list of available classes and a mostly useful autoexplore feature.