
NetHack 3.6.2 - paraiuspau
https://www.nethack.org/v362/release.html
======
Anchor
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
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

~~~
cwingrav
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
> Make sure to use mods too.

Which?

~~~
cwingrav
Just search "rimworld mods" and you'll find lots of people talking about which
to use. Most are quality of life improvements.

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SlyShy
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.

~~~
simias
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
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
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.

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scentoni
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.

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haolez
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
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
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.

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

~~~
anyfoo
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)

~~~
earenndil
Correction: it wasn't that people were hacking on it, the name 'hack' referred
to hacking at monsters.

~~~
anyfoo
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.

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mruts
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
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

~~~
grawprog
I'm not sure how long exactly. I played with the wiki open for a fair bit. The
help in nethack is pretty descriptive for keys. You end up remembering the
ones you use the most pretty quickly. Some of the more obscure ones I forget.

Something about the complexity of the controls is part of the charm for me
though. Suddenly you remember you can do something you totally forgot about
and it changes the way you play the game. Or you reach some kind of
understanding about one of the mechanics that just makes it part of your play
style.

I've played a lot of different roguelikes, nethack and its variants are some
of the few I still get that feeling of discovery from, despite playing it for
years, scouring spoilers and even looking at parts of the source for fun.

