NetHack 5.0.0

Wow. Did not expect this when I logged in to HN today. It's 1998 all over again for me. :)

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.

Can't wait to dive in!

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.

** SPOILER BELOW ** (in someone's reply to me)

List of changes:

https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/doc/fixe...

First impression: it has a tutorial, which should actually help increase the player base quite a bit.

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".