Been playing for hack since Fred Fish #7 1987. Still have never reached the amulet.
"Slow down. Think clearly." - Izchak
Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.
NetHack 5.0.0
31–40 of 186 posts
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#32In 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. If you keep a journal of things you do and notice in each play-through, your eulogy will be more useful. :)
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 of playing with only what the game provided made it all the more interesting.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#33Last 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 ga…
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.
** SPOILER ABOVE **
Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#34There'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.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#35As 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.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#36Can you name a game that is older than NetHack and still in active development? I can't.
Wikipedia's historical list of MUDs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MUDs ) suggests that MUD1 (1978, homepage: https://www.british-legends.com/CMS/ ) and MUD2 (1985, homepage: https://www.mud2.com/CMS/index.php ) might still be active. From what I can tell their codebases are pretty light on substantial updates in recent years, but then again Nethack was at point considered abandoned for about a decade.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#37In 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 f…
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 ever ascended spoiler-free.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#38Wow! Wonder how they test all the releases.
> The source release includes all the code for the above versions plus code for the systems listed below.
Windows 8.x/10/11
Linux
macOS
AmigaDOS
Windows CE
OS/2
Unix (*BSD, System V, Solaris, HP-UX, ...)
BeOS
VMSRe: NetHack 5.0.0
#39I played this game a bit back in 3.4.3 times.
It's been great on long-haul flights to play on the laptop. Doesn't demand your battery.
Re: NetHack 5.0.0
#40Seems each NetHack release it gets harder and harder :)
But I since we are in May I would guess it will be part of junethack:
I cannot get into hardfought.org right now, but nethack.alt seems to be available. I can see alt.org is using nethack 3.6.7
looking forward to giving v5 a try.