Nethack 5.0.0 is out!

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https://nethack.org/v500/release.html

While I prefer Dynahack these days for the more luxurious TUI and additional content, Nethack has been one of my favourites from as far back as my Amiga days. Once you realise you can at least try to do anything with anything¹ (use the * wildcard character when asked for an item), the game opens up in ways most RPGs just can’t.

¹ use a wand to write in the dust, train a pet to steal from shops, throw potions at monsters, eat (or refrigerate) slain monsters to gain their abilities, rub lamps just in case, wash the ink off scrolls, use a credit card to unbolt doors…

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Nethack is still getting updates?! :O

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The devteam were silent for like a decade, then woke up and started making updates in 2015.

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edited

There was actually a lot of development going on outside the official DevTeam, by people such as paxed (host of NAO). When development officially resumed, there were a ton of patches from paxed and other community members that got incorporated, so it really culminated in the addition of a lot of development work that had continued all along.

Now paxed and a few of these other community members are officially part of the DevTeam.

Edit: oops! Fixed the NAO link!

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Oh, I didn’t know that. I knew there were a lot of very widely-used patches, especially on NAO, but not that their developers then got brought into the fold. Cool!

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Browsing around nethack.org I found this link if anyone’s in need of an introduction to nethack: https://web.archive.org/web/20210212161326/http://www.linuxvoice.com/nethack/

The comments are full of people sharing their yasd stories.

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C99 compliant!!

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Yeah, I’m guessing, it’s a major release in the semantic version sense, not necessarily content-wise, but that still caught me offguard. The big news is that they write their code different now. 🙃

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Oh it’s a HUGE release, content-wise. They have changed a ton of things in this one. They just don’t mention content changes in the fix logs, for spoiler reasons!

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where are the content changes?

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They aren’t fully documented yet, but here’s the NetHack Wiki 5.0.0 page which lists most of them. It’s a pretty substantial list, despite being incomplete!

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I can’t figure out how to install this on Arch Linux, wtf

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OP edited

Still stuck? I was going to wait for it to show up in the repos, but it hasn’t so far. So here’s how I did it (for my regular user account, not system-wide):

git clone https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack
cd NetHack
sys/unix/setup.sh sys/unix/hints/linux.500

Now you’ve got a Makefile in the top-level NetHack as well as the src subdirectory. Find the else #!WANT_SOURCE_INSTALL block in both and edit HACKDIR to set the directory for the game itself and SHELLDIR to set the directory for the launcher script.

(And if I actually knew how to use make, I’d probably have a less clunky method than this. Anyone?)

make fetch-Lua
make all
make install
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