NetHack

About the game

NetHack is a dungeon you descend rather than a story you follow. Each game builds a fresh set of levels, and the only fixed points are the top, where you start, and the bottom, where the Amulet of Yendor waits behind more danger than most characters will ever see. Almost nobody wins. That is not a flaw in the design; it is the design.

What makes it endure is that the world is written as a set of rules rather than a list of scripted events, and the rules apply to everything at once. Water conducts electricity, so a lightning bolt in a flooded room is a bad idea for whoever is standing in it — including you. A cream pie to the face blinds a monster, and it blinds you too if you are careless with it. Rings can be dropped down a well. Cockatrice corpses turn things to stone, which is fatal when eaten and useful when thrown. None of this is explained anywhere in the game. You find it out, usually by dying.

The result is a game that rewards reading the situation rather than memorising a route. Veterans of thirty years still report discovering interactions they had never tried. The community saying — the DevTeam thinks of everything — started as a joke about how often a wild idea turns out to be implemented already.

Playing it here

This is the MS-DOS build, run in DOSBox. The display is text: letters and punctuation stand in for you, the monsters and the dungeon. Your character is @. A d is a dog or a jackal, a D is a dragon, and the difference matters enormously.

Expect to lose the first several games quickly. That is the normal way in.

Controls

Movement uses the arrow keys, or hjkl in the classic Rogue style — h left, j down, k up, l right, with yubn for the diagonals.

A few things worth knowing

Eat before you starve, not after. Hunger kills more early characters than monsters do. When the status line says Hungry, deal with it.

Read the messages. NetHack tells you almost everything, once, in a single line at the top of the screen. "You feel a strange vibration" is not flavour text.

Praying works, but rarely. Your god will rescue you from starvation or serious injury, roughly once every thousand turns. Praying too often is worse than not praying at all.

Nothing is identified. A potion is "a pink potion" until you learn what pink means in this game, and it means something different in the next one. Testing unknown items is a skill in itself.

Source code

The NetHack licence requires that the complete source code accompany the game when it is distributed. It is hosted here alongside the bundle, and linked from the licences page.