xNetHack

About the game

xNetHack is a variant of NetHack, the dungeon crawl that has been played and modified since 1987. You pick a role (a Valkyrie, an Archeologist, a Wizard and so on), arrive on the first level with a pet and a few tools, and go down. Each game builds a new set of levels, items are unidentified until you work out what they do, and a single mistake can end the run. Almost nobody wins.

What sets this variant apart is a set of design goals, written down by its maintainer: fix balance problems, remove the parts of the game that are tedious or frustrating, make the dull parts more interesting, and try out ideas from the community. It is deliberately conservative about it. Instead of piling on new monsters, it tends to make the existing ones behave differently, and instead of changing the rules wholesale it adjusts them. The result still feels like NetHack, only with fewer arbitrary ways to die and more reasons to think.

The project began in 2018 as a fork of NetHack 3.6.1. This is version 10.0, from 2026, which is built on the new NetHack 3.7 code (the official release calls it 5.0).

Playing it here

The screen is a text terminal: letters and symbols stand for you, the monsters and the dungeon, and colours tell some of them apart. You are the @; the little d or f next to you at the start is your pet. We compiled the game for the browser from the project's source code, with its own terminal interface, and a canvas draws the screen. A keyboard is required. The download is about 3 MB and the game then plays offline.

At the start the game asks for a name, then lets you pick a role or have one chosen for you (press y to accept a random one). It also offers a short tutorial level, which is a good idea the first time.

Press S to save and quit. Saved characters, and the high-score list, stay in this browser; the game shows a list of them when you come back. Clearing this site's data deletes them. The game is in English. The novels you can find and read show short passages from Terry Pratchett's books, as in the official game.

Controls

Movement uses the arrow keys, or hjkl in the classic style: h left, j down, k up, l right, with yubn for the diagonals. Holding Shift with a direction runs until something interesting appears.

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. The game tells you almost everything in a single line at the top of the screen. When it ends in --More--, press Space to continue.

Let your pet fight with you. Keep the kitten or dog close in the first levels and it will deal with things that would hurt you.

Learn one thing at a time. The in-game help (?) and the tutorial are worth the few minutes; after that, experiment with the unknown items when you are not in danger.