NetHack4 Philosophy

(2013)

I played nethack a lot in the 90’s when I was in college. The farthest I got was the plane of air. Despite never beating it I consider it to be one of my favorite games. I’m glad to see design goals are still in the same spirit. Perhaps I should pick it up again now that my patience has leveled up.

Plane of Air is pretty darn far! Those Air Elementals can be brutal.

Still, it's impressive you made it that far, and it's rough you made it so close without actually ascending!

You may or may not be interested in my "Love Letter to NetHack" talk that I did for Roguelike Celebration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy39L-EaOtk&t=16s

I talk a lot about what makes NetHack unique and influential.

If I read the site properly, did this person usurp the trademark for Nethack for himself? Is this an actual authorized version 4 of Nethack? I just downloaded it the other day and I think it was at 3.6.7

You did much better than me. I always starved to death, or I died of poison trying not to starve to death.

This is a well known indication of a beginner: experienced players apparently never die this way - but I have no idea what they do different or even ideas of what else to try and so I gave up. There was a massive wealth of options (even in the 1990s) and I always wanted to get back into it, but until I come up with a path forward it always feels like I'll never get far so what is the point...

FWIW, TNNT is in progress now

https://tnnt.org/

Wasn't there some kind of conflict between Nethack4 and Nethack3 people ages ago ?

Contrast this with the documented philosophy of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which at least partly positions itself as a philosophical antithesis to Nethack: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/master/crawl-ref/docs/cr...

I've only beat the game by playing it in the debugger. I'm not sure if anyone has really beat it honestly.

There's so many Dumb Ways to Die in the game.

I always played with cheats on just so I could try all the characters and see all their quests and stuff.

Amazing the Ascension speed record is like 49 minutes.

They cover that in the FAQ: http://nethack4.org/faq.html

Basically, NetHack development stalled out, so the developer(s?) behind NetHack 4 decided to fork it. Unlike other forks whose main goal is to put cool stuff in the game without regard for taste or balance, they wanted to stay true to the original.

Not that I agree with the fork name. It's best to not call your fork something that could be confused with the original, were the original devs to ever reach a 4.0 release.

Nintendo Switch (2) port please

I love DCSS, and in abstract I think that "meaningful decisions (no no-brainers)" is a great top priority design principle, but in practice I wish they cared more about maintaining the qualia of the game itself.

I understand why they removed food, because it wasn't "fun" or interesting to experienced players. But it was more than just a time pressure mechanic. Cutting up and eating monsters to make your bread rations go further is as thematic as the difference between Zin and Trog

I think 3 and 4 are separate forks, but I could be misremembering.

Now now, it's that the game is full of ways to have YASD, Yet Another Stupid Death.

Honestly, it's still potentially fun because of the logistical challenge (your carrying capacity is limited, so staying fed interferes with the ability to carry loot and equipment) and because of unique food effects that may confer mutations and resistances. Eating is very often not a "no-brainer" decision.

On the other hand, I love auto-explore and I don't think I could ever go back to a traditional roguelike that lacks it. "I want to see the entire level in case there are interesting things here" is only "not a no-brainer" if prepared food is very scarce and butchery is implausibly inefficient; walking around without interaction doesn't improve the game experience, etc. (And sure, you can balance the game around not needing to explore entire maps to gain experience, but then you spoil the fun for people who do want to do that.)

I ascended a couple of times and don't remember ever losing on the planes. But I had read spoilers, and over-prepared on any run where I got as far as the end of the main dungeon.

It absolutely has been done, many times by many people.

> You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of nethack4.org is not available.

:(

My experience is 30 years old so take this with a grain of salt.

I rushed goblin mines on every character. If I hit a bunch of food in town then the run was on. Store food you can’t carry every few levels. You only need to carry enough food to reach one of your stashes.

You learn good/bad food by watching pet. If your pet wants to eat it then you are good.

I have no idea how people manage vegetarian or foodless runs.

The author of nethack4 (Alex Smith) subsequently joined the original nethack (nethack 3.x) dev team: https://nethack.org/common/news.html#newmembers

I have also played for decades. I have beat it multiple times, but never on my PC. The only places I have beat it were on my (Apple) phone and on my (Android) tablet. Something about the UI difference subtly impacts my playstyle.

I hope one day the DevTeam releases a NetHack 5 which serves as a successor to both variants.

DCSS pretty much plays itself and not in a good way. No idea why people find it fun at all, and I'm a hardcore fan of CDDA, Nethack, even Brogue.

Food was almost never interesting in DCSS, except for maybe Centaurs.

Once you reached a certain point you either had a giant stack of rations or a giant stack of honeycombs if you were a Spriggan. Random mutations can happen from other non-food sources, and most items are not worth lugging around so it never really forced you to make decisions. I handled long term item storage by setting a waypoint on a square on a finished floor I used to store items. If you have ++Fire, +Cold, and +RMut then you have all of the resistance you’ll need.

FWIW I’ve won crawl dozens of times, at least once for every race and class. Placed in the top 3 for the 0.10 online tournament, both individually and my team. The two guys who beat me were both child chess prodigies, both won the Morgan Prize and both were multiple time Putnam Fellows; I went to public school and later got a GED. Felt pretty big brained after that tournament lol.

Haven’t played since 0.13

Taking advantage of this thread to ask: have anyone here tried Cogmind? What did you think of it? I’ve found that traditional roguelike fans always have strong opinions about the course of a games development, and there’s often an older version of the game that’s held in higher regard by the community than the current one.

https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/