NetHack 3.6.1

April 27, 2018 8:13 PM

NetHack 3.6.1 has been released. Release notes. Downloads (so far the only ready-to-run version is Windows). Usenet announcement on Google Groups.

The previous version, on Metafilter.

NetHack has traditionally tried to support many many platforms, but in the absence of people to maintain them, this will be the last version to support several legacy versions, including 16-bit MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Classic MacOS, BeOS and OS/2. The next version will also finally drop support for pre-ANSI C.

The maintainers of some prominent variants are joining the Dev Team, Alex Smith and Patrick Muller.

In addition to bug fixes, here are some of the new features added:
- Naming to get Sting or Orcrist breaks illiterate conduct.
- Poison breath leaves a lingering trail of poison gas.
- Knives can open tins.
- Monkeys and apes can be tamed with bananas.
- Whether a ray bounces off a wall depends on the type of wall.
- Peacefuls may react when you attack other peacefuls.
- Eat a nurse corpse to cure blindness.
- Wielding the various "Bane" weapons provides extra effects, making them more useful items.
- "Elbereth" has been modified in a couple of new ways. In particular, it must now be the only thing inscribed on a square to function.
- MS-DOS support restored, for those who like playing strict terminal or DOS-based graphic.
- Pets may now make ranged attacks. Maybe this will fix the infamous problem where tamed dragons refused to ever make breath attacks....

Saves are compatible between versions 3.6.0 and 3.6.1.

posted by JHarris (60 comments total)

The last time I chucked a banana at a monkey he ignored it and ran off with my boots. Glad to see this has been addressed. All reasonable monkeys would choose bananas over boots.
posted by postcommunism at 8:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [21 favorites]

Maybe now I'll finally get farther than the damn Mines.
posted by Alensin at 8:31 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

Matt Colville has been live-streaming some of his NetHack play (3.6.0 so far) which you can find on his Twitch channel (warning, some videos start with loud electronic music), at least for the time being.
posted by Sing Fool Sing at 8:34 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

"Eat a nurse corpse to cure blindness"?

Everybody knows to cure blindness you have to go trudging across the tundra, mile after mile, to St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast (where I stole the margareen).
posted by Reverend John at 8:34 PM on April 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

Also, I'm relatively new to nethack and I try to avoid spoilers because I love the trial and error and because I don't want to snatch those trials and errors from anyone else. But I also like telling people about it.

On my best run so far I found myself in the bilious swamp of [REDACTED] where I was thrice swallowed whole by the demon [REDACTED], but thrice from within his belly smote him with the hammer named [REDACTED], until at last he burst asunder. I donned my ring of [REDACTED] and rose into the air to escape the mire. But an arch [REDACTED] spied and pursued me, slipping in and out of reality and summoning hordes of flying [REDACTED], who encircled me high above a murky pool and tore at me from all sides until I fell. It was great.

On a less auspicious run I was very hungry and I ate an egg I found lying on the cold dungeon floor. It was perfectly fresh, but about three turns later I learned that not all eggs come from chickens.
posted by postcommunism at 8:54 PM on April 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

The next version will also finally drop support for pre-ANSI C.

WHAT?!?!? YOU HERETIC BASTARDS WILL BURN IN K&R HELL.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:55 PM on April 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

I've been playing 3.6.1-dev for over a year now and would never go back. And given the glacial pace of the dev-team I won't live to see another iteration but I'll die happy...
posted by jim in austin at 9:09 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

postcommunism's heavily redacted comment sounds like a mashup of Avengers Infinity War spoilers, IKEA floorplans and the House Intelligence Committee report... and I was hoping for more Westworld or Jeopardy...
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:15 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

MS-DOS support restored

You can run, but you can't hide.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:16 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

The last time I chucked a banana at a monkey he ignored it and ran off with my boots. Glad to see this has been addressed. All reasonable monkeys would choose bananas over boots.

I mean, that’s great and all, but what about Nethack?
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:30 PM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]

Grumble. Guess it's time I upgrade from 3.4.3 -- I've been holding off because I've got all the 3.4.3 quirks mastered. I just ascended my first knight this week -- I can regularly ascend Valkyries, and often a Wizard or a Priestess.

I guess I'm just scared of how much they weakened magic cancellation in 3.6.
posted by fings at 9:57 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Flagged as Fantastic Celsius1414, haha!

Don't follow every release, but I love that NetHack and ADOM have become active again, against all expectations. A slow release pace is fine by me. I'm more a DCSS person, yet can't remotely keep up with their fast release schedule. I occasionally wonder if a new Brogue has been released, despite never having got far enough into the game for (relatively) minor tweaks to be significant.

Anyhow, I'd like to be halfway competent at NetHack one day and if the price of that is one-in-a-while releases which help keep the established fans intrigued as well as new fans attracted by the new new new news, then count me in.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 10:02 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Flagged for “promoting obsessions that threaten my marriage.” Mods?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [12 favorites]

Tourists start out with lots of gold (suitable for shopping with), a credit card, lots of food, some maps, and an expensive camera. Most monsters don’t like being photographed.

This is from disc world isn't it.

I think I've found something to do during my remaining vacation days.

Tourists in NetHack also begin armoured with a Hawaiian Shirt, IIRC (I finally kicked my decade-long NetHack addiction some years ago), so: yes.

They're also one of the hardest classes to play as. But don't let that stop you trying!
posted by avapoet at 12:27 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

How did I know this was a JHarris post as soon as I saw it and BEFORE seeing the poster name?
posted by Samizdata at 1:37 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

BTW, for you that need to waste your life untethered to a computer, Pathos is quite a lovely little free Android NetHack port with a nice touch/tiles interface and a very dedicated yet very nice developer! (In no way associated, but exchanged some bug-related emails with the dev, so thus the personal commentary.) It is actively developed also.
posted by Samizdata at 1:40 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Eep, I just read the release notes for 3.6.0... I didn't know they nerfed Elbereth!:

1. Elbereth needs to be at the start of the line to work. This means that there's no point in spamming it, because the single Elbereth at the start is all that matters.
2. Elbereth only works while you are personally standing on it. You can't use it to protect an item any more; in 3.4.3 you could activate it by dropping an item on it, in 3.6.0 you have to be on the square for it to work.
3. Elbereth has a chance to erode whenever it scares a monster. This is guaranteed to happen with a dust engraving, and can happen even with a burnt engraving (!). As a consequence, if you write a dust-E during combat, it's basically guaranteed that it won't even last the turn.
4. Elbereth doesn't work in Gehennom or (IIRC) the Planes. (This doesn't matter much as normally you wouldn't use it much there anyway, with a couple of notable exceptions.)

i used to play a (weaponless) tourist, which involved a lot of engraving elbereth and throwing rocks/darts/daggers. I don't know if I'll be able to do it again.
posted by yaymukund at 3:15 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

What is nicest graphics avail for 3.6? I see Vulture looking great but not fully up to date?
posted by Meatbomb at 3:24 AM on April 28, 2018

Don't follow every release, but I love that NetHack and ADOM have become active again, against all expectations.

I clicked on this post thinking "I can read about this without playing - at least it's not ADOM."

There goes my weekend.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:43 AM on April 28, 2018

Oh man, I don't have the free time for Nethack right now.
posted by octothorpe at 4:07 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

ssh [e-mail]
> You are lucky! Full moon tonighttomorrow.

The best part of nethack.alt.org is that you can play from anywhere: telnet, ssh, or your browser.

The second best thing is that you can spectate other people's games as they play, which is surprisingly fun.
posted by SemiSophos at 4:48 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

I had forgotten how long the last Nethack release thread got. Yikes!
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:16 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Literally the only thing keeping this from destroying my life is that my laptop doesn't have a number pad and I find playing with just the normal keys extremely annoying.
posted by praemunire at 9:04 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

It’s really amazing how cheap number pads are. You could get a Bluetooth pad for less than $30.
posted by egypturnash at 9:07 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

My old laptop didn't have a numpad, so I bought a USB one for like $5 at Target.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:25 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Does the number pad make it that much better? I play with regular controls on my laptop. It seems ok.
posted by hot_monster at 9:42 AM on April 28, 2018

Literally the only thing keeping this from destroying my life is that my laptop doesn't have a number pad and I find playing with just the normal keys extremely annoying.

This is what made ADOM, which allows custom keybindings, my roguelike drug-of-choice--I type on a Dvorak layout which makes the default non-numberpad movement nonsensical. I used to have a painstakingly developed custom keyboard file for ADOM with nearly every action redefined to make it playable.

Upon googling I see Nethack apparently now also supports custom keybindings (and I have a number pad now anyway), so maybe it's time to give it another shot.
posted by egregious theorem at 10:06 AM on April 28, 2018

Unless you're comfortable using the vi-style movement keys (I extremely am not) I'm not sure how you'd move diagonally without a numpad or remapping over keys that are already mapped to something.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:13 AM on April 28, 2018

Just think of yourself as cosplaying a grid bug.
posted by Etrigan at 11:07 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

I can't see how a subminor version release merits a best of the web. Though looking at the release notes, I suspect NetHack is an elaborate hoax, a bit like the rules in Mornington Crescent.
posted by scruss at 11:10 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Elbereth always felt way to overpowered to me, like cheating. Also very spoilery; is there any way in-game to discover it?
posted by Nelson at 11:10 AM on April 28, 2018

I spend many hours a week using Vim so the standard Nethack key mapping is already burned into my brain.
posted by octothorpe at 11:16 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Nelson: "Elbereth always felt way to overpowered to me, like cheating. Also very spoilery; is there any way in-game to discover it?"

I'm pretty sure that there's a fortune cookie that at least hints at it.
posted by octothorpe at 11:17 AM on April 28, 2018

Elbereth always felt way to overpowered to me, like cheating. Also very spoilery; is there any way in-game to discover it?

If the in-game help counts, looking for help on "engrave" tells you that engraving Elbereth is a good idea (AFAICT from the online guidebook anyway; I don't have Nethack on any machines right now because sometimes I need to see the sun)
posted by yomimono at 11:27 AM on April 28, 2018

I can't see how a subminor version release merits a best of the web.

1. Nethack revisions are really uncommon. The previous version, 3.6.0, came after a twelve year hiatus. Although the Dev Team has said that they are trying to release them faster now, it's still been about two-and-a-half years since then.

~ and ~

2. Nethack is the geek game of all geek games. Not only was it the foremost example of roguelike gaming for much of its history, and not only is it still pretty dang good, but it's got this huge reputation:

* People play Nethack for years without a win. It's the exemplar of what I call a "Mt. Everest" game, a big weighty thing most players don't expect to win, something for them to chew on for months, if not years.
* It requires something like a master's degree in the game to win.
* It's a pretty good simulation of a solo classic D&D game, although with some essential changes (it's very easy to get experience levels early on).
* The game is known for a huge variety of special cases, to the extent where it defies believe. The phrase often used is, The Dev Team thinks of everything.
* There's all kinds of crazy obscure strategies, and great interactions with them from the game. Hearing stories of people's wins, and even losses, is as much fun as playing.
* It's a bona-fide piece of internet history. The "Net" in its name refers to Usenet, and new versions are still announced there.
* And, of course, it's all open source and free and available for a plethora of systems.
posted by JHarris at 11:30 AM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

Wow! They're going to start using ANSI C a mere 29 years after its original release. I feel less bad about dragging my feet on a Python 2 to 3 conversion.
posted by grouse at 11:37 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Elbereth always felt way to overpowered to me, like cheating. Also very spoilery; is there any way in-game to discover it?

There's a major oracle consultation that reveals it. That said, it's been reduced in potency in recent versions. It no longer works in Gehennom or the endgame areas, for instance.
posted by JHarris at 11:45 AM on April 28, 2018

I can't see how a subminor version release merits a best of the web

I think the podcast tries to keep that up, but the blue moved on from that criteria a long time ago.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:03 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's been something like 30 plus years since I played this game (a lot. A real lot.) Seeing mention of some of these things ("Elbereth" for example, nurses)... just gives me chills. I think I'll go do something else now...
posted by emmet at 1:46 PM on April 28, 2018

scruss: "I can't see how a subminor version release merits a best of the web."

Good thing that hasn't been the standard for about a decade.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:59 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sing Fool Sing: "Matt Colville has been live-streaming some of his NetHack play (3.6.0 so far) which you can find on his Twitch channel (warning, some videos start with loud electronic music), at least for the time being."

"Loud electronic music"? I'll have you know that's the TIME RIDER.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:00 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Good thing that hasn't been the standard for about a decade.

So it's also no longer the plastic.com it's ok to like?
posted by lkc at 3:30 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

This is great...there is an entire generation of kids who have grown up with "modern" computer games that feature super-realistic and sophisticated graphics/video that leave little to the imagination, who have never known the pure existential horror of being eaten by a grue...
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 4:24 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Nethack, in fact, although it contains zorkmids and other references to Zork, does not contain any grues. ADOM has them, however, both as monsters, and also (if I remember right) as a slight random chance of instant death if you're in a dark area and are sufficiently unlucky (Doomed-level).
posted by JHarris at 4:32 PM on April 28, 2018

Anyone have a link to the Mac OS X binary? It looks like you need to mangle a lot of build files and figure out a workable toolchain to get it to compile on anything non-Linux. Homebrew doesn't have a formula for it.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:41 PM on April 28, 2018

Finally, something to distract me from Angband 4.1.2.
posted by mollweide at 4:41 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Last night there was only a Windows binary up. You'll have to build your own, unfortunately, or rely on someone else to build it for you, until they get around to supplying official binaries.
posted by JHarris at 4:45 PM on April 28, 2018

(Which, yes, sucks. Sorry about that. Surely someone here has to have built it for macOS by now?)
posted by JHarris at 4:46 PM on April 28, 2018

→ Nethack is the geek game of all geek games

It's a geek game. It's certainly a challenge to compile, and the documentation for new users is atrocious. I fiddled about for ages getting the games user perms right and ensuring that X11 graphics were enabled, then I got a first screen of not-quite-fitting-my-terminal vaguely-Tolkeinish crap (I detect the stench of esr) followed by a screen straight out of DUNJON on the Pet. Which was at least fun. The X thing never happened.

I think I remember playing moria on and off on the Amiga. It was okay if you had low expectations, and nethack has got no hook at all for me. I'll stick with Dope Wars, thanks.

→ It looks like you need to mangle a lot of build files and figure out a workable toolchain to get it to compile on anything non-Linux.

There's a hell of a lot of dicking around even on Linux. It could badly use some autoconf love. Produces a tonne of compiler warnings that code that mature shouldn't.
posted by scruss at 7:31 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

ESR referenced Nethack in his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar something like a thousand years ago. He was once considered a fairly influential open source thinker. What he's become in the years since he wrote that should not be held against Nethack.

In any case, Nethack is still the geek game, I say, by whatever power is given me to declare such, even though it's gotten lots of competition since. Dwarf Fortress may have surpassed it in sheer complexity (both of play and interface), but by its very nature is its own self-contained world (or more accurately, it generates its own self-contained, dwarfen world, and supplies a rudimentary human interpretation of it), so it doesn't have NH's many references and in-jokes. And Minecraft seems to have become more a kids' thing these days. The other true roguelikes each have their strengths, sometimes considerable ones, but Nethack is still the best in total.

Nethack is not a Tolkien game except in the sense that it has a ton of references without heeding their source, which is pretty much also how Dungeons & Dragons got them. If you don't like it in this form, you might seek out Vulture's, on Steam, which is Nethack with a fancy --dare I say it-- shmancy interface. As for the compiler warnings and such, as noted above, Nethack is still written in pre-ANSI C, and is one of the most ported computer programs ever made, the current version still able to be compiled on Amigas, Atari STs, MS-DOS and classic Mac OS. That's gonna make your code a bit funky.

In fact, the next version abandons those platforms. It is the end of an era, although arguably necessary for Nethack to continue. Anyway, I invoke the general rule of fan enthusiasm on Metafilter: you might not like it, but others do, and it's doing no harm, so how about let us have our fun, and I won't mention any of the dozen-or-so reasons I can think of to tear down Dope Wars.
posted by JHarris at 7:53 PM on April 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

"Elbereth" now erodes based on attacks by the player, not monsters scared

So does this mean that you can just stand on a square and rest indefinitely? That'd be an anti-nerf.
posted by fnerg at 8:46 PM on April 28, 2018

You followed a strict vegan diet.
You were an atheist.
You never hit with a wielded weapon.
You were illiterate.
You never genocided any monsters.
You never polymorphed an object.
You never changed form.
You used no wishes.

.. more or less how I want my eulogy to go.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:11 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

(copied from Notable Ascensions, where you can find narratives of victory, utterly inexplicable for the uninitiated)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:24 PM on April 28, 2018

Is there a decent iOS interface yet? I know there have been dozens of attempts but all the ones I tried have been awkward, convoluted, often unusable kludges.

I’ll never have the dedicated free time to experience a game like this on a PC, but I’d love to have a useable mobile version I could dip into for 10 minute sessions a few times a day. Alas, I suspect converting the Nethack interface to touchscreens in a way that isn’t a clumsy retrofit is a particularly tall order.
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:52 PM on April 28, 2018

So does this mean that you can just stand on a square and rest indefinitely? That'd be an anti-nerf.

Hmm, may be true, although you'd probably starve if you relied on it too much unless you had a ring of slow digestion.

Yeah Ian A.T., it's a game that really, really wants a keyboard interface. This is why I think the Windows graphics version, with drop-down menus for commands, sucks. I think the best version of vanilla Nethack is the MS-DOS version with VGA graphics, which is why I'm glad to see it's back, although there's no official binary yet and I'd have to run it in Dosbox anyway.
posted by JHarris at 11:33 PM on April 28, 2018

It looks like you need to mangle a lot of build files and figure out a workable toolchain to get it to compile on anything non-Linux. Homebrew doesn't have a formula for it.

For the toolchain, try this to get the Command Line Tools package. To get a quick TTY binary these are the steps I use. This just builds the game into the playground folder and doesn't do any installing.

If you want to play the X11 version with tiles for some reason, get XQuartz. Do the steps above but while you're editing macosx10.10, also change the WANT_WIN_* and WANT_DEFAULT from TTY to X11. (You also have to exit WANT_DEFAULT's value to X11, not x11.)

Those are the things that work for me, at least.

Or just play on alt.org. That's what I do when I want to actually play and not mess around with the code.
posted by fleacircus at 7:39 AM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Alt.org is awesome! If you can do without graphics (and I hear someone's even written a client to remedy that), you get the ability to play on a shared score list (top 2,000!), community-contributed fortune cookies, dungeon graffiti and gravestone markings, user interface aids, the ability to watch other people's games as they play, the ability to send them messages in their game (Nethack has built-in email support and will present the player your message as a Scroll of Mail!), and last but definitely not least, bones files from other players, meaning you can find the remains of previous adventurers along your way, along with all their stuff, but also what killed them....
posted by JHarris at 8:25 AM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also, a public service announcement--

There are two Nethack wikis. Please avoid linking to the Wikia one (nethack.wikia.com). Some time back the community moved to a self-hosted and ad-free wiki, nethackwiki.com. Not only are there no ads, but this seems to be the wiki that gets most of the updates.
posted by JHarris at 8:29 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

I just play on alt.org. I hate playing with graphics anyway and I like that I can save my game and pick it up on any computer.
posted by octothorpe at 9:12 AM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm kinda looking forward to getting a classic MacOS build. I've been working on bringing a couple of PowerBook Duos back to life, and this is the perfect thing to be playing on them.
posted by wotsac at 10:40 AM on April 29, 2018 [3 favorites]