But I since we are in May I would guess it will be part of junethack:
I cannot get into hardfought.org right now, but nethack.alt seems to be available. I can see alt.org is using nethack 3.6.7
looking forward to giving v5 a try.
There was some bot DOS attack on hardfought, so they had to get behind cloudflare IIRC but that made having the same domain for somehow problematic.
And yes, it will be part of Junethack. 3.7 already was so it's actually just changing version numbers. :)
Perhaps using those graphics for Nethack would be interesting. I think we could remove FAST mode.
Generally with such ideas several people thought and implemented it 20 years ago.
Mazogs is shit, not as impressive as I imagined it.
I guess the rest of this weekend is already accounted for.
I wonder how many players today will resist those temptations now that they're not only trivial to discover and execute, but also widely accepted in gaming culture.
I urge new players to resist spoilers and cheats for as long as they can. This game is full of wonderful details and interactions that are not at all obvious, and they make it exceptionally rewarding to progress when you do so by discovering them on your own.
Of course, my recommended approach will mean dying a lot. If you keep a journal of things you do and notice in each play-through, your eulogy will be more useful. :)
Take heart: Starting over means you're likely to encounter new things in the levels you've seen before, so it won't be boring.
...
*I don't recall why the save files seemed elusive back then. Perhaps the system on which I played put them someplace obscure that I lacked either the motivation or the knowledge to find. Or perhaps they were kept out of reach of the player by unix permissions, requiring setuid for the game to read them. Either way, I'm glad, because the challenge and mystery of playing with only what the game provided made it all the more interesting.
Kind of old fashioned now that almost every Unix system is a single user system. There are still public servers for those that want the temptation to be taken away from them.
As to spoilers... Everybody reads the spoilers. I doubt anyone has ever ascended spoiler-free.
A friend once showed me a post on rec.games.roguelike.nethack where someone was finally begging for a hint because they'd gone deep in the dungeon and couldn't figure out anything to do next. They couldn't find any staircases down, though they had found a weird vibrating square, and none of the many weird items they'd collected seemed to do anything to help.
On DOS, the ! Command, gave you access to the levels files, for which you could make a closet level.
I always started a few rounds as every role, and watched the hilarity begin with the stupid ways to kill yourself, which after a few months, were always hillariously fun to read.
Savescumming is also just explore/wizard mode with more steps.
I play tons of both games but am having difficulty settling in nethack
Now though. Maybe I'll go back to it
Or, to give up and read online how to play?
Or some of both?
I’m not just talking about gamers, either. I have noticed a huge change with the high school students I tutor in mathematics. They have no patience for my attempts to teach them how to solve the problems, they just want the answer. Give me the answer! Now! Now! Now! Luckily they have LLMs to answer all their questions now, so only the few students who really want to learn continue to ask me questions.
I digress.
As for the issue of dying repeatedly, that’s a mindset thing. When I die in a game of NetHack, I take a bit of time to reflect on why I died (roughly proportional in time to how far into the game I was) then I start a new game and check out what I have. Most roles in NetHack have randomized statistics and a partly randomized starting inventory, with the Wizard being a notable extreme. This along with the first few floors of loot tend to be enough to draw me right in to the next game.
Some people get seriously dejected when they die in the game. I think they’ve been trained by more modern games to see death as a flaw in the game, as though they were watching a movie and it suddenly skipped back to an earlier point (or even the very beginning).
With NetHack death is a normal thing, and very frequent for new players. This is not at all atypical for the arcade games which were popular at the time of its original release in 1987. Another way to look at it is like chess: on the road to becoming a grandmaster, you can expect to lose many thousands of games. How you respond to and learn from those losses are what ultimately determine whether you reach the top of the mountain.
Yahtzee was talking about Dark Souls, but it applies. (Vigorously NSFW, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=STrYyhEwkbY )
That said, I think Nethack is best experienced with liberal and unapologetic spoiler use.