[HN Gopher] NetHack4 Philosophy
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NetHack4 Philosophy
Author : suioir
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-11-04 13:52 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nethack4.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nethack4.org)
| HanClinto wrote:
| (2013)
| ectospheno wrote:
| 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.
| HanClinto wrote:
| 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!
| bluGill wrote:
| 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...
| ectospheno wrote:
| 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.
| dripton wrote:
| Minor spoilers. (I've ascended but that was a long time ago
| so some of my NetHack knowledge might be outdated.)
|
| You can mostly trust your pet. But you can't totally trust
| your pet, because there are some foods that are good for
| pets but not for @.
|
| One is tripe. I don't get tripe in my pho because NetHack
| told me it's dog food.
|
| Another is whatever species you are. If you're a human and
| eat human, or an elf and eat elf, you might get smitten for
| cannibalism. It's fine for your dog or cat to eat human or
| elf though.
|
| And there's also the edge case of almost-spoiled food. If
| your pet eats one of a group of corpses on turn n, and you
| eat another on turn n+1, it's possible that yours rotted in
| the meantime. Either because n was the exact limit, or
| because it was close and yours died a few turns before
| theirs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've only beat the game by playing it in the debugger. I'm not
| sure if anyone has really beat it honestly.
| zahlman wrote:
| It absolutely has been done, many times by many people.
| ourmandave wrote:
| 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.
| fencepost wrote:
| Now now, it's that the game is full of ways to have YASD, Yet
| Another Stupid Death.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| ranbato wrote:
| 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.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| 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.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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
| robrtsql wrote:
| 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.
| cestith wrote:
| I think 3 and 4 are separate forks, but I could be
| misremembering.
| jonchang wrote:
| The author of nethack4 (Alex Smith) subsequently joined the
| original nethack (nethack 3.x) dev team:
| https://nethack.org/common/news.html#newmembers
| jl6 wrote:
| I hope one day the DevTeam releases a NetHack 5 which serves
| as a successor to both variants.
| jmclnx wrote:
| FWIW, TNNT is in progress now
|
| https://tnnt.org/
|
| Wasn't there some kind of conflict between Nethack4 and Nethack3
| people ages ago ?
| kibwen wrote:
| 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...
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| 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
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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
| smw wrote:
| It's a _much_ better game now. You should try again!
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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.
| smw wrote:
| Let's see your dcss stats [0] link if it's that easy?
|
| [0] https://dcss-stats.com/
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Nintendo Switch (2) port please
| zahlman wrote:
| > You've enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a
| HTTPS version of nethack4.org is not available.
|
| :(
| teksts wrote:
| 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/
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(page generated 2025-11-12 23:01 UTC)