The NetHack Home Page
Information for version 3.4.1
- What is NetHack?
- NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game that runs
on a wide variety of computer systems, with a variety of
graphical and text interfaces all using the same game engine.
Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the
emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon
and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing
everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game
presents a different landscape - the random number generator
provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the
dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of
a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and
your gender.
For information on running the program see the README that comes
with each copy.
For details on the game itself, see the Guidebook.
- When will the next version be released?
- When it's ready. The Dev Team doesn't announce
schedules so they don't miss deadlines. :-)
- Where do I find out about new versions?
- Here, or on USENET:
Read rec.games.roguelike.announce
on your local news server.
- What is the current version?
- 3.4.1
- Where do I get it?
- NetHack 3.4.1 can be obtained from the Dev Team's downloads page or by ftp from
ftp.sourceforge.net in /pub/sourceforge/nethack.
- What does it cost?
- Nothing - NetHack is free software. While there is no
monetary cost associated with it, NetHack is not in the
public domain. Please see the license
for details.
- Where can we discuss NetHack?
- The best place to discuss NetHack is on USENET:
Read rec.games.roguelike.nethack
on your local news server.
The newsgroup has a FAQ
maintained by Dylan O'Donnell.
- How do I contact the developers?
- See the contacts page.
- Can I use my old save files and bones files with the new
version?
- Almost always no, but see the release information for each
version to be sure. These files contain information from the
internal structures of the game, and these almost always change
between versions.
You can use save and bones files from 3.4.0 with
3.4.1.
You cannot use save or bones files from any earlier
version than 3.4.0 with 3.4.1.
- Can I share my bones files with my friends?
- Maybe. If you are using the same version of NetHack, compiled
with the same options, on the same kind of operating system, it
will probably work; if any of these differ, it definitely
won't.
For 3.4.1, the two executables in the Windows package
canshare bones files with each other.
- My game crashed and I've got all these files ending in a
number lying around. Can I get my game back?
- Maybe. See the documentation for your version and look for
the recover program.
- Why is it called NetHack if it's a single player game
that doesn't use the net?
- The "Net" in NetHack refers to the way the
developers, many of whom have never met in person, organize the
work on the program.
- How about a multi-player version?
- See things the Dev Team are NOT doing.
- I kicked a chest, and "heard a muffled shatter" but
didn't find any broken glass. What happened?
- We don't keep track of dungeon rubbish.
- How do I get a "-" in a player name?
- Sorry, you can't.
- I changed alignment and saved the game. When I restored I was
greeted with my original alignment but the status line shows the
new alignment.
- This is not a bug.
- Q: Will NetHack continue to be supported for Classic MacOS?
- A: Yes.
- Are the Dev Team porting NetHack to Java?
- No. "Porting" to Java would actually be a complete
rewrite, and they have no interest in that. There is no java
applet window port either.
- Are the Dev Team porting NetHack to Palms?
- No. Other people who've written in with information about
them lead them to believe that it won't work on most models,
but the largest ones *might* be able to run it, if someone wrote
bridge code adapting some major NetHack assumptions. The UI would
actually be the easy part -- that's split off from the rest
of the code anyway. The hard part is that Palms have only memory
(no disk) and a very limited heap, while NetHack is designed to
run in low memory conditions by writing everything not used to
disk and likes to keep those varying - but often large - numbers
of monsters and objects in the heap. A couple people have gone
off to look at the exact constraints, but the Dev Team
haven't heard anything to suggest that actual porting has
started, let alone successfully finished. Aside from advising
such people on NetHack internals, and merging their port code
back in should such ever appear, they have no plans in that area.
Some people may
be making progress.
- Has anyone ever thought that multiplayer NetHack would be a
neat idea?
- (Sigh.) Yes, at least a couple hundred people. The Dev Team
think you can't do that in a playable way without
compromising the basic idea of being able to think as long as you
want about what you're doing, but many people have made many
different suggestions as to the one obvious way to handle things.
If you still like the idea, you can try Crossfire, a multiplayer
roguelike for UNIX/X11. Other games to check out are MAngband and
Diablo.
- Why don't the Dev Team add Glamdring/Mournblade/etc.?
After all, you have Orcrist/Stormbringer/etc., so you must have
just overlooked the others!
- Yes, but the new names would be just like the old ones, and
wouldn't add anything new to the game. The Dev Team try to
make new things add new choices instead of adding absolutely
everything they can find. (Believe it or not. :-)
- Why don't the Dev Team add this new role? I've come
up with ideas for a leader, nemesis, and artifact, so it should
be trivial for them to name all their experience levels and
implement the new abilities and design appropriate quest levels
for them and write pages of new quest text to cover every
situation and then manage to differentiate the new role from the
existing ones when outside the quest levels.
- They're still trying to get the existing roles
differentiated.
- Could they include an "easy" option?
- That's what explore mode is for!
- How about prompting the player before they break a #conduct?
- No. The whole point of #conduct is that you are avoiding the
kinds of actions that lead to violations.
- Hey, how about a first-person shooter version (like Doom)?
- Sorry, that would be a very different game, and they like
working on this one.
- Is NetHack version 3.4 Y2K compliant?
- Yes, all since 3.2.3 have been Y2K compliant.
- What about earlier versions?
- NetHack 3.2.2 and earlier versions are not Y2K compliant (the
score file used 2 digit years and will be corrupted if added to
after the year 1999). If you need to finish games started under
3.2.2, get version 3.2.3.
- Guidebook.html
- How to play NetHack (html).
- Guidebook.pdf
- How to play NetHack (pdf).
- Guidebook.ps
- How to play NetHack (postscript).
- Guidebook.txt
- How to play NetHack (ASCII).
- nethack.txt
- The Unix manual page for NetHack.
- recover.txt
- The Unix manual page for the recover utility.
- dlb.txt
- The Unix manual page for the dlb utility. Only interesting if
you want to know how NetHack works on the inside.
- dgn_comp.txt
- The Unix manual page for the dungeon compiler. Only
interesting if you want to know how NetHack works on the inside.
- lev_comp.txt
- The Unix manual page for the level compiler. Only interesting
if you want to know how NetHack works on the inside.