![[Two People Crossing Swords.]](index.gif)
For the latest version (3.4.1), click here.
The game of NetHack is a single player dungeon simulation. A player may play with a character over a period of days, weeks, even months, attempting to win the game by retrieving the Amulet of Yendor which is located deep down in Gehennom. For more information, read the NetHack manual or the Guidebook (both should be in your NetHack distribution). If the Guidebook is missing from your distribution, you can find some links to it by looking at the latest news page.
NetHack is a direct descendant of the games Hack and Rogue. The "Net" in NetHack refers to its development by a team of programmers here in the usenet community (normally referred to as the NetHack Development Team, or, usually, the Dev Team). The current version of NetHack is version 3.3.1 (released August 10, 2000). The Dev Team is always taking suggestions and bug reports, and is already working on the next version. Don't bother to send them bug reports on versions older than version 3.3.1, the current version! If you have any comments or suggestions on NetHack, and you are still playing, say, version 3.2.3, please get version 3.3.1 first and check whether your proposed change has already been implemented.
The Dev Team will never give an indication on how far it has progressed with the next version, neither will it give a clue as to what changes there will be in the next version. When the next version is finished, it will just POOF! appear, with no advance warning. Also note that it is not even known (outside the Dev Team) what the next version's number will be (although 3.3.2 sounds the most probable). To give you an impression of how long it might take: the elapsed time between the release of versions 3.1.3 and 3.2.0 was almost 3 years, 5 years passed between 3.2.2 and 3.2.3/3.3.0, and even the 'minor' upgrade from 3.3.0 to 3.3.1 took eight months, so please be patient!
NetHack itself is a very complex game, compared to ones such as Moria, Rogue, or Angband (even if it is not necessarily more difficult to win). There are several different classes, a larger variety of items (from keys to artifacts), a larger, and meaner collection of monsters, and several quests that a player must finish before winning the game. As opposed to the randomness that is found in the other games, NetHack tends to have set playing patterns that one must follow to win. There are also many new dungeon features as well as interesting things that a player can do.
These NetHack pages include the following chapters:
On this Nethack home page, and on all other pages maintained by yours truly, links to files that are bigger than about 30 kByte have the size of that file mentioned.