After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6
nethack.org
nethack.org
You can play or watch games in progress by:
ssh joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org
It's also available as a standalone program you can run on your own machine.
DCSS has some made some great innovations, such as fantastic use of color and auto-explore, tons of really unique gods and races, it's scriptable(!) in Lua, the list goes on and on...
[1] - http://crawl.develz.org/
Here's a screenshot of me at the moment: http://i.imgur.com/mZXTnh1.png
There are a bunch of available servers:
* Sydney, Australia: http://crawl.project357.org
* Arizona, USA: http://crawl.akrasiac.org
* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.berotato.org
* Georgia, USA: http://crawl.s-z.org
* Paris, France: http://crawl.xtahua.com
* Falkenstein, Germany: http://crawl.lantea.net
* Seoul, Korea: http://webzook.net
* Tokyo, Japan: http://lazy-life.ddo.jp
And of course you can watch others playing on webtiles, too.
Essentially what you can get from: https://lookupdb.guy.ht/#term/death%20yak
Here's the query syntax for Sequell (a bot): https://github.com/crawl/sequell/blob/master/docs/listgame.m...
And just to add to the link dump, here's a list of user defined commands for the bots: https://loom.shalott.org/userdef.html
They have a tournament a few times a year, with every release. You build teams (or play on a team by yourself) and accumulate points a variety of ways. Banners are earned, and it is all logged.
I'm part of a small sub-community of players, and we use it to filter the announcements so we only see the players we care about, run queries on the Crawl bots without disrupting ##crawl, etc.
(edit: oh hi grimgrin, didn't notice it was you :)
My first thought is to create an entry in my ~/.ssh/config with an entry for the untrusted host I'm going to ssh in to, using the "IdentityFile" keyword to point to some bogus/misleading identity file. How does that sound?
Host *
# Do not send pubkey to each and any host
PubkeyAuthentication no
# Use Agent
IdentitiesOnly yes
"Privacy: a secret matter."
"Privacy: freedom from unauthorized intrusion."
"Privacy: the quality or state of being apart from company or observation."
So you see, privacy IS security.
Not just any public key, it's your public key. It identifies you.
Brogue is shorter and tighter than DCSS. If I had my way, we'd cut down crawl to 27 levels. In Brogue the maps are smaller, the food clock is more punishing, enemies tend to be more distinct from one another. I've joked that every time we need new content for crawl, we just steal it from Brogue.
Edit: Please use this key when connecting to crawl servers -- http://crawl.akrasiac.org/cao_key
Some server admins have disabled password login.
> the number of races/background/god combination in DCSS is simply incredible
Brogue reifies the concepts of "class", "god", "race" etc etc into the object system. Every character starts out exactly the same, and you choose your 'build' based somewhat off what you find in the dungeon. You don't learn spells, you pick up staves/wands/charms.
Additionally, it tries very, very hard to never let you grind your character. (As bhickey mentioned, ) the food clock is punishing, and the dungeon is less same-y. Yes, DCSS has branches that differentiate parts of the dungeon pretty successfully, but within a single branch (except for the set levels at the end), they're on the boring side.
When I first started playing DCSS, most of my roguelike experience was with Nethack, so I thought the interface was amazing (stashes! auto-explore! waypoints!), but now I kind of think they're crutches.
Still rock hard though.
I mean, Octopod Transmuter is not... easy... but all the long major roguelikes (ADOM, Nethack, DCSS, ToME) are basically games of patience. They're repeatably doable if you learn all the rules and are careful. Speedruns are harder, of course.
Whereas even if you're completely spoiled and have achieved a perfect score in the past, Brogue is still difficult because every decision matters and you can't take your time. If you don't plan the most efficient way to explore each level then you starve, and if you miss or waste a key resource then you die because you aren't powerful enough. I still love Crawl but I strongly second the recommendation to give Brogue a whirl.
Brogue does sound interesting though. But perhaps beyond my skill level.
"At the time of his passing this year, the DevTeam decided that it would be a fitting tribute to take a number of our favourite quotes from the various Discworld novels and incorporate them into the game. Being the way we are, we did a little more than that. There are now a huge number of quotes from many of the Discworld novels in the tribute file, but this doesn't mean that we wouldn't accept new submissions from other Pratchett fans."
"As some may know, Terry Pratchett was a fan of NetHack, dating back to the time that we introduced the Tourist class which was openly based on the Discworld novels he penned."
while True:
Damn! Dead again.
OK well I'll stop now, get up, go do something else.
five minutes passes .....
OK one more timehttp://store.steampowered.com/app/333300/
I know this post is about NH, but some might find this interesting anyway.
I played ADOM first, so for me NH required re-training; so I may be biased. ADOM offers a more complex world with different endings, compared with NH that AFAIK focus on the Amulet of Yendor only (I might be wrong on this!).
I personally prefer it to Nethack as it's more varied, the ASCII UI is better (it also has tiles but I'm and oldschool player and use ASCII), the story is richer (and allowing for lots of roleplay, feeling more like an RPG), and it relies less on spoilers. Although to each their own, of course.
For me ADOM is the best maximalistic roguelike, Brogue is the best minimalistic roguelike.
By the way, just in case you don't know, you can try it for free. The paid Steam version mainly adds configurability of things like disabling permadeath, disabling hunger and stuff like that, and it is also updated more frequently; but the free version has the full world and the core roguelike experience. There are also servers where you can play the free version in ASCII mode online through ssh and spectate games, check http://ancardia.uk.to/ (UK) and http://ancardia.us.to (USA).
http://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/
It's a great year for Rogue-likes in general, it seems!
$ ssh nethack@alt.org
It's also available as a standalone program you can run on your own machine.[1]
You can follow milestones, defeats, and victories at #nethack@freenode. See NAO[2] for more information!
* NAO currently runs NetHack 3.4.3.
[1] - http://www.nethack.org
[2] - https://alt.org/nethack/
From what he told me, he worked hard this year to add lots of what is considered "standard" among the modern NetHack forks. He didn't succeed completely but it's an uphill battle if some of your code changes are code reviewed with comments like "but this won't compile on a pre ANSI C compiler".
I hope he and the other new members will be able to jump start again the development of NetHack.
One of my favorite things to do was enter a shop and then throw things out the door of the shop so the shopkeepr didn't think I was stealing. Also, can't remember how, but I used to be able to get my pet to steal things from the shop.
Oh, and if you could pick up the corpse of a cockatrice then anything you attacked and hit with it turned to stone. Nice. Maybe you needed to be wearing gloves to do that. Can't remember it was a long time ago.
I did also get addicted to another text based game called "Empire" for a while. I'm not sure if it still exists.
I think I played it on a Compaq 286.
Oh no... I can feel that long faded addiction tugging me back to the console......I'd better call my sponsor.
Pets are your friends! http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Apport
>Oh no... I can feel that long faded addiction tugging me back to the console......I'd better call my sponsor.
Sponsor here. Relapse. It's okay. You managed a fake amulet; Why not the real thing?
P.S. I never played a version of nethack that let you throw stuff out of the shop with the shopkeeper still alive. But I've been playing for less than ten years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire
Or maybe this online mud? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(online_game)
There are a few in Wikipeda, so there are probably more as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(disambiguation)#Video_...
I was only able to find this man page for the game I was thinking of:
http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/athena/contrib/games/man/man6/con...
;-)
It's probably a bit easier to learn than Dwarf Fortress, but not by much.
It is an absolutely rewarding game once you make it past the first entry point, though.
You can control the curve by choosing how much to self-discover/look up online. Many of the secrets will take a good while to discover by yourself.
My experience after discovering the game was one of being overwhelmed. Every single keyboard button has multiple functions, there's so much stuff happening and you're just stumbling around in a world whose rules you don't understand. (Like real life.)
After some time, I've dived into the spoilers file and gave it an extensive read. I realized that it would have taken years of playing figuring all this game mechanics out. And that even when spoiled, the game remains a lot of fun. (Again, like real life.)
What remains are fond memories and the realization that I'll probably never finish it in my lifetime. And I'm ok with that.
So yes, it's complex and complicated, but rewarding.
There are also spoilers all over the place on the internet, namely on the Nethack wiki, that'll answer any question (literally, any question) about the game that you have.
So that'd be a yes. 301 gold pieces to the priest, not 300.
Make sure you play it with a good terminal character set but don't go for graphics that would spoil it.
This game is the definition of "gameplay is more important than graphics"
Using "spoiler file" or wiki, will give you a rough overview of the creature's strength and ability, weapon effectiveness, etc. This is helpful but is not enough to win.
To win you must understand deeply (grok) all the different mechanisms of the game (hunger, prayer, sacrifice, alchemy, intrisics, etc) and then have a strategy.
This guide allowed me to ascend : https://alt.org/nethack/mirror/homepage.mac.com/mhjohnson/ma...
This is counter intuitive but the early game is much harder, once you have found the right items, identified important scrolls and potions (about finishing gnome mine & sokoban) the game becomes much easier. And if you are well prepared everything beyond the Valley of Death is kinda boring and "easy". For a first ascension, it is probably wiser to chose an easy class (valkyrie, barbarian, knight, wizard).
Key strategy for the early game are : using your pet to identify cursed items, to not level up too quickly because the generated monster will become too tough, when in a desperate spot engraving "Elbereth" with your fingers might save you a few times[0], praying at the right time, etc
A full game with a successful ascension is about 20-30 hours. However you probably need 50-100 hours of failed attempt to learn the rope first. And it can be frustrating at times because even if you know the game better, it will take some times to make a breakthrough and survive the early levels.
Lastly if you really want to learn fast, play on a public server, and when you are in a very tough spot, you can (at least you could) ask people on #Nethack on Freenode for advice.
In the end, the game is very satisfying, because even if there is a big element of luck, once you know the game well, this is your skill as a player that will determine if you live or die, and this is really rewarding.
I played quite a few hours of Moria (never killing the Balrog, but I never really was that motivated to "win" - I generally enjoyed finding new items, and discovering/learning "all" the spells. This in the older versions that included fun things like "Genocide"). I've also played a bit of the various Angbands, but I keep feeling that the stuff they add/change tend to make for an inferior game.
I really thought NH and Moria were more similar -- I think now that my initial dislike for NH was based on this misconception (NH is indeed a poor Moria, but it might be a great game if not viewed as a "version" of Moria).
Personally I found it to become a lot more fun once I started using spoilers, as there were so many things I would never have found out. The only slight negative is that I have since become obsessive about trying to identify things by all available methods, that costs time and is a bit boring. But that's my own choice.
And I'm a completely hack and slash player -- I've ascended 15 Valkyries I think (and some Barbarians), but I'm utterly useless as a weaker class that needs to be played with caution. I did manage a few wizards that got lucky early on, they become all-powerful later.
But every time you play and die, you'll learn something. The learning curve is the game.
Select one item:
a - Long description of the game and commands.
b - List of game commands.
c - Concise history of NetHack.
d - Info on a character in the game display.
e - Info on what a given key does.
f - List of game options.
g - Longer explanation of game options.
h - List of extended commands.
i - The NetHack license.
(end)
To get started you really only need to know two commands. The command ? will give you a list of the available commands (as well as other information) and the command / will identify the things you see on the screen.
For software that runs in the terminal on a unix system, putting such instructions in the manpage is the appropriate thing to do. I don't know how they do it on Windows, it's quite possible it's more obscure there, which would be a shame, because more people on Windows are uncomfortable with TUIs.
The GUI version has menus that feature the same content that you get with '?' in the terminal version. For the console verson on Windows, you'll have to read the manual.
When I started with NetHack in the 80s on the Amiga, I wouldn't have had any chance of playing it if the Amiga version didn't feature menus with all the available commands showing also the keys.
I knew a guy who quit drinking for a week so that he could ascend. So there's that, too: don't play drunk.
Take a subnotebook on the train!
If you want to play a roguelike on a portable, you'll need to play something built for portable. I have no specific recommendations... unfortunately, I can't help but compare things to Angband (my drug of choice) and everything ends up too simple by comparison. That's just my problem, though. Android certainly has a lot of roguelike things on it, the Web is full of reviews and recommendations: https://www.google.com/search?q=best+android+roguelike
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/suraj$20nethack/rec...
What a beautiful game.
The article below does an excellent overview of its history and inspiration from NetHack.
1. http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/07/the-game-archaeologist-tr...
For the project I work on, we moved code hosting to github years ago, but still have our downloads hosted by SF.net, and haven't even thought of what to do about mailing lists and tickets. We'll get around to moving it all, eventually, but for small teams working on a project with so many users, so many files, so many mailing lists, so many tickets, and just a lot of pieces that make up the "project", it's a lot of work, and the gains may not be immediately felt.
I don't know where the NetHack team is in their migration, but it is apparent they're working on it. I'm not gonna criticize them for not having it done already.
And, of course, there is no guarantee that github won't turn evil, someday, too.
Merry Christmas everyone! Awesome :)
--rog hum mal
That's probably why it doesn't work correctly at the moment.
But totally worth it.
Ascii art never looked so 'cosmic'
It has nicer 2D tiles than the QT ones IMO and you can toggle between the tiles and ASCII mode (with a few enhancements) by pressing tab.
Too bad it's so old. I wonder if there's any chance of it getting ported to 3.6.0.
Why didn't they just make it public on github, and use their issue tracker?
EDIT: actually the sys/Install/NewInstall.unx instructions worked for me, at least it is starting to make.