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Comment by foresto | Hacker News Reader

Last time I played, after many close calls, I finally got my hands on the amulet. Knowing that the journey back to daylight was likely to be at least as dangerous as the way I had come, I took a breath, saved, and set the game aside.

That was about seventeen years ago. I still have the save file. Today's announcement got me excited about the prospect of finally finishing my game, until I saw this:

> Existing saved games and bones files will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.

Drat.

Thankfully, NetHack is not one of those modern, commercial, online-only games that make it difficult to run old versions.

** SPOILER BELOW ** (in someone's reply to me)

View on HN

Drat.

NetHack 5.0 changes thousands and upon thousands of things from the previous release, 3.6.7, which was 3 years ago. 17 years ago is an eternity in this game’s history. The versions may not have gone up hardly at all in that time, but the fix logs are enormous.

Adding up the line counts of the fix logs for the 3.6.X releases with 5.0, I get a total of 6814 lines. That’s bug fixes only. There’s a similarly large number of gameplay changes!

All that is to say, migrating your old save file through all of those changes would’ve been a ton of extra work to support. I know Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup can migrate old save files but they have a very carefully designed system for sunsetting removed features in a way that old save files can still use them.

Wait, what happened to v4??

This is a rough history from an outsider: the original developers (“DevTeam”) went quiet, and would not take in new talent. There was some new talent in the community, and momentum for code tidy up and new features. One group forked and called theirs nethack 4. There were other forks with a similar spirit, such as unnethack. Eventually, DevTeam decided to reach an accommodation with talent in the fork groups. Release 5 is a DevTeam release with input from what was new blood fifteen years ago.

The story is a bit more convoluted. After the 3.4.3 release in 2003, the DevTeam stopped releasing new versions. They were still responsive when contacted by e-mail, though. But then we also didn't know how the development version looked like.

In 2014 the dev version was leaked to the community and in the following discussions with the DevTeam on how to handle this, the DevTeam got the first shoot of new devs in a while which lead to the release of 3.6.0 in 2015. This version was a polished version of the dev version, also incorporating some of the popular community patches at the time. The 3.6 branch received regular bugfix and security updates (3.6.7 was released in 2023).

Since 3.6.0 there's a mirror repository of NetHack on GitHub. So the development version that was internally numbered 3.7.0 which would become 5.0.0 was always accessible and, contrary to the 3.4.3 era, could be played anytime and was also installed on the public servers to play.

I also have a Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup with my first 3 runes around somewhere.

I'm aware I will probably lose it, but I'm also anxious to touch it. Maybe I should just get myself some good coffee tomorrow and get over with it. Biggest learning of that save is also how careful and defensive you have to play if you want to consistently get further.

DCSS has also changed so much, it's hardly the same game anymore. It's maybe a better game in many ways, but it's not the game I spent time getting to know and getting good at.

Maybe an early example of "forever games" like Minecraft which just keep getting expanded forever and move ever further from the game you knew.

One of the oldest photos on my phone is the screenshot from the one and only time I beat Nethack. (As a tourist BTW)

Relax. It's the fake amulet. I found it twice.

As I recall from my game of many, many years ago, I got the amulet to the surface and was greeted with, “Oops, that’s the fake amulet. Go back down.” I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I played it.

** SPOILER ABOVE **

Would you please edit your comment, and preface it with a spoiler warning?

Nethack has been around since 1987, it's a little late for spoilers.

People still play this game. Spoilers still spoil experiences for others.

Meh, imo spoilers only spoil experiences for people who take media too seriously.

When I consider watching a movie, one of the first things I do is read a complete plot summary, including the ending. When I do this and no longer want to watch the movie, in my mind, that’s not a sign that any experience was spoiled, but rather that it just wasn’t very interesting to begin with.

Conversely, I have played Nethack on and off for decades, have read countless spoilers about it, yet still haven’t won and still find it interesting.

I disagree with your movie watching routine. A movie is more than just its plot.

In your opinion, a movie is more than just its plot. Not everyone values the elements of movies the same way.

I play a lot of experimental games where not knowing what the plot is is the point of the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is one such game. The experience is the point, not the plot.

Many films are meant to be experienced, not just read or watched. Otherwise what's the point of a movie when you can just read a screen play? Or what's the point of a screen play when you can just read a synopsis?

Agree 100%.

I watched Million Dollar Baby for the first time a year or two ago. I thought it was just a boxing movie, something like rocky or something.

I don't think reading the synopsis would have affected me like that movie did. I thought about it for days afterwards.

Never watched, or even cared to watch, but now I'm curious! Thanks for the rec!

1) NetHack is not one of those games

2) If you want to avoid spoilers, you should probably avoid discussion threads about the subject, because people will often discuss their experiences in such threads

1. It doesn't have to be for the experience of the plot to be important.

2. Fair point but with a game like nethack I'd say a majority of folks are interested in discussing the development of nethack without necessarily discussing the plot. HN has no concept of spoiler tags nor topiced threads so it's not really easy to contain the discussion per-thread.

Besides even if you don't care about spoilers, a lot of people do, regardless of your thoughts on how you personally like to experience media.

I actually tend to live a remarkably spoiler free life, but that's mostly by avoiding threads that would give spoilers on things I care about.

Like, it's fine to care about spoilers, you just can't expect a random community that doesn't even have the concept of spoiler tags to accommodate your desire. Doubly so since that desire is competing with the desire of others to discuss the topic.

I'm also not even sure where you'd draw the distinction with a game like NetHack - how do you discuss a change on how to acquire Excalibur without discussing how to acquire Excalibur, or spoiling that you can reliably acquire it?

I agree, you can't expect this community to hide spoilers about stuff. I have seen random spoilers in topics that weren't even about media (in classic HN fashion, random tangents start to talk about books or movies). Sometimes they would attempt to mark a spoiler by adding a bunch of lines of spoiler, then the reader could just collapse the comment thread.

That said, I haven't played enough nethack to even understand the spoilers so I'll probably forget about it. I'm primarily in this thread because because my dad introduced nethack to me when I was a kid, so seeing 5.0 is an incredible accomplishment and the meta discussion about it is fascinating.

I agree Nethack is not one of those games. People always pretended it was, though. They called "spoilers" what would be called documentation in most games. No one didn't use them (the "unspoiled" win mentioned elsewhere in the thread was a stretch even if you take them at their word). It was supposed to be theoretically possible to find out core game features from e.g. random rumors, but that was completely hypothetical - I'm pretty sure at no point in Nethack's development was it ever playtested with new players.

Not just random rumours, there are multiple specific mechanisms built into the game that explain core features, which a curious player can stumble on and then deliberately mine for information.

NetHack in many ways has common heritage with text-based adventure games of the 1970s and 80s, such as Zork. NetHack’s in-game currency is even a reference to Zork! Solving Zork without spoilers is also extremely difficult, despite lacking the tactical combat of NetHack. However, playing Zork with spoilers completely ruins the game, whereas NetHack is still a lot of fun even for highly spoiled players.

I generally agree.

But there are movies that can be spoiled because of the big plot twist.

Eg. The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, to name a few (and [anime] Your Name, even the recently released Cosmic Princess Kaguya)

And then there are some movies where the plot is so obvious that you could have a LLM one-shot predict the whole thing.

That said if the movie/game/whatever is released for a couple years, I think the spoiler warnings should be optional regardless.

We’re in a thread about Nethack 5.0 release, I think it’s safe to say not everyone in this thread has finished the game.

OP is talking about a several decade old version of nethack, not nethack 5.0.0.

I've never understood why something being so old is an excuse to spoil. Many people weren't old enough to be alive when it was last a cultural icon and may not have heard about it until this thread.

I never said being old is an excuse to spoil. My comment was solely in response to OP's comment, which specifically mentioned the fact that this is a thread about Nethack 5.0.0. The fact that we are in a thread about Nethack 5.0.0 is not relevant to the particular spoiler at hand.

Not me! Maybe some day, but losing can be fun too.

There's only one documented instance of someone winning without spoilers. It's a 40-year-old game.

I think that particular spoiler has been well known for many years, and knowing it would actually save a new player a huge waste of effort without any significant drawbacks.

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