News: 0183118322

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

NetHack 5.0 Released (nethack.org)

(Sunday May 03, 2026 @10:09PM (EditorDavid) from the Amulet-of-Yendor dept.)


"So yesterday the Devteam (it is always the Devteam) [1]released version 5.0 of legendary and venerable rogueike compuer game NetHack," writes the [2]Rogue-like games column @Play . "It is 39 years old... "

[3]MilenCent (Slashdot reader #219,397) writes:

> In addition to play changes it's left for players to discover, this version updates the code to compile with C99, makes it much easier to cross compile the code for other systems than the one running, and now uses Lua for its dungeon generation. Happy hacking!

For new players, "Nethack 5.0 now has an optional tutorial in the early phases of the game that might help you," notes the [4]Rogue-like games column @Play :

> Three systems binaries are provided: Windows, MS-DOS and Amiga. Yes, Nethack still supports MS-DOS, and yes, it still supports classic Amiga: it explicitly supports AmigaDOS 3.0, meaning it can still run on 68000 machines... That these are the only systems they provide binaries for shouldn't be seen as an indication that these are the "most important" platforms for Nethack, it's more that, since it's entirely open source, building it yourself is entirely possible, and more expected than with most software. Nethack can be built for Linux, Windows 8-11, AmigaDOS, MacOS (I'm not sure if this includes classic Mac too but it might), Windows CE (wow), OS/2 (additional wow), BeOS, VMS and multiple Unixes... Another option is to play through public Nethack servers. The most popular of these are probably [5]alt.org and [6]Hardfought .



[1] https://nethack.org/index.html

[2] https://setsideb.com/nethack-5-0-has-been-released/

[3] https://www.slashdot.org/~MilenCent

[4] https://setsideb.com/nethack-5-0-has-been-released/

[5] https://www.alt.org/nethack/

[6] https://www.hardfought.org/



I only just updated to 3.7.0-132 a while back (Score:2)

by cruff ( 171569 )

I've been enjoying finding the changes from the previous version I was running. Now there's a whole new set of things...

Version (Score:3)

by markdavis ( 642305 )

I know version numbers are often arbitrary, but why did it jump from 3.6.7 to 5.0? Do they not like the number 4?

Re: (Score:2)

by Quietust ( 205670 )

NetHack has many variants and forks, and one of them was named [1]NetHack 4 [nethackwiki.com] (and was based on version 3.4.3) - naming this release 4.0.0 would've been rather confusing.

On top of that, there had been numerous development builds named "3.7.0", so releasing the final version with that same number would've also been confusing, so they went with 5.0.0 instead.

[1] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/NetHack_4

Re: (Score:2)

by markdavis ( 642305 )

Thanks! That was very informative (and not something I could easily find).

I remember playing Rogue way back in the 80's on ASCII terminals :) Many hours. I think I moved on from that fad before NetHack appeared. It is cool that there is an X11 version for Athena and QT, too.

Now I am getting nostalgic.... I remember when we were on X Terminals, Xblast TNT came out. Great times blasting other players on the network. Wow- it is still in the Mint repos, and as a native package! [1]https://community.linuxm [linuxmint.com]

[1] https://community.linuxmint.com/software/view/xblast-tnt

Binaries provided for DOS, Windows, and Amiga (Score:2)

by Jeremi ( 14640 )

... other, more obscure platforms are also supported, but if you want to run NetHack on them, you'll have to compile it yourself from source. Kind of a baller move if you ask me :)

You're dead, Jim.
-- McCoy, "Amok Time", stardate 3372.7