The Technical Geekery

The Technical Geekery
# Home \| NetHack
+ Home + Join Email List (+) + Blog (+) + Windows + Tips + Wintips Archives + Internet + Useful Websites + Interesting Websites + NetHack + Dvorak Keyboard + Anki	NetHack NetHack is an extremely old computer game that can trace its origins back into the eighties with a game called Rogue. I'll refrain from giving you a history lesson, though--you can find the whole thing on the Internet if you care to. It is widely known among geeks as one of the most complex and difficult to learn games ever made, and is much loved by logical minds for the strategy involved in staying alive. NetHack is usually played at a command prompt, with just the symbols you can find on the keyboard, but it's surprisingly easy to interpret and, because of this design choice, it runs on basically every computer with a C compiler. Once you get good at NetHack, it becomes surprisingly easy to win, but that doesn't mean the fun is over, because you can challenge yourself to avoid performing some action (I'm working on a game where I'm not allowed to press the letter 'p' on the keyboard), get your percentage of won games as high as you can, or set a world record winning the game in about a twentieth of the usual time. Anyway, this is my collection of resources and information, which is sorely lacking at the moment but will get better. Table of Contents 1. NetHack Public Servers 2. Community 3. Instructional Recordings, and How to Play Them 3b. My instructional recordings (otherwise known as "Let's Play NetHack") 4. Interhack NetHack Public Servers You can play NetHack 'locally', by running it on your own computer, but most involved players prefer to play it on a public server, where you connect to a server that runs the NetHack game for you. This is for several reasons: the server automatically keeps stats and records games for you, it often connects to an IRC channel bot that announces deaths, you don't have to worry about your computer crashing, you can play from anywhere, and you can get the 'bones' of dead players other than yourself. The most popular server is nethack.alt.org (known as NAO), but there are others such as nethack.eu if your lag is too high. (If you don't live in the US or have a bad internet connection, playing on NAO may be an enormous exercise in patience as your keystrokes take half a second to have any effect.) To play on a public server, you usually just telnet to it. For example, to connect to NAO on my computer, I open a terminal and type 'telnet nethack.alt.org'. If you're on Windows and don't have telnet, check out PuTTY. If you prefer to play NetHack locally for whatever reason, you can download it from http://www.nethack.org. NetHack is released under a very similar license to the GNU GPL, and you can download the source code if you care to. Community The biggest community gathering is the IRC channel #nethack on freenode.net. If you don't have an IRC client, you can join the fun by browsing to http://webchat.freenode.net, choosing a nickname, and selecting the #nethack channel to join. The friendly bot Rodney announces all deaths and wins on NAO and is a convenient portal to statistics and information about the game. There are usually about 200 people on the channel and about 50 people who are semi-active, and people are always happy to answer your questions, however much of a newbie you may be. (If you ask, someone can probably watch your game on NAO and tell you the most likely way to get out of your predicament!) I'm scorchgeek--if you have any questions about this page or my ttyrec series (see below), feel free to send me a private message if I'm online (/msg scorchgeek <message>), or you can have Rodney deliver a message to me (/msg Rodney !message scorchgeek <message>). In the latter case, I'll get the message when I next log in. There is also a NetHack Usenet newsgroup, rec.games.roguelike.nethack (link is Google Groups). The volume has dropped in recent years, but there are still people who discuss their games there. There is a NetHack wiki at http://nethackwiki.com. (There is also a Wikia wiki by nearly the same name, which is beating this wiki in most Google search results, but this wiki was abandoned for the new URL--don't use it anymore, as nobody updates it.) Instructional TTYRECs The traditional way of recording a game of NetHack is a 'ttyrec', or terminal recording. These are generally recorded by the program 'ttyrec' and played back by the program 'ttyplay', but there are other ways as well. Many public servers, like nethack.alt.org (the most popular) record every game so that others can watch games live and so that you can download them to watch experienced players win or yourself lose. Anyway, someone once had a bright idea that you could include information on how to do something in the actual game, instead of writing out a walkthrough. But to my knowledge nobody had ever tried to play the entire game this way--so that's what I did. I plan to record one of these for every role (there are 13); right now I've completed the first two (plus the last one). Playing TTYRECs There are a few different players to play back these files--they're not just movies. The advantage is that you can search a ttyrec, pause it, and watch a recording as it gets recorded. My personal favorite is Jettyplay (direct download), which is written in Java and ought to run easily on any system with Java installed. If you can't get it to run by double-clicking, try selecting Open With and finding the Java runtime program, or you can join IRC and ask for help. You can also hunt down any working ttyrec player and use it. The reason I recommend jettyplay is that, first of all, you can easily pause and change the speed (if you want smaller increments of speed, click in the speed selection box instead of the arrows). You can also seek to any point, and find easily. Finally, it runs out-of-the-box on all operating systems. Please tell me if you have problems getting the ttyrecs to work--that way I can put better instructions in for future watchers. NOTE: I'm having a strange problem where jettyplay detects my terminal size as being 316x24, where in fact it's a perfectly normal 80x24. The result is text that's too small to see. Fortunately, this is easy to fix: select View --> Terminal Size --> Fixed Size and accept the default size of 80x24. The actual TTYRECs I have both zip and tar.bz files available. Both contain exactly the same files--the only difference is the type of compression used. Most Windows users will probably want the zip, while *nix systems generally prefer tar files. There are many ttyrec files in each, which are dated by the time and date I recorded them, so they ought to sort alphabetically in the right order. Some are a couple of hours, while others are only 30 minutes or so. If you need to stop in the middle, you can look at the frame number in Jettyplay or the turn number in the lower-right corner of NetHack and queue to that point when you come back. Also don't be shy to play the ttyrec faster than I recorded it--I'm limited by my typing speed, but if my writing is slow and annoying speed it up. One last thing: In some of the ttyrecs I included analysis and intermission texts intended to talk about the game. Text file copies of those are also in the archive, with filenames in the format of <ttyrecname>.ttyrec.note.txt. Feel free to copy those if you care to. Archeologist (11 TTYRECs, ~12.5 hours total): zip \| tar.bz2 Barbarian (8 TTYRECs, ~9 hours total): zip \| tar.bz2 Wizard (9 TTYRECs, ~10 hours total): zip \| tar.bz2 If you're having trouble reading these ttyrecs, please see the section above. Deaths I think watching the ways I've died may be instructional as well. I probably don't recommend watching the whole thing, as that would just be stupid; instead, pull up the last file and queue to a few minutes/seconds before the end. Here's a list of the interesting ways I've ended up dying. Drowned by a Giant Eel (Barbarian) : This is one of the most annoying deaths. It's easy to prevent, but inattention will kill you every time. In this death, I reached the edge of the water and pressed a key to move back, ready to turn around. I didn't even notice that the eel had appeared out of the water and grabbed me, and my speed boots unfortunately didn't grant me a free turn. zip \| tar.bz2 Interhack Interhack is a program that adds a few layers of interface enhancements and such to NetHack. Anyway, right now the place where it's supposed to be hosted is down, and a few people have been looking for it because the NetHack devnull tournament is coming up. So I've posted the last version of the tarball I have here. Date Last Updated (UTC)