Nethack is still getting updates?! :O
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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The devteam were silent for like a decade, then woke up and started making updates in 2015.
There was actually a lot of development going on outside the official DevTeam, by people such as paxed (host of NAO). When development officially resumed, there were a ton of patches from paxed and other community members that got incorporated, so it really culminated in the addition of a lot of development work that had continued all along.
Now paxed and a few of these other community members are officially part of the DevTeam.
Edit: oops! Fixed the NAO link!
Oh, I didn't know that. I knew there were a lot of very widely-used patches, especially on NAO, but not that their developers then got brought into the fold. Cool!
Browsing around nethack.org I found this link if anyone's in need of an introduction to nethack: https://web.archive.org/web/20210212161326/http://www.linuxvoice.com/nethack/
The comments are full of people sharing their yasd stories.
C99 compliant!!
Yeah, I'm guessing, it's a major release in the semantic version sense, not necessarily content-wise, but that still caught me offguard. The big news is that they write their code different now. 🙃
Oh it’s a HUGE release, content-wise. They have changed a ton of things in this one. They just don’t mention content changes in the fix logs, for spoiler reasons!
where are the content changes?
I can't figure out how to install this on Arch Linux, wtf
Still stuck? I was going to wait for it to show up in the repos, but it hasn’t so far. So here’s how I did it (for my regular user account, not system-wide):
git clone https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack
cd NetHack
sys/unix/setup.sh sys/unix/hints/linux.500
Now you’ve got a Makefile in the top-level NetHack as well as the src subdirectory. Find the else #!WANT_SOURCE_INSTALL block in both and edit HACKDIR to set the directory for the game itself and SHELLDIR to set the directory for the launcher script.
(And if I actually knew how to use make, I’d probably have a less clunky method than this. Anyone?)
make fetch-Lua
make all
make install