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Comment by foresto

1 day ago

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)

28 comments

foresto

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chongli  14 hours ago

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.

  • abustamam  12 hours ago

    Wait, what happened to v4??

    • cturner  10 hours ago

      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.

      1 reply →

tetha  20 hours ago

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.

  • vintermann  6 hours ago

    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.

why_at  19 hours ago

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

technothrasher  1 day ago

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.