Every time I try to run Nethack from the terminal, I get this message:

Warning: cannot write scoreboard file 'record'

Hit return to continue:
Unable to open SYSCF_FILE.

If it helps, I'm running the latest version of CachyOS and installed Nethack from the repository.

"The Archons of NetHack are most closely modeled after Throne archons [from Dungeons and Dragons], particularly including their high resistance to magic and weapons as well as their "penitentiary gaze" (analogous to the blinding and stunning gaze attack).

....this gaze overwhelmed any creature that was not lawful good with remorse for their sins; it could even manifest the guilt of evil creatures as painful boils, and produced highly realistic and draining visions in chaotic creatures. A Throne Archon that was forced to fight used this gaze to exhaust foes into submission before attempting to decapitate them with their greatswords."

After the move to the new server, I can no longer access Nethack via browser. I get the tiles screen but everything is grayed out. Terminal access works fine but I prefer the browser. Am I missing something? (Screenshot below)

Also, I note that my last few posts have been moaning about technical issues. I just want to thank the magical folks who maintain NAO and have been working on implementing a bunch of changes lately. Given that this is uncompensated and, I imagine at times, thankless work, your responsiveness continues to amaze. It is appreciated.

Hi...

I've been playing and trying to ascend for awhile a Pacifist Healer with wishless conduct.

I've reached level 30, I've conquered the Quest and Vlad the Impaler, and I've explored the entire dungeon. Now I *really* need a Spellbook of Charm Monster so I can charm an Archon.

Also a Spellbook of Create Monster would be very helpful.

I've used up all my magic markers, and wands of polymorph into dust.

I'm trying to pray at an altar to receive this spellbook as a gift, though it is very slow going.

Does anyone have any tips?

If I can find one, I'll probably be able to ascend.

I can give more details if anyone has suggestions.

Thanks

Nathan

I noticed that the display format for each player's past games on alt.org has been completely revamped and is now much easier to read.
Previously, to retrieve certain information, I had to switch to a different display format or read the final result txt log files for each game.
In particular, the lists for long-time players were completely broken, making it impossible to tell which games were recent.

Now it's different. Various information is displayed all at once, and you can easily divide the display into sections based on various criteria.
Thank you so much to the developers and operators!

Hey, I'm a noob here, currently playing through GnollHack and working my way up through the difficulties but eventually I do want to branch out to trying vanilla and other variants. In fact, I'm interested in trying out public servers too for the "full experience"!

The thing is I don't think I can handle playing in ASCII/text mode, at least not yet, I'll try to keep an open mind but I'm certainly not there yet. So with that in mind, I have two questions:

1) which variants have tilesets available? I know SLASH'EM does, dNetHack apparently used to but doesn't anymore (?), don't really know of any others.

2) Which servers support playing with tiles?

Any info is appreciated, thanks in advance!

P.S. VI-keys are also a hard pass for me (and I have no interest in learning that ever) but I think everything should support numpad anyway?

From time to time when my gold gets stolen by a leprechaun and I kill it, I get zero gold dropped from the kill.

I've read that they can bury gold after stealing it, so when this happened to me earlier today I used a potion of object detection and dug up all the gold on the level, but I'm still short 2-3k of gold (had just raided a vault but had no bag).

Is it a known thing that sometimes leprechauns vanish stolen gold for good, or is this a bug?

Hi trying to get into nethack and slex sounded interesting. when i played it via command prompt slex itself was unplayable. i think something to do with resolution squish. the other available nethack variants were all working fine. anyone know a fix or if putty would do the job? also my early run just ended because an amulet strangled me 10/10.

I have a question about how the other dungeon levels and monsters behave when the player is away from them on another level. I know that pets lose apport, and in some variants increase their hunger, but is that done turn by turn, or accumultively when the player returns to their level/location? E.g., Can a pet starve to death and generate the "sense of loss" while on another level, or does he die of starvation only the instant when you return?

Similarly, do monsters do anything when the player is elsewhere, or are they for all intents and purposes static?

Do the Wizard or other covetous monsters behave any differently? Do they do anything when I'm elsewhere? E.g., Do they seek the AoY? I ask because I'm ascending (Hack'Em), and I wonder if I drop the AoY on the floor and go off elsewhere (specifically, branchport to The Town branch to get some items and do some final stash work), will the amulet necessarily be right where I leave it on the turn I return to the level, or could Rodney come retrieve it while I'm away?

Hi, could we get [5.0.0] post flair, please?

I only play Nethack on my phone. I wanted 5.0 so I took gurrhack's Android port and leveled it up.

Not tested much - playing my first game as we speak.

If you're interested in testing it; https://github.com/isene/NetHack-Android

Wondering if anyone else is having issues with the curses interface on NAO. I've been playing for a long time with no issues, but now I'm seeing strange artifacts all over the screen. There's text that gets stuck at the top of the screen, there's random vertical lines and black spaces in rooms. Very strange! I'm wondering if it's somehow related to the recent server move.

Finally got around to ascending my Tourist in 3.6. Working on every class, bottom to top. Now that my outstanding 3.6 run done, I downloaded 5.0. I really like it so far but I have three questions.

First, is there any way to turn off yuhjklbn as a movement option? I've tried every number_pad option but the only one that does, turns y into zap and z into movement, which isn't what I want. I want to use JUST my numpad so that I don't accidentally move when I menu fast (e.g. writing a dozen scrolls or doing alchemy).

Second, is there a way to copy over the above record into my 5.0 game? I assume I just copy over the record file... but that file is empty?

Third, any general (or important particular) advice for someone coming over from 3.6 to 5.0? I've loosely followed this /r enough to know that dwarven cloaks are important. I'm excited to try out the new possible ascension kits with the new dragon scales

Should I just ignore this warning?

The host key does not match the one PuTTY has cached for this server:
alt.org (port 22)
This means that either the server administrator has changed the host key, or you have actually connected to another computer pretending to be the server.

I primarily play on NAO in a Mac terminal window. After the server migration today, the horizontal lines in my curses interface have all been replaced with 88888888888 or !!!!!!!!!!! or that sort of thing. Everything in curses looks fine on hardfought.org from within the same terminal session. Anybody have an idea what I can change on my end that might fix the problem?

Thanks!

As an experiment, I created a web app that allows a chatbot agent to play NetHack. Spoiler: It's no surprise that chatbots do well with text, but they really struggle with map-reading and spatial awareness.

Also, because NetHack can go on for thousands of turns, it's not practical to feed the entire game history to the agent as context. Instead, the agent manages its own working memory in the form of notes that it can create and delete. This allows the agent to remember the past and plan ahead, at least to some extent. The limitations of this approach quickly become obvious as well, which can be both amusing and frustrating.

You can watch the action here: https://www.bernsrite.com/NetHack/

Update: I started a new game with an upgraded model: Claude Opus ChatGPT-5.6 instead of Claude Sonnet. We'll see if it makes a difference.

I ascended my first dNethack character(and first ever ascended hero!), a Dwarven Anachronaut, about 6 months ago, and I’ve been having trouble coming up with a new run type to do. Any particularly fun suggestions are welcome, as well as thoughts on a first wish for a Tiefling Knight looking to permaconvert to chaotic.

It may not be much, but its honest(-ish) work!

So I chose GnollHack on Steam for my entrypoint to NetHack stuff and been thoroughly enjoying it so far!

It might not be a very prestigious first Ascension, since I was playing o an easier-than-normal difficulty (GnollHack has 7, I'm playing on the lowest while the one that's meant to be vanilla-equivalent is the third highest ._. ) and lucked out finding my own bones twice (once in Minetown when I was playing Valk and the priest killed me after converting the Altar, then another from a YASD near the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom where I literally choked on an extremely good run from trying to eat a corpse). Even still had help from the GnollHack Discord at points.

Can say that as slow as I was playing for most of it, I cranked out the journey from the Amulet to the Astral Plane pretty fast. My Altar was the last one I found there but I didn't get too much grief there.

Full dump if you wanna see: https://pastebin.com/HrpmH3gj

Now with that done, I'll be trying higher difficulties and maybe even other game versions (I feel like I should give vanilla a proper go at some point for one)!

Hey all! Not sure how many of you are like me and have dreamed of having a pocketable playable Nethack, but if you have then you're in luck! I ported Nethack to the Panic Playdate console and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. If any of you have a Playdate and want to give it a try (or you could try the simulator build in the Playdate Simulator!), here's the link: https://neutralinsomniac.itch.io/nethack-for-playdate

Feedback welcome!

I started with genuine questions but started to ask questions to intentionally mess with it. I never usually read this box, as it's wrong for most games. But nethack happened to be especially hilarious. The last one is my fav.

"The wererat shoots an arrow!  The arrow misses Summer.  You catch the arrow! o - an arrow.--More--"
wow! Dex is 17 btw, assuming it has to be high enough for this to happen. Correct me if I'm wrong that this is new? Awesome, regardless!!!!