First, I was afraid nerdsholmferret 8/1 '26

I resisted trying Nethack 5.0 for a while, but there is some good news:

"You finish eating the xorn corpse.  You feel less concerned about becoming petrified."

There's also a tutorial mode which should help anyone who wants to start playing Nethack after 40+ years of development.

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3d 9 Comments
In the words of Beaker, “meepwy meepowawy”.
nerdsholmferret
Oh cool. Hopefully I will get around to checking this out. With any luck they have improved the casually screwing around until you die on level 5 experience.
Thomas Boutell
But not you. I'm sure you will survive.
Thomas Boutell
I have been enjoying the hell out of the 1,000+ changes, but even having gotten some Fountain-Demon wishes, I haven't even seen the Castle level yet. Cleared Sokoban a few times, got to Mines' end a few times, got wiped out on the Big Room level a few times...it's nethack all right. I've never really recovered from the Elbereth nerf, if I'm honest.
Paul Lord
...I was petrified!

(Sorry - couldn't be helped.)

Also, thanks for the reminder. I do wanna give it a go.
Matt Lichtenwalner
Currently reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, which seems to contain some pretty explicit references to Nethack already just a small part of the way in. (We picked it up as the shortest book that would get us into a book club meeting at the awesome local horror bookstore as soon as possible)
Thomas Boutell
Yeah - DCC is also having a real moment right now. So much so that I've seen it advertised _in other ads_. That's some impressive marketing fu, if you ask me.
Matt Lichtenwalner
I'm only like 55 pages in but it seems to owe a large debt to Philip José Farmer as well.
Thomas Boutell
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with his work. I can say that DCC is way over the top. A caricature of the genre, imo. That doesn't make it any less enjoyable - just have to know what you're in for.
Matt Lichtenwalner