I would say yes! 3.2 is from before when they split race and role. In 3.2 you could play as an Elf; in more recent versions, you can play as an Elf of many different roles. 3.2 is also before they introduced magic proficiencies, so you couldn't get better at classes of magic individually. And 5.0 greatly improves Gehennom, in many versions of Nethack it's the least interesting part of the game, an interminable slog through 20+ maze levels where most of the monsters don't post you much threat, until you finally get down to the bottom of the dungeon and the fun picks back up again....

I'd say Hack is harder than Nethack. What matters is how much of the game you know. In Hack, if you have bad luck you are basically screwed; in Nethack, prayer can get you out of lots of trouble, you just have to know it's there to rely upon and not to use it too often.\

Nethack also has many ways you can use resources, even bad resources, to survive. Take bad or useless potions and dip them in water to dilute them into plain water, get them blessed to make them all into holy water, then use that to bless your other items to get much more use out of them. Wash scrolls to make them into scrolls of blank paper, then use a magic marker to write the scrolls you want on them. Combine these two tricks to make blessed scrolls of identify and find out what many, if not all, of your items are. Drop extra rings down sinks for clues as to what they are. Use wands to write on the ground for clues to their identities.

This is a different play philosophy from Hack, where in large part you take what the game gives you and do the best you can with it.

Dragons have tough skin and also count as Large creatures, so most classes will have difficulty. But Monks are made specifically to fight unarmed. There is a conduct for playing without ever having hit with a wielded weapon, and people have earned every conduct, so, I'd say yes. I don't know what you mean by "the" dragon though; Nethack has no shortage of the scaly beasties.

Well in this case Nethack is _definitely_ a roguelike, it's one of the classics. You can't get more roguelike than Nethack.

Ah, I hadn't played 3.6.7 yet so those were new to me. Thanks for the info!

Nethack now supports cross compilation, so it might be possible to build for BeOS from a different kind of machine. Or maybe they use Haiku?

Some of those things that I've found:

* A tutorial is offered on starting a game
* There can be themed rooms now, including (seen with my own eyes) non-rectangular ones, icy rooms, nested rooms and statue gardens (where the statues can actually be monsters).
* Iron bars can now be normal dungeon dressing. Before, they had only been seen in very few instances in Quest levels.
* Monkeys in minetown can now try to steal items from you (those may have been in a previous version)
* player monster corpses can generate on traps

I've also heard that the mid-game Gehennom area (aka Hell) is much less monotonous now, with all kinds of special terrain. I'd say it's mostly an incremental release, no major game systems have been added, but I guess the game's pretty set in stone now. I do miss the days when Nethack 3.0 greatly reworked the game, and Nethack 3.1 its dungeon, but then there's lots of room for new classic-style roguelikes to fill in those blanks.

(Disclaimer: submitter of the post, and also the person who's blog was linked to it, although that was added by the editor and not me.)

I would take the bet that *zero percent* of Nethack is vibe coded. The Devteam are not the kinds of people, I believe, to be easily swayed by (spits) _passing fancies_ like Claude. Lua (I've been told) can be compiled as straight C, so it doesn't introduce further dependencies. The previous special level building system of Nethack used yacc and lex, and was rather complex. I'm sad that these classic Unix tools are no longer part of the build process, but using Lua may make it easier to expand Nethack in the future.

Fun fact: Lua was part of Angband's code for a brief time.

I remember how Target's use of "AI Camera" resulted in people being falsely accused of shoplifting.

That flushing noise you just heard is the sound of decades and billions of dollars of branding swirling down the money commode.

Just a reminder! It's "blog post," not "blog!"

To address the contents of the post: yeah, this sucks, a textbook example of enshittification.

Tech companies: Security is such a huge priority that we'll load our software with power and memory wasting countermeasures that annoy the hell out of you. You may hate being that using two-factor authentication requires you to grab your phone for a text message before you log into anything, but it's all in the name of security! You should learn with it, it's all for the best!

Also tech companies: It's so important to lard our work with generative AI features that a little security compromise is fine!