alt Hacker NewsLast 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)
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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.
One of the oldest photos on my phone is the screenshot from the one and only time I beat Nethack. (As a tourist BTW)
Relax. It's the fake amulet. I found it twice.
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.
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.