Caves of Qud is, imo, a particularly exemplary entry into the genre. Its a different approach with a very unique setting and evocative way of story telling. Its just plain...weird.
Looking forward to 3.7 where they finally address a glaring omission where up until now deities have been weirdly indifferent about people vomiting on altars.
There's a list of public servers in the wiki at https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Public_server but it's hard to tell at a glance which ones are most popular.
em.slashem.me has an SSL certificate which expired last April.
https://underhound.eu:8080/#lobby
It has a very different philosophy from NetHack tho, in that you generally have clear trade-offs between your choices (e.g. there isn't a "best" armor or weapon, you have limited skill upgrades and need to choose how to spend them etc..), compared to the "keep buffing up until you're god" you get in NetHack.
Both are a lot of fun and frustration.
Personally, the text interface remains my favorite. The world I build in my head is far richer than any GUI can do.
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2015/12/nethack-roguelike-rpg-open...
Updated since 1987!
Altough the references to Terry Pratchett are a good reason to play vanilla Nethack.
Can you expand on this? I've been losing for years. What else can you do besides killing things?
Go shopping. Or have your pet go "shopping" for you.
Have your pet kill things. This removes threats and gets you loot and through maybe half a dozen levels, helping you gear up without leveling up (and yes, eventually you want to level up, but you want to do it very slowly if at all while gearing up, because the faster you level up, the more likely it is the game will generate tough monsters you're probably not ready for, like soldier ants or crowds of orcs with poison arrows).
I was looking at the list of diffs with some confusion about why it's such a small point release ( https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-3.6/doc/fixe... ) before I re-read the release notes and saw the security issue.
Since we're not building a VM per user on multi-user systems, we do care about security of the programs we install.
