I discovered Nethack for the first time this weekend. Well, I knew it existed for a while, but I had always sort of poked around at it, generally unimpressed. But on Friday there was a lobste.rs post about a speedrun of nethack that totally captured my attention. The runners used the inventory at the start of a randomly generated map to determine which seed was used by the RNG to build the dungeon. From there, they had a general sense of what would work. This resulted in an ascension, as victories are called, of sub 8 minutes. The previous best on the most popular nethack server, nethack.alt.org, was more than 90 minutes. Crazy.

All that to say that reading about their speedrun made me realized how much more there was in nethack. Much more. And now I’m hooked. I also joined the IRC channel for NAO and with IRCCloud I get notifications when I’m done with a game with my final score. It’s actually kind of delightful. Now I need to stop wasting time with it :)