NetHack is a single-player roguelike dungeon crawler and one of the oldest continuously developed free software games. First released in 1987, it sends the player into the Mazes of Menace to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, relying on a procedurally generated dungeon, permanent death and a famously deep web of interactions between monsters, items and the environment. The current release, NetHack 5.0.0, was published in May 2026 and development continues in the open.

Key Features

• Procedurally generated dungeon — every level is generated afresh, so no two runs follow the same layout, monster set or item drops.
• Classic ASCII display, with tile front-ends — play the traditional character-based grid in any terminal, or build the graphical tile interface (X11, Qt, Windows) for a readable map.
• Permadeath and bones files — a single death ends the run, and the remains of a previous character can reappear in a later game as a bones level.
• Emergent gameplay — roles, races and alignments combine with hundreds of monsters and items whose interactions are simulated rather than scripted.
• Nearly four decades of development — continuously maintained by a volunteer team since 1987, with a stable, well documented codebase.
• Official ports for many systems — Unix/Linux, macOS, Windows, Amiga and MS-DOS ports are published from the official site, alongside a large family of community variants.
• Built-in help and documentation — an in-game help system, the NetHack Wiki and the long-running rec.games.roguelike.nethack community.
• Free and open source — distributed under the NetHack General Public License, a GPL-style copyleft licence.

Why Use NetHack?

NetHack is the reference point for the roguelike genre: it is small, offline, free of accounts and telemetry, and it runs on almost anything — including a remote SSH session. Its depth comes from systems that interact with each other rather than from scripted content, which is why players are still discovering new strategies after thirty years. For anyone curious about where modern roguelikes and survival games come from, NetHack is the clearest place to start.

Use Cases

• Play a full roguelike offline on a low-spec machine or over SSH in a terminal.
• Study game design and systems-based (emergent) gameplay in a codebase you can read.
• Run a game with no online requirement, no account and no telemetry.
• Learn the conventions of the genre before moving on to faster modern variants.

Platform

Linux/Unix · macOS · Windows · Amiga · MS-DOS (official ports); source builds run on other Unix-like systems.

Licence

Open source. NetHack General Public License (NGPL) — a GPL-style copyleft licence based on the Bison General Public License. Sources: nethack.org/common/license.html.

Website

nethack.org · github.com/NetHack/NetHack

Similar

• Crossfire — open-source multiplayer roguelike with a graphical client
• Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup — modern open-source roguelike, faster to play and friendlier to newcomers