Last December 8 marked the tenth anniversary of the current release of “vanilla” Nethack. There has been no definite statement from the dev team that there will be no future releases, but it doesn’t seem very likely. As I’ve said before, this extended period of dormancy has spurred the creation of new versions of Nethack in an effort to fix the bugs that remain and introduce gameplay and interface options meant to make it a more enjoyable experience.

As of now, 18 January 2014, there are 3 or 4 actively maintained variants of Nethack that can be played offline (i.e. without connecting to a Nethack server). They are:

Nethack4 – this version differs the least from vanilla Nethack 3.4.3, unfortunately at the moment it’s not really possible to play on Windows except on a server. It runs great on Linux, though, and compiling it is simple once you have all the needed dependencies. This variant is updated fairly often. Created and maintained by Alex Smith

Dynahack – this version has a binary for Windows, which seems fine. It can be compiled for Linux but I’m having a minor difficulty doing that at the moment. The Windows version works great, aside from the fact that the terminal won’t let you really increase font size that much and won’t open full-screen. [Luckily, the final 2 options in Dynahack’s option menu allow you to set window height and width!]. Dynahack has a lot more changes in it than Nethack4 does. Like UnNetHack, you can play a vampire, and there is a new role of convict. DynaHack doesn’t make it easy to choose “conducts” as a challenge, which is something UnNetHack lets you do. Much like Nethack4 and Nitrohack, you can easily create and load several characters, and play on a server from the main menu screen. Created and maintained by Tung Nguyen.

UnNetHack – This variant has binaries for both Windows and Linux so it’s one of the quickest to get started with no matter which system you use. Current version is 5.1, released in December of 2013. There are quite a lot of changes in this from vanilla, including 3 new classes, a new race, and a tutorial mode. There are dungeon changes including a shorter Sokoban that has more variety in its puzzles, and the Town and Dragon Caves special areas. Some of the regular areas have been altered so as to increase variety between games. Veterans who ascend fairly regularly can also select “conducts” – voluntary challenges such as not praying, not eating meat (for non-monks), not reading anything ingame, etc – that make it more difficult to win. The Windows edition of UnNetHack includes both ASCII and a tiled version, and the tiles are quite nicely done. Created by Patrick Mueller

UnNetHackPlus – A fork of UnNetHack, approved of by Patrick. It seems to be mainly an increase in variety and challenges from UnNetHack.

Also available (but dormant) are GruntHack, SporkHack and SLASH’EM.