Hack

Rogue with a dog and a shopkeeper · the game NetHack grew from

Date of birth1982 (Fenlason) · 1.0.3 in July 1985

CreatorsFenlason · Brouwer with Woodland, Thome, Payne

LanguageC ~19,200 lines (1.0.3)

PlatformUnix + termcap BSD and System V, VT100 terminals

Lineage

Hack is new code inspired by Rogue. Jay Fenlason wrote it in 1982 at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School with Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome and Jonathan Payne; his READ_ME calls it “an implementation of Rogue” with 52+ instead of 26 monster types. He learned Rogue at the SFSU Logo Workshop.

Andries Brouwer took it over at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam and rewrote almost all of it; by his own note the result was “more than thrice as large”, with the dog, the long worms and the shops. His versions went out on Usenet from 1984; 1.0.3 (July 1985) was the last, and the one BSD Unix shipped. Don Kneller ported it to MS-DOS (PC Hack), and NetHack (1987) grew out of Hack. This page's game is restoHack, a restoration of 1.0.3 for modern compilers. See the family tree.

Credits

Jay Fenlason	Original author (1982)
Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome, Jon Payne	Helped Fenlason: the original `buzz()`, the chameleon, the lock file and the screen code
Andries Brouwer	Rewrote and extended it into Hack 1.0–1.0.3 (1984–85), Stichting Mathematisch Centrum
Don Kneller	MS-DOS port (PC Hack), a sibling of this version
Critlist	restoHack, the restoration this port is built from (Critlist/restoHack @ 0bd798b)
DragonDePlatino, DawnBringer	DawnLike tiles (CC-BY 4.0); the NetHack 3.6 tiles are the alternative

Screenshots

Character creation: Who are you? Are you an experienced player? What kind of character are you? — Hack has no title screen. It starts by asking who you are, then which kind of adventurer.

Two rooms joined by a winding corridor — First steps: two rooms and the corridors between them, found by auto-explore.

The message line reads: You miss the hobgoblin. The hobgoblin misses. The giant rat misses. — A fight on level 1: a hobgoblin and a giant rat at once.

A wizard's inventory: elven cloak, wands, rings, potions, scrolls — Inventory: a Wizard starts with unknown wands, rings, potions and scrolls, each with its own random label.

Trivia

Fenlason wrote it with three friends while they were students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. (Wikipedia)
His READ_ME calls it “my first semester programming project” and gives his home phone number, adding that he has a modem and a teen-age sister. (Original_READ_ME)
Brouwer's READ_ME points players who want “a real cave instead of dull rectangles” to his other game, Quest. (READ_ME)
1.0.3 went out on 23 July 1985 as a patch against 1.0.2, and it is the first version with a wizard (debug) mode. (NetHackWiki)
It has exactly one artifact: Orcrist, a two-handed sword that does extra damage to orcs. (NetHackWiki)
Hack still ships with many Unix systems (Debian, Ubuntu, the BSDs, Fedora), and there is even a Game Boy Advance port. (Wikipedia)

What's unique

A pet. You start with a little dog that fights for you, can be fed and trained, and won't step on cursed items.
Shops and shopkeepers. Pick up an item, pay for it, or be chased down for stealing it.
Things react to each other. Cockatrices stone you slowly, a dead lizard cures it; nymphs steal and teleport away; rust monsters rust your armour; floating eyes freeze you if you hit them.
Levels are kept. Unlike Rogue, a level you leave is stored in a file and is waiting for you when you come back, with what you dropped. Bones files let you find the ghost of an earlier player.
Six kinds of hero instead of Rogue's one: Tourist, Speleologist, Fighter, Knight, Cave-man (or Cave-woman), Wizard.

Code dive

Language: K&R C, about 19,200 lines in 77 files in the 1.0.3 source (restoHack: about 23,300 lines in 79 files after the modernisation). Files are named by topic: hack.shk.c is the shopkeeper, hack.dog.c the pet, hack.worm.c the long worm.
Environment: 4.xBSD and System V Unix, played on terminals through termcap escape codes, not curses. The data tables: def.objects.h lists every item, hack.monst.c every monster.
Saving: the game writes the current level and every visited level to files, then exits. restoHack added a versioned save header so pointers are not written raw.
This port: the game is not changed for the screen. Its escape codes run through a small VT100 emulator that fills an 80×24 buffer, and the map part of that buffer is drawn as tiles, in X11 and in the browser (WebAssembly via Emscripten). We fixed two bugs on the way: item labels changed after a restore, and item names showed as “<corrupted>” in WebAssembly. Source: memmaker/hack.

Stats

Thing	Count	Notable ones
Classes	6	The Tourist carries an expensive camera; the Speleologist starts with a pick-axe and digs.
Monsters	57	The cockatrice, the leprechaun, the nymph, the long worm (grows a tail), the xan, the zruty, the nurse, the shopkeeper and the wizard of Yendor guarding the Amulet.
Potions	16	Booze, fruit juice, sickness, gain level, levitation.
Scrolls	21	Genocide, punishment (a ball and chain), amnesia, and a mail scroll.
Rings	19	Teleport control, conflict, protection from shape changers, hunger, aggravate monster.
Wands	18	Wishing, digging, polymorph, undead turning, death.
Weapons	18	Crysknife, worm tooth, boomerang; a two-handed sword named Orcrist is the one artifact.
Armour	12	From leather armour to plate mail, plus elven cloak, helmet, shield, pair of gloves.
Traps	8	Bear trap, arrow, dart, trapdoor, teleport, pit, sleeping gas, piercer; plus mimics posing as items.
Levels	40	Mazes from about level 26; the Amulet of Yendor is in a maze on level 30 or deeper.
Spells	0	Magic lives only in items.

Manual

The manual page shipped with the source, hack(6) (text), and the in-game introduction, help (text). Both © Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, 1985, under its BSD-style licence.

Getting started

Open the game, type a name and answer y to “experienced player?” to pick a class (Knight or Cave-man is easiest), or n to get a random one.
Move with hjklyubn or the arrow keys; walk into a monster to attack. x explores on its own.
Press Enter for a menu of every command, i for the inventory.
Stuck in a dead end? Search with s (or 20s). Press > to walk to the down stairs and take them.
Eat when you are “Hungry”. The full key list is in the in-game guide.

Help

We found no walkthrough: every dungeon is different. Rules of thumb:

Never hit a floating eye in melee. Never eat a cockatrice corpse; keep a dead lizard.
Keep the dog close on the first levels, and let it walk over shop goods and items: it won't step on cursed ones.
Fight in corridors, rest back to full hit points before going down.
Read unknown scrolls when nothing is near; one of them may be enchant armour.
More: NetHackWiki on Hack 1.0.3 and RogueBasin.

Cheats

Wizard mode (hack -D, for the user named in config.h) exists in the source but can't be reached in the browser: the page doesn't pass -D.
Save scumming works in the browser: Export save before something risky, Import save if it goes wrong.