SLASH'EM

Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic · NetHack with everything added

Date of birthNovember 1997 SLASH'EM 0.1 per its own history file (NetHackWiki says 7 January 1998); this version 0.0.7E7F3: 30 December 2006

CreatorsWarren Cheung later the Slash'EM dev team: J. Ali Harlow, Pekka Rousu, Clive Crous, Paul Hurtley and others

LanguageC ~185,000 lines in 214 src/*.c/include/*.h files

PlatformUnix, Windows, DOS, Mac… also OS/2, Amiga, Atari, BeOS, VMS, Windows CE; here: the browser

Lineage

SLASH'EM is a NetHack variant built from two older NetHack mods. Tom Proudfoot's SLASH (February 1996, from his own NetHack-- and parts of Stephen White's NetHack Plus) was synchronised with NetHack 3.2 by Enrico Horn as SLASH 4.1.2. Larry Stewart-Zerba's Wizard Patch (April 1996 to April 1997, later with Warwick Allison) enhanced the Wizard's spellcasting. Warren Cheung combined SLASH 4.1.2 and the Wizard Patch into SLASH'EM 0.1 in November 1997.

The code then followed NetHack upstream: 0.0.6 was merged onto NetHack 3.3, and 0.0.7 (the version here, 0.0.7E7F3) onto NetHack 3.4.3. Sources: dat/history and the Guidebook's history chapter. See the family tree, next to NetHack 5.0.

Credits

Warren Cheung	Created SLASH'EM 0.1 (1997); combined 0.0.5E7F1 with NetHack 3.3 into 0.0.6; project administrator
J. Ali Harlow	Project administrator; GTK interface and 32×32 tiles for 0.0.6, the Unix port; released 0.0.7E7F1 to E7F3
Warren Cheung, Christian Cooper, J. Ali Harlow, Paul Hurtley, Pekka Rousu, Darshan Shaligram	Combined SLASH'EM 0.0.6E5F2 with NetHack 3.4 to create 0.0.7
Pekka Rousu, Clive Crous	Developers; Paul Hurtley: Mac port
Tom Proudfoot; Enrico Horn	SLASH, and its 3.2 port SLASH 4.1.2
Larry Stewart-Zerba, Warwick Allison	The Wizard Patch
Kevin Hugo	Mac port and many changes (many of the “KMH” comments in the code)
Nathan La, Dirk Schoenberger, Robin Johnson	Tiles for the SLASH/SLASH'EM monsters
Kelly Bailey, Tina Hall	Level designs (Minetown variants; Grund's Stronghold)
The NetHack DevTeam	NetHack 3.4.3, the code underneath
This port	Web window port and browser build (memmaker/slashem)

Trivia

The name stands for “Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack – Extended Magic”. (NetHackWiki)
The dates disagree: the game's own history file says SLASH'EM 0.1 appeared in November 1997, NetHackWiki says Warren Cheung released it on 7 January 1998. (NetHackWiki)
0.0.7E7F3 (30 December 2006) is the last stable release; an alpha 0.0.8E0F1 came out the same day. (slashem.sourceforge.net)
It is considered much more difficult than vanilla NetHack. (NetHackWiki)
Sokoban is among the features NetHack adopted from SLASH'EM. (RogueBasin)
Its vampire race and Black Market level were taken over by other variants such as UnNetHack; Slash'EM Extended and SlashTHEM continue it. (NetHackWiki)
According to NetHackWiki, as of March 2026 no fork of SLASH'EM is maintained. (NetHackWiki)
3D and isometric front-ends exist: noegnud and Vulture. (Wikipedia)

What's unique

18 roles, 10 races. New roles Flame Mage, Ice Mage, Necromancer, Undead Slayer and Yeoman; new races doppelganger, drow, hobbit, lycanthrope and vampire, next to NetHack's 13 roles and 5 races.
Techniques (#technique, T): 41 role and race powers with a cooldown, from the Samurai's kiii and the Healer's surgery to the Necromancer's raise zombies and the Monk's spirit bomb.
A much bigger dungeon. Grund's Stronghold, the Wyrm Caves, One-eyed Sam's Black Market, the Lost Tomb, the Spider Caves, the Sunless Sea, the Temple of Moloch, the Giant Caverns and Frankenstein's Lab; special levels such as the rat and kobold levels, the storerooms, the nymph level, a Mall and the Guild of Disgruntled Adventurers.
Alignment quests: besides the role Quest, a Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic Quest, each a single level behind a portal.
Lightsabers and firearms (pistols to rocket launchers), medical kits, orbs, and edible killers: the “killer food ration” is a monster.

Code dive

Language: K&R-era C: 184,611 lines in 214 files under src/ and include/; 344,004 lines in 535 .c/.h/.y/.l files counting ports and tools (upstream commit ab6287b).
Platforms: sys/ has Unix, MS-DOS, Windows NT and CE, Mac, OS/2, Amiga, Atari, BeOS and VMS. Window ports in win/: tty, X11, Qt, GTK, GNOME, Win32, GEM, an OpenGL port (gl, glHack) and a proxy port for remote interfaces.
Data tables: monsters in src/monst.c, objects in src/objects.c, artifacts in include/artilist.h, roles and races in src/role.c, techniques in src/tech.c. Levels are written in .des files compiled by lev_comp (yacc/lex), the dungeon layout in dat/dungeon.def by dgn_comp. Save files are raw structs.
USER_SOUNDS: regex rules map messages to sound files; our port uses the same hook for its sound effects.
Our port: a web window port (win/web/winweb.c) built with Emscripten, auto-explore, walking to stairs, an Enter menu of all commands, and autosave. The level compilers run under node because wasm32's 4-byte long changes the data file headers.
Source: memmaker/slashem; upstream is the SourceForge tarball se007e7f3.tar.gz; our changes.

Stats

Counted in the source (object counts are table entries, a few of them alternatives under #ifdef; 537 objects in the build).

Thing	Count	Notable ones
Roles	18	The Flame Mage's rank titles run from Spark to Disintegrator; the Undead Slayer's quest leader is Van Helsing and its nemesis Count Dracula; the Yeoman faces Colonel Blood.
Races	10	Human, elf, dwarf, gnome, orc, doppelganger, drow, hobbit, lycanthrope, vampire.
Monsters	612	Grund the Orc King, Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster, Vecna, the Beholder, the Nightmare, the koala, the wombat, and mimics as food: the killer tripe ration and the huge pile of killer coins.
Artifacts	69	The Hand of Vecna, the Eye of the Beholder, the Keys of Law, Neutrality and Chaos, the Stake of Van Helsing, the Crown of Saint Edward, the Bat from Hell, Houchou.
Techniques	41	Berserk, research, eviscerate, liquid leap, sigil of tempest, tinker, spirit bomb, draw blood.
Weapons	82 + 18 firearms	Pistol, sniper rifle, auto shotgun, rocket launcher and their ammunition; lightsabers in green, blue and red, and a red double lightsaber.
Armour	92	Eleven colours of dragon scales and scale mail (22 entries).
Rings / Amulets	33 / 12	Ring of mood, of gain intelligence; amulet of drain resistance, of flying.
Tools	~60	Orbs of enchantment, charging and destruction; land mine, beartrap, spoon, torch.
Potions / Scrolls	32 / 23	Including vampire blood.
Spellbooks	56	Flame sphere, freeze sphere, poison blast, acid stream, command undead, passwall, create familiar.
Wands	30	Create horde, fireball, draining, fear.
Food	37	Asian pear, eyeball, severed hand, meat stick, pill, holy wafer, K- and C-ration.
Traps	22	Land mine, rolling boulder, magic portal.
Dungeon	21 dungeons	Dungeons of Doom 42–46 levels, Gehennom 17, Gnomish Mines 8–9 (7 Minetown variants), Sokoban 4, the Quest 5–6, Vlad's Tower 3, Elemental Planes 6, plus eleven one-level branches.

Manual

The SLASH'EM Guidebook (text, 3,960 lines, December 2003 edition) shipped with the source, under the NetHack General Public License. Its last chapter is the history these pages quote. The in-game ? help and the port's help page cover the keys.

Getting started

Open the game, type a name and answer n to pick role, race, gender and alignment (a Valkyrie or a Samurai forgives mistakes), or y for random.
Move with the arrow keys or hjklyubn; walk into a monster to attack. ~ explores on its own, > walks to the stairs you have seen.
Press Enter for a menu of every command, i for the inventory (also shown in its own window).
Try your role's technique with #technique; pray (#pray) when hit points are low and you have not prayed in a long time.
Eat when “Hungry”, keep your pet close, and expect to die more often than in NetHack: the full key list is in the in-game guide.

Help

There is no walkthrough as such; the closest is NetHackWiki's Standard strategy (SLASH'EM), from character creation to the endgame. Rules of thumb from it:

Gain experience level 2 on the first two dungeon levels before going deeper.
Press p in a shop for the shopkeeper's services, such as identification and rustproofing.
Drain resistance matters more than in NetHack (wands of draining, deep dragons).
Don't fight One-eyed Sam head on in the Black Market.
More: NetHackWiki: SLASH'EM, RogueBasin, the source's own doc/strategy.txt.

Cheats

Wizard mode (slashem -D) is compiled in, but the browser page never passes -D (and the web build can't look up the user it checks), so it can't be reached here.
Explore mode works: X or #explore turns the game into a non-scoring discovery game, with no way back.
Save scumming works in the browser: Export save before something risky, Import save if it goes wrong.
No exploits are listed here: none were checked on a fetched page.