NetHackWiki:About

From NetHackWiki
Revision as of 01:32, 2 January 2017 by Phol ende wodan (talk | contribs) (Change broken Wikia link for Free Documentation License to gnu.org)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

This is the NetHackWiki, an unofficial resource and community site for NetHack, the roguelike computer game. It contains game information, spoilers, and other information related to both NetHack, and related games such as SLASH'EM. NetHackWiki has many volunteer authors... including you, should you choose to help! This web site is a wiki; you can edit any page to improve it.

NetHackWiki, like most NetHack sites on the Internet, has no official affiliation with NetHack or NetHack's DevTeam.

But what is NetHack?

NetHack is a one-player fantasy game for your computer. It is a multiplatform game, and runs on BeOS, DOS, Mac OS, Windows, Unix, and some others. You can visit its official site at http://www.nethack.org to download the game and its source code. Or instead of downloading the game, you can play on a public server such as nethack.alt.org.

Like many roguelike games, NetHack emphasises gameplay over graphics; the entire game is drawn in ASCII. (There are, however, a few versions using graphical tiles.) You, the player, who most of the time appears as an @, must descend the staircases into the dungeon to search for and retrieve the Amulet of Yendor for your god. (In most games, a monster will kill you!)

What is a wiki?

A wiki is a web site that allows users to change any page using a web browser, with out needing complicated technical knowledge.

This particular wiki used to be hosted by Wikia as WikiHack, but was moved away from there, by a vote at >80%, due to Wikia forcing obnoxious formatting changes onto the site. WikiHack is currently a ghost town, with vandalisms as its main edit count. This is because Wikia doesn't allow deletion of its wikis, so that they can make more money. Please update any overlooked leftover links to http://nethack.wikia.com to point at http://nethackwiki.com instead. The site allows anyone to click edit and change almost any page.

When you edit here, MediaWiki will save your IP address, unless you register a username and password and login. We strongly recommend that frequent editors login so that we can recognise you by name. Note that accounts from other wikia.com and memory-alpha.org sites also work at NetHackWiki.

The easiest way to see what other users are doing is to visit the recent changes.

Free as in freedom

NetHack is free software: the NetHack General Public License provides that, "Specifically, we want to make sure that you have the right to give away copies of NetHack, that you receive source code or else can get it if you want it, that you can change NetHack or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things." Likewise, this wiki is free documentation: the text of the GNU Free Documentation License provides that each NetHackWiki page gives everyone "the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially."

For more information