The NetHack devteam is announcing the release of NetHack 5.0.0 on
May 2, 2026

NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack,
which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent
of NetHack 3.6.

NetHack 5.0.0 is a release of NetHack. As a .0 version, there may be
some bugs encountered. Constructive suggestions, GitHub pull requests,
and bugreports are all welcome and encouraged.

Along with the game improvements and bug fixes, NetHack 5.0 strives to
make some general architectural improvements to the game or to its
building process. Among them, 5.0:

• Has its source code compliant with the C99 standard.

• Removes barriers to building NetHack on one platform and operating
  system, for later execution on another (possibly quite different)
  platform and/or operating system. That capability is generally known
  as "cross-compiling."
  See the file "Cross-compiling" in the top-level folder for more
  information on that.

• The build-time "yacc and lex"-based level compiler, the
  "yacc and lex"-based dungeon compiler, and the quest text file
  processing previously done by NetHack's "makedefs" utility, have
  been replaced with Lua text alternatives that are loaded and
  processed by the game during play.

A list of over 3100 fixes and changes can be found in the game's sources
in the file doc/fixes5-0-0.txt. The text in there was written for the
development team's own use and is provided "as is". Some entries might
be considered "spoilers", particularly in the "new features" section.

Existing saved games and bones files will not work with NetHack 5.0.0.

Checksums (sha256) of binaries that you have downloaded from nethack.org
can be verified on Windows platforms using:
certUtil -hashfile nethack-500-win-x64.zip SHA256
or
certUtil -hashfile nethack-500-win-arm64.zip SHA256

The following command can be used on most platforms to help confirm the
location of various files that NetHack may use:
nethack --showpaths

As with all releases of the game, we appreciate your feedback. Please
submit any bugs using the problem report form. Also, please check the
"known bugs" list before you log a problem - somebody else may have
already found it.

Happy NetHacking!

NetHack-3.7 Work-in-progress for testing

Release build of NetHack 3.6.5