The November Nethack Tournament


2018 ARCHIVE

History

The long-running /dev/null/nethack tournament was unexpectedly shut down in September 2017. When this was announced, some players from TeamSplat banded together quickly with the help of the hardfought.org server to put together a tribute tournament, which was intended to be the same as devnull but updated to 3.6.0.

The tribute tournament was never planned to run for a second year; instead, respecting devnull's wishes to shut down completely and not keep its name going, plans for a new tournament were laid. This new tournament would be based off the newly available development version of NetHack (currently NetHack 3.6.2), and would remain a primarily vanilla-like tournament, unlike other tournaments like Junethack which focus on variant play. It was also decided to keep the tradition of running the tournament throughout November, when a lot of veteran players come out of the woodwork checking to see if there's a tournament.

So TNNT is devnull?

TNNT is not devnull. As per krystal's wishes, the devnull name, tournament structure, and game changes have been retired. TNNT is a fresh start - any game changes are based on a clean vanilla nethack codebase, and the various components of the tournament were designed from scratch.

What about the devnull challenges?

As with the rest of devnull, the challenges have been permanently retired and are not implemented in TNNT. However, TNNT does add some of its own gameplay content, including features that don't exist in any variants. It's a bit of a work in progress, and added gameplay features in 2018 will probably be minimal, but we expect to add more in subsequent years.

If you are looking for the code powering the devnull challenges, to use as a patch for your own purposes, you can find it... somewhere (we don't have a link handy).

Contributors