A classic dungeon crawler. Unlike other games the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight – in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly.
NetHack is a very deep and very fun game but also very, very challenging Use the keyboard for everything.
Use shift+? for in game help
You can use the number pad or hjkl keys for movement.
NetHack is a big game so it will take some getting used to.
For a complete description of the game and every command see the NetHack Guidebook
Legend
symbol meaning
@ you (or a human)
. floor
< stairs up to the previous level
> stairs down to the next level
+ closed door; spellbook
$ pile of gold
^ trap
% food, corpse, something edible (not necessarily healthy)
? scroll
Spiel Tags
adventure, challenging, classic, Crawl, crawler, difficult, dos, dungeon, en, hack, nethack, old, Puzzle, Retro, RogueLike, roll playing, RPG, text based, unix