Junethack 2023 – the 13th NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament

The thirteenth installment of the annual NetHack Cross-Variant Summer Tournament called Junethack will started June 1 at midnight UTC and will be running until June 30 midnight UTC.

This tournament is trying to appeal not only to the hardcore serial ascenders but also to players that get constantly mangled and beaten to death in unrealistic brutal situations by this sadistic game (that means probably you) by offering various non-winning achievements and encouraging people to try and play NetHack forks. In other words, if you suck at playing NetHack, this is the tournament for you!

This year, we have (again) the most variants ever available for you to play (I swear, NetHack forks don’t grow on trees even if it feels like it). 20 different variants of NetHack make the full set of cross-variant achievements harder to get than in any years before. We really don’t expect anybody to catch get them all. Because of this the cross-variant achievements are fine-grained and you earn one for every new milestone in a new variant.

This year there’s a variant returning to the tournament that for the last time was playable in the 2014 tournament. AceHack got resurrected and is playable on the Hardfought public servers.

The newest entry in the family of NetHack variants is HackEM, another variant following in Slash’EM’s footsteps and trying to reconcile crazy game design with the desire of players to die in games. It is also playable on the Hardfought public servers.

Also consider joining a clan. Playing with others is great fun and the clan trophies are designed such that a clan member cannot have a negative impact on a clan’s standing. Many clans are communicating on IRC or Discord if you are looking for an existing clan.

You can get in contact with the organizers of Junethack here, on reddit, on rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and in the #junethack IRC channel on the Libera.Chat IRC network. There’s also a dedicated discord channel #nethack-junethack on the Roguelikes discord channel which is synced with the IRC channel.

There’s a FAQ on the NetHack wiki.

If you want to help out in the development of the tournament, you can check out our code from GitHub.

Register at the tournament homepage and start venturing into the Dungeons of Doom!

~ by bhaak on 1. June 2023.