NetHack

The classic roguelike adventure: Descend the Mazes of Menace and retrieve the Amulet of Yendor!

NOTE: This is a demo website! Please visit www.nethack.org for the real NetHack website.

How to Contribute

You don't need to be a member of the NetHack DevTeam to help the cause! Whether you're a developer, writer, artist, or just a humble player, there are many ways you can contribute to the future of NetHack. Read on!

Note: All work that ends up in NetHack will be placed under the NetHack General Public License, so make sure you're okay with that before proceeding.

Submitting a bug or suggestion

The easiest way to contribute to NetHack is to report bugs that you find and offer suggestions for improvement. Send them to our public bug tracker or email them in, following the advice on the Contact Us page.

Before providing a suggestion, check the list of Things we are NOT doing in our FAQ.

Writing documentation and encyclopedia entries

The best way to offer improvements and additions to our documentation and in-game encyclopedia lore text (i.e. what you get when you ask for more info when looking at a monster in the game using ; (semicolon) or type something in using the / (forward slash) command) is by editing the source code (see below), but if that's too hard for you, you can also send it to our bug tracker or email it in.

If you're offering a new encyclopedia entry that comes from a source, please include what that source is as well.

New tiles and tilesets

If you have what it takes to make a new tileset, or even just touch up a tile or two in a current tileset, send it to our bug tracker or email us.

Consider also sharing your creations with the greater NetHack community; virtually all graphical tiles ports of NetHack support custom tilesets, so people can try yours right away!

If you find tiles that are missing or seem off, or have improvements to some existing tiles, let us know about those as well.

Editing the source code

If you're a developer, the most direct way of contributing to NetHack is by editing the source code. Changes can range from typo fixes to full-blown new features; see Using Git with NetHack for more details.

If you need ideas on what to work on once you have a clone of our repo, check the bug tracker.

Follow our blog

Finally, keep an eye on our blog; sometimes we may ask for help, and you'll find something that you can help with even if you can't think of anything yourself.