After a 10 year hiatus the NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6, a combination of the old and new.

Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.

Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be
disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus
of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward.

Here's a brief synopsis of some of the changes we've made in the past year.
For a more detailed set of changes, please see the announcement message we've posted at nethack.org:

The DevTeam have spent a large amount of time this past year revamping our
own internal infrastructure which, although functional, was not up to date.

We've migrated our internal source repository to Git, with plans of providing a publicly available "current maintenance version" in the future.

We're also in the process of migrating our defect tracking list to Bugzilla,
although we will likely retain a more streamlined externally facing interface.

There's a number of gameplay changes in the 3.6 release.

Many of these were incremental from 3.4, based on the ten years of accumulated patching. Most of these are boundary condition fixes and improvements that would make the game more realistic, although there are
new features that were added as well.

A number of these were released in the 3.5 "leak" release. Many others have been introduced later.

A number of significant changes were derived from UnNetHack, NetHack 4 and other variants, such as:

- Roderick Schertler's pickup_thrown patch
- Extensions of Malcolm Ryan's Statue Glyphs patch for tty and tiles
- Extensions of the Paranoid_Quit patch
- Extensions of the Dungeon Overview
- Aardvark Joe's Extended Logfile
- Michael Deutschmann's use_darkgray patch
- Clive Crous' dark_room patch
- Jeroen Demeyer and Jukka Lahtinen sortloot patch
- Stefano Busti's Auto open doors patch

There are also a number of clean-up activities that were undertaken with
respect to code hygiene and removal of conditional build code in order to
streamline the code.

A number of treasured NetHack community patches, or our variations of them,
have been rolled in to the base NetHack source tree in this version, meaning
that they're no longer optional, including:

- menucolors
- pickup thrown
- statue glyphs
- dungeon overview
- sortloot

One final item, our tribute to Terry Pratchett:

As some may know, Terry Pratchett was a fan of NetHack, dating back to the time that we introduced the Tourist class which was openly based on the Discworld novels he penned.

At the time of his passing this year, the DevTeam decided that it would be a fitting tribute to take a number of our favourite quotes from the various Discworld novels and incorporate them into the game. Being the way we are, we did a little more than that. There are now a huge number of quotes from
many of the Discworld novels in the tribute file, but this doesn't mean that we wouldn't accept new submissions from other Pratchett fans.

The complete list can be found in dat/tribute and special thanks to Michael Allison who took the lead on this one.

Here, by the way, is a quote from "Guards! Guards!" which has meanings on more than one level - I think that Sir Terry would have appreciated its use in this context:

    "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night
 in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people
 remembered that."

As with all releases of the game, we appreciate your feedback. Please submit any bugs using the problem report sheet at:

     http://www.nethack.org/common/contact.html.

Also, please check the "known bugs" list at:

     http://www.nethack.org/v360/bugs.html

before you log a problem - somebody else may have already found it, after all.

Happy NetHacking!

For the DevTeam...

Mike Stephenson