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You have just finished your years as a student at the local adventurer's guild. After much practice and sweat you have finally completed your training and are ready to embark upon a perilous adventure. To prove your worthiness, the local guild masters have sent you into the Mazes of Menace. Your quest is to return with the Amulet of Yendor. According to legend, the gods will grant immortality to the one who recovers this artifact; true or not, its recovery will bring honor and full guild membership (not to mention the attentions of certain wealthy wizards).
You set out for the dungeon and after several days of uneventful travel, you see the ancient ruins that mark the entrance to the Mazes of Menace. It is late at night, so you make camp at the entrance and spend the night sleeping under the open skies. In the morning, you gather your gear, eat what may be your last meal outside, and enter the dungeon.
You have just begun a game of NetHack. Your goal is to grab as much treasure as you can, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and escape the Mazes of Menace alive. On the screen is kept a map of where you have been and what you have seen on the current dungeon level; as you explore more of the level, it appears on the screen in front of you.
When NetHack's ancestor rogue first appeared, its screen orientation was almost unique among computer fantasy games. Since then, screen orientation has become the norm rather than the exception; NetHack continues this fine tradition. Unlike text adventure games that input commands in pseudo-English sentences and explain the results in words, NetHack commands are all one or two keystrokes and the results are displayed graphically on the screen. A minimum screen size of 24 lines by 80 columns is recommended; if the screen is larger, only a 21x80 section will be used for the map.
NetHack generates a new dungeon every time you play it; even the authors still find it an entertaining and exciting game despite having won several times.
The Mazes of Menace are the dreaded dungeons into which you are about to descend. There are… several levels of dungeon to explore and conquer in NetHack…
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