u/kjoonlee

Easiest way (if you already use Homebrew) to get NetHack up and running would be to just run brew install nethack. But if you don’t use Homebrew or don’t want to install Homebrew, here’s a quick guide to building NetHack 5.0 on macOS.

Quick build instructions

1. Get nethack-500-src.tgz from the website:
   • https://nethack.org/v500/download-src.html
2. Unpack the source code from Terminal.app:
   • cd ~
   • tar xf ~/Downloads/nethack-500-src.tgz
3. Follow the instructions from NetHack-5.0.0/sys/unix/NewInstall.unx

Original instructions:

cd $Top/sys/unix
sh setup.sh hints/NAME_OF_HINTS_FILE
cd ../..
make fetch-Lua
make all

What worked for me:

cd ~/NetHack-5.0.0/sys/unix/
sh setup.sh hints/macOS.500
cd ../..
make fetch-Lua
make all

Install

And to install, you can run make install from NetHack-5.0.0 and it will install NetHack to ~/nethackdir. It might even create a ~/bin/nethack script that calls the ~/nethackdir/nethack executable.