| HACK(6) | Games Manual | HACK(6) | 
hack —
| hack | [ -ddirectory]
      [-n] [-uplayername] | 
| hack | [ -ddirectory]
      [-s] [-X]
      [playername ...] | 
hack is a display oriented dungeons & dragons-like
  game. Both display and command structure resemble rogue. (For a game with the
  same structure but entirely different display - a real cave instead of dull
  rectangles - try Quest.)
To get started you really only need to know two commands. The
    command ? will give you a list of the available
    commands and the command / will identify the things
    you see on the screen.
To win the game (as opposed to merely playing to beat other people's high scores) you must locate the Amulet of Yendor which is somewhere below the 20th level of the dungeon and get it out. Nobody has achieved this yet and if somebody does, he will probably go down in history as a hero among heroes.
When the game ends, either by your death, when you quit, or if you
    escape from the caves, hack will give you (a
    fragment of) the list of top scorers. The scoring is based on many aspects
    of your behavior but a rough estimate is obtained by taking the amount of
    gold you've found in the cave plus four times your (real) experience.
    Precious stones may be worth a lot of gold when brought to the exit. There
    is a 10% penalty for getting yourself killed.
The administration of the game is kept in the directory specified
    with the -d option, or, if no such option is given,
    in the directory specified by the environment variable
    HACKDIR, or, if no such variable exists, in the
    current directory. This same directory contains several auxiliary files such
    as lockfiles and the list of topscorers and a subdirectory
    save where games are saved. The game administrator
    may however choose to install hack with a fixed playing ground, usually
    /var/games/hackdir.
The -n option suppresses printing of the
    news.
The -u playername
    option supplies the answer to the question "Who are you?". When
    playername has as suffix one of -T,
    -S, -K, -F,
    -C, or -W, then this supplies the answer
    to the question "What kind of character ... ?".
The -s option will print out the list of
    your scores. It may be followed by arguments -X
    where X is one of the letters C, F, K, S, T, W to print the scores of
    Cavemen, Fighters, Knights, Speleologists, Tourists or Wizards. It may also
    be followed by one or more player names to print the scores of the players
    mentioned.
USER
    or LOGNAMEHOMESHELLTERMHACKPAGER,
    PAGERMAILMAILREADERHACKDIRHACKOPTIONSSeveral other environment variables are used in debugging (wizard)
    mode, like GENOCIDED,
    INVENT, MAGIC and
    SHOPTYPE.
Andries Brouwer continuously deformed their sources into the current version - in fact an entirely different game.
| March 31, 1985 | NetBSD 9.2 |