NetHack is still under active development as we speak. There were 5 commits pushed in the past 2 days. Over the past month there were 148 commits to NetHack-3.7 (the current development branch), 197 files have been changed and there have been 5,136 additions and 4,251 deletions.

The NetHack Wiki has a nice summary of the changes coming in NetHack 3.7.0. For comparison, NetHack 3.6.0 was released in December 2015. I’m hoping 3.7.0 will come out this year, so that we might get in just under 10 years between major releases!

I have been playing off and on since 2009. It’s a game I will always come back to, I love it so dearly. Despite its reputation for brutal difficulty, I find it very cozy and relaxing to play, probably because it feels as familiar as an old pair of slippers by a warm fire. For people who know how it works inside and out, the game is not particularly difficult, although there remain some rather stubborn random deaths that can hit anyone (especially early traps) and are almost impossible to avoid.