NetHack Android DS

A modernized Android port of NetHack 3.6.7, built for touchscreens and physical gamepads. This is a personal, in-development project meant to scratch a personal itch, so expect rough edges.

Releases (APK downloads) are posted on the GitHub releases page.

Requires Android 13 or later.

Design Philosophy

This port is built around a few firm ideas:

• Touch and gamepad first. A physical keyboard or mouse should never be required for gameplay. Navigation, commands, and menus all work through touch gestures or a physical gamepad. The soft keyboard only appears for text entry.
• Native Android experience. This port tries to create a gaming experience that feels natural and not like a soft keyboard bolted onto a terminal-native game. In this way it borrows a lot from my work on NetHackDS.
• Radical configurability. NetHack is a deep game. The interface must accommodate diverse playstyles rather than enforcing a single correct way to play.
• Always fullscreen and immersive. It's a game. There's no good reason to give up screen real estate.

Showcase

Portrait — Touch Mode

Like the original project this is based on, this port supports tapping to control as well as a widget overlay system allowing for deep customization:

portrait-touch-mode.mp4

Landscape — Touch Mode

Orientation-specific layouts allow for unique portrait and landscape layouts.

landscape-touch-mode.mp4

Dual Screen — Gamepad

In truth the reason this port exists is because I wanted something I could play on my Ayn Thor, so this port includes first-class support for dual-screen devices and gamepads:

dual-screen-gamepad.mp4

Overlay Editor

The overlay system is designed to allow the user to relocate nearly any on-screen element, allowing for deep customization:

overlay-editor.mp4

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Architecture

The port follows a thick native, thin wrapper model:

• The vanilla NetHack 3.6.7 engine compiles to a native shared library (libnethack.so) via the Android NDK. The core game logic is untouched.
• A thin JNI bridge (sys/android/winandroid.c) connects the engine to the Java UI layer by implementing NetHack's standard window_procs interface.
• The UI is implemented by ForkFront-DS, a dedicated Android library that lives in sys/android/forkfront/ as a Git submodule. It handles rendering, input, menus, dialogs, and settings.

For a deeper dive, see the docs in DEVEL/:

• Port Overview — strategy and directory structure
• Architecture — data flow and component layers
• Build Guide — full prerequisites and troubleshooting

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Building from Source

Requirements: JDK 17, Android SDK 34, NDK 21.4.7075529.

cd sys/android
./gradlew assembleDebug

The resulting APK is at sys/android/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk.

See DEVEL/android-port-build.md for full setup instructions.

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Origins

This project is a hard fork of NetHack-Android by gurrhack, which provided the original native bridge and build system for NetHack 3.6.7 on Android. The UI library, ForkFront, is similarly a hard fork of gurrhack's ForkFront-Android. Both forks diverge substantially in architecture and design philosophy, and while it could not exist without all that previous hard work, I've opted to deviate pretty substantially without a focus on contributing back to the original (now fairly quiet) project.

NetHack itself is the work of the NetHack Dev Team and a long line of contributors stretching back to 1987. See README.NetHack for the original upstream README.

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. The ForkFront submodule has its own CONTRIBUTING.md with the same conventions.