Played Nethack for many years but switched to Crawl eventually. Lately I've been playing Brogue too. Never ascended in any of them but that doesn't keep me from enjoying them.

Must have: HJKL navigation (including diagonal). Big plus: terminal mode. Not a fan of tiles but I've grown to like Brogue's hybrid approach. I think I am ok with it because it's done so tastefully.
I've gotten spoiled by auto-explore and other travel aids in Crawl and Brogue, hard to go back to Nethack now. I am sure there are some variants that have it, I will look around at some point.

For a while I played Nethack using an Emacs interface, that was pretty neat but it hasn't kept up with later versions.

A few communities I am finding on https://browse.feddit.de/:
https://lemmy.world/c/roguelikedev
https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/nethack
https://lemmy.world/c/crawl
https://lemmy.world/c/dcss

Interested! My first roguelike was, well, rogue. Never got overly into it, but spent many many hours playing ADOM, nethack, and others. I hope there's a community already, and if not, let's make one!

Would love a roguelike community somewhere here. My favourite one is definetly Tales of Maj'Eyal, but that's not really unknown, so I would recommend Approaching Infinity. It's a space faring roguelike where you fly a spaceship and exolore planets, stations and such. It gets tons of updates and has a story too, which is nice.

My first real foray into roguelikes was Nethack.

Absolutely overwhelming but bit by bit i figured out the controls and found a decent android client to mess around in.

Never ascended, but had some good runs :)

send me you're favorite unknown traditional roguelikes.

My favorite roguelikes are probably pretty well-known roguelikes.

• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. You listed this one.

• Caves of Qud

The ones that I've probably spent the most time on that someone today might not have played are mainly because they're pretty elderly now. Tales of Middle Earth 2, the predecessor to Tales of Maj'Eyal. Zangband and Angband.

EDIT: Oh, right. And Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup; someone else mentioned that below. Would go with the "not at all unknown, but a good game" category above.

DragonFangZ is a cute, anime themed traditional roguelike that's noteworthy for its cute chibi artstyle, and its rather poor localization. It's not bad in that the translation choices are bad, but in that the person who did the translation, they did their best and it's really endearing!

The gimmick of this game is the Fang system, wherein sometimes when you kill a monster, they'll drop a "Fang" which can be consumed for a permanent upgrade, or equipped for access to an ability. These are themed around the monster the Fang dropped from and can be combined. Further, there's the Brave system that incentivizes players to leave corridors and battle with 8 spaces surrounding them for an attack boost.

Overall, it's a really sweet and endearing game, and I wish more people would give it a shot!

As a very casual rogue-like enjoyer (failed to ever kill the unicorn in nethack), I regularly enjoy Rogue Fable III. There’s not a ton of story or content, but all the essentials are there.

It’s a generic dungeon with various themed levels. (No puzzles.) Minor lore through occasionaly messages by the underlord or by reading signs/messages. Get the keys from guardians in side dungeons, then beat the big wizard and take his goblet of immortality.

You get a race for basic modifiers (no weight limit, but only move horizontally, for example).
You get a class, which determines your default talent/spell list.
Then you can get some extra talents/spells regardless of class from books/altars/librarians.

It’s simple, but I enjoy doing it while listening to other things. No direct challenge modes, but various race/class combos are more difficult than others.

Super big Caves of Qud fan here!

Not sure if it counts, but I've been playing Elona/Eternal League of Nefia. it's been hard though because there is very little english discussion of it, and I refuse to set foot on 4chan where most of it would probably be.

I've really enjoyed SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition (really cheap on Steam as I type this), Brogue and Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

Not sure if it's just me, but I find many games tedious (often because hunger and inventory management). Difficult games are just a different kind of tedious than filler games.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is one, it does let you deal with things from many angles but I don't think it's good enough for unknown/cursed equipment. Especially as it's so easy to get screwed over (especially early on).

I play the (old) free alpha of Rogue Fable III on itch. It has a completely different feel, a lot more going on mechanically (skills/attributes, terrain) so it at least somewhat feels like more my fault when I lose.

Either way we both know I'm probably going to lose with unused potions/scrolls even if I got a good sword, but I probably will not have gotten suitable armor etc. either. And when I win it seems like I either got perfect luck or I found a way to (borderline) cheese the game (which I mean sometimes that may be intended, but it doesn't feel great to try again).

Oh if you don't know it yet, check out Ultima Ratio Regum.

Still in development but super impressive

I also really enjoy DCSS and have got the orb out a few times. I hope a true general and traditional-only Roguelike community will pop up soon.