NetHack Spoilers

Dungeon Emergency Checklist

When a turn has gone bad, stop typing and read the messages again.

1. Check HP, hunger, encumbrance, and every status word.
2. Look for the up stair, a door you can close, or another one-turn escape. Inventory search comes after the obvious exit.
3. If you cannot walk away, engrave Elbereth in dust before the monster reaches you. Use a permanent engraving when you have time.
4. Prayer can cure a life-threatening problem when your alignment and Luck are sound and enough time has passed. In Gehennom, expect less.
5. For stoning, eat a lizard corpse. For sliming, use fire. For illness, use blessed healing or non-cursed extra healing. For strangulation, remove the amulet or pray.
6. If nothing in the pack saves you, write down the death. NetHack is very good at making the same mistake memorable.

The Roles

The intrinsic tables give the exact level-by-level abilities for every role and race.

Your role sets your opening inventory, later intrinsics, skill caps, and Quest. Those differences change how you solve the same dungeon: a Valkyrie can trade blows early, a Wizard kills at range, and an Archeologist can dig around the fight.

Archeologist (Lawful or Neutral). The Indiana Jones of the Mazes. You set out with a pickaxe, a bullwhip, a tinning kit to preserve food, a touchstone for identifying gems, and your lucky fedora: the pack of an explorer not a warrior. The pickaxe is special, part weapon and part tool. Swing it in a fight, but also use it to dig your own way through the world: cut a new hallway, break into a sealed vault to reach the gold inside, or dig straight down to the level below. Your touchstone tells a true gem from cut glass with a single rub, and your training lets you read a scroll’s label the moment you pick it up, so scrolls identify themselves as you find them. You are thin-skinned at first, so the early levels reward patience and stealth over trading blows. But you are sharp, born with the Intelligence and Wisdom of a natural spellcaster. Although you do not begin with any magic, you grow into it as spellbooks find their way to you. In time you can become an expert at combat with the pickaxe and saber, and in the spells of Divination. These include magic mapping, a spell that reveals a whole level’s map in an instant. One rule every Archeologist learns: never smash a historic statue. You alone can tell which statues are historic, and destroying a piece of the past offends your god and costs you alignment.

Barbarian (Neutral or Chaotic). Raw muscle, and the most hit points of any role. Your game is to hit hard and outlast whatever hits back; you can dispatch most problems in the early Mazes with a few strikes of your heavy weapon. You begin already immune to poison, which rules out a whole category of early deaths, and you carry a great two-handed weapon (a two-handed sword or a battle-axe), a one-handed backup, a suit of ring mail, and food. For the first stretch of the game you can simply wade in and swing. Trouble comes later, once you have coasted comfortably to the middle of the game and meet monsters whose magic ignores muscle entirely. Start hunting magic resistance early, most reliably a suit of gray dragon scale mail. Because poison cannot touch you, you can also taste-test risky potions and foods that would lay a weaker adventurer low.

Cave Dweller (Lawful or Neutral). The simplest role in the game, and a fine place to learn the dungeon without a lot of moving parts. You are primitive but sturdy: a club, a sling with a pile of flint stones to fling, leather armor, and hit points that climb generously as you grow. There are no spellbooks to study and no starting spells. What makes the Cave Dweller distinctive is what you lack: no resistances at all to begin with. Where other roles are handed protection from fire or cold or poison, you earn each one by eating the right corpse. A fire ant grants fire resistance and a killer bee can grant poison resistance. In a fight you can grow expert with the club, mace, quarterstaff, spear, and sling, and like the Barbarian a master of bare-handed combat, so even weaponless you hit hard. Low starting Intelligence and narrow spell skills make scrolls more dependable than spellbooks. Choose the dwarf or human background for the heaviest melee.

Healer (Neutral). The dungeon’s doctor. You arrive equipped for medicine rather than war: a stethoscope, a small surgeon’s scalpel, healing potions by the handful, three spellbooks of healing magic already blessed so they will not blow up when you read them, and a wand of sleep. That wand is your best early defense. Most monsters in the first levels have no defense against sleep, and a single charge drops even a dangerous one where it stands. Save the charges for threats you cannot safely kill another way. The stethoscope is useful from turn one: press it to a monster to hear exactly how much fight it has left, or to yourself to learn your own hidden condition. Two gifts come built in. You are immune to poison, and the potion of sickness can’t touch you, so a mystery potion can never poison or sicken you, though paralysis or sleep still can. You are no brawler, so lean on the wand and, later, on your spells. In time you grow expert with the knife, quarterstaff, dart, and unicorn horn, and in the healing arts, and around the middle of the game you shift from drinking healing to casting it.

Knight (Lawful). Chivalry, on horseback. You ride to war with a code of honor and a companion at your side: a saddled pony trots with you from the first turn, alongside a long sword, a lance, and a full suit of armor, helmet, shield, and gloves. On foot, the lance can be used as a reach weapon, but charge from horseback with the lance, a joust, and you land crushing damage no one else can match, for no other role wields a lance so well. Riding your steed you can carry more, but climbing into the saddle is riskier than it looks: a failed mount throws you for 10–14 HP, most of a new Knight’s life, and early on you fail nearly half the time, so do not rush to ride. Let the pony grow up first, into a horse and then a warhorse, and mount when the odds favor you. Two marks of the order: as a Lawful knight holding a long sword, you have the best chance in the game of drawing Excalibur from a fountain, and your code forbids striking a fleeing, sleeping, or helpless foe, which costs you standing if you do. Feed the pony apples, keep the carrots to cure blindness, and pick your fights with honor.

Monk (Any alignment). You begin unarmed and can train your martial arts to a level of mastery no other role can reach, until your bare fists strike harder than most swords. From the very start you can see the invisible, shrug off sleep, and move with unusual speed, and you gain new powers faster than any other role. To keep the combat bonuses, stay light and unburdened. Any body armor costs 20 points of accuracy, a shield cancels your martial bonus, and metal on your head, hands, or feet clouds your magic, so you fight best in little more than the robe you begin in, which sharpens your spellcasting rather than dulling it. Guard the robe and keep to the vegetarian diet if you want to preserve your conduct.

Priest (Any alignment, matching your god). Your faith gives you an immediate read on every item’s condition: blessed, cursed, or uncursed. You never have to wonder whether the cloak on the floor is safe to wear. You set out with a mace, a robe and shield, and four flasks of holy water, and you can always make more: set potions of water on an altar of your faith and pray, and the whole pile turns holy at once. Your god favors you at the altar in another way, too. When sacrifice yields your first artifact gift, it is guaranteed to be Demonbane, a blessed silver mace made to smite demons. Each worthy offering has a one-in-six chance to produce that first gift. You are a capable fighter who grows into a formidable caster of clerical magic, expert with a whole rack of blunt weapons and in the healing, divination, and cleric schools. One caution: guard your Luck. Do not kill peaceful monsters or break mirrors before you have sacrificed your way into your god’s good graces, or the answer to a desperate prayer may not be the one you hoped for.

Ranger (Neutral or Chaotic). The hunter, most at home striking from a distance. You begin with a bow and a deep quiver of arrows, and a +2 cloak of displacement that makes attackers swing at an image of you a step from where you truly stand, one of the safest opening hands in the game. Your gift is volume: with a bow trained high, a single turn can loose two or three arrows at once, and few things survive that for long. You notice everything as well, spotting hidden passages and traps as you walk without stopping to search. Two pieces of woodcraft are worth remembering. Your finest arrows, the enchanted +2 stack, break far less often than ordinary ones, so save them for real fights and spend the cheap arrows on the harmless newts of the first level. And your place is at range: step back, keep a wall at your shoulder, and let the arrows do the work rather than trading blows on the front line.

Rogue (Chaotic). A thief in the dark, quick with a blade and quieter on your feet. You travel light: a short sword, a fistful of throwing daggers, leather armor, a lock pick that opens any door, chest, or box from the very first turn, and a sack to carry your finds. You move in near-silence, slipping past sleeping monsters without waking them, and when you strike an enemy that is fleeing or caught off guard, your backstab drives the blow home for far more damage than the same strike would deal head-on. Your daggers are made to be thrown, not thrust: you hurl several in a single turn. Later you can coat darts and any arrows, bolts, or shuriken you find with the poison you start carrying. Daggers cannot be poisoned. Stay in the shadows, and avoid the loud, clumsy actions, like kicking at doors or wading into a crowd, that give your position away.

Samurai (Lawful). A disciplined warrior of the old school, fast and deadly with a blade. You carry a katana, one of the finest single-handed swords in the dungeon, a shorter companion sword called a wakizashi, a yumi longbow with a quiver of arrows, and a suit of splint mail, and you move with a quickness other warriors have to earn. The katana carries you cleanly through the early game. Its companion, though, is the wrong partner for two-blade fighting: the little wakizashi doesn’t share the katana’s swordsmanship, so when you find an ordinary long sword, take that up instead and fight with a blade in each hand, both swinging with your full skill. Don’t forget the bow at your back, either. Trained up, the yumi makes you a ranged threat to rival a Ranger, two or three arrows a turn from a warrior already fearsome up close.

Tourist (Neutral). You arrive on holiday: a loud Hawaiian shirt, a credit card, an expensive camera, a small mountain of +2 darts, a couple of healing potions, and four scrolls of magic mapping. You have almost no armor, few hit points, and no real weapon, so early on nearly anything can kill you. Your survival hangs on cleverness rather than muscle. The camera is the trick: a flash blinds whatever is bearing down on you, and a blinded monster is one you can pepper with darts from a safe distance while your pet closes in to finish it. Save the mapping scrolls for the levels that look most dangerous. Shopkeepers can smell a tourist: until you are seasoned, they overcharge you and lowball what they buy. Leave serious shopping for later in the run. Survive that brutal opening and the Tourist blossoms: your quest reward, the Platinum Yendorian Express Card, grants magic resistance and helps recharge tools. With a good Intelligence score, a late-game Tourist also casts well. The hardest role in the game, and a badge of honor for anyone who ascends one.

Valkyrie (Lawful or Neutral; female only). The classic recommendation for anyone chasing a first ascension, and for good reason: strong from the start, hard to kill, and simple to play. A warrior-maiden of the North, you begin with a spear, a dagger, and a sturdy +3 small shield, already resistant to cold, with combat stats that let you meet the early dungeon head-on. The gods have set your late game aside for you, too. Your first guaranteed sacrifice gift, whatever your alignment, is Mjollnir, a thunderous war hammer. A Valkyrie with Strength 25 can throw it and usually catch it on the return. You can grow skilled with a wider range of weapons than nearly anyone. The one thing not to do is coast. Your muscles carry you a long way, but the demons of Gehennom hurl magic that ignores armor and hit points alike, so line up magic resistance and reflection before you enter Gehennom.

Wizard (Neutral or Chaotic). You set out already holding a treasure most adventurers spend the whole game hoping to find: a cloak of magic resistance, which turns aside a whole category of deadly magic from the very first turn. Around it you carry a quarterstaff, a wand, a pair of rings, a handful of potions and scrolls, a magic marker, and the force bolt spell to fling at anything that comes close. The early game is the fragile part. Your body is weak and your spell energy is thin, so fight carefully and lean on your wand and force bolt rather than your fists. As you study each school of spellcasting you begin to recognize its spellbooks on sight. A Wizard who reaches the middle game with a broad library has an answer to most fights. Keep the quarterstaff in hand as you cast, since it steadies your spells, and mind two quirks: you start with no food and a kitten who will not share, and your own force bolt will shatter potions lying on the ground (see Spellcasting).

The Races

Your race affects your starting and maximum attributes, and which intrinsics you get. No stat can go below 3; the table lists the maximum each race can reach for each attribute.

Human. No infravision, no poison resistance, no special talents. Every role is open to you, but gnomes and orcs are still hostile; being human does not make the Mines friendly.

Dwarf. Sturdy fighters with the best Dex and Con caps and matching human Strength. Infravision from level 1, the best HP gain per level of any race, pick-axe digging at twice the normal speed, and a feel for buried treasure under your feet. Mines residents are mostly peaceful to you. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Valkyrie.

Elf. Infravision plus sleep resistance at XL 4. Fragile HP but with the best Int and Wis caps and the best Pw (spell energy) growth per level of any race, plus an innate bow bonus (+1 to-hit with any bow, +2 with an elven bow) that applies even to roles that don’t normally pick one up. Elf Priests and Wizards get a free musical instrument. Available for: Priest, Ranger, Wizard.

Gnome. Infravision from level 1, slightly higher Int cap than a human, and most gnomes and dwarves in the Mines are peaceful to you. The early branch turns from a meat grinder into a friendly shopping trip. Touchstones identify gems for you without needing to be blessed. Gnome Rangers also reach crossbow multishot at Str 16 instead of Str 18. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Healer, Ranger, Wizard.

Orc. Poison resistance from level 1 is useful, and it lets you eat kobold corpses safely (free nutrition in the early dungeon). Orcs may also eat other orcs without a cannibalism penalty. Lower stat caps overall, and many humans, elves, and dwarves are race-hostile to orcs. Monsters that are normally peaceful, including shopkeepers, priests, and watchmen, stay peaceful. Other orcs aren’t automatically peaceful either. Available for: Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard.

Alignment

It is tempting to read Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic as good, balanced, and evil. The game does not judge you that way. Alignment is a number that measures how well you have kept your god’s rules.

Killing a hostile monster usually raises that number. Killing a peaceful monster costs every alignment 5 points, and murdering one also costs Luck. Some roles add rules of their own: Knights lose standing for striking helpless foes, and Samurai for attacking peaceful ones. A damaged record can be repaired through ordinary hostile kills and sacrifice.

Alignment also determines your god, your Quest, and which artifacts you can handle safely. Lawful characters can draw Excalibur from a fountain at XL 5 or later. Rogues are always Chaotic; dwarves are always Lawful. For the full altar rules, see Altars and Alignment.

The Early Shopping List

A source of nutrition. You will get hungry. It happens faster than you think. But your main food source isn’t going to be the rations in your pack. Unless you’re playing a vegetarian role, most of your food in the early dungeon is the corpses of the things you kill. Eat fresh kills as you go (e, then choose the corpse on your square), and rations become emergency backup rather than the main course. Grab every food ration you see, sure, but two or three is plenty to carry; you don’t need to hoard. Tripe rations are for your pet, not for you.

A way to identify things. In the early game, your primary identification tools are altars (drop items to see if they flash blessed/cursed), your pet (it is reluctant to step on cursed items), and experimentation. A scroll of identify is valuable, but you might not find one for a while. A touchstone (a gray stone that identifies gems) is helpful. At shops you will learn to recognize some items by their prices: the cheapest scroll is an identify scroll, and the cheapest potion is a healing potion. The full identification playbook is in A Practical Identification Strategy.

Armor improvements. At AC 6 or worse, with no altar or pet to test what you find, put on ordinary body armor, helmets, shields, and cloaks. A curse on one of those is usually less dangerous than walking around unarmored. Test boots and gloves first: cursed levitation, fumbling, or trapped hands can leave you unable to escape.

Your weapon. Most roles should keep the weapon they started with: it matches your best skill, which you can #enhance through practice, and switching weapons also discards any enchantment it may have started with. Pick a replacement if you’re a Tourist, Cave Dweller, or Healer who starts with a feeble weapon, or if it matches your skills (check the #enhance chapter), or it’s silver (a hefty bonus against werecreatures, vampires, demons, shades, and imps). Ordinary zombies and mummies ignore it. Prefer one-handed if you want the option to hold a shield.

A throwing stack. Keep daggers, darts, spears, or a bow and arrows ready, not buried in a bag. A floating eye should never be fought in melee. Rothes, homunculi, killer bees, and soldier ants are also much safer if you begin hurting them before they reach you.

Restraint. New adventurers pick up everything they find. Veterans pick up everything they need. The difference is about forty pounds and the ability to outrun a gnome lord. If your status line reads “Burdened,” you’re carrying more than you can use. You are also moving slow enough for some monsters to land two hits per one of yours. When your pile of stuff gets too heavy, drop the non-essentials. Careful about what you leave for monsters, though. They can pick up what you drop, and they can loot containers. You can drop stuff a level up; monsters don’t carry stashes between levels.

The Golden Rules of Early Survival

Rule 1: Don’t fight what you can’t beat. Decide after the first exchange, not when you are down to your last few hit points. Take the up stair if you can. Otherwise reach a door you can close, then a corridor. If there is no way out, engrave Elbereth in the dust with E, then -, before the monster reaches you.

  Bad: fighting in the open       Good: corridor chokepoint

  ┌─────·──────┐                  ┌─────·──────┐
  │·o··Z·······│                  │·o···Z······│
  │··k·@·G·Z···│                  │··k··G······│
  │····o·······│                  │·o··········+##@
  │··G·········│                  │··G·········│
  └────────────┘                  └────────────┘

  You're surrounded.              They come to you one at a time.

Rule 2: Don’t eat things you don’t understand. Monster corpses can grant powerful intrinsics, or they can poison you, give you food poisoning, or worse. Until you know what a corpse does, leave it on the ground. (Kobold k meat, for example, is poisonous and confers nothing.) The exceptions: you can always safely eat food rations, lembas wafers, cram rations, and fruits. Lichen corpses are safe and never rot. Lizard corpses are safe, never rot, and cure petrification. Keep one in open inventory, not buried in a bag: if a cockatrice touches you, you have two turns to chew. Newt corpses are safe, and they sometimes restore 1–3 Pw, which is the first sustainable mana source a spellcaster will see.

Rule 3: Your pet is your friend. Your starting pet fights alongside you and picks up items (a pet is reluctant to step onto a cursed item, which makes that a useful test), and can even be trained to steal from shops. Keep it fed by dropping tripe rations or corpses near it.

Rule 4: Learn to pray. If you are about to die (hit points critically low, Weak with no food, turning to stone) you can pray to your god (#pray) for help. In the early game, with decent alignment and non-negative Luck, prayer will almost certainly save you. Do not pray in the first 300 turns. After a prayer, count on waiting about a thousand turns to be safe; the actual recovery averages around 500 but can run much longer. Praying at the wrong time (when your god is angry, when you’re in Gehennom, or when you’ve prayed too recently) can make things much worse. Don’t waste it on minor problems (see Divine Relations for the full mechanics). If you have lost alignment, kill ordinary hostile monsters; kobolds and orcs are useful targets even for a Neutral character.

Rule 5: Explore thoroughly but move purposefully. Every turn costs nutrition, so standing around for hundreds of turns starves you, but rushing past rooms misses items you need. Explore each level fairly completely (check rooms, open doors, and use s, or 10s, to look for hidden passages), then move on when you’ve found what it offers. Once you know the down stair, do not spend hundreds of turns tapping walls. If you are Hungry and the level has no food left, go down.

Rule 6: Build your defenses. In the first half of the game, your goal isn’t treasure but the resistances that carry you through the late game. The three most important are magic resistance, reflection, and poison resistance. Poison resistance is an intrinsic from eating the right corpse: a killer bee, giant spider, yellow mold, or a black pudding kicked from a sink. Magic resistance and reflection come from gear: dragon scale mail (gray for MR, silver for reflection), a cloak of MR or amulet of reflection, a silver shield (reflection), or an artifact from your god, the Quest, or a wish.

Rule 7: Type deliberately, never autorepeat. Each key you press is a turn. If you hold a movement key down and let it autorepeat, your character marches blindly until something stops them, usually a monster you didn’t intend to engage, a trap that’s just been revealed, or a fountain you didn’t mean to quaff. Press each key once and pause. To cross long corridors without one keypress per square, learn the shift-direction shortcut: capital H J K L Y U B N runs past items and doors but stops for a monster ahead or one that hits you. G+direction is the cautious version; it also stops beside monsters, items, and doors. Autorepeat offers neither protection.

Dungeon Hazards (and How to Survive Them)

Here’s a short list of common early deaths and how to prevent them:

Starvation. Eat when you’re Hungry (the status message), not when you’re Weak or Fainting. If you are Hungry with no food, descend; a cleared floor will not grow a new ration. Weak already counts as a prayer emergency. At Fainting, eat or pray at once.

Floating eyes. They’re the e on the map. Small, blue, and seemingly harmless. If you hit one in melee, you’ll be paralyzed, and every monster in the vicinity will take free shots at your frozen body. Use ranged attacks, or just walk around them. They are very slow.

Rotted corpses. If you eat a corpse that’s been on the ground too long, you’ll get food poisoning, which is lethal without treatment. Eat corpses fresh, within about 30 turns of the kill for a guaranteed-safe meal. Past that, the rot roll turns random; past ~175 turns an uncursed corpse is certainly tainted. If you do get food poisoning, use blessed healing, non-cursed extra or full healing, a unicorn horn, or a eucalyptus leaf. Pray only if the requirements in Divine Relations are satisfied.

Falling down stairs while overburdened. If you’re carrying too much, taking the stairs can make you tumble for 1–3 HP. A cockatrice corpse in your pack is harmless; a wielded one can stone you in the fall.

Caught in the open by a pack. Jackals bite for only 1d2 each, but small packs of two to four spawn on the upper levels and surround you in open rooms. Killer bees, soldier ants, and gnomes arrive the same way. Retreat to a doorway or corridor at the first sign of more than two attackers. If they have not reached you yet, hold your ground and let them spend the approach turns; stepping toward a pack gives those turns away.

Pushing too quickly into the Mines. The deeper Mines below Minetown are crowded with armored dwarves and gnome lords. If you’re not ready for armored melee packs, head back to the main branch and return later.

Supply Containers

New in NetHack 5.0: somebody has been leaving care packages.

Every level above the Oracle has a 2/3 chance of hosting a “supply chest”: usually a chest (sometimes a large box), usually locked, seeded with at least one survivability item. The contents pool: potion of healing (about a 50% chance per chest, sometimes a pair), or otherwise potion of extra healing / speed / gain energy, scroll of enchant weapon, enchant armor, confuse monster, or scare monster, wand of digging, or spellbook of healing. There’s also a 2/3 chance of an extra random item, biased toward low-level spellbooks. The Mines branch level gets a different gift: a guaranteed food ration, cram ration, or lembas wafer.

These look like ordinary containers, no special marking. Above the Oracle, check every chest and large box. A locked one yields to a credit card, a key, or a wand of opening, or #force it. Pry with a dagger if you can: blades very rarely snap, while a blunt weapon may smash the box and any healing potion inside.

The Big Picture

The dungeon is a branching tree with a main trunk and several side branches. Exact depths vary; the diagram gives the usual shape.

The Dungeons of Doom form the upper half, roughly levels 1 through 27. Side branches lead to the Gnomish Mines (where you can find a luckstone and shops), Sokoban (a puzzle with a prize at the top), your Quest dungeon (in which your role’s leader sends you on a mission to retrieve a precious artifact), and sometimes Fort Ludios (a vault full of gold). The trunk ends at The Castle, the gateway to Gehennom.

Gehennom is the lower half: lava-filled maze levels and demon lords, with the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom in Moloch’s Sanctum. Once you have it, you climb back up through the Elemental Planes to the Astral Plane, where your god awaits your offering.

The Map Symbols

Everything in the dungeon is represented by a symbol on the screen. Learn to read them at a glance:

Letters represent monsters: d for dogs, D for dragons, Z for zombies. Colors help distinguish within a class: a red D is a red dragon, while a gray D is a gray dragon (see Field Guide to Dungeon Fauna).

Color memo: branch staircases turn yellow. Staircases that lead into a sub-branch (Mines or Sokoban) display in yellow once you’ve used them. Ordinary main-trunk stairs stay default-colored, so on a level with several stairs the yellow one is your way back into the branch.

Item symbols are punctuation marks:

Room Types

Most rooms in the dungeon are ordinary, empty or with a few items and monsters scattered about. But some rooms are special:

   A shop:                 A zoo:                 A throne room:
   ┌───────┐               ┌────────┐             ┌────────┐
   │[?!=/("│               │Z··Z$Z··│             │··Z·Z·Z·│
   │)%*[?!(│               │$Z···$Z·│             │·Z·\··Z·│
   │··@····│               │·Z$Z··Z$│             │··Z·Z···│
   └──+────┘               └───+────┘             └───+────┘
      #                        #                      #
   @ = shopkeeper          Z = sleeping           \ = throne
   Items for sale.         $ = gold piles         Monsters guard.

Shops. Identified by the shopkeeper inside, usually near the door. Shops sell items of a particular type: general stores, armor shops, weapon shops, scroll shops, potion shops, and more. Items on the shop floor belong to the shopkeeper; pick one up and you’ll be quoted a price. You can sell items too. Shopkeepers are extremely powerful in combat, so don’t steal unless you have a plan.

Temples. A room with an altar and a priest or priestess tending it. The altar’s alignment matters: if it matches yours, you can sacrifice here for good effects. If it doesn’t, the resident priest won’t be friendly about your attempts. The priest will also accept gold donations in exchange for clairvoyance or a permanent AC bonus See Donating to Priests.

Throne rooms. A room with a throne (\), a sleeping ruler at the throne, and a full court of monsters filling the rest. Sitting on the throne has random effects, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible.

Zoos. A room packed with sleeping monsters and gold. Each sleeper that can see you from within ten squares has a one-in-seven chance to wake each turn. Stealth prevents that. Fight from the doorway so only one or two can reach you at a time.

Barracks. A room full of soldiers. They’re organized and armed, but they’re also carrying good equipment. Worth clearing if you can handle the fight.

Beehives. A room full of killer bees and royal jelly. The bees are dangerous in numbers, but royal jelly is excellent food.

Themed rooms. The dungeon also has dozens of rooms that are odd in shape (pillars, a room inside a room) or in their contents. Some to look out for:

• Light source rooms. They reliably contain a lit oil lamp. Free torch.
• Buried treasure. A burned engraving somewhere on the floor reads “Dig 3 east 2 south” (or wherever) and points to a buried chest plus 3–12 random items. A pick-axe earns its weight here.
• Massacre. Floor strewn with human adventurer corpses. None grants an intrinsic. A human who eats one commits cannibalism, and a non-Chaotic sacrifice of one is a serious offense.
• Mausoleum. A small interior chamber with one waiting monster (mummy, vampire, lich, or zombie) or a human corpse. Open the door carefully.
• Spider nest, buried zombies, trap room, teleportation hub. Treat these as traps. Spider nests and buried zombies scale with depth, so back out and return with what the room calls for. Trap rooms may hold anything from arrow traps to anti-magic fields or land mines.
• Pillared and divided rooms. Some rooms contain pillars, an inner chamber, or a blocked center. Use those corners to protect an Elbereth square or keep a polearm target at reach.

Themed rooms are mixed in with ordinary rooms; a level may have several.

Common Early Encounters

Mid-Dungeon Threats

Very Dangerous Monsters

Special Symbols

A few map glyphs aren’t monsters in the conventional sense, but you’ll see them and need to know what they mean.

Fountains {

Ah, fountains. That gentle bubbling sound has lured more adventurers to their doom than any trap, with the promise of a cool refreshing drink.

About one in seven randomly placed fountains is a magic fountain, regardless of your Luck. It is indistinguishable from an ordinary one until you drink. With non-negative Luck, a successful magic draught says Wow! This makes you feel great!, restores every attribute to its maximum, and raises every attribute by one. That consumes the magic charge. (Pre-placed fountains like those in Minetown or the Oracle, and fountains created from another feature, are never magic. Also: dipping gets no benefits from magic charge but could consume it.)

Quaffing from an ordinary fountain is a dangerous slot machine with dozens of random effects including:

Most of the time, nothing happens. A demon appears about 1/30; on shallow levels it may grant a wish instead of attacking, working out to roughly 1 wish per 150 quaffs and dropping to zero past Dlvl 20. To take the risk: put your items in a bag (cursing protection), engrave Elbereth (demons keep their distance), and have a charm- or scare-monster effect ready in case a demon appears.

Dipping in a fountain is how a Lawful character gets Excalibur. If you’re at least XL 5, dipping a long sword may transform it into Excalibur, one of the finest weapons in the dungeon. Knights get a generous 1/6 chance per dip; everyone else gets a meager 1/30. Otherwise, dipping can rust your gear, summon hostile water creatures, or occasionally uncurse the dipped item.

At XL 5, a Lawful Knight carrying a long sword should dip in every fountain until Excalibur appears. Each dip carries roughly a one-in-three chance of drying the fountain up, so a single one rarely lasts long enough to deliver on its own. Don’t worry about the rust you collect along the way; the instant the sword becomes Excalibur, that rust is wiped clean and the blade turns permanently rustproof. A couple of cautions: leave the Minetown fountains alone, since draining a town fountain brings the Watch down on you, and if you’re not lawful, don’t dip at all, because the Lady of the Lake will only curse the sword. Other lawful roles can try, but at 1-in-30 a dip they should pack patience.

Altars _

An altar is a consecrated stone shrine, marked _ on the map and aligned to one of the three gods. Drop your gear on it to learn at a glance what is blessed or cursed, and sacrifice fresh corpses on it to earn your god’s favor.

Dropping items on an altar (d for one, D to drop several at once) reveals their BUC status instantly. Amber flash → Blessed. No flash → Uncursed. Black flash → Cursed.

It costs nothing and never runs out, so haul unknown gear to the first altar you find before putting it on. (Drop the whole pile at once; you’ll see one flash per item.)

Sacrificing monster corpses on an altar (#offer, while standing on it) earns your god’s favor. A stale corpse simply does nothing; a fresh, difficult monster is worth more. Sacrifice enough and your deity may reward you with an artifact weapon aligned to your cause. Don’t sacrifice your starting pet: the alignment loss is severe and the residual aggravate-monster intrinsic sticks around for the rest of the run. See Divine Relations for the full theology.

Converting an altar is risky enough that the details matter. With a non-negative alignment record, a cross-aligned sacrifice either flips the altar or costs 1 Luck; either result may summon a minion. With a negative record, the altar converts you instead. Read Altars and Alignment before trying it.

Thrones \

A throne is an ornate royal seat, marked \, that turns up now and then in a room of its own. Sitting on one (#sit) is the purest gamble in the Mazes: the list of possible outcomes reads like a wish list shuffled with a hit list:

• A wish (most reliable at non-negative Luck)
• Genocide of one monster species
• Free identification of one to four items in your pack (or, one time in five, your entire inventory)
• A stat boost or a stat drain
• An electric shock
• Full healing
• A crowd of hostile monsters, summoned for your amusement
• Confusion
• A curse on as many as six items; at positive Luck, long blindness and lost Luck instead
• Magic mapping of the level
• See invisible
• All your gold, vanished
• Teleportation; with bad Luck, every monster on the level wakes instead

About one time in three, something happens, but you won’t know which column of the ledger it’s going to hit. Sit on a throne when you’re strong enough to survive the worst row of that table. A wish can still come at Luck -1, but non-negative Luck guarantees the favorable branch when that outcome is rolled. Even when nothing happens, the throne may vanish in a puff of logic, so you might get several tries or none at all. (Vlad’s throne in the Tower is special: it never vanishes without granting a wish first.) Kicking a throne is a different gamble. One kick in three, once per throne, dislodges 300–500 gold and up to six gems. Of the failed kicks, one in four drops you through a trap door.

Sinks {

They say a dungeon has everything but the kitchen sink. The Mazes of Menace has the kitchen sink too, the white { on the map, and it is more colorful hazard than convenience. You can kick it, drink from it, or drop things down it: a couple of those tricks pay off, but most fizzle, and several can hurt you.

Kicking a sink usually produces a harmless Klunk! Four kicks in five do nothing. A successful kick might shake loose a ring or summon a black pudding (dangerous, though its glob is a triple-resistance snack) or an amorous demon posing as “the dish washer” (the same incubus/succubus as a seduction encounter), or just stub your toe. Each non-stub outcome fires at most once per sink. Worth a try early on only if you can handle whatever climbs out.

Dropping a ring down a sink produces a message distinctive to the ring’s type, one for each of the twenty-eight rings, decoded in the table below. Searching and slow digestion return at once. Of the other rings, one in twenty comes back and one in five of the rest is buried beneath the sink, where a pick-axe can recover it; the rest are gone. It’s most useful when you have a duplicate ring to spare, or when you’re starving and gambling that an unknown ring is slow digestion. For anything else, price-ID, an altar, or a scroll of identify tells you as much and keeps the ring.

Quaffing from a sink rolls one of twenty random effects, most of them nothing. The good ones are thin: about a 1-in-20 chance a ring turns up at your feet (once per sink), and a similar chance a random potion is poured down your throat, which is a gamble in itself. The bad ones are worse: one sip in twenty polymorphs you uncontrollably, another unleashes a water elemental (a serious fight in the early game), and others scald, gas, or sicken you. On balance it is more hazard than help: an entertaining gamble if that is your idea of fun, but not something to rely on. If you do quaff, keep HP and an escape route in reserve.

Pouring potions down a sink (by dipping) produces telltale effects, a clever way to narrow down potion identities without risking a sip. Five potions print unique sink-only messages:

For most other potions, the sink instead prints “A wisp of vapor rises up…” and then applies the same vapor effect as breathing a broken potion: the side effect normally identifies the potion. Sleeping and paralysis leave you helpless for 1–5 turns; hallucination gives only a momentary vision. Wasted on water, fruit juice, gain level, gain energy, and monster detection: those all just print “nothing seems to happen.”

Vaults

A vault is a tiny walled-off 2×2 room not connected to the rest of the level. Each one holds a pile of gold. You will usually find one by digging through stone or by teleporting in. The engraving “ad aerarium” on a level marks one nearby (see Engravings). A scroll of gold detection (or object detection) will spotlight the gold pile through the walls, and magic mapping reveals the closet directly.

There is no door, and no obvious way out. After about thirty turns inside, a vault guard appears and asks “Who are you?” You have two real answers.

Tell the truth. The guard makes you drop your gold, opens a temporary corridor, leads you out, and re-seals the vault behind him. You lose every coin, but you escape.

Answer Croesus (or Kroisos or Creosote). The guard takes that as the vault owner’s name and politely leaves. Lawful characters lose one alignment point for lying. You keep your gold but stay sealed in alone with your treasure.

If you do not want to starve, follow the guard and leave the gold, unless you can dig or teleport out yourself. (If Croesus is dead because you killed him at Fort Ludios, the Croesus answer angers the guard instead; use the real-name route then.)

Statues

A statue is a stone likeness of a monster, now and then a creature petrified where it stood. Most statues can be broken for any contents inside (with a pickaxe, wand of striking, or force bolt), but some are statue traps that animate the sculpted monster when struck or stepped on. For an Archeologist, the word historic appears in the name of a significant statue. Breaking one costs 1 alignment point.

The Route

Explore the upper Dungeons of Doom until you have found an altar or another way to test curses. The Mines entrance appears on Dlvl 2–4, but note it and keep going unless you are ready: about XL 5, AC 5 or better, full HP, a throwing stack, and an escape item is a fair bar. Near the Oracle, take the upward branch through Sokoban for its bag of holding or amulet of reflection. Then visit Minetown, finish the Mines when you can handle the packs, return to the main dungeon for the Quest at XL 14, and continue through Medusa to the Castle.

Sokoban or Mines first? You usually encounter the Mines first (Dlvl 2 to 4), but the strategic suggestion for most beginners is Sokoban. It’s a controlled puzzle crawl with mostly trivial monsters, and the prize at the top (reflection or a bag of holding) directly helps the Mines run afterward. The Mines are a fairer fight after Sokoban: you come back with one of those prizes and a few more levels.

The Gnomish Mines

The entrance appears somewhere around dungeon levels 2 through 4, as a downward staircase. You’ll know you’re in the Mines because the walls become rough stone and the corridors get irregular, as pictured below.

               ··└       ·······?└┘·└─┐
                ··└      ·G···········│
                ···      ┐·····*······└
                 ··└┐    │··`········
            ┌──┐ ┐··│┌─┐┌┘········
          ┌─┘··└┐│··└┘·└┘······┌
         ┌┘·····│┌─·`·······<·┌
         │······└┘·····)······└┐
     └───┘····┌┐····)··········└─┘  └┐
┐·············││·`········@··········│
└─┐······─┐·──┴┼─┐···················└
  └──┐·   │····└─┘···┌┐h··············└
     └┐   └──┐·······│└─┐···┌┐·········│
             └──┐····└  └───┘ ─┐·│····┌┘

The Mines are populated primarily by gnomes and dwarves, with tougher variants (gnome lords, dwarf lords, then gnome and dwarf kings) appearing as you descend. If you’re playing a gnome or dwarf, most of them will be peaceful, which makes the Mines a relatively comfortable detour. Everyone else fights through a steady stream of hostile gnomes and dwarves.

The Mines also have a notorious surprise guest: a mind flayer can spawn on any random Mines level outside Minetown, including Mine’s End. “You sense a faint wave of psychic energy” on an unexplored Mines level is the warning. A mind flayer drains Intelligence on every successful tentacle hit. In the early game you may not have the helmet protection or ranged attack power you’ll need to fight one safely. Retreat to prep, or skip the branch.

Minetown appears a few levels into the Mines. Usually it’s a small settlement with shops and a temple. Visit after you can manage the Mines’ packs, or return after Sokoban if the first trip turns ugly. The shops let you sell unwanted items for gold and buy useful gear. The temple has an altar (check the alignment) and a resident priest. If the altar matches your alignment, you’ve found a safe place to identify items by dropping them on it. The Minetown priest can also grant permanent AC reductions. A qualifying first donation grants 2–4 points of intrinsic protection, not just one. The price and threshold are easy to misread, so use the full table in Donating to Priests).

Candles spawn often enough that you’ll usually have enough by endgame, but you do need to source seven for the Candelabrum of Invocation later. Izchak’s lighting store in Minetown is the clean answer: buy seven there. If the shop is absent (Orcish Town layout), seven are scattered on that level instead. Wax candles burn longer than tallow but either works, and mixing types is fine.

One in seven times, however, Minetown generates as Orcish Town: an overrun settlement with no shops, no priest, and iron bars blocking the entrances. There’s still an unaligned altar, but you won’t get any shopping done.

Watch out for the Minetown watch. The guards are peaceful unless you steal, attack a peaceful creature, break a door, or dig in town. Anger one and the whole watch turns on you.

Mine’s End is the bottom of the Mines. All three Mine’s End variants contain a guaranteed (not-cursed) luckstone, so you’ll get one wherever you arrive. It adds 3 to your Luck and stops good Luck from wearing off; bless it and carry it for the rest of the game (see How Luck Works).

Finding it takes care. In most layouts the luckstone hides in a secret room, so if a maze dead-ends with no treasure in sight, search the walls (s, 10s) for hidden doors rather than digging, which these levels resist. There may be several such rooms, so don’t stop at the first. (One variant hides the luckstone among fakes: four mimics disguised as gray stones, plus a real cursed loadstone that looks just like it and welds to your pack. Searching (s) beside a suspect stone exposes any mimic on the spot; a real stone just sits there. That leaves the luckstone and the loadstone, which a shop tells apart by price ($60 versus $1). Don’t lean on the kick test here — wedged in its niche, even a real luckstone can thump like a loadstone.)

Sokoban

The prize at the top is usually a bag of holding, otherwise an amulet of reflection. Either can settle a major equipment problem before the Mines become difficult.

The entrance staircase appears somewhere around dungeon levels 6 through 10 (one level below the Oracle), and it goes up. Sokoban is a set of four puzzle levels where you push boulders onto holes or into place to open a path. Teleport doesn’t work here, and you can’t dig down off the entrance level (its floor is reinforced).

The puzzles are fixed (two variants per level, randomly chosen).

Each level has exactly one correct solution. If you push a boulder into a corner where it blocks your progress there is no way to start over. You’re left with a few ways to cheat, which might or may not help: squeeze past the boulder (drop your stuff to fit), dig the boulder with a wielded pick-axe or mattock, or fracture it with force bolt or a wand of striking (a scroll of earth and polymorph also count). Each of these costs a point of Luck and breaks the Sokoban conduct. The walls themselves are non-diggable on every Sokoban level, and pits cannot be bypassed. Even flying or levitation will not carry you over an open pit; the air currents pull you down anyway. You can climb back out after falling.

The prize at the top is either a bag of holding or an amulet of reflection, both extremely valuable; the Sokoban Solutions appendix documents the per-variant 75/25 weighting. A cursed scroll of scare monster is placed under the prize as bait. A bag of holding lets you carry far more inventory at reduced weight. An amulet of reflection bounces ray attacks back at their casters.

The prize remains available after an infraction. The lost Luck does not clear when you finish a level; it drifts one point toward zero every 600 turns, unless an unblessed luckstone holds it there.

Monsters behind boulders. A monster trapped behind a boulder can’t get to you, but you can still get to it: thrown daggers or darts fly straight over a boulder, and most attack spells (magic missile, cone of cold) pass over too. Don’t clear the way with force bolt or a wand of striking, though; those shatter the boulder, which costs you Luck and a piece you need for the puzzle.

Every legitimate boulder-push exercises Strength. The puzzle gives you plenty of practice without any need to walk around Stressed.

For complete solutions to all eight level variants, see Sokoban Solutions in the appendices.

The Oracle

Somewhere in the mid-levels of the Dungeons of Doom (around levels 5 through 9), you’ll find a special room containing the Oracle of Delphi, flanked by centaur statues (empty) and four fountains. Like every oracle since antiquity, she trades in riddles and takes payment up front.

She offers two services:

• Minor consultations are cheap (50 zorkmids) and produce fortune-cookie-style messages, drawn from the same true-rumor pool, mostly atmospheric, occasionally useful.
• Major consultations are expensive (500 + 50 × experience level) but pay back the gold in useful intel: hints about monsters, items, and rules.

The Oracle is peaceful and never attacks. Her room is a safe place to rest for a moment, though the fountains carry the usual risks.

Each type of consultation grants experience points the first time you buy it. If your first consultation ever is a major, you get 50–100 XP (it scales with your level). A minor first gives only 5 XP, and the major afterward gives less. Repeat consultations give nothing.

The Quest

Sooner or later, your own people call. The Quest is a branch of the dungeon shaped for your role alone: a nemesis has seized your role’s legendary artifact, and your leader summons you to prove yourself, defeat that nemesis, and bring it home. Around dungeon levels 11 through 16, a magic portal drops you onto it.

You’ll know when you’ve reached the right level. The first time you arrive there, a faint telepathic call from your quest leader breaks through:

You receive a faint telepathic message …. Your help is urgently needed …. Look for a …ic transporter. You couldn’t quite make out that last message.

You are now looking for a magic portal, which renders as a bright magenta ^ once you discover it. Like any trap, it stays hidden until you step on it (which also triggers it) or search the square.

To embark on your Quest, you will need experience level 14 and a friendly word with your quest leader on the first floor before they will let you descend. If you are prepared and worthy, your leader will send you to retrieve your role’s quest artifact from a quest nemesis.

Mid-game XP is slow to earn, so the path to XL 14 usually includes eating a few wraith corpses (one experience level each), or a blessed potion of gain level. (On graveyard levels like the Valley of the Dead, an undead leaves a corpse only about a third as often, so lead a wraith out before killing it if you want the level-up.)

Each role has a unique Quest with unique maps, a unique nemesis, and a unique artifact reward. The Valkyrie hunts Lord Surtur for the Orb of Fate. A Samurai’s path ends in a duel with Ashikaga Takauji over the Tsurugi of Muramasa. The Wizard descends into the Dark One’s stronghold for the Eye of the Aethiopica. The Artifacts chapter has the full per-role list.

Most quest artifacts are worth carrying for the rest of the game. Each gives some mix of magic resistance, telepathy, warning, reflection, stealth, or luck. Check whether its protection works when carried or only when wielded or worn.

A second important prize waits on the nemesis’s square. The Bell of Opening rides in the nemesis’s pack and drops when you kill them. It is one of the three Invocation items, and you cannot finish the game without it: at the bottom of Gehennom, on the vibrating square just above Moloch’s Sanctum, you ring the Bell, light the Candelabrum, and read the Book of the Dead to open the way down to the Amulet of Yendor (the full ritual is The Heist). Your quest artifact, meanwhile, lies under the nemesis’s feet, placed when the level was generated. Grab both before you go; the Quest is the only place to get either.

A nemesis may have picked up an amulet of life saving along the way, so don’t be shocked if one shrugs off a killing blow and you have to do it twice. The portal back to the main dungeon is on the first Quest level only. If you descend underprepared and have to turn back, you may have a long climb home.

The whole Quest hinges on your leader’s approval. Below XL 14, or with too little alignment, you are expelled automatically and may return after fixing the problem. If you have changed alignment, the leader banishes you for good. Do not experiment with a helm of opposite alignment before the Quest.

The Rogue Level

Somewhere in the middle dungeon you’ll cross a one-level historical district. “You enter what seems to be an older, more primitive world.” The neighborhood is preserved as it was when Rogue was the only dungeon-crawl anyone had heard of, and a few details give the era away:

• All the wildlife is in capital letters: lowercase species hadn’t been invented yet.
• Armor displays as ], food as :, amulets as ,, and gold shares a symbol with gems (in Rogue they were the same thing).
• Doors don’t close. Hinges came later.
• Tile mode switches off in favor of plain ASCII characters.
• No fountains, sinks, altars, shopkeepers, or priests, and no spellbooks, tools, or amulets in the natural item pool, all post-Rogue inventions.

Your modern tricks still work; you can engrave Elbereth here even though that was a Hack-era addition. A small anachronism.

Fort Ludios

Fort Ludios is the stronghold of Croesus. It is optional and easy to miss: the portal appears between Dlvl 11 and Medusa, always inside a sealed vault, so dig in or break the door. The alarm wakes sixteen soldiers and a lieutenant. Four dragons guard the storerooms; a stone giant and four giant eels patrol the moat. Croesus waits on the throne and hits hard enough that you should shoot or zap him across the moat.

The level is non-diggable and blocks ordinary teleportation. Leave by the portal or by level teleport. The treasury holds 36,000 to 54,000 zm across sixty squares, with a land mine or spiked pit under roughly a third of them. The corner towers hold diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and amethysts; soldiers carry rations and serviceable weapons. None of it is required to win. The gold is the reason to come, and it buys protection from priests.

Medusa’s Island

Medusa’s level sits near the bottom of the Dungeons of Doom, around level 25. You’ll know it by the large body of water and the statues scattered around (those used to be adventurers).

Arien Malec collected crossing strategies from RGRN posters back in the early 2000s, with input from Pat Rankin, Geoduck, Topi Linkala, and others. That is a condensed version of his guide.

The level stacks three challenges on one island: crossing the water that surrounds it, the giant eels (electric eels on one layout) lurking in that water, and Medusa herself, whose gaze turns you to stone. Each gets its own section below. If you carried the amulet of reflection out of Sokoban, the third problem is already solved.

There is a downward staircase on the island itself that leads toward the Castle. The level has four possible layouts, so don’t rely on memorizing a single map.

The Perseus statue. One of the statues on the island is named Perseus, the mythological hero who killed Medusa with a mirrored shield. Break it with force bolt, striking, or a pick-axe to recover a (cursed) shield of reflection (75% in three of the four layouts; 25% in the fourth), a blessed +2 scimitar (50%), levitation boots (25% in three layouts; 75% in the fourth, the same layout that is stingy with the shield), and a sack to put them in (50%). The shield is cursed, so plan to uncurse it before swapping it in. The other statues on the level are intentionally empty.

Surviving Medusa’s gaze. You need one of the following before entering her level:

• Reflection (amulet, shield, or silver dragon scale mail). Her gaze bounces back and stones her instead. That is the cleanest solution and the one most players use.
• Blindfold or towel. Wear it before entering line of sight. You’ll need telepathy or monster detection to navigate while blind. Works perfectly but makes the level harder to explore.
• A mirror. Apply it at an awake Medusa anywhere along a clear straight line. Every layout generates her asleep, so wake her from safety first.
• One-shot kill. A wand of death or finger of death can kill her before she gets a turn. Medusa resists stoning, so a cockatrice corpse does not work. Whatever you do, don’t eat her corpse: she’s the Gorgon, and the cadaver instantly petrifies whoever sits down for dinner.

Crossing the water. The island is surrounded by deep water. Your options, from safest to most desperate:

• Levitation (ring, boots, potion, or spell). The easiest way to cross. Eels can still grab you from adjacent water (see Drowning in Ways to Die Instantly).
• Water walking boots. You walk on the surface. Eels can still grab you in adjacent water.
• Wand of cold. Zap the water to freeze a path of ice. Every other step may make you slip and lose two turns, and fire can melt the path again, but it gets you across.
• Scroll of earth. Creates boulders that fall into the water, making a boulder bridge. Slow but works if you have nothing else.
• Polymorph into a flying or swimming creature. Risky if you lack polymorph control.
• Jumping boots or the knight’s jump. Can leap across narrow water gaps, but requires careful positioning.

Surviving the eels. The water contains giant eels (and on one of the four layout variants, a kraken) that can grab and drown you. Critical rules:

• An oilskin cloak or greased armor makes the eel slip off on the grab attempt. Greasing wears off, so it’s not fully reliable; oilskin doesn’t.
• Magical breathing (amulet or polymorph) prevents the drown even after being grabbed.
• Kill eels at range whenever possible. Wands, spells, and thrown weapons all work. Don’t melee eels in the water.
• Levitation and water walking do NOT protect against being grabbed by an eel in adjacent water. The drown check uses the eel’s tile, not yours. Only oilskin/grease, magical breathing, or killing the eel first are reliable.

The Castle

The Castle is the grand finale of the sunlit dungeon and the doorway to everything worse below: a stone fortress ringed by a moat, with a drawbridge for its only entrance. Inside waits an army of defenders: soldiers in the barracks, dragons guarding the storerooms, and a court of high-letter monsters in the throne room. The reward that makes the siege worth it sits in a locked chest in one of the four corner towers, the wand of wishing, the most valuable find in the game.

The Castle also serves as the gateway to Gehennom. For how to open the drawbridge and what to do once you’re inside, see The Castle in Part Five.

Nuisance Traps

Annoying but rarely lethal. The silver lining: arrow and dart traps produce free ammunition, and you can trigger them on purpose to stock up.

Movement Traps

Trapdoors and level teleporters are the most disruptive: one wrong step and you’re separated from your pet, your stash, and your carefully explored map. But with teleport control (from an item or intrinsic), teleport traps become free transportation. Levitation or flying both make you immune to pits, holes, and trapdoors entirely. Except in Sokoban, where the puzzle levels disable the skip and you fall in regardless.

Dangerous Traps

Fire traps threaten your pack, not just your health. The fire itself hurts, but the danger is what happens to your inventory: scrolls burn, potions shatter, and that stack of twenty scrolls of identify you’ve been hoarding is suddenly ash. Fire resistance saves your skin but not your belongings. Items inside a sack or oilskin sack survive the trap; the sack itself absorbs the burn. Gehennom is fire-trap country, so keep your consumables bagged.

With polymorph control, a polymorph trap lets you choose a new form. Without it, the trap chooses for you, possibly turning you into a newt that cannot use any of your equipment. Magic resistance and the Unchanging intrinsic both block the polymorph entirely.

If you do get caught and polymorphed into a handless form, your gear drops to the floor on the spot. Don’t panic and don’t move: random polymorphs wear off in a few hundred turns, and your kit is at the square you’re standing on. Defend the square if you can, pray if a monster has you in a corner, and pick everything up the moment you change back. (If you happen to be carrying a wand of polymorph or know the spell, zapping or casting it on yourself lets you reroll the form, but only if your current form can use a wand or cast.)

Sleeping gas is murder in monster-rich areas. You can’t fight, you can’t run, you can’t even wake up on purpose. Monsters line up to hit you like it’s a buffet. Sleep resistance from elven blood, orange dragon armor, or the right corpse prevents it.

Magic traps fire one of twenty random effects. A bit under half the time you get the dangerous one: a flash of light briefly blinds you and summons a few hostile monsters. One roll engulfs you in fire. The rest are harmless or even helpful: several are pure flavor, one toggles your invisibility, one uncurses worn and wielded items, and one tames the nearby monsters and raises your Charisma by a point. That last is why some players camp a known magic trap for the Charisma and cheaper shop prices, but it comes up only about one roll in twenty, and the fire and monster summons make the wait risky.

Bear traps clamp on for several turns. Try to step diagonally off the square; the diagonal escape is about five times faster than orthogonal. A wand of opening or spell of knock frees you on the spot.

Magic resistance blocks a teleport trap. If you want to use one, stand on it after it has been discovered and press Ctrl+T; the command does nothing from another square.

Anti-magic fields hit harder if you’re magic-resistant. The trap drains spell energy, and having magic resistance also triggers an “anti-magic implosion” that costs you HP. The damage is d4 base, plus another d4 if you have half-physical or half-spell damage, plus d4 for wielding Magicbane, plus d4 for carrying any one magic-resistance artifact (only one counts; the check breaks on first match). At worst that’s 4d4 damage, quartered (rounded up) if you can pass through walls. The defense is finding the trap first (search) and stepping around it. A wand of cancellation aimed at a magical trap does remove the trap, but it triggers a 20 + 3d6 damage blast at the trap’s square in the process; not a silent defuse.

Iron footwear (iron shoes or kicking boots) absorbs a surprising amount of trap punishment in 5.0: no leg damage from a bear trap, no spikes from a spiked pit, no polymorph from a polymorph trap (your shoes shift instead), and a positively- enchanted pair eats an anti-magic field’s drain by losing one enchantment instead. Useful protection to have on if you haven’t found anything better yet.

Searching and Detection

The best defense against traps is finding them before they find you:

• Search (s) repeatedly. Each search has an independent chance to reveal each adjacent trap, and Luck improves the odds. (The artifact/lenses search bonus only speeds up secret-door and secret-corridor discovery, not trap finding.)
• Wand of secret door detection reveals everything hidden in a roughly circular area around you (radius about eight, blocked by line of sight): secret doors, secret corridors, traps, trapped chests, and concealed monsters. It’s not directional.
• Crystal ball can reveal traps across the entire level
• Flying and levitation make you immune to most floor traps (you still trigger webs and magic, teleport, level-teleport, polymorph, and anti-magic traps)
• A scroll of gold detection read while confused turns the gold-reveal into a trap reveal: every trap on the level lights up at once. Confused gold detection is the cheapest pre-Gehennom trap survey.

A good time to search is when the dungeon has already hinted that something is wrong: a stray corpse in the middle of an otherwise empty room, a scatter of arrows or darts on the floor, or a themed room whose gimmick is hidden hazards.

Finding Secret Doors

The Dungeons of Doom were designed by architects who believed that every room should have one emergency exit that requires ten minutes of tapping on walls to locate. Secret doors and corridors are the game’s passive-aggressive way of saying “you haven’t explored thoroughly enough.”

When to search for secrets:

• Dead ends that feel too convenient. If a corridor just stops, and you haven’t found what you came for, there’s probably a door in the surrounding walls
• Suspiciously empty rooms with no obvious exit. The exit exists; it’s just been cunningly disguised as a wall
• After exhausting all visible options. When you’ve explored everything reachable and still haven’t found the downstairs, it’s time to stop wandering and start wall-tapping

The systematic approach:

Type 20s to search twenty times in one spot. For new characters with average Luck, you need 15-22 searches to reliably reveal a secret. Searching once and moving on is announcing your intention to remain lost.

Move three squares along the wall and repeat. Each search reaches one square in every direction, so a stride of three gives complete wall coverage with no gaps and no wasted re-searching. The pattern looks tedious on paper because it is tedious, but tedium is cheaper than being trapped on Dlvl 1 forever.

A Ranger or Archeologist is spared much of that: both have automatic searching from the start (as does anyone wielding Excalibur), so they check every adjacent square automatically with each step and often turn up secrets just by walking the walls. A stubborn door may still want you to stop and search a few times.

Items that help:

• Ring of searching auto-searches every turn while it’s worn
• Excalibur (or any artifact with the searching aura), wielded, adds its enchantment to your search bonus (a freshly-dipped +0 Excalibur adds nothing)
• Lenses worn (and you not blind) add +2 to the search bonus
• Wand of secret door detection instantly reveals nearby secrets in a radius
• Blessed scroll of magic mapping shows every secret door on the level (only the blessed version)

If the down stair is already known, take it. Wall-tapping is for a level whose exit or special room is still missing, not a ritual to perform on every floor.

Iron Bars

Iron bars look like a barrier but aren’t solid: light passes through and tiny creatures (grid bugs, bats, rats) can squeeze between, though anything kitten-sized or larger is blocked. Pick-axes bounce off them, wands of digging fizzle, and striking or force bolt pass through harmlessly. What gets through is acid: a yellow dragon’s breath, or a potion of acid shattered against the bars. The potion is the handy one. Wield it and force-fight (F) into the bars, and the splash dissolves them away. And if you happen to be chained to a heavy iron ball, you can wield the ball and batter the bars apart by hand, though it takes about twenty-five swings.

Usually, dig around them. Bars sit in a niche cut into a room wall, so digging diagonally past them or through the back wall reaches the contents without touching the bars. What’s usually behind: a scroll of teleportation.

Emergencies

Level Ambience

Intrinsics and Corpse Effects

Identification and Status Changes

Elbereth

To-Hit Calculation

Every swing of your weapon is a d20 roll, modified by everything that matters in a sword fight:

• Your experience level (higher means you’ve seen things)
• Your weapon’s enchantment (a +7 Excalibur hits noticeably better)
• Your Luck (the universe takes sides; the to-hit contribution caps around ±5 even though Luck itself ranges further)
• Your Strength and Dexterity bonuses (muscles plus agility, both matter)
• The monster’s AC (the lower their AC, the harder they are to tag)

Add 1, your XL, Strength and Dexterity bonuses, about a third of your Luck, weapon enchantment and skill, then the target’s AC. Your attack hits when the d20 rolls under that total. A negative target AC lowers the number, so enchantment and weapon skill matter more as you descend.

Damage

Base damage depends on your weapon and whether the target is small or large. Most weapons favor one shape over the other: short blades for kobolds, two-handers for ogres. Added to base:

• Weapon enchantment (+1 per point)
• Strength bonus (up to +6 before a two-handed multiplier)
• Weapon skill bonus (depends on skill level)
• Special bonuses (silver damage, artifact bonuses, etc.)
• Two-handed weapons get a 50% bonus to the strength damage component, which makes giving up the shield slot worthwhile

At 18/100 Strength, that +6 becomes +9 on a two-handed sword. Its d12+9 averages about five more damage per swing than a long sword’s d8+6, before enchantment and skill.

AC and Defense

Your AC determines how likely monsters are to hit you. AC starts at 10 (no armor) and goes down as you put pieces on; lower is better. The journey from “I die to gnomes” to “nothing can touch me” looks like this:

Negative AC is rolled afresh on each attack, and monster level still adds to the chance to hit. At AC -20 an ogre connects about one swing in four, while a level-15 monster lands roughly two in three. Many late-game threats use special attacks (breath weapons, spells, gaze attacks) that ignore AC entirely. You can be wearing impenetrable armor and a disenchanter will still ruin your day.

Seven slots, four paths down. You can wear seven pieces at once: body suit, cloak, helmet, gloves, boots, shield, and shirt. Filling every slot with ordinary armor gets you from AC 10 to roughly AC 0. From there, the paths into negative AC are enchantment, swapping ordinary pieces for magic ones (many magic pieces carry an intrinsic on top of their AC bonus), and extrinsic Protection bought from any priest. See the Armory for picks by slot.

Test the dangerous slots first. Drop boots and gloves on an altar, or see whether your pet is reluctant to cross them. At AC 6 or worse, with no test available, wear ordinary suits, helms, shields, and cloaks; being stuck in one is usually safer than staying unarmored. See A Practical Identification Strategy for the full procedure.

Changing armor takes turns and layers in order. You wear armor with W and take it off with T. Shirt goes on first, body suit second, cloak last, so reaching an inner piece means shedding what’s over it. A metal body suit takes 5 turns to don or remove; leather 3, mithril 1; helmets and gloves take 1 turn each, boots 2; cloaks, shields, and the shirt are instant. A full Hawaiian-shirt-to-cloak swap can mean six exposed turns, and you take all incoming attacks during them, so save armor changes for a clear room or a corridor at your back.

Speed

Divide before you engage. A useful number in a fight is the monster’s speed divided by your effective speed: that ratio is how many times it acts for every action you take. A base-12 hero against a speed-18 centaur sees a ratio of 1.5, so the centaur lands three hits for every two of yours and wins a melee duel. Slip on speed boots (effective ~20) and the ratio flips to 0.9, and now it’s your fight. Against an air elemental at speed 36, the ratio is 3.0 unboosted and 1.8 even with boots, still hopeless on foot. Ranged or skip. A ratio above 1.0 is a fight you lose to attrition unless you can drop the monster in your opening burst; a ratio below 1.0 is kiteable, so back into a corridor and strike between its steps. If you can’t drop a faster monster, don’t run in the open, since it only catches up and keeps hitting. Reduce how many can reach you instead: a doorway, a closed door, or the stairs.

Under the hood. Your base speed is 12, and so is the cost of any action. Each creature builds up a private counter; when nobody can afford to move, every counter advances by that creature’s speed, and that repeats until someone can act. A faster creature’s counter simply fills more often, which is why the ratio above holds. Monster speeds come from the bestiary: zombies at 6, humans at 12, centaurs at 18, vampire bats at 20, air elementals at 36.

Speed grants extra moves probabilistically. Fast (from certain corpses) adds a +12 bonus to roughly one allocation in three, averaging effective speed ~16. Very Fast (speed boots, potion of speed, haste self) adds the same bonus to two allocations in three, averaging ~20. The roll is per-allocation, not sustained, so any single tense round may or may not give you the extra; the average is reliable over many actions. Very Fast doesn’t stack with Fast; the better state wins. Speed boots are the easiest source: put them on once and stop spending potions or spell energy on speed.

Encumbrance shaves the allocation directly. It reduces the points your allocation gives you, after the intrinsic bonus is applied:

A Stressed character with intrinsic Fast still moves slower than a baseline Unencumbered one. At Stressed, a speed-6 zombie keeps pace; at Strained it acts twice per move. Get to Unencumbered, ideally with a bag of holding.

Reference: common monster speeds.

Speed boots earn their slot against the fast monsters. Against a speed-6 zombie your ratio only creeps from 0.5 to 0.3, but against a speed-18 centaur it drops from 1.5 to 0.9, the difference between losing a chase and winning a duel.

Two-Weapon Combat

Some roles can fight with a weapon in each hand, which looks impressive and gives a second swing per turn. Each strike takes a flat to-hit and damage penalty by skill rank (−9/−7/−5/−3 to hit, −3/−1/0/+1 damage from Unskilled through Expert), and the loadout must be melee on both sides. No shield, no launcher, no thrown projectiles. Only Rogue and Samurai reach Expert; Valkyrie and Knight cap at Skilled; Barbarian at Basic. Rangers, Healers, Monks, and Wizards cannot use the style.

When the second swing pays off. The extra hit is worth its to-hit penalty only when your hit chance is already high and your damage is healthy. At Expert (−3/+1) with high enchantment against a moderate-AC target, a Samurai’s katana + wakizashi out-damages the katana alone on most rounds. At Skilled (−5/0) the math is roughly a wash. Below Skilled the penalty usually swallows the benefit, so a Knight or Barbarian is better off with one good weapon. The two-handed bonus (3/2 Strength damage on bimanual weapons) is a strong alternative for any role without a two-weapon skill.

Setting it up. There is no separate command for the off-hand; the second weapon lives in a “secondary” slot you fill with the swap command. Wield the off-hand weapon with w, press x to push it into the secondary slot, then w your main weapon, and finally press X (capital, the two-weapon toggle) to fight with both. Press X again to go back to one weapon. The off-hand has to be a one-handed melee weapon. If it is cursed when you try to start, it slips to the floor.

Ranged Combat

Hitting at distance is one of the dungeon’s great advantages. Every turn a monster spends closing the gap is a turn you spend whittling its HP from a safer square. Rangers and Samurai live by their bows, but any role can set a quiver and reach for f. The toolkit:

Fire, throw, and swap commands.

• t is throw: pick an item from inventory and a direction.
• f is fire: throws whatever is in your quiver without re-prompting. Once set, repeated f is the fastest ranged attack you have.
• Q sets the quiver: pick the default thrown stack (arrows for a Ranger, daggers for a Rogue, shuriken or arrows for a Samurai). Set it once at the start of the run.
• x swaps primary and secondary weapons. Wield your bow, set a melee weapon as secondary, and x toggles between them. The common Ranger pattern is: shoot at range, swap to a dagger when the monster closes, swap back to the bow once it’s dead.

Launchers and ammo. Bows (bow, elven bow, orcish bow, yumi) shoot arrows; crossbows shoot bolts (harder per shot but slower, and they need Str 18 for full multishot, or Str 16 for gnomes); slings shoot rocks or gems. Polearms strike at distance 2 with a (apply) instead. You can also throw daggers, darts, shuriken, javelins, and boomerangs without a launcher.

Lining up the shot. Projectiles travel in a straight line and can’t bend around a corner or shoot diagonally through a closed doorway. If a monster is across a zigzag corridor, advance until the line opens. The shot stops at the first solid target along the path: if your pet is between you and the monster, you’ll hit the pet. The same rules apply to wand zaps and spell rays.

Multishot. With the right skill and role, a single f launches multiple projectiles per turn. Rangers get +1 on any non-dagger ranged weapon; Rogues get +1 on thrown daggers; Samurai get +1 with a yumi and ya; Skilled adds +1 and Expert +2; the Longbow of Diana adds +1 while wielded. At Expert with a matching role, the game rolls from one projectile up to the maximum. An Expert Ranger averages about two and a half shots a turn.

Conserving ammo. Each arrow or bolt has a per-hit break chance: roughly 67% for a +0 stack, 25% for a +2 stack. Train multishot on a cheap found stack; save your +2s for fights that need them. A Ranger who walks out of the upper dungeon with thirty unbroken +2 arrows can keep shooting through the long fights.

Fighting Smart

The dungeon rewards cowardice, cunning, and property damage. Make the fight unfair before it starts.

Common Combat Deaths

Beyond the top ten, certain enemy categories kill more beginners than their depth or appearance would suggest. They come in packs, move faster than you, or have one attack you cannot afford to take.

The Gnomish Mines are a top killer. The danger is the layout: Mines rooms are large open caves where four or five armed opponents have plenty of room to swarm around you. Use ranged attacks, or look for natural pinch points where the cave walls narrow. Dwarves hit harder than gnomes, and gnomish wizards (the first spellcasting enemy you meet) blast you with psychic bolts and can heal and hasten themselves. Lords and kings appear deeper, with differently colored G and h glyphs. Scout the first Mines level, but come back with about XL 5, AC 5 or better, full HP, a throwing stack, and one escape item. Sleep resistance helps, but is not a reason to wait forever.

Sleep without resistance is a near-instadeath. A homunculus (i) bite, a sleeping-gas trap, or later an orange dragon or Nazgul breath puts you to sleep for several turns. If you are alone in a corridor it costs you a couple of rounds. If you are surrounded by anything else, the surrounding monsters hit you freely while you cannot move. Sleep resistance comes from being an elf at XL 4, orange dragon armor, and several corpses. Neither the Wizard’s cloak of magic resistance nor the Ranger’s cloak of displacement supplies it.

Bats and other speedsters (B). Bats and giant bats clock in at speed 22, nearly twice your starting 12. They get two attacks for every one of yours, and a 1d4 bite at double rate chews through low HP fast. Ravens and vampire bats are speed 20 with two attacks each (and the vampire bat’s second bite drains Strength). Fight from a doorway so they cannot circle you, or kill them at range. Centaurs (speed 18 to 20) and vortices raise the same problem later on.

Ants and other pack travelers (a). Soldier ants are speed 18 with two attacks (bite plus a Strength-draining sting) and travel in groups. Killer bees, giant ants, and fire ants are the same shape of problem. Treat any chittering or buzzing on an unexplored level as a reason to back up and find a chokepoint before the pack closes.

Quadrupeds (q). Rothes are three-attack pack hunters at sluggish speed 9: a single one is easy to outrun, but three in a room is several real fights stacked together. Mumakil are solo two-attack bruisers (4d12 butt plus 2d6 bite) that hit harder than anything else in the upper dungeon. Both wander mid-level rooms.

Golems ('). Most are slow but several hit disproportionately hard. The rope golem grapples on a hugs attack and pins you in place for adjacent friends to chew on. Clay and stone golems deliver 3d10 and 3d8 in a single claw. The iron golem is the heaviest threat here: level 18, 4d10 weapon plus a 4d6 poison-gas breath that drains Strength, and resistant to fire, cold, electricity, sleep, and poison. Most golems leave no corpse, so they cannot be eaten for intrinsics. Kill them quickly and at range when you can.

Water demons from fountains (&). Quaffing a fountain summons a water demon roughly 1 quaff in 30. The wish roll happens as the demon appears: a grateful one grants it immediately and vanishes; otherwise the level-8 demon attacks. Wish odds also drop with depth, so casual quaffing pays worse the deeper you go. Don’t quaff from fountains until you have magic resistance, reflection, or a clear path of retreat.

Floating eyes (e). Hit one in melee and you’re paralyzed for 3 to 210 turns, about 100 on average; whatever passes by during the nap kills you. Kill at range, then eat the corpse for telepathy.

Minotaurs (H, in the Castle and maze levels of Gehennom). Three attacks (two 3d10 claws and a 2d8 head-butt) averaging about 42 damage per turn. The hardest hitter short of the Riders themselves (the three near-unkillable horsemen who guard the endgame). Use a wand of sleep, a thrown potion of paralysis (with free action), or just dig down before they reach you. Minotaurs ignore Elbereth.

Major demons gate in more major demons. Once per attack round, a major demon has a one-in-16 chance to summon another outside Gehennom and a one-in-ten chance inside it.

Deadly Mistakes

Routine mistakes kill more adventurers than exotic instadeaths. The list below is a field guide, not a server ranking.

Eating mistakes. Old corpses cause food poisoning, poisonous corpses (deadly poison) drop you fast, and eating while Satiated risks choking. Watch your nutrition before committing to a heavy corpse, and pray immediately if you ate something you shouldn’t have.

Reading unidentified scrolls in a shop. A confused or cursed scroll of teleportation level-teles you out of the shop with the unpaid merchandise still in your pack, turning the shopkeeper hostile when you return. A scroll of fire destroys shop goods you are liable for. Save the price-ID session for outside.

Mount slips and riding accidents. Getting on a steed rolls against your experience level plus the steed’s tameness; a failure costs 10 to 14 HP. The dangerous cases are a cursed or greased saddle (the slip is essentially guaranteed and the fall hurts). The Confused or Fumbling or Glib cases have worse odds, and a fresh pet at XL 2 throws you 9 times in 20; a barely tame one does so about 17 times in 20.

Pet kills. Kittens, little dogs, housecats, and ponies all appear on the death list, almost always because the player put on a ring of conflict and forgot to take it off. Remove the ring before walking back to your pet.

Boiling and shattering potions. A potion dropped on Gehennom’s hot floor breaks about half the time, harmlessly. Fire reaching the potions in your pack is what can boil them and kill you. Bagging your potion and scroll stash is wise: a fire trap or a red dragon’s flames incinerate loose scrolls and potions, and a white dragon’s frost shatters loose potions.

Wands in the wrong hands. Monsters use attack wands, and a ray can ricochet off a wall back into your face. Reflection and magic resistance matter long before Gehennom. Engrave-test an unknown wand before aiming it at anything alive.

Killed by a grid bug. The weakest monster in the game gets the last hit on someone who walked away from a real fight at 2 HP, or who decided to read a scroll on the turn one was adjacent. Don’t read scrolls under threat.

Killed by kicking. Kicking sinks summons a black pudding, a foocubus, or worse. Kicking a door merely gives a harmless Whammm! when it fails, but a wall hurts. Trapped chests are a separate danger. Kick only when you can spare the consequence.

Wrath of a god. You prayed when your god wasn’t willing. See Divine Relations for the prayer cooldown and what counts as “trouble” worth a prayer.

Scroll of genocide while confused. Confused genocide removes your role’s own species from the world (Valkyrie, Wizard, Samurai). You become the genocide. Don’t read scrolls under confusion unless you already know what they are.

Scroll of earth on yourself. Buried under a pile of boulders you summoned on your own head.

Most early deaths are ordinary fights allowed to run one exchange too long.

A Note on Nymphs

The n class (wood, water, mountain) doesn’t want to kill you. She wants your inventory. In the early game a nymph pulls worn armor right off your body, undoing the AC you’ve assembled, and each successful claw hit also lifts a random item from your pack. Then she teleports away to a random spot on the same level. Your bag of holding, your amulet of reflection, a freshly-wished cloak of magic resistance: gone, across the map, often into a room you haven’t explored. Few monsters set an early character back this hard, and it takes only one hit.

Only theft. Both claws use the same attack: each takes either an item from your pack or something you are wearing. She costs you gear, not hit points.

Defenses. The rule is never to let a nymph reach melee range. Kill at range (darts, force bolt, a wand of anything). Engrave Elbereth: nymphs respect it. Or drop your most irreplaceable items on the floor before approaching. Whatever’s not in your pack can’t be stolen. Since she does no HP damage, a character stripped to nothing, no worn gear, empty pack, can even fight a nymph bare-handed in perfect safety. It won’t stop her blinking away between hits, but she has nothing left to take.

Already robbed? She keeps what she took until she dies, so you have to hunt her down and kill her: the loot drops from her corpse. A robbed nymph stays on the same level unless she later falls through a trapdoor or wanders onto a staircase, which carries your item off with her.

Never engage a nymph while carrying the Amulet of Yendor during the Ascension Run. If she steals it, you abandon your climb to hunt her down and kill her, and the mysterious force does not pause while you search.

A Note on Mimics

Mimics are far tougher than their depth suggests: their claws hit hard enough to kill a low-level character outright, and small mimics rank in the top ten causes of death. The reprieve is that all mimics are slow (speed 3, less than half your base speed). If you uncloak one and don’t like the matchup, walk away and come back stronger; it isn’t going anywhere.

You meet them mostly in shops: an average shop has one or two in the aisles masquerading as merchandise, with more as you descend.

The visual tell. A mimic appearing as a generic “strange object” renders on the map as ], a mirror of [, the armor class. No real item ever displays as ], so a ] anywhere is always a mimic.

How to uncover one safely. Searching an adjacent square (s) reveals a concealed mimic. Throw a cheap item at the suspected square; the mimic uncloaks and the item lands harmlessly. A stethoscope applied to the square also uncloaks. Telepathy, ESP, astral vision, and a wand of secret door detection see through the disguise and show the mimic as m. Your pet won’t step onto a mimic.

Recognizing a large mimic before it grabs you. Once an m is uncloaked you see its color: small mimics are brown, large mimics red, giant mimics magenta. Depth also helps: large and giant mimics don’t generally appear until mid-dungeon, so almost every mimic in the upper levels is a small one with a 3d4 claw.

Sticking. A small mimic hits hard but never holds you (you can always step away). A large or giant mimic glues you in place on a successful claw hit: you can’t move, take stairs, or drop through a hole. And once stuck you have only about a 1-in-13 chance each turn to pull free while it’s awake. Kill it (it’s slow), teleport out, or put it to sleep first. The best protection is to avoid the hold: since it only lands from melee, searching (s) as you move through a shop reveals a large or giant mimic before you step next to it, and one you’ve spotted can never grab you.

Eating the corpse turns you into a pile of gold (or, while hallucinating, an orange) for 20 / 40 / 50 turns depending on size. Anything that tries to pick “you” up snaps the spell.

A Note on Werecreatures

A bite from a werejackal, wererat, or werewolf can infect you with lycanthropy, and the infection, not the bite, is the danger. You then transform into the beast at random, roughly every 60 to 80 turns and more often at night. Each shift forces you out of your armor; a werewolf destroys your body armor and shirt but drops the cloak intact, then leaves you in a weak beast body. You revert on your own, but a mid-fight transform leaves you stripped at the worst possible moment.

When the werecreature summons help, write Elbereth at once. The summoned animals respect it, but the werecreature’s human @ form walks through, so keep an exit as well.

Curing it. Quaff holy water, #pray, or eat a sprig of wolfsbane. Summon a pet army first, though: a few turns in beast form spent on #monster call up wolves (or rats or jackals) that stay tame after you cure, a free pack you can later grow into something fiercer at a polymorph trap.

A potion of polymorph or a polytrap, while you’re infected, turns you into your were-form rather than a random monster, and doesn’t cure you.

A Note on Puddings

Puddings are the dungeon’s signature self-multiplying monsters, and their leftover globs are also among the best food you can find. The class lives in the mid-dungeon and Gehennom. Brown and black puddings split when you hit them with an iron or metal weapon: one becomes two, two becomes four, and your long-sword grinding session turns into a swarm. Black pudding additionally corrodes your wielded weapon on its passive return-hit, so each round of splitting is also a step toward your blade rusting away.

Defenses. Melee with a silver or wooden weapon (silver dagger, elven dagger, club, quarterstaff). These don’t trigger the split. Mithril also bypasses the check. Fire kills without splitting; brown and black puddings resist cold. Most attack spells work too.

Gray ooze doesn’t split, but it rusts armor on a hit; don’t engage in your starting iron suit if you can avoid it.

Eat the globs. A pudding leaves a glob rather than a corpse, and the globs are some of the best food in the game. Unlike corpses, globs can’t be sacrificed at an altar, so puddings can’t be farmed for offerings. The globs remain edible for about 500 turns and are packed with resistances. A brown-pudding glob grants cold, shock, and poison resistance over repeated eats; a gray-ooze glob grants fire, cold, and poison resistance; a black-pudding glob also grants cold, shock, and poison resistance. Brown pudding and gray ooze are vegetarian-safe; black pudding is not. Globs of the same color merge into one meal with one resistance roll, so eat them one at a time off the floor before they combine. The full intrinsic table is in Useful Corpse Effects.

A Note on Dragons

Dragons deserve a full briefing. Each color has its own breath weapon, resistance, scale mail property, and degree of desire to kill you specifically. The summary:

Gray dragon scale mail grants magic resistance, the most important defensive property in the game. Gray dragons are the ones you most want to kill for their skin, and also the ones most likely to make you regret trying.

Silver dragon scale mail grants reflection, turning away most ray attacks.

Black dragons disintegrate everything you’re wearing along with you, including your magic resistance. Carry reflection or eat enough black dragons to grow disintegration resistance before going where they live. Their scale mail grants disintegration resistance plus drain resistance, a rare extrinsic source of the latter.

Yellow dragon scale mail gives more than its label. Listed power is acid resistance, but it also grants stoning resistance, the same outright immunity acid blob corpses give. If you find a yellow dragon and don’t already have stone-res, killing it is worth the trip. Yellow dragons are no rarer than the other colors.

Orange dragon scale mail grants sleep resistance and free action (the ring’s effect), bundled into one slot.

White dragon scale mail grants cold resistance and slow digestion, which slows hunger on long descents.

Red dragon scale mail grants fire resistance and infravision, the same effect as a ring of infravision or being elven.

Green dragon scale mail grants poison resistance and sickness resistance, covering both poison and illness attacks.

Blue dragon scale mail grants shock resistance and intrinsic speed, same tier as speed boots. (Wearing both at once doesn’t make you faster; either alone reaches Very Fast.) That combination makes blue an excellent general-purpose choice.

Gold dragons breathe fire. Their scale mail has no elemental resistance but is permanently lit (radius 4 blessed, 3 uncursed, 2 cursed), so it can replace torches and oil. It also confers hallucination resistance.

All scale mails are dragonhide, body-slot, and +9 AC worn. Dragonhide resists rust, corrosion, and fire, but not disenchantment. The choice of which color to chase is usually whichever dragon’s territory you can reach safely; about one in three adult-dragon kills drops a set of scales, which you can wear directly or convert to scale mail by reading a non-cursed scroll of enchant armor while wearing them.

A Note on Trolls

The T class doesn’t stay dead. After you kill a troll, its corpse sits on the floor for a few hidden turns and then stands back up at full HP, fresh and angry. About three troll corpses in four get back up within fifty turns.

Stopping the revival. Eat the corpse, tin it, feed it to a pet, or kick it into lava. Teleport only moves it elsewhere on the same level, and striking does not destroy it.

Trolls drop their gear when they die. A revived troll re-collects what it was carrying, so a revive-and-recollect cycle leaves piles of mixed troll-gear and dead-troll bodies on the same square. Pick up the gear before they wake up. The loot is yours either way.

Class members. Plain troll, ice troll, rock troll, water troll, and the late-game Olog-hai. All revive, and the corpse behaves the same way regardless of variant. The Olog-hai is the variant to fear, a three-attack hitter at level 13.

A Note on Wraiths

The W class has a touch attack that drains an experience level, one of the few permanent character setbacks in the game. You lose maximum HP, energy, and the most recent skill slot, but not attribute points. A potion of restore ability returns lost levels. The wraith can land the touch again if you let it, so plan the kill from across the room.

The corpse gives you a level. The touch is melee-range only, so engage at distance or from inside a corridor where you control the spacing. A wraith corpse rots at the ordinary rate; eat it while it is fresh and the room is safe.

Farming wraiths. Mid-to-late-game players hunt wraiths in the upper Quest and throughout Gehennom for experience levels. A cursed scroll of genocide naming “wraith” reverse-genocides four to six fresh wraiths at your feet, a ready-made banquet if you can drop each one in the turn it arrives. The classic setup is to stand on stairs (so you can escape if it goes wrong), drop a stack of cursed scrolls, and graze. Some ascending heroes credit a wraith binge for the experience levels that carried them through Gehennom.

A Note on Seduction

The amorous demon (&, gray) appears as a succubus to male heroes and an incubus to female ones. A same-sex foocubus just claws at you and never starts the seduction. The encounter is a Cha+Int gamble: five bad outcomes vs. five good ones, plus a payment phase. Handled badly it can drain a level, an attribute, and 6–15 HP; handled well it grants a level, an attribute, full HP, and extra max Pw.

Mechanics. The demon must be adjacent and not on cooldown. It strips off your worn armor one piece at a time (cloak, suit, boots, gloves, shield, helm, shirt). The items are unequipped to your inventory, not taken or dropped on the floor; the strip only costs you the slot for the rest of the encounter. You get a yes/no prompt before each piece comes off with probability Cha/20 (so Cha 18 prompts about 9 times in 10; Cha 10 about half the time). If you’re still wearing a body armor or cloak when the strip ends, the encounter ends right there and the demon walks away. A hard-to-remove suit is the simplest defense.

If you do get to the act, the outcome rolls against your combined Cha+Int (capped at 32). At the cap the bad-outcome chance is about 6%; at Cha+Int = 20 it’s about 40%; at 10 it’s nearly 70%. Check your stats before you accept.

The demon then charges 500+ zorkmids (high Cha can refuse; peaceful demons charge 1/5). Being asleep or otherwise unresponsive defers the attempt entirely.

Strategic note. At high Cha+Int the encounter is net-positive, and the armor-removal step strips cursed worn pieces too, an amorous demon can be the cheapest curse-removal in the dungeon. Some players keep one alive to farm XP and attributes. Don’t try this at experience level 1, though: the level-drain outcome is fatal.

A Note on Light Bursts

Yellow lights (y, level 3) and black lights (y, level 5) attack by exploding the moment you’re adjacent. Yellow lights blind you for 10d20 turns (a blessed potion of healing or any extra/full healing cures, or a unicorn horn); black lights hallucinate you for 10d12 turns (unicorn horn cures, or wait). Both lights die in the explosion; the blindness or hallucination is what endangers you. Defenses: kill them at range with wands, thrown daggers, or breath weapons. Warning detects them through their invisibility; telepathy does not (mindless).

Attack Wands

Being hit by a powerful wand can mean instant death. A wand of death or finger of death kills an unprotected character outright, and ray wands of cold, fire, lightning, or magic missile can roll lethal damage too.

Defense: Reflection bounces rays; magic resistance blocks death and magic-missile rays. The first time most monsters zap a beam wand (death, sleep, fire, cold, lightning, magic missile) at you, the shot misses. If you can see the monster, the wand identifies itself in the same moment, so you know what was aimed at you and have a turn to react before the next zap connects. Monsters native to the Castle, Ludios, the Quest, Gehennom, Vlad’s Tower, and the Planes get no warning miss.

Choking

If you push past Satiated and keep eating, you can choke and die. The game prints “You’re having a hard time getting all of it down” as a warning; if you have eating-confirmations turned on it’ll also prompt you. Past a hard nutrition threshold only a one-in-20 escape, or being Breathless, keeps the meal from killing you instantly.

The other path to choking is the amulet of strangulation. Worn, it puts a short countdown on your throat and kills you when it runs out. The amulet generates cursed 90% of the time, so you usually can’t just take it off: pray, or uncurse it with holy water or remove curse. Magic resistance doesn’t help. Polymorphing into a Breathless form does save you.

Defense: Don’t eat above Satiated. Be paranoid about unidentified amulets.

Starvation

That isn’t technically instant, but it feels like it. If your nutrition drops to zero, you faint. If you don’t eat something while fainted, you die. In the early game before you’ve established a food supply, starvation still needs an immediate answer.

Defenses: Eat corpses promptly. Pray when your god is willing and you are Weak or Fainting (prayer cures hunger). Carry food rations, tripe rations, or lembas wafers.

Famine, one of the three Riders in the endgame, will kill you quickly through starvation by draining 40–80 nutrition per hit, with no extrinsic to block it. Enter the Astral Plane Satiated and carry a stack of food rations through the fight, or you will be Faint soon after Famine hits.

Deadly Poison

A handful of monsters (pit vipers, killer bees, cobras, some spiders) have a poison-damage branch that can deliver 10 to 30 extra HP of damage on top of the normal hit. At full HP you usually survive; at low HP it can outright kill you. The “extra-damage” roll fires about 1 in 240 per qualifying hit. Eating any Rider corpse (Death, Pestilence, or Famine) is instantly fatal regardless of HP.

Defenses: Poison resistance makes you immune. Most characters can get that early by eating enough appropriate corpses. It’s one of the first intrinsics worth acquiring.

Brainlessness

Mind flayers drain Intelligence with their tentacle attacks. If your Intelligence drops to your racial minimum (3 for humans), the next drain kills you: “brainlessness.” A regular mind flayer has three tentacle attacks per turn; the master mind flayer has five, plus a heavier weapon strike. A single unprepared turn next to a master mind flayer can drop your Int by up to ten. Each hit also has a 1-in-5 chance to trigger spell amnesia: a random number of your spells (up to all of them) drop to zero retention; re-study spellbooks to restore. Independently, each hit has another 1-in-5 chance to drain one or two of your weapon skills — Basic falls back to Unskilled, Expert to Skilled, and so on. Skill loss has to be earned back at training posts, so do not stand and trade blows with a mind flayer.

Defenses: Wear any helmet. Even a plain orcish helm blocks seven of every eight tentacle drains. Greasing the helmet stacks an additional slip-off roll on top, so a greased helmet is the gold standard. Better yet, kill them at range (wands, spells) so the question doesn’t arise. One useful detail: a mind flayer’s mind blast locks on every time when telepathy reveals you, but can still fire one time in ten without it. Taking off an amulet of ESP lowers the risk; it does not remove it. To recover drained Intelligence you need a potion of restore ability (uncursed restores one stat; blessed restores all), the spell of restore ability, or prayer when you’re in good standing. In 5.0 the unicorn horn no longer restores lost attributes, so don’t rely on it. Stockpile at least one restore ability before pushing into mind flayer territory.

Engulfment

Two monsters hide in plain sight until you walk into them. The lurker above (t, gray, level 10) hides on the ceiling and drops onto whoever passes underneath; the trapper (t, green, level 12) hides on the floor and engulfs whoever steps onto it. Both look like ordinary terrain until they trigger. Their engulfment wraps and crushes rather than digesting.

Other engulfers don’t hide. Purple worms digest; vortices and fog clouds engulf and batter you without digestion. Dragons do not swallow you.

Defenses: Searching reveals hidden monsters. Telepathy shows them through the deception. Wearing a ring of warning or a helm of caution tips you off before you step.

Getting out. Once engulfed, attack the host repeatedly; weapons still work from inside. If you have a wand of digging, zap it (no direction needed): it almost always expels you immediately, leaving the engulfer at 1 HP. A wand of opening or the knock spell forces the engulfer to release you on the spot without killing it, useful if a tame purple worm has swallowed you in conflict. Ranged spells and rays will tear into the host from the inside.

Drowning

Giant eels, electric eels, and krakens can grab you with their wrap attack. Once they have you, each of the monster’s turns you can drown. The check uses the monster’s tile (always water for an eel or kraken), not yours, so you can drown even while standing on adjacent dry land. Only Swimming, magical breathing, or amphibious form prevent the drown; encumbrance doesn’t matter here. (Encumbrance only matters if you fall into water and need to crawl out; Stressed or worse forces emergency disrobe.) You’ll meet eels and krakens at Medusa’s level, in moats around the Castle, in swamp rooms, and on the Water Plane.

Defenses: An amulet (or spell) of magical breathing gives you Breathless and ends the grab-drown threat. Levitation keeps you above pools so you can’t walk into them, but does not save you from an eel’s grab once it lands. Kill sea monsters at range whenever possible; their grab attack requires adjacency.

Petrification (Stoning)

Petrification is the reason players carry a lizard corpse. Touching or eating a cockatrice without protection, kicking its corpse barefoot, or meeting Medusa’s gaze kills at once; a lizard cannot help. Stepping on the corpse is safe unless Fumbling trips you onto it.

A cockatrice’s hiss or a thrown egg instead starts a five-turn countdown. It announces itself with “You are slowing down,” “Your limbs are stiffening,” “Your limbs have turned to stone” (at which point you are paralyzed and can no longer act), “You have turned to stone,” and “You are a statue” (death).

Defenses ahead of time: wear gloves around cockatrice corpses, use reflection against Medusa, and pile up timed stoning resistance from acid blob corpses (each one grants 3–18 turns). For something permanent, wear yellow dragon scale mail.

Peril in the new moon. A cockatrice’s hiss has a small chance to start stoning on any landed melee hit (roughly 1 in 30). On the real-world night of a new moon, that jumps to about 1 in 3. Hunt the nest on another night.

Defenses while it’s happening: eat a lizard corpse (that is why you carry one), eat an acidic corpse, drink a potion of acid, pray, or cast stone-to-flesh on yourself. Keep the lizard in your main inventory, not in a bag: pulling it out of a bag takes a turn you can’t spare. Act before the “Your limbs have turned to stone” message; after that you’re paralyzed for three turns and the final messages kill you. Amulet of Unchanging does not interrupt stoning. If you happen to be polymorphed into a non-stone golem, wearing it during the countdown is actively harmful; it blocks the stone-golem auto-poly that would otherwise save you on death.

Out of lizards? Any acidic corpse will do: acid blob, jellies, yellow dragon, black naga, and yes, green slime works (but green slime starts a different countdown that turns you to slime; only reach for it as a last resort). Quaffing a potion of acid has the same curative effect.

The other side of the coin: a wielded cockatrice corpse (with gloves on) is one of the game’s most devastating weapons. anything you hit that lacks stoning resistance turns to stone. The classic offense, known to veterans as the “rubber chicken,” handles many demon lords. Medusa and the Riders resist stoning. The failure modes you must guard against are falling into a pit, hole, or trapdoor while carrying it, and losing the gloves. Thrown cockatrice eggs work the same way and have the same hazard if a monster throws one at you.

Disintegration

A black dragon’s breath is the only monster, spell, or wand that disintegrates you. (A deeply angered god can also call down a wide-angle disintegration beam as a follow-up to lightning; reflection won’t block that one. Only disintegration resistance will. Stay on speaking terms with your god.)

Defenses: Disintegration resistance (from eating a black dragon corpse or wearing black dragon scale mail) gives full immunity. Reflection bounces the breath back, protecting you, but black dragons are themselves disintegration-resistant, so the bounce won’t kill them. Magic resistance does not help.

Without disintegration resistance, your worn armor takes the breath first: the shield is destroyed first if you have one, then your body armor and cloak together; only if neither is worn do you die outright (with your cloak and shirt destroyed in the process). So an ordinary shield at least eats one breath for you before being lost. An amulet of life saving still rescues you from the fatal case, though you lose any armor it took.

Level Drain

Certain monsters reduce your experience level on a hit, taking the HP and power gains that came with each lost level. Wraiths, barrow wights, Nazgul, vampires, vampire leaders, and Vlad himself all carry level-drain attacks. Stormbringer in an enemy’s hand does the same. Drained levels do not come back on their own. You re-earn them by killing more monsters, by drinking a potion of restore ability (a blessed one restores all lost levels at once), or by eating a wraith corpse.

(Don’t confuse drain-life with Strength drain: a vampire bat’s poisoned bite drains Str, not levels. Stat drain is a separate problem and Enchantment Drain covers its cousin.)

Defenses: Drain resistance makes you immune. The classic sources are wielding Excalibur (Lawful), Stormbringer (Chaotic), or the Staff of Aesculapius (Healer’s quest artifact). New in 5.0: wearing black dragon scale mail (disintegration resistance plus drain resistance, both in one slot) or a shield of drain resistance (random shop find, no other property).

Wraith corpses are weightless and can’t be tinned (no nutrition), so eat them fresh the moment the fight ends.

Enchantment Drain

Disenchanters (R, blue) appear only in Gehennom. Their claw drains worn gear; hitting one in melee drains your weapon.

Their active claw picks one of your worn armor pieces (cloak first, then suit, then shirt, then helm, gloves, boots, or shield by weighted chance) and shaves 1 off its enchantment. If you have no armor at all, it can instead chew a ring, amulet, or blindfold. It can’t reach your wielded weapon with the active attack. The game does print “Your thing seems less effective” each time, so you’ll know when it lands.

Your weapon only takes enchantment damage as a passive counter when you hit them in melee. Three or four melee strikes will take a +7 sword to +3; that passive drain is silent. Range-killing sidesteps both attacks at once.

Defenses. Magic-cancellation armor at MC3 mostly blocks their armor drain but doesn’t stop the melee counter that drains your weapon. Rings of conflict and pets redirect them to other targets. Artifacts resist drain 9 times in 10; ordinary items only 1 in 10. Don’t eat the corpse: it strips a random intrinsic.

The Touch of Death

Some monsters, most notably Death (one of the Riders on the Astral Plane), can kill you with a single touch. The Finger of Death spell and the wand of death work similarly. Do not zap a wand of death or finger of death at Death the Rider. Death absorbs the attack and gains max HP. Magic missile is the recommended answer against all three Riders.

Death the Rider’s touch has a 15% chance to attempt the full 8d6 + 50 blow and drain half that damage from your maximum HP. Magic resistance reduces that to the smaller drain rather than blocking it. Sixty percent of touches deliver that smaller drain directly, and 25% miss. A high-level character with many hit points can survive the high-damage hit; the permadrain still hurts.

The wand of death and Finger of Death spell are gated by magic resistance only when the death ray hits you from outside. If you misfire and self-zap, MR doesn’t save you; only being nonliving (polymorphed into a vampire, lich, skeleton, etc.) or a demon will. The same nonliving/demon immunity also protects against incoming death rays.

An amulet of life saving will revive you once if the touch or zap kills you outright.

Genocide

Reading an uncursed scroll of genocide while confused can genocide your own role species. Check your status before reading one.

Prayer

Praying (#pray) calls on your god for help. When conditions are right, prayer pulls you back from stoning, starvation, or near-death. When conditions are wrong, it can kill you.

The mechanics below were inspired by Matthew Lahut’s Praying Spoiler, the long-running RGRN reference for the prayer system.

What prayer fixes (in priority order). Your god fixes the most urgent trouble first:

1. Petrification in progress (stoning)
2. Sliming in progress
3. Strangulation
4. Sinking in lava
5. Illness (food poisoning, sickness)
6. Severe hunger (Weak or Fainting)
7. Standing in a stinking cloud
8. Critically low HP (≤5, or below a fraction of maxHP that scales with your experience level: 1/5 at XL 1–5, 1/6 at 6–13, 1/7 at 14–21, 1/8 at 22–29, 1/9 at XL 30+)
9. Lycanthropy
10. Stuck in a wall, collapsing under load, cursed levitation boots, unusable hands (cursed glove + cursed wielded weapon), cursed blindfold

After resolving the major troubles above, your god may also grant additional blessings: clearing minor afflictions (plain hunger, blindness, confusion, stunning, hallucination, ordinary punishment with iron ball and chain), improving your alignment, or even gifting intrinsics like telepathy or speed.

The requirements for a safe prayer. All of the following must be true:

• Your alignment must be non-negative. Killing peacefuls, robbing shops, and other misdeeds reduce alignment. Sacrifice and virtuous behavior raise it.
• Your luck must be non-negative. Luck is affected by many things (see Luck and Fortune).
• Your god must not be angry. God anger is separate from alignment and accumulates from specific offenses (breaking conduct with your god, desecrating altars).
• The prayer timeout must have expired. After a successful prayer, you must wait before praying again. The timeout averages around 450 turns but can run much longer. In a genuine emergency (HP critical, starving), there is some forgiveness if your timeout is close to expiring.
• You must not be polymorphed into a demon or undead while worshipping a non-chaotic god.
• You must not be in Gehennom (unless you worship Moloch, which no standard role does). Your god cannot hear you there. That is one of the things that makes Gehennom so dangerous.
• If you’re on an altar, it should be co-aligned. Praying on a cross-aligned altar directs your prayer to the wrong god.

The short rule: pray for a listed trouble only when your alignment and Luck are non-negative, your god has not expressed anger, and you are off another god’s altar and outside Gehennom. If you have never prayed, wait until after turn 300. Afterward, allow about a thousand turns between prayers when you can; the average recovery is nearer 500, but the tail is long.

When prayer goes wrong. If a requirement is unmet, your god punishes instead of helping: lost alignment or luck, a longer timeout, cursed worn items, or hostile minions. Severe transgressions can trigger lightning or disintegration, both fatal.

Practical guidance. Pray only when you’re about to die and have no other option: starvation, stoning, illness, critically low HP. First run the checklist above (alignment non-negative, timeout expired, no cross-aligned altar). If any answer is no, find another way.

Prayer timeout tracking. The game does not show the number. Five hundred turns is an average, not a promise; use a thousand as the safe rule when the run gives you that much room.

Turning Undead

Knights and Priests can #turn to call on their god and drive back the undead: every undead and vampire in sight (and demons, past experience level 15) within a wide radius. The tougher the creature, the higher your level must be to destroy it rather than merely scare it, zombies at experience level 6 but ghosts not until 14, liches 16. Below that, a turn only routs them, and magic-resistant undead like ghosts resist about half the time. Lawful and neutral heroes destroy what they turn; chaotic ones pacify it.

Unlike prayer, turning costs nothing with your god: no timeout and no goodwill, so use it freely, paying only a few turns of paralysis while you chant. But like prayer it fails in Gehennom, so it’s dead weight in the Valley of the Dead. The turn undead spell is different: it fires in one direction, scares one target, and works there.

Sacrifice

Sacrifice trades a fresh corpse for favor. On a co-aligned altar, #offer first calms an angry god, then repairs alignment and prayer timeout; once those are sound it can raise Luck or produce an artifact. Holy water and crowning come from prayer on the altar, not the sacrifice itself.

The rules:

• The corpse must be fresh, killed within the last 50 turns. A corpse older than that has zero sacrifice value (the gods simply ignore it). Acid blob corpses are the one exception and never spoil for that purpose.
• Bigger monsters make more valuable sacrifices. “You have a feeling of inadequacy” means your god was angry and the corpse was too small to help; the requirement does not scale with XL.
• The altar must match your alignment, or you’re praying to someone else’s god (which has its own consequences).
• Same-race sacrifice punishes a lawful or neutral hero (and turns a co-aligned altar chaotic). For a chaotic hero on a chaotic altar, though, it is a reward: a peaceful demon appears and your Luck and alignment both rise.
• Two requirements before any gift can fire: you must be experience level 3 or higher, and your Luck must not be negative.

With enough sacrifice credit, your god may gift you an artifact weapon. The chance per qualifying sacrifice is roughly 1 in 6 for the first gift, then drops sharply for each subsequent gift. The drop depends on two things: how many gifts you have already received and how many artifacts exist in the game (yours, randomly generated, and from any bones files you have inherited). If only your first gift exists, the next chance begins around one in eight; more gifts and more existing artifacts make it worse. Don’t be surprised if you get one artifact and then nothing more for thousands of turns.

The first gift is not merely biased for several roles. A Valkyrie, Wizard, Barbarian, Samurai, or Priest can receive only the role’s signature artifact first, and it adopts the hero’s alignment. The corpse also caps what can appear: Sting, Ogresmasher, and Trollsbane need only a value-1 offering; Vorpal Blade and Fire Brand need 5; Frost Brand needs 9; Grayswandir needs 10. Save a troll-class corpse when fishing for the strongest gifts.

Donating to Priests

A peaceful priest in their own temple accepts donations. #chat to them and a prompt appears: How much will you offer (suggested: X or Y)? The two numbers are the priest’s suggested thresholds for the two reward tiers.

What you get:

• Clairvoyance. 500–999 turns per suggested amount of automatic short-range map awareness (you “see” the immediate area around you every few turns without moving). Granted if you offer in the lower tier.
• Protection. An intrinsic AC bonus that stacks across visits. Granted if you offer in the upper tier. Your first donation grants 2–4 points; subsequent donations add 1 each up to 9; past 9, the chance to get another point drops to 1-in-N. The bonus persists for life, unlike clairvoyance.

The cost. Pay enough and the benefit is yours. The priest’s prompt always shows you the exact ask, which scales with your experience level and how much gold you’re carrying:

• Clairvoyance: a randomized 150–250 zorkmids × experience level as the base ask
• Protection: twice that, 300 to 500 zorkmids × experience level

If you walk in carrying far more gold than the baseline, the priest scales the ask to your purse. The useful thresholds are the two numbers in the prompt: pay at least the first for clairvoyance and the larger for protection.

The cheapskate penalty. If you offer noticeably less than what’s expected while clearly able to afford more, the priest calls you a Cheapskate and will hold a grudge: the next time you chat with that same priest, the cost will be higher. The penalty stacks if you keep doing it, and it sticks for the rest of the game. Other priests in other temples aren’t affected. Refusing to donate anything at all also costs you alignment with your god.

Practical guidance:

• Donate early, donate often. Protection stacks, so 500 zm at XL 1 buys the same AC reduction as 15000 zm at XL 30. Visiting the Minetown temple every time you climb back up from the Mines is a classic stacking ritual.
• Count gold before chatting. The priest’s roll is sensitive to what’s in your inventory; drop excess gold on the floor outside the temple before asking, then pick it back up.
• Cross-aligned priests still accept donations and still grant the AC and clairvoyance. You miss the alignment bonus and you can’t sacrifice on their altar, but the AC ramp still works.
• Do not start the conversation unless you are willing to pay. A zero offer counts as a refusal: it costs alignment and marks you as a cheapskate just like a token offer.

Altars and Alignment

To convert a cross-aligned altar, sacrifice ordinary fresh corpses on it. Each attempt either flips the altar to your god (success), costs you Luck (failure), or, if your alignment record is negative, converts you to the altar’s alignment instead. Better odds at higher experience level. Worth the risk when you need a co-aligned altar for sacrifice gifts, holy water, or BUC testing.

Above XL 8, either result can also summon a hostile minion of the displaced god. Have an exit in reach before you make the offering.

Keep two things off every altar:

• A corpse of your own race (human, elf, gnome, dwarf, or orc, whichever you are). Punished on every altar — unless you are chaotic and the altar is chaotic, where it instead rewards you with a peaceful demon and a Luck and alignment boost.
• A unicorn whose alignment matches the altar. Counts as an insult to that god.

Crowning

If your alignment record reaches 20 and your Luck reaches 10, your god may crown you on a successful prayer. Crowning grants:

• A special title (e.g., “Hand of Elbereth” for lawful characters).
• An alignment gift, with exceptions. A Lawful crowning transforms the long sword you are wielding into Excalibur, so having a +7 long sword in hand at the moment of crowning gives you a +7 Excalibur; with no long sword there is no sword. Wizards and Monks receive their spellbook instead of the weapon.
• Intrinsic fire resistance, cold resistance, shock resistance, sleep resistance, poison resistance, and see invisible.
• Permanent skill-unrestriction on your alignment’s sword slot.
• A class-specific bonus: Wizards get the finger of death spell; Monks get restore ability.

Crowning makes every later prayer add roughly 1,000 turns on top of the ordinary timeout. If you’re sacrificing to fish for an artifact gift, mind your piousness, since a prayer made at high standing can crown you. A stethoscope applied to yourself reports it in words; piously is the top band, where a prayer could crown you.

Starting Pets

Most roles begin with a faithful pet: a little dog or a kitten, depending on your role. It follows you between levels (if adjacent when you take stairs), fights alongside you, picks up items, and eats food it finds on the floor. Think of it as a self-propelled, self-feeding curse tester with teeth.

A pet that eats well and fights often will grow. A little dog becomes a dog, then a large dog. A kitten becomes a housecat, then a large cat. A grown large dog or large cat is a genuine combat asset, capable of taking on mid-dungeon threats that would give you trouble.

One more thing: your pet usually avoids cursed items when there’s an uncursed alternative, which makes it a probabilistic curse-detector. Drop items on the ground and watch what your pet walks past versus what it walks around. If it has no choice, it will still cross the cursed square, but consistent avoidance across many turns is a strong tell. Even when it does step onto a cursed pile (chasing food, or pulled by a magic whistle), the game prints “[pet] moves reluctantly onto …”. That message is a giveaway.

Feeding and Loyalty

Pets have an invisible tameness score that decreases when you leave them behind on another level for too many turns, drag them by a leash, or hit them yourself. Hunger affects their behavior, not tameness. (Combat damage from other monsters doesn’t reduce tameness.) When tameness hits zero, the pet either goes untame-but-peaceful or turns fully hostile. Feeding is the antidote:

• Dogs and cats love tripe rations and most meat
• Horses prefer apples, carrots, and other vegetarian fare

You’ll find tripe rations scattered through the dungeon. Always pick them up, even though they’re revolting food for humans. Your pet will adore you for it (unless it’s a horse, which prefers fruit). When you’re carrying food your pet likes, it will follow you more closely.

Is it hungry? There’s no meter, but #chat to the pet and the sound tells you, graded by how recently it fed:

The hungry sound is your cue to feed. It doubles as the unhappy sound, so read it in a calm moment: a cat that yowls or a horse that neighs has nearly gone feral.

Taming New Creatures

If your starting pet perishes (or you want an army), several methods of taming exist:

• Throwing food at a suitable creature: meat for dogs and cats, produce for horses
• Scroll of taming or spell of charm monster both route through the same handler and tame all eligible creatures within a 3×3 radius. Reading the scroll while confused widens that to 11×11 (but you can’t cast the spell while confused).
• Magic trap effects occasionally produce taming

Taming isn’t limited to small animals: with a scroll of taming or the charm monster spell, you can recruit a purple worm to swallow your enemies whole, a dragon to breathe fire at them, a titan to crush them underfoot. The exclusion list is substantial, though: no humans (priests, shopkeepers, watchmen, soldiers, kings), no covetous monsters (the Wizard, liches, masters), no demons (unless you are one), no vault guards, quest leaders, nor minions can be tamed. Unique monsters (Medusa, etc.) also resist.

What Pets Do for You

A well-fed pet earns its keep in several ways:

• Combat muscle. A strong pet clears rooms and softens up dangerous monsters before you engage
• Curse detection. The drop-and-watch trick is free but probabilistic; look for repeated reluctance or the printed message
• Shoplifting. If your pet picks up an item inside a shop and carries it out the door, the shopkeeper blames the animal, not you. That takes patience (the pet must wander onto the item, then wander back out) but it’s the cheapest way to acquire a wand of wishing from a shop
• Sacrifice fodder. Monsters your pet kills leave corpses you can sacrifice on altars, exactly as if you’d killed them yourself

Training apport (fetching). Hand-feeding your pet builds a score called apport. A pet with high apport will pick up nearby items and bring them to you. That is what makes pet-shoplifting practical: drop something at the shop counter, walk out, and trust the pet to follow with the goods. Pair it with a magic whistle (below) to yank a loaded pet to your side from anywhere on the level.

Upgrading your pet. Three moves matter most.

• A magic whistle teleports every tame creature on the level to a spot next to you each time you blow it. Distance doesn’t matter; trapped pets get freed in the process.
• Tame a warhorse early (throw apples or carrots) and you have a fast, hard-hitting mount before mid-game.
• Late in the run, polymorph your pet into a stronger form. Titan is a popular target: level 16, speed 18, flies, throws boulders, and casts spells. Faster than anything else that strong, so it keeps up with a speed-boosted hero, and the spell-cast attack threatens at range. Balrog hits harder but is speed 5, slow enough that anything that runs gets away. Gray dragon is an alternative when you specifically want the magic-resistance intrinsic and a body that won’t accidentally re-polymorph.
• If you can tame an Archon directly (via a scroll of taming on a hostile, magic-whistle recall of one you tamed earlier, or a conflict-ring accident), do it. The Archon is the ultimate pet: level 19, speed 16, AC −6, magic resistance, sees invisible, flies, regenerates, and a multi- attack that includes a blinding gaze and a spell-cast. You cannot polymorph a pet into an Archon: you must encounter one and tame it.

Keeping Your Pet Alive

Pets die from the same things you do: traps, poison, powerful monsters, drowning in water. Use a stethoscope to check your companion’s health, and don’t lead it into fights it can’t win.

If you change levels and your pet isn’t adjacent, it won’t follow. Its loyalty ticks down while it waits, so go back for it before it forgets you were friends. A magic whistle warps every pet on your level to a square next to you, even on no-teleport floors. Sokoban has no special protection against loyalty decay; do not leave a pet there while you clear another branch.

If you see “You have a sad feeling for a moment”, that’s different: a pet of yours just died offscreen on another level, usually one you left behind.

Pets can now gain resistances and return from the dead. A pet that dines on the right monsters will gain resistances: fire resistance, cold resistance, whatever the dungeon’s terrible buffet was offering. You cannot reliably engineer that, but it is a reason to let your pet eat rather than scoop up every corpse yourself.

If your companion falls in battle, stand on its corpse at a co-aligned altar and pray. That is a last resort, not a renewable strategy: prayer timeout, alignment, and luck all factor in.

Blessed, Uncursed, Cursed (BUC)

Before you can worry about what an item is, you need to know what condition it’s in. Every item in the Mazes is blessed, uncursed, or cursed (BUC for short). The gods have opinions about your equipment, and those opinions have consequences:

• A blessed scroll of identify reveals one to four items, or the whole pack one time in five. Positive Luck raises the minimum to two. An uncursed scroll usually identifies one item, but one time in five it gets the blessed result. A cursed scroll identifies only itself the first time you read one of that type, then one item per subsequent cursed read.
• A cursed piece of armor bonds to your skin like it has abandonment issues. You cannot remove it until you lift the curse.
• A cursed potion of gain level interprets “gain a level” in the most literal architectural sense: you rocket through the ceiling to the floor above, instead of gaining an experience level.

BUC status changes each object in its own way. A blessed luckstone keeps good Luck and lets bad Luck wear off; a cursed one does the reverse. A cursed or confused scroll of teleportation sends you to a random level instead of teleporting within the current one.

You don’t see BUC status by default. Priests are the exception: they sense it as soon as they handle an object. Everyone else must test.

Altar testing. Drop an item on an altar:

• An amber flash means blessed.
• A black flash means cursed.
• No flash means uncursed.

That is free and unlimited. If you find an altar early, use it.

Pet testing. A pet normally steps reluctantly onto a cursed item, so drop the object in a doorway or corridor and watch several passes. Repeatedly walking around it is strong evidence that it is cursed; walking over it once is not proof that it is safe. Food, fear, combat, and pathfinding can spoil the test. A further trap: a helm of opposite alignment or dunce cap may test uncursed and then curse itself when worn. Fumbling gloves and levitation boots do not autocurse, but they are generated cursed often enough that you should still test them.

Holy water. Dipping an item in blessed water (holy water) will uncurse a cursed item or bless an uncursed one. Dipping in cursed water (unholy water) curses an uncursed item or unblesses a blessed one. You make holy water by placing potions of water on a co-aligned altar and making a successful prayer there. It is precious in the early game, so save it for items you’ve already identified.

Scroll of identify. Save this for objects that the cheaper tests cannot settle. A blessed scroll identifies one to four inventory items—or everything, one time in five. Positive Luck guarantees at least two. An uncursed scroll usually identifies one item but gets the blessed result one time in five. Pick up every unidentified item before reading a blessed scroll so the all-inventory result reaches everything you own.

The Price Is Right

Every unidentified object has a fixed base price. With Charisma 11–15 and no surcharge, the shopkeeper’s buy quote is that base price; the ordinary offer for an item you sell is half of it. That makes a shop an identification station as well as a market.

Shopkeeper pricing was first documented in detail by Gregory Bond’s Shopping Spoiler, HTML-formatted by Kate Nepveu and hosted on steelypips.org. David Damerell’s Object Identification Spoiler expanded the price-based identification techniques. The mechanics below draw from both.

To quote an item without picking it up, stand on it and press :, or #chat with the shopkeeper while you are standing there. Do not throw your own object in from the doorway: you get no quote, and the shopkeeper pockets it.

Three conditions impose the same Tourist markup: wearing a dunce cap, playing a Tourist below XL 15, or showing a T-shirt or Hawaiian shirt with no body armor or cloak over it. Each raises buy prices by a third and cuts ordinary sell offers from one-half to one-third of base; the conditions do not stack. Charisma changes buy quotes only. Cover the shirt before doing business.

Items in the same category that share a base price are in the same price group. A price often narrows an object to two or three candidates. Low Charisma raises buy quotes (to twice base at Cha 5 or less); high Charisma lowers them (to half base at Cha 19 or more). The tables below do the conversion.

Two wrinkles affect unidentified merchandise. About one object in four carries a permanent one-third buy surcharge, so identical-looking stacks may receive different quotes. About one shopkeeper in four offers only three-quarters of the normal sell price for unidentified goods; that habit applies to the shopkeeper, not the object. If a quote misses the expected tier, check the neighboring tier as well.

Angry. Attacking a shopkeeper, zapping a wand at one, leaving with unpaid goods, or refusing to pay for shop damage makes the shopkeeper angry. Even after you settle matters, a pacified shopkeeper keeps a one-third buy surcharge. Sell prices are unaffected.

After a fight. If you actually attacked a shopkeeper rather than just running up a debt, they want blood, not gold. You can still buy them off. Press p to offer 1000 gold pieces, which you must have in hand. If you are the shop’s registered customer the offer fails about one time in three, wasting the gold and leaving them furious. Otherwise they calm down, minus the usual surcharge.

Invisible. A shopkeeper will not do business with a customer they cannot see. Walk in invisible and you get “Invisible customers are not welcome!” and no quotes, no sales. If you are stuck invisible, wear a mummy wrapping as your cloak: it blocks the invisibility, so you appear visible again and the shopkeeper deals with you normally. Take it off on your way out if you want to vanish once more.

The specialty is a clue too. A shop that deals in one kind of goods stocks only items that fit its theme, so where you find something can name it outright. Everything on a lighting shop’s shelves is light-related: every wand there is a wand of light, every potion is oil, every scroll a scroll of light, every spellbook a spellbook of light. A food shop’s only potions are fruit juice, booze, and water. That is the shop’s own stock talking. An item you or a monster dropped on the floor could be anything.

The price tables for each item class follow.

The Engrave Test (Wands)

The wand-identification test costs one charge and preserves the rest.

Procedure adapted from Kieron Dunbar’s “Identifying Wands by Zapping” spoiler, originally posted to RGRN.

1. BUC-test the wand first. A cursed wand has a 1-in-100 chance to explode when used for engraving. Drop it on any altar, or use another curse test, before spending a charge.
2. Write a short message on the floor with your finger. Engrave anything in the dust first (command E, then select “-” for fingers, then type a word or two). That matters because a few wands act on the existing engraving rather than producing a visible effect on bare floor: polymorph rewrites the message as a random new one, and cancellation, make-invisible, and teleportation each make it “vanish”. Without a pre-written message you won’t see those behaviors.
3. Engrave again with the wand. Use E and select the wand. Observe the result. The Wand Table lists the engrave-test result for each wand; most reveal themselves here. A wand of lightning also blinds you for up to 50 turns, so do not test one while monsters are near. A few wands share results; see Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results.

A suspected wand of wishing is safe to engrave-test. If a $500 candidate asks “For what do you wish?”, the test has spent a charge and granted the wish. Make it count.

The Sink Test (Rings)

If you find a sink, you can drop a ring down it. Each type produces a clue, though a few messages overlap and some require sight, so that is not always formal identification. Rings of searching and slow digestion return immediately. Another ring has a 1-in-20 chance to come back and a 1-in-5 chance to be buried under the sink; otherwise it is gone. Use a spare ring, not your only candidate. See Sinks for the message table.

Use-Testing (The Careful Way)

When you don’t have access to a shop or a sink, you can sometimes figure out what an item is by using it carefully. Here’s the approach for each category:

Potions. The safest test is to throw a potion at a monster and observe the effect. Throwing avoids the risk of drinking something lethal. If a potion heals the monster, it’s some kind of healing potion. If the monster speeds up, it’s speed. If the monster becomes invisible, well, you’ve learned something (and now have an invisible monster to deal with).

You can also dip items into potions. Dipping a stack of poisonable ammunition (arrows, crossbow bolts, darts, or shuriken) into a potion of sickness will poison it, confirming the potion’s identity (it won’t poison a sword or any non-missile weapon). Dipping a unicorn horn into a potion of confusion, hallucination, or blindness turns it into water; dipping into a potion of sickness turns it into fruit juice.

Oil is the only potion you can apply. #apply an unidentified potion and, if the game offers to light it, it’s a potion of oil; nothing else responds.

A dip also makes a quick safety check before drinking blind. Acid corrodes a dipped arrow and sickness coats it with poison, so if you dip a spare arrow and nothing happens, the potion is neither acid nor sickness (nor oil, polymorph, or holy water). That won’t clear paralysis or sleeping, which give no reaction but will still leave you helpless.

Testing a $200 potion. The $200 group (enlightenment, full healing, levitation, polymorph, speed) has good payouts but two traps. Uncursed levitation lasts 10–149 turns; blessed levitation lasts 250–299, though you can press > to descend early. Polymorph may put you in a form that destroys or sheds body armor. Strip to a shirt and test only when nothing is hunting you.

Scrolls. Reading is risky. Some scrolls (destroy armor, amnesia, punishment) are outright harmful. Safest is to price-ID first, then read from safe price groups. If you must test blind: take off your armor before reading a scroll that might be destroy armor. Read from a position where teleportation won’t be disastrous.

Confused reading produces different effects for many scrolls and is sometimes useful. A confused scroll of remove curse randomizes the BUC of your uncursed items (about a quarter end up blessed, a quarter end up cursed, and half stay uncursed) and leaves already-cursed items cursed. A non-blessed confused scroll only touches your worn and wielded gear (plus loadstones and active leashes); a blessed confused scroll touches your whole inventory. So it’s a way to get a few cheap blessings on worn items, not a curse-removal tool. Don’t read it confused if you need to uncurse something.

Rings. First, confirm the ring is not cursed (altar or pet test). Then put it on. Many rings produce an immediate message or visible effect: you start levitating, you become invisible, you feel stronger. If nothing obvious happens, check your stats and inventory for subtle changes (protection, searching). Take it off quickly if you feel hungry faster than normal (hunger ring) or if monsters seem newly aggressive (aggravate monster).

Amulets. BUC-test an amulet before wearing it. Strangulation kills in six turns; remove the amulet immediately, or pray if a curse holds it on. Restful sleep can leave you helpless. An amulet of ESP reveals itself if you go blind while wearing it; reflection becomes apparent when a ray bounces from you.

Armor. Magical armor reveals itself when worn: speed boots make you faster, a cloak of invisibility makes you invisible. But trying on unknown armor in a shop is dangerous: if it is cursed you cannot take it off, and the shopkeeper still expects payment. A helm of opposite alignment or dunce cap can even curse itself on wear. Verify BUC before wearing unknown armor in a shop. Outside a shop, survival takes priority: at AC 6 or worse, wear found body armor, helms, shields, and cloaks if you cannot test them. Keep testing boots and gloves first; their bad magical variants can be immediately dangerous.

Each type of special armor has a randomized appearance, so the same “snow boots” that were safe levitation in your last game might be jumping or fumble boots this time. The four shuffled pools are:

• 4 magical helms share 4 appearances: plumed / etched / crested / visored helmet → one of helmet, helm of caution, helm of opposite alignment, helm of telepathy. (Helm of brilliance is always “crystal helmet”; dunce cap and cornuthaum both look like “conical hat”; that pair is a fixed pun.)
• 4 magical cloaks share 4 appearances: tattered cape / opera cloak / ornamental cope / piece of cloth → one of cloak of protection, invisibility, magic resistance, or displacement. All excellent.
• 4 gloves share 4 appearances: old / padded / riding / fencing gloves → leather gloves or one of the three gauntlet types (fumbling, power, dexterity).
• 7 magical boots share 7 appearances: combat / jungle / hiking / mud / buckled / riding / snow boots → one of speed, water walking, jumping, elven, kicking, fumble, or levitation boots.

Prices do not shuffle. They separate the safe boots and cloaks from the cursed ones.

Gray Stones: Four Stones, One Lucky

Gray stones range from a luckstone worth carrying all game to a loadstone you cannot put down. There are four types:

Here’s how to tell them apart:

The kick test. Kick an unidentified gray stone on the floor. If it scoots away normally, it’s not a loadstone. A loadstone is abnormally heavy and resists being kicked. Take off gauntlets of power and kicking boots first, or you may overpower a real loadstone and fool yourself.

The pick-up test. Loadstones are cursed when they generate, and a cursed loadstone refuses to be dropped at all. The game prints “For some reason, you cannot drop the stone!” and the stone stays in your pack. If you pick up a gray stone and it weighs you down suspiciously, try to drop it. If you can’t, you are stuck with a cursed loadstone until you uncurse it (holy water, scroll of remove curse, prayer). Then you can drop it.

The price test. At base price, $60 means a luckstone, $45 a touchstone, and $1 flint or a loadstone. The random unidentified-item surcharge can make a $45 touchstone quote at $60, so only a $45 quote is conclusive by itself.

The rub test. Apply (a) a gray stone to a gem in your pack (or #rub it against one). A touchstone produces a colored-streak message. If the touchstone is blessed (or you’re an Archeologist or Gnome holding an uncursed one), the streak also identifies the gem. Other gray stones produce similar streak messages, so a streak alone doesn’t prove touchstone; an identification result does. A cursed touchstone can shatter the gem.

Location clue. The luckstone at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines is guaranteed and always uncursed, so a gray stone at Mine’s End is usually it. One layout salts the level with decoys, though — four mimics disguised as gray stones and a real cursed loadstone. Search (s) beside a suspect stone to expose any mimic, then price-ID the two real stones ($60 versus $1) instead of grabbing one blindly; the kick test is unreliable in these cramped niches.

Before picking up a gray stone, kick it and check BUC. A few seconds of testing can spare you a 500-unit loadstone welded to your pack.

Naming What You’ve Learned

As you gather clues, use the #name command to track what you know. You can call an entire item class by a name you choose. For example, if you’ve determined that “fizzy potions” are in the $200 price group, call them “fizzy=$200” so you don’t forget. If you later throw one at a monster and it speeds up, you can rename the class to “speed.”

Identification by stacking. When you pick up an item, the game merges it into an existing slot only if the two are identical: same type, same enchantment, same BUC, same erodeproofing. So whether a new item stacks with one you already understand leaks information for free. When a merge actually teaches you something the game says so explicitly: “You learn more about your items by comparing them.” That message is your cue that the merge propagated a known property (BUC, enchantment, erosion) to the previously unknown side. Two same-appearance items that don’t merge are a different potion, a different BUC, or one side has been diluted or eroded.

A Practical Strategy

All of these techniques combine into a workflow:

At an altar (priority one). Ferry unknown equipment to the altar and drop each item. Sort the pack by BUC; whether to wear, stash, or discard an object still depends on what it does.

At a shop (priority two). Stand on unidentified items and press : for quotes. Group them by price and compare them with the tables.

Engrave-test your wands once BUC is known and the area is safe. The test costs one charge. Gravel identifies digging; ice cubes identify cold. Be prepared for lightning blindness.

Experiment cautiously with the rest. Wear non-cursed rings one at a time. Throw potions at monsters. Read scrolls from safe price groups after removing your armor.

Save your scrolls of identify for the items that resist other methods, in roughly this order: spellbooks first (reading an unknown high-level book can paralyze you for many turns among whatever is nearby), amulets next (all the same price), then the resistance/utility rings in the $200 group, then any wands that engrave-tested ambiguously.

Use the cheapest safe method first: altar, shop, engrave test, controlled use-test, then a scroll of identify.

How Hunger Works

Your nutrition starts at 900 and ticks down steadily. The rate depends on what you’re doing:

• Base consumption costs 1 point per turn (less while sleeping).
• Regeneration (from a ring or intrinsic) costs extra on odd turns.
• Encumbrance costs extra on odd turns if you’re stressed or worse (burdened alone is free).
• Rings usually cost 1 extra nutrition every 20 turns. Regeneration, conflict, and hunger rings cost ten times that while active.

When nutrition drops below certain thresholds, you get warnings:

Eat when you get the “Hungry” message; don’t wait for “Weak.” If you hit Fainting and have no food, pray to your god (see Divine Relations); a willing god cures hunger. If you are merely Hungry and have no food, take the stairs down. A new floor offers corpses and provisions; searching an exhausted one does not.

What to Eat

Eat what is safe. Unless you are keeping vegetarian conduct, much of your nutrition can come from fresh kills. Check the corpse before you save a ration; freshness alone does not make it edible.

• Eat corpses within 30 to 50 turns of the kill. Past that they risk being tainted, which means food poisoning (lethal without treatment).
• Some corpses grant intrinsic resistances (poison resistance from killer bees, fire resistance from fire giants, etc.). Eat these deliberately, even when you are not hungry. See the table below.
• Some corpses are harmful (cockatrice corpses petrify you, green slimes turn you into slime, kobold meat is poisonous). Know which corpses are safe before eating.

Food rations (or gunyoki, for Samurai) are the emergency backup. 800 nutrition, weight 20, common in shops. Carry two or three for when you don’t have a fresh kill in front of you. You don’t need to hoard them.

Lembas wafers provide 800 nutrition at only 5 weight. Elves gain a quarter more nutrition from them; orcs gain a quarter less.

Tripe rations aren’t pleasant eating (your character retches) but pets love them. Save tripe for your pet.

Tins are preserved food that never spoils, but they are also a trap if you’re sloppy about where you open them. Opening a tin is an occupation: you cannot act while you work, and a monster can wander up and attack you mid-open. A tin opener finishes in zero or one turn, a dagger in three, an axe in six, and bare hands in as many as fifty turns of helpless effort. Don’t pop a tin in a corridor next to a sleeping room. Blessed tins are the one exception: they open in zero or one turn no matter the tool (instantly with a blessed tin opener). A tin of spinach increases your Strength.

Vegetarian characters have to live on rations, lembas, fruits, and the small set of non-meat corpses (fungi, molds, lichens, jellies, plus eggs). Vegans lose the eggs, so they’re stricter still: rations, lembas, fruits, and plant corpses only. Plan ahead. The corpse-pile strategy doesn’t work for either, so rations and fruit are the budget items to hoard.

Dangerous Foods

Before eating a corpse, ask:

1. Is it fresh—roughly under 50 turns old?
2. Is it neither a c corpse nor Medusa?
3. Is it not green slime?
4. Is it not my own race, unless I have the Cave Dweller or orc exemption?
5. Is it not a dog or cat, unless I accept aggravate monster?

Then check the table below for poison, acid, and unusual effects.

Cockatrice corpse: instant death by stoning. Never eat this.

Acidic corpses (acid blob, etc.): damage unless acid resistant.

Poisonous corpses: damage and stat drain unless poison resistant.

Rotten corpses: food poisoning. Pray immediately if affected.

Cannibalism (eating your own race): costs 2 to 5 Luck and gives the aggravate monster intrinsic. Cave Dwellers and orcs are exempt.

Useful Corpse Effects

Eating for intrinsics pays off through the early and mid game. Each resistance is a chance per eat, not a guarantee, so eat every one you find, not just the first. The tables below give a verdict for every monster symbol: each row’s general ruling plus the members that differ. Eat corpses fresh (much over fifty turns old risks food poisoning), and a * marks a resistance that is only temporary.

No corpse, nothing to eat: A angels, & demons, L liches, v vortices, y lights, plus the exceptions named in the tables.

Undead substitutions: ordinary vampires, mummies, and race-based zombies leave an already-old corpse of their base race despite carrying the no-corpse generation flag. Treat it as tainted unless you have sickness resistance. Vlad, ghouls, and skeletons leave nothing edible.

Usually plain meat: C centaurs, G gnomes, J jabberwocks, K Kops, o orcs, O ogres, p piercers, q quadrupeds, t trappers, U umber hulks, w worms, z zruties. Cats, dogs, leprechauns, and nymphs have important effects listed below.

Vegetarian-safe corpses (vegan, except the pudding globs, which are vegetarian only):

Everything else (meat):

A gelatinous cube is the highest-density source of ascension-kit intrinsics in the game; poison resistance off any of the early corpses is the most important single intrinsic to bank.

Sprig of wolfsbane. Not a corpse but the same shelf. Eating one cures lycanthropy (see A note on werecreatures). It weighs almost nothing, so keep any you find.

Puddings, cubes, molds, and blobs can be useful food. Many offer a chance at an intrinsic. Puddings and acid blobs leave globs; globs of one kind merge into a single meal and therefore a single resistance roll. Eat separate globs from the floor before they merge in your inventory.

Food Strategy

1. Eat safe, fresh corpses as your primary food source.
2. Save food rations and lembas wafers for emergencies.
3. Eat intrinsic-granting corpses deliberately (even if not hungry).
4. Go down when Hungry with no food; pray when Weak or Fainting if it is safe to pray.
5. Buy food from shops when you can afford it.
6. Don’t carry more food than you need. It’s heavy.

The Potion Table

What each potion does, and the uses that aren’t obvious from the label. Prices for narrowing an unidentified bottle are in Potion Prices; the standouts get fuller treatment in Key Potions below. The chance is that potion’s share of the random potions you find, unchanged by depth.

Key Potions

Healing, extra healing, full healing. Extra healing is the one to stockpile: it always cures blindness and (non-cursed) also cures sickness in addition to restoring HP. Non-cursed extra and full healing raise your maximum HP if the heal would otherwise overflow; blessed versions give the biggest boost. Save every non-cursed extra or full healing potion you do not need immediately for Gehennom and the ascension run.

Gain ability. When blessed, raises all your stats by 1. Uncursed raises a random stat. That is liquid gold: save every one until you can bless it.

Speed. One non-cursed quaff grants permanent intrinsic speed; blessing only lengthens the temporary boost layered on top. A self-zapped wand of speed monster instead gives 50–74 turns of temporary speed.

Holy water. Put uncursed water on a co-aligned altar and make a successful prayer there; every potion of water on that square becomes holy. Holy water blesses any item you dip into it. Because a dip blesses the whole stack at once, dipping a stack of plain water into holy water turns it all holy for a single consumed bottle, so one holy water seeds many more.

Short on water? Make your own. Any potion but acid reduces toward plain water each time it gets wet, so two dips finish the job: the first dilutes it, the second waters it down. A dip treats a whole stack at once, so a pile of unwanted potions waters down together. At a fountain, every dip also rolls on the fountain’s event table and has a one-in-three chance to dry the fountain. Clear the area first; unwanted potions can become holy-water feedstock, but the process is not risk-free.

Gain level. Raises your experience level by 1. Useful for reaching quest eligibility quickly, or converting into something better through alchemy. When cursed, it moves you up one dungeon level instead: you rise straight through the ceiling.

Identifying a polymorph potion. A clean test: dip a single arrow or dart into an unknown potion. If the arrow turns into a different item, the potion was polymorph and identifies itself. You spend one arrow and one potion; you save the gamble of quaffing it.

Alchemy

Dip one potion into another and you might create something better, or you might cause an explosion. Most combinations are duds, but the useful recipes are worth memorizing:

The chain from healing → extra healing → full healing → gain ability via gain energy or gain level is the core alchemy sequence. A handful of common healing potions and a gain energy or two can be transmuted into the rarest potions in the game.

A useful side-loop is Levitation + Enlightenment → Gain level (2/3 chance, or nothing 1/3). Both inputs are reasonably common and individually low-value, but the output is one of the catalysts that feeds the main healing chain. If you find a stack of each, that is a way to manufacture gain-level potions rather than wait for the dungeon to drop them.

Chained alchemy climbs two at a time. Alchemy upgrades a stack of potions into a better one, and the healing chain (healing → extra healing → full healing) is the classic run. A dip transmutes a good batch of fresh potions at once, up to seven or eight, but everything alchemy produces comes out diluted, and a diluted stack converts only two per dip. So the first step of a chain can be a big batch, while every step after works on the diluted output of the last and moves just two potions at a time. Diluted potions work fine (a home-brewed full healing heals exactly like a found one); the dilution only limits chained alchemy.

Alchemy carries an explosion risk: roughly 10% on any non-water combination. An alchemy smock (if you find one) reduces that to about 1 in 30. Do your chemistry in an isolated room, away from your stash, and never dip a cursed potion into another. The target potion is always consumed. A blast also destroys the potion you are dipping, and dipping a cursed potion detonates every time.

Neutralizing Ailments

A non-cursed unicorn horn cures blindness, deafness, confusion, stunning, hallucination, vomiting, and sickness. It may take several applications; the exact blessed and uncursed odds are in Key Tools. It does not restore drained ability scores, which now require a potion of restore ability.

If you have no horn, potions cover most of the same ground:

• Blindness (and deafness): blessed healing, or any non-cursed extra or full healing. Eating a carrot works too, and temporary blindness (a cream pie, a yellow light) just wears off.
• Hallucination: extra or full healing clear it; plain healing does not. A potion of sickness snaps you out of it as well, though its other effects make you pay for it.
• Sickness (the food-poisoning timer that kills you): blessed healing, non-cursed extra or full healing, a unicorn horn, or a eucalyptus leaf. Prayer works if your god is listening.
• Stoning: eat a lizard or acidic corpse before the countdown ends. Keep a lizard in open inventory; it never rots.
• Confusion and stunning: a unicorn horn clears them. A lizard corpse cuts either timer to two turns; otherwise wait them out.

A horn also purifies bad potions by dipping:

• Blindness, confusion, hallucination → uncursed water
• Sickness → fruit juice

The water can be blessed into holy water and the fruit juice alchemized into see invisible, so nothing is wasted.

The Scroll Table

Each scroll’s effect and best use. Prices for narrowing an unidentified scroll are in Scroll Prices; the standouts get fuller treatment in Key Scrolls below. The chance is that scroll’s share of the random scrolls you find, unchanged by depth.

Key Scrolls

Identify. The scroll only inspects your main inventory: items inside a bag or sitting on the floor are invisible to it. Pull everything out of your bag and pick up nearby unknowns before reading. A blessed scroll identifies one to four items, with a one-in-five chance to identify everything; positive Luck raises the minimum to two. An uncursed scroll gets that blessed result one time in five and otherwise names one item.

Enchant weapon / enchant armor. Uncursed enchant weapon raises by +1. Blessed raises by up to 3, less the more the weapon is already enchanted (no more than +1 once the weapon is +6 or higher). At +6 or higher, each read has a 2/3 chance of destroying the weapon outright. Safe ceiling: +5. Enchant armor raises by a small random amount that’s larger when armor is unenchanted, larger again for elven or non-magic armor, and +1 extra when blessed. Once worn armor exceeds +3 (or +5 for elven / Wizard’s Cornuthaum), each further enchant attempt can destroy the armor; the scroll “evaporates” your gear. Blessed scrolls don’t bypass that cap.

Remove curse. Frees you from cursed equipment. Uncursed version works on worn and wielded items only; blessed version uncurses your entire inventory.

Charging. Recharges wands and rechargeable tools. Save one for a wand of wishing. The risk, charge counts, and ring rules are collected under Recharging.

Genocide. Uncursed eliminates a single species; blessed wipes an entire monster class from the game forever. Liches (L) are the usual blessed target. Do not blessed-genocide a class that contains your own race or role. Dwarves are h, Gnomes are G, Elves and Humans are @, Orcs are o; a blessed scroll targeting one of those ends the game with “killed by a scroll of genocide”. And @ is lethal for every role, not just elves and humans, since your role-self is an @. (That makes the popular “wipe mind flayers” pick a Dwarf trap, since mind flayers are also h.) Read one while confused and you genocide your own role’s species the same way. Check the symbol before answering the prompt.

Reverse genocide. A cursed scroll of genocide doesn’t remove its target; it spawns 4 to 6 of the named species at your feet. The named species must be one that can ordinarily be created. Naming wraiths gives you a corpse pile for level recovery; naming mind flayers buys an Int-fed feast if you’re polymorphed into one; naming an easy-to-tame creature gives you instant pet candidates. Don’t try unique monsters (the gods refuse).

Magic mapping. Reveals the entire level layout; blessed also shows secret doors. Invaluable in Gehennom’s maddening mazes, where mapping by hand could take a lifetime you don’t have.

Scare monster. The trick: don’t read it. Drop it on the floor and stand on it. It works like a permanent Elbereth, frightening most monsters away. The first time you pick up an uncursed scroll, it survives but gets “stamped”; the next pickup ends with “The scroll turns to dust as you pick it up,” and the scroll is gone. A cursed scroll dusts on the first pickup. Drop where you want the safe spot, not where you will need to relocate.

Teleportation. Uncursed teleports you randomly on the level. Cursed or confused reading sends you to a random dungeon level. With teleport control, you choose where you land. The game’s most flexible escape hatch.

Stinking cloud. Reading places a poison-gas fog at a visible square within about five squares (about fifteen squares of coverage uncursed, twenty-five if blessed) that blinds anything inside and deals roughly 6–13 HP per turn to anything not poison-resistant. A clean way to clear a throne room or the Wizard’s Tower from a safe corridor, as long as you are poison-resistant or unbreathing: the gas doesn’t pick sides. Kills inside the cloud still count as yours for XP and alignment.

Fire. Erupts in a burst of flame. Read uncursed or cursed and the explosion is centered on you, for only a few points of damage but enough to ignite the scrolls and potions in your pack. Blessed is a different scroll entirely: it deals five times the damage and prompts you to aim at a visible square within about five squares, making it one of the few ranged area attacks a non-spellcaster can carry. Either version burns away green slime if it catches you, so it doubles as a slime cure. Bless it and keep it; an unblessed test-read goes off in your own pack.

Confused Reading

Many scrolls do something completely different when read while confused. Some of these alternate effects are better than the normal ones:

Confused enchant armor / enchant weapon, if uncursed or blessed, erodeproofs the item instead of enchanting. That is the usual way to rustproof your gear, useful when you need protection from rust more than another +1.

Confused destroy armor reaches the same result by the opposite BUC: if cursed, it doesn’t destroy anything, it erodeproofs a piece of armor. (Uncursed or blessed strips erodeproofing instead.)

Confused remove curse randomizes uncursed objects: one chance in four to bless, one in four to curse, and one in two to leave alone. An unblessed scroll reaches only worn and wielded gear, loadstones, and active leashes; only a blessed scroll reaches the whole main inventory. It is a gamble, not a curse-removal method.

Confused taming widens the scroll’s reach from a 3×3 area around you to 11×11. The trick is scroll-only; confused charm monster just fizzles.

Confused teleportation sends you to a random dungeon level instead of a random spot on this floor. Useful as a panic button, dangerous if you’re shallow and want to keep exploring.

Confused gold detection detects every trap on this level instead of gold. Far faster than searching tile by tile.

Confused charging restores Pw, and if you’re already at full, raises your max Pw by 4–16 (6–24 blessed). A spellcaster’s permanent buff if you can spare the scroll. Cursed reading zeroes your Pw instead.

The cleanest way to confuse yourself on purpose is a potion of confusion: drink one and the timer runs about 16–22 turns. A non-blessed potion of booze (Samurai: sake) will also confuse you for a few turns.

The Wand Table

Unlike scroll and potion prices, wand prices alone rarely pin down a specific wand. A $150 wand is one of thirteen possibilities. The engrave-test result in the rightmost column is far more useful: most wands reveal themselves in one zap. See The Engrave Test (Wands) for the procedure and Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results for the few shared results.

¹ Shared by cancellation, make-invisible, and teleportation. ² Shared by sleep and death.

Key Wands

Wishing. Each zap grants one wish. Wands of wishing generate with 1 charge. Recharge the wand once before trying to wrest it, then use the eventual wrested charge last: that gives three wishes. Without a scroll of charging, the initial and wrested charges give two. Plan the wishes before you reach the Castle.

Death. Fires a death ray that instantly kills most things it hits. Reflected by reflection. Blocked by magic resistance. One of the strongest late-game attacks—but a bounce can kill you just as instantly if you lack reflection or magic resistance.

Sleep. A sleep ray can end an early run without dealing a point of damage. A bounced ray may leave you helpless for 6d25 turns; aim away from walls and do not rely on waking before the monster arrives.

Digging. Essential utility. Dig through walls to create shortcuts, dig down to escape dangerous situations, dig through rock to reach vaults and hidden areas. A downward zap drops you onto the next floor, the same direction you wanted to go anyway.

Teleportation. Zap a monster to send it elsewhere on the level, or zap yourself to escape. It buys distance without having to win the fight first.

Fire, cold, lightning. Offensive ray wands that bounce off walls. Fire burns scrolls and spellbooks on the floor. Cold freezes water (useful for creating paths). Lightning blinds monsters.

Cancellation. Removes special properties from items and monsters. A cancelled monster loses most of its special attacks: a cancelled cockatrice can’t petrify, a cancelled mind flayer can’t suck brains, and a cancelled clay golem dissolves on the spot. Keep that wand out of a bag of holding: it destroys the bag and everything inside. Pointed at a pile of unidentified scrolls and potions, it converts them into blank scrolls and water, which feed the magic-marker and holy-water production lines.

Polymorph. Transforms monsters into random other monsters and items into random other items of the same class. Can be used creatively (polymorph a pile of junk armor hoping for dragon scale mail, polymorph a weak monster hoping for a useful corpse). Risky but powerful.

Make invisible. A self-zap makes you invisible for 31–45 turns. A monster you zap becomes invisible permanently, which is seldom an improvement unless you can still see it. For lasting invisibility on yourself, use a ring or cloak.

Stasis. Zap it and nothing seems to happen: no ray, no aim, no message. What it really does is seal the level against teleportation for 10–30 turns. While the seal holds, nobody can teleport: not you, not your foes, not even the covetous monsters that normally blink across the level to reach you. The magic whistle falls silent too. Despite the name, it freezes no one in place; the monsters around you keep moving and swinging. Its use is narrow: pin a teleport-reliant enemy so it cannot flee to heal or harry you from afar, at the cost of sealing away your own escape teleport along with theirs.

Probing. A diagnostic wand: zap at a monster to learn its HP, max HP, level, and what it’s carrying. Useful on shopkeepers, soldiers, and named adventurers whose inventory might be worth the trouble. A stethoscope reports HP and status but not gear; if you want to know what’s in the pack, probing is the tool.

Resolving Ambiguous Engrave Results

A few engrave-test results are shared by more than one wand.

“The engraving vanishes!” belongs to cancellation, make-invisible, or teleportation. Drop a known item and zap each candidate: make-invisible hides it, teleportation sends it elsewhere on the level, cancellation dulls its magic.

“The bugs on the floor stop moving!” belongs to sleep or death. Death is the only $500 ray wand.

No engrave message at all narrows to one of six: nothing, opening, locking, probing, undead turning, or stasis. Test each at a safe target:

• Opening unlocks a chest or door. Locking locks one.
• Probing reveals a nearby monster’s stats.
• Undead turning revives a fresh corpse to its original species (and animates any corpses the target was carrying).
• Stasis seals the level against teleportation and gives no outward sign at all, so it is the hardest of the six to pin down; if a later teleport mysteriously fails, that was the wand.
• Nothing does nothing.

For non-ambiguous wands, a follow-up zap at a safe target confirms what the engrave-test already suggested: slow monster / speed monster at a tame or weak monster, striking at a closed door, polymorph at a pile of junk gear. Avoid zapping unidentified wands at yourself.

Recharging

Wands can be recharged with a scroll of charging. The most prized use is on a wand of wishing, where one recharge safely turns a single wish into two. Each successive recharge raises the risk of the wand exploding. The formula is (recharges cubed) / 343, so:

• First recharge: safe, no chance of exploding.
• Second: 0.3%.
• Third: 2.3%.
• Fourth: 7.9%.
• Eighth: 100%.

Use blessed charging for the best results, except on a wand of wishing, which follows its own rules. A fresh wand of wishing has exactly one charge. An uncursed or blessed scroll of charging adds one wish; blessing does not add another, while a cursed scroll strips the wand to zero. Recharge before wrestling, because the wrested use destroys the wand. The first recharge is safe and a second is a guaranteed explosion. The total is two wishes without charging or three with one recharge.

Rings are chargeable too, but the explosion test uses their current enchantment: +0 is safe, +1 explodes one time in seven, +3 about 43%, +5 about 71%, and +7 always. A valuable highly enchanted ring is a poor charging target.

Wresting

When a wand has 0 charges, you can still try to zap it. There is a 1/121 chance of “wresting” one final charge from the wand before it turns to dust. That is a last resort, but it works on wands of wishing too.

Polymorph as a Tool

Self-polymorph has uses worth the risk. A wand of polymorph zapped at yourself, a potion of polymorph, the polymorph self spell, or stepping on a polymorph trap can all roll a new form for you. With polymorph control (the ring or intrinsic) the game lets you choose the form.

• Travel where your legs can’t. A xorn phases through walls. An eel breathes underwater. A vampire becomes a bat or a fog cloud and slips under doors. A floating eye drifts past traps you can’t disarm.
• Bring your own resistances and attacks. A red dragon form gives you fire breath. A brown mold form freezes anything that hits you in melee. A purple worm swallows your problems whole. Most monster powers are yours when you wear their shape.
• Borrow another body. The new form rolls its own full HP. Your ordinary HP remains underneath and returns when the form ends.
• Escape cursed body armor. A bigger form breaks out and destroys the suit. A smaller form drops it intact into your inventory, where you can holy-water it back to neutral.
• Eat what you can’t. A metallivore form eats iron bars. A green dragon shrugs off poisonous corpses.

Without polymorph control, a failed Constitution check can cause system shock for up to 30 HP. Cursed polymorph objects do not strip control; the danger is transforming without it. Do not try at low HP.

A wand of polymorph zapped at a pile of junk items reshuffles each one into a random item of the same class. That trick is called “polypiling,” because it can turn a pile of dross into a selection of stuff you need. Drop the fodder on a square far from your real pack: a misaimed zap that catches your bag of holding rolls the bag too. Max your Luck first. When polypile fails, one of the zapped items can turn into a hostile golem made from its material, and every point of Luck lowers the chance of that going wrong.

The Ring Table

Rings marked “auto-curse” generate cursed 90% of the time, and a cursed ring can’t be removed until you uncurse it.

Key Rings

Free action prevents paralysis, a common way for a late-game monster to take enough unanswered turns to kill you.

Teleport control turns random teleportation into aimed movement and makes teleportitis useful.

Conflict makes monsters attack one another. It can dismantle a crowded room, but it also makes your pets attack you.

Slow digestion greatly reduces ordinary hunger. It does not make you immune to the extra drain from other worn rings.

Aggravate monster roughly doubles the effective dungeon depth for monster generation, capped at 50. That is usually disastrous. A prepared chaotic player may use it briefly to attract difficult sacrifice fodder, then remove it. Since the ring generates cursed 90% of the time, that is not an experiment to perform without a BUC test.

A blessed potion of polymorph grants you polymorph control for that specific transformation: you choose the form, no ring required. That makes the ring of polymorph control less of a critical acquisition: you no longer need to find it or wish for it just to do a single controlled polymorph. The ring remains useful for repeated transformations. Save that wish for something else.

The hidden cost: an ordinary worn ring costs 1 nutrition every 20 turns; conflict, regeneration, and hunger cost 1 every 2 turns. Keep situational rings in inventory and put them on when needed. Free action is the exception: protection against an unexpected paralysis is worth its modest food cost.

Amulets

Amulets are simpler in theory but harder to identify: they all cost $150, so price is no help. You’ll need to wear-test or use a scroll of identify. The stakes are high, because the range runs from “saves your life” to “slowly strangles you to death”:

BUC-test an unknown amulet before putting it on. An amulet of strangulation starts a six-turn death timer: take it off immediately, or pray if a curse prevents removal.

Key Amulets

Life saving revives you to 50 HP plus a Constitution bonus, capped at your maximum, then crumbles and costs 1 Constitution. It cannot save death by genocide. Once identified, wear it and forget it; the danger you failed to anticipate is the one it is for.

Reflection is excellent if you didn’t get a shield of reflection from Perseus’s statue or elsewhere. Wearing it as an amulet frees up your shield slot for a small shield or two-weapon fighting.

Guarding provides +2 AC and +2 magic cancellation (MC). That is a new addition in 5.0 that neatly solves the MC puzzle: pair it with a cloak of magic resistance (MC1) and you reach MC3, freeing you from needing the less versatile cloak of protection.

Magical breathing prevents drowning. It earns its slot at Medusa’s island and becomes essential on the Plane of Water.

Flying is the late-addition cousin of levitation: you stay in the air the same way, but you can still pick things up and choose to drop down on your turn. The bonus is that your steed flies with you. A flying warhorse skips over moats, pools, and the Castle’s drawbridge, and crosses Medusa’s island edge to edge. Steeds cannot wear speed boots, and your speed does not add to theirs.

Restful sleep puts you to sleep randomly and is usually cursed, so an untested one may not come off. Wearing it while asleep grants +1 HP per turn via accelerated regeneration. In a fully secured room with the door spiked shut, that turns a near-useless item into a slow field hospital.

Containers

Every adventurer eventually runs out of carrying capacity, and the bag of holding is the dungeon’s most coveted answer.

Note the weights. Sacks are 15 (carry one). Boxes and chests are furniture, not luggage: a large box weighs 350, a chest 600, an ice box 900, comparable to your entire carrying capacity. Use them as floor stash, not as something to drag from level to level.

A bag of holding changes the effective weight of its contents: blessed quarters it, uncursed halves it, and cursed doubles it. Sokoban’s prize is a bag of holding half the time; if you receive the amulet instead, a bag is a strong wish candidate.

A warning: never put a wand of cancellation, another bag of holding, or a charged bag of tricks inside a bag of holding. The bag explodes for 6d6 damage, scatters its own contents, and destroys about one item in thirteen.

If you find a cursed bag of holding (in a bones pile, perhaps), don’t open it. Drop it on the floor and zap a wand of cancellation at it. The explosion rule only fires on insertion, not on a zap, so the bag uncurses safely.

The identically-named bag of tricks is a different beast, and it punishes the obvious move: try to loot it like a container and it grows a huge set of teeth and bites you (painful, but at least a free identification). To use it, apply it (a) instead. Each charge summons a random hostile monster onto your square (rarely a small swarm). It carries nothing, but standing beside an altar it makes a tidy sacrifice-and-experience engine. Don’t apply it when you’re weak or cornered, since deeper down it can disgorge something dangerous.

Unlocking Tools

The dungeon is full of locked things, and brute force is noisy and slow. A skeleton key is the most reliable ordinary tool (70%+ success on doors, 75%+ on boxes). A lock pick (Samurai: osaku) is respectable. A credit card is the worst but still better than kicking. Carry one of the three; they are light, and locked doors are everywhere.

Skeleton keys and lock picks can also lock what they can unlock, so they double as your way to relock a chest after stashing loot. Credit cards are unlock-only.

Light Sources

Oil lamps and candles light dark corridors. A magic lamp burns indefinitely and can still be rubbed while lit. Rub it (#rub) and there’s a 1-in-3 chance the djinni emerges, then a chance it grants you a wish (80% if the lamp is blessed, so ~27% wish per rub overall), less if it isn’t. Try again on the same lamp until the djinni shows. Use it for light until you can bless and rub it; lighting it does not consume the wish.

The Candelabrum of Invocation is a unique candelabra found in Vlad’s Tower. It’s one of three items needed for the invocation ritual to enter Moloch’s Sanctum. You’ll need seven candles to fill it, so start hoarding candles when you find them.

Musical Instruments

Any tonal instrument (wooden flute, magic flute, tooled horn, frost or fire horn, bugle, or harp) can play the passtune at the Castle drawbridge. The tune and its two sources are described in The Castle. A magic harp (Samurai: magic koto) charms monsters into tameness; a wooden harp is just a koto. A magic flute puts them to sleep. A drum of earthquake creates pits around you, which is as chaotic as it sounds.

A tooled horn or leather drum wakes and scares nearby monsters; the drum also deafens you for 30–49 turns. A wooden flute produces only sound.

Other Notable Tools

Key Tools

Apply a non-cursed unicorn horn to cure confusion, blindness, sickness, hallucination, stunning, vomiting, and deafness: most of the status ailments that matter. Carry one at all times.

Bless your horn. A blessed horn can fix up to seven ailments in a single application; an uncursed horn maxes out at three, with a 35% chance of doing nothing even when you have troubles to fix. A cursed horn will inflict a random ailment from the same list (including the new deafness one), so be sure of bless status before applying. Horns don’t get used up, so a non-emergency test apply is free.

The stethoscope reports a monster’s HP and condition. Its first use on each game turn is free, so checking does not surrender your move; further uses that turn cost time.

A 5.0 caveat: the unicorn horn no longer restores lost ability scores. Drained Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and so on now require a potion of restore ability (or its spell) to bring back. The horn remains the universal cure for status problems, but not for attribute drain. Budget for restore ability separately.

The magic marker is a printing press for scrolls (and, more expensively, spellbooks). A fresh marker has 30-99 charges; one non-cursed scroll of charging restores it to at least 50 (more if the scroll is blessed), but only once. The second recharge attempt always fails. Each write costs roughly half to all of the target scroll’s basecost: magic mapping 4-7 charges, identify 7-13, enchant weapon / enchant armor / charging 8-15, teleportation 10-19, and genocide 15-29. Spellbooks cost about 10 × spell level: a level-3 book averages ~22 charges, a level-7 ~52.

To write a scroll intentionally, enter a label you have seen; that produces the scroll bearing that label even if you have not formally identified it. If charges run out mid-write, scrolls disappear entirely (paper + charges wasted); a spellbook’s paper survives but the writing fades.

Blank paper is the marker’s fuel, and you can make your own: dip any unwanted scroll or spellbook in water and it washes blank. A pool or moat does it cleanly and every time; a fountain works too but rolls the usual fountain risks on top. So spare scrolls of light or create monster aren’t junk, they’re feedstock for a scroll of identify or enchant weapon.

High-value writes include genocide (common class targets are L, &, and h, though uniquely named demon lords survive; see Genocide for the race warning), charging (uncursed or blessed adds one wish to a wand of wishing, for 8–15 marker charges), and enchant weapon / enchant armor. Never recharge a wand of wishing twice.

The marker also feeds the wraith feast: a cursed scroll of genocide on a non-graveyard level summons four to six wraiths at your feet (see Farming wraiths).

The tinning kit turns a corpse (apply, then select the corpse) into a tin: up to 50 nutrition of preserved food that keeps indefinitely. Tinning eliminates raw-corpse poison and acid damage as well as neutralizing spoilage, so a tinned killer bee or acid blob is safe to eat with no resistance, and the intrinsic grant still applies. The kit lets you seek poison resistance without taking poison damage; acid resistance from a corpse lasts only 3–18 turns, so it cannot be banked the same way. Don’t tin a cockatrice, and don’t eat a cockatrice tin; you petrify on the spot.

The pickaxe and the heavier dwarvish mattock dig through most walls and floors. Apply (a) and pick a direction for a sideways tunnel, or apply downward to chip through the floor for a quick escape. A wand of digging is faster in a straight line but burns charges. Sokoban is non-diggable; in Gehennom, the Valley floor, Sanctum, and the two towers resist digging, while the filler mazes do not. Applied to a statue, a pickaxe also breaks it (dropping any contents, or animating the sculpted monster if it is a statue trap).

The crystal ball is a one-question oracle when applied (a): name a map symbol, and the ball scans the whole level for that symbol. Each use consumes one charge; a scroll of charging restores a few. A spent ball still applies but shows nothing useful, just colored haze.

Intelligence determines whether each reading lands or backfires. The Int check is rolled against an “oops” threshold of 8 for a quest artifact, 16 for a blessed ball, or 20 for uncursed; rolling over the threshold triggers a misfire. Misfires range from harmless (“too much to comprehend”) through confusion, blindness, and hallucination to (one outcome in five on an unblessed non-artifact ball) an explosion that hits you for about 1d30. A cursed ball misfires every time while charged. An altar reveals BUC; holy water blesses the ball.

The can of grease coats armor against hugs, wraps, sticky attacks, and mind-flayer tentacles. It does not stop nymph theft, Rider grabs, or weapon snatching. Greasing a bag protects its contents from water until the coating wears off.

Armor and AC

Armor Class is what decides how often you get hit, and it’s the most important defensive number in the game. Each point you push down means more monster swings whiff past you. AC starts at 10 and drops as you add protection; lower is better. At AC −10 or below you’re quite difficult to damage with physical attacks; the practical target for an ascension kit is AC −20, with diminishing returns past −25.

If your AC is 6 or worse, do not wait indefinitely for an altar: ordinary body armor, helms, shields, and cloaks are usually worth the risk. Test boots, gloves, and conical hats before wearing them; their bad magical forms can trap or cripple you.

Weapons

Your weapon determines its reach, damage, and the skill you train. The sections that follow group weapons by how they are used. For per-skill stat tables, see Weapons Tables in the appendix.

A handful of commands run through everything below: w wields a weapon; x exchanges it with the alternate weapon slot; t throws any item; f fires whatever stack you’ve set in your quiver; Q sets that quiver. Polearms, whips, pick-axes, and grappling hooks are also used through a (apply), the same key used for most tools.

For a first run, train the weapon your role can keep using:

Enchantment

Weapons and armor can be enchanted using scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor. An uncursed enchant-weapon scroll adds +1; an uncursed enchant-armor scroll adds 1–2, with larger gains possible on plain +0 armor. Blessed scrolls can add more. At +6 or higher, a weapon has a two-in-three chance to evaporate when positively enchanted. Armor is also at risk: above +3 each new scroll has a chance to destroy the item (above +5 for “special” armor like elven pieces, or the Wizard’s cornuthaum). Blessed scrolls give more points per read but don’t change the destruction threshold; cursed scrolls can subtract enchantment and shouldn’t be used for enchanting at all.

Erosion and Proofing

Weapons and armor can be damaged by rust (iron items), fire (organic items), and corrosion (copper items). A badly damaged item provides less AC or damage.

To fix erosion, read a non-cursed scroll of enchant weapon while confused (for your weapon), or a non-cursed scroll of enchant armor while confused (for a random worn armor piece). That erodeproofs the item and repairs existing damage. A confused cursed scroll strips proofing instead.

You can also slow erosion without magic. Coat an armor piece with grease (apply a can of grease). The grease layer can deflect hugs, wraps, sticky attacks, and mind-flayer tentacles, but not ordinary theft or weapon snatching. Grease shields gear from water too: a greased weapon or suit takes a fountain dip, a water trap, or a wade through deep water without rusting. Each soaking has about a 50% chance of washing the grease away, so it buys a few dunks of cover, not a permanent seal.

Dragon Scale Mail

Dragon scales are prized for their toughness and their magical protections, and mail forged from those scales is among the best body armor in the game.

Dragons don’t always drop scales, and they never drop the mail itself. A fresh kill yields scales about one time in three, and a revived dragon only one time in twenty. Scales can be worn as body armor just like mail and carry the color’s full intrinsic property (gray gives magic resistance, silver reflection, and so on, identical to the mail). But the AC of scales is only +3 whereas fully formed scale mail is +9. Same weight.

To upgrade scales into scale mail: wear the scales and read a non-cursed scroll of enchant armor. The scales merge and harden into the corresponding dragon scale mail at +0 (or higher if blessed; a blessed scroll also blesses the result). A cursed scroll just gives the usual bad enchant effect; no merge.

How Items Get Cursed

• Born that way. Some items generate cursed most of the time (rings of teleportation, rings of polymorph, amulets of strangulation; anything the dungeon thinks is funny)
• Bones inheritance. Items on a bones level have an 80% chance of being cursed.
• Monster interference. Certain monsters can curse items in your inventory
• Confused remove curse. Reading it confused has a chance of cursing items instead of uncursing them
• Unholy water. The evil twin of holy water

Effects of Cursed Items

• Cursed armor and rings bond to you and can’t be removed: a cursed ring of teleportation means random teleports you can’t stop, and a cursed pair of levitation boots means you can never touch the ground again
• Cursed weapons can’t be unwielded. Hope you like that -3 orcish dagger
• Cursed potions and scrolls have specific altered effects; some are weaker, some harmful, and a few are useful on purpose
• Cursed tools malfunction spectacularly. A cursed bag of holding doubles the weight of its contents instead of reducing it
• Cursed food is unpleasant but rarely fatal. Small mercies

Detecting Curses

Prevention is better than cure. Test items before wearing them:

• Altar test. Drop an item on an altar. A black flash means cursed; no flash means uncursed
• Pet test. A pet steps reluctantly onto a cursed object. Drop it in a narrow route and watch several passes; one crossing does not prove safety
• Scroll of identify. Always reveals the full status

(Temple donation does not reveal BUC; that’s a common spoiler myth. Donating to a priest grants temporary clairvoyance and a Protection bonus, but inventory BUC stays hidden.)

Removing Curses

When prevention fails, you have three remedies:

• Scroll of remove curse. Uncursed removes curses from worn and wielded items. Blessed uncurses your entire inventory
• Holy water. Dip a cursed item in holy water and it becomes uncursed. That is the main reason to hoard holy water
• Prayer. Cursed levitation, a welded weapon when you have no free hand, and a cursed blindfold count as major trouble and can be the prayer’s main repair. Ordinary cursed equipment is minor trouble: with positive Luck and nothing worse to fix, a successful prayer uncurses at most one item.

Stuck in cursed body armor? Polymorphing into a form too small for the suit drops it off into your inventory (curse and all), even though it would normally refuse to come off. From there, dip in holy water and re-wear. See Polymorph as a Tool.

Most veterans carry holy water and a scroll of remove curse at all times.

Learning Spells

Read a spellbook (r, the same key that reads scrolls) to learn its spell. The book’s shop price is 100 times the spell level. Reading takes several turns and can fail: the result may teleport you, take your gold, blind, confuse, poison, or injure you. A surviving book can be tried again. In 5.0, a Wizard who is not certain to succeed sees “This spellbook is difficult to comprehend. Continue?”; declining costs nothing.

The book’s level decides which effects are on the table. A level-1 book can teleport you somewhere random when you fail to read it. A level-2 book might aggravate nearby monsters instead. Misread a level-3 book and it can blind you for 250 to 350 turns. A level-4 book can take all your gold, and level 5 can leave you confused for 16 to 22 turns. Misread a level-6 book and you may be contact-poisoned: gloves take corrosion damage, bare hands take 3 to 6 points of Strength plus 1d10 HP (just 1 to 2 Strength and 1d6 HP with poison resistance). And a level-7 book can have an exploding rune. Magic resistance blocks the explosion; without it, you take 2d10+5 damage. Practical rule: don’t read books you can’t afford to fail.

The chance of successfully reading a spellbook depends on the spell level, your Intelligence, and your experience level. The exact formula is Int + 4 + XL/2 − 2·level versus a roll of 1d20, so read 20 or more always succeeds, 10 is a coin flip, and anything below that is dicey. Reading a level-7 spell at Int 15, XL 2 gives a read score of 6: only a 30% chance of success. Lenses add +2. A blessed spellbook bypasses the check entirely and always succeeds. A cursed spellbook fails automatically and applies one of the failure effects above.

The formula produces a read score. A score of 5 succeeds 25% of the time, 10 succeeds 50%, 15 succeeds 75%, and 20 succeeds automatically. To guarantee a read without lenses, you need Int + XL/2 of 18 for a level-1 book, then 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, or 30 for levels 2 through 7. Lenses reduce each requirement by 2.

Save your holy water for your hardest unread spellbooks.

Wizards are the undisputed masters of magic: they read books and cast spells more reliably, and can reach Expert in every school. A well-built Wizard can eventually learn every spell in the game, which is the closest the Mazes come to letting you cheat. Monks are the surprising second. They have access to all seven spell schools too, and their no-body-armor restriction helps casting because metal body armor adds a failure penalty; the monk-favored robe grants a bonus. Priests and Healers cast well in their own schools. Other roles can manage the occasional spell with help. A Valkyrie can sometimes read identify (level 3) if her Intelligence is boosted by gain-ability potions, but non-spellcasters are usually better off with scrolls.

Wizards identify books by training. Advancing a spell school skill to each rank automatically reveals the appearances of spellbooks in that school: unskilled unlocks level-1 appearances, basic level-3, skilled level-5, expert level-7. A Wizard starts knowing all level-1 appearances and level-3 in attack and enchantment, so several books are already identifiable in their core schools.

Each spell stays in memory for about 20,000 turns, then fades and must be relearned. The spell list (+) shows time-remaining. You can also apply a spellbook to check how worn it is: each successful read counts toward a fixed total of four before the book fades to blank paper. Failed reads don’t add to that counter, but each failure has its own 1-in-3 chance to destroy the book outright. Carry important spellbooks if you plan to rely on their spells in the late game.

Paperbacks. A spellbook that appears as a paperback is a novel rather than a real spellbook. Read it: the first novel you pick up in a game grants 20 XP, which is exactly enough to lift a fresh character from experience level 1 to 2. (The 20 XP only fires once; subsequent paperbacks just display a quote.) Each paperback is a Terry Pratchett Discworld title, and reading it opens a passage from the novel.

Key Spells

The other 32 spells, along with their schools, types, and rank-gated upgrades, are in the Spell Tables appendix.

For Wizards, learning identify and magic mapping as spells dramatically reduces your need for scrolls: it’s like having infinite scrolls, except they cost mana instead of inventory space. Finger of death is the ultimate argument-ender. Charm monster turns your enemies into your friends, which is even better than killing them because friends carry things and absorb hits.

Chain lightning is a fine room-clearer. At level 2 it’s within reach of any character who can cast at all. The spell auto-fires in all eight directions without a target prompt, deals 2d6 per hit, and stops dead at any peaceful or tame monster, so you can clear a hostile room without lighting up your pet or a shopkeeper down the hall. Shock-resistant hostiles eat one hit, then end that beam.

If the + menu shows 100% fail, the problem is usually equipment or skill, not the spellbook. Remove a shield first, then metal body armor, helm, gloves, or boots; raise the role’s casting stat and train the spell’s school. A robe halves the metal-suit penalty, and wielding a quarterstaff gives a small bonus. Every shield imposes a flat penalty, and shields heavier than 30 weight quarter the final chance.

Mana Management

Your power (Pw) pool determines how many spells you can cast before you need to sit in a corner and regenerate like a phone battery. Casting a spell costs 5 Pw per spell level (so finger of death is 35 Pw). A failed cast still spends half.

Pw regenerates on a periodic tick that shortens as you level: every 24 turns at XL 1 (18 for a Wizard), 18 by XL 10 (14 Wizard), 12 by XL 20 (9 Wizard), and 5 by XL 30 (4 Wizard). Each tick gives 1 to ((Wis + Int) / 15) + 1 Pw, typically 1-3; magical breathing adds 2 to that ceiling. The energy regeneration intrinsic (from the Eye of the Aethiopica, among others) bypasses the tick, so you regen every turn. Stressed or worse encumbrance shuts regen off; Burdened is fine.

Carry backup wands and scrolls: a Wizard out of Pw is just a person in a bathrobe holding a stick.

How Luck Works

Luck ranges from −13 to +13 and normally starts at 0. Left alone, it drifts back toward its calendar baseline.

Luck timeout. Every 600 turns, Luck moves one point toward its baseline, normally 0. While you carry the Amulet or your god is angry, it moves every 300 turns.

Luckstones. A luckstone in open inventory (not in a bag) adds 3 to your Luck, or subtracts 3 if cursed, and changes the timeout:

Bless it. A blessed luckstone keeps the Luck you earn and lets mistakes wear off. The Mine’s End stone is uncursed, so dip it in holy water. Never carry a cursed one.

The Heart of Ahriman (itself a luckstone), the Tsurugi of Muramasa, and the Orb of Fate count as luckstones. Carrying several never adds more than 3, and a cursed one weakens the rest.

Calendar Luck. The drift target isn’t always 0:

• On a full moon night, baseline Luck is +1: Luck drifts toward +1 instead of 0. If you started the session on a full moon, you have +1 Luck for free.
• On Friday the 13th, baseline Luck is −1. Avoid stair-up runs on this day if you can; your accumulated good Luck will sap toward −1 even if you’ve been virtuous.

(NetHack uses the computer’s real date.)

Gaining and Losing Luck

Unicorn gem-throwing is the strongest active Luck source in the game. Throw a properly-identified real gem (not glass) at a unicorn whose alignment matches yours and you gain +5 Luck immediately. The unicorn turns peaceful, accepts the gift, and teleports away, and will accept another later if you find it again. Identify your gems first (touchstone or scroll of identify); the bonus drops from +5 to +1 if you don’t actually know what you’re throwing. Glass gems are harmless but yield nothing; throwing them is a safe way to pacify an unwanted unicorn without spending real gems. Avoid throwing real gems at cross-aligned unicorns: the result is a random Luck change between -3 and +3. Archeologists start with a touchstone, which lets them verify whether a gem is real before throwing it at a unicorn.

A sacrifice can raise Luck only while the corpse’s difficulty exceeds your current Luck. Kobolds are too weak to help. For later gains, use fresh corpses from tough monsters.

Why Luck Matters

At Luck +5 (or higher, with a luckstone), life is noticeably better:

• You hit more often in combat. Swings that would have missed connect instead.
• Your prayers are more likely to be answered. Your god likes lucky people. (Gods are fickle that way.)
• Many smaller checks tip your way as well.

Negative Luck makes prayer unsafe. At −1 or −2 Luck, if your god is not angry, the usual result is simple displeasure and a reset prayer timer rather than a curse or divine bolt. Deeper negative Luck and anger allow harsher outcomes. Luck also changes attacks and many Luck-adjusted rolls; it does not make scrolls generically backfire.

How Exercise Works

The counter is invisible. A long enough streak of exercising behavior, plus a passing random roll (with diminishing returns once you’ve already gained), gives you the message “You feel agile! You must have been working on your reflexes!”, or the matching one for the other stats. The reverse, “You haven’t been working on reflexes lately,” fires when the abuse counter wins instead.

Exercise can lift a stat up to 18 (your innate maximum isn’t bypassed; potions of gain ability still rule the top end). Abuse can drop it down to your racial minimum.

Actions That Exercise and Abuse

Two Monk-specific quirks: a Monk who is Weak from fasting exercises Wis, and a Satiated Monk abuses it.

Why Exercise Matters

Stats matter for almost everything: Str for damage and carrying capacity, Dex for hit chance, Con for HP per level, and Wis for Pw regeneration. Those gradual gains add up. So do five hundred turns spent Satiated and Fumbling.

The Skill Ladder

Practice with a weapon improves how often you hit and how hard. The game tracks that as a skill rank: more practice, higher rank, more deadly swings. Most skills run Unskilled → Basic → Skilled → Expert. Bare hands and martial arts alone reach Master and Grand Master. Each rank-up costs both practice (uses of the skill) and skill slots (a finite budget tied to your experience level).

Non-weapon skills (spell schools, riding, bare hands, martial arts) cost roughly half as many slots as melee weapons, the dungeon’s quiet subsidy for magic. (Two-weapon uses the weapon column despite the name.) You start with 2 slots, gain one per experience level (29 more by XL 30), and one more if you are crowned, so the absolute ceiling is 32 slots for an XL-30 crowned hero. Lose an experience level and you lose a slot, which can demote your most recent advancement.

Each role has a per-skill cap beyond which no amount of training will help. A Wizard caps at Basic with a mace and is restricted from long swords. Restricted skills don’t appear on #enhance and stay Unskilled, except for god-given artifact weapons, which unrestrict the skill to Basic. The full role caps appear in Per-Role Skill Caps below.

Training a Skill

Practice accumulates through use:

• Weapon skills tick on every melee or thrown hit that does more than 1 damage. A pillow-soft punch for 1 point doesn’t count. Spears, javelins, knives, daggers, and aklys train the same skill whether you stab with them or throw them.
• Bare hands counts 50% of your hits; martial arts counts 75%. The rank still applies on every hit; that just slows the climb.
• Riding earns one tick every 100 squares ridden.
• Spell schools earn N practice per successful cast of a level-N spell. Every school has a level-1 option to grind. See the schools table below.

Skills your role starts at Basic come pre-credited with 20 practice uses, so you’re already a quarter of the way to Skilled before the first turn.

When you’ve earned enough practice, the message names the category: “You feel more confident in your weapon skills,” “spell casting skills,” or “fighting skills.” That is your cue to type #enhance. If more advancements remain after you pick one, you’ll see “You feel you could be more dangerous!” Keep going.

What a Rank Buys You

For weapons and fighting styles, each rank shifts your to-hit and damage bonuses by a flat amount (the values replace each other, not stack):

(Each cell is to-hit / damage.) Two-weapon penalties apply to each of the two strikes. A Basic two-weaponer hits twice but at −7 each, which is much worse than one solid swing. Bare hands and martial arts bonuses apply on every hit; only the practice counter skips the weakest hits. The Expert weapon line (+3 / +2) is the payoff for dedicating to a single weapon.

The Seven Spell Schools

Every spellbook belongs to one of seven schools, and your rank in that school determines how reliably you can cast spells from it. Higher rank also unlocks some spell upgrades. Cone of cold becomes a cluster of 3×3 explosions at Skilled, identify IDs the whole stack, haste self lasts longer, and so on.

Per-Role Skill Caps

Three tables of fixed maxima follow: weapons, fighting styles, and spell schools. Skills not listed for a role are restricted: the rank is locked at Unskilled, with one exception (a god-given artifact weapon unrestricts you to Basic in its skill). Key: B=Basic, S=Skilled, E=Expert, M=Master, GM=Grand Master, (blank)=restricted.

A blank cell doesn’t mean the skill is unusable, just locked at Unskilled forever. A Healer can still read a spellbook of force bolt and try to cast it. A Wizard can still swing a long sword. They’ll just always pay the Unskilled penalty from the Skill Ladder (−4/−2 for a weapon, −9/−3 per strike for two-weapon, the Unskilled cast-failure rate for a spell school), with no path to improvement. Role abbreviations: Arc=Archeologist, Bar=Barbarian, Cav=Caveman, Hea=Healer, Kni=Knight, Mon=Monk, Pri=Priest, Rog=Rogue, Ran=Ranger, Sam=Samurai, Tou=Tourist, Val=Valkyrie, Wiz=Wizard.

Spending Slots Wisely

Thirty-two slots sounds like plenty until you start counting. Expert in a single weapon costs 6 slots (1+2+3) by itself. A Valkyrie aiming for Expert long sword, Skilled two-weapon, and Skilled riding is eleven slots deep before any spell school.

A few principles:

• Don’t enhance reflexively. Slots are spent permanently (short of losing experience). If you’re not committed to a weapon, hold the slot until you are.
• Cap-aware investment. Pushing a skill to its role cap is fine: the menu just stops offering further advances. You can’t waste enhancements past the cap because the option never appears.
• Wizards get two benefits from spell schools. Each rank-up improves casting success and reveals more spellbook appearances in that school (the identification payoff covered in the Spellcasting chapter). Schools containing your unidentified books deserve priority. That double benefit is Wizard-only; other roles only get the casting-success benefit.
• Wizards: daggers before schools. A common opening pushes Dagger to Expert (six slots) before serious investment in spell schools. Thrown daggers carry the early game while Pw is scarce, and school ranks then come online to upgrade the late game without leaving the early game starving.
• Riding is a skill. Without Basic riding you can’t pick up items, loot, dip, set or disarm traps, or engrave on the floor while mounted. Knights start at Basic. Pushing to Skilled erases the −1 to-hit penalty in the saddle and adds +1 damage.
• Bare hands and martial arts favor Monks. Grand Master needs 9 cumulative non-weapon slots, which Monks reach naturally. Barbarians, Cave Dwellers, and Samurai can reach Master; other roles have lower caps.

A few spells get sharper at Skilled. Cone of cold and fireball become a cluster of 3×3 explosions you can place at range. Identify, remove curse, haste self, detect monsters, and several others gain the blessed-scroll effect.

Sources of Wishes

The Mazes are stingy, but there are more wish sources than most travelers realize:

• Wand of wishing: found in one of the Castle’s four corner towers (see Key Wands for the charge mechanics).
• Vlad’s throne: A special throne that grants a guaranteed wish if you keep sitting. Four of thirteen outcomes are a wish (which destroys the throne); the other nine are painful but the throne survives. Keep sitting until the wish arrives.
• The Amulet of Yendor: Grants a wish when you first pick it up. A reward for reaching the bottom of the dungeon. You can decline this wish if your kit is already complete; some minimalist ascenders skip it entirely on principle.
• Magic lamp: Rubbing a blessed lamp summons the djinni 1-in-3 times; if it appears, it grants a wish 80% of the time, so roughly 27% wish per rub. Keep rubbing. Either a magic lamp or a magic marker is guaranteed in Orcus Town.
• Fountain: roughly 1 in 30 quaffs summons a water demon, and that demon grants a wish only about 1-in-5 times on shallow floors (less on deeper ones), so a true wish chance closer to 1 in 150 per quaff. Far more likely to produce snakes, nymphs, curses, or vomiting.
• Throne: Very rare chance of a wish when sitting. Also a very real chance of everything going wrong.
• Djinni from smoky potion: Rare (1 in 13 base probability), and even then only 20% wish chance (80% if blessed). But when it works, you feel like a genius.

The number of wishes varies widely. A sensible budget is about five, counting the Castle wand’s initial, recharged, and wrested charges, Vlad’s throne, and the Amulet pickup wish. Lamps, fountain demons, and smoky potions may add more.

What to Wish For

Choose the two body-armour wishes as a pair. If you already have reflection from an amulet or shield, wish for gray dragon scale mail to gain magic resistance. If a cloak already supplies magic resistance and reflection is missing, wish for silver. Once one defense is secured outside the body slot, the other mail becomes the better first wish.

1. Gray dragon scale mail (magic resistance + AC; magic resistance is the most important protection in the game). Type blessed greased fixed +2 gray dragon scale mail.
2. Silver dragon scale mail (reflection + AC; reflection protects against wands and breath weapons). Type blessed greased fixed +2 silver dragon scale mail.
3. Speed boots (being fast gives you more actions per turn, excellent for both offense and escape). Type blessed greased fixed +2 speed boots.
4. Gauntlets of power (STR 25 if your role benefits; most roles benefit from punching harder). Type blessed greased fixed +2 gauntlets of power.
5. Amulet of life saving (an extra life for the Planes). Type blessed amulet of life saving (amulets take no enchantment or erosion).
6. A specific artifact (Grayswandir is a common target; its silver hurts demons, imps, vampires, weres, and shades). Type blessed greased fixed +2 Grayswandir.

Don’t wish for consumables (scrolls, potions) unless you’re in dire straits. A wish is for permanent gear you can’t otherwise get: dragon scale mail, speed boots, an artifact.

Wish Syntax

When the prompt asks “For what do you wish?”, be specific. Here is what each word buys you:

• “blessed greased fixed +2 gray dragon scale mail” is the standard form. blessed because BUC defaults to random, greased can deflect hugs, wraps, sticky attacks, and mind-flayer tentacles, fixed (or rustproof or erodeproof) locks erosion, and +2 is the enchantment. Don’t reach higher than you have to: when you name a plus on armor or a weapon, the wish secretly rolls a number from 1 to 5, and if your plus is greater than that roll the enchantment collapses to +0. So +1 always lands, +2 lands four times in five, +3 only three in five, and anything past +5 never lands at all. A +3 wish has the higher average if it lands, but ask for +2 anyway: the plus is steadier, and once you top it off with enchant scrolls it ends up a hair ahead of where a +3 wish would have left you.
• Mind your Luck before you wish. Non-negative Luck is all you need, and piling up more buys you nothing extra at the prompt. Negative Luck, though, poisons the whole wish: blessed comes out cursed, fixed fails to hold, and any plus above +2 flips to a minus. If your Luck has soured, mend it before you spend a wish on gear.
• “gray dragon scale mail” alone lets the dice pick the BUC and the enchantment, so a bare wish can land cursed. You had one wish; spell out the BUC and the plus. And don’t forget “scale”: “gray dragon mail” alone hands you a scroll of mail instead.
• Artifact wishes get harder as artifacts accumulate. The denial roll scales with the total artifacts in the world (yours, generated, even bones-file ones), and your artifact-wish counter ticks whether the artifact appears. Quest artifacts are absolutely blocked.
• A few targets are silently nerfed into mundane substitutes. The Amulet of Yendor becomes a fake amulet, the Bell of Opening a plain bell, the Book of the Dead blank paper, and the Candelabrum a tallow candle. A wish for a magic lamp also fails, handing you an ordinary oil lamp. Cruel, after all that lamp-rubbing.

Alignment and Blasting

Each artifact has an alignment. If you try to handle an artifact that doesn’t match your alignment:

• Intelligent artifacts blast for 4d10 on every touch when your role or alignment is wrong (2d10 with magic resistance). The item evades your grasp only when both are wrong.
• Other misaligned artifacts have a 1-in-4 chance on every touch to blast for 4d4 damage (2d4 with magic resistance).

Wishable / random artifacts

These are the artifacts you can find, get from a sacrifice gift, fountain-dip up (Excalibur), or wish for. Bonus damage is rolled fresh on each hit (e.g. +d10 means roll 1d10). The “extra” column is the damage rolled on top of the base weapon’s own damage. A weapon listed as “×2 vs X” rolls its base damage twice against any member of that monster class.