A Traveler’s Companion to the Mazes of Menace

The Roles

There are thirteen roles available to adventurers. Each comes with different starting equipment, different intrinsic abilities gained at various experience levels, and a different quest to complete in the mid-game.

Archeologist. You start with a bullwhip, a pickaxe, and a tinning kit. The pickaxe is the kit’s quiet workhorse: it lets you dig through walls and create your own escape routes from the very first level. The tinning kit lets you preserve corpses for later. Archeologists are capable and flexible, though a bit fragile in early combat. You begin knowing what all gems are, which is a nice parlor trick and occasionally useful for unicorn negotiation. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral.

Barbarian. You start strong. Literally. A two-handed sword and good starting strength mean you can hack through early monsters with ease. The downside is that two-handed weapons prevent you from using a shield, and Barbarians are not known for their finesse. You do get poison resistance from the start, which saves you from several common early deaths. A straightforward role for players who like straightforward solutions. Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

Cave Dweller. You start primitive but tough, with a club, a sling, and a pile of flint stones for it. You gain speed by mid-game and your hit dice are generous. The Cave Dweller’s simplicity is a virtue: fewer tools means fewer things to manage. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral.

Healer. You begin with a stethoscope, healing potions, and poison resistance. The stethoscope is remarkable: it lets you check a monster’s hit points and your own internal state. Healers are fragile fighters, but their medical knowledge keeps them alive through situations that would kill other roles. You’re also immune to sickness, so unknown potions of sickness become a free quaff-test (and you can convert them to fruit juice by dipping a unicorn horn). Alignment: Neutral.

Knight. You start mounted on a saddled pony, with a +1 long sword and a +1 lance among your gear. The pony is a decent combatant early on and the basis of your unique trick: jousting from horseback with the lance is devastating when it connects, though the lance is largely useless on foot. As a Lawful character with a starting long sword, you also have the best odds in the game at Excalibur. Dip your long sword in a fountain at experience level 5+ and Knights get a 1-in-6 chance per dip, far better than the 1-in-30 every other Lawful role faces. Knights follow a code of conduct that imposes alignment penalties for attacking fleeing or helpless monsters, so pick your fights carefully. Knights also have intrinsic jumping, which lets you reposition without spending an attack. Alignment: Lawful.

Monk. You fight best with bare hands and start with no weapon at all. Monks gain martial arts abilities as they level, eventually becoming formidable unarmed combatants. You start with sleep resistance and see invisible, and you should avoid eating meat if you want to maintain your spiritual discipline. One of the more unusual roles, rewarding for experienced players. Alignment: Any.

Priest. You start with a mace, four potions of holy water, and the ability to intuitively sense whether items are blessed, cursed, or uncursed, so you know on sight whether that cloak you just found is safe to wear. Competent fighters with access to clerical spells. Your first sacrifice gift is guaranteed: Demonbane (now a silver mace), which aligns with your weapon skill — sacrifice early and often. Alignment: Any (matches your god).

Ranger. You start with a bow, a generous supply of arrows, a dagger, and a +2 cloak of displacement — one of the strongest defensive starts in the game. You’re unmatched as an early-game ranged threat. Rangers gain Searching at XL 1, Stealth at XL 7, and See Invisible at XL 15. Your elven racial option grants sleep resistance at XL 4. If you enjoy picking off enemies from a distance, this is your role. Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

Rogue. NetHack’s thief class: lockpicking and stealthy assassinations. You start with a short sword, six daggers for throwing, leather armor, a lock pick, a sack, and a potion of sickness (toss it at an enemy, or save it to coat any darts, shuriken, or arrows you find — only missiles can be poisoned). Your lock pick makes every locked door, chest, and box openable from turn one. You get stealth from the beginning, which lets you walk up to sleeping enemies without waking them, and your backstab ability deals extra damage (+1 to +your level) when you hit a monster that’s fleeing or helpless. Alignment: Chaotic.

Samurai. You start with a katana, which is one of the better one-handed weapons in the game, plus a wakizashi backup and a yumi bow with arrows. Samurai get speed early and have a strong martial kit overall. The katana’s damage output carries you through the early game with ease. Alignment: Lawful.

Tourist. You start with a Hawaiian shirt, a credit card, a camera, and a truly absurd number of darts. Tourists have weak combat and a fragile early game: this is the hardest of the standard roles. The darts do train ranged skills fast, though, and the camera can blind monsters in a pinch. A good role for players who have ascended before and want a real challenge. Alignment: Neutral.

Valkyrie. The standard recommendation for a first serious attempt. You start with a spear, a small shield, and cold resistance; strong combat stats and good starting equipment do the rest. Mjollnir (+d5/+d24 war hammer that returns when thrown at Strength 25) drops as your sacrifice gift regardless of alignment, and is what you’ll wield by the late game. Alignment: Lawful or Neutral. Female only.

Wizard. You start with a quarterstaff, a cloak of magic resistance (an endgame-quality item from turn one), a wand, two rings, three potions, three scrolls, the force-bolt spell plus a random spellbook, and a high-enchantment magic marker. Physical combat is terrible, so spells are the answer: fragile early, overwhelming late. Advancing a spell-school skill (new in 5.0) also identifies spellbooks of that school by appearance, so you get free book-ID just by casting (see Spellcasting). Alignment: Neutral or Chaotic.

The Races

Your race affects your starting and maximum attributes, and which intrinsics you get. All stats range from 3 and higher; the table below shows the maximum each race can reach for each attribute.

Human. No infravision, no poison resistance, no special talents. On the bright side, every role is open to you and nobody in the dungeon singles you out for being one. Perfectly serviceable.

Dwarf. Sturdy fighters with the best Dex and Con caps and matching human Strength. Infravision (the ability to see warm-blooded creatures in the dark) from level 1. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Valkyrie.

Elf. Infravision plus sleep resistance at XL 4. Fragile compared to humans but with the best Int and Wis caps. Elf Priests and Wizards get a free musical instrument. Available for: Priest, Ranger, Wizard.

Gnome. Small but resourceful; slightly higher Int cap than a human. Available for: Archeologist, Cave Dweller, Healer, Ranger, Wizard.

Orc. Poison resistance from level 1 is genuinely useful. Lower stat caps overall, and humans, elves, and dwarves are race-hostile to orcs (shopkeepers, priests, watchmen included); other orcs aren’t automatically peaceful either. Available for: Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard.

Alignment

Your alignment (Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic) determines which gods you worship, which artifacts you can safely use, and how certain actions affect your standing. It’s tempting to think of these as “good,” “balanced,” and “evil,” but it’s more nuanced than that.

The key thing to understand about alignment is that it’s a number. Every action that matches your alignment’s expectations increases it; actions that violate your alignment’s code decrease it. Your alignment record affects your relationship with your god, which in turn affects whether prayer will save you or smite you.

Lawful characters should avoid attacking peaceful creatures and should never murder. Sacrifice frequently at co-aligned altars. Lawful has the advantage of access to Excalibur, a top-tier melee weapon obtainable as early as experience level 5.

Neutral characters have the most flexibility. You can get away with more than a Lawful character, but your god still frowns on truly chaotic behavior. Neutral has access to some excellent quest artifacts.

Chaotic characters can kill with relative impunity but should avoid pious behavior that doesn’t match their dark patron’s expectations. Chaotic is often paired with Rogue for thematic consistency.

For your first game: Valkyrie, Human or Dwarf. Strong combat, cold resistance, and Mjollnir waiting at the first co-aligned altar you can sacrifice on. It’s the closest thing to an easy mode the Mazes offer, which is to say it’s still very hard.

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, 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 won’t 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 but not urgent.

Armor improvements. Whatever you’re wearing, you can probably do better. Look for cloaks, helmets, gloves, and boots to fill empty equipment slots. Even basic items like a helmet or pair of gloves provide armor class benefits and can protect against specific attacks.

A ranged attack. Daggers, darts, or a bow with arrows. Fighting from range is almost always safer than melee, and some monsters (like floating eyes) should never be fought in melee.

Supply chests. Some of the large boxes and chests you find on the levels above the Oracle are special supply chests. They are usually locked but stocked with useful magical items: healing or gain-energy potions, enchant-weapon or enchant-armor scrolls, sometimes a wand of digging or a low-level spellbook. About two-thirds of the early levels have one. Picking or #forceing them open is almost always worth the time.

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.

The Golden Rules of Early Survival

Rule 1: Don’t fight what you can’t beat. This sounds obvious, but it’s the single most violated principle in the Mazes. If a monster is too tough for you, walk away. Use corridors as chokepoints. Funnel enemies so you fight them one at a time. If you stumble into a room full of monsters, step back into the corridor and force them to come to you in single file.

  Bad: fighting in the open       Good: corridor chokepoint

  ┌─────·──────┐                  ┌─────·──────┐
  │·Z··Z·······│                  │·Z···Z······│
  │··Z·@·Z·Z···│                  │··Z··Z······│
  │····Z·······│                  │·Z··········+##@
  │··Z·········│                  │··Z·········│
  └────────────┘                  └────────────┘

  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. Always carry one if you can.

Rule 3: Your pet is your friend. Your starting pet is more useful than it appears. It will fight alongside you, pick up items (which tells you they’re not cursed, since pets avoid cursed items on the ground), and can even be trained to steal from shops. Keep it fed by dropping tripe rations or corpses near it. A healthy, well-fed pet is one of your best early assets.

Rule 4: Learn to pray. If you are about to die (hit points critically low, starving, turning to stone) you can pray to your god for help. In the early game, with decent alignment, prayer will almost certainly save you. But you can only pray about once every thousand turns or so, and 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. Think of prayer as an emergency button with a cooldown. Don’t waste it on minor problems (see Divine Relations for the full mechanics).

Rule 5: Explore thoroughly but move purposefully. Every turn you spend in the dungeon costs nutrition. If you stand around for hundreds of turns, you’ll starve. But rushing past rooms means missing items you need. The sweet spot is to explore each level fairly completely (check rooms, open doors, look for hidden passages) but don’t grind. When you’ve found what the level has to offer, move on.

Rule 6: Build your defenses. In the first half of the game, your real goal isn’t accumulating treasure. It’s acquiring the resistances and protections that will help you survive the late game. The three most important are magic resistance, reflection, and poison resistance (plus a lizard corpse in your pack for petrification emergencies). Poison resistance can be acquired as an intrinsic by eating the right corpse, like a killer bee, a cave spider, a 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), an amulet of reflection, or an artifact granted by your god, won on the Quest, or bestowed by a wish.

Things That Kill You (And How Not to Let 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’re Fainting, pray immediately. Pick up every food ration you find.

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, pray immediately.

Falling down stairs while overburdened. If you’re carrying too much, taking the stairs can make you tumble for 1–3 HP. Annoying rather than dangerous, but a habit worth avoiding: drop items before descending or manage your inventory.

Killer bees. They come in swarms, they’re fast, and in the early game, a group of them can overwhelm you. If you see one bee, expect more. Use a corridor to fight them one at a time.

Your own pet. If your pet is between you and a narrow corridor, you might accidentally swap places with it repeatedly instead of moving. Worse, if you attack it (because you got confused or forgot it was there), you lose alignment and trust. Be aware of where your pet is.

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. On your first ten levels, check every chest and large box you find. A locked one will yield to a credit card, a key, a wand of opening, or you can #force the issue with a weapon you don’t mind breaking. An orcish dagger off the first orc you kill is a perfect tool (pet-test it first: could be cursed). The contents aren’t guaranteed to change your run, but finding a stack of healing potions on level 4 before you’ve learned the hard way how much you need them is the dungeon’s act of goodwill.

The Big Picture

Before we talk about what the symbols mean, here’s the overall shape of the place. The dungeon is a branching tree with a main trunk (the Dungeons of Doom) and several side branches. The diagram nearby shows the full layout. Knowing where you are in this tree helps you plan your route and know what’s coming.

The Dungeons of Doom form the upper half, roughly levels 1 through 27. Along the way you’ll find branches leading to the Gnomish Mines (luckstone, shops), Sokoban (a prize at the top), your Quest (your role’s special dungeon), and optionally Fort Ludios (a vault full of gold). The main trunk ends at The Castle, which guards the entrance to Gehennom.

Gehennom is the lower half: maze levels, demon lords, and the ultimate objective: the Amulet of Yendor at the very bottom in Moloch’s Sanctum. Once you have it, you climb all the way back up and pass through the Elemental Planes to reach the Astral Plane, where your god awaits your offering.

The typical trip: go down through the Dungeons, detour into the Mines for a luckstone and Minetown’s shops, clear Sokoban for a prize, do your Quest, reach the Castle, descend through Gehennom to get the Amulet, then climb all the way back up and through the Planes. Simple enough on paper. Surviving it is another matter.

The Map Symbols

Everything in the dungeon is represented by a symbol on the screen. Learning to read these symbols quickly is important:

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).

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 standing in the doorway (or inside). 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 (\) and usually surrounded by monsters. Sitting on the throne has random effects, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible. See Points of Interest.

Zoos. A room packed with sleeping monsters and gold. They wake not from opening the door (which is silent) but from the noise of you fighting the first few. Fight from the doorway so they wake and approach one or two at a time, not all at once.

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. New in 5.0 and the most visible change to ordinary level generation: scattered through the Dungeons of Doom, you’ll occasionally walk into rooms that aren’t shops, aren’t zoos, and aren’t anything else from the list above, but are also clearly not random. They’re called themed rooms, and there are dozens of them. Some have unusual shapes (L-shaped, T-shaped, S-shaped, circular, cross-shaped, four-leaf-clover-shaped, with pillars, with a room-inside-a-room). Some have unusual contents (a buried- treasure cache; a buried-zombies field that wakes up when disturbed; a small massacre of statues and old corpses; a mausoleum; a trap room seeded with one kind of trap; a separate teleportation hub of fixed-destination teleporters; an empty room shaped like the Oracle’s chamber; a garden; a spider nest; an ice room; a cloud room; a boulder room).

The interesting ones for the player:

• Light source rooms. They reliably contain a lit oil lamp. Free torch.
• Buried treasure. The floor needs digging, but the haul is real. A pick-axe earns its weight here.
• Massacre. Floor strewn with adventurer-role corpses (rogue, ranger, valkyrie, etc.). Useful for sacrifice and for eating the safe ones for intrinsics if you know the role.
• 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. These are traps in everything but name. Spider nest and buried zombies scale with level difficulty, so what looks innocuous on Dlvl 4 is rough on Dlvl 18. Trap rooms can be anything from arrow traps to anti-magic to land mines; recognize the pattern, retreat, prepare, return.
• Light-and-frame rooms (pillars, room-in-a-room, blocked center). Tactically excellent for setting up Elbereth squares or anchoring a polearm fight.

Themed rooms are mixed in with ordinary rooms; you can have several on a single level. They make the early dungeon less predictable in a friendly way: more terrain types to fight in, more item discovery, and the occasional educational ambush.

A room full of one kind of monster is almost certainly a themed room, not a coincidence. Themed rooms have above-average monster density concentrated around a single type, so any room that looks curated deserves more respect than a random room of equivalent apparent difficulty. Retreat, assess, and enter with a plan rather than a direction.

Common Early Encounters

Mid-Dungeon Threats

Things You Don’t Want to Meet

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. Every experienced player has a fountain story: the time they summoned a water demon on dungeon level 3, the time they quaffed and got a wish, the time snakes poured out of the basin.

Quaffing from a fountain is a slot machine with these reels:

Most of the time, nothing happens. Sometimes something wonderful happens. And sometimes a water demon appears and reminds you that curiosity has a body count. Demons appear about 1 quaff in 30; on shallow levels they may grant you a wish before leaving, working out to roughly 1 wish per 150 quaffs. Past Dlvl 20 the wish odds drop to zero — only the hostility remains.

Dipping in a fountain is a different gamble, and one that Lawful characters should know by heart. If you’re at least experience level 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.

The conventional wisdom: if you’re a lawful Knight carrying a long sword, dip in every fountain you see until Excalibur appears. Other lawful characters should try too, but pack patience. And if you’re not lawful? Walk past the fountain. It has nothing for you but wet boots and regret.

Altars _

If fountains are slot machines, altars are the single most useful piece of furniture in the dungeon. Treat every altar like the treasure it is.

Dropping items on an altar reveals their BUC status instantly: - Amber flash → blessed - Black flash → cursed - No flash → uncursed

This is free, unlimited, and works on everything. In the early game, your first altar becomes your testing laboratory: haul every suspicious piece of gear there before putting it on. Many promising ascensions have been saved by the simple discipline of altar-testing before wearing.

Sacrificing monster corpses on an altar deepens your relationship with your god. The corpse must be fresh (stale sacrifices are an insult) and the bigger the monster, the more your god is impressed. Sacrifice enough and your deity may reward you with an artifact weapon aligned to your cause. See Divine Relations for the full theology.

Converting an altar to your alignment is possible by sacrificing ordinary monster corpses on a cross-aligned altar. Each attempt has a chance of flipping the altar to your god, a chance of doing nothing, and a chance of backfiring (the wrong god notices and punishes you, or worse, you get converted). It’s a real gamble, but worth it when the dungeon gives you an altar to the wrong god and you need a co-aligned one for sacrifice and holy water. See Altars and Alignment for the gotchas (same-race sacrifice, unicorns).

Thrones \

Sitting on a throne is the purest gamble in NetHack. The list of possible outcomes reads like a wish list shuffled with a hit list:

• A wish (if your luck is positive)
• Genocide of a monster class
• 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 one of your items
• Magic mapping of the level
• See invisible
• All your gold, vanished

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, and ideally when your luck is positive (for a shot at the wish). 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.)

Sinks {

Sinks are the dungeon’s most underrated identification tool.

Kicking a sink can shake loose a ring (useful!), summon a black pudding (terrifying, but its glob is a triple-resistance snack), summon an amorous demon posing as “the dish washer” (the same incubus/succubus as a seduction encounter — careful!), or just stub your toe. Each non-stub outcome fires at most once per sink. Worth a kick in the early game if you can handle what comes out.

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 makes you yawn, hallucination starts hallucinating, blindness blinds briefly, healing nudges HP, and so on). Wasted on water, fruit juice, gain level, gain energy, and monster detection: those all just print “nothing seems to happen.”

Quaffing from a sink rolls one of 20 random effects. Mostly nothing useful (mild flavor messages, summoned sewer rat, vomit, scalding water), but three outcomes are worth the occasional risk: ~5% chance to gain an experience level outright, ~5% chance to find a ring at your feet (once per sink), and ~5% chance to drink a random unidentified potion. Worth a quaff or two from any sink you encounter, but keep HP and an escape plan in reserve: it could summon a water elemental, or it could polymorph you.

Dropping a ring down a sink produces a message unique to the ring type — the most reliable non-magical way to identify rings. Most rings are consumed, but two come back after IDing themselves for free:

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’ll usually find one by digging through stone or by teleporting in. The engraving “ad aerarium” on a level marks one nearby (see Engravings).

After about thirty turns inside, a guard appears at the doorway and asks “Who are you?” The trick: answer Croesus (also accepted as Kroisos or Creosote). The guard takes that as the name of the vault’s owner and politely leaves, gold untouched. If you give your real name, the guard escorts you out the long way and the gold goes with him. If you’re Lawful, lying costs you one alignment.

If Croesus himself is dead (you killed him at Fort Ludios), claiming his name angers the guard. Use the real-name route then.

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.

The Mines are populated primarily by gnomes, dwarves, and the occasional dwarf lord. If you’re playing a gnomish character, most of them will be peaceful, which makes the Mines a relatively comfortable detour. Everyone else will need to fight through a modest but steady stream of hostile gnomes.

Minetown appears a few levels into the Mines. Usually it’s a small settlement with shops and a temple, and it’s worth visiting early. 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 is also the cheapest source of intrinsic AC bonuses in the game — donating 500 zorkmids at low XL stacks each visit (see 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. If you were counting on Minetown for early commerce, this is a rude surprise.

Watch out for the Minetown watch. The guards are peaceful unless you steal from a shop or attack a peaceful creature. If you anger them, they’ll call for reinforcements.

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. A luckstone in your open inventory prevents your luck from timing out toward zero, which affects everything from combat to fountain wishes. Grab it and carry it for the rest of the game. (One layout variant also seeds a fake luckstone mimic disguised as a luckstone — BUC-test what you pick up before relying on it.)

Sokoban

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 might 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 a wand of striking or a scroll of earth (or polymorph the boulder into something else). Each of these costs a point of Luck and breaks the Sokoban conduct. The walls themselves are non-diggable on every Sokoban level, and pit traps are inescapable — even flying or levitation won’t carry you over an open pit, the air currents pull you down anyway. Teleport doesn’t work here: the level forbids it.

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. Either one is worth the detour.

One important rule: the Sokoban levels penalize you for “cheating.” Breaking or polymorphing boulders, reading scrolls of earth, or squeezing past boulders costs you a point of luck each time. Solve each level honestly if you can.

Strength training side effect. Every legitimate boulder-push exercises Strength. Sokoban is the safest place to grind Str up since the puzzles require dozens of pushes without putting you in combat. Don’t try to train Str by walking around Stressed in the rest of the dungeon: the HP penalty isn’t worth what you’d gain.

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 and four fountains.

The Oracle 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 game mechanics.

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

The Quest

Around dungeon levels 11 through 16, a magic portal drops you onto your Quest. You’ll need experience level 14 and a friendly word with your quest leader on the first floor before they’ll let you descend. The leader sends you to retrieve your role’s quest artifact from a quest nemesis.

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.

Quest artifacts are powerful. Each grants a unique mix of carried or worn intrinsics: protection, luck, ESP, warning, reflection, or stealth depending on role. A few grant magic resistance just by being carried; a few others block magic attacks only when wielded or worn. The Artifacts chapter has the per-role list. Getting your quest artifact is a pivotal moment. The late game starts here.

Two prizes wait on the nemesis’s square. The Bell of Opening rides in the nemesis’s pack and falls when you kill them (one of the three invocation items you’ll need for Gehennom). Your role’s quest artifact has been sitting under their feet the whole time, placed when the level was generated. Pick both up. The Quest is the only place in the game you can get them.

Most nemeses carry an amulet of life saving, so expect to kill them twice. The portal back is on the first Quest level only. If you descend underprepared you may have a long climb home.

If your alignment record is too low, your quest leader will refuse to send you. Attacking peacefuls is the usual cause. Keep your hands clean.

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.

Modern mechanics still work; you can engrave Elbereth here even though that was a Hack-era addition. A small and forgivable anachronism.

Fort Ludios

Fort Ludios is optional and easy to miss entirely. It appears as a magic portal anywhere from Dlvl 11 down to just above Medusa, always inside a sealed vault, so you’ll need to dig in. The portal leads to a fortified military compound: sixteen soldiers and a lieutenant, with more drifting out of the barracks once the alarm trips. Four guard dragons. A stone giant. Four giant eels patrolling the moat. And Croesus on the throne, the vault guardian himself. The level is non-diggable. The level prevents teleportation, so once you’re inside the only way out is back through the portal or a scroll of level teleportation (a plain scroll of teleportation won’t work here). Croesus hits hard in melee, so shoot or zap him from across the moat rather than walking up.

The real prize is the gold. A 60-square treasury holds 36k to 54k gold, with land mines and spiked pits on roughly a third of the tiles. Gem caches in each corner tower (diamonds, emeralds, rubies, amethysts), plus the occasional chest in the barracks. Soldiers carry rations and serviceable weapons. The alarm only quiets once Croesus is dead. Fort Ludios is a good place to visit for gold, identification scrolls, or shop stock, but it’s not essential for victory.

If you can’t find the portal, don’t worry about it. Fort Ludios is a bonus, not a requirement.

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).

The level has three challenges stacked together:

1. Crossing the water. The island is surrounded by water. You’ll need levitation, water walking boots, or some creative approach (freezing water with a wand of cold, building a boulder bridge, polymorphing into a flying creature). Don’t wade in without preparation, because:

2. Giant eels (electric eels on one layout). The water is home to giant eels that can grab and drown you on a successful hit, reaching into adjacent dry tiles too. See the eel-survival rules below.

3. Medusa herself. Her gaze turns you to stone. You need either reflection (a shield of reflection or amulet of reflection bounces the gaze back, stoning her instead) or blindness (you can’t meet her gaze if you can’t see). A mirror also works if you apply it at her. Reflection is the cleanest solution. If you got the amulet of reflection from Sokoban, you’re already prepared.

There is a downward staircase on the island itself that leads toward the Castle. The level has four possible layouts (two added in 3.6), 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. #loot him for 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’s 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.

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

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. This 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 Medusa to reflect her gaze at close range. More dangerous than passive reflection since you need to be adjacent.
• One-shot kill. If you have a wand of death, the spell finger of death, or a cockatrice corpse, you can kill Medusa before she gets a turn. Combine with speed or stealth for reliability.

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).
• 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. Ice is safe to walk on. This is reliable and only costs a few charges.
• 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 last level of the Dungeons of Doom proper, a stone fortress surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge as 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. Hidden in a chest in one of the four corner towers is the wand of wishing.

The Castle is the last step of the dungeon proper and the gateway to Gehennom. For how to open the drawbridge and what to do once you’re inside, see The Castle in Part Six.

Nuisance Traps

Annoying but rarely lethal. The silver lining: arrow and dart traps produce free ammunition. Veterans sometimes trigger them deliberately 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 are the sleeper threat. The fire itself hurts, but the real catastrophe is 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.

Polymorph traps are a double-edged sword. With polymorph control, they’re a free polymorphing booth. Without it, you become something random, possibly a newt that can’t use any of its equipment. Magic resistance and the Unchanging intrinsic both block the polymorph entirely. Tcontrol is the only way to use the trap; MR or Unchanging let you walk through it untouched.

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 (elven blood, the right ring) sidesteps it.

Anti-magic fields hit harder if you’re magic-resistant. Counterintuitive enough to mislead returning players. 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
• Pets avoid known traps, so watch their pathfinding for clues
• Flying and levitation make you immune to most floor traps (you’ll still trigger magic, teleport, and anti-magic traps)

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, a square your pet refuses to cross, or a themed room whose gimmick is hidden hazards.

Iron Bars

Iron bars look like a barrier but aren’t solid: light passes through, you can see what’s on the other side, and tiny creatures (grid bugs, bats, rats) can squeeze between — kittens and little dogs are already too big. What they resist is almost everything the player can throw at them: pick-axes bounce off (“Clang!”), wands of digging fizzle, weapons swing through harmlessly, and kicking just hurts your foot. Wands and spells of striking and force bolt pass through the bars without effect. The bars corrode for an acid ray, acid breath or spit (if you are polymorphed into a yellow dragon or black naga), and a wand of lightning can melt them too — though only about one zap in ten actually dissolves the bars.

The practical early-game answer is to dig around them. Iron bars sit in a niche cut into a room wall, so digging diagonally past the bars (or breaking through the wall to the stone behind and then back into the niche) reaches the contents without touching the bars. Mid-game, polymorph into something that breathes acid or lightning, passes walls (xorn, earth elemental), is tiny enough to slip between, or eats metal (rock mole). Starting pets won’t fit, but a polymorphed pet can.

What’s typically behind them: a scroll of teleportation (unless the level is non-teleport, in which case the niche skips it), occasionally a random item or a previous adventurer’s corpse. The scroll is a joke: you’d need one already to read it from outside the bars.

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 essentially 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.

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 — but the total bonus from Excalibur + lenses caps at +5, so lenses only help if Excalibur’s enchantment is below +3
• 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)

The wisdom of patience:

Secret doors are NetHack’s way of teaching you that brute force doesn’t solve every problem. Sometimes you need brute force applied methodically to every wall section in sequence. The downstairs you seek is behind one of these walls. Finding it is a matter of systematic elimination. The only mistake is giving up after three searches and declaring the level “impossible.”

Engravings

You can write on the dungeon floor with the engrave command (E). Engravings serve a few practical purposes: writing Elbereth (covered next), running the engrave-test on an unidentified wand (covered in the wand chapter), or just leaving a note for whoever finds your bones file. The mechanics described here apply to any engraving, not just Elbereth.

Methods, speed, and durability. The tool you write with determines how quickly you can finish, how hard the engraving is to erase, and whether your stylus suffers wear.

The three durability tiers correspond to how the text resists ordinary erosion:

• Fragile (dust) — a monster stepping on the square smudges one character. In dust, an Elbereth lasts as long as the floor stays clear.
• Semi-permanent (scratched into the floor) — monster traffic doesn’t smudge it. Random erosion can occasionally chip a character under unusual conditions, but in practice the engraving lasts indefinitely.
• Permanent (burned in) — the engraving doesn’t erode at all under normal conditions; only ice tiles or magical attacks can damage it.

Engraving is an interruptible occupation. Anything written by hand at multi-turn speed (non-athame edged weapon, gem) takes one turn per letter. If you’re interrupted mid-word — by an attack, a monster wandering into view, or anything else that breaks an occupation — you get a partial engraving that does nothing useful. Instant methods (any wand, finger-in-dust, or an uncursed athame) finish in a single occupation action.

Impairment and errors. If you are blind, confused, stunned, or hallucinating, you have a chance of misspelling each letter, and this scrambling applies to every engraving method, including burns from a wand of fire. (Only the dust/blood surface-garble roll is skipped for harder methods.) A misspelled message has no special power; this matters most for Elbereth.

Overwriting and combining. Appending to an existing engraving is possible, but for named-word magic like Elbereth the engraving must read exactly that word and nothing else, so the appended text usually destroys the ward. To refresh, overwrite the square or pick a fresh one.

Two engravings worth recognizing. Most engravings you find are random flavor (graffiti, “elbereth” left by someone else, etc.), but two specific messages are trap markers placed by the dungeon: “ad aerarium” (Latin: to the treasury) is engraved near a secret closet containing either a vault teleporter (a one-shot TELEP_TRAP that drops you into Croesus’s 2×2 gold vault on the same level — pick up the gold, then escape ahead of the vault guard) or a level teleporter (a LEVEL_TELEP that sends you to a random dungeon level, often unwelcome without Teleport control); “Vlad was here” marks a secret closet containing a trap door. Both are easy to miss in the message log, and worth investigating when you see them — but be ready for what’s on the other side.

Elbereth

To-Hit Calculation

Every swing of your weapon is a d20 roll, modified by everything the game can think of to make your life interesting:

• Your experience level (the game’s way of saying “you’ve seen things”)
• Your weapon’s enchantment (a +7 Excalibur hits noticeably better)
• Your Luck (the universe literally 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)

You need to roll at or above (10 + defender’s AC - your modifiers). Since some late-game monsters have AC of -10 or worse, this formula can feel like trying to hit smoke. Enchant your weapon. Keep your luck up. And maybe don’t try to punch an arch-lich.

Damage

Base damage depends on your weapon and whether the target is small or large. (Most weapons are optimized for one or the other, because apparently dungeon physics care about monster volume.) Added to base:

• Weapon enchantment (+1 per point)
• Strength bonus (up to +6 for STR 18/xx, or more)
• Weapon skill bonus (depends on skill level)
• Special bonuses (silver damage, artifact bonuses, etc.)
• In 5.0, two-handed weapons get a 50% bonus to the strength damage component, a deliberate payoff for giving up your shield

This narrows the gap between two-handed builds and dual-wielding considerably. A Barbarian with a two-handed sword and respectable Strength is not just accepting the trade-off of foregoing a shield: they’re dealing measurably more damage per swing than a comparable one-handed build. If you’ve been avoiding two-handed weapons because the math didn’t add up, run those numbers again.

AC and Defense

Your AC determines how likely monsters are to hit you. The journey from “I die to gnomes” to “nothing can touch me” looks like this:

At AC -20, almost nothing hits you with physical attacks. Feel free to laugh at ogres. But 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. AC is necessary but not sufficient.

Two-Weapon Combat

Some roles can fight with a weapon in each hand, which looks impressive and gives more attacks per turn. The catch: each strike takes a flat to-hit and damage penalty determined by your two-weapon skill (−9/−7/−5/−3 to hit, −3/−1/0/+1 damage from Unskilled through Expert), and you can’t use a shield. Only Rogue and Samurai can reach Expert; Valkyrie and Knight cap at Skilled; everyone else lower or none. Rangers don’t have the skill at all. If you’re not sure, just use one really good weapon. In 5.0, two-handed weapons got a buff (3/2 strength damage bonus) that makes them a good alternative.

Fighting Smart

The dungeon rewards cowardice, cunning, and property damage. Here are the time-tested tactics that keep adventurers breathing:

• Use corridors. Monsters can only approach one at a time in a corridor — the single most important tactical principle in the Mazes. Never fight a mob in an open room if you can retreat to a chokepoint and fight them in single file. It turns a suicide mission into a turkey shoot.
• Fight at range. Wands, thrown weapons, and spells let you soften up monsters before they reach you. This is especially important against monsters with dangerous melee attacks. A fire ant is scary in melee. A fire ant that you’ve already zapped three times is just a warm corpse.
• Know when to run. The Mazes have no medals for bravery, only for survival. If a fight is going badly, use a scroll of teleportation, a wand of teleportation, or just run. Dead adventurers don’t get second chances (unless wearing an amulet of life saving).
• Use conflict. A ring of conflict makes monsters fight each other. Walk into a room full of enemies, put on the ring, and watch from the doorway as they destroy each other. Two 5.0 caveats: a monster has to see you for conflict to affect it (so blind or out-of-sight monsters keep their wits), and the chance scales with your Charisma: high Cha makes it noticeably more reliable, low Cha makes it flaky.
• Elbereth for emergencies. Write it, stand on it, recover. The monsters will mill around you looking confused and angry, which is exactly how you want them.
• Ranged attackers retreat. Monsters with ranged attacks (archers, spellcasters, anything that can hurt you from a distance) now actively back away when you close to melee range. Walking toward a centaur archer to neutralize its bow no longer works; it will simply back up and keep shooting. The tactical implications: use corners and narrow passages to cut off their retreat, bring ranged options of your own, or use a wand of teleportation to skip past the dance. This change also means monster spellcasters are more dangerous than they used to be: they’ll maintain the range they need to cast while you struggle to close.
• Cornered scared monsters fight. Elbereth still works, and the engrave-and-regenerate tactic still works, but only when the monster has somewhere to go. A frightened monster that has nowhere to flee will now turn and fight rather than stand helplessly while you recover. If you’ve carved Elbereth in a corridor and then backed a monster into a dead end, be ready for it to make a decision about that arrangement. Keep an exit behind the monster, or expect contact.
• The first swing wakes the room. Sleeping monsters stay asleep while you walk past them, but a hit on one wakes everything around it: the struck monster growls, and the growl wakes any other sleeping monster within roughly seven squares for a level-3 gnome, more for larger creatures. A packed room becomes a simultaneous brawl on swing two. Pull the pack one at a time by backing away into a corridor first (so they wake strung out in a line) or write Elbereth and let them come.
• Watch your alignment around peacefuls. Knights and Samurai take a special alignment hit for attacking the helpless, fleeing, or peaceful (a caitiff penalty for Knights, a giri-breaking penalty for Samurai). The Quest entrance check requires alignment record at least 20 and experience level at least 14. A handful of careless peaceful kills can lock a Knight or Samurai out of the Quest for the rest of the run.

Common Combat Deaths

Beyond the top ten, certain enemy categories kill more beginners than their depth or appearance would suggest. The shape of the threat is usually pack tactics, surprising speed, or one catastrophic special attack.

The Gnomish Mines is a choice, not a routine stop. Mines residents are G, gnomes, and h, the humanoid class that includes dwarves. Plain gnomes, gnome lords, dwarves, and gnomish wizards all sit in the top fifteen causes of death on the public server, because the Mines funnel four or five armed opponents into a single room and beginners walk in at XL 3 expecting an extra branch. Dwarves hit harder than they look and come armored. Gnomish wizards (a G with spell attacks) can cast sleep at you among other things, and a sleeping adventurer in a Mines room is a dead one. Take the branch when you have HP, a real weapon, and sleep resistance. A positive AC at XL 5 is not enough.

Sleep without resistance is a near-instadeath. A homunculus (i) bite, a gnomish wizard’s sleep spell, 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 chew through your HP while you cannot move. Sleep resistance comes from any elf, elven mummy, or giant corpse, and from several roles’ starting kits (Wizard’s cloak of MR, Ranger’s elven cloak). Eat for it before descending into the Mines or the lower Quest.

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). The defense is positioning, not HP totals: fight from a doorway so they cannot kite around 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. A wandering soldier-ant pack on Dlvl 4 can end a careless run. 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 ('). Golems are class ' (apostrophe), not P (which is puddings). 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 endgame model: 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. Water demons are major demons (class &, level 8) who attack first and grant a wish only if you survive. 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.

Deadly Mistakes

Routine mistakes kill more adventurers than exotic instadeaths. The list below is sorted roughly by frequency on the public server.

Eating mistakes. Rotted corpse, poisonous corpse, and choking each rank in the top forty causes of death. Don’t eat old corpses. Don’t eat while Satiated. Don’t finish a heavy corpse if you’re already approaching Satiated. 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. More heroes die slipping off saddled ponies than die to mind flayers. Getting on a steed rolls against your experience level plus the steed’s tameness; on a failure you take 10 to 14 HP. Don’t mount while Confused, Fumbling, or Glib, don’t mount with a cursed or greased saddle, and don’t mount a barely-tame pony at experience level 2.

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. Hot ground in Gehennom shatters any potion you drop on the floor, and the shrapnel is deadly. Keep potions in a bag once you descend below the Castle. Bagging your potion and scroll stash earlier is also wise: a yellow dragon’s lightning bolt shatters every loose potion in your pack, and a fire trap incinerates loose scrolls.

Killed by your own wand. Self-zapped attack wands, rays ricocheting off a wall in a narrow corridor and back into your face. Engrave-test wands before pointing them at yourself.

Killed by a grid bug. The weakest monster in the game kills more than 11,000 adventurers per year. They get the last hit on someone who walked away from a real fight at 2 HP, or someone 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 doors can break your toe. Kicking locked chests can electrocute you, and electric shock is a top-100 cause of death on its own. Stop kicking things.

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.

The pattern across the whole list: routine mistakes kill far more adventurers than exotic instadeaths. Floating eyes, cockatrices, mind flayers, and disenchanters all matter (and they’re catalogued in the named-death entries below). But the median death is a preventable swarm of jackals on Dlvl 3.

A note on mimics

You will frequently meet mimics in shops, with more as you get deeper. An average shop has one or two mimics sitting in the aisles, masquerading as items. They’re slow (speed 3) but their claws hit hard. Small mimics rank in the top ten causes of death.

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 ]. A ] on a shop floor or anywhere else is always a mimic.

Other contextual disguises (rare in practice but worth knowing): a mimic in a temple may appear as an extra altar, in a Delphi room as a second fountain, in a maze as a lone boulder. So “a single piece of furniture that shouldn’t be there” is suspicious.

How to uncover one safely. Search the adjacent square (s) reveals concealed mimics like it reveals traps. 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.

Sticking. Large and giant mimics glue you in place on a successful claw hit: you can’t move, you can’t go down stairs, you can’t escape down a hole. Magic cancellation (cloak of protection, amulet of guarding, etc.) reduces the sticking chance — one more reason to secure MC before browsing mid-game shops.

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 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, full stop. 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. The second pillar of not dying to wands.

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 is the sleeper pick. 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 rare, though.

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 — a useful nutritional save 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 — a pair of niche defenses in one slot.

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.) One of the most powerful body slots in the game.

Gold dragons are new in 5.0 and breathe fire. Their scale mail has no resistance power but is permanently lit (radius 4 blessed, 3 uncursed, 2 cursed) — the only body-slot light source in the game, and it lets you abandon torches and oil. It also confers hallucination resistance.

All scale mails are dragonhide, body-slot, +9 AC worn (the best in the body slot), and resist disenchantment naturally. The choice of which color to chase is usually whichever dragon’s territory you can reach safely; killing a dragon yields scales you can wear immediately or convert to scale mail.

Some things in the Mazes kill you outright. Not by whittling down your hit points, not by wearing you down over time, but by ending your life in a single move with no second chance. These are called instadeaths, and learning to recognize the situations that produce them is the difference between a promising run and a one-line epitaph.

The catalog of instadeaths below is inspired by Trevor Powell’s Instadeath Spoiler, which drew on Dylan O’Donnell’s RGRN files. Trevor defined an instadeath as “a single move death which does not involve the player’s hit points dropping to zero,” and that taxonomy has been the standard reference ever since.

Petrification (Stoning)

Touching a cockatrice without gloves, eating a cockatrice corpse, catching Medusa’s gaze, or kicking a cockatrice corpse barefoot will turn you to stone. Stepping on the corpse is safe so long as you don’t have Fumbling (Fumbling can trip you over the corpse for instant death). The process is sometimes immediate; otherwise a five-turn countdown 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 d(3,6) turns of HStone resistance — useful, but not permanent). For something permanent, wear yellow dragon scale mail.

Defenses while it’s happening: eat a lizard corpse (this is why you carry one), eat an acidic corpse, drink a potion of acid, pray, or cast stone-to-flesh on yourself. Note: 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.

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.

Attack Wands and the Warning Shot

The first time any given monster zaps 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 now you know what was just aimed at you and you have a turn to do something about it before the next zap connects. Late-game exception: monsters generated in the Stronghold, Knox, the Quest, Gehennom, Vlad’s Tower, or the endgame planes start with their “experience” flag already set, so their first zap can connect. The freebie is an early-to-mid-game courtesy.

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.

Death the Rider’s touch rolls 1d20 each hit. Rolls 17-19 trigger the full 8d6 + 50 instakill attempt and permadrain half the damage from your max HP — magic resistance fully blocks this high-damage branch. Rolls 5-16 (the most common 60%) deliver a smaller life-drain that MR does not block. Rolls 0-4 miss entirely. 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. This is one of the rare cases where being polymorphed into something dead is the safer state. 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.

Starvation

This 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 is a real threat.

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. Don’t let nutrition management slide.

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, and is widely called the most lethal non-boss monster in the dungeon. 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 memorized spells (zero to all of them) drop to zero retention; re-study from spellbooks to restore. (Before 5.0 amnesia used to wipe maps and identification also, but no longer.)

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. 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.

Level Drain

A recurring theme in the bestiary: 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).

Eating a fresh wraith corpse restores one experience level and is one of the better reasons to keep one fresh; wraith corpses are weightless and can’t be tinned (no nutrition), so eat them as soon as the fight ends.

Enchantment Drain

Disenchanters (R, blue) appear only in Gehennom. Their claw is the silent ascension-killer it’s reputed to be, but the mechanic is more constrained than common lore suggests.

Their active claw picks one of your worn armor pieces (cloak first, then suit, shirt, helm/gloves/boots/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. Every artifact has a 90% chance to resist each enchantment-drain attempt on itself; ordinary items resist 10% of the time. The Invocation items (Amulet, Bell, Candelabrum, Book of the Dead) and Rider corpses always resist. Magic-cancellation armor is the strongest non-artifact armor defense for the active claw: at MC3 the claw will mostly fail to land. (MC doesn’t help against the passive counter, so still don’t melee them.) Range-kill is the cleanest plan; rings of conflict and pets reliably redirect them. Don’t eat the corpse: it strips a random intrinsic.

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. Engulfment wraps and crushes rather than digesting, but you still take damage every turn until you cut your way out, with limited movement options while inside.

Other engulfers don’t hide; they just swallow you in melee. Dragons and purple worms can swallow whole creatures up to their size. Dragons tend to be polite about it (you escape after one or two turns); purple worms are the bigger danger, and the dread fog cloud and air elemental count as engulfers too even though they don’t digest.

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. Ranged spells and rays will tear into the host from the inside.

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 (up to 200 — a blessed potion of healing or any extra/full healing cures, or apply a unicorn horn); black lights hallucinate you for 10d12 turns (a unicorn horn cures it, or wait it out). Both lights die in the explosion, so the encounter resolves immediately, but the after-effect is long enough to be the real threat. Black lights are invisible; see invisible reveals them, but because they die in the same turn they attack, you’ll only “see” them just before they vanish.

Defenses: Kill them at range with wands, thrown daggers, breath weapons — anything that doesn’t bring you adjacent. Warning detects them through invisibility, but telepathy does not (they’re mindless). If you do get blinded, a unicorn horn cures it.

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 only thing the strip costs you is 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.

The Riders

On the Astral Plane, three unique &-class beings guard the way to the high altars: Death, Famine, and Pestilence, the Riders. They are level 30, regenerate while you fight, see invisible, and shove monsters out of their path. Each hits twice per turn with a touch attack dealing 8d8 damage. Death’s touch has a 3-in-20 chance of instant-kill on every hit — magic resistance blocks the instakill specifically; the regular damage still goes through. Pestilence inflicts a deadly illness that kills you over the next several turns. Sick resistance is the cleanest defense, though a unicorn horn can sometimes clear it in time. Famine adds 40–79 hunger units to a normal hit, which won’t drop you below Hungry in one swing but will starve you fast across an encounter. Eating any Rider corpse is straight-up fatal. A mercy in 5.0: if Pestilence or Famine land their first attack on a turn, the second downgrades to a stun.

Defenses: An amulet of life saving is the best insurance on Astral, full stop. Magic resistance is what stops Death’s instakill (but not its 8d8 baseline). Sick resistance handles Pestilence. Carry plenty of food (Famine’s drain bypasses normal nutrition) and a unicorn horn for the stun secondary effects. In a crowd, a ring of conflict can keep the Riders tangled fighting nearby monsters instead of chasing you, sometimes long enough to reach the altar.

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 the choke check fires and, unless you’re Breathless or pass a 1-in-20 escape, kills 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 — strangulation isn’t an attack, it’s a timer death. Polymorphing into a Breathless form does save you.

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

Deadly Poison

A handful of monsters (pit vipers, killer bees, cobras, some spiders) have a poison-damage branch that can deliver 10 to 34 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 genuinely instantly fatal regardless of HP.

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

Disintegration

A black dragon’s breath is the only thing in the game that disintegrates you. There’s no other monster, spell, or wand that deals the same damage type.

Defenses: Disintegration resistance (from eating a black dragon corpse or wearing black dragon scale mail) gives full immunity. Reflection bounces the beam 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, the game tries to save your worn armor before disintegrating you: the breath destroys your shield first if you have one, then your body armor; 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.

Genocide

Reading an uncursed scroll of genocide while confused can genocide your own species. Don’t do this.

Delayed Deaths

Not every fatal threat kills instantly. Several give you a few turns to react. Knowing the warning signs and the cures can save a run.

Sliming. Being hit by a green slime (or eating its glob, or being digested by one as a polyform) starts a ~10-turn transformation into a green slime yourself — dead. Cures: burn the slime off with fire (a wand of fire zapped at yourself, a scroll of fire read at self, a fire trap, a red dragon’s breath); polymorph into a flame-bodied or slime-immune form; or cast the spell of cure sickness. An amulet of unchanging blocks the contagion entirely and even aborts a transformation already underway. Cancelling the green slime in melee prevents new infections but does nothing to a timer already running. Prayer would cure it, but green slime lives in Gehennom where prayer fails, so don’t plan on it. Fire is the most reliable cure.

Illness (food poisoning). Eating a rotten corpse or certain attacks (giant ant, etc.) gives you food poisoning, which kills in 10–19 turns (“You feel deathly sick.”). Cures: a unicorn horn (apply it), pray, eat a eucalyptus leaf, or vomit (by being satiated and eating more). Vomiting from other causes also cures food poisoning. Poison resistance does NOT protect against food poisoning — that’s sickness resistance, a separate intrinsic.

Pestilence’s terminal illness is the harder cousin: vomiting won’t clear it, and the timer is Constitution-dependent (~20+Con turns). The cures that do work: unicorn horn, prayer, eucalyptus leaf.

Sinking in lava. Falling into lava without levitation or fire resistance gives you a few turns to escape before you sink and die. Your inventory is also at risk. Cures: prayer, levitation (put on levitation boots or a ring), teleport, or just step out if you can. Fire resistance prevents the damage but doesn’t prevent sinking. Lava immersion also destroys most of your inventory.

Drowning (being held). When grabbed by an eel or kraken in water, you have a few turns to escape before drowning. The drown check uses the eel’s tile, so levitation, water walking, and encumbrance status are irrelevant once the grab lands. Cures: magical breathing (amulet or spell), kill or teleport the eel before it pulls you under, or avoid water entirely. See Drowning in Ways to Die for the full picture.

Strangulation. Wearing a cursed amulet of strangulation slowly kills you over a few turns. Cure: remove the amulet (requires uncursing it first, since cursed amulets can’t be removed: use a scroll of remove curse, holy water, or prayer).

The Displacer Beast

The displacer beast (f, blue, 5.0 addition) is a tiger-sized feline with AC −10 and three attacks per turn (4d4 / 4d4 / 2d10). The misleading name: it isn’t displaced in the cloak-of-displacement sense. Its trick is the opposite, when you melee it, half the time it swaps places with you instead of taking the hit, which can pull you off Elbereth, out of a doorway, or onto a trap. Ranged attacks (wand, spell, thrown) bypass the swap entirely. It also has MR 0 — extremely unusual for a level-12 monster, where most peers carry 10–70% resistance — so sleep, paralysis, and charm/taming all land with no save. Speed 12, so a speed-boosted hero outpaces it. (Don’t bother trying to swap it into a moat or lava — the swap only fires if the destination square is survivable for the beast, and water/lava aren’t.)

Tame one and you have one of the best pets in the game. AC −10, three attacks (4d4 claw / 4d4 claw / 2d10 bite), speed 12. Charm monster works first try; a scroll of taming with no MR roll to fail is essentially guaranteed. A tame displacer beast will walk into late-game fights and walk out, eating tough hostiles while taking minimal retaliation.

Eating the corpse gives you cloak-style displacement for a few turns: monsters target a phantom image one square off from where you really are and miss accordingly. Note that this is a different mechanic from the beast’s own place-swap, despite the shared name: you get the same effect as wearing a cloak of displacement, not the ability to swap places with attackers.

The Genetic Engineer

The genetic engineer (Q, green) shares its symbol class with the quantum mechanic but plays differently: where a quantum mechanic teleports its target on a hit, a genetic engineer polymorphs its target. One claw and, unless you have Unchanging or magic resistance, you become something else: same roll as any other uncontrolled polymorph source, with the dramatic message “you are subjected to a freakish metamorphosis.” Engineers also teleport on their own, so range alone won’t save you forever.

Defenses: Unchanging (immune), magic resistance (also fully blocks the polymorph), kill it before it closes, or accept the next several turns of the dungeon playing as something else. The engineer has a short cooldown between successful polymorph hits, so the encounter is survivable even without unchanging if you can finish quickly.

The corpse is a tool. Eating a genetic engineer corpse is mechanically identical to eating a doppelganger corpse: the same uncontrolled polymorph, just with louder flavor text. The practical use is the same as the doppelganger’s: tin it, and you have a portable polymorph source. Pair a tin with polymorph control and you have a controlled polymorph that survives Gehennom’s hot ground. The first engineer that kills you is a loss; the second one in your bag is a kit.

Prayer

Praying (#pray) calls on your god for help. When conditions are right, prayer is the single most powerful emergency tool in the game. When conditions are wrong, it can kill you.

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

What prayer fixes (in priority order). Your god addresses your problems in a specific order, fixing the most urgent 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 range from under 200 to over 700 due to the random formula used. 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. This 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.

When prayer goes wrong. If any requirement is unmet, your god responds with punishment instead of help: loss of alignment, loss of luck, increased timeout, cursing of worn items, or summoning of hostile minions. Severe transgressions (praying to a very angry god) can trigger lightning or disintegration, both potentially fatal.

Practical guidance. Pray when you’re about to die and have no other option. Starvation, stoning, illness, and critically low HP are all valid emergencies. Don’t waste prayers on minor inconveniences. Before you pray, make a mental check: is my alignment positive? Have enough turns passed? Am I on a co-aligned altar or no altar at all? If you can’t answer yes to these, find another solution.

Prayer timeout tracking. The game doesn’t show your timeout directly, but you can estimate it. Count roughly 500 turns from your last prayer (more if it went badly). In the early game, when turns are slow and you’re fighting one creature at a time, 500 turns pass quickly. In the late game, when you might take 100 actions per level, it takes longer to feel.

Sacrifice

Offering fresh monster corpses at an altar (#offer) builds favor with your god. 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).
• Bigger monsters are more valuable sacrifices.
• The altar must match your alignment, or you’re praying to someone else’s god (which has its own consequences).
• Same-race sacrifice is forbidden and severely punished. On a lawful or neutral altar it turns the altar chaotic (not co-aligned — only chaotic heroes benefit); on a chaotic altar it summons a demon.

With enough sacrifice credit, your god may gift you an artifact weapon. The first gift comes after relatively modest sacrifice; subsequent gifts require substantially more. Gift artifacts are always aligned to your god and always match a weapon skill you can use.

There is a minimum. In 5.0, not every corpse you drop on the altar moves you toward the next artifact gift. The gods have opinions about what constitutes a worthy offering, and a kobold doesn’t make the cut. Fresh corpses of appropriately challenging monsters are what advances your standing. If you’ve been feeding the altar with early-dungeon sweepings and wondering why the gifts aren’t arriving, this is why.

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 — a few hundred turns 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. Each successful donation pushes the bonus up by 1 (rarely more), capped at 20. 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 — 300–500 zorkmids × experience level

If you walk in carrying far more gold than the baseline, the priest scales the ask up to match — roughly a third of your purse for clairvoyance, two-thirds for protection. A rich hero who hands over only the baseline amount will be politely thanked but not blessed. The prompt always tells you the exact figure, so trust it over any rule of thumb.

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.
• Walk away rather than lowball. Once the cheapskate flag is set on a priest, it doesn’t come off. If the suggested amount is more than you want to part with, decline the prompt entirely rather than offering a token sum.

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 god is already angry — 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.

Two things to never sacrifice on any altar:

• A same-race corpse (humans for most roles; also elves if you’re elven). Punished on every altar; on a Chaotic one it summons a demon.
• A unicorn whose alignment matches the altar. Counts as an insult to that god.

Crowning

If your alignment record is very high (through sacrifice and good behavior), your god may crown you. Crowning grants:

• A special title (e.g., “Hand of Elbereth” for lawful characters).
• An artifact weapon appropriate to your alignment, if one is available that you can use.
• Intrinsic fire resistance, cold resistance, shock resistance, sleep resistance, poison resistance, and see invisible.
• A class-specific bonus: Wizards get the finger of death spell; Monks get restore ability.

The catch is that crowning adds about ~1000 turns of prayer timeout on top of the usual post-prayer wait, turning prayer into an unreliable emergency tool. If you’re sacrificing to fish for an artifact gift, watch the alignment record so you don’t trigger a crowning by accident.

Starting Pets

Most roles begin with a faithful pet: a little dog or a kitten, depending on your role. This small creature is more useful than it looks. 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 trap detector 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.

Feeding and Loyalty

Pets have an invisible tameness score that decreases when they go hungry past the threshold, when you leave them behind on another level for too many turns, or when you hit them. (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

Tripe rations are ideal for dogs and cats. You’ll find them scattered through the dungeon. Always pick them up, even though they’re revolting food for humans. Your pet will adore you for it.

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 (its growing tail will sprawl across the room and get in the way of your shots), 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 old drop-and-watch trick, described above: free, reliable, and available from turn one
• Shoplifting. If your pet picks up an item inside a shop and carries it out the door, the shopkeeper blames the animal, not you. This 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. This is what makes pet-shoplifting practical: once your pet returns dropped items reliably, you can 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. Titans, balrogs, and gray dragons are popular targets; a gray dragon has magic resistance and resists further polymorph, so it locks in. Cast polymorph carefully: random self-poly on the pet can downgrade it, and a polymorphed steed stops being saddled.

Keeping Your Pet Alive

Pets die from the same things you do: traps, poison, powerful monsters, drowning in water. Keep an eye on your companion’s health (; to farlook) and don’t lead it into fights it can’t win. A dead pet is not just a loss of utility; it’s a cold feeling in the pit of your stomach.

If you change levels and your pet isn’t adjacent, it won’t follow. Your pet is still alive on the previous level, but its loyalty is ticking down. Go back for it before it forgets you were friends.

If you see “You have a sad feeling for a moment” — that’s different. That message means a pet of yours just died offscreen on another level, usually one you left behind that got into a fight it couldn’t win.

Current editions have added two things that veteran pet-owners should know.

First: your pet eats for a reason beyond loyalty. The same corpse mechanics that grant you resistances apply to pets as well. A pet that dines on the right monsters will gain resistances: fire resistance, cold resistance, whatever the dungeon’s terrible buffet was offering. A well-fed pet is also a better-armored one. This is not something you can reliably engineer, but it’s a reason to let your pet eat rather than scooping up every corpse yourself.

Second, and more importantly: pets can now be revived. If your companion falls in battle, stand on its corpse at a co-aligned altar and pray. The gods, in their occasional mercy, may return it to you. This is a last-resort miracle, not a renewable strategy: your prayer timeout, your alignment, and a certain amount of luck all factor in. But it means that the large cat you’ve carried since level 3, the one who has earned names and battle scars and the terrified respect of every dungeon denizen you’ve walked past, is worth a detour to the nearest temple before you write it off. The dungeon kept this secret for a long time. Now you know.

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), and the difference matters far more than you’d think. The gods have opinions about your equipment, and those opinions have consequences:

• A blessed scroll of identify reveals at least 2 items in your pack (more with positive Luck), and one time in five reveals the whole pack. An uncursed scroll IDs one or two items; a cursed scroll IDs only the scroll itself the first time you read one of that type, and 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.

The pattern is consistent: blessed items are helpful beyond their description, uncursed items work as advertised, and cursed items find creative ways to ruin your day. A blessed luckstone passively improves your luck; a cursed one drags it down. A cursed scroll of teleportation sends you to a random level instead of teleporting within the current one. You get the idea.

You don’t see BUC status by default (Priests are the exception: they sense it naturally, which tells you something about clerical paranoia). But there are several reliable ways to check:

Altar testing. Drop an item on an altar:

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

This is free, fast, and unlimited. If you find an altar early, use it heavily.

Pet testing. Your pet won’t step on cursed items. If you drop something and your dog walks around it, it’s cursed. If the dog walks over it (or picks it up), it’s safe. Not as precise as an altar, but works anywhere.

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 praying on a co-aligned altar while carrying potions of water; it’s precious in the early game, so save it for items you’ve already identified.

Scroll of identify. A blessed scroll identifies at least 2 items in your pack, more with positive Luck, with a 1-in-5 chance to ID the whole pack outright. An uncursed scroll IDs one or two items per read. A cursed scroll IDs only itself the first time you read one of that type, then one item per cursed read after.

The Price Is Right

Shopkeepers are, without exaggeration, your most important identification tool. Every unidentified item has a fixed base price that depends on what it actually is. When you pick up an item in a shop, the shopkeeper quotes you a price derived from that base price, modified by your Charisma and the shopkeeper’s markup.

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.

The key insight: items in the same category that share a base price are in the same price group. If you know the price, you can narrow down the possibilities enormously, sometimes to just two or three candidates.

Pick up an item and note the quoted price. With average Charisma (11-15), buy price equals base and sell is half base. Low Charisma pushes buy up (×2 at Cha ≤ 5); high Charisma pulls it down (×½ at Cha ≥ 19). Sell prices don’t change with Charisma, but if shopkeepers see you as a mark, then you can only sell at a third of base, and you’ll have to pay 4/3 to buy. Three visible cues count you as a mark: wearing a dunce cap, playing a Tourist below XL 15, or wearing a Hawaiian shirt visibly (no body armor or cloak over it). The rest of this guide refers to them collectively as Tourist. You don’t need to memorize the formulas; what matters is grouping by price tier.

Two further wrinkles affect unidentified items. About a quarter of unID’d items carry an extra 4/3 buy surcharge, fixed per item, so a given scroll’s surcharge status is consistent across shops. And about a quarter of shopkeepers are “unfamiliar” with unID’d merchandise and offer only 3/4 of normal on sell, fixed per shopkeeper, so once you’ve tested one unID item you know the rule for all unID sales at that shop. Either wrinkle can shift a quoted price into an adjacent tier, so when in doubt check the surrounding tiers too.

Angry. A shopkeeper you’ve previously angered (fired a wand from a doorway, attacked them, picked up an unpaid item while broke) and then made amends (paid the bill, fled and let them calm down) becomes peaceful again but keeps a permanent +33% buy surcharge on every item. Paying the bill clears the bill but not the surcharge; that flag sticks for the rest of your visits to that shopkeeper. Sell prices are unaffected.

The price tables for each item class follow. These are your field reference for shopping trips.

The Engrave Test (Wands)

The single most useful wand-identification trick costs you nothing. Apply a wand by engraving on the floor with it (command: E, then select the wand). What happens tells you what the wand is:

The engrave test costs one charge per wand but preserves the rest. With one zap you can sort most wands into clear categories. For wands that just write in the dust, you’ll need further testing: zap them at a monster or in a safe direction.

Warning: In 5.0, cursed wands may explode when used to engrave. BUC-test your wands before engraving with them.

The Sink Test (Rings)

If you find a sink, you can drop a ring down it. Each ring type produces a characteristic message, identifying the ring. See Sinks under Points of Interest for the full message-to-ring table; the short version is that searching and slow digestion come back to you (free identification), and every other ring is consumed.

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, shuriken, or sling stones) 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.

Scrolls. Reading is risky. Some scrolls (destroy armor, amnesia, punishment) are outright harmful. The safest approach is to price-ID first, then read scrolls 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 start feeling hungry faster than normal (hunger ring) or if monsters seem to be approaching more aggressively (aggravate monster).

Amulets. Most amulets are safe to wear briefly. Put it on, wait a few turns, take it off. The dangerous ones (strangulation, restful sleep) are usually cursed, so check BUC first. An amulet of ESP reveals itself if you go blind while wearing it (you’ll see monsters as brain-shapes). Amulet of reflection is trickier to detect, but you’ll notice it when a ray bounces off 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’s cursed it welds itself on, you can’t drop it, and the shopkeeper still expects payment. Worse, the auto-cursed types (fumble boots, levitation boots, gauntlets of fumbling, helm of opposite alignment) masquerade as the desirable ones. Verify BUC before wearing unknown armor in a shop. Without an altar, your options are the pet-step test, Priest intrinsic BUC sense, or a scroll of identify from your own inventory.

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.
• 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.

The good news: prices don’t shuffle, and prices within each pool fall into informative tiers.

Gray Stones: Four Stones, One Correct Answer

Gray stones deserve their own section because they look identical but have wildly different value. There are four types:

The problem: all four look like “a gray stone” until identified. 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.

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’re stuck with a cursed loadstone until you can uncurse it (holy water, scroll of remove curse, prayer) — then drop it.

The price test. If you can reach a shop: a $60 gray stone is a luckstone. A $45 gray stone is a touchstone. A $1 gray stone is flint or a loadstone.

The rub test. Apply (a) a gray stone to a gem in your pack. A touchstone produces a colored-streak message — and 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 Mine’s End is guaranteed. If you find a gray stone at the bottom of the Mines, it’s almost certainly the luckstone. Bless-test it at an altar to confirm (the guaranteed one is always uncursed).

The rule of thumb: if you find a gray stone, don’t pick it up until you’ve tested it. A loadstone can ruin your encumbrance, and if it’s cursed, you’re stuck with it until you find a way to uncurse. Kick it first. Check BUC second. Then pick it up.

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.”

This habit of annotating your discoveries is what separates adventurers who die on level 8 from adventurers who reach the Castle. The dungeon doesn’t keep notes for you. You have to do it yourself.

A Practical Strategy

All of these techniques combine into a workflow. Here’s what a seasoned traveler does on a typical descent:

At an altar (priority one). Ferry everything you’ve found to the altar. Drop each item. Sort your pack into blessed, uncursed, and cursed piles. Wield or wear the blessed stuff. Stash or discard the cursed stuff.

At a shop (priority two). Pick up and put down unidentified items to get price quotes. Group them by price. Cross-reference with the tables above. Suddenly half your inventory is narrowed to two or three possibilities.

Engrave-test your wands as soon as you find them. It’s fast, it costs only one charge, and it immediately sorts wands into categories. A wand that digs the floor is digging. A wand that drops ice cubes is cold. Simple.

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: amulets (all the same price), spellbooks (dangerous to read if unknown), and the one stubborn potion in the $50 group that you can’t quite pin down.

The system is about reducing uncertainty with the cheapest, safest method first: altars and shops are free, engrave-testing costs one charge, use-testing costs more and carries risk, and scrolls of identify are the precious last resort.

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 cause additional hunger while worn. Two rings drain faster.

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). Prayer cures hunger if your god is willing to help.

What to Eat

Eat the things you kill. The single most important food fact for new players: unless you’re playing a vegetarian role (Monk, or any role pursuing a vegan/vegetarian conduct), the bulk of your nutrition comes from monster corpses you leave on the floor. Every fresh kill is a meal. Don’t burn food rations while there’s a freshly dead rat at your feet. A few rules:

• Eat corpses within 30 to 50 turns of the kill. Past that they risk being tainted, which means food poisoning (lethal without treatment).
• Never eat old corpses. If in doubt, don’t eat it.
• Some corpses grant intrinsic resistances (poison resistance from killer bees, fire resistance from fire giants, etc.). Eat these deliberately, even when you’re not hungry — see the table below.
• Some corpses are harmful (floating eyes paralyze you, green slimes turn you into slime, cockatrice corpses kill you). Know which corpses are safe before eating.

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

Lembas wafers are the gold standard: 800 nutrition at only 5 weight, the best ratio in the game. Elven characters find these more often.

Tripe rations are terrible for you (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

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. Cavemen and orcs are exempt.

Useful Corpse Effects

Eating for intrinsics is the highest-leverage habit in the early and mid game. Each resistance is a chance per eat, not a guarantee, so eat every one of these you find, not just the first. Two tables follow: meat corpses and vegetarian-safe corpses, each ordered roughly by when you’ll first meet the creature on a typical descent.

Meat corpses:

Vegetarian-safe corpses (those marked † are also vegan):

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 outright. If you’re heading anywhere were-things roam (the Mines, the Quest for some roles), carry a sprig or two. It weighs almost nothing.

Eat the puddings, cubes, molds, and blobs. They look like inedible terrain, but every one of them yields an intrinsic when eaten. Puddings and acid blobs leave globs rather than corpses (a 5.0 food-handling detail that doesn’t change the strategy), and the globs of one color stack and shrink slowly, so a pile of brown-pudding globs is a re-rollable chance at shock resistance.

Food Strategy

1. Eat 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. Pray when Weak or Fainting if you have nothing to eat.
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

As with all randomized items, price is your best friend. A shop visit narrows a mysterious bottle from “could be anything” to a short list of candidates:

Water is the oddity in the $100 group: it always appears as “clear potion,” identifiable on sight. Don’t underestimate it; water is the raw material for holy water, which is the foundation of everything.

Key Potions

Healing, extra healing, full healing. The healing chain, and your lifeline in combat. Extra healing is the workhorse: 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. You can never have too many of these.

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

Speed. One non-cursed quaff and you’re permanently faster for the rest of the game; blessing only stretches the temporary timer that overlays the intrinsic. Speed is arguably the single most important buff in NetHack; the difference between moving at normal speed and fast speed is the difference between trading blows and hitting twice before they swing once. In 5.0, the wand of speed monster no longer grants permanent speed when self-zapped, only a temporary burst of 50–74 turns. The potion is the real prize.

Holy water. Not a potion you find: a potion you make. Drop uncursed water on a co-aligned altar, pray, and the gods bless it for you. Holy water can then bless any item you dip into it. This is the engine that drives your entire inventory: blessed scrolls of identify, blessed potions of gain ability, blessed scrolls of enchant weapon. You will never have enough holy water.

Gain level. Raises your experience level by 1. Useful for reaching quest eligibility quickly, or converting into something better through alchemy.

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

Here’s where potions get interesting. 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, and it’s extraordinarily powerful. A handful of common healing potions and a gain energy or two can be transmuted into the rarest potions in the game. Treat every gain energy potion like the catalyst it is.

A side-loop worth knowing: 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, this is a way to manufacture gain-level potions rather than wait for the dungeon to drop them.

A note on the current state of dungeon chemistry. The old alchemy trick (dilute a large stack of potions by dipping them in water, then convert the whole diluted stack at once) no longer works. Current editions cap diluted dips at two potions per operation. The chain from healing up to gain ability is still there; you just do it in small batches with undiluted inputs. Think of it as artisanal alchemy rather than industrial production.

The explosion risk is real: roughly 10% on any non-water combination. An alchemy smock (if you find one) reduces this to about 1 in 30, which is the difference between “risky hobby” and “acceptable profession.” Do your chemistry in an isolated room, away from your stash, and never dip a cursed potion into another. The dipping potion (not the one it goes into) is the one the game tests for explosion, and a cursed dip detonates every time. The dungeon is consistent about this if nothing else.

Unicorn Horn Interactions

A unicorn horn dipped into certain potions purifies them:

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

This turns dangerous potions into useful raw materials. The water can be blessed into holy water; the fruit juice can be alchemized into see invisible. Nothing is wasted in a well-run dungeon pharmacy.

The Scroll Table

Price-identification is especially powerful for scrolls, because the cheapest scroll (base 20) is always identify, the one you need most:

The $60 group is treasure (enchant weapon lurks there alongside innocent blank paper). The $80 group is equally good: enchant armor and remove curse, two scrolls you’ll always want more of. The $100 group is the danger zone, a grab-bag mixing magic mapping and teleportation with destroy armor. And at $300, you’ll find both genocide (the game’s nuclear option) and punishment (a ball and chain permanently attached to your ankle). Choose wisely.

Key Scrolls

Identify. The bread and butter of dungeon life. Blessed identify reveals multiple items at once (with positive luck, always at least two). You will never have enough of these.

Enchant weapon / enchant armor. The path to endgame power. 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). And there’s a catch: 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 this cap.

Remove curse. Frees you from cursed equipment. Uncursed version works on worn and wielded items only; blessed version uncurses your entire inventory. Every adventurer has a “put on a cursed ring” story. This scroll is the happy ending.

Charging. Recharges wands and rechargeable tools. Save these for your wand of wishing: one charge means one more wish. Blessed charging restores more charges. Each recharge has an n³/7³ chance of the wand exploding (where n is the count of previous recharges): 0% on first, 0.3% on second, 2% on third, 8% on fourth, 19% on fifth, 36% on sixth, 63% on seventh — and on the eighth, always. Wand of wishing is the exception: it explodes 100% of the time on the second recharge, so recharge it exactly once and no more.

Genocide. The nuclear option. Uncursed eliminates a single species; blessed wipes an entire monster class from the game forever. Liches (L) are the canonical blessed target. Never 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”. (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. Read carefully.

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 catch: pick it up after it’s been dropped and it crumbles to dust. So choose your standing spot wisely.

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.

Confused Reading

Here’s a trick the dungeon doesn’t advertise: many scrolls do something completely different when read while confused. Some of these alternate effects are better than the normal ones:

Confused destroy armor, if cursed, doesn’t destroy anything: it erodeproofs a piece of armor. (Uncursed or blessed strips erodeproofing instead.) One of the best tricks in the game.

Confused enchant armor / enchant weapon, if uncursed or blessed, erodeproofs the item instead of enchanting. Useful when you need protection from rust more than another +1.

Confused remove curse has a 25% chance of blessing or cursing each uncursed item. Risky, but it’s a clever way to create holy water if you confuse-read while carrying uncursed potions of water.

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 don’t want to skip the early game.

Confused gold detection detects traps on this level instead of gold. Faster and safer than the search command.

Confused light creates a small posse of cancelled, friendly yellow lights around you (or black lights, if the scroll is cursed). They die quietly and can’t harm you.

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.

Confused scare monster wakes nearby sleepers and you hear sad wailing in the distance. The opposite of helpful. Don’t read this for an emergency.

Confused genocide genocides your own role. This kills you. Don’t get confused at the wrong moment.

The Wand Table

Key Wands

Wishing. The most valuable item in the game. Each zap grants one wish. In 5.0, wands of wishing generate with only 1 charge and can be recharged once (and only once) to a maximum of 1 additional charge. This means the Castle wand of wishing typically yields 2 wishes plus a possible wrested third, a significant reduction from older versions where it could provide 5 to 7. Plan your wishes carefully before you find one.

Death. Fires a death ray that instantly kills most things it hits. Reflected by reflection. Blocked by magic resistance. One of the best offensive tools in the late game.

Digging. Essential utility. Dig through walls to create shortcuts, dig down to escape dangerous situations, dig through rock to reach vaults and hidden areas. Every ascension kit should include a wand of digging.

Teleportation. Zap monsters to send them somewhere else on the level. Zap yourself to teleport. Enormously useful for escaping trouble or removing a dangerous monster from your path.

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. Do NOT put this wand in a bag of holding (it will explode the bag). Keep it separate in your main inventory.

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. Turns a target (or yourself, if you zap it reflexively) invisible. In older editions, self-zapping granted a permanent invisibility intrinsic, which made this a coveted find. In 5.0, it gives you 31–45 turns of temporary invisibility. Still useful for slipping through a dangerous area or turning a fight in your favor, but not a permanent upgrade. For lasting invisibility, you want a ring of invisibility or a cloak. The wand is now a tactical tool rather than a build enabler: think of it as “invisibility on demand for the next minute” rather than “invisibility forever from one lucky find.”

Stasis. A new 5.0 wand that freezes every monster on the level for 10–30 turns. No ray, no aim, no message — just a hush. Use it when you’re surrounded and need a free moment to engrave Elbereth, drink a potion, change weapons, or just walk past. The silence on engraving makes it harder to identify by the engrave test, but if you sit on a charge for a fight you’ll know.

Identification by Engraving

The engrave test (described in A Practical Identification Strategy) is the fastest way to sort wands. Every wand type produces a distinctive result when used to engrave on the floor.

Kieron Dunbar’s “Identifying Wands by Zapping” spoiler, originally posted to RGRN, describes a systematic protocol for narrowing down wand identity through controlled experiments. The approach below is adapted from his checklist.

Before you start writing on the floor: in 5.0, a cursed wand used to engrave may explode, so BUC-test before you test (see The Engrave Test (Wands) for the full safety procedure).

Beyond Engraving: Systematic Wand Testing

The engrave test sorts most wands immediately, but a few produce ambiguous results. For those, a systematic testing protocol helps:

Step 1: Note the wand category. When you engrave, the result tells you whether the wand is NODIR (non-directional), RAY, or BEAM (immediate). This alone cuts the possibilities dramatically.

• NODIR wands (light, enlightenment, create monster, secret door detection, stasis, wishing): Most reveal themselves through the engrave-test message. Light creates a lit field. Enlightenment makes you feel self-knowledgeable. Create monster says “bugs appear.” Wishing prompts you for a wish. Stasis is deliberately silent on engraving — the C code hides it among the other silent wands so the engrave test can’t single it out.
• RAY wands (digging, magic missile, fire, cold, lightning, sleep, death): Digging riddles the floor with holes. Fire, cold, and lightning produce obvious elemental effects. Magic missile riddles the surface with bullet holes. Sleep and death both produce the same “the bugs on the surface stop moving!” message — price-test to tell them apart (death is $500).
• BEAM wands (everything else): The engrave test distinguishes most of them. Cancellation and make invisible erase the engraving in place. Teleportation moves it elsewhere on the level (look around to spot it). Polymorph rewrites your engraving as a different random one. Striking interrupts with “The wand unsuccessfully fights your attempt to write!” Slow monster and speed monster make the bugs on the surface slow down or speed up, respectively. Five BEAM wands — nothing, undead turning, opening, locking, probing — produce no engrave message at all. Combined with the silent NODIR stasis (above), a wand that engraves in silence is one of six possibilities; the zap tests below will resolve them.

Step 2: Safe zapping tests. For wands that remain unidentified after engraving, zap them at safe targets:

• Zap at a locked chest or door. A wand of opening unlocks it. A wand of locking locks it. A wand of striking breaks it.
• Zap at a corpse on the floor. A wand of undead turning revives the corpse to its original species (and animates any carried corpses too). A wand of polymorph transforms it.
• Zap at a tame or weak monster. Speed monster makes it faster. Slow monster makes it slower. Make invisible makes it vanish. Probing reveals its stats.
• Zap at a cancellable item (a potion, a figurine). Cancellation will dull it. Note: cancellation does NOT affect booze, fruit juice, or oil, so don’t use those as test subjects.

The three “vanishes” wands. Cancellation, make-invisible, and teleportation all print “The engraving vanishes!” on the engrave-test. To tell them apart, drop a known item and zap each candidate: make-invisible makes the item invisible; teleportation moves it elsewhere on the level; cancellation dulls its magic. (Polymorph isn’t in this group: it rewrites your engraving as a different random one, which is its own giveaway.)

Step 3: When in doubt, check the price. If testing hasn’t resolved the wand, its shop price narrows the field further. A $150 wand is one of thirteen types. A $200 wand is one of four. A $500 wand is death or wishing, and you should be very careful with it either way.

Recharging

Wands can be recharged with a scroll of charging. Each recharge increases the risk of the wand exploding. The formula is (recharges cubed) / 343, so:

• First recharge: 0.3% explosion chance.
• Second: 2.3%.
• Third: 7.9%.
• Seventh: 100%.

Use blessed charging for the best results — except on a wand of wishing, which follows its own rules. A fresh wand of wishing is always generated with exactly one charge. A scroll of charging adds one more wish whether blessed or uncursed; blessing doesn’t help here, and a cursed scroll strips the wand to zero like any other. You can recharge once safely; a second attempt is a guaranteed explosion. So the lifetime cap on a single wand of wishing is two wishes reliably, or three if you successfully wrest the final charge at the end.

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. This is a last resort, but it works on wands of wishing too.

Polymorph as a Tool

Self-polymorph is one of the most interesting tools in the game. A wand of polymorph zapped at yourself, a potion of polymorph, the polymorph self spell, or stepping on a polytrap all do the same thing: roll a new form for you. With polymorph control (the ring or intrinsic) the game lets you choose the form, which is where the real fun begins.

• 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 burns anything that hits you in melee. A purple worm swallows your problems whole. Most monster powers are yours when you wear their shape.
• Grow a bigger body. A stronger form rolls a new max HP and your current HP scales with the ratio. A dying Wizard at 50/100 wakes up at 200/400 as a fresh titan.
• 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.

Caveat: cursed polymorph items strip control, and rough transformations can hit you with system shock. Don’t be at 5 HP when you reach for the wand.

The Ring Table

Rings marked “auto-curse” generate cursed 90% of the time. If you slip on a ring and can’t remove it, you’ve just learned what auto-curse means the hard way.

Ring of aggravate monster deserves a footnote in the “niche uses of terrible things” category. In 5.0, wearing it roughly doubles the effective dungeon level for purposes of monster generation, so creatures well above your current depth start appearing. This is obviously catastrophic if you forget you’re wearing it. But for a chaotic player who needs high-difficulty sacrifice fodder for the next artifact gift, deliberately wearing the ring to force harder spawns (then removing it) is a calculated risk with an actual payoff. The key word is “deliberately.” The ring is auto-cursed 90% of the time. If it goes on and won’t come off, the fact that you’re now generating liches on dungeon level 8 is no longer a feature.

The rings that matter most: Free action is arguably the single best ring in the game: paralysis is death in the late game, and this ring makes you immune. Teleport control turns random teleportation from a nuisance into on-demand transportation. Conflict makes monsters attack each other instead of you, which is devastating on crowded levels (though it also turns your pets hostile). Slow digestion lets you go indefinitely between meals.

In 5.0, a blessed potion of polymorph grants you polymorph control for that specific transformation: you choose the form, no ring required. This 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 if you want ongoing control for repeated transformations, but it’s no longer a hard prerequisite for the opening act of any polymorph strategy. Save that wish for something else.

The hidden cost: Every ring you wear increases your hunger rate. Two rings drain food noticeably faster. The veteran habit is to keep rings in inventory and slip them on only when needed: free action before fighting mind flayers, conflict before entering a throne room. Economy of fingers is an art.

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”:

Life saving is the crown jewel. When you die (any kind of death) it triggers, revives you at full HP, and crumbles to dust. Wear it whenever you’re going somewhere dangerous. Take it off when you’re safe. You only get the one miracle.

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). This 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, which sounds niche until you reach Medusa’s level (surrounded by water) or the Plane of Water (entirely underwater). Then it’s existential.

Flying is the late-addition cousin of levitation: you stay in the air the same way, but you can still pick things up and you can choose to drop down on your turn. The under-appreciated bonus is that your steed flies with you. A flying warhorse skips over moats, fountains, pools, and the Castle’s drawbridge entirely — a fast Knight can cross Medusa’s island and the Castle from edge to edge without worrying about the water at all. Stack with boots of speed and a wand of speed monster on the mount and you have a genuinely terrifying cavalry unit.

Restful sleep puts you to sleep randomly and is usually cursed, which should tell you everything you need to know about when to put it on unexamined. However, in 5.0, wearing it while asleep grants +1 HP per turn via accelerated regeneration, stacking with your normal healing. In a fully secured room with the door spiked shut and nothing actively trying to kill you, this turns a nearly useless item into a slow but functional field hospital. The conditions required (safety, time, and nothing better to do) describe a situation you rarely find in the Mazes. When you do, the amulet is less embarrassing to wear than it looks.

Containers

The bag of holding deserves special mention because it transforms how you play. A blessed bag reduces the weight of everything inside to roughly one quarter, meaning you can carry your entire potion supply, your backup armor, your scroll library, and still have room for loot. Almost every ascending player carries one. Sokoban’s prize is a bag of holding half the time; otherwise wish for one when you can.

A warning: never put a wand of cancellation, another bag of holding, or a charged bag of tricks inside a bag of holding. The resulting magical explosion scatters your carefully curated inventory across the floor (in older editions it destroyed everything!). Either way, it’s a game-ending mistake that every veteran has made exactly once.

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 the bag from outside. Cancellation uncurses items it touches, and the explosion rule only triggers on insertion, not on a zap. You’ll have a safe, uncursed bag.

One 5.0 hazard that you will need to be aware of: intelligent monsters can now loot unlocked containers. They can remove items, carry containers away, and unlock chests with keys. If you’ve been leaving your secondary stash in an unlocked chest on a partially-cleared level while you scouted ahead, stop. The Castle chest in particular (containing the wand of wishing) can be emptied by the level’s residents if you leave them time and opportunity. Clear levels before abandoning valuables, and keep your most important containers locked. The dungeon has gotten better at wanting what you have.

Unlocking Tools

The dungeon is full of locked things, and brute force is noisy and slow. A skeleton key is the gold standard (70%+ success on doors, 75%+ on boxes). A lock pick is respectable. A credit card is the worst but still better than kicking. Always carry one of these. The weight is negligible and the utility is constant.

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, which is pleasant but not essential. The real prize is the magic lamp: rub it 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. Never, ever use a magic lamp for light. That’s like using a winning lottery ticket as a bookmark.

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

Music has power in the Mazes. Any tonal instrument (wooden flute, magic flute, tooled horn, frost or fire horn, bugle, or harp) can play the passtune at the Castle drawbridge — you’ll find the notes nearby, so listen carefully. A magic harp charms monsters into tameness. A magic flute puts them to sleep. A drum of earthquake creates pits around you, which is as chaotic as it sounds.

Non-magical instruments (wooden flute, leather drum) produce noise but no special effects, useful only for confusing the issue.

Other Notable Tools

The unicorn horn is the dungeon’s all-purpose first-aid kit. Apply it to cure confusion, blindness, sickness, hallucination, stunning, vomiting, and (new in 5.0) deafness: most of the status ailments that matter. Carry one at all times. If you don’t have one, getting one should be near the top of your priority list.

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.

A 5.0 caveat: the unicorn horn no longer restores lost ability scores the way it used to. 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. Earlier guides that described it as a complete cure-all are out of date; 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 you must have identified it first. Writing by appearance gives a random scroll of that appearance, which is usually wasted charges. If charges run out mid-write, scrolls disappear entirely (paper + charges wasted); a spellbook’s paper survives but the writing fades.

The big-ticket writes for an ascension kit are scrolls of genocide (three of these wipe the worst monster letters L, &, and h out of the game, though uniquely-named demon lords survive any class genocide; see Genocide for the race-trap warning), charging (a blessed one restores one additional wish to an empty wand of wishing for 8-15 charges very well spent, though a second charging attempt always explodes the wand), and enchant weapon / enchant armor for the +7 ascension kit. A well-used marker can produce a meaningful share of your ascension kit.

Armor and AC

Armor Class (AC) starts at 10 and decreases as you add protection. Lower is better. Each point of AC reduces the chance of being hit. At AC -10 or below, you’re quite difficult to damage with physical attacks.

The key armor slots:

The helm of caution is new in 5.0: it grants warning, the same intrinsic the ring provides, in the helmet slot. Warning fills the screen with colored markers indicating nearby threats by danger level (white for the least threat, through red, with magenta for the worst) without you having to see the monsters yet. It is the ideal early-game helm slot: cheap (50 zm), light, and a real edge against ambushes. Late game it competes with helm of brilliance (Wizards) and helm of telepathy (everyone), but the warning bonus stays useful all the way down.

Dragon scale mail is the endgame body armor of choice. In 5.0, most colors provide two extrinsic resistances (gray and silver provide only the named one). Gray dragon scale mail provides magic resistance and is a popular wish target. Silver provides reflection. Black provides disintegration resistance and drain resistance (one of two non-artifact sources, alongside the shield of drain resistance). Green provides poison resistance and sickness immunity.

To get dragon scale mail: kill a dragon, pick up the scales it drops, then read a (non-cursed) scroll of enchant armor while wearing them (they transform into scale mail); or wish for the mail directly.

Speed boots are worth wishing for. Being faster than your enemies means you get more turns — more chances to attack, cast spells, or run away.

Cloak of magic resistance provides magic resistance in the cloak slot and frees up other slots for different resistances. However, be aware that since 3.6, magic cancellation (MC) values were overhauled: the cloak of magic resistance now provides only MC1, not MC3. The cloak of protection is now the only single item that provides MC3, which blocks 90% of monster special attacks (down from 98% in older editions). A ring of protection now contributes +1 MC, and the new amulet of guarding provides +2 MC, giving you more ways to assemble full magic cancellation coverage.

For the AC, MC, weight, cost, and granted-power numbers on every piece of armor in the game, see the Armor Tables appendix.

Weapons

Weapon choice depends heavily on your role and skill caps.

Excalibur (long sword dipped in a fountain while Lawful) is one of the best weapons: +d5 to hit and +d10 damage, level drain resistance, automatic searching. For Lawful characters, getting Excalibur early is a priority.

Silver saber deserves special mention. Many endgame threats (demons, undead, werecreatures) are vulnerable to silver. A silver saber does an extra d20 damage against them, making it one of the best late-game weapons.

Your quest artifact is often your primary weapon or at least worth carrying for its properties. Check what your role’s artifact does.

For the full damage/weight/cost numbers on every weapon in the game, see the Weapons Tables appendix.

Enchantment

Weapons and armor can be enchanted using scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor. Each scroll adds +1 (uncursed) or potentially more (blessed). For weapons there’s no destruction limit at all: above +9 the scroll just becomes less likely to add a point, but the weapon is never lost. Armor is different — 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 confused scroll of enchant weapon (for your weapon) or confused scroll of enchant armor (for a random worn armor piece). This erodeproofs the item permanently without changing its enchantment. It also repairs any existing damage.

You can also slow erosion without magic. Coat an armor piece with grease (apply a can of grease). The grease layer also makes the piece slippery to monster steal and to grab attacks, but it wears off after a few hits.

Dragon Scale Mail

Killing a dragon doesn’t always drop full scale mail. Often you’ll find loose scales instead. Scales wear in the body slot just like the mail and carry the color’s full intrinsic property (gray gives magic resistance, silver reflection, and so on, identical to the mail). The trade-off is AC: scales give +3 where the mail gives +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.

For which color to chase, see A note on dragons.

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. That tempting armor on the dead adventurer’s corpse? Probably trapped
• 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 often do the opposite of what you want, or a weakened version of the normal effect
• 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. This is free, instant, and should become instinct
• Pet test. Your pet refuses to step on cursed items. Drop and observe
• Scroll of identify. Always reveals the full status
• Formal price-ID via shop appraisal. Shopkeepers don’t reveal BUC directly, but the sell-back offer they make narrows the item to a few possibilities; combined with the altar test you can often pin it down

(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 — a real relief when the curse problem has gotten out of hand
• Holy water. Dip a cursed item in holy water and it becomes uncursed. Simple, reliable, and reason enough to stockpile holy water
• Prayer. A pleased god uncurses your worn items as a side benefit of answering prayer. Don’t waste a prayer solely on this, but it’s a nice bonus

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.

The lesson: always carry holy water and a scroll of remove curse. The moment you find yourself stuck with cursed levitation boots over a moat, you’ll understand why veterans never leave home without them.

Alignment and Blasting

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

• Intelligent artifacts (most quest artifacts and certain alignment-restricted artifacts): 4d10 damage (or 2d10 with magic resistance) and the item evades your grasp. You cannot wield these.
• Other misaligned artifacts: 4d4 damage on first touch (2d4 with magic resistance), 1/4 chance of being blasted on each subsequent touch.

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.

Not every entry is equally desirable. Grayswandir and Magicbane are the artifacts most players try to wish for first; Mjollnir is the Valkyrie’s archetypal wish; Excalibur is usually fountain-dipped rather than wished. Frost Brand, Vorpal Blade, and Stormbringer are common second wishes. Snickersnee and Sunsword were historically considered flavour pieces, but their 5.0 effects (free reach attack per turn; on-demand camera-style blind) have moved them into the “worth wishing for, role permitting” tier. The remaining entries (the bane weapons, Fire Brand, Cleaver) are usually accepted as sacrifice gifts rather than spent wishes on.

Excalibur is the go-to weapon for Lawful characters; the drain resistance alone is worth carrying it, even after you have a stronger weapon. Knights start aligned to it and have unique 1-in-6 fountain-dip odds; every other Lawful role faces 1-in-30.

Grayswandir is wishable and arguably the game’s best melee weapon. It’s silver (extra damage to many monsters), halves incoming physical damage, and grants hallucination resistance.

Mjollnir is the Valkyrie’s signature throw-and-return weapon — and only Valkyries get the reliable 99% catch-back. Other roles can wield it for melee but won’t reliably catch it on the return throw. It needs Strength 25 to wield in either case (gauntlets of power or rings of gain strength get you there). Its +d24 shock damage is brutal against anything not shock-resistant.

Magicbane is the Wizard’s go-to athame. The combined effect of its stun damage, curse protection, and magic resistance — all of which require it to be wielded, not just carried — makes it Wizard’s preferred melee weapon. Often the first gift from a Neutral sacrifice.

Stormbringer is dangerous to use because it attacks peaceful monsters automatically, which can cause alignment problems. But each hit drains a level from the target and gives it to you, which is huge in the early-to-mid game. Stormbringer is also intelligent: a Lawful or Neutral wielder who touches it without permission takes the heavier 4d10 magical-blast damage rather than the 4d4 dealt by ordinary cross-alignment artifacts.

Cleaver is the Barbarian quest artifact. When wielded one-handed (not two-weaponing), every swing strikes the primary target and one square on each side of it: three monsters per attack when packed in a corridor mouth or against a diagonal pair. The two-weapon penalty suppresses the spin, so most Barbarians keep Cleaver as their primary and a shield in the off slot.

Frost Brand and Fire Brand each have an #invoke power the wishable table doesn’t capture: Frost Brand summons a snowstorm around you (cold damage to nearby squares), Fire Brand summons a firestorm. Either one clears the room around you when you’re cornered.

Snickersnee got a major buff in 5.0: it now counts as a polearm even when you’re on foot (regular pole weapons require a steed). Once per turn you can #apply it for a free reach attack at a target up to two squares away — a real free action that doesn’t end your turn, leaving you a normal melee swing on top. The free hit is announced by a distinctive “Shkinng!” The combined output (one ranged + one melee per turn) makes Snickersnee a contender for best Samurai weapon in the game, not just a flavor piece.

Sunsword is the Lawful long sword that wants to be a tool. Wielded, it lights its current radius (handy in caves and the Mines without costing an oil lamp). #invoke it for a directed blinding ray — mechanically a Camera flash in any direction, not limited to undead. It costs 5×spell-level Pw to invoke, so save it for the fights that demand it (Riders, mind flayers, the Wizard of Yendor), but a blind monster is a monster that misses you. Invoking up or down lights the room; invoking at yourself self-blinds (don’t).

Bane weapons (Sunsword, Demonbane, Sting, Orcrist, Grimtooth, Dragonbane, Werebane, Giantslayer, Ogresmasher, Trollsbane) deal double base damage against their target class. Most are disappointing as a primary weapon, but the defensive riders are often the real reason to swap one in: Trollsbane regenerates while wielded (genuinely useful for an early character holding the line), Dragonbane reflects, Werebane neutralizes lycanthropy, Grimtooth defends against poison. Sting and Orcrist are notable because elves can start with elven daggers and broadswords as their base weapons.

Quest artifacts

Each role has exactly one quest artifact, awarded for completing the role’s quest. They are intelligent: only the rightful owner can safely wield them; anyone else gets blasted. Most of the non-weapon ones grant magic resistance just by sitting in your inventory, so roles whose quest artifact is a passive object still benefit from carrying it.

A wishing quirk to know about. The wish system blocks your own role’s quest artifact (you have to earn it the hard way), but it doesn’t block other roles’ quest artifacts. A neutral character can wish for any neutral quest artifact, a lawful one for any lawful quest artifact, and so on. The alignment-blast rule still applies if you actually wield or wear a misaligned one, but carry bonuses (MR, drain resistance, regeneration, half spell damage, energy regeneration, etc.) work for anyone. A neutral Monk can wish for the Healer’s Staff of Aesculapius for the drain-life-on-hit and drain-resistance carry bonus, or the Wizard’s Eye of the Aethiopica for MR + half-spell-damage + energy regen, even though those quests are closed to the Monk. Wishes for artifacts of all kinds also have an increasing fizzle chance as more artifacts already exist in the game.

#invoke (default ^A) activates each artifact’s special power; the cost is some energy plus a wear-out interval before it can be used again.

The Orb of Detection (Archeologist): a crystal ball that grants ESP and magic resistance just by being carried. #invoke toggles invisibility. Archeologists are already exceptional at stealth, and this turns them into a ghost.

The Heart of Ahriman (Barbarian): a luckstone that doubles as a +1 luck talisman with stealth. Critically, it counts as a luckstone for all the luckstone mechanics (mine’s-end protection, gem-throw luck math, luck cap +13 instead of +10). It’s also a projectile weapon: Barbarians can throw it for double damage and pick it back up. #invoke is levitation.

The Sceptre of Might (Caveman): mace base, +d5 to-hit, double damage against any monster whose alignment differs from the artifact’s (the Sceptre itself is Lawful, so it deals doubled damage against chaotic, neutral, and unaligned monsters — most of the dungeon’s hostiles once you reach Gehennom). It also grants magic resistance while wielded. #invoke casts conflict (monsters fight each other) at a steep energy cost.

The Staff of Aesculapius (Healer): the Healer’s salvation. Each hit drains life (one of only three drain-life weapons; the others are Stormbringer and the rider Death) and gives you regeneration plus drain resistance just by carrying it. #invoke heals fully and cures nearly every bad status. Few artifacts change a role’s late game as much as this one.

The Magic Mirror of Merlin (Knight): grants ESP and magic resistance, and occasionally speaks, dropping hints. Knights already have Excalibur for combat, so the Mirror is pure passive utility.

The Eyes of the Overworld (Monk): lenses that, when worn, give astral vision (see invisible, see through walls, spot secret doors) and magic resistance. Both effects require them to be worn — carrying them in inventory does nothing. #invoke enlightens you. For a Monk who can’t safely wear body armor, a powerful passive on a slot they can use.

The Mitre of Holiness (Priest): a helm of brilliance with the usual brilliance bonus to intelligence and wisdom (so spell-cast more reliably), plus fire resistance while carried, plus a free -1 to AC. #invoke for an energy boost, useful for spell-heavy Priests. Note: despite what older spoilers say, the Mitre does not deal bonus damage against undead (the artifact has no melee attack to carry the bonus), and it does not grant drain resistance.

The Longbow of Diana (Ranger): a real artifact bow with +d5 to hit plus reflection while wielded, ESP while carried. #invoke conjures free arrows out of thin air. Combined with the Ranger’s ranged specialization this is the role’s centerpiece.

The Master Key of Thievery (Rogue): a carry package of warning, teleport control, half physical damage taken, and #invoke instantly untraps a nearby trap. The unlocking bonus depends on alignment: a Rogue gets it from any non-cursed Key; everyone else needs a blessed Key. With those preconditions met, #untrap also gains a perfect-detection bonus on doors and chests.

The Tsurugi of Muramasa (Samurai): a katana-grade two-handed sword with +d8 damage and a behead chance (like Vorpal Blade) and a +1 protection bonus, and it acts as a luckstone. Note that Tsurugi does not grant magic resistance, despite the weapon’s reputation. One of the strongest artifacts in the game, the Samurai’s reward for a hard quest.

The Platinum Yendorian Express Card (Tourist): the Tourist’s get-out-of-jail card. Carrying it grants ESP, magic resistance, and half spell damage; #invoke charges an item (a wand, ring, or marker), which in the Tourist’s hands is roughly “a free wish per ~1000 turns.” Pairs especially well with marker-stockpiling strategies.

The Orb of Fate (Valkyrie): the most generous passive in the game: counts as a luckstone, grants warning, halves both spell and physical damage taken. #invoke is levitate-or-teleport (a toggle, very useful in the Sanctum). Valkyries also have Mjollnir to throw, so the Orb sits in inventory as pure carry value.

The Eye of the Aethiopica (Wizard): grants magic resistance when worn (a Wizard’s wearing slot for it is the amulet, so in practice always); carrying also gives half spell damage taken and extra energy regeneration, a Wizard’s most precious resource. #invoke opens a portal that drops you in Vlad’s Tower (one-way; useful for shortcutting the Castle → Vlad’s traversal). For a spell-caster this is irreplaceable.

Learning Spells

Read a spellbook to learn the spell it contains. Reading takes several turns and can fail. A failed reading can teleport you, take your gold, blind, confuse, or poison you, blow up in your face for HP damage, or randomly curse one of your items. A book that survives failures can be retried.

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 1 or 2 points of Strength plus 1d10 HP (1d6 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.

Here’s a rough guide to what you can safely read:

The “Minimum Int + XL” column means the sum of your Intelligence and experience level. With 18 Intelligence at level 14, your sum is 32, so you can reliably read up to level 6 spells. A blessed book skips the difficulty check entirely and always succeeds, no matter what your Int and level are — which is one reason to save holy water for your hardest unread spellbooks.

Wizards identify books by training. In 5.0, 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, which means they begin the game with a meaningful identification advantage in their core schools.

So training your spell schools pays off twice: better casting and free book-ID. The unknown book you’ve been carrying since level 5? Train up the right school and suddenly you know what it is. Prioritize the schools containing your most-wanted unidentified books, not just the ones that improve your current casting.

Wizards are the undisputed masters of magic: they learn faster, fail less, and have the widest range of useful spells. A well-built Wizard can eventually learn every spell in the game, which is the closest the Mazes come to letting you cheat. Other roles can cast some spells but with less panache. A Valkyrie can occasionally read identify (level 3) if her Intelligence is boosted by gain-ability potions, but non-spellcasters are usually better off with scrolls. Tourists, Barbarians, and Cavemen should probably stick to hitting things.

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 with you 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 34 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.

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. Power regenerates over time, faster with higher Wisdom and Intelligence, faster still for Wizards or with a regeneration source.

High-level spells cost serious power. Plan your casting and 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. It starts at 0, the universe’s way of saying “prove yourself.” Left alone, luck drifts back toward zero over time; the Mazes don’t give anything for free.

Luck timeout. Every 600 turns, your luck moves one point toward 0. If you have +5 luck, it will drop to +4 after 600 turns, then +3 after 1200, eventually reaching 0. Your good deeds are forgotten. Your sins, alas, are also forgiven.

Luckstone. Carrying a luckstone in your open inventory (not inside a container) freezes the timer. Your luck stays wherever it is until something changes it. This is why getting the luckstone from Mine’s End is one of the first things every experienced player does. It’s a small gray stone that makes the universe remember you fondly.

Bless state matters. Any non-cursed luckstone (blessed or uncursed) freezes drift toward your baseline and adds +3 to your effective Luck on most rolls. A cursed luckstone is dangerous: it subtracts 3 from your effective Luck and holds negative Luck in place (preventing the usual drift back toward zero from below). Always BUC-check a luckstone before carrying it, and bless it on an altar if you can. (The +3 bonus comes from set_moreluck; the curse doesn’t speed positive Luck’s decay, but it locks bad Luck in.)

The Heart of Ahriman, Tsurugi of Muramasa, and Orb of Fate all count as luckstones. Barbarian, Samurai, and Valkyrie quest artifacts confer the same drift-freeze and bless-state bonus, so those three roles get a “free luckstone” from their quest reward. Carrying both a blessed luckstone and one of these artifacts doesn’t stack the +3 bonus (the bonus is binary, not additive), but it does add an extra unit of “blessed” to the count if you somehow end up with a cursed luckstone, partially offsetting it.

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 your computer’s real date for this; set your clock back if you’ve planned an ascension on the 13th and don’t want the penalty, though most players just embrace the theme.)

Gaining and Losing Luck

The pattern is consistent: be virtuous and the numbers smile on you. Be a monster and they frown. The Mazes have a moral compass, and it’s embedded in the math.

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 and is rarely worth the gamble. Archeologists start with a touchstone, which lets them verify whether a gem is real before throwing it at a unicorn.

There is a ceiling on the luck you can harvest from any given corpse. If your current luck score already exceeds the difficulty rating of the monster you just sacrificed, you gain nothing. The altar accepts your offering politely and gives you nothing in return, because the gods have standards.

So 5.0 closes an old strategy: sitting at a co-aligned altar with a pile of kobold corpses and grinding luck to maximum. It no longer works once your luck is already above modest levels. To raise luck via sacrifice in the mid-to-late game, you need fresh corpses of monsters whose difficulty exceeds your current luck value. In practice: a luckstone, occasional mid-tier sacrifices, and not killing peacefuls is now the standard path to high luck.

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.)
• Scrolls of enchant weapon/armor succeed more often at high enchantment levels.
• Wands of wishing are more likely to work perfectly on wresting.
• Fountain wishes become slightly more likely.

At negative luck, all of these go wrong. Any negative Luck causes prayer to fail with the “too naughty” rejection (pray.c:2155) — not just at the floor of −10. You’ll miss attacks you should have hit. Scrolls will backfire. The dungeon becomes a place that is trying to kill you even harder than usual, which is saying something.

The practical advice: get a luckstone early, sacrifice occasionally to keep luck positive, and don’t kill peacefuls. Treat the universe well and it will return the favor, in the form of slightly better random numbers, which in the Mazes is the closest thing to love.

The Skill Ladder

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, with one exception: if your god grants you an artifact weapon, you’re auto-unrestricted in its skill up to Basic. The full role caps live in the Skill Caps appendix.

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 — this 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 game says “You feel more confident in your skills.” That’s 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 is gated by the dmg>1 roll. The Expert weapon line (+3 / +2) is why dedicating to a single weapon matters: that’s the difference between landing the killing blow and watching the monster shrug.

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.

Role caps vary sharply across schools:

• Wizards have access to all seven schools and cap at Expert in attack, divination, escape, and matter.
• Monks also have access to all seven, but cap at Expert only in healing — Skilled in cleric and escape, Basic elsewhere.
• Priests reach Expert in healing, divination, and cleric.
• Healers cap at Expert in healing and are restricted from every other school. Specialization by decree.
• Knights train attack, healing, and cleric to Skilled.
• Rangers push divination to Expert — their one specialty school.
• Rogues, Tourists, Samurai each get two or three schools at Skilled or lower, usually built around divination or escape.
• Cavemen reach Skilled in matter and Basic in attack — two schools only.
• Barbarians and Valkyries cap at Basic in their two schools (attack and escape) and can’t reliably cast spells past spell-level 3.

Full role caps for every weapon, fighting style, and spell school are in the Skill Caps appendix; the full list of 43 spells is in the Spell Tables appendix.

Spending Slots Wisely

Thirty 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, Expert two-weapon, and Skilled riding is fourteen 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. This double benefit is Wizard-only; other roles only get the casting-success benefit.
• 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 are the domain of Monks. Grand Master needs 9 cumulative non-weapon slots, which Monks reach naturally. Anyone else dabbling in unarmed combat should plan to stop at Basic.

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 the Castle treasure room (see Key Wands for the 5.0 charge mechanics). The Castle chest also contains a potion of gain level, because the Mazes occasionally feel generous.
• 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, so persistence pays off.
• 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.

In practice, the number of wishes a run produces varies widely. A sensible budget if you take each guaranteed source once is about four (Castle wand, Vlad’s throne, Amulet pickup, one magic lamp). Anything beyond that is luck (extra lamps, fountain demons, recharge chains) or commitment. Don’t waste any of them on food.

What to Wish For

Generations of adventurers have argued about optimal wish order. Here’s the conventional wisdom, battle-tested by thousands of ascensions:

1. Gray dragon scale mail (magic resistance + AC; magic resistance is the most important protection in the game, so this is highly recommended).
2. Silver dragon scale mail (reflection + AC, the second pillar of not dying to wands).
3. Speed boots (being fast gives you more actions per turn, excellent for both offense and escape).
4. Gauntlets of power (STR 25 if your role benefits; most roles benefit from punching harder).
5. Amulet of life saving (insurance for the endgame, when overconfidence kills more adventurers than monsters do).
6. A specific artifact (Grayswandir is a common target for the silver damage against everything in Gehennom).

Don’t wish for consumables (scrolls, potions) unless you’re in dire straits. Items you can find through normal play aren’t worth a wish. A wish is for things that change the fundamental equation of your survival.

Wish Syntax

When the game asks “For what do you wish?”, be specific. This is not the time for ambiguity:

• “blessed +3 gray dragon scale mail” gets you exactly that.
• “gray dragon scale mail” alone lets the dice pick blessed/ cursed and enchantment — a bare wish can roll cursed. You had one wish; spell out the BUC and the plus.
• 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 or not the artifact actually 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, the Candelabrum a tallow candle, and — relevant after all that lamp-rubbing — a wish for a magic lamp hands you an ordinary oil lamp.

The Valley of the Dead

The very first level of Gehennom, immediately below the Castle, is a named special level called the Valley of the Dead. You’ll see the arrival message — “You arrive at the Valley of the Dead…” — and the dungeon overview will mark it for you. It’s a wide hand-designed map with three irregular graveyards scattered across it and a permanent shrine to Moloch in the upper-left corner (an unaligned high altar; do not pray here). Walls are non-diggable everywhere, so you can’t shortcut through them, and the level is flagged noteleport and nommap — magic mapping won’t reveal it and teleportation doesn’t work.

The morbid detail worth noticing: scattered across the level are dead bodies of every player role the dungeon has ever seen descend — two corpses each of Archeologists, Barbarians, Cavemen, Healers, Knights, Rangers, Rogues, Samurai, Tourists, Valkyries, and Wizards. Pointedly absent: no Priests, no Monks (maybe Moloch has a special fate reserved for members of those classes).

What’s Different in Gehennom

• No prayer. Your god is deaf to you in Gehennom (unless you’re a Moloch worshipper, and you’re not). No emergency healing. No food rescue. No curse removal via divine intervention. Pack accordingly, because down here, you are completely on your own
• Fire everywhere. Fire traps litter the corridors. Demons breathe fire as casually as you breathe air. If you don’t have fire resistance by now, turn around
• Hot ground. In 5.0, the ground itself is hot enough to shatter potions dropped on the floor. Keep everything in a bag at all times
• Demon lords. Named demon lords (Orcus, Baalzebub, Asmodeus, Juiblex, Yeenoghu, and if you’re very unlucky, Demogorgon) hold court on specific levels. Each is a major battle. Several can summon reinforcements. All of them are angry you’re here. However, most demon lords can be bribed. On first sight, if you haven’t already attacked them, a major demon will name a price in gold for safe passage. The demand is a random fraction (roughly 20–100%) of the gold sitting in your main inventory — not gold inside containers — so a well-known runner-up trick is to stash most of your gold in a bag of holding before approaching the throne: the demand shrinks proportionally, and a few hundred zm bribe can buy off a prince who would otherwise have demanded thousands. The alternative is fighting a high-level boss, so unless you specifically want the XP or sacrifice corpse, bribery is often the better trade. (Wielding Excalibur or Demonbane closes off the bribery option — they refuse to talk and attack on sight.) The Riders on the Astral Plane and a small handful of demons (notably Demogorgon) won’t take a bribe; the rest usually will
• Teleportation restrictions. In 5.0, teleportation is blocked on a demon lord’s lair level while that lord still lives. Kill or banish them and the restriction lifts. In older editions, most Gehennom levels permanently blocked teleportation
• Mazes. Nearly every level is a maze. A wand of digging or pickaxe isn’t optional here; it’s as essential as your weapon. Dig straight lines to the stairs and don’t look back

The demon-prince lairs

Three of Gehennom’s special levels are the personal thrones of Asmodeus (fire-, cold-, and poison-resistant, casts cold spells, carries wands of cold and fire), Baalzebub (the Lord of the Flies — gaze that stuns you and a poisonous bite that drains Strength; his lair is a beetle-shaped maze), and Juiblex (the Faceless Lord, a slime that engulfs in melee and spits acid). All three sit alone in their lairs and won’t pursue you, so you can avoid them entirely by skipping their level.

Asmodeus and Baalzebub are bribable: the demand is a random fraction of the gold in your main inventory, so stash gold in a bag of holding before walking up to the throne and a few hundred zm will buy off a prince who would otherwise have demanded thousands. Juiblex is not bribable — only the Arch-Devil demons with the bribe disposition (Geryon, Dispater, Baalzebub, Asmodeus) accept gold; Juiblex, Yeenoghu, Orcus, and Demogorgon attack on sight regardless. Fighting Juiblex is viable late game (wand of death works on all four), but expect a real fight. None of their corpses is useful for sacrifice the way a fresh weak monster’s would be.

Vlad’s Tower

A three-level tower branching upward off Gehennom (one of the only side-branches in the lower dungeon). Vlad the Impaler — a unique vampire lord — guards the Candelabrum of Invocation at the top. Climb the tower, kill Vlad, take the Candelabrum.

The tower also contains a special throne, and 5.0 has made it both more rewarding and more painful. The good news: it never disintegrates from sheer use the way ordinary thrones do, so you can sit on it again and again. The bad news: you will, because the prize is rare. Each sit rolls one of thirteen effects. Four of them grant a wish (the throne does disintegrate after the wish, having spent its power). The other nine are bad: permanent level drain, an inventory-coating layer of grease (your weapon will slip, your shield will fall off), a stripped intrinsic, a forced level teleport to the vibrating-square level (sometimes useful, often not), three summoned demons, a confused-blessed remove curse on your gear, forced polymorph, acid damage in eighty-HP gulps if you don’t have acid resistance, or a randomized stat shuffle that will probably make several of your scores worse.

The arithmetic: only one sit in three picks an effect at all (the other two roll “you feel out of place” and do nothing); of those that fire, 4/13 are the wish. Unconditional rate is about 1 in 10, so plan on roughly ten sits before the wish lands, with about seven bad effects absorbed along the way. Plan accordingly. Stand at full HP, leave any precious gear behind (a grease hit coats your whole pack and makes you Glib for 100 to 200 turns, dropping items from your hands when you try to use them), and have acid resistance or magic resistance ready before you sit. If you don’t want a forced wish (say, you’ve already used your Castle wish and Amulet wish and want to keep this one for the ascension kit), you can sit at any time; you don’t have to do it right now. The throne stays put unless something on the level destroys it.

Orcus Town

Orcus is a god of the underworld in Roman mythology — a chthonic figure who punishes broken oaths and devours the dead. In NetHack he’s a unique demon prince (&, level 66, fast flier), the Prince of Undead, who casts spells, swings a weapon, claws twice, and stings for strength drain. His signature artifact is the Wand of Orcus — a wand of death by another name; his fingertip cantrip is also a death ray, so wear an amulet of life saving and consider opening with your own wand of death rather than a melee approach.

His level is a ghost town: a normal shopping district with all the shopkeepers and customers killed off by his ambient aura, the buildings stocked with random loot instead of for-sale inventory. What’s left is an honor guard of liches, vampires, and ghouls. Somewhere on the level the dungeon guarantees either a magic lamp or a magic marker (50/50). Walk carefully (fire and magic traps everywhere), deal with the residents, and lift the lamp or marker on your way out. Either is a real supplement to the Castle wand’s single charge.

The Wizard’s Tower

A sequence of three special Gehennom levels that lead to the Wizard of Yendor himself and the Book of the Dead. He is the most dangerous enemy in the game, not because he’s the strongest fighter, but because he never stops. He teleports to your location, summons monsters, steals back his Amulet whenever you grab it, curses your gear, and once you wake him he will not leave you alone for the rest of the game.

Kill him cleanly the first time, grab the Book, and move on. Subsequent kills don’t yield new loot (he respawns), so don’t engage him voluntarily again. The “Run, don’t fight” advice for the Ascension Run is mostly about him.

Moloch’s Sanctum

The bottom level of Gehennom. It is sealed: until the Invocation ritual is performed (see “The Heist” below), the down-stair to the Sanctum doesn’t exist, and the level above is just one more maze. Once the seal breaks, descend to find the High Priest of Moloch standing on the high altar with the Amulet of Yendor. The High Priest is a unique non-bribable boss who casts spells, summons minions, and aggrieves anyone in melee range — the standard answer is a wand of death or finger of death from a safe distance.

The Heist

The climax of the game is a choreographed sequence: three Invocation items, one vibrating square, one final boss, and one frantic climb back to the surface. The steps:

1. Collect the trio. You need the Bell of Opening (the Quest goal, dropped by your quest nemesis), the Candelabrum of Invocation (the top of Vlad’s Tower), and the Book of the Dead (the bottom of the Wizard’s Tower). Missing any one means walking all the way back to fetch it; the Bell in particular is easy to leave behind on the nemesis’s corpse the first time through the Quest.

2. Attach all seven candles to the Candelabrum. Apply (a) each candle and select the Candelabrum. Candles spawn often enough that you’ll usually have enough, but you need a source for seven: Izchak’s lighting shop in Minetown is the clean answer, or seven are scattered on that level if the shop is absent (Orcish Town layout).

3. Find the vibrating square. On the Gehennom level directly above Moloch’s Sanctum, a single square vibrates when you step on it: “You feel an unsettling vibration under your feet.” The square’s position is random within the maze, so you have to search by walking — scrolls of magic mapping help enormously.

4. Perform the Invocation. Standing on the vibrating square, with the Candelabrum lit and the Book in your pack, #invoke the Bell of Opening. The floor opens; a down-stair to the Sanctum appears under your feet.

5. Swipe the Amulet from Moloch. Descend, take down the High Priest (wand of death is the clean answer), walk onto the high altar, and pick up the Amulet of Yendor.

6. Begin the getaway. The up-stair from the Sanctum now lifts you out (it wouldn’t before you had the Amulet). You’re now on the Ascension Run — every covetous monster in the game has noticed, the Wizard of Yendor will keep teleporting to you to take his Amulet back, and the Mysterious Force will keep yanking you back down. Climb fast (see The Ascension Run below).

Survival Tips

• Bring extra food — you’ll be moving fast and praying is not a reliable refill
• Bring scrolls of remove curse — fast inventory cleanup when something goes wrong
• Dig, don’t navigate. Maze walls are faster to go through than around
• Kill the Wizard quickly. Every turn he lives is another summoned monster, another stolen item, another cursed piece of gear. He’ll come back (he always comes back), but the intervals between his appearances give you breathing room
• The Amulet anchors you. Level teleportation doesn’t work while you carry it. Every step back to the surface must be climbed by foot
• Genocide the lich class. A blessed scroll of genocide applied to L removes liches, demiliches, master liches, and arch-liches in one read. Some of the worst Gehennom threats, gone for the rest of the run

What killed the runners-up

A look at characters who died in deep Gehennom (Dlvl 35-50) shows that their inventories were nearly indistinguishable from the winners’. Their AC was −23 to −40. They had wands of death, all three Invocation items, silver dragon scale mail. What killed them was behavior:

• Inventory management mid-combat. An Archeologist on Dlvl 35 tried to open a tin while a jabberwock, a displacer beast, and a zruty were adjacent. The tin opener prompt took the turn she didn’t have.
• Eating when not hungry. A Tourist with AC −40 and all three Invocation items, deep in Gehennom, chose to eat a stalker corpse while satiated and choked to death. The ring of slow digestion on her finger does not prevent choking.
• Out of escape consumables. A Wizard on Dlvl 50 — within sight of the Sanctum — burned the last wand-of-death charge before reserving an escape route, then died blind and surrounded.

The gear gets you to Gehennom. Discipline gets you to the Sanctum. Keep at least one escape consumable (scroll of teleportation, wand of digging, oilskin sack with a potion of full healing) within reach at all times. Don’t take a turn that isn’t moving you toward the Sanctum unless every adjacent square is clear.

The Problems

Everything that can go wrong will try:

• The Wizard of Yendor periodically teleports to you, summoning nasty monsters and trying to steal back his Amulet. He will not stop. Kill him each time; he always comes back. He is the world’s most persistent ex.
• The Amulet blocks teleportation. You can’t level teleport while carrying the Amulet. You must climb every single staircase from the bottom of Gehennom to the surface. All of them. By foot.
• Covetous monsters. Demon lords and the Wizard can warp directly to your position and attack. They specifically target you for the Amulet, because apparently everyone wants this thing.
• The Mysterious Force. While carrying the Amulet in Gehennom, each time you climb stairs there’s a chance the force grabs you instead. Often it just shuffles you elsewhere on the same level; sometimes it drops you down a level (Chaotic max), two levels (Neutral max), or even three (Lawfuls only) — the dungeon is literally holding onto you. The pull is hardest on Chaotics and softest on Lawfuls, but Lawfuls also pay the longest tail when it does trigger. In 5.0 it decays as it triggers: every yank slightly reduces the chance of the next one. The force is a hard Gehennom gate: it stops the moment you climb out of Gehennom, and it also never fires on the bottom four levels.

Strategy

You are no longer an explorer. You are a running back carrying the ball through the entire opposing team. Speed is everything.

• Run, don’t fight. Don’t explore. Don’t loot. Just go up. Every turn you spend fighting something optional is a turn the Wizard gets closer to stealing back his Amulet.
• Dig. Use your wand of digging to reach staircases quickly. Straight lines through walls beat wandering through corridors.
• Zap problems away. Teleportation wands move monsters out of your path. Death wands remove them permanently. Use both liberally.
• Kill the Wizard fast. When he shows up (and he will), don’t try to be clever. Finger of death, wand of death, or brute force. The faster he’s down, the fewer monsters he summons.
• Don’t rely on Elbereth past the Castle. Elbereth is completely ignored in all of Gehennom and on all four Elemental Planes plus Astral. You can still write it for the alignment, but no monster will care. Plan your heal-and-recover breaks around corridors, scrolls of teleportation, and conflict instead.

The Ascension Run rewards preparation and punishes hesitation. If you packed well at the Castle and your resistances are solid, this is a sprint, not a marathon. Once you reach the top of the Dungeons of Doom, the final staircase leads to the Elemental Planes: the last obstacle between you and divinity.

Plane of Earth

You arrive encased in solid rock and boulders, surrounded by earth elementals that hit like the mountain itself. The portal is buried somewhere in the level. Dig. A wand of digging is essential; a scroll of magic mapping or crystal ball reveals the portal’s location so you can dig toward it instead of blind. This level is claustrophobic, dark, and punishing, but it’s the gentlest of the four.

Plane of Air

The opposite extreme: an open void with no walls, no floor you can feel, just empty sky and air elementals moving faster than thought. They attack multiple times per turn and they cannot be genocided. A ring of conflict is devastating here: let them tear each other apart while you search for the portal. A scroll of magic mapping reveals it. The level is divided into drifting cloud bubbles that move on their own each turn: if you’re standing in a bubble when it shifts, you shift with it. Walking with the drift can carry you across the level faster than fighting against it, and a bubble may eventually drift you onto the portal square itself. (Note that teleportation is blocked on every plane, so wand of teleport on yourself just prints “A mysterious force prevents you from teleporting!” It still works on monsters for clearing space.)

Plane of Fire

Everything is on fire. The ground is fire. The air is fire. Fire elementals fill the level, and fire traps dot every corridor. Fire resistance isn’t just recommended: without it, you’ll be dead in turns. Map the level, find the portal among the flames, and get there. Don’t stop to fight anything you don’t have to.

Plane of Water

The entire level is underwater. Without magical breathing (an amulet, the Amphibious intrinsic, or a polyform that breathes water) you will drown. Drowning calls the standard death path, so an amulet of life saving will rescue you — but you’ll drown again on your next turn unless something has changed. The level is a labyrinth of water-filled chambers with occasional air pockets. Sea monsters prowl the corridors.

The standard tactic on arrival: genocide class ;. Read a scroll of genocide, target the entire ; class (eels, krakens, sea monsters, sharks, jellyfish, piranhas), and the level instantly empties of anything that can drag you under. This is the right moment for that scroll — class ; is almost nowhere else in the game (a kraken in Medusa’s pool, a moccasin from a fountain are isolated encounters not worth burning a class-wipe on), and on the next plane it’s irrelevant. Spend the scroll here. Then find the portal and push through. This is the last barrier between you and the gods.

The Astral Plane

You surface into the presence of the divine. Three altars stand in the great temple: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. You must sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor on the altar matching your alignment to ascend. Choose wrong and the game ends on the spot: the opposing god gains dominion over your god, and you’ve handed victory to the other side. There is no retrieval — pick the right altar the first time.

The plane is swarming with Angels and the three Riders: Death, Famine, and Pestilence. The Riders cannot be permanently killed; they revive, they pursue, they do not stop. Don’t try to clear the level. You are not here to fight. You are here to reach one altar, make one sacrifice, and end this.

• Conflict and teleportation wands clear a path through the crowds, though note teleportation on yourself fails on every elemental plane (only monster-targeted teleport works).
• Identify the correct altar by walking adjacent to it: farlook (;) reveals an altar’s alignment only when you’re standing next to it. From across the room you only see “an aligned high altar.” Plan to visit each in turn if necessary.
• The Riders will follow you. Outrun them, don’t outfight them
• When you offer the Amulet on the correct altar: you ascend. The game is won. You’ve done what so few have done. Congratulations.

Command counts

Type a number before any command and the game repeats it that many times: 10s searches ten times, 20. waits twenty turns, 5h walks west five times. The sequence interrupts automatically as soon as anything interesting happens — a monster appears adjacent, your HP changes, a --More-- prompt fires, the search turns up something. Press ESC to cancel early.

Counts up to 32,767 are accepted (five digits), but the practical limit is “however long you’ll watch the screen update without losing patience.” 99s is plenty for any real searching job.

Repeat last command (Ctrl+A)

Ctrl+A runs whatever you just ran, with the same count if you used one. After your first 10s of searching, every subsequent search is one keystroke. This is the most-used advanced command in the game and you’ll reach for it dozens of times per session. It remembers the last command that actually executed, not attempts that were canceled or bumped against a wall.

Movement prefixes

A handful of prefix keys modify the next command and then clear. They are essential for moving safely through populated areas.

• F then a direction — force attack into that square, even if no monster is visible there. Use it on suspected invisible monsters, on a displaced creature whose image is one square off from its real position, or to break your own Elbereth. Double-tap F to cancel without acting.
• G then a direction — run that direction until something interesting appears: a monster, an unknown item, a trap, a corridor branch, a closed door. Capital-letter directions (H, J, K, L, and the diagonals Y, U, B, N) are the same thing in one keystroke and are what most players actually use. g is a less-cautious variant of G, but in practice the difference is negligible.
• m then a direction — move without attacking and without picking up. Walk past your pet without striking it (“Pardon me, Fido”), step past an autopickup heap, refuse to walk into a known pool or lava square. With non-movement commands, m requests a menu instead of the default single-target prompt: me is “what would you like to eat?”, ma is “which tool?”, m, lets you pick from a floor pile.

Message history and redraw

Ctrl+P walks backward through the message history one message at a time. A monster’s special-attack warning, a shopkeeper’s price quote, or a status onset is preserved long enough to read it twice. The buffer holds the last several dozen lines; older messages roll off silently.

Ctrl+R redraws the screen — a useful reflex when the terminal gets garbled or when something doesn’t look right.

Dungeon overview and event journal

Ctrl+O (or #overview) lists the interesting levels you’ve visited — anywhere with an altar, throne, fountain, sink, shop, temple, vault, or branch stair, plus the Castle’s tune once you learn it. Prefix with m to see all visited levels in a menu and add or edit annotations from there; #annotate does the same for the level you’re standing on. The classic use is labeling stash floors so you remember which one held the bag.

v (or #chronicle) opens the chronicle — a chronological journal of major events from this run: first kills, conduct breaks, artifact gifts and crownings, prayer outcomes, level milestones, and entries into major branches. Mainly for end-of-run storytelling; for current conduct state use #conduct.

Options worth knowing about

Open the options screen with O (capital O, not zero). The defaults are reasonable, but a few settings change how the commands above feel:

• number_pad turns the numeric keypad into movement keys (1–9 for directions). Off by default; enabling it changes digit-prefix behavior so you press n first to enter a count.
• autopickup picks items up as you walk over them, filtered by pickup_types (e.g. pickup_types:$?! for gold, scrolls, and potions). The m prefix on movement suppresses autopickup for one step.
• verbose turns on a layer of extra descriptive messages (more detailed feedback when wielding, digging, hearing monsters, watching your pet, and so on). Turn it off if the message log feels noisy.

The full options list is deep, but the rest is taste and convenience. If something about the interface annoys you, there is almost certainly a setting for it.

A bigger interface shift requires a different binary: NetHack built with the curses windowtype (nethack-curses on most distributions, or a custom build with curses support) draws a properly paneled UI inside the terminal. Set windowtype:curses, align_message:right, align_status:bottom, perm_invent, and windowborders in your rc, open a 120×40 terminal, and you get a permanent inventory column, a multi-line message panel, and bordered status and map regions. Plain tty NetHack pins the message line at row 0 no matter what you set.

Level 1, Version A

            11111
   12345678901234
 1 ┌────┐  ┌───┐
 2 │····│  │···│
 3 │·A··└──┘·B·│
 4 │·C······D··│
 5 │··┌─┐@┌─┐E·│
 6 ├──┴─┴─┼─┘·─┴┐
 7 │·^·^·<│·····│
 8 │·^┌───┤F····│
 9 └┐^│   │·G···│
10  │↑└───┘·H···│
11  │^^^^^←I·J··│
12  │··┌────────┘
13  └──┘

1. Push A right one square.
2. Push C up one square.
3. Push D right one square.
4. Push D left to (4,4).
5. Push E down to (11,8).

The map now looks like this:

            11111
   12345678901234
 1 ┌────┐  ┌───┐
 2 │····│  │···│
 3 │·CA·└──┘·B·│
 4 │··D········│
 5 │··┌─┐>┌─┐··│
 6 ├──┴─┴─┼─┘·─┴┐
 7 │·^·^·<│··@··│
 8 │·^┌───┤F·E··│
 9 └┐^│   │·G···│
10  │↑└───┘·H···│
11  │^^^^^←I·J··│
12  │··┌────────┘
13  └──┘

6. Push H left one square.
7. Finish I, J, E, G, H, F, B, D, and C.

One boulder (A) remains. The two scrolls at (3,12) and (4,12) are always scrolls of earth.

Level 1, Version B

            111111
   123456789012345
 1 ┌─┬────┐ ┌────┐
 2 │<│@···└─┘····│
 3 │^├┐·AB····C··│
 4 │^││··DE│·F·G·│
 5 │^││····│·····│
 6 │^├┴───┬┘H────┤
 7 │^│    │······│
 8 │↑└────┘······│
 9 │^^^^^←IJKL···│
10 │··┌───┐······│
11 └──┘   └──────┘

1. Push A down one square.
2. Push B right to (11,3).
3. Push H down to (10,8).
4. Push J up one square.
5. Finish I.
6. Push L up one square.
7. Finish K, J, H, and L.

The map now looks like this:

            111111
   123456789012345
 1 ┌─┬────┐ ┌────┐
 2 │<│>···└─┘····│
 3 │^├┐······BC··│
 4 │^││·ADE│·F·G·│
 5 │^││····│·····│
 6 │^├┴───┬┘·────┤
 7 │^│    │······│
 8 │↑└────┘······│
 9 │@····←·······│
10 │··┌───┐······│
11 └──┘   └──────┘

8. Push C down one square.
9. Push B left to (6,3).
10. Push G down one square, then left to (10,5).
11. Finish G.
12. Finish C and F like G.
13. Move B right to (11,3), then down two squares, then left to (10,5).
14. Finish B.
15. Move A up one square.
16. Finish A like B.

Two boulders (D and E) remain. The two scrolls at (2,10) and (3,10) are always scrolls of earth.

Level 2, Version A

            11111111112222222222
   12345678901234567890123456789
 1 ┌────┬────┐       ┌─────────┐
 2 │····│····└─┐     │·········│
 3 │··AB│CD···@│     │·········│
 4 │·····E···┌─┘     │·········│
 5 │····│····│       │····<····│
 6 ├─·──┼────┴┐      │·········│
 7 │··F·│·····│      │·········│
 8 │·GH·│I·J·K│      │·········│
 9 │··L·····M·│      │·········│
10 │·NOP│Q··R·└──────┴────────+┤
11 │····│··S·T→^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^·│
12 └────┴──────────────────────┘

1. Push E left to (3,4).
2. Push L right to (9,9).
3. Push R right one square.
4. Finish T, S, M, R, K, J, and L.
5. Finish N, O, P, G, and E.
6. Push F left one square.
7. Finish H.
8. Push F up to (3,4).
9. Finish F and A.

Five boulders (B, C, D, I, and Q) remain.

Level 2, Version B

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1  ┌──┐          ┌─────────┐
 2 ┌┘·@└──────┐   │·········│
 3 │··········│   │·········│
 4 │·A┌───┐B─·│   │·········│
 5 │··│···│·C·│   │····<····│
 6 │·D·E····F─┤   │·········│
 7 │·G··H··│··│   │·········│
 8 │·────I·└┐·│   │·········│
 9 │··J···K·│·└┐  │·········│
10 │·──┐L─···M·└──┴────────+┤
11 │···│··N─·O→^^^^^^^^^^^^·│
12 │··P······┌──────────────┘
13 └───┐··│··│
14     └──┴──┘

1. Push B down two squares.
2. Push C left one square.
3. Push P right three squares, then up one square, to (7,11).
4. Finish O.
5. Push N down one square, then left to (3,12).
6. Push M left one square.
7. Push F up one square.
8. Push B left two squares.
9. Push K down two squares.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1  ┌──┐          ┌─────────┐
 2 ┌┘·>└──────┐   │·········│
 3 │··········│   │·········│
 4 │·A┌───┐·─·│   │·········│
 5 │··│···│CF·│   │····<····│
 6 │·D·E·B···─┤   │·········│
 7 │·G··H··│··│   │·········│
 8 │·────I·└┐·│   │·········│
 9 │··J·····│·└┐  │·········│
10 │·──┐L─@·M··└──┴────────+┤
11 │···│·PK─··→·^^^^^^^^^^^·│
12 │·N·······┌──────────────┘
13 └───┐··│··│
14     └──┴──┘

10. Push M right one square, then down to (11,11). Finish M.
11. Push N right to (10,12), then up to (10,10). Finish N like M.
12. Push K down one square, then left to (3,12). Finish K like N.
13. Push P right one square, then down one square. Finish P like N.
14. Push L down two squares, then left to (3,12). Finish L like N.
15. Push I down one square, then right one square, then down to (8,12). Finish I like N.
16. Push J right to (8,9), then down to (8,12). Finish J like N.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1  ┌──┐          ┌─────────┐
 2 ┌┘·>└──────┐   │·········│
 3 │··········│   │·········│
 4 │·A┌───┐·─·│   │·········│
 5 │··│···│CF·│   │····<····│
 6 │·D·E·B···─┤   │·········│
 7 │·G··H··│··│   │·········│
 8 │·────··└┐·│   │·········│
 9 │········│·└┐  │·········│
10 │·──┐·─·····└──┴────────+┤
11 │···│···─@·→········^^^^·│
12 │·········┌──────────────┘
13 └───┐··│··│
14     └──┴──┘

17. Push H left one square.
18. Push B down one square, then right one square, then down to (8,12). Finish B.
19. Push C down one square, then left two squares, to (7,6). Finish C like B.
20. Push F left one square, then down one square, then left to (7,6). Finish F like C.
21. Push G right one square. Push D up one square.
22. Push E right two squares, to (7,6). Finish E like F.

Four boulders (A, D, G, and H) remain.

Level 3, Version A

            11111111112
   12345678901234567890
 1 ┌────────┬───┬─────┐
 2 │········│···│·····│
 3 │·AB··─CD│·─·│·····│
 4 │··│·E·F·│GH·│·····│
 5 ├─·│··─··│·─·│··<··│
 6 │···┌─·······│·····│
 7 │···│·I·─···─┤·····│
 8 │·J·│K·│···──┤·····│
 9 ├─L·│··└─────┴────+┤
10 │··M···→^^^^^^^^^^·│
11 │···│·@┌───────────┘
12 └───┴──┘

1. Push M left one square. Finish M.
2. Push J right one square.
3. Finish L, J, A, and B.
4. Push D down to (9,6).
5. Finish I.
6. Push K down two squares, then left to (3,10). Finish K.
7. Push E up one square.
8. Push F right one square, then up one square, to (9,3).
9. Push E down one square, then left one square, to (5,4).
10. Push E up one square, then left two squares. Finish E.
11. Push C down one square, then left three squares, to (5,4). Finish C like E.
12. Push D right two squares, then left to (8,6).
13. Push D up two squares, then left to (5,4). Finish D like E.

Three boulders (F, G, and H) remain.

Level 3, Version B

            1111111111222
   1234567890123456789012
 1   ┌─┬────┐  
 2 ┌─┘·│····│  
 3 │···A····├─┬───────┐  
 4 │·─·BC─DE│·│·······│  
 5 │·FG─······│·······│  
 6 │·─··H·│···│·······│  
 7 │····─I└─J─┤···<···│  
 8 │··KL··M···│·······│  
 9 │·──···│···│·······├─┐
10 │····─N├───┤·······+·│
11 └─┐··O·└───┴───────┤·│
12   │··P@→^^^^^^^^^^^+·│
13   └────────────────┴─┘

1. Push O left two squares, to (4,11).
2. Finish P and N.
3. Push L down one square, to (5,9).
4. Push O up one square, to (4,10).
5. Finish L.
6. Push K right one square, to (5,8). Finish K.
7. Push O right one square, to (5,10). Finish O.

The map now looks like this:

            1111111111222
   1234567890123456789012
 1   ┌─┬────┐  
 2 ┌─┘·│····│  
 3 │···A····├─┬───────┐  
 4 │·─·BC─DE│·│·······│  
 5 │·FG─······│·······│  
 6 │·─··H·│···│·······│  
 7 │····─I└─J─┤···<···│  
 8 │······M···│·······│  
 9 │·──···│···│·······├─┐
10 │····─·├───┤·······+·│
11 └─┐····└───┴───────┤·│
12   │··@>→····^^^^^^·+·│
13   └────────────────┴─┘

8. Push G down to (4,8), then one square right, to (5,8). Finish G.
9. Push F one square right. Finish F like G.
10. Push M two squares right, to (10,8), then left to (5,8). Finish M.
11. Push J up two squares, to (10,5).
12. Finish I.
13. Push H right one square. Finish H.
14. Push A right two squares, to (7,3).
15. Push C down two squares, to (6,6). Finish C like H.

Five boulders (A, B, D, E, and J) remain.

Level 4, Version A (prize: usually bag of holding, 25% amulet of reflection)

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1 ┌────────────────────────┐
 2 │@·····^→^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^·│
 3 │·······┌──────────────┐·│
 4 └┬─────·└────┐         │·│
 5  │···········│         │·│
 6  │·A·B·C·D·E·│         │·│
 7 ┌┴──────·────┤         │·│
 8 │···F·G··H·I·│         │·│
 9 │···J········│         │·│
10 └┬───·──────┬┘   ┌─────┤·│
11  │··K·L·M···│  ┌─┤·····│·│
12  │·····N····│  │·+·····│·│
13  │·O·P···Q·┌┘  ├─┤·····│·│
14 ┌┴─────·─┬─┘   │·+·····+·│
15 │··R·····│     ├─┤·····├─┘
16 │········│     │·+·····│
17 │···┌────┘     └─┤·····│
18 └───┘            └─────┘

1. Push A left one square.
2. Push B left one square.
3. Push C left one square.
4. Push E right one square.
5. Push D right one square.
6. Push G to (9,8), then up three squares, then left one square. Finish G.
7. Finish H and I like G.
8. Push J left two squares, to (3,9).
9. Finish F like G.
10. Push N right three squares, to (11,12).
11. Push L to (6,11), then up three squares. Finish L.
12. Finish M and K like L.
13. Push N left three squares, then up one square, to (8,11). Finish N like L.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1 ┌────────────────────────┐
 2 │>·····@→·······^^^^^^^^·│
 3 │·······┌──────────────┐·│
 4 └┬─────·└────┐         │·│
 5  │···········│         │·│
 6  │A·B·C···D·E│         │·│
 7 ┌┴──────·────┤         │·│
 8 │············│         │·│
 9 │·J··········│         │·│
10 └┬───·──────┬┘   ┌─────┤·│
11  │··········│  ┌─┤·····│·│
12  │··········│  │·+·····│·│
13  │·O·P···Q·┌┘  ├─┤·····│·│
14 ┌┴─────·─┬─┘   │·+·····+·│
15 │··R·····│     ├─┤·····├─┘
16 │········│     │·+·····│
17 │···┌────┘     └─┤·····│
18 └───┘            └─────┘

14. Push R to (8,15), then up four squares. Finish R like L.
15. Push Q to (8,13), then down three squares, then left to (3,16). Push Q up one square. Finish Q like R.
16. Finish P and O like Q.
17. Push J to (6,9), then down three squares. Finish J like L.
18. Push C to (9,6), then down three squares. Finish C like J.
19. Finish B and D like C.

Two boulders (A and E) remain. There is a bag of holding in one of the small chambers ((17,12), (17,14), or (17,16)) next to the treasure zoo.

Level 4, Version B (prize: usually amulet of reflection, 25% bag of holding)

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1   ┌──────────────────────┐
 2   │··→^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^·│
 3   │··┌─────────────────┐·│
 4 ┌─┴┐·│    ┌───┐        │·│
 5 │··│A└┐  ┌┘···│        │·│
 6 │·····├──┤·N··│        │·│
 7 │·BC··│··│··O·│        │·│
 8 └┐··DE│···PQ·┌┘        │·│
 9  │F··G···│R··│   ┌─────┤·│
10  │·HI·│··│··S│ ┌─┤·····│·│
11  │·J·K└──┤·T·│ │·+·····│·│
12  │·······│··┌┘ ├─┤·····│·│
13  └──┐·L··│·┌┘  │·+·····+·│
14     └┬─·─┘·│   ├─┤·····├─┘
15      │·M···│   │·+·····│
16      │@·│··│   └─┤·····│
17      └──┴──┘     └─────┘

1. Push M right three squares, then up four squares.
2. Push T up one square.
3. Push S up two squares.
4. Push Q up one square.
5. Push P left three squares.
6. Push G left two squares.
7. Push D up two squares, then left one square.
8. Finish A.
9. Push B up one square.
10. Push C right one square. Finish C.
11. Push B down one square.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1   ┌──────────────────────┐
 2   │··→·^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^··│
 3   │··┌─────────────────┐·│
 4 ┌─┴┐·│    ┌───┐        │·│
 5 │··│·└┐  ┌┘···│        │·│
 6 │·@D··├──┤·N··│        │·│
 7 │·B···│··│·QO·│        │·│
 8 └┐···E│P····S┌┘        │·│
 9  │FG·····│R··│   ┌─────┤·│
10  │·HI·│··│·T·│ ┌─┤·····│·│
11  │·J·K└──┤M··│ │·+·····│·│
12  │·······│··┌┘ ├─┤·····│·│
13  └──┐·L··│·┌┘  │·+·····+·│
14     └┬─·─┘·│   ├─┤·····├─┘
15      │·····│   │·+·····│
16      │>·│··│   └─┤·····│
17      └──┴──┘     └─────┘

12. Push D right one square. Finish D.
13. Push B right two squares. Finish B.
14. Finish I.
15. Push E down one square, then left one square. Finish E.
16. Push F up three squares, then right two squares. Finish F.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1   ┌──────────────────────┐
 2   │·@→······^^^^^^^^^^^··│
 3   │··┌─────────────────┐·│
 4 ┌─┴┐·│    ┌───┐        │·│
 5 │··│·└┐  ┌┘···│        │·│
 6 │·····├──┤·N··│        │·│
 7 │·····│··│·QO·│        │·│
 8 └┐····│P····S┌┘        │·│
 9  │·G·····│R··│   ┌─────┤·│
10  │·H··│··│·T·│ ┌─┤·····│·│
11  │·J·K└──┤M··│ │·+·····│·│
12  │·······│··┌┘ ├─┤·····│·│
13  └──┐·L··│·┌┘  │·+·····+·│
14     └┬─·─┘·│   ├─┤·····├─┘
15      │·····│   │·+·····│
16      │>·│··│   └─┤·····│
17      └──┴──┘     └─────┘

17. Push G right one square. Finish G.
18. Finish H and J like G.
19. Push P down one square, then left three squares, to (5,9). Finish P.
20. Push K to (6,9), then left one square. Finish K.
21. Push L right one square, then up one square, then left two squares. Finish L like K.

The map now looks like this:

            11111111112222222
   12345678901234567890123456
 1   ┌──────────────────────┐
 2   │·@→············^^^^^··│
 3   │··┌─────────────────┐·│
 4 ┌─┴┐·│    ┌───┐        │·│
 5 │··│·└┐  ┌┘···│        │·│
 6 │·····├──┤·N··│        │·│
 7 │·····│··│·QO·│        │·│
 8 └┐····│·····S┌┘        │·│
 9  │·······│R··│   ┌─────┤·│
10  │····│··│·T·│ ┌─┤·····│·│
11  │····└──┤M··│ │·+·····│·│
12  │·······│··┌┘ ├─┤·····│·│
13  └──┐····│·┌┘  │·+·····+·│
14     └┬─·─┘·│   ├─┤·····├─┘
15      │·····│   │·+·····│
16      │>·│··│   └─┤·····│
17      └──┴──┘     └─────┘

22. Push T down one square.
23. Push R to (11,8), then left three squares. Finish R like P.
24. Finish M like R.
25. Push T left one square. Finish T like R.
26. Push N right one square.
27. Push Q down to (12,9), then left one square. Finish Q like R.
28. Push N left one square. Finish N like Q.

Two boulders (O and S) remain. There is an amulet of reflection in one of the small chambers ((17,11), (17,13), or (17,15)) next to the treasure zoo.

The Food Conducts

These form a hierarchy: foodless is stricter than vegan, which is stricter than vegetarian.

Vegetarian. Don’t eat meat. Specifically, don’t eat the corpses of non-vegetarian monsters, and avoid items made from animal products (meat sticks, eggs from carnivorous creatures). In practice, this means living on permissible corpses and globs. Lichens, jellies, fungi and molds, and gray ooze or brown pudding globs are all safe. Fortune cookies, lembas wafers, and whatever vegetable food you find on the ground also work. Green slime is technically vegan, but eating its glob slimes you. The vegetarian monster list is broader than you might expect: all b (blobs), all j (jellies), all F (fungi and molds), all v (vortices), all y (lights), all E (elementals) except stalkers, and all ' (golems) except flesh golems and leather golems. Vegetarian-safe is not the same as safe. Yellow mold corpses poison, violet fungus paralyzes, and acid blobs sting going down. Monks already pay an alignment penalty for meat, so vegetarian is mostly free for them.

Vegan. Follow all vegetarian restrictions, plus avoid eating eggs, pancakes, lumps of royal jelly, cream pies, candy bars, and fortune cookies. (Yes, fortune cookies are vegetarian-safe but not vegan-safe. They contain eggs.) The conduct fires only on eating: carrying or using animal-derived items is fine, so vegans can still light the Candelabrum with wax or tallow candles, wear leather armor, and apply bone horns. Vegan also excludes puddings.

Foodless. Don’t eat anything at all. Your only nutrition sources are prayer (which cures hunger from Hungry status onward, not just Weak/Fainting), the spell of stone to flesh on rocks in your inventory (which creates meatballs, but eating them breaks the conduct), and a ring of slow digestion (which slows hunger almost to a halt). Most foodless runs rely on finding a ring of slow digestion early or praying through hunger until one appears. Wishing for the ring is the usual plan if a wand of wishing or magic lamp turns up. Chewing through walls also breaks this conduct (it counts as eating rock).

Atheist

Don’t interact with the divine. Specifically: don’t #pray, don’t #offer corpses at altars, don’t #turn undead, and don’t #chat with priests. The altar BUC flash also counts: any non-coin item you drop on an altar increments the conduct counter, so the original identification trick is off-limits too. This removes your safety net for starvation, stoning, illness, and cursed items. You’ll need to solve every problem through items and knowledge alone.

Atheist runs require careful resource management. Without prayer to cure hunger, you need reliable food sources. Without sacrifice or altar BUC, identification is harder and you’ll get no artifact gifts. The final Amulet offering for ascension is exempt, so a clean atheist ascension is mechanically possible.

Weaponless

Never hit a monster with a wielded weapon or weapon-tool. You can throw weapons, fire them from bows and crossbows, and use wands and spells. You can also fight bare-handed or with martial arts (Monks excel here). What you cannot do is swing a sword, axe, mace, aklys, pick-axe, unicorn horn, or any other weapon-class or weapon-tool item in melee while it’s in your wielded slot. The one ranged exception that does break the conduct: using a wielded polearm at range via #apply.

This is less restrictive than it sounds. Monks start with strong martial arts and get better. Other classes can rely on spells, wands, and thrown daggers. A wielded cockatrice corpse still works (it’s not a weapon). The main sacrifice is giving up the damage output of late-game artifact weapons.

Pacifist

Don’t kill any monsters. Not directly, not with pets, not through any means that the game attributes to you. The pacifist runs on pets doing the fighting, on conflict to make monsters attack each other, on Elbereth to keep them at bay, and on creative use of the dungeon environment.

Pacifist ascensions are possible but require deep knowledge of the game’s mechanics. Most pacifist players use a large, well-trained pet (often polymorphed into a purple worm or similar), the spell of charm monster, and extremely patient tactics.

Illiterate

Don’t read anything. No scrolls, no spellbooks, no fortune cookies, no T-shirts. You also can’t engrave anything more than a single “x” or “X” (the traditional illiterate’s signature). You don’t lose the conduct if you read blank scrolls or spellbooks, or Hawaiian shirts, the Book of the Dead, or messages already engraved on the floor.

Without scrolls, you lose access to identify, enchant weapon/armor, teleportation, remove curse, and genocide in their most common forms. Without spellbooks, you can’t learn new spells or refresh old ones, so any starting spell you have will eventually fade. This forces extreme reliance on wands, potions, and creative workarounds.

No Genocide

Never genocide any monster. Genocide is prompted by reading a scroll of genocide (uncursed picks one species; blessed wipes the whole class) and by sitting on a throne: one outcome in the throne-effect table (case 8 of 13) prompts you to genocide a single species. To preserve the conduct, type “none” at the prompt — don’t just press Enter, because empty input re-prompts and on a cursed scroll the game will eventually conjure random monsters instead of letting you escape.

This means you’ll face the full bestiary throughout the game, including master and arch-liches, mind flayers, cockatrices, and everything else that experienced players routinely eliminate. You’ll also have to cross the Plane of Water the hard way: the standard tactic of genociding class ; to clear out the eels and krakens is off-limits, so bring magical breathing and pay attention to where the sea monsters can reach you.

This is one of the milder conducts: many players ascend without genociding anything simply because they never find the scroll and never roll case 8 on a throne. But deliberately maintaining it against late-game threats takes discipline.

Polymorph Restrictions

Two related conducts track polymorphing:

No polymorph. Never let your form change. Obvious sources: potion or ring of polymorph, wand or spell of polymorph (zapped at you), and polymorph traps. Less obvious: a genetic engineer’s claw; eating a chameleon, doppelganger, or mimic corpse; and failing to cure slimedness (turns you into a green slime). The Amulet of Unchanging blocks every path. A failed system shock does not break the conduct. Keeping this conduct forgoes the advantages of powerful monster forms (master mind flayer, xorn, various dragons).

No polymorph objects. Never polymorph items. Don’t zap items with a wand of polymorph, don’t dip items in potions of polymorph, and avoid other means of transforming objects. This eliminates a powerful item-generation strategy (polypiling) that many players use to obtain specific high-value items.

Wishing Restrictions

Two related conducts:

Wishless. Never make a wish. Refuse wishes from wands, fountains, smoky potion djinn, thrones, and all other sources. Picking up the Amulet of Yendor also triggers a wish prompt: wish for “nothing” (the literal string) and the counter doesn’t tick. Wishing for “nothing” is the standard escape hatch for any forced wish — keep it in mind whenever something hands you an unwanted wish. This is extremely challenging because wishes are the primary way to obtain critical items (silver dragon scale mail, speed boots, a bag of holding) when the dungeon doesn’t provide them.

No wishing for artifacts. Make wishes, but never wish for an artifact. This prevents the most efficient wish strategy (wishing for Grayswandir, the Eye of the Aethiopica, or similar game-changing artifacts) while still allowing wishes for mundane necessities. The counter ticks even for denied artifact wishes (when the game gives you “something in your hand” instead), so be sure you can get the artifact before asking.

Combining Conducts

The real prestige comes from combining multiple conducts. A vegetarian atheist run is substantially harder than either alone. A pacifist illiterate vegan foodless atheist weaponless run is the stuff of legends (and has been done). The game’s end screen lists all maintained conducts, and the community has long celebrated players who push the boundaries of what’s possible within self-imposed constraints.

Recent editions of the Mazes have added several more tracked conducts:

Nudist. Never wear any armor, shirt, cloak, gloves, boots, helmet, or shield. Set the nudist option at game start. You fight the entire dungeon in your underwear. Officially tracked since 3.6.

Blind (Zen). Play the entire game without sight. Set the blind option at game start. You’ll need telepathy and other senses to navigate. Officially tracked since 3.6.

Mazes 5.0 added five more tracked conducts: Pauper, Petless, Permadeaf, Sokoban, and Bonesless. Pauper, Permadeaf, Petless, and Bonesless are start-of-game options (you opt in or out before play). Sokoban is tracked automatically based on what you do during the run.

Pauper (new in 5.0)

Start with absolutely nothing: no gold, no inventory, no armor, no starting weapon. Set OPTIONS=pauper in your rcfile (rcfile or NETHACKOPTIONS env only; the in-game O menu cannot toggle it). Pauper implicitly sets nudist as well, so you also begin without armor. Pauper is a permanent conduct you never lose: it does not forbid acquiring or spending gold later. The conduct is about starting empty, not about staying penniless.

To keep the start from being impossible, the game compensates: you get two unspent weapon-skill slots and your role knows one signature spell or item. Wizard knows force bolt; Healer knows healing; Cleric, Knight, and Monk all know protection (Cleric also knows water); Archeologist knows touchstone; Cave Dweller knows flint; Rogue and Tourist know sack; Samurai knows gunyoki rations. The supply chests on early levels (see What to Pack) can provide much of your first kit.

Petless (new in 5.0)

Never have a pet. Set OPTIONS=pettype:none in your rcfile to skip the starting companion entirely (this overrides per-role defaults). After that, you lose the conduct the moment anything becomes tame. The game won’t stop you — scrolls of taming, the charm monster spell, food thrown at hostile dogs and cats, and magic-trap accidents all still work. Each one just breaks Petless on the spot.

Permadeaf (new in 5.0)

Never hear anything. Set OPTIONS=permadeaf (or OPTIONS=deaf) in your rcfile. This option is set-in-config only; the in-game O menu cannot toggle it. (Don’t confuse permadeaf with the unrelated acoustics flavor toggle, which doesn’t earn the conduct.) The game then runs as if you had the Deaf intrinsic from turn one and never recovered: all the “you hear water falling”, “you hear someone counting money”, “you hear a door open” messages and the ambient monster sounds (“you hear a slurp” and friends) are suppressed.

The catch: only the messages are suppressed. A shrieker still shrieks and still summons monsters and aggravates the level — you just don’t get the warning that it happened. Treat empty silence near a F-class monster as the same threat as the usual SCREECH.

Many monster warnings, environmental cues (vaults, fountains, doors opening off-screen), and status messages arrive as sounds. Permadeaf requires navigating the dungeon by sight and logic alone, which turns out to be possible and occasionally educational about how much information you normally get for free.

Sokoban (new in 5.0)

Complete Sokoban without breaking the rules. Each cheating action costs 1 point of Luck and increments the conduct counter: pushing into a wall to squeeze past a boulder (when you drop your stuff to fit), fracturing a boulder with a wand of striking or scroll of earth, polymorphing a boulder, or dismounting onto a boulder. Flying and levitation don’t let you skip Sokoban’s pit traps — the air currents pull you down regardless. The game tracks violations automatically. The conduct is for players who enjoy Sokoban’s boulder-shoving and want their playthrough to acknowledge a clean solve.

Bonesless (new in 5.0)

Never inherit from another player’s grave. To get the bonesless conduct, you have to turn bones off for the run: set OPTIONS=!bones in your rcfile (rcfile or NETHACKOPTIONS env only; the in-game O menu cannot toggle it). The same flag also stops your own death from generating a bones file for future players, so !bones cuts both directions of the bones cycle. The bonesless achievement is recorded only when bones was disabled, not when you happened not to encounter any. (Going a whole game without bones because the dungeon directory has nothing eligible is a separate enlightenment line — “never encountered any bones levels” — and doesn’t earn the conduct.)

Credit and Debt

Each shopkeeper keeps a per-customer ledger with three numbers: credit, debit, and loan. The most common confusion is around credit, so spell out exactly when it appears.

How you get credit. Two ways, neither automatic for a successful sale:

1. Shopkeeper runs short of gold while paying you. When you sell an item, the shopkeeper pays in gold by default. If they don’t have enough gold to cover the offer, the game prompts: “Shopkeeper cannot pay you at present. Will you accept N zorkmids in credit for that?” Answering yes converts the shortfall (or the whole price, if they have zero gold) into credit. A normal sale where the shopkeeper has enough gold just pays you in cash, no credit involved.
2. You drop gold on a shop floor square. Any gold you drop or throw inside the shop is added to your credit balance (after paying off any existing debt first). This is the “shop as safe-deposit box” trick: credit can’t be stolen by nymphs, can’t fall into pits, and can’t be lost to a polymorph trap.

How credit gets used. When you buy something, the shopkeeper applies your credit against the purchase price first (“the price is deducted from your credit”). Any remainder comes out of your gold. Credit is per-shop and per-shopkeeper, and cannot be withdrawn back to gold.

Is paying from credit better or worse than paying in gold? The price itself is identical: credit is deducted from the post- Charisma, post-Tourist, post-angry cost at a strict 1:1 ratio, with no markup or discount either way. The differences are about how safe and liquid your money is, not how far it stretches:

• Better in that credit can’t be stolen by nymphs, can’t fall into a pit when you die, can’t be lost to a polymorph trap, and doesn’t bog you down with carry weight. A shop you’ll come back to is a strong bank.
• Worse in that credit is locked to one shopkeeper. If you over-accumulate at a shop that doesn’t have items you want (or the shopkeeper dies, or you anger them and they go hostile), the credit evaporates. You also can’t tip altar donations, can’t pay shrine fees, and can’t bribe a demon out of credit.

Practical balance: park spare gold as credit at a shop you intend to keep visiting (the Gnomish Mines general store is a popular choice), but don’t deposit more than you expect to spend there.

Debit is the inverse: it accrues when you use an unpaid item inside the shop (read a scroll, quaff a potion, zap a wand) and you haven’t completed the purchase. You’re charged a fraction of the item’s price as a usage fee; future gold drops or sales pay it down before any new credit accumulates.

Loan appears only in the unusual case where the shopkeeper has lent you gold: you carry their coins as part of your inventory. Dropping gold in the shop pays this off before adding credit.

Walk-out hazard. Leaving the shop with unpaid items or unpaid debt turns the shopkeeper hostile. The Keystone Kops will pursue you through the dungeon, and the shopkeeper themselves is one of the toughest melee NPCs in the game: high HP, low AC, and unfazed by Elbereth. Pay the bill at the door.

Shopkeeper Behavior

A shopkeeper is one of the toughest NPCs in the game: high HP, good AC, hits hard, and unfazed by Elbereth or by the kind of clever escape that works on other monsters. They also see everything — they track every item you pick up and every item that enters the shop, even when you’re invisible. The practical consequences for the player:

• Shopkeepers block the door whenever you have unpaid items.
• If you break something in the shop (a potion, a wand), you pay for it.
• Digging through a shop wall or floor doesn’t escape the bill. The dig works, but the shopkeeper bills you for wall damage and the chase happens anyway. Tunnel-out is no shortcut.
• Artifact items are priced at special high prices. For most named weapons that lands in the 10,000–30,000 zm range. An unidentified long sword priced at 16,000 zm is not something to glance over: that exorbitant price is a give-away.
• A shopkeeper can be killed for the entire stock plus the till (1,000–4,000 zm and a skeleton key on death), but they’re a tough fight (high HP, low AC, hits hard with their weapon), and killing them summons a wave of Keystone Kops to pursue you, costs you a chunk of alignment, and leaves the shop permanently empty: no more buying, no more selling, no more price-ID from that shopkeeper. Two community notes worth knowing: polymorphing the shopkeeper first (via wand or trap) means killing them no longer counts as murder, which is the preferred approach for Lawful and Neutral characters. And chaotic humans can sacrifice the shopkeeper’s corpse on an unaligned altar to convert it, which is a niche but real motive. Strong late-game players sometimes do clear shops anyway, but it’s not a casual mid-game move.

Beyond the rules, a few tactical habits pay off:

• Drop everything at the door to see your bill. Standing on the door square, drop your whole inventory; the shopkeeper’s bill highlights the items you owe for. The shopkeeper isn’t guessing — the game tracks unpaid items precisely — but it’s a handy way to recall what you actually picked up when the shop has a hundred lookalikes.
• Sell to build credit. Credit acts as gold you can spend in that shop, and credit doesn’t get stolen by nymphs or fall into pits. Selling a stack of useless daggers to a weapon shop is a way to “bank” gold safely while you’re shopping in town.
• Bones-shop gotcha. When you find a shop in someone’s bones file, all the items inside still belong to the dead adventurer’s ghost shopkeeper; pick up anything and you owe the new shopkeeper full price. The shop floor is not free loot.
• “Closed for inventory” engraving on a door. This marks a shop whose door spawned locked, not an abandoned one. The shopkeeper is still inside, the stock is still unpaid, and breaking the door down to get in just earns you a normal shop visit plus an angry shopkeeper. (In Orcus Town the shopkeepers are usually dead by the time you arrive — Orcus killed them — so the items there often are ownerless, but that’s because of Orcus, not the engraving.)

The best strategy is usually to play fair: sell what you don’t need, buy what you do, and use the pricing system to identify as much as possible before spending your gold on scrolls of identify.

Gem Identification Through Selling

Selling unidentified gems is not a reliable price-ID method. Shopkeepers offer 3 to 8 zm for any unidentified gem, real or glass alike, and the exact amount varies by both the gem’s true identity and the shopkeeper. Real diamonds and worthless glass diamonds both quote in the same 3-8 zm range; you cannot tell them apart by price. Selling the same gem at two different shops gives different prices for any unidentified gem, not just glass.

The practical method is a touchstone (gray stone, base price 45, guaranteed at Mine’s End and sometimes found elsewhere). Rubbing an unidentified gem against a blessed touchstone names the gem outright; with a merely uncursed touchstone you only get a streak color. (Archeologists and Gnomes get the full name from a non-cursed stone, a racial perk.) Hardness doesn’t matter; every gem works. Once identified, real gems sell for their real value (often hundreds of zm each) while glass sells for almost nothing.

Dagger

Knife

Short sword

Saber

Broadsword

Long sword

Two-handed sword

Two-handed weapons get a 3/2 Strength damage bonus in 5.0 — your STR damage contribution is multiplied by 1.5 when wielding a bimanual weapon. Combined with the high base dice below, that’s a big chunk of why two-handed swords compete with one-hand-plus- shield even though you forfeit the shield slot. The same bonus applies to the battle-axe, dwarvish mattock, bardiche, and any other bimanual weapon.

Axe

Pick-axe

Club

Mace

Morning star

Flail

Hammer

Quarterstaff

Polearms

All polearms are two-handed. To strike at range, #apply the weapon (not wield-and-attack): you can hit at distance 2 orthogonally at Basic skill, with extra positions opening up at Skilled. You can still hit an adjacent monster the normal way with a polearm in hand, but the attack is treated as bashing — damage clamps to 1d2 base before bonuses and the weapon-skill bonus doesn’t apply (Strength still does). Reach is what makes them worth carrying. Notes below describe each entry’s extra damage; the reach mechanic is identical across the class.

Spear

All spears share the same skill (trident uses a different class — see below). The Valkyrie starts with one and can train to Expert. The Caveman is the actual spear-multishot specialist: Cavemen get +1 multishot on any thrown spear (regular, silver, javelin alike), so a stack of javelins is real ranged firepower for them.

Spears get a +2 to-hit bonus when used against the big monsters — xorns, dragons, jabberwocks, nagas, and giants — the kebab bonus.

Trident

Lance

Whip

Bow

Crossbow

Sling

Dart

Shuriken

Boomerang

Body armor (suits)